Pickpocket

1-3-4-8. The lock screen disappears into the home screen and its neat rows of apps. A text message from someone named Lisa: I guess so. Longer walk. I’ll leave the garage in five.

I don’t waste my time imagining the context, or who Lisa is, or who the man with the phone is. He opens Twitter, scrolls down to a baseball highlight. He’s got a faint bald spot swirling from the middle of his head and the hair around it is sharp like razor wire. Thick neck, untrimmed, running down into a black polo. I look out the window at the late-April haze. The leaves have finally turned themselves inside-out from their buds; they mix with the flowering trees, milky white and lime, a yellowness all around them. Shadows are softer but wider; they spread like a murky puddle over the thickening grass.

He texts in Size 14 font. I don’t have to strain to see. He types Pick up Tommy before you come. Then slips the phone into–yes–his left pocket, the one by the aisle. The seat’s stainless steel armrest sits three inches above the open pocket, now sagging with the added weight. I can see the base of it, still glowing against his leg as it waits to turn off.

He remains still at my stop. I tap his right shoulder; he turns. “This is Rosslyn, right?”

He nods silently.

“Thank you,” I say. I smile at him, I look him in the eye: dark brown iris, indistinguishable from the pupil. He turns back around. The phone goes into my left pocket as I time my rising perfectly with the Metro voice saying This is a blue line train to Largo. When boarding, please move to the center of the car.

Seamless is the word that comes to mind. Implying smoothness, precise action. Uniformity. No bumps, no creases, no evidence of imperfection. The phone didn’t even graze his pocket lining. Seamless.

                                                                                                      ***

The Potomac is seamless, or rippleless, waveless. So flat a layer of pollen coats its surface even near the middle. There is no wind and the sun is emerging into its summer self, toasting the leftover winter air. I feel it on my face and my arms, some kind of nostalgia in the warmth. But the shade makes me shiver.

In Georgetown I walk to a Starbucks and order a small black coffee and an everything bagel with avocado. The avocado is unflavored guacamole, the consistency of humus. It tastes like wax. I salt it heavily before taking the next bite.

1-3-4-8. Lisa had texted again. On the way. I exit iMessage and browse the home screen. WhatsApp, yes–but inside there seem to be only work-related messages. Nothing interesting. I go back to the home screen and tear through the remaining pages. It comes up dry.

Married men are either the most fun or the least fun.

I open photos. First I check the Recently Deleted folder–1-3-4-8, but it doesn’t work. Same for the Hidden Folder. Interesting, but disappointing. Back to the Favorite album, I find pictures of the man, plus presumably Lisa and Tommy.

Same swirling hair, receding hairline evident from the front. A sleek nose but drooping chin, skin loose and sliding off his face. Poorly fitting suit, thick tie. Lisa: also curly, also brunette, glasses, a slim-fit striped button-down fitted around her waist, light blue jeans. Something I’d wear.

Tommy–maybe 10, Lisa’s hand on his shoulder, the man’s on his head. Baseball cap, blue little league jersey, hands clasped behind his back, smiling with sealed lips. He has that face of a kid with no outstanding features, a face that just looks like “kid.”

I ate half the bagel and took my coffee on the way out.

                                                                                                      ***

Angel greets me at the door. She slept on the couch again.

“I keep telling you, you can sleep in the bed.”

“Why would I do that,” she asks, “when you go to bed early and leave me alone every morning?”

“Because you wake up in the middle of the day anyway. Might as well be comfortable.” I kiss her–she’s still got morning on her breath, green tea tongue. She smiles at me, her teeth like whitecaps on the river, eyes like sun spots.

“Got something for you,” I say.

“Oh yeah?” she asks.

I put the phone in her hand. “1-3-4-8,” I say.

She types in the code and the home screen flips up.

“Anything interesting?” she asks.

“Can’t get into the hidden photos. Nothing else really.”

“You don’t know that,” she says. “Could be something hiding in the apps, too.”

I watch her light up as she scrolls, and with her the room lights up, too. Dust sparkles through the sun’s beam. Angel insisted we take the curtains down. I’ve forgotten why anyone would want to block out the sun.

She’s radiant as she stands; her ballerina footsteps take her silently across the hall and she sits down softly at the computer. She fingers through the chargers, pinches the iPhone lightning cord, plugs in the phone. Her head silhouetted against the white screen, a candy cane-striped progress bar emerges. Downloading…

“What else have you done today?” she asks.

“Got coffee. Strolled around Georgetown. Saw a couple dogs.”

“Any Frenchies?”

“Not today,” I say. She sighs.

She grabs her mug, swivels the chair around. “Could you refill this? There’s plenty left, if you want some.”

“Sure,” I say. The house smells like a flower shop; it’s yellowish with the sunlight, the aged and fading beige walls and the stale wooden floorboards. Even the cabinets give off a kind of life. I pour the tea into her mug, grab one for me, fill it up–the steam rolls out and rises to my chin. No grounds in the bottom. Seamless?

She smiles again when I place the mug on the table. The data emerges, long threads, locked boxes that Angel clicks and types away. Slowly she unravels and untangles.

“Tell me your secrets, old man,” she mutters.

Information condenses and drains into a comprehensive profile. Dan Reneger. 43. 5 foot 8 inches, 190 pounds. Wife Helen Reneger.

“Who’s Lisa, then?” asks Angel.

“The woman he was texting,” I say. “Assumed she was the wife. Anything good there?”

“Nothing but the texts.”

“What about Tommy?”

She types some more. “Only in texts to Lisa.”

“Interesting.”

Angel lifts the phone from the desk, enters settings, initiates system shutdown. She taps “Confirm” a few more times before the phone dims and cuts to black. She tosses it in the trash at the foot of the desk.

“Put on some music,” she said.

I connect to the speaker on the desk and start playing Sam Gendel’s blueblue from the top. “Tate-jima” begins, its plucky notes hovering above a static droll, and the room relaxes. The movement slows, the sunlight stagnates and mellows out all that it touches.

Angel cracks the lock on the hidden photos. A blonde woman, younger, a patterned snake tattoo coursing up her left arm. And a boy, maybe 12, freckled and doe-eyed, blonde curls. And the man there with them, a different face, a different smile. She scrolls up and down; there are hundreds.

“There you are,” she says.

She closes the file and starts digging for email addresses.

The birds are flapping in a whirlwind at the window sill, clustered around our feeder that they’ve emptied in a day. Sparrows, everyone’s least favorite bird–except Angel’s. “I admire their cohesiveness,” she once said.

Two stories below them a man is sitting on the curb by the bus stop, embracing his legs, looking off toward the townhouses a block over. He’s silent; I can’t tell if his eyes are open. The street is empty but car sounds ring out from the distance, ghostlike.

I am watching Angel work her way through the noise on the screen. There is a pleasant warmth in the room that is full and forgiving, and I have a feeling like the world’s infinities are a secret we keep only to ourselves. I swirl the tea in the mug. She is so lovely, I am thinking, so lovely.