The Detective took in the scene. A standard bar. Cheap wooden furniture. Dim lighting. Walls lined with stills from classic films. Specials written on a board in chalk.
He could see everything.
“They entered here, obviously,” The Detective said, gesturing at a door opening to a side street. The officer accompanying him peered at the frame, trying to make out what he had been able to find.
“They came in separately, a few minutes apart,” The Detective said. “See here? There’s one pair of muddy prints. They must have arrived after the rain started, but their date made it inside before the downpour.”
“Incredible,” the officer said.
“They took a seat,” The Detective said, walking over to one corner, “right here at this table. One of them went to the bar to order drinks. You can tell it was the person who sat here by the way they’ve placed the drinks down on this side of the table, then slid one glass across, leaving a wet trail.”
The officer nodded, taking notes.
The Detective pulled on a pair of gloves and sat down at the table himself, then began to murmur as he looked at various items around the room.
“They were pleased to meet each other,'“ he said. “They’d been talking online before finally catching up in person. There’s hesitation in those footprints, but not too much. A drink has been spilled around the outline of a phone, where they were showing one another old messages.”
“Do you think we could ID them?” asked the officer.
The Detective ignored him. “One of them was a fan of romantic comedies,” he said. “The other agreed. They shared their favourite movies and connected over their shared enjoyment of 1990s cinema. They both preferred dogs over cats. They believed that honour was more important than truth. They had a great deal of respect for nu-metal, even though they didn’t listen to it. Neither felt that destiny was real, but part of them hoped it might be.”
“Can you tell that because of the condensation on the glass, or something?”
The Detective stood up. “The conversation flowed,” he said. “They’d never had a meeting like this before. Neither of them. They bonded over their mutual ambivalence towards photographs of flowers in the afternoon light. They became excited when they realised they’d both eaten at the same Italian restaurant within the same six month period. They shared secrets not even their closest friends knew.”
“Okay–”
“Around one hour twelve minutes in, they kissed.”
“How do you know all this?” asked the officer.
The Detective glared at him. “You think I don’t know what love feels like?” he replied. “You think I can’t tell when romance is in the air? It lingers, that kind of romance. It lingers. It’s the most obvious thing in the world.”
“So,” the officer said, writing this down in his book, “how do we find them?”
“We don’t.”
“We don’t?”
“We leave them be,” The Detective said. “We let them stoke the flame of love together, and live it. We let them live it, for all of us.”
The officer smiled, and The Detective smiled back. Neither of them could believe what they had just uncovered.
They agreed that they had found evidence of something far rarer than proof of a federal crime – they had found evidence of true love.
The next day, they were both fired.
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A Quick Recommendation
This story by Tim Horvath tracks a deceptively simple relationship that begins at a conference on the search for extraterrestrial life. My favourite thing about it is the way it finds interesting, connecting things in small moments or words, with these becoming the focus rather than everything happening around the characters.
Not only did we have jokes, but we had whole languages; if anything, languages were what we had most of all. I specialized in them, was a programmer who bounced around Silicon Valley till I got stuck in one stringifying, brackety loop too many, hooked on Modafinil, sick of the bravado that we were going to engineer our way into ethical wealth. I’d been one of those nerdy teenagers who leapt at the chance to farm out my computer’s energy to SETI, and I allowed it to revert to the screensaver, a flickering spiky field, green to fuchsia, marching again and again across my monitor. I was crunching data from satellite dishes and telescopes, and I was hooked on the idea of panning for life in my own corner of the universe.
The full story, ‘The Tungsten Record’, is in Conjunctions (which has thankfully been saved after having its funding pulled earlier this year!).
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