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The clicking and ticking of speed cube gears under tension were drowned in an excited crowd, but she had an inkling that the curious woman to her northeast, whom Maya was watching at the corners of her eyes, could isolate and listen to this plastic-upon-metal, plastic-upon-different-plastic symphony. The woman seemed unbothered by the noisy spectators sitting oblivious to her private experience. She did not so much as flinch – let alone cheer in surprise – every time someone got another record. Just a constant amused smile so slight that Maya couldn’t help leaning forward in her chair. Someone else like her? Why at a convention like this, if she too could already know every match outcome, save for a heavy headache? But then, Maya was no better.
After four more matches with her eyes decidedly planted on the competitors’ cubes instead, Maya left in no rush out some side door.
***
Dawn had passed five minutes ago. Leyla was standing in the cold, weak wind just outside the tickets office, staring out where the tracks disappeared into fog. She was far too inland to hear the waves crashing languidly, and at this hour there was no loud crowd to substitute the ocean – she was ‘early’.
The few passengers were either barely awake, clutching warm cardboard around cheap coffee, or decided in their defiance of such a thing as a sleep schedule. Some were checking their tickets, squinting into the mist obscured horizon, and checking their tickets again. Leyla didn’t need to do that. She would only calculate for a few minutes plus-minus now, without getting lightheaded. When she had done it for practice in her self-study efforts, staring at the rail network maps used to be her favorite pastime – now increasingly redundant. So what if with her crystal clear memory and her deterministic joys it didn’t have to be surprising when the 106 line was late?
She noticed another passenger seemingly entranced by the station’s rail network map, hunched in front of a newly applied colorful tangle on the panel. At second glance, this woman did not seem to be a passenger, no bulky suitcase to drag around. Despite her bare arms she was not shaking as half the station was despite their thick coats, like sand on a Chladni plate.
Leyla was aware that her sideways stare had rotated into her shamelessly facing the board – and the intriguing person in front of it. What was she looking at? Drawing Leyla out of her ponderings, the woman’s head turned an infinitesimal amount towards her. The only other person on this platform who was here not for travel but perhaps for sating a desire for complex systems.
Then to her horror, the corner of the woman’s mouth lifted ever so slightly. Now, Leyla was usually composed. Why not, if one could always be ready? Apparently not currently, for this person was throwing off the parameters she could easily keep track of. The ones that she could extrapolate while on a call, like biking and solving a sudoku grid that she memorized, like it was nothing new. Just who was this?
Leyla threw a haphazard smile in her direction, mumbled a good morning, and in long strides that she hoped did not come off as panicked, exited the station. Calmly.
***
Maya was staring at the lump of clay before her like it would run out if she averted her eyes even one second. Her vision was lighting up with sparks already, a personal low budget new year’s display; she didn’t need to know exactly how to shape this rotationally asymmetric joke of a bowl anyways. She would just have to figure it out in real time with her hands. How… unfortunate and inefficient. Maya enjoyed this pretense for getting to build avoidable spontaneity into her days. Who wouldn’t want to avert a spectacular migraine aura and have a little fun at the same time? Done with the 7-fold symmetric aberration in her hands, she went to pick up more clay.
At the other side of the studio, with her ‘luck’, cutting clay into ridiculously small tetrahedra using the wire – somehow – was none other than the mysterious woman from the cubing competition, and then the train station. Clearly she was drawn to these regular polyhedra.
It would have been surprising that Maya hadn’t noticed her earlier, if not for Maya’s little exercise in non-prediction decreasing her focus onto just this… blob of clay. She realized she’d been staring at her fellow artist for way too long. Off-kilter, she thought. Now, because of a stranger? Maya relaxed her grip on her bowl, she hadn’t noticed herself starting to squeeze it. The rotational symmetry was broken now, dented in the shape of her fingers. While Maya looked around for a place to put her creation so she could scour around the shelves – she glanced at the paper nametag on the woman’s glittering shirt – Leyla remained focused on her clay cutting wire, sustaining a perfect tension as she sliced.
As for Maya, after three layers of plastic, she recovered her preferred clay and reluctantly returned to her wheel. Her eyes stayed stuck on this Leyla for a second too long, and if she imagined the woman meeting her gaze, then maybe Maya’s migraine was just too severe.
