Chapter 1

Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt once said: 'The emotions I feel are no more meant to be shown in their unadulterated state than the inner organs by which we live.'

Camille was rather alarmed to find that the guy for whom she had been scripting the perfect pickup line had gone missing.

She found him at the grocers. She had developed a habit of going there at the odd hour of eight thirty in the evening after she took a wrong turn and discovered this shop on the way home from work. At any normal hour, there would have been a hoard of stampeding people, as this was in the busiest part of town. However, few came at a half hour before store closing, as all the freshest produces were gone, and the light was dimming outside as well. Camille had no choice in the matter, however, since she rarely left work early enough to make it to the grocers to begin with. Being an aspiring lawyer really was not as glamorous a job as TV shows made it to be. She did try her best to make it here every day though. Not because she needed a daily infusion of arugula and instant noodles, but because one of the most interesting people she had ever come across came here at this hour.

He had hair close to being caramel but not quite there yet, holding a loose wave, and slightly longer than how most men wore it. He had a haircut sometimes last week, though. He intermittently wore glasses—the ones with a thick black rim at the top of the glass panels, the kind that Camille remembered seeing on her college professors. He always wore a tie, usually skinny. She had never looked into his eyes long enough to figure out each speck of pigment, but they were a nice, warm chestnut color. He shaved meticulously, so that even by eight thirty at night there was still no hint of a shadow spanning across his cheeks. His chin turned upwards ever so slightly, giving him an adorable small bump at the base of his face. He was lanky in figure, tall, but not intimidatingly so. He had a funny walk, with more pressure on his left foot, perhaps as a result of the weight of his messenger bag on his right shoulder, but he moved briskly and with purpose. He had a habit of scanning everything with words on it, be it a sticker, a poster, an ad, or the ingredients table. He fidgeted with his watch while he waited in line, which he wore over his sleeve.

As you might be able to tell, Camille had observed this man very closely. She thought it might be borderline creepy, but decided that it was a rather harmless sort of stalking if one would even call it that.

Camille had found him on a dreary Wednesday two weeks ago, looking in the same aisle for frozen food. She had entered the aisle with a list of the necessities of life on her phone—consisting mainly of waffles and pre-cooked packages—and behold, there he stood, holding the door open in front of the pizza section. He had on a small frown as he browsed the boxes and perhaps tried to decide if the sausage one would taste better than the four-cheese blend one. His left hand reached up to push his glasses a little higher on that thin, cleanly sculpted bridge of a nose, and the hair fell into his eyes ever so slightly, and the corners of his mouth stretched downwards subconsciously—and Camille felt her heart stretch out a little in response.

She didn't really eat pizza, but that wasn't going to stop her.

Camille smoothed out her hair (she was glad she visited the saloon to touchup her apricot blonde dye job), half wished that she had not changed out of her work heels into flats, and soldiered on to pick out some pizza.

She reached for a rather strange box of anchovies pizza (anchovies!), and was about to ask the man for a recommendation when he suddenly spoke.

"Anchovies, that's the least favorite topping in America, although in Russia, they serve pizza with mockba, a combination of sardines, tuna, mackerel, salmon, and onions. Did you know that Americans consume two hundred fifty one billion seven hundred seventy thousand pounds of pepperoni as toppings per year."

Camille was too surprised to react, and in her bewildered pause, the man smiled sheepishly—his lips thinned a little and curved perfectly and oh wait he was saying something—

"… Carried away, sorry," and left hurriedly.

The 'Wait' was resting on her lips, but she couldn't speak them, and Camille watched the glorious man walk away. If she had not been enchanted by his face and figure, then she certainly was by this awkward display of knowledge and misplaced friendliness.

Camille's best friend in college always said she went for the weird ones.

To fulfill her friend's prophecy, Camille threw the anchovies pizza into her basket, and walked stealthily after him, feasting her eyes on scalloping waves of hair and the movements of his limbs in a casual tweed blazer. She felt like it would be strange to catch up and start a conversation though, so when he paid and left the store, she stayed to pick out the groceries that she actually came here for.

But she saw him again the day afterwards. And the day after that. In fact, she saw him every day that she came (which was every day except the two times that she really could not bring the work back home with her).

Then all of the sudden, he disappeared.

It had been a full two weeks since she last saw him, and Camille was starting to get worried. Perhaps he got into some sort of trouble? Or what if he had an accident and was in the hospital? Or—the worst of the worst—he had moved? She could file a missing persons report, but she doubted the police would take her very seriously. (It had been two weeks, and one definitely needed stocking up on pizza after two weeks.)

She didn't even know his name.

What she did know, however, was that this man came at the precise half-hour for two whole weeks, and he wouldn't have just stopped for no reason. No, she couldn't accept that. There must be some horrid reason, some unspeakable tragedy that pulled him away and kept him there. Why else would such a man simply break out of what seemed like a long-term habit? He seemed like a man of routine too, and while his face held enough paleness and eye-bags that he could have passed for a junkie, but he was too smartly dressed for that. Also too cute, but that was a subjective judgment on Camille's part.

So it was with great relief that Camille came on the next Tuesday and found him back in the pizza aisle again, right where he belonged.

Author's Note: Story cover is an oil by Leonid Afremov.