In which Nenipven makes a grave tactical mistake as the result of too much alcohol, and accuses Stephanie of improper conduct with a parsnip. This puts a slight damper on their date, as you may well imagine.
“Sorry about that,” she said, returning to the table and closing her phone with a snap. “Work never ends when you’re a freelance journalist. They just called to ask me to review some products. On the up side, free products. On the down side, there goes my weekend.”
“On the upside, money,” Nenipven said. And then he hiccupped.
“How many glasses of wine have you had?” Stephanie asked suspiciously.
“I… don’t know,” Nenipven admitted. He didn’t even know how many would be considered a lot. “Four?”
“Hmmm,” she said noncommittally.
“Where were we?” he asked.
“I believe I was up by one… no, two.” She picked up her wine glass and swirled it, but didn’t take another sip. The waiter walked by, and she flagged him down to ask for coffee.
“Ah yes. Do you ever wonder, I wonder,” he swirled his wine and took another sip. “Why we do the things we do? Is it just for the challenge? And if so, why do we continue to do things long after we’ve proven we are up to the challenge? Is once not enough, and if not, then what is? How many challenges must we complete before we are satisfied and can simply say ‘yes, I can do that’ without having to prove it? And do our failures detract from our successes?”
Stephanie was thrown by the sudden conversational sidetrack, but she regrouped quickly. “You mean, failures are negatives, actually reducing the amount of successes?”
“Yeah, that,” he said. “So if a succeed once, but fail once, it’s like I’ve never succeeded. And worse yet, what if that one failure keeps you from feeling like you will ever be a success? That without a one hundred percent success rate, you are a failure?”
“Well, that would be sad. Everyone fails now and then, you have to learn to live with it. I think it’s mostly important to learn from our failures. Cliché, I know, but it really is true. You can’t let a failure hold you back forever. Where is all this coming from?”
“I… I… I…” He hiccupped suddenly. “I don’t know. I really don’t. I just feel like a miserable failure, and I don’t even know why. There’s something I’m supposed to do, something I’ve been trying to do, but I keep failing.”
“I think you’ve had a bit much,” she said, and made a move to pull the wine glass away from him.
“No!” he said sharply, pulling it out of her reach. “I haven’t had enough! It’s helping me remember. I didn’t even remember that I’d forgotten before the wine. Now, at least, I know there is something to remember, even if I can’t. I’d say that’s a step in the right direction, wouldn’t you?”
“I suppose?” She sounded hesitant.
“Damn straight. Now where were we? Just keep going, it helps to distract my mind from what I’m trying to remember.”
“Okay, I’ll go. I’ve never had the patience to learn to do any one thing really, really well. There’s always something new I want to try, so I never devote enough time to practicing the things I already sort of know how to do.” She stirred sugar into the coffee the waiter brought her.
“True. You are the type who’s always up for something new,” he guessed.
“You are correct. Your turn.”
“I’m a horrible teacher. I mean, I’m patient enough when it comes to silly things, like waiting in the queue at the Galaxy club, because there are girls to oogle and that’s never a waste of time, but I can’t explain things well. I don’t know why they thought I could be a teacher. I’m a little like you, always looking for something new, and teaching the old over and over chafed, which is why…” His voice drifted off, and he was lost in thought for a moment. “Which is why I went looking for something, and found it. And it changed – no, ruined – my life. Anyway, I expect people to know everything that’s going on in my head, to know what I know, which makes teaching very difficult. I can do a decent set of written instructions, though, given the time and motivation.”
“Oh, you just had to tack that last one on there, eh? Very well, I’ll say all true.”
“And you would be correct,” he said, but he was still thinking about whatever it was that had jogged his memory.