***
Half an hour left until midnight, Leyla was still speeding through her turns. She planned to get through another eight-ball game before the place closed for the night. Cold, strategically placed lamps glinted off the polished sphere as it hurtled across the muted fabric cover, but Leyla did not need to look to know where it would strike. Instead, she straightened back into a relaxed stance and scanned the crowds again. To her side, her opponent’s huff confirmed her small victory.
It was going to be a low rolling resistance ride if she kept extrapolating like this, the dynamics of the incompressible spheres on level planar surface, the cue at choice angles, the miniscule shaking of the ground as fellow patrons of the intro-to classical mechanics arts walked around. She was calculating motions – even before she was losing matches a few days in a row and in want of feedback for her self-study – because these past few weeks had been interesting. She kept seeing this almost-spectre – Maya, was it? The handwriting on the nametag was quite elegant – every so often at her favorite places for practicing… this. The pool hall was about three hundred kelvins, but that did not entirely explain the warmth in Leyla’s temples and ears at the thought of their paths intersecting again.
Just as she was thinking about Maya’s dextrous hands and monstrous clay creation, she caught a glimpse of a perhaps familiar face entering the pool hall – now a quarter hour until its closing – slipping through a minimally opened door. Nobody else seemed to pay attention to her weaving a quick line through the crowd to the only corner where one could see every table at play. And she knew this, Leyla realized. Maybe their pastimes overlapping was something other than the ‘coincidence’ of particles in a box collisions. It seemed more likely every week she caught her visage in some other crowd.
As if on cue, Maya appeared to conclude her sweep through the tables, having leaned one way or the other to get a better view. Her dance of obliviousness didn’t fool Leyla. If her hypothesis was true, she figured Maya wouldn't have to as much as enter the establishment if she simply wanted to know the states of the games.
Leyla did not sport a glass of spirits like many of her barely-rivals here; recklessness came to her regardless. This time she spared the effort to fix her gaze even when the other woman’s scanning motion fell upon her eyes. Maya’s face lit up across the hall. “Well played,” she was saying, beaming. Despite her voice rising no higher than the crowd Leyla could hear her as clearly as if she were leaning into her ear. Too few heartbeats later Maya retraced her path back to the double doors of the hall and stepped into the chilly night air without looking back.
Leyla realized she had not made any attempt to find an opponent as fast as herself for her final game of the day. There were now only a few minutes to midnight. With a sigh she began thinking of the bus status instead, and walked toward the door through a thinning crowd.
***
The cool wind of the late evening was a welcome respite from the days’ sticky, humid warmth. Maya was quite sure everyone on the rooftop agreed with her on this as she took a sip of her wonderfully icy and sour lemonade that her friend had prepared for the group. Around her was a good amount of poor cable management, a scattering of tripods, a lot of portable telescopes, and a few amateur astrophotography setups being built. The occasional quiet laughter relaxed her posture as she found the outside of the stairway housing a perfect place to lean on. She sat down and waited for astronomical twilight to end. Better visibility, today was supposed to have some meteor showers. They should be fun for their photography, she figured. Strictly speaking, she wouldn’t require the telescopes for her stargazing. Besides, she wanted to finish the lemonade before venturing near friend-of-a-friends’ viewing stations.
Down to an incredible precision when the sun went eighteen degrees below horizon, she heard a new friend-of-a-friend emerge from the staircase. Curious. Maya was planning to get up anyways, thank you very much. And so she noticed, suspicion in the form of the same star-like glittering shirt as the pottery studio, and confirmation in her friend’s exclamation of one Leyla. Maya almost stumbled back against the wall of the housing. Again? Determined to not let this intriguing, gorgeous, peculiar woman permeate all of her waking thoughts, Maya walked over to someone else’s Saturn viewing station.
With some astigmatism, the sparkles on everything were quite entertaining. And so she spent a few hours, lost in silently appraising each telescope and the various lens combinations within.
When she emerged from her optics survey having visited all stations and greeted fellow enthusiasts, she found herself next to Leyla. They were both a few meters back from a tracking astrophotography telescope and a DSLR camera standard for this endeavor. Not the worst Maya had seen.
Some minutes later Leyla moved forward to crouch and watch through a screen the input to the setup. Maya’s suspicions – and hopes, really – all pointed toward a strange commonality between her and Leyla. Their chance encounters had only emboldened Maya in asking their first question. “I didn’t know you needed to look at camera screens so much to stargaze.” Leyla’s frame shook slightly. Quite boldly interpreting this as laughter, Maya continued on. “Did you know the meteor showers would happen tonight? I mean, they’re every year around this time but…” She trailed off to unsure silence.
