Speed Dating the Wrong Sign

I moved to Middleton Vale in September, six months after the breakup, and for the first three weeks my social life consisted of the night bus and the microwave in my rented flat. The breakup is worth a paragraph, not a chapter. Fiona and I worked at the same biomedical supply company and dated for two years, from when I was twenty-two to twenty-four, and when it ended I found out she had already been seeing our regional manager for a while. I did not want to be the guy who keeps running into his ex in the break room, so I took a transfer to a territory nobody else wanted and drove a rental van full of centrifuge tubes to a town where I knew exactly zero people. I am twenty-four now, which felt old at the time and feels absurd now that I have met people in this town who have actual histories.

The night bus is officially the 47, but everybody calls it the sign because of the neon sign mounted above the windscreen, a leftover from some previous owner who ran party buses in the eighties. The sign is supposed to say LATE RIDER but half the letters are dead, so what it actually says at any given moment depends on which tubes are sputtering. Some nights it says L T E ID R, which nobody minds. The problem is that on cold nights, when the tubes warm up unevenly, it goes through a phase where it says something that looks a lot like LATE RIDE, and drunk people get on expecting a different kind of evening entirely. The drivers have stopped correcting them.

I was on the 47 around nine on a Thursday, coming back from a dinner that was technically a client meeting and technically just me eating chicken alone, when I saw the sign do its worst trick yet. It flickered through LATE, then LA TE, and then for a solid ten seconds it said PSYCHE before dying back to L TE. I am not a mystical person but I took it as an omen anyway, mostly because the alternative was going home and microwaving something.

The bus was half empty. There was a man asleep near the back with his mouth open, a woman in scrubs doing a crossword, and near the middle, one seat in from the aisle, a woman writing furiously in a notebook with such force that I could hear the pen from four rows back. She was forty-something, I would guess mid-forties, with dark hair going grey at the temples and a canvas jacket covered in what looked like paint flecks. She did not look up. I sat down next to her because the other empty seats were next to the sleeping man and next to a puddle of something, and because furious notebook writers are usually less chatty than crossword people. I was wrong about that, fortunately.

She wrote for another two stops. I looked out the window at the shuttered hardware store going past. Then she stopped, underlined something twice, and said, without turning her head, "Do you think the word 'vulnerable' is doing any work in that sentence, or is it just decoration?"

I should mention here that she asked me that. It was not rhetorical in a way that required silence.

"Decoration," I said. "Any sentence that announces its own vulnerability is lying."

She turned and looked at me properly for the first time. Her name, I learned within a minute, was Keiko, she was forty-six, and she was a paintings conservator at the university museum, which explained the paint flecks, and she was writing what she called a eulogy, though not for a person.

"For an event," she said. "A funeral dirge for an event called Love at First Psychic. It runs Friday and Saturday nights in the back room of the Lotus Hall. Speed dating. Twelve three-minute dates, a break, then everyone writes down who they liked and the host, a man named Miguel Pemberton, matches them up and announces the results like he's reading lottery numbers."

"You've been?"

"No. My friend has. Twice. She's a ceramicist, forty-one, does these beautiful matte glazes that look like river stones, and she is funny and sharp and pays her bills, and the second time she went, Miguel Pemberton stood up in front of the room during the results and said her matches had come back empty and that maybe the spirits were telling her to focus on her art, because clearly romance wasn't her medium. He said it like a joke. The room laughed. She came home and did not throw a pot for five weeks. A ceramicist who doesn't throw pots is basically a bird that's stopped flying."

I did not know what to say to that, so I said nothing, which turned out to be the correct response, because she kept going.

"So I'm going on Friday. I signed up online under the name Delphine. I'm going to ruin it. Not violently. I have a plan and the plan is elegant."

She showed me the notebook. The plan, as far as I could understand it, was this: during the three-minute dates, Keiko would ask each man a series of questions designed to make them behave terribly in front of everyone, something about leading with their worst opinions, and then at the results announcement she would stand up and, in front of the room, read aloud a prepared statement about Miguel Pemberton, his business model, and the specific cruelty of using a lonely woman's bad luck as crowd material. There was a version of the statement drafted, revised, and drafted again. There was a highlighted section. There was a backup joke in case the room turned against her.

"You rehearsed a joke," I said.

"Two jokes. A eulogy needs levity or it curdles."

The bus stopped. Two students got on, looked at the sign, which was flickering between LATE and PSYCHE again, and got off at the next stop looking disappointed. Keiko watched them go with what I would later learn was her standard expression, which was one degree off from amused and pointing downhill.

"The flaw in my plan," she said, closing the notebook, "is that I have never in my life done speed dating and I don't actually know how a room like that works. My friend Esther says the men there are mostly fine and mostly nervous and Miguel Pemberton is the only monster, and monsters do well in crowds. And the sign out there just told me the universe has opinions, so."

"I think the sign is broken."

"Everything is broken. That's how you read it."

I told her my situation, briefly. New town, no friends, six months out of a two-year relationship that ended the standard embarrassing way, sales rep for biomedical supply, which sounds more interesting than it is and pays worse than it should. She asked what a biomedical supply company actually supplies and I explained about centrifuge tubes and sample trays and she said, with real feeling, that she had spent twenty years of her marriage with a man who never once asked what she did all day, so hearing the centrifuge tube supply chain explained on a night bus was, comparatively, a red-letter evening.

