Page 89 of Goodbye Days

On one wall is a huge antique map of London. On another wall a sweeping black-and-white panorama of the New York City skyline. The furniture resembles what I’ve seen at a family trip to Ikea, but more substantial and luxurious.

“Man, cool house,” I say.

“Thanks. I can’t take credit,” Eli says.

“Are your parents, like, artists or architects or something?”

“Naw. My mom is a neurosurgeon at Vanderbilt Hospital. My dad is a history professor at Vanderbilt. He researches the Cold War. You should hear this insane theory he has about the Roswell UFO incident in 1947.”

I laugh. “My dad is an English professor at Belmont. My mom is a physical therapist.”

“No way! We totally have parallel families.”

“I have a sister.”

“Dude, me too. A twin, actually. Adair. She goes to school with us. She’s at dance practice now.”

“Nice.”

“You hungry or thirsty or anything?”

“Always.”

Eli leads me into the kitchen, which is no less impressive than what I’ve already seen. Full of glass, steel, and granite. There’s a huge wine rack, and copper-bottomed pots and pans hang from the ceiling. He opens a cabinet and starts getting out bags of chips, popcorn, and dried fruit and nuts from Trader Joe’s. “Anything you want,” he says.

He goes to the fridge and grabs us a couple of bottles of some cola that I’ve never heard of but that purports to be “handcrafted in small batches.”

“Thanks.” I study the label. “How do you handcraft cola?”

“Weird, huh? I picture some guy wearing a blacksmith’s apron pounding a hammer into a vat of cola.”

“A carpenter sawing his saw into cola.”

We laugh. I grab a bag of dried mandarin oranges. We head to his room.

Here’s the first indication that somebody under forty lives here. The walls are painted dark gray and covered with posters of bands I’ve never heard of—black and death metal bands whose skeletal, twisting-branch logos are mostly illegible. One wall resembles a museum of guitars, with four electrics and two acoustics hanging on it.

Black jeans and black T-shirts with more band names cover the floor.

I step over some. “Musician, huh?”

“How’d you guess? What about you? What’s your jam that got you into NAA?”

“Writing. Fiction.”

“Cool. Wanna be our scribe?”

“Sure.” I pull out my laptop and sit at Eli’s desk.

Eli pulls down an acoustic guitar and sits on the edge of the bed. “You mind? I concentrate better while I’m playing.”

“Go ahead.”

He starts fingerpicking. It’s immediately clear how he got into NAA. “So,” he says. “We have to predict a future technology…”

“And the impact it’ll have on our lives.”

“Dude, I’m glad we got assigned as partners. This might be right up your alley.”