Collision Theory

by Adrian Todd Zuniga

  “It’s your idea?” Gemma asks me. Her dark hair is pixie-cut, her teeth perfectly straight.

  “Ryan and I thought it up together.”

  “So humble,” Ryan says as he puts his hand on my shoulder. “So talented at deflecting credit.”

  The girls laugh.

  •••

  I’m midway through my second Vodka Collins, feeling lighter and freer than I have since LA, the night with Carly before Sarah showed. But amidst this light and free, what makes the most sense is to excuse myself from talking to Gemma so I can rush home, go to Craigslist so I can:

  [ post ], Gemma…(m4w), [publish].

  But in lieu of a rattling exit, I interrupt all conversation to announce that I have a theory in progress.

  “Oh?” says Gemma.

  “Oh?” says Ryan, mimicking her.

  “Do these theory announcements happen often?” Colette asks Ryan.

  “She means ‘Oh?’” Gemma says. “Now spill it.”

  With the blustering fuel of alcohol swimming in my veins, I say like it’s a conspiracy, “It’s my Collision Theory.” Everyone leans in. After weeks of intentionally talking to no one, their curiosity and interest surprise me. “Say I’m at a dinner party.”

  “Potluck or…?” Gemma interrupts. “Kidding. Sorry. Go on.”

  “Okay, so I’m at a dinner party, and there’s a girl next to me, and we end up talking. She and I are simply a meet.”

  “Totally,” Colette says. “She sounds boring anyway.”

  They all laugh. I trundle on. “Everything is based on the impact of molecules,” I say. “Because I was invited to this dinner party by friends, the impact of molecules is lessened. So my theory is that for a meaningful, deep-rooted relationship to form, the initial intersecting of two beings has to be a collision, with surprise and randomness, where things are thrown way off the tracks.”

  “That’s the most elegant rejection I’ve ever gotten,” Gemma says.

  More laughs.

  “So are we all just a boring meet?” Ryan asks.

  “It appears so!” Gemma says with a smile, and raises her glass, so they all do. I raise my glass last. “To be safe, let’s gently toast with these glasses so none of them fall in love.”

  “If only I’d have slipped on an ice cube, barrel-rolled you both, and Thomas could have caught you to save the day,” Ryan says.

  “He might be right, though,” Colette says. “My parents were a meet. Then I guess they unmet when they divorced.” She laughs, and tells Ryan as an aside, “They haven’t talked for years.” Then she takes a long drink from her straw, emptying her highball glass so it’s just a lime wedge and some defeated ice.

  “I had a boyfriend once who was a definite collision,” Gemma says. “Fireworks, then the ultimate flame-out. God, he was bad news in every direction. Such a total asshole.” Her eyes go watery and dark. “So while I want to be a cool kid and say, Yay, collisions!, wisdom tells me a plain old-fashioned meet might suit me just fine.”

  “Lately I’ve been trying to replace a past collision,” I say. “My thinking being that the only way to replace a collision is with another collision.”

  Gemma says, “Maybe you should consider changing your approach?”

  “I know,” I say. “But sometimes you start a thing, even if it doesn’t feel good, even if it doesn’t feel right, and it’s like you have to finish to prove that it was all for something. Or maybe I just want to prove myself right.”

  “You know who else thinks that way?” she says. “Gamblers.”

  Forty-Two

  The next morning—my head singing and my stomach gurgling from downing four over-sugared drinks—I check my email to find my first-ever response to one of my many Missed Connection postings. It’s from “Angela”—Dark, Curly Hair, Holding a See-Through Bag of Kiwis on Fillmore—and the subject line reads: craigslist posting: i saw you too… In the body of her email, she’s written, “…and I liked your hair.”

  Surprised, I want to call out to Ryan to ask what I should do next. But I stop myself because the Elvis script is still on page one; because he’d know how I’ve been spending my days. Any possible positive dims, and instead of feeling found, I feel exposed and embarrassed. When I write back to Angela, all I can bring myself to type is: “Hi, I’m Thomas.”

