Signal Loss

She sat at the hotel bar watching the strands of her hair come undone in the mirror behind the liquor bottles. At thirty-four, she'd started finding silver threads like old copper wire, brittle and betraying. The man beside her — let's call him what he was, a mistake — ordered another round of drinks she'd pay for later in ways that had nothing to do with money.

The high-speed cable snaked along the baseboard, the room's only connection to a world that kept moving without her. She'd spent seven hours on a conference call that resolved nothing, listening to voices distorted through compression, words reduced to data packets and lost meaning.

His wife had called at noon. Sarah had seen the name flash across the screen: "Bear" — his nickname for her, something about hibernation or warmth or perhaps the way she'd finally emerged from their bedroom to find him in a hotel room two towns over. The orange glow of sunset through cheap curtains made everything look like a photograph from the seventies, preserved and fading.

"You left your hat," she said now, watching him fumble with something that wasn't his wedding ring.

He laughed, and she hated how familiar it sounded. "I leave a lot of things."

She wanted to tell him about the silver hair, the way time was writing itself across her body while he remained suspended in perpetual boyhood. She wanted to say that she'd been the one to find the bear — not his wife, not really. She'd found the version of him that was supposed to protect something, but instead he'd eaten everything soft and trusting and moved on.

Instead she watched the cable modem blink. Green, amber, red. A system of signals she could interpret better than any human language now.

"Your wife called," she said again. "About the hat."

He went still. The bar noise receded like a tide.

"She knows?"

"About the hat. About this room. About the fact that you're not at a conference in Denver."

He stood up, leaving his drink. Left his hat too — a bearded thing with pom-poms, ridiculous and suddenly sad. She wondered what it said about her that she'd found something endearing in a man who wore winter hats in April.

Outside, the streetlights flickered on. Another cable failed somewhere. Another system overheating. She signaled the bartender for the check, for once glad she'd have to pay.