“My turn. I suffer from extreme sleep inertia. I frequently wake up extremely confused and disoriented, and cannot distinguish dreams from reality. In fact, just the other day I had a dream about a good friend of mine, who – in the dream, not in real life – got a hideous super short haircut and dyed her hair the palest blonde, which looked horrible on her. I hedged when she asked me what I thought, but then did say I thought she looked better with the darker hair. She got really mad at me, claimed I never supported anything she did, and threw me out of her house, saying I was never welcome there again.” She paused, and he looked at her as if to reassure her that, despite the preoccupied look on his face, his was listening. “And for some reason I needed to get back into the house. I think it was because I’d forgotten something, or left something, or… hell, maybe I wanted to steal something? I can’t remember. But I climbed up in through a second-story window and was rummaging through her dresser. And the room wasn’t her room, but it was, you know the way that works in dreams?”
“Yeah, I once had a dream my boss backed over a gorilla in the parking garage, only word didn’t have a parking garage,” he said.
“Exactly, but in the dream you know it is work, and it is work’s non-existent parking garage, somehow. It was like that. It wasn’t her house, but it was. Anyway, I don’t know if I found what I was looking for, but I woke up, and I was completely convinced that she was mad at me in real life. Even though I kept telling myself it was just a dream, it still bugged me. I couldn’t get over it. Until I finally say her, and she assured me she wasn’t mad at me – and I saw she hadn’t cut or dyed her hair.” She took a sip of her coffee. “Even though, logically, I knew it was a dream, it felt so real. I couldn’t make myself believe that it was just a dream, not deep down. Some irrational part of me still believed it. How stupid is that?”
“It’s not, I think a lot of people have that problem. But from the level of detail, I’m going to say that one’s a gimme and it’s true,” he said.
“Oh, you’re right. I’d kind of forgotten I was supposed to be trying to fool you. Got a little carried away.” She gave a little laugh. “That one just really bothers me. I see it as a character flaw, when logic and reason don’t emerge victorious.”
“Well, sometimes there are good reasons for those feelings. Not, perhaps, in your case, but sometimes. I mean, not in this case of your case, but sometimes for you, just not now,” he hastily amended.
“I know what you mean. It’s just hard, when you’re used to being all reasonable and logical, to have emotion ride in and triumph, you know?”
“Well, not really. I’m pretty emotional, and I rely on gut feeling and intuition a lot,” he admitted. “It’s saved my skin more than once, so I’ve learned to depend on it.”
“Yes, I can see how in some situations, like noticing someone who gives you an uncomfortable feeling in a park at night, could help you out. But how could thinking someone was mad at you help anything?”
“You never know. Maybe, because you were worried that you had upset a friend by saying something that hurt her feelings, you didn’t say something else that day. Maybe that sense of worry over what you’d said, or felt like you’d said, led to you not saying something in real life that could have had dire consequences.” He raised his glass, but it was empty. She pushed her still mostly full glass over to him, and he took it with a grateful smile.
“Okay, I’ll admit that is plausible, though it’s not something you can ever know. What would have been, what could have been, that sort of thing. Unless, I suppose, you believe in an infinite number if parallel universes where every possible permutation of every possible decision are being played out as we speak.” She laughed. “And we could find a way to travel between them.”
“No, not an infinite number, just the two,” he said somberly, and catching her startled look, quickly added. “You know, this one and the other one where all the evil guys have goatees?”
She laughed, and he relaxed. The alcohol was breaking down the barriers in his memory, but it was also loosening his tongue, and that was not good. Pretty soon he’d be telling her about… something. It darted across the back of his mind, and was gone. He sipped her glass of wine and willed himself to relax. It would come back, when he wasn’t thinking about it.
“Okay, my turn,” he said, but whatever he was going to say was cut off but a loud bang as a shot shattered the large glass picture window across the front of the restaurant. Pippiment, startled out of his snooze, leapt off Nenipven’s lap and shot under the table. Nenipven scooted around the table, grabbed Stephanie, and pulled her down.
“What was that?” she gasped.
“Just someone shooting up the café,” he said mildly, as more shots rang out. “We’ll be fine if we stay here.”
“How can you be sure of that?”
“Because I’m an inter-dimensional time traveling being and we know these things,” he said absently. Then he paused. “Oh, bugger, did I say that out loud?”
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