He Comes

Late one November night, mid-asynchronous-chat, I was complaining that the Bay Area can't even produce a proper autumn, and he said Urk had started on its endless winter rain. And then some wire in me crossed, and I typed:

"If you're so tough, come see what no-autumn looks like."

Regretted it on send. In our protocol, a message like that is an out-of-bounds packet; convention says it gets politely dropped.

Instead he replied: "Okay."

Me: ?

"Next month." He was typing faster than he ever types. "Fiskano has a North American distributor to meet in San Francisco. It was my father's trip. I'll take it."

I stared at the screen with my heart going like a prod incident. Compose yourself, Daisy. The man has a business trip; you are a checkpoint conveniently on the route. I sent back a decorous "see you then," then went and shook Vivi awake.

"He's coming!"

Vivi heard me out through half-open eyes and delivered a line for the ages: "Mm. A business trip." She rolled over. "A-Dai. Every man on this planet who wants to see someone will first find himself a trip that can be expensed. It's called plausible deniability. You wouldn't know. You've never dated."

The day he landed, I went to SFO. In the arrivals crowd he stood a full head above everyone — locating him was basically cheating. He saw me, didn't wave, didn't walk faster. Just came over, stopped in front of me, and looked down.

"Hm," he said. "California really doesn't have an autumn."

That week, his days belonged to fish and his evenings belonged to me. I fed him Mission tacos, dim sum in the Sunset, Sichuan in the South Bay — he ordered in Mandarin and startled the auntie into comping us an extra dish. Vivi conducted a full-dinner-length evaluation and issued her findings in one word: "正. Approved." She had a follow-up remark loaded; I killed it with a look.

Friday night we walked the ocean. The Pacific is a much louder animal than the North Sea; it slams. Out of nowhere he said: "These places you're showing me. You don't actually come to them, do you."

I stopped walking. "How do you know that?"

"The way you navigate here," he said. "Like a tourist. You've lived in this city over a year, Daisy. You've turned your life into a commute."

The wind was cold and my face was hot. Anger. Not entirely anger. "And you?" I hit back. "Your life isn't a commute? One man alone in a fishing village, minding his father's business, awake at three a.m. working on his unsolvable problem — how's the problem going? Solved yet?"

He looked at me for a long time. The ocean slammed four, five times.

"No," he said, quieter now. "And I've discovered I don't want to solve it anymore."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning," he said, "some problems shouldn't be solved. Some problems you keep."

I can still see that moment: him standing in the Pacific wind saying that sentence with no beginning and no end, and in his eyes a thing I couldn't parse — something like fear, and something like relief. Three days later he flew home. At security, this time, he did say goodbye. He also said: "Christmas. You come."

Not a question. The man's defects remained fully unpatched.

Vivi says when a man crosses an ocean to see you, the stated reason is business.

What she didn't say: some men cross an ocean to check on a problem — to confirm it truly has no solution.