The Maker of Small Celebrations

Val Crandall arrived at the Eclipse Pavilion at six forty on a Friday evening, which was fifteen minutes earlier than she needed to be, because she had spent thirty-four years being early to things and saw no reason to stop now. The elevator opened onto the rooftop and the whole city spread out in front of her, glowing. That characterized the Bay Area in 2089. Every building wore its coat of light. The moss on the walls of the towers shifted colors on schedule, soft blues for the residential blocks, a stubborn orange along the commercial strips, and the two bridges out in the bay pulsed in long slow waves like something breathing. It was pretty. She had seen it every week for three years from hotel windows and train platforms, and it was still pretty, and she was tired of being the person who noticed that it was pretty and then went back to work.

Her job, for anyone who asked, was bioluminescent home systems. She was a tech rep for a company called Verdant Living, which meant she drove up and down the coast teaching homeowners how to program their walls to glow in patterns, or teaching building managers why their patterns had gone wrong, which happened more than the brochures admitted. Moss was alive. Alive things held opinions. You could spend an afternoon coaxing a stubborn patch of living wall back to its programmed sequence and it would behave beautifully until the moment you packed up your kit, and then it would sulk back to whatever it wanted. She had learned to find this funny somewhere around year two. Mostly.

She checked her reflection in the dark glass of the elevator door before she walked out. Silver in her hair already, at thirty-four, which she blamed on the travel. Her one suitcase was in a locker downstairs because she had come straight from a service call in San Jose, and her hands still smelled faintly of nutrient spray no matter how many times she washed them. This was the reality of the reunion weekend. She had not taken a full week off since spring. The last vacation she remembered clearly had been two years ago, and she had spent half of it answering messages, and the other half sleeping, and she could not actually tell you which half had been better. That was the sort of thing she was hoping to figure out this weekend. Shelley had told her on the phone, plain as anything, that Val was going to show up, have a good time, and stop checking her work messages, and Val had agreed to all three and meant maybe sixty percent of it.

The check-in table sat just inside the pavilion's covered terrace, staffed by two volunteers she didn't recognize and a stack of name tags arranged alphabetically. Behind the table, adjusting a small lantern of engineered glow-moss so that it cast light across the guest list, stood a man she would have known anywhere, and would have gotten wrong everywhere else. Collin Pendergast. Twelve years was a long time. He had been tall and narrow at twenty-two, all elbows and serious talk, and now he was still tall but he had filled out, and his hair was shorter, and there was a streak of deliberate blue glow-thread woven into the collar of his shirt, the kind artists wore to signal that they worked with light professionally. He resembled a man who had decided who he was and then actually done it. She had not expected that to sting, but it did, a little.

He looked up from the lantern before she reached the table. He read her face the way he used to read circuit diagrams, patiently, all the way through.

"Val," he said. "Val Crandall. You're early."

"You're keeping a list," she said. "Of course I'm early."

He laughed, and the laugh was the same, which somehow made the rest of the changes easier to take. He pulled her name tag off the table and handed it over, and did not make the joke everyone made about name tags at reunions, which was that nobody needed them, and instead just waited while she peeled the backing and stuck it crooked on her jacket, because of course her jacket was already glow-dusted from the service call and nothing stuck right to it.

"Senior week," he said. "Twelve years ago. You taught me how to dance on the roof of that terrible apartment on Weldon Street, and then we both pretended the rest of the summer hadn't happened, and I've felt bad about the pretending for about eleven of those twelve years."

Val stood there with her name tag half pressed down and considered what to do with that. She was not used to men leading with honesty. Her last two years of dating, what little there had been, had been a procession of men who talked about themselves in measured portions, like they were rationing. Collin had apparently never learned rationing, or had unlearned it, and the effect was disorienting in a way she found she didn't mind.

"You felt bad about that?" she said. "I felt bad about it too. I figured you'd moved on and forgotten the whole thing."

"Forget it? Val, I built a light pattern for my first gallery show based on that roof. The whole piece. Nobody at the gallery knew that, but it was that roof, all those colors coming up over the bay at two in the morning." He said it plainly, without weight, like it was just a fact about his year, and that was the moment she understood he had actually changed. The boy she remembered would have wrapped that confession in six qualifiers and an apology.

