Coherent Light
Copyright© 2026 by Stories2tell
Chapter 6: Cohabitation
The apartment above Mrs. O’Grady’s garage was smaller than the listing had suggested and larger than it needed to be for one person, which meant it was approximately correct for two. Two bedrooms, a kitchen that required both occupants to be deliberate about their movements if they were in it simultaneously, a bathroom with a window that faced the back garden, and a living room that held a couch, a table, and the specific quality of furnished neutrality that rentals achieved when the landlord had furnished them to offend no one and please no one in particular.
Mrs. O’Grady had shown me the apartment on a Tuesday in August, three days after I arrived in Orlando by bus. She was Irish-American, seventies, with the compact efficiency of someone who had been managing property and people for long enough to have developed very clear preferences about both and very little patience for ambiguity about either. She told me the rules — no smoking, no pets, no guests past eleven on weeknights, rent on the first — with the specific directness of someone who had learned that stating expectations clearly at the beginning cost less than managing violations later. I found this approach entirely sensible and said so.
She looked at me with the expression of someone recalibrating a first impression upward.
She told me there was another potential tenant for the second bedroom. She described him as a former Marine, a civil engineering student, quiet, which were three pieces of information that I processed in order: former military meant disciplined domestic habits and probably non-negotiable standards about certain things, which was fine as long as I knew which things. Civil engineering meant someone who understood the structural and mechanical world in ways that were adjacent to my own competence without being identical to it. Quiet was the variable that mattered most.
She gave me a day to think about it. I said I didn’t need a day.
Patrick Bates arrived on a Thursday with a duffel bag and a backpack and a set of machinist’s calipers in a leather case that he set on the kitchen counter while he inspected the apartment with the specific systematic attention of someone assessing a space for its operational characteristics rather than its aesthetic ones. He moved through the rooms in a sequence that felt deliberate — not the casual drift of someone getting a feel for a new space, but something more systematic, as if the layout were information he was filing rather than an environment he was settling into — and he did this without self-consciousness, which told me it was habitual rather than performed.
I watched this from the kitchen doorway and thought: this is someone who has been in environments where the layout of a space was information rather than background.
He finished the assessment and looked at me with the green eyes that were his most immediately distinctive feature — not cold exactly, but calibrated, the eyes of someone who was gathering data and would decide later what to do with it.
He asked: What’s the kitchen arrangement?
I said: I tend to keep it organized by function rather than aesthetics. If you have a different system tell me and we can find one that works for both.
He considered this for a moment. Then he said: OK, that works.
That was the beginning of it. Not warmly. Not with the performed friendliness that people who didn’t know how to be with strangers sometimes produced in opening interactions, the excessive openness that was actually a request for reassurance. Just two people establishing the operating parameters of a shared space with the minimum necessary language.
Mrs. O’Grady approved the arrangement the following morning. We signed the lease together, which required us to sit at her kitchen table for twenty minutes with the documents, during which she asked Patrick questions about his military service and me questions about my program at CREOL and received from both of us answers that were accurate and sufficient and not particularly forthcoming, and she looked between us with the expression of someone recognizing a pattern.
She said: You’re both going to be very quiet neighbors.
Patrick said: Yes.
I said: That’s the plan.
She handed us the keys.
The garage negotiation happened the previous afternoon, which was the first extended conversation we had. We needed to have an agreement before signing the lease so this had the potential to become a problem.
I needed it. Not as a storage space — though it would serve that function — but as a workspace, a private laboratory, a room where the equipment could be set up without the constraints of a bedroom and where I could run experiments that required darkness or specific temperatures or a level of electrical consumption that the bedroom circuit wasn’t designed for. I had been planning the garage setup since March, when the lease arrangement was confirmed, and I had the layout sketched in the project notebook with the same precision I brought to everything I planned.
Patrick listened to the explanation with the quality of attention he brought to everything — complete and unhurried, not filling the spaces where other people would have filled them with acknowledgments or questions. When I finished he said: so you’re paying for the garage.
I said: yes. I need all of it. I wasn’t sure how to split that fairly.