To her relief, Leyla smiled and partially turned to face her. “Yeah, I was trying to get a sight of them too. I… figured… that today’s dusk was best,” Leyla said. “In thirty-seven minutes the meteor shower will start. They say,” she added more quietly. Maya hummed in approval and thanks. She was growing increasingly convinced that Leyla could also ‘see’ the stars as they were closer to the start of time, and as they would be soon.
She was so curious that she wanted to stare at a normal incidence at Leyla’s face for hours and note every time she wasn’t surprised by one or another odd fact. When Maya left with her thoughts forming quite an unusual turbulence, again, Leyla was still standing impressively still beside the tracking telescope.
***
Leyla was always sixty seconds early to the studio door of her knitting machine reservation. Her project this time was a set of ion and molecular absorption spectra, rectangles fit for the flat shaped output of the machine she selected. After quickly checking in at the lobby, Leyla unceremoniously opened the studio door. She barely fit through the frame with perhaps too many varieties of colorful yarn in her bag.
It turned out that if not for the overflowing sea of yarn, she still would have had to stop: Standing at the circular knitting machine was Maya. She was deftly weaving her starting string of yarn over-under through the hooks in the machine to set up some project – the rest of the yarn scattered on the table at her hip was all teals and blues and grey. “Hey,” Leyla greeted, hoping the warbling volume and pitch of her voice did not give away her surprise at yet another coincidence, nor exactly how pleasant the surprise was. Calmly, just like the train station from weeks ago.
Maya smiled at her, lifting her gaze from the machine without slowing her hands and the hooks. “Nice seeing you around! Didn’t know you were into other arts. Beyond that of cutting clay into a small horde of platonic solids, I mean.” Maya said.
Why did she sound so unaffected? Surely she was surprised, for Leyla’s working hypothesis was that they couldn’t use their… unusual skills to predict and perceive each other. One she would be happy to test out for a sample size of at least thirty, she noted distractedly.
Leyla’s senses returned to her and she finally stepped past the doorframe to set down her materials on another table. “The many octahedra are for enrichment, thank you very much. And I like watching the strings come together with these,” she gestured around the studio, “It’s quite entertaining even if it’s… predictable.” Maya’s eyes gleamed at her last sentence, and she grinned like she maybe knew too much.
Seeing someone else like herself got Leyla off her balance. It was a type of unsettling that made her spine alight in electricity, her blood warm, and was not entirely so horrible. They exchanged affirmative nods, which felt silly, and Maya appeared pleased with her comment with the ‘predictable’, while Leyla hoped she appeared in-the-know too.
Hours elapsed in the soft clicking and whirring of electrics and mechanics, during which Maya finished two pieces. Both of them resembled an overcast day’s beach and waves, except in the more simplified one it was clear there was a mismatch in the pattern and a shift broke the expected shapes. Leyla watched from the corner of her eye as Maya unraveled the flawed project slowly. Like she was somehow savoring it. Leyla chose to disregard her earlier attempt at projecting composure: “Why would you start the machine if you knew?” Lelya blurted out. If you could know it would fail, went unsaid. “About the string tension, I mean,” she hastily added.
Maya laughed gently. “You know, I had a headache. I must not have noticed.” Leyla could feel blood rushing to her face and ears as she uttered an embarrassed ah I see and turned her whole torso pointedly towards her own project.
In the next hour Maya redid the one she had unraveled, that had elicited the question, now without the shifting error. Then, she started to unravel the first one, the flawlessly knit textile. Still mortified and rotating all their interactions up to this point in her mind, Leyla decidedly did not hurl another potentially rude question at her. Instead, she stared at the strings of yarn falling and collecting into a small hill, for a good eight minutes, got herself together, and cleaned up her work bench. As she left the studio, Maya flashed another all-too-knowing smile at her. Leyla squeaked a quick bye and almost ran through the lobby, body now entirely too warm for the air conditioned building.
***
Maya was standing in the water, looking down and watching the sand erode where she stepped, digging a pit so slowly. The sun was burning hot, the sky was clear, the horizon was empty of ships. Kelp lazily floated back and forth near the shoreline, the waves tall and clear in the shallow edges of the seafloor. It was all stunningly saturated in blue and humidity, yet Maya was staring only at the wet sand and its ensemble movement, humming quietly.
