Birthday in Barcelona

The flight from Chicago had eaten eleven hours of my life and most of my spine, and by the time the taxi dropped me in front of the hotel in the Gothic Quarter it was already evening and I was forty-four years old with about six hours left on the clock. I'm Paul, by the way, insurance adjuster, divorced two years, and my ex-husband used to plan these elaborate birthday weekends for me, so I guess I was feeling a little raw about walking into a budget hotel alone with my own suitcase. The lobby was the size of a walk-in closet and the kid at the desk could not have been less interested in me, which, fine, at least he was honest about it. He handed me a key card, told me breakfast was until ten, and pointed at a rickety elevator that groaned like it was doing me a personal favor.

The room was small even by European standards, with a bed that looked like it had been designed for a large dog and an air conditioner unit bolted above the window that rattled like a jar of loose change. I dropped my bag, sat on the edge of the bed, and looked around at the beige walls and the single sad print of some plaza I'd probably walk through tomorrow, and I thought, happy birthday, Paul, you really booked it this time. So I did the thing any dignified adult man would do in that situation, which was open the mini-bar, extract a tiny bottle of beer that cost about six times what it was worth, and drink it standing at the window watching scooters go by in the street below. The air smelled like grilled seafood and diesel, and honestly, that part was kind of great. Somebody down there was having a wonderful Thursday night, laughing loud in Spanish with their friends, and I toasted them with my little bottle and decided tomorrow, my actual forty-fifth birthday, I was going to be that guy. Or a reasonable facsimile.

* * *

The conference welcome mixer was the next morning, held in a rooftop bar two streets over that Gordon, the Barcelona office manager, had apparently rented out, though from the crowd you'd never have guessed anyone had rented anything. Gordon himself was easy to spot, a big friendly guy of forty-seven with the hunted look of a man who'd organized four hundred people into one space and was just waiting for something to catch fire. He shook my hand and said, "Paul! From Chicago, yes? You find the hotel okay? It is small, I know, but the location, eh?"

"The location's great, Gordon," I said, and I meant it, mostly.

I got a coffee and was doing my usual conference thing, hovering near the snack table with my badge on crooked, when I heard somebody yell my name across the rooftop. And I mean yelled, no shame about it at all. I turned around and there was Fred, thirty-nine years old, my coworker of five years, in a linen shirt with the top three buttons open, grinning at me like we were the only two people on the roof.

"No way," I said, walking over. "You're on this thing too?"

"They sent two from every regional office, Paul, keep up." He hugged me, which he'd never done before, and I felt it in my whole torso for a second before we stepped apart. "I saw your name on the attendee list three weeks ago and I've been saving up. Okay, here's the challenge. I have been in Barcelona since Tuesday, I've done my homework, and I am going to drink you under this beautiful rooftop. Loser buys dinner tomorrow night."

"Fred, it's literally my forty-fifth birthday."

"That's the spirit," he said, and waved down the bartender.

Now, Fred has been flirting with me for about five years in that way where neither of us ever calls it flirting, the commentary on my shirts, the way he always picks the seat next to mine in meetings, the time he brought me back a coffee mug from Cancun for no reason whatsoever. I'm not blind. But he's never once made a move, and I've never once made one back, because we're coworkers and I'm older and divorced and a little gun-shy, and because it's easier to just enjoy the game. So I drank with him, is my point. He did tequila, I did rum, we traded rounds, and the sun climbed and my face got warm, and somewhere in there I stopped keeping score and just enjoyed talking to him without a conference table between us.

Around two, Gordon climbed on a chair, clinked his glass with a spoon, and waited for quiet with visible effort. "Thank you all for coming. Before I release you into my beautiful city, one announcement." He held up an envelope like it contained something dangerous. "This afternoon, team-building scavenger hunt. Teams of two. First team to solve all three clues and return here wins five hundred euros." A cheer went up. "Teams have been assigned at random," he continued, in the tone of a man reading a disclaimer, "by an algorithm, not by me, and I ask you, please, whatever happens, remember we are all colleagues."

Somebody in the back laughed and Gordon flinched, which told me he'd had an incident before.

He walked along the front of the crowd with a hat full of folded slips of paper. I drew one, unfolded it, and read my partner's name, and I laughed out loud.

"Who'd you get?" Fred asked, leaning in.

"You," I said. "Apparently the algorithm ships us."

Fred's eyebrows went up and then he smiled, slow, like he was pleased with the machine. "Well. Five hundred euros and a whole afternoon with you. Gordon's algorithm is smarter than everyone gives it credit for."

"You're buying dinner if you lose, remember."

"That was the drink-off. This is a different competition. New rules, new me."

* * *

The hunt started at four that afternoon, still my birthday, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't having a good time before we even solved anything. Fred had bought a disposable camera somewhere, because the rules said photos, no phones, which Gordon explained with the weary voice of a man who'd been burned by Photoshop. The first clue was a close-up photo of a gargoyle, a snarling stone face with its tongue out, and we stood in a plaza holding it between us like a screenwriters' room.

"That's the cathedral," I said. "Has to be. Those gargoyles are famous."

"Paul, it's not the cathedral. This one has a forked tongue. I looked at the cathedral gargoyles on Tuesday, they're all animals, there's one that's an elephant up there somewhere. This is a different building entirely."

"You looked at gargoyles on Tuesday? On your own time?"

"I had a feeling I'd need them," he said, and waggled his eyebrows, and I elbowed him and we walked three blocks arguing about medieval stonework like it was a divorce hearing. He was right, it turned out. The forked-tongue gargoyle was on a little government building tucked into a side street, and when we found it Fred made me pose pointing at it while he shot the photo and narrated, "And here we see Paul, forty-five years old today, discovering that his partner was right."

"Get the angle right or I'm contesting this."

"I did a whole session on photo documentation for claims, Paul, the angle is right."

We took a break after that at a squat little bar in a plaza the size of my hotel room