  Which is enough.

  •••

  The next night, while Ryan’s up the street at our local café doing another pass on his Netflix pilot, I’m two miles from home, standing on the street with Angela, after dinner. She’s wearing jeans and gray suede boots. There is no wind. “We can have a margarita there,” she says and points to a Mexican-themed bar a few doors down, then to a wine bar across the street. “Or a glass of wine there.”

  “Either for me,” I say with rare enthusiasm.

  After all this looking for Sarah—Find her? Where?!—when Angela says, “Wine!” and loops her arm into mine, it ignites in me a starry explosion of romantic possibilities.

  The late-October air is charged with a wintry chill, and as she leads me across the street I tell her it’s funny how we met. How the cosmos couldn’t account for the internet when the continents were being pulled apart. But here we are.

  “Missed Connections are great,” she says. “I’m on there all the time. It’s how I met my boyfriend.”

  I stop, surprised.

  Angela pulls at my arm with playful zeal. “Hurry up!”

  But I don’t budge.

  “Come on,” she says with a flirty pout.

  “A boyfriend?”

  Angela holds up her hand, shows me her wedding ring. “I feel like maybe you haven’t noticed this,” she says.

  “You’re married?” I ask.

  “Not to my boyfriend.”

  She draws me closer to the curb. A car passes.

  “To sum it up: I’m married to my husband Benjamin, I have a boyfriend Victor, and I’m on a Missed Connections date with you. The first two are one hundred percent in the know, and they’re fine with it. Now you know, too.”

  I shake my head and look down. I’m surprised by how disappointed I am. Angela being little more than a stranger.

  “Look, we’re having fun, right?” she says. “So maybe we see what happens?”

  But I know, now. This is no collision. I am no one to her, and she will be no one to me. The initial impact of our molecules was low-grade, but now it has flatlined to zero.

  “Sorry,” I tell Angela as I back away. “But I better not.” Once there are a few meters between us, I turn and walk in the direction of my apartment, hands in pockets, head down against the cold, while the pinwheel spins.

  •••

  The next morning, I check my email to find Subject: CL: Oh, hey! from Cat. After the Angela twist ending, I’m reluctant to write back, but my thinking is, what if? Otherwise I have to write Attack on Graceland. And today? There’s just no way. So, that night I’m nearly to the corner of Minna and Second Street, when a woman I’ve never seen before is waving in my direction. I look behind me, but she shouts, “Thomas!”

  I’m confused, because in my mind Cat is Short Black Hair, Surprise Blue Eyes from the Fulton 5 Bus. But this girl’s hair is light brown, not black. Her eyes, I see when we shake hands, are brown, not blue. My mind races, trying to match her to some past moment—some clerical notebook error on my part—but I feel certain this is the first time I’ve ever seen this woman in my life.

  “So?” she asks as her left hand goes to her hip, and her right hand extends away from her in a show of beauty pageant mimicry.

  Her So? is for how I think she looks, but shouldn’t I already know? Still, I tell her, “Great.” Because something in me won’t break the illusion—maybe this wrinkle will serve as the surprise, the randomness that could add up to a collision.

  “Ton
ight my work’s office party is there,” she says, and points to the Museum of Modern Art.

  I give a surprised look.

  “Skip the frying pan, straight into the fire,” she says. “Might as well maximize potential awkwardness, right? Just don’t be surprised if I introduce you as my fiancé.”

  “Really?”

  “‘Really?’” she mimics, then laughs. “You’re hilarious.”

  Once we’re inside MoMA, we check in and grab glasses of Sauvignon Blanc. We walk around at a leisurely pace past handfuls of people, but Cat doesn’t say hello to anyone.

  “Are we crashing this party?” I ask.

  “I wish,” she says. “But no. I work at Morgan Stanley, so at things like this it’s just wave after wave of somebodies.”

  We’re standing before a piece of Gerhard Richter’s work when Cat—who is Catarina, not Catherine—says to me, “You know, you’re a lot more guarded than you were over email.”

