“You said ‘maybe later on,’” she said, “you’d tell me your name. You gonna tell me?”
“Why so many questions?”
“You know my name, don’t you?” She flipped to her book cover. Tapped her name, Vivienne Pink. “Reciprocate.”
“Alex, Alexi. Alexi.”
“From around here, or where?”
“Sometimes. Here. There.”
“En passant?”
“Always.”
“I like Alexi.”
“Alexi works.”
There was that eye again. The war eye, the lonely redoubt. Was it wave eye? The surfer’s thing. Was it something else in the vitreous humour? He could be trained to focus, as she was. She was so used to observing people whose cynosure of their eyes was their phone, that she was feeling uncannily human with him. She could be a slithering mess of solitude sliming out of her carapace, an eye coming out of her shell. He looked at her, eye
