him across the Starbucks and had a crazy urge to duck away and change into better clothes, just so he wouldn't look like such a fucking hayseed next to this guy.
'Hey, Lawrence, fancy meeting you here!' He shook Lawrence's hand and gave him a wry, you-and-me-in-it- together smile. 'How's the vision quest coming?'
'Huh?'
'The Anomaly — that's what you're chasing, aren't you? It's your little rite of passage. My sister had one last year. Figured out that some guy who travelled from Fort Worth to Portland, Oregon every week was actually a fictional construct invented by cargo smugglers who used his seat to plant a series of mules running heroin and cash. She was so proud afterwards that I couldn't get her to shut up about it. You had the holy fire the other night when I saw you. '
Lawrence felt himself blushing. 'It's not really ‘holy'—all that religious stuff, it's just a metaphor. We're not really spiritual. '
'Oh, the distinction between the spiritual and the material is pretty arbitrary anyway. Don't worry, I don't think you're a cultist or anything. No more than any of us, anyway. So, how's it going?'
'I think it's over,' he said. 'Dead end. Maybe I'll get an easier Anomaly next time. '
'Sounds awful! I didn't think you were allowed to give up on Anomalies?'
Lawrence looked around to see if anyone was listening to them. 'this one leads to the Securitat,' he said. 'In a sense, you could say that I've solved it. I think the guy I'm looking for ended up with his sister. '
The man's expression froze, not moving one iota. 'You must be disappointed,' he said, in neutral tones. 'Oh well. ' He leaned over the condiment bar to get a napkin and wrestled with the dispenser for a moment. It didn't cooperate, and he ended up holding fifty napkins. He made a disgusted noise and said, 'Can you help me get these back into the dispenser?'
Lawrence pushed at the dispenser and let the man feed it his excess napkins, arranging them neatly. While he did this, he contrived to hand Lawrence a card, which Lawrence cupped in his palm and then ditched into his inside jacket pocket under the pretense of reaching in to adjust his pan.
'Thanks,' the man said. 'Well, I guess you'll be going back to your campus now?'
'In the morning,' Lawrence said. 'I figured I'd see some New York first. Play tourist, catch a Broadway show. '
The man laughed. 'All right then — you enjoy it. ' He did nothing significant as he shook Lawrence's hand and left, holding his paper cup. He did nothing to indicate that he'd just brought Lawrence into some kind of illegal conspiracy.
Lawrence read the note later, on a bench in Bryant Park, holding a paper bag of roasted chestnuts and fastidiously piling the husks next to him as he peeled them away. It was a neatly cut rectangle of card sliced from a health-food cereal box. Lettered on the back of it in pencil were two short lines:
Wednesdays 8:30PM
Half Moon Cafe 164 2nd Ave
The address was on the Lower East Side, a neighborhood that had been scorchingly trendy the last time Lawrence had been there. More importantly: it was Wednesday.
The Half Moon Cafe turned out to be one of those New York places that are so incredibly hip they don't have a sign or any outward indication of their existence. Number 164 was a frosted glass door between a dry-cleaner's and a Pakistani grocery store, propped open with a squashed Mountain Dew can. Lawrence opened the door, heart pounding, and slipped inside. A long, dark corridor stretched away before him, with a single door at the end, open a crack, dim light spilling out of it. He walked quickly down the corridor, sure that there were cameras observing him.
The door at the end of the hallway had a sheet of paper on it, with HALF MOON CAFE laser-printed in its center. Good food smells came from behind it, and the clink of cutlery, and soft conversation. He nudged it open and found himself in a dim, flickering room lit by candles and draped with gathered curtains that turned the walls into the proscenia of a grand and ancient stage. There were four or five small tables and a long one at the back of the room, crowded with people, with wine in ice-buckets at either end.
A very pretty girl stood at the podium before him, dressed in a conservative suit, but with her hair shaved into a half-inch brush of electric blue. She lifted an eyebrow at him as though she was sharing a joke with him and said, 'Welcome to the Half Moon. Do you have a reservation?'
Lawrence had carefully shredded the bit of cardboard and dropped its tatters in six different trash cans, feeling like a real spy as he did so (and realizing at the same time that going to all these different cans was probably anomalous enough in itself to draw suspicion).
'A friend told me he'd meet me here,' he said.
'What was your friend's name?'
Lawrence stuck his chin in the top of his coat to tell his pan to stop warning him that he was breathing too shallowly. 'I don't know,' he said. He craned his neck to look behind her at the tables. He couldn't see the man, but it was so dark in the restaurant—
'You made it, huh?' the man had yet another fantastic sweater on, this one with a tight herringbone weave and ribbing down the sleeves. He caught Lawrence sizing him up and grinned. 'My weakness — the world's wool farmers would starve if it wasn't for me. 'He patted the greeter on the hand. 'He's at our table. ' She gave Lawrence a knowing smile and the tiniest hint of a wink.
'Nice of you to come,' he said as they threaded their way slowly through the crowded tables, past couples having murmured conversations over candlelight, intense business dinners, an old couple eating in silence with evident relish. 'Especially as it's your last night in the city. '
'What kind of restaurant is this?'
'Oh, it's not any kind of restaurant at all. Private kitchen. Ormund, he owns the place and cooks like a wizard. He runs this little place off the books for his friends to eat in. We come every Wednesday. That's his vegan night. You'd be amazed with what that guy can do with some greens and a sweet potato. And the cacao nib and avocado chili chocolate is something else. '
The large table was crowded with men and women in their thirties, people who had the look of belonging. They dressed well in fabrics that draped or clung like someone had thought about it, with jewelry that combined old pieces of brass with modern plastics and heavy clay beads that clicked like pool-balls. The women were beautiful or at least handsome — one woman with cheekbones like snowplows and a jawline as long as a ski-slope was possibly the most striking person he'd ever seen up close. The men were handsome or at least craggy, with three-day beards or neat, full moustaches. They were talking in twos and threes, passing around overflowing dishes of steaming greens and oranges and browns, chatting and forking by turns.
'Everyone, I'd like you to meet my guest for the evening. ' the man gestured at Lawrence. Lawrence hadn't told the man his name yet, but he made it seem like he was being gracious and letting Lawrence introduce himself.
'Lawrence,' he said, giving a little wave. 'Just in New York for one more night,' he said, still waving. He stopped waving. The closest people — including the striking woman with the cheekbones — waved back, smiling. The furthest people stopped talking and tipped their forks at him or at least cocked their heads.
'Sara,' The cheekbones woman said, pronouncing the first 'a' long, “Sah-rah,' and making it sound unpretentious. The low-key buzzing from Lawrence's pan warned him that he was still overwrought, breathing badly, heart thudding. Who were these people?
'And I'm Randy,' the man said. 'Sorry, I should have said that sooner. '
The food was passed down to his end. It was delicious, almost as good as the food at the campus, which was saying something — there was a dedicated cadre of cooks there who made gastronomy their 20 percent projects, using elaborate computational models to create dishes that were always different and always delicious.
The big difference was the company. These people didn't have to retreat to belong, they belonged right here. Sara told him about her job managing a specialist antiquarian bookstore and there were a hundred stories about her customers and their funny ways. Randy worked at an architectural design firm and he had done some work at Sara's bookstore. Down the table there were actors and waiters and an insurance person and someone who did something in city government, and they all ate and talked and made him feel like he was a different kind of man, the