  “Oh?” I say. My phone rings in my pocket, a vibration-pause-vibration, but I ignore it.

  “With me, you can just say what’s on your mind. I’m impossible to offend.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Okay.”

  “So, go on…” she says.

  “Well,” I start. “You’re not the girl that I saw on the bus.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I don’t think so,” I say.

  “You must be so disappointed,” she says and flicks her hair with a laugh. “I’m an absolute horror.”

  “You’re not—you’re obviously not.”

  “Look,” Cat says. “I was on that bus at some point that day. So I clicked. It wasn’t me, but my ego wanted to be picked at random from all the other girls in the city. And I’m sure that says something weird about me that I can dig into with my therapist. But it’s all weird. Online dating. Craigslist. Meeting in person. Meeting at all. I just figured, I’m single and you’re searching, so in a bold moment, I decided: Take a chance. Write and say hello, and just see.”

  “I get it,” I say. “I appreciate you telling me.”

  But reality has set in: we are just two people who were on separate buses, brought together not by wondrous chance, but each of our flawed intentions.

  “I guess I’m just not the Sarah you’re looking for.”

  “What’d you just say?” I ask.

  “I’m not the someone you’re looking for?”

  My hand goes to my forehead, a relief. I visibly exhale.

  “You can go,” she says, unaffected. “It’s really fine.”

  But it doesn’t feel fine. Sarah is nowhere to be found, my two Missed Connections attempts were total fails, and I feel singular in the world. Alone.

  “In fact, I release you,” Cat says as she leans forward and kisses me on the cheek. “Good luck, hopeful Thomas. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to drink too much wine and flirt with my boss’s son.”

  Cat raises her glass with a wide smile, then walks away.

  •••

  On my defeated walk home, while the moon glows wide and yellow in the sky, a new pinwheel kick-starts: Mom kissing my forehead goodnight when I was seven; Dad lighting candles in January when I was ten… But before it’s run a full cycle, it’s stalled by a bus that slows to a crawl at a stoplight. I look inside and when I see her, she’s looking right at me. I can’t believe it. It’s Sarah.

  I raise my hand in slow motion, a still wave, then I realize, no, it’s not Sarah. But this girl looks so much like her. It’s maybe five seconds I study her, while she studies me. Then the bus chugs and stammers. As it pulls away, she waves back.

  •••

  At home, before bed, I pull out my laptop and head to Missed Connections, click on [ post ] and I write:

  Window Wave from the Geary Bus (m4w)

  You were on the bus at the corner of Geary and 5th. I waved and, after a few confused (?) seconds, you waved back. You: Dark hair, slim neck. Your eyes were faraway diamonds. Me: I can’t get my bearings. I’m in this giant, ongoing spin. What I want isn’t just inaccessible, but she’s long gone. Are you the one who can stop it? The solution to quiet everything down?

  Forty-Three

  A week later, Ryan’s cooking in the kitchen, taking a break from what he’s calling Pilot’s final stretch. I hear my phone ring in my bedroom and race to answer, but don’t get to it before it goes to voicemail.

  I return to the kitchen to tell Ryan, “It was a call from Anarchy.” I play him Sam’s recorded voice, “Oy, mate, Sam here. Just a quick bell to see how the script’s moving. Would love to see a few pages, geezer. The first act, if you’ve nailed it. Cheers.”

  I hang up, trying to hide my alarm, and look to Ryan for guidance.

  “Producers,” he says with a note of disapproval. “It’s only been five weeks. I’ve never written anything resembling a readable script in less than eight. He’s just amped, which is a good thing. But best for you to send it to me, and I’ll read it tomorrow,” he says. “Maybe we send a scene or two, but really, Sam can wait. We’ve got another seven weeks before it’s due.”

  Which means I’ve burnt 41 percent of the time we’ve got to finish our first draft. And I’ve only done, roughly, 8 percent.

  “Okay,” I say, feeling hollow.

  “And I’ll be free by week’s end. We’ll be up against it time-wise, but we’ve got the blessing of working from what you’ve already done. Which’ll make life way easier.”

