Tom laughs. Nervously. Here he’s in this stranger’s room, a man who repudiates every fiber of Malorie’s being, a man who breaks another rule with every single thing he does and says, a man who somehow intuited the glasses were more than old-world eyewear.

“You wore them between cars,” Henry says. “I saw you. As you looked at the world your way. And did you see anything out there to drive you mad? Are you mad, Tom?”

“I’m not. No.”

“Of course you’re not. Let’s imagine for a moment that I’d been raised without the knowledge of the existence of whales. Would the sight of one, a leviathan rising from the deep, have been enough to drive me insane? If I were to encounter one, alone, out in a dinghy, the beast coming up beneath me, would that have been enough to have stolen my sanity?”

“I don’t—”

“I think it might’ve been. The fear alone, the moment of disbelief, reality forever cracked. But you see, Tom, I do know about whales. I was raised with the knowledge of them. We all were. So when the creatures came and people lost their minds, I reminded myself of this, I saw things this way. As if I’d always known them. And that’s all there was to it. I wouldn’t allow them to surprise me. I didn’t let them confuse me. You and your sister, you two were raised in a world where they exist. Doesn’t that make them fathomable?”

“Yeah.”

“More than that even, huh. As commonplace as trees. You ever hear how, in the old world, the older generations didn’t know what to make of new technology? And so they quit using it or didn’t ever start in the first place? It’s not that they were actually incapable of using a video camera. It’s that they chose not to. This,” Henry waves a hand, “all this is a choice. Your mother doesn’t have to live by the fold, as modern people have come to call it. And she certainly doesn’t need to force you to live by it at all. Can I see those glasses?”

The question comes suddenly, but Tom isn’t put off. Everything Henry says is making sense to him. The man is connecting with Tom on a level nobody ever has. Is this what Indian River is like?

“Here,” he says. He hands over the glasses. Henry examines them, flips them over, tries them on. When he looks at Tom, Tom smiles. But Henry doesn’t. His face is stone behind Tom’s invention.

Henry removes the glasses.

“Have you tried them yet? Have you really gone out with them, stared out the window, anything of that nature?”

Tom reddens. He’s embarrassed. Why hasn’t he tried them out?

Malorie.