And so, even with her unembellished senses she did not notice someone approaching the shallow pit she was barely sinking in. Her head snapped to the side as Leyla's calm voice calling her name finally cut through the crashing waves. “Heat wave, huh?” Leyla sounded amused. “Thought I might spectate some fluid dynamics too.”
Maya stared, her senses rapidly coming back to the present, though she did not make the extra effort to calculate it all this time. It was charming to be a bit surprised, particularly by someone else who chose when they could be surprised too. She was finding herself staring at Leyla at chance meetings quite often these days. There was a way to remedy that, she supposed.
Leyla also faced the ocean, standing with her shoulder next to hers. Her hair was brushing against Maya’s arm and the weather was somehow even hotter now. A few minutes passed while the patch of sand Leyla stood in danced alive with water and she started almost sinking into the shore as well.
“The bluffs will never be this shape again,” Maya began, slightly too loud. “Though I suspect you could know their contours years from now without needing another visit?”
At the almost-confession half-accusation, a smile spread across Leyla’s face. It was a sight that had been quickly burnt into Maya’s memory at the astro gathering and had embellished many daydreams after.
“Well, that’s not so fun is it? Just like the way you look at the rail network maps. Besides, this whole shoreline would be such a headache. I like thinking of just this section I’m standing at right now much more.” Leyla said.
“Yeah, it’s not as fun.” Maya’s heartrate was picking up. She was focused exactly on Leyla, the only being in her depth of field that she was perceiving. Which was why Maya did not catch the height of the incoming wave and how it would definitely drench her clothes when it hit where they were busy talking with finally shed caution. Her conversation partner, however, seemed to be a bit less lost, because Maya figured – right after she collided with a small lukewarm wall of water – Leyla had gracefully taken a long step backwards just seconds before.
So she donned mock-betrayal on her face – and promptly lost it upon seeing Leyla grinning ear to ear. Laughter escaped Maya and soon she was wading through water to get enough depth to heroically splash some water back at Leyla.
***
The next day, Maya is waiting at her doorway, hand securely at the side of the frame. Leaning forward to swivel her head, her eyes scan across the space of the shared apartment hallway. Leyla’s late, and Maya doesn’t want to bother guessing why.
Several seconds later, she finally hears unrushed syncopated clicks from Leyla’s shoes, and soon after spots her hair oscillating at the same periodicity.
Leyla considers herself no stranger to stairs but her heartrate disagrees. Luckily she can feel the wind that breezes through the open windows of Maya’s flat. She hears her call out, “The ice is melting! Who knew you had it in you to not be on time for once?” She is laughing. It’s a wonderful sound. Leyla bounds up the remaining stairs two-at-a-time, still careful not to crash into railings the plastic bags of cherries, peaches, and nectarines that she’s carried for a while now. A few steps in front of the doorway she stops. Leyla can spot the iced tea set on a window-side table, and above it a turned off air conditioner unit painted bright colors. She presumes her curiosity will never end.
Maya can spot the corner of a sudoku book peeking out of Leyla’s fabric bag, and a small flower tucked into one of the plastic ones for the fruit. “Seems quite hot out there.” Maya says. Leyla’s attention snaps back onto her face, and she stands still for too long, the stairs catching up to her.
“Not a vampire, are you?” Maya says, tilting her face, and moves only a few steps back from the threshold. “Please, come in.”
Leyla is nervous in a way she often isn’t. By now it is clear to Lelya that she does want to play this game, and if she doesn’t know how to start – and what a thrill that is – she’ll just sweep the parameter space and trust Maya.
Leyla puts her shoes to the side slowly, which is also known as excited – and strategic, of course – stalling, and holds the fruit bags out of her way. She steps inside onto a cold tiled floor, centimeters away from Maya. But not touching, just like the beach.
It seems to Leyla that Maya’s been as restless about today as herself, if the way her breath caught when Leyla eventually made her way past the threshold is anything to go by. Maya herself is experiencing quite an elevated heartrate. But then, remembering the over-road mirages in the streets could explain other signs. It could just be the summer heat.
She supposes they’ll have all the time to find out.
Maya lightly wraps her hand around Leyla’s arm to finally get them out of the entryway, the apartment door slipping past them to close with the draught. They set the fruits on the table, they quip about the tea with its ice already melted. As they make their way through to the balcony, neither of them are sure of anything, and it all feels so alive.