He said: you don’t need to split it. I don’t have a car. I don’t need storage. You use it, you pay for it.
There was no performance of generosity in this — no suggestion that he was doing me a favor. He had assessed the situation and stated the logical conclusion, which was that an arrangement where I paid for a resource I used entirely was the correct arrangement. I found this response considerably more comfortable than an offer to split costs I would then have had to negotiate around.
I said: I’d prefer to be the only one with access.
He said: I have no reason to go in there.
We shook hands. It had the quality of a real handshake — transactional, specific, mutually understood.
The FedEx deliveries arrived over the following three days: six boxes of varying sizes, each packed with the specific care of someone who has shipped precision equipment before and understands that the packaging is part of the instrument’s protection. I brought them down to the garage and unpacked them in the sequence I had planned, which was the sequence that allowed each station to be established before the next one needed the space the previous one had occupied.
Patrick was on the external stairs reading when the second delivery arrived and he watched me carry the boxes down without offering to help, which I noted as correct behavior — he had assessed that I was managing the task and that unsolicited assistance would have been an imposition rather than a contribution. When I came back up for the third box he held the door open, which was the appropriate level of involvement. I said thanks. He went back to his book.
The optical bench went along the north wall, which had the most stable temperature differential and the least vibration from the street. The electronics workbench went along the east wall, under the window, with the component storage system organized on the pegboard above it in the same arrangement it had occupied in Mrs. Langdon’s garage and before that in my room in Charlotte — organized by function, labeled in the system I had developed over three years of knowing exactly where something needed to be when I needed it in the dark or in a hurry. The test equipment occupied the shelf above the bench: oscilloscope, multimeter, spectrum analyzer I had assembled from a kit, the laser power meter that had been the most expensive single purchase of the past year.
The laser diode assembly went on the optical bench last, unwrapped from its padding with the same care I had used to pack it, checked against the forty-seven pages of documentation to confirm nothing had shifted in transit, and powered up for the first time in the new space.
The fringes appeared on the screen at the far end of the bench with the same sharpness they had appeared in Charlotte, which was the confirmation I needed that nothing had been disturbed. I sat with it for a moment — the coherent beam, the precise spots on the screen, the physics working correctly in a new room — and felt the specific satisfaction of a thing in its right place.
I turned it off and went upstairs to make dinner.
UCF’s CREOL program began with an orientation week that had the specific quality of all institutional orientation weeks: informative in the administrative sense, socially performative in the way that groups of strangers who have been assembled by a common purpose and told to get to know each other performed getting to know each other. I attended the required sessions with the systematic thoroughness I brought to obligations I had accepted, extracted the information that was genuinely useful — faculty research areas, lab access procedures, the specific bureaucratic pathways for equipment requests and safety certifications — and participated in the social portions at the level of functional presence without deep engagement.
My cohort in the photonics program was eleven students. They were, as a group, considerably more technically capable than the general undergraduate population and considerably more varied in their social competence, which was a distribution I had expected and found congenial. Several of them had the same quality of focused absorption I had been developing in Charlotte — present in the technical conversations, quieter in the social ones, more interested in the equipment than in the event. I noted these people as the ones I would probably find it easiest to work with.
One of them, a tall woman named Elena from Windsor, Ontario who had an undergraduate degree in physics already and had come to CREOL specifically for a faculty member’s work on optical coherence tomography, asked me at the orientation lunch what I was working on. I told her about the laser diode assembly and the feedback architecture I had designed and the question of whether the approach was novel or whether I had simply not read the right literature yet.
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said: there’s a group at CREOL working on something adjacent to that. I can introduce you to the graduate student if you want.
I said yes.
That was the beginning of my actual UCF education, which started approximately four days before the first class did.
Patrick had enrolled in the civil engineering program with the specific purposefulness of someone who had identified a destination and was moving toward it without requiring the journey to be pleasant. He attended his orientation sessions, established his schedule, identified the library’s engineering section in the first week, and settled into the academic rhythm with the adaptation speed of someone who had been processing new institutional environments his entire life and had developed, over that time, an efficient method for doing it.
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