“And what are you going to do when you grow up?”
“Gosh, I don’t know. Grow up, I guess?”
He was silent a moment. “I think that would be a shame.”
“If I grew up?”
“If you changed.”
I made a sort of hiccoughing noise. Surprise and bubbly pleasure. “You don’t know me.”
“No,” he agreed. “But I’ve enjoyed talking to you and I’m sure others will too.”
That sounded perilously close to goodbye and I panicked. Maybe it was just because I would have to start the cycle of doom all over again but I genuinely didn’t want him to go. “To be honest, you’re the only person who hasn’t hung up on me halfway through my opening line.”
There was another moment of silence. I might have been imagining it but it felt a little charged. “You asked me not to.”
“I was honestly pretty desperate.”
“Well, it seemed to work.”
“I guess you took pity on me.”
“I wouldn’t call it pity.”
I nearly asked him what he would call it, but I didn’t quite have the balls. I’d been told to telebond, after all, not teleflirt. I wondered what he looked like. What he was doing right now as he was talking to me. Probably he was sixty-five and tending a bonsai tree, but his voice made me imagine wingback chairs and whisky. A riding crop with a silver tip laid idly across a knee…Okay, maybe that was too far. Or just far enough.
I shivered and suddenly realized how, well, silent silence was when the only thing connecting you was an electrical signal. I didn’t know this man, and he didn’t know me, and if I didn’t say something soon, it was going to get super fucking uncomfortable. “So…um…” I fumbled with the cheat sheet of helpful icebreakers. “When was the last time you were here?”
“Ah.” A chill syllable, as devastating as a dial tone. “I was wondering when we’d get to this part.”
“Um, what part?”
“The part where we exchange charming stories about life at St. Sebastian’s and then you ask me for money.”
I actually yelped. I’d been sufficiently distracted by the awkward (and occasionally not awkward) conversation part of the arrangement that I’d managed to totally forget about the whole fund-raising thing.
He laughed and it wasn’t like the other time. It was cold and harsh, and very, very resistible. “What else does it say on your list?”
“Pardon?”
“Your list. What else does it say about me?”
I hadn’t expected the call to last more than five seconds, so I hadn’t bothered to read anything beyond the number I was dialing. I looked now. “It says you’re Caspian Leander Hart and you graduated in 2010 with a first in politics, philosophy, and economics. Oh my God, you were a PPEist.”
“Someone has to be.”
“And apparently you’re the CEO of a multinational banking and financial services holding company. I don’t know what much of that means.”
“You can look it up on the Internet. Anything more?”
I stared at the next line. “It says you’re a lovely person, and very kind to animals.”
“Arden.”
It showed how screwed up my priorities were right then that, for a moment, all I could think was, He remembered my name. I imagined his lips shaping it: Arden, Arden, Arden. “Uh, what?”
“What does it really say?”
My name, and the touch of sternness, raised all the hairs on my arms. “It says you’re the third richest man in the UK with a net worth in the region of twelve billion quid.”
I waited. No idea what for. I’d done as he’d commanded, but he wasn’t exactly going to shower me in praise and cookies for it. I expected he would hang up but he didn’t and so we were stuck here, fresh silence deepening between us into this well of infinite nothingness.
“Um…” I skimmed desperately over the cheat sheet. “It says here that I should ask you if you’re enjoying it. But I don’t know what the it is. Oh, right. The answer to the previous question. How are you enjoying being the third richest man in the UK?”
“I’m finding it quite enjoyable.”
“You recommend insane wealth as a potential future for other St. Seb’s graduates?”
And then…then he laughed again, the laugh I liked. And I could breathe. “I do. What’s your next question?”
I checked. “Do you get the Arrow?”
“Since I don’t know what that is, it seems safe to assume I don’t.”
“It’s the Book of Making You Feel Bad About Yourself. You know, the St. Seb’s magazine? It’s full of stories about people who are living amazing lives and achieving amazing things while you’re sitting around in your pants playing Tsum Tsum.” I paused. “I guess you don’t do that, what with being a billionaire and everything.”
“I don’t, no.”
“And you don’t have time for the post, so the whole thing’s a bust really.”
I must have sounded a bit woebegone because he said, “There isn’t an e-copy you could sign me up for?” with the same kind of embarrassed gentleness you might show a three-legged kitten if you weren’t all that keen on cats.
“I don’t know. It just turns up in my pidgeon hole. It’s this glossy thing and the cover story is always St. Sebastian’s Graduate Now King of Everything Ever.”
Another soft laugh. “In which case, I shall strongly resist being put on the mailing list.”
“Oh my God,” I wailed. “I’m epically bad at this. I’ve stirred you from apathy to active antipathy. Do you not like St. Sebastian’s?”
“I haven’t thought about it since I left.”
“You don’t have any good memories?”
“It’s not that. It’s simply that I prefer to focus my energy on the present.”
“And you never look back?” I tried again. “Never miss anybody or feel thankful?”
“The past is merely a string of things that have already happened.”.”
I knew I was a dweller by nature, reliving every moment of embarrassment, every harsh word, every little loss, but I wasn’t sure his way was the answer either. “That sounds alienating. Living out of time.”
“I would rather control my future than concern myself something I can’t change.”
Something in the way he said it made the back of my neck prickle. “You can’t control everything.”
“On the contrary, with enough wealth, power, and conviction, one can control anything. Anyone.”
Aaaand that really wasn’t helping with my inappropriate telefeelz. I tried to laugh it off, but it came out way too shaky to be convincing. “You sound like…There’s this line in Ulysses where someone describes history as a nightmare from which he’s trying to awake.”
“I’m already awake. And I haven’t read Ulysses.”
“You want to know a secret? Me neither.”
“But you can quote from it.” He seemed to have warmed up again. Maybe he was even smiling. And I thought, What would a man like this look like when he smiled?