A volunteer bumped past with a box of programs, and Collin stepped out from behind the table and steered her toward the bar with a hand hovered near her elbow, not touching, just indicating direction, which she appreciated more than she could have explained. The bar was real wood, actual old-growth salvage, which cost a fortune in 2089, and the drinks came in glasses etched with the reunion year. She ordered something with citrus in it because she had spent the afternoon in the sun in San Jose and her body was voting.

* * *

They took a small table at the edge of the terrace, and the talking went easy in a way that surprised her. He asked about her work and she told him the truth, which was that she spent her life explaining to strangers why their glowing walls had moods, and he laughed at the right places, not the polite places. He told her about his career in the plain terms of someone who had gotten somewhere he was proud of. Commissions for municipal light installations, a studio in Oakland with four people on payroll, the pavilion contract itself. He had designed the pattern that ran through the terrace railing where they sat. Then he went quieter for a moment and told her his mother had died two winters ago, and that he had taken a year off commissions and just built small things, things nobody paid for, because his hands needed work that asked nothing back. Val recognized that. She had done the same thing with her own griefs, just with service tickets instead of sculptures.

"You ever get married?" she asked, and immediately wished she had built up to it, but he only shook his head.

"Almost, once. Six years ago. It didn't take. You?"

"No. I date my work, basically. It's not a healthy relationship but it's committed."

He grinned at that and told her she should charge for her material, and the conversation drifted on through a second drink and the slow arrival of other classmates, a few of whom waved at their table. Cade Jordon came through at one point with his transit-project brochures practically glowing alongside his cufflinks, and greeted Val with the same half-flirt he'd tried at a party when they were both twenty-four, and she handled him the way she handled stubborn moss, politely and with firm boundaries, and Collin watched this with an expression he didn't bother hiding.

Eventually the sky went fully dark and the city did its nine o'clock shift, the whole bay rim brightening in one long rolling wave from Oakland to the bridges, and the pavilion crowd oohed at it the way crowds do. Collin leaned in over the table.

"There's something I built for tonight," he said. "Out on the open terrace, past the railings. The moss pattern responds to voices. Pitch and volume. I've been tinkering with it for three weeks and I'd like you to see it, because honestly you're the only person here who'd understand what it's doing."

"Is that a professional invitation or a personal one?"

"Both. Mostly personal, if I'm being plain about it."

Val looked at him over her glass and did the arithmetic she'd been avoiding all evening. She was thirty-four, he was thirty-four, the night on the roof had been twelve years ago and neither of them was that person anymore, and she was actually glad of it. She set the glass down.

"Show me," she said.

He walked her out past the railings to the open stretch of terrace, where a wide panel of living moss climbed the far wall, deep green and dormant, waiting. He told her to say something, anything, and she laughed and said hello, stupidly, and the whole panel woke. Rings of light bloomed out from the center in the exact pitch of her voice, soft gold spreading to blue at the edges, and when he spoke next the pattern answered him differently, in tones of green and white, and when they both talked at once the two patterns reached toward each other across the panel and braided together in the middle.

"There," he said quietly. "That's the part I wanted you to see."

The two of them ended up leaving the pavilion around ten thirty, which surprised Val, because she had planned on leaving by ten and had told Shelley as much on the phone three weeks ago. Shelley had already gone home to her kids by then, which was its own kind of proof that reunions were shorter in practice than in planning. Collin walked her out the long way, past the coat check, past the table of leftover programs, and down the wide stairs to the street level, and neither of them suggested a cab, so neither of them got in one.

The streets of the neighborhood glowed the way they always did after the nine o'clock shift, the moss on the building faces dimmed to their night palettes, mostly deep blues and greens with the occasional apartment dweller who had never learned restraint. Val had seen this city every week for three years from hotel windows and train platforms, and it still looked different at walking speed. She said so, and Collin said that the whole point of building things at walking speed was that most of his work was an argument against viewing distance.

"That sounds like an artist thing to say," she told him.

"It is an artist thing to say. I've been workshopping it on clients all year."