Brass Pin Evening

The office closed at five, and by six I was sitting at the bar of The Peat & Fossil with a brass pin in my jacket pocket and news I couldn't decide whether to celebrate or dread.

The Peat & Fossil is this weird little bar on the corner of Rue des Sables, built around an old stage where local bands used to play back when there was peat moss to sell and money to spend. Now the stage just holds a row of worn stools and a jukebox nobody loads with new songs. Regulars are mostly survey geologists and retired guys who argue about rainfall. I was thirty-four, three years in Mazagran, and I liked the place because nobody in it asked me about trilobite cuticle thickness.

I'd found the pin that afternoon, stuck in the felt lining of a fossil tray. Small, brass, the kind you push into cork maps. No idea where it came from. I'd been turning it over in my fingers when my supervisor walked past my desk and dropped the other kind of bomb on me.

"So you're on the shortlist," Terry had said, like he was telling me it might rain. "The promotion review. Section lead. It's next week."

I'd said something brilliant like, "Oh!" And then he'd said congratulations, and I'd said thanks, and we'd both stood there like two people who had run out of script, which was pretty much how every conversation with Terry went.

Anyway. I ordered a gin and tonic and sat with my back to the door, which was rude of me, because Terry walked in five minutes later and I only knew because the bartender said, "The usual?"

"The usual," Terry said, and sat down two stools away, and then looked at my glass and said, "Huh."

"What?"

"You got a gin and tonic."

"I did."

"That's what I ordered."

"So we match," I said. "Very coordinated. Very professional."

He laughed into his drink. Terry is thirty-nine, divorced five years, the kind of guy who irons his shirts himself because he doesn't trust anyone else with the collar. He hired me three years ago and in that whole time we have never once gone for a drink, and I could claim that's his fault, but honestly it's both of ours.

"Deployment freeze starts at midnight," he said. "You ready for the quiet?"

"Ready. Tomorrow the whole survey grinds to a stop. No changes, no pushes, nothing. Just us and the fossils, sitting there."

"Ten days of it. You'll get bored."

"I'll get a lot of measuring done, is what I'll get." I turned the glass on the bar. "Terry, can I ask you something? About the shortlist."

"Ask."

"Does it change anything? Between us, I mean. Work-wise."

He was quiet for a second. "It shouldn't."

"But?"

"But nothing. You'd be good at it. That's the whole answer."

I pulled the brass pin out of my pocket and set it on the bar between us. "Found this in tray forty-seven. Under the Ogyginus. Any idea?"

He picked it up and rolled it between his fingers. "Old pushpin. Somebody used to pin location notes to the cork backing, back before everything went digital. Must have slipped behind the foam." He squinted at it. "Thirty years old, maybe. Older than you."

"Everything in that building is older than me. That's my job."

"Fair." He set it back down but didn't push it toward me. He just left it there, in the middle, like it belonged to both of us.

The bartender came around and we ordered food we didn't need and two big glasses of water we needed more than we admitted. The regulars at the far end were arguing about whether a certain wadi had shifted course in the eighties, and the jukebox was playing something with a lot of accordion in it. I was on my second gin and tonic when Terry put his glass down and turned on his stool to face me.

"Can I propose something weird?"

"Those are my favorite kinds of proposals."

"For tonight only. Not at work. Not ever at work." He tapped the bar. "We pretend we're strangers."

I laughed. "Strangers."

"A stranger walks into a bar. Sees a woman at the end of it. Finds an excuse to talk to her. That is the entire game. No titles. No supervisor. No shortlist. Tomorrow the freeze starts and everything goes quiet, so tonight, we're quiet too. Nobody from work in here."

I looked at him. He wasn't smiling the way he smiles in meetings, that careful polite smile. He looked a little nervous, actually, which was new information about Terry that I filed away immediately.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because I've known you three years and I don't know what you do on Sundays. And tomorrow I find out I might be your boss in a bigger way than I already am, and after that it gets harder, not easier, to just talk." He shrugged. "So. One night. Two people who just met."

I turned my glass around. Around and around.

"Okay," I said. "But there are rules. If either of us says stop, we stop. And we don't talk about cuticle thickness even once."

"Deal." Then he added, serious for a second, "And the review stays separate. Say stop tonight, say never, say anything, and it changes nothing about the shortlist. I'm telling the committee Monday that I'm sitting out your panel whatever you answer."

"Good. Now shake." He stuck out his hand. "Terry."

I shook it. "Christine."

"Nice to meet you, Christine. What do you do?"

"None of your business," I said, and he laughed so hard he had to put his drink down.

We did the whole thing, stupidly, thoroughly. He asked where I was from and I said a town you haven't heard of. He asked if I'd lived in Mazagran long and I said three years and he said, funny, feels like I've seen you around, and I said that's because we've been pretending not to see each other for three years and he said, no, tonight we just met, keep up.

"Do you dance?" he asked, nodding at the stage.

"On that thing? It's not even a stage anymore. It's stools and a jukebox."

"It's a stage if two people are on it."

"That's the worst definition of a stage I've ever heard."

"Is it wrong, though?"

It wasn't wrong. We carried our stools up there like idiots while the bartender watched us with the face of a man who has seen much stranger things. The jukebox gave us something slow with a horn section. Terry held out his hand, palm up, an actual invitation, and I put my hand in it.

"Fair warning," I said. "I dance like a filing cabinet."

"Noted. I dance like a filing cabinet's less organized cousin."

We were terrible at it and it was the best hour I'd had in months. Somewhere in the middle of the second song he stopped trying to lead and we just kind of swayed, and I realized I'd stopped thinking about the review. Completely stopped. The brass pin was sitting on the bar where he'd left it, catching the light, and I thought about how something that small can hold a place on a map for thirty years.

"Christine," he said, during the third song. "Can I ask you something as a stranger?"

"You just did."

"Another one."

"Go ahead."

"If I asked to see you again, would that be yes or would that be complicated?"

I stopped swaying. He didn't push. He just waited, which I have decided is his best quality, and the accordion song wound down and the bartender flipped the jukebox to the next record and I thought, well, the freeze starts at midnight, everything holds still till then anyway.

"Ask me at closing time," I said. "Not before."

"Deal," he said, and we kept swaying, and neither of us mentioned that closing time was in forty minutes, or that morning would come after that, or what either of those things was going to cost us.

While I was figuring out how to step off a stage with dignity, Terry found the microphone stand. It was lying behind the jukebox like a fallen soldier, all dust and one bent clamp, and he picked it up and straightened it and clicked the switch a few times like he expected it to work.

"Dead," he said. "Good. I'm a terrible singer."

"Then what's the stand for?"

"Props." He planted it between us and leaned on it with one elbow. "I'm a traveling musician. That's my story now. I play small rooms. I play this room."

"You play no rooms. You measure rock for a living."

"Shh. You're breaking the game. I'm a musician passing through Mazagran, and you are?"

"Local. Born here. Never left."

"Never?"

"Never. And I don't dance. And tonight my name is Amira, because Christine is the woman from the office."

"Then what are we doing on your stage?"

"Standing on it. Historically." I put a hand on the stand too, because apparently we were both going to commit to this bit. "The bands stopped coming before I was born. My mother saw one once. She said the singer cried through the whole second set."

"That's a good detail. Keep it."