“You better go,” I said. “Your bandwidth.”
He said, “Allie,” and tried to hug me, but I pushed him away. I heard the door click behind me and wished we were twenty again, taking off, not for Barcelona or San Sebastian, but for the Holiday Inn Express at the edge of town.
Sun blazed into the room and I went to close the drapes against it. The cruise ship was gone. Perhaps I was wrong, and no one fell. Or was collected quickly.
Or was at the bottom of the sea.
The ceiling at Anagram was draped in a fabric that made me think of one continuous, undulating jellyfish. It glowed pink as we came in and green by the time we were seated.
“Would you look at this menu?” Dawn said. “Not that it’ll help much.”
Every dish was an anagram of its true composition. No descriptions or ingredients were listed. The hostess had taken an exhaustive survey of our allergies and sensitivities. A leafy, live centerpiece grew from a hole cut in the middle of the table. A little white card designated it as “Shying Veil.”
“I got food poisoning at Passports, believe it or not,” Howie said. “Never eat oysters in Europe in the summer. Unless it’s an oyster-producing region. Normandy, I’d eat oysters there.”
“What’re you going to have?” I asked Matteo.
“Does it matter? That’s the point, right?” He laughed tightly, and alone.
“Some of these are pretty obvious,” Dawn said. “We could get our phones and figure them out.”
“Not really in the spirit of the place, is it?” Matteo said.
“My uncle used to say my name backwards,” I said. “Samoht Nosilla.Like a secret name. But that’s a palindrome, right? Not an anagram.”
“A palindrome is a word that’s the same forwards and backwards,” Howie said. “But that’s really cute.”
“Now, your father was a professor, wasn’t he?” Dawn asked Matteo.
He nodded. “Philosophy. University of Kansas, mostly.”
“No wonder you picked a job doing real things,” Dawn said, smiling.
“Dawn,” Howie said.
“No, no, absolutely,” Matteo said. “I’m reacting to my father’s position. And to my parents having no control over where we lived because of tenure. The 80s and 90s, God. We had to send to my aunt in New York for half the food in our pantry, the grocery stores were so pathetic.”