  I don’t tell him I’m still twenty-two pages shy of a finished first act. Ninety-two pages shy of a first draft. Or that the eight pages I’ve written may be totally worthless.

  “Speaking of, I was thinking about how we could develop our reluctant sidekick character into the ultimate Elvis nerd,” Ryan says. “Like, he’ll know what movies to use for guidance to get him and Lucas out of jams in any given situation, but instead of a convenient hanger-on, he’s an asset. We keep him dorky and weak, like we talked about from the start, so he can’t save the day himself. But the audience sees him as an unsung hero. You’ve probably got something better than that, but, yeah.”

  “No,” I say. Because I don’t. “That’s smart.”

  “It’ll keep our main dude from having to learn all the Elvis stuff on the fly, which means we’ll have to do less heavy lifting.”

  Ryan’s just said more about the script in two minutes than I’ve typed in weeks. “Yeah,” I say. “Sounds good.”

  “You want one of these?” he asks, and holds up a meatless hamburger patty that looks like a brown, soy waffle. I tell him no thanks and head out of the kitchen, for fear the Attack on Graceland chatter will turn to unanswerable specifics. But before I’m out of earshot, Ryan calls out, “Oh, and I wanted to ask you… Elsa’s got a work thing in Seattle on Wednesday, then she’s going to be in town for a long weekend, and…would it be weird if she stayed here?”

  Elsa? The uninvited? Who played Sarah in a past life? Who knows my mom’s tear ducts had clogged, that she left notes around the house for my helpless father? “The Elsa?”

  “We were going to get an Airbnb, and we can, it’s totally cool, but I wanted to ask you, since money’s tight for the next while…”

  “Elsa, though. Really?”

  “Really,” he says, and I see in his eyes that this is a real thing. She’s not just coming to San Francisco for a long weekend. She’s coming to see him. He’s invited her.

  “She’s…” I want to call her a wrecking ball. Or unhinged. But without her, maybe I would have never seen my mother. And she stayed and supported. Tried, and fought, when I wouldn’t. “She’s welcome.”

  “Yeah?”

  I nod.

  “She’s really brilliant,” he says. “I saw her a few times in LA. And unlike Delphine? Elsa actually likes me.” There’s delight in his eyes until he sees my face, the wrack of
sadness over my mom, over Sarah. “Shit, sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

  “No,” I tell him. “You’re excited. It’s good.” Because it is good.

  “You’re sure she can stay?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Of course.” And it’s true.

  “Thank you,” he says. “She’ll be thrilled to see you.”

  Ryan turns and uses a spatula to smush down his burger patty, which hasn’t snapped or sizzled. It’s now darker, more solid. He moves it from grill to plate, and I see the non-meat doesn’t leak any non-grease. He covers it with lettuce and a slice of tomato. I watch all of this from the doorway, see a lightness and a joy in him that I haven’t seen for ages.

  Forty-Four

  It’s three days later when my cell phone wakes me from an early-evening nap. It’s Ryan calling.

  “Hey,” I say, face pressed into my pillow.

  “You’re sleeping?” he says.

  “A little. What’s up?”

  “I’m at the airport and Elsa’s plane is running late, so I’m killing time. And I don’t mean to be up your ass, which, by the way, is a disgusting expression, but I just checked my email and you still haven’t sent me the script.”

  “I know.”

  Just this morning, I inched it to page fourteen, only halfway through the first act, which is what he’s expecting. “Just send whatever you have, so I can at least see.”

  “Soon,” I say, buying whatever time.

  “Now! Just send something. The first page. The first five. I’ve tried not to press because it’s been a crazy time for you emotionally. But it’s been six weeks, and for all I know you haven’t typed a word.”

  “I have.”

  “Then prove it,” he says. “This is a big deal for us. Or for me, if you want to bail. Elsa’s here three nights, and once she’s gone, we have to hit the ground sprinting if we’re going to meet our deadline.”

  “I know,” I say, feeling the mass of these wasted days.

  “And if I’m going to be starting from zero, you have to tell me.”