Chapter 5: The Current

I almost did not go.

This was predictable enough that Sofia would have been bored by it.

At seven-thirty, I stood in the hotel room wearing the wrong shirt and constructing reasons to stay. Fatigue. Work messages. Social overload. The need to prepare for travel. A vague headache I was willing to develop if circumstances required. The party was optional, and optional things had always been dangerous because they revealed preference. Mandatory events could be endured. Optional events required wanting.

The badge lay on the desk where I had left it.

The lanyard empty beside it.

That felt like both obedience and defiance.

At seven-forty, I changed the shirt.

The mirror by the door offered me a man who looked almost convincing.

Late thirties. Dark hair beginning to silver at the temples, which clients sometimes called distinguished when they wanted to be kind. Tired eyes. Decent shoulders because anxiety had driven me back into martial arts two years earlier and the body, unlike the mind, improved when you repeated the right thing. There was a faint bruise under my left collarbone from Thursday’s training, yellowing now, half-hidden by the open shirt. I touched it once with two fingers.

On the mat, at least, pressure had edges.

A choke was honest. A grip either held or it didn’t. You tapped and began again. No one asked whether the escape was artistic. No one praised your potential while your neck was trapped under another man’s forearm. On the mat, doubt could become breath, angle, frame, hip, hand. The body told the truth and punished the lie immediately.

At seven-fifty, I checked my phone. Three new messages from photographers I had met that day. One from the Amsterdam photographer. He had waited eleven days and then found someone else for August. He was kind about it. One from a bride asking again about the gallery.

At seven-fifty-two, I opened the Prague folder and looked at the lunch photograph of Sofia.

It was good.

The background had a bright edge I would normally darken. Her hand was slightly blurred because she had been moving. The paper plate was ugly. The coffee cup looked cheap because it was.

It was good because she was there.

Unarranged. Met.

I closed the laptop.

At eight-oh-three, I left the room.

The party was in a cellar venue below an old building near the river. You entered through a narrow doorway, descended stone stairs, and arrived inside bass, heat, coloured light, and the temporary democracy of people who had spent two days talking about craft and now wanted to become bodies.

Photographers without cameras looked almost indecent.

Hands empty. Shoulders loose. Faces no longer hidden behind viewfinders. People who had spent the day discussing ethics and editing were now shouting over music with beer in their hands, swaying under low arches while blue and amber light moved across the stone walls.

The sound hit first. Bass through the floor. Laughter. Glass. A cheer from near the bar. My body tightened automatically, then failed to find a reason to flee because someone saw me and shouted my name.

“Evan!”

Linnea from the coffee station waved me over. Beside her stood two men I half-recognized and one woman whose work I had saved to a folder called Inspiration, which wasn’t a healthy folder to have.

“You came,” Linnea said.

“I was threatened by a Portuguese woman.”

“That is usually wise to obey.”

Someone put a beer in my hand. Someone else mentioned the talk. The woman from the inspiration folder said, “The line about the father under the tent. I’ve been thinking about it all day,” and I almost dropped the beer because admiration is much safer at a distance.

I stayed.

I stayed, with lager sweating in my hand.

No one seemed to mind the part of me that didn’t know how to be there.

I spoke to people. Badly at first. Too careful. Too many sentences beginning with Well, I suppose. But the music made precision impossible, and after a while the impossibility became a mercy. A German photographer shouted that my talk had made him want to delete half his portfolio, and I shouted back that he should wait until morning because destruction after beer was unreliable. He laughed and hit my shoulder hard enough to hurt.

A Canon rep found me near the bar and said something about a recorded interview. I nodded with the borrowed calm of someone this happened to. A young Czech photographer asked whether I would look at her website sometime. I said yes and meant it. Étienne Laurent raised his glass from across the room. It still entered me like approval from an institution older than either of us.

Rejection would have been easier. People kept making space and then expecting me to occupy it.

The first beer helped. I did not pretend otherwise. I had spent too many years mistrusting any aid that didn’t look noble. Beer was not wisdom. It was not courage. But it loosened the hand fear had around my ribs. The second helped less in the head and more in the shoulders. The music and beer made the room less like an examination and more like weather.

And through all of it, I kept finding Sofia.

I was not searching for her. Searching would have been simpler, a task with a method. Instead the night kept tilting, and there she was.