Chapter 2
It rained, a cold steady drizzle, and the rubber strip had come loose from one wiper so it was just slapping water around.
The headlights cast a dim yellow glow as they made their way along the Great West Road out of London, past flooded soccer
pitches, sooty chest-high stone walls, and brick rows of flats. Colin’s knees bumped the dashboard, and every time they struck
a pothole the glove compartment popped open.
“I love your car,” Colin said. “It’s so you.”
“Cramped, out of shape, and rusting? What are you driving these days?”
“Depends where I’m at. I’ve got a prototype Tesla Roadster at the Malibu place. Elon let me have it for a song because I was
an early investor. He’s only made about ten of them so far. You’ve never driven anything like it. The closest I’ll ever come
to flying an X-Wing fighter.”
“What’s an Elon?”
“It’s a South African emerald mine that dates hot models and has far too many opinions. What are we listening to? Is that
a cassette player? That’s so charming. I didn’t know they still put those in cars.”
“I just started buying CDs,” Arthur said.
“Well, stop. Wait two years and you’ll be able to download any song you want.”
“To what?”
“To your phone. Oh, shit, I forgot. I gave you a cell phone and you never use it.”
“I have a landline. Will I be able to download songs to that? No, never mind. I wouldn’t want to even if I could. It would be too much like being on hold.”
The cockpit swam with calypso horns and an insouciant West Indian voice. Colin thought it was probably an old recording—it
had that flattened hiss he associated with the era before compressed digital sound.
“My people made this music,” Arthur said. “My father’s people, anyway. The Windrush folk. They came to London after the war.
They rebuilt the skyline by day and they rebuilt the English libido by night.”
“That’s interesting, because the melodies and lyrics are cheerful, but the effect is melancholy. It really drives home that
you could be some place with palm trees, beaches, rum, and minimally dressed women—but instead you’re in England.”
“Your scorn for England is misplaced, Colin. You owe this nation everything. Turing dreamt up the computer—if not for him,
you’d still be whacking off to magazines. Arthur C. Clarke, Anthony Burgess, H. G. Wells. Orwell. Englishmen single-handedly
invented the future.”
“That’s understandable. Anything to escape their present.”
“Who am I kidding? You never did whack off to porn. Be honest with me, Colin. Have you ever looked at a bar code and got a
boner?”
“I love you, Arthur. I hated it when you left. Hated it. I’ll never understand it. You’ve lived here—eating their crap food,
shivering in their badly heated flats—for fifteen years, by choice. Bad enough you left me. But you left Gwen. How could you?”
Arthur considered for a time, then said, “I let her down, and she had the good sense to hold me accountable instead of making
excuses for me. Once I knew we weren’t going to be together, there was no reason to come back. It was easier to do the work
here. When it comes to dragons, only the Chinese surpass England’s body of study, and unfortunately, I could never pick up
Mandarin. I tried. It kicked my ass.”
“Ah, well. Give it another fifteen years and you’ll be able to translate any language in real time, probably with your cell phone. If you ever buy one. No one will need to study languages again.”
“I hope you’re wrong.”
Colin laughed. “Of course you do. You never want to do anything the easy way.”
“When you’re translating yourself—reading medieval French, say—you aren’t just taking one word and mentally transposing it
to English. You’re able to think and feel things you can’t think and feel in modern American. Things only a French yeoman might’ve thought and felt about his place in a cosmos ruled
by a God at war with a beast—the beast in the human soul.”
Colin was quiet for a moment, letting it roll over him. Then he said, “That’s a lovely line of thought. Is that from one of
your lectures?”
“Intro to Medieval French Poetry. I usually deliver that one in the first class. How’d it land?”
“Aces, man. You gave me a shiver.”
“That’s why they pay me the big bucks.”
They hit a pothole. The glove compartment popped open.
“Euphemistically,” Arthur said.
“You should really let me put a word in with Elon for you,” Colin told him.