She had been married for twenty years, she said, from twenty-four to forty-four, and separated two years ago, amicably, which she said the way you describe weather in another country. He was a good man who was bad in bed in the specific way of never once asking a follow-up question. She did not say that part angrily. She said it like a fact she had finished auditing.

The bus reached the end of the line, which was a loop near the university, and we both stayed on for the second circuit, which neither of us had ever done and which the driver permitted with a shrug. The sign outside had settled into saying PSYCHE steadily, which Keiko declared proof of something. She said she had bought her ticket for Friday's event already, twenty pounds, non-refundable, and that Miguel Pemberton's website promised "a curated journey to your soulmate" and also had a stock photo of two laughing adults holding wine glasses that had been taken from a bank advert.

"The elegant version of my plan," she said, "requires an accomplice, and Esther won't do it, she says she's over it, which she is not, she's just tired. The accomplice signs up too, sits through the three-minute rounds feeding me information, and at the results announcement stands up next to me so I'm not one lone furious woman in a room of strangers but two, which is a completely different animal."

I want to be accurate about how this next part happened, because I have told it wrong to myself a couple of times. She did not maneuver me. She laid the plan out, flaws visible, jokes rehearsed, and then she said, plainly, "I could use an accomplice. You'd have to be free Friday. And you'd have to be willing to be terrible at speed dating in front of strangers, which based on everything you've told me, you already are."

I thought about my Friday, which contained a microwave and nothing else.

"I'm in," I said. "But I should tell you I'm bad at plans."

"Good," she said. "Plans that survive contact with bad planners were never plans. Get off at my stop, I'll show you the website, and you can meet Esther, who will cry when she hears there are two of us now."

The bus looped back around. The sign said PSYCHE the whole way.

I offered to be her fake boyfriend on the walk from the bus stop to her building, mostly as a joke. We were passing a chip shop and a boarded-up travel agency and I said I had been practicing looking devoted for years, I had a two-year run at it, references available. She laughed, a proper laugh, the kind that stops a person on a pavement, and then she said no.

"Absolutely not. I work alone. That's not a philosophy, it's just how the last twenty years turned out. If you're in the room as my boyfriend, Miguel Pemberton will build an entire narrative around us, the golden couple, and my statement will land like a drunk aunt at a wedding. As two separate strangers we're chaos. As a unit we're a segment."

That was sound reasoning, which annoyed me, because I had liked the idea of being her fake boyfriend for about forty seconds and had already developed opinions about it. So I said fine, I would be a lone stranger, terrible at speed dating, sitting three seats away and feeding her nothing useful, and she said that was the spirit.

Her place was a narrow terraced house near the university, with a front door that only half worked. Inside it smelled like turpentine, in a good way, the way a workshop smells when somebody actually works in it. There were brushes in jars on the windowsill and a big flat lamp over a table and a photograph of Esther, whom I would meet later, standing next to a kiln looking triumphant about something. Keiko opened her laptop and showed me the Love at First Psychic website, which was worse than she had described. There was a countdown timer. There was a testimonial from someone named only "Sandra, thirty-eight, feels seen." There was Miguel Pemberton in a purple shirt, arms crossed, smiling the way men smile in photos when they have been told to look trustworthy.

And while she was scrolling, the bus thing happened. Not the bus, the physics. She reached across me for the mouse and my knee knocked the notebook off the arm of the chair and it hit the floor and fell open, and I looked down before I could stop being a person with eyes, and there it was. Page after page. Tiny handwriting, different inks, arrows going everywhere. A map of the Lotus Hall with the fire exits marked. A list of questions ranked by how badly she judged they would make men behave. Do you believe in destiny, followed by a note that said "destiny talkers escalate fast." A section headed MIGUEL, with his full name spelled out, Miguel Pemberton, and the timing of the results announcement, and the sentence about romance not being Esther's medium written out verbatim and underlined twice. A contingency plan for if the lights in the hall were dimmed, because apparently she had thought about reading the statement by the light of her phone.

I should say here that I did not laugh at her. Some people would have. But I had spent six months being the person whose plans were all mess, and the level of preparation, the ranked questions, the backup joke made me feel less like I had joined a scheme and more like I had joined a small army with one soldier and now two.

"You've thought about the lighting," I said.

"The lighting is where revolutions fail," she said, taking the notebook back without embarrassment, which I liked. "Esther thinks I'm doing too much. Esther is wrong. You do too little and you get five weeks of not touching clay."

We rode the 47 back toward town, because by then it was nearly ten and neither of us wanted to admit the evening had a shape yet, and the sign did its thing overhead, PSYCHE, PSYCHE, L T E ID R, and I remember thinking that Friday was tomorrow and I already had a feeling about it I couldn't name, something between nerves and standing at the top of a pool.

Friday came and my plan, as promised, fell apart on contact.

The Lotus Hall was above a defunct kebab shop, up a staircase with carpet worn down the middle, and it held maybe sixty folding chairs arranged in a horseshoe with a microphone stand at the open end. Miguel Pemberton was taller than his website photo and wearing the same purple shirt, which told me something about his wardrobe and something about the website. There was a table with name tags and a cash box and a cable running from a speaker to a wall socket, taped down at intervals, except for one interval where it wasn't.

Keiko was signed in as Delphine, which I learned she had chosen because it was the name of a painting she had spent four months conserving the year before, a woman holding a letter, and she wore a name tag