Chapter Four
He bought the second ticket three weeks after the first, and this time he didn't construct a reason. He just bought it. Progress, he supposed, of a certain kind.
The Metcha event opened at eight. Marco joined at seven fifty-eight, which he recognized as the behavior of a person who wanted to seem casual and had failed. The spectator view loaded — a small video feed of Claire at her desk, the shelf of arranged spines behind her, the ring light making everything warm and slightly unreal — and a queue counter in the corner that read: 14 waiting.
His position: fourteen.
He settled in.
The thing about spectator mode, Marco discovered, was that it was a genuinely strange experience that he could not stop doing. You watched the host talk to other people — full conversations, interrupted only when a turn ended and a new face appeared — and you were present for all of it, unnamed, unacknowledged, a ghost in a waiting room that had a very comfortable couch.
It should have felt voyeuristic. It felt, instead, oddly companionable.
He watched Claire talk to a woman who was reading her way through every Booker Prize winner in chronological order — "I'm on 1977," the woman said, with the energy of someone who had signed a contract in blood — and Claire had lit up and said she thought Staying On was criminally underloved and they had a small spirited argument about Paul Scott that ended with both of them recommending the other something. He watched her talk to a teenage girl who was nervous and barely said anything and Claire had simply started recommending books, gently, one after another, until the girl said "that one" about a novel Marco hadn't heard of and Claire had said "yes, that one, absolutely that one" with such certainty that he almost wrote it down. He did write it down.
His queue position moved: fourteen, eleven, eight.
He was reading while he waited — the Peter Beagle, finally, which he'd been saving without knowing he was saving it — and he kept having to reread the same paragraph because he'd look up at the spectator feed and lose his place. Claire was talking to someone about endings. Whether a sad ending could still be a satisfying one. Whether the two things were even in tension.
"I think a sad ending is only unsatisfying if it feels arbitrary," she was saying, leaning forward slightly in the way she did when she meant it. "If the sadness is earned — if it's the truest thing the book could do — then I think you finish it and feel full, not empty. Grief can be a kind of completion."
Marco put his book down entirely.
Queue position: five.
He'd been waiting forty-three minutes. He'd graded six journals during that time, written down four book titles, eaten the cereal he'd forgotten about from three nights ago, and had one thought — small, manageable, easy to set aside — that kept returning anyway: that he could not remember the last time he had sat still for forty-three minutes and not minded at all.
Queue position: three. Two.
The fan ahead of him ended their call. Claire looked at the screen, refreshed — reset herself, he could see it, a small settling of the shoulders, a breath — and then the call connected and she was looking at him, and she said:
"Oh — you're back."
He hadn't expected her to remember. There had been fourteen people in front of him the first time; he'd been last in a long night. He was, he realized, startlingly pleased.
"I'm back," he said.
"Did you read it?" She didn't say which book. She didn't need to.
"I'm almost at the end. I've been — " he paused. "I've been saving it a little. Which is embarrassing to admit."
"No it isn't," Claire said immediately. "That's exactly the right way to read it. You save the last twenty pages for a night when you're ready to be sad on purpose." She tilted her head. "Are you a teacher?"
He blinked. "How did you — "
"You said 'which is embarrassing to admit' like you were worried I'd grade you on it." A small smile. "It's not a criticism. Teachers are my favorite people to talk to about books. You read them like they're meant to be passed on."
Marco looked at her — warm-lit, certain, completely unaware that she had just described him more accurately than most people managed in a year — and thought: I am going to be in so much trouble.
He did not examine this thought very closely.