***

What Nate was not, despite her extreme behavior and ridiculous analytical gifts: outrageous. For the language of outrage is the language of ineffectuality, and Nate was the opposite of ineffectual. She never resorted—never had to resort—to the tropes and indications of the thwarted; rather, she was a professional accessor of the most relevant political cliques, an overcomer, par excellence, of high barriers. In this she demonstrated utter mastery of her ever-changing environment. Wizardly control.

As she herself might’ve put it, though, the usual formulations of individual paradox—the canonical way to draw the dyad—also gave an incomplete picture of her unique complexity. The whole externally-competent-but-internally-clueless paradigm didn’t hold. She wasn’t internally clueless, she was internally riveted. She was in touch with the biggest big stuff, and it was touching her back, a communion of universal forces. Such matters took precedence over the quotidian, and led to the kind of distracted affect she gave off.

In Henry’s case, he’d seen similar specimens during his previous life with Time, and then Newsweek. A Qatari royal, for instance, and one particular Wimbledon champion. A Colombian coca exporter. But none of them had what Nate had had: a sense of death, of skimming past death, randomly, surviving for no identifiable reason.

It was a quarter to midnight. Henry yawned. Nate noticed. “Need something to help you stay awake, old man?” she asked and patted her canvas attaché on the barstool next to her.

Henry didn’t follow. “What?”

“Never mind.”

“I don’t understand,” Henry complained, “I used to sleep for two hours then go for 20.”

“Funny,” Nate said, “I used to sleep for 12 hours, then go for two before I needed a nap.”

“Really?”

“Mm. I slept through whole courses in law school. Evidence, for example…”

Here she trailed off, derailed into some combination of memory and speculation by the dense, fraught content of the word. Evidence. Her right forearm was parallel to Henry’s left on the bar. She stared off into the middle distance, and moved her hand to his wrist, palm down, fingers curved under to the clasp of his watchband. It was a quintessential gesture, multi-dimensional, at once intimate and distancing: the conspiratorial touch that tethered her while she went out into other realms of emotional meaning, other galaxies and still-developing nebulae that the rest of humanity hadn’t been chosen to enter. Remember how tall she was. The pants, the slick hair, the lipstick. She was all strangeness and perfection.

Henry studied the latticework of blue tubes veining the back of her hand. He pushed against the taut surface of one of them, tested its spongy, biological give. “Is this where they put the IVs in?” he asked.

She shook her head without looking up. “No. Forearm.”

The fire in the corner made no noise, and Rita didn’t come over to them, and Henry didn’t ask anything else.

“Anyway,” Nate said eventually. “This isn’t the place.” She finished her second Glenlivet and set the glass down, slid off her stool, ducked under the strap of her bag.

“Evidence, Henry,” she said. “To this day I have no idea what counts.”

“But you aced the exam, of course,” Henry said.

“Well, sure,” she admitted. “It would’ve been impolite to give crappy answers.”