“A better question would be: Pen, will you fall in love with someone once you can strain out the sludge from your dignity? And the answer is yes.”

“Okay, Daddy,” she said, to quiet me.

She hadn’t wanted a detailed answer, and I didn’t ask her about half-formed attachments to beards, illicit girlfriends, strangers. I could have checked the tabloids to find out.

As she walked me to the door, I said, “By the way, I’ll be out of town next week,” which wasn’t strictly necessary, as we didn’t fuck regularly.

Still, she was always the one leaving, and I thought it might make me seem more desirable to be less available.

“K,” was her only response. Somewhere in the grand equation of love was curiosity, and she had zero interest in my mission to retrieve Blithe.

Her driver picked me up in the building garage. I always forgot to ask if I was supposed to tip. R would take care of it. In the driver’s seat of his hybrid, he was too professional for me to read any of his feelings.

I walked into my apartment, bracing for weed-smell and potions and takeout splatters. There was a column of banker’s boxes stacked in the kitchen.

I took the top off one and started grazing Blithe’s data. The idiot must have been so despondent, he’d given the Rhiz access to everything. We’re talking inside-of-bathroom-trash-can (some pieces of gum and, eek, a plastic water bottle), complete bioaffective feed, and certain measurements so finely graded as to be beyond human comprehension. I got overwhelmed by the accounting required, and went to sleep.

The next morning, I was out in the backyard when my phone hummed. The screen turned white, and I could either accept the Operatrix’s transmission or decline it by pressing the Rhiz button.

Declining a transmission was generally a bad idea. I accepted, the air crackled, my phone’s projector lifted up, and there was the Operatrix again.

“Pen, this is not the way to go about things. You have five days to write a narrative report and figure out who Blithe is. I know you’ve learned something about discipline from your day job.”

The Operatrix said day job to flatter me, as if I were meant for greater things.

“Yeah, how to untangle harnesses and distinguish inside and building keys.”

“We don’t have time for your self-denigration.”

Touché.

“We will send over the plane tickets tomorrow.”

“K. But how does anyone learn about another? You must know that my parents are dead and that I lack essential bonding skills.”

“Start with the first box. Boi, bye. And check your entryway for a package.”

I went to the “lobby” between the building’s front door and interior door, where people often discarded objects before moving out, which the super then had to throw away. A messenger had left me an almost-weightless keyboard in a normative manila envelope with a breezy green seal.