3
ORLANDO
“Dude,” I muttered, “I think this is a bad idea.”
I stood against the wall in the back room of the bar, which had been reserved for the special event. Ten tables were arranged in a row, with a woman sitting at each one. They nervously glanced around the room or focused on their cell phones. I felt much the same.
Josh looked sideways at me. “You’re the one who came to me! If you back out now there’ll be an uneven number. Just go with it.”
I’d never tried speed dating. It had always seemed too rushed, a forced interaction that stripped away all spontaneity and charm. A terrible way to meet someone.
But I was running out of options.
“Okay, gentlemen!” The speed-dating organizer clapped her hands together and stood in the center of the room. She was a middle-aged woman, thin like a yoga instructor, and I got the impression she believed she was doing us a great service. A modern day village matchmaker. “You know the rules. You have two minutes and two minutes only. No cheating! Once you hear the bell, it’s time to switch tables. Are we all ready?”
Her voice rose during the last part as if she expected us to break out in cheers, but all she got was a smattering of nods and mumbled acceptance.
“Begin!”
I took a deep breath and sat at the first table.
“Hi there!” the woman said. Woman was kind; she looked like she was fresh out of high school, where she’d been Captain of the Enthusiasm Team. “How are you… Orlando? Ohh, I like that name.”
She was looking at my name tag. I did the same to her and said, “I’m fine, Margaret.”
This wasn’t a natural interaction. I felt stiff, like cardboard being bent in the wrong direction.
“Great!” She had a cue card in front of her with notes on it. “Well. I’m Margaret, which you already know! I’m a Sophomore at DePaul, getting my major in Information Technology. My hobbies include tennis, volunteering at the animal shelter…”
“Oh wow.”
“…and I want to go into anti-virus research. For a company like Symantec, or McAfee?”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yes! I think that would be so neat.” She cocked her head. “Tell me about yourself, Orlando!”
I tried to put on a smile, but was too conscious of it. She probably could tell I wasn’t into this. “Well. I got my degree in personal finance, and eventually went into cryptocurrency.”
“Cryptocurrency? Like the Bitcoins?”
“Bitcoin, yep. And other blockchain technology. That should be right up your alley, working in IT.” I started thinking of cryptography in general, and how that was related to information security overall, which should have been up her alley, but then Margaret wrinkled her nose.
“I think it’s all a scam. Aren’t they used to buy drugs and prostitutes and stuff on the dark web?” She waved a hand and looked down at her cue card. “Anyways! Do you like to travel?”
I told her about my trip last week to Belize. She asked the polite amount of questions, and then used it as an excuse to springboard into her desire to backpack through Europe after college. I nodded along, faking as much enthusiasm as I could, and then the bell rang. Margaret covered up her sheet so I couldn’t see what she wrote next to my name.
I shot Josh a kill me now look as all the men got up and moved one chair to the right.
The next woman clearly didn’t want to be here, and had probably been dragged along by a friend. She stared at the table top and mumbled her answers, and even when I commented that I didn’t like things either she stayed inside her shell.
The third woman was closer to Margaret in personality. I let her drone on. She was nice enough, but this entire thing was way too forced. I didn’t feel a connection to any of these women, and having a literal ticking clock didn’t help.
The woman after that bombarded me with a cheerful, “Tell me three random facts about yourself!”
“Umm,” I said. “Well. I love trains…”
“Oh I hate trains,” she said, not letting me finish. “I live in an apartment right next to a track, and they’re always blowing the horn when they go by. It’s so loud! I mean, why can’t they make quieter trains?”
“Yeah, good point,” I said, as if that were a good point instead of a really dumb thing to say.
I could feel despair billowing in my chest. Another wasted night. What was I going to do about my situation?
“But what really changed my views on Christianity…” my current partner was saying.
“Hey,” I interrupted, leaning forward across the table. “You wanna get out of here?”
She leaned back an inch. “What?”
“Go somewhere else. Get a drink. See where the night takes us.”
She looked confused for a moment, as if I were making some bad joke. Then a mask fell over her face, and she said, “That’s not why I’m here,” and made a mark on her card.
“Oh come on,” I began, then stopped myself. “You know—nevermind. I’m sorry. I just hate how fake these things are, ya know?”
“Yeah…” she said, but I could tell she didn’t agree.
The next table was occupied by a beautiful black woman about my age, with eyes like piercing almonds and a smile that made me tingle. “Hey, you want to get out of here and have some real fun?” I said, giving her my best smile. “My condo is only three blocks from here.”
It was the wrong thing to say, and I knew it immediately.
“Fuck you, creep.” She crossed her arms and turned away from me. The girls at the next two tables looked over, frowning at me.
Well shit. Why did I say that?
I still had the full two minutes with this woman, and with the next two tables already looking sideways at me with disgust I knew I wasn’t going to get anywhere.
Cursing under my breath, I apologized, rose from the table, and left the bar.
*
I was normally the smooth guy.
It hadn’t always been that way. I was a shy nerd as a kid, with thick glasses and a bad case of asthma. To make matters worse, my parents had immigrated here from the Dominican Republic, and I was the only “ethnic” kid in my elementary and middle schools. Nevermind that I’d been born in Illinois; dark skin and Latin parents meant I was always being asked where I was from. And when my answer was met with the stereotypical, “No, I mean, where are you from,” question, I’d get an attitude and say something insulting and then any chance of making a new friend was lost.
Things finally got better in high school. More diversity meant I blended in a little better, and once I hit puberty and started playing baseball making friends got a whole lot more natural. And after that, when I learned I could get far with an easy smile and a good body and a healthy dose of confidence, life got a lot easier.
So yeah, I was normally the smooth guy with women. The guy who could disarm a girl at a party and have her laughing in stitches in no time. The guy for whom dating and romance came easy.
Until this goddamn totem came into my life.
I walked outside the bar and reached inside my pocket for my e-cig, but the addiction that really tugged on me was the totem. I pulled it out and gazed at it in the glow of the neon bar sign above, admiring the dark onyx gem set in the neck. It had pulsed in my pocket during speed dating, an urgency I couldn’t ignore. Maybe that’s why I’d tried my Hail Mary with the last two women.
Because that’s the reason I was here: Ethan and Sam told me everything.
Gryphons, and dragons, and a transformation that would leave me naked when I was done. It all felt like a bad joke. “Hey buddy, that totem you found gives you magical powers, but to unleash them you need to find a woman as your mate.” And as crazy as it sounded, deep down I knew it was the truth. I could feel a beast inside me, buzzing in my chest like a cell phone duct taped to my skin. It needed to be unleashed, and the longer I went without letting it out the worse things would get.
I wiped sweat from my forehead, even though it was a freezing night. I wished I’d never found it in that cave.
Two women in cocktail dressed walked by on the street. What was stopping me from offering one of them them a thousand bucks to take the totem and press the gem? I could get it over with instantly. Boom, done.
But I knew what was stopping me: the goddamn totem. It practically flinched at the thought of me paying one of these women to press it, as if that were some massive violation. They weren’t my mate, it insisted.
I had to find my mate.
I sucked on my electronic nicotine stick and tried to relax.
“Yo Orlando,” Josh said, emerging from the bar sometime later. “What’s up with you, man?”
“Good question.”
“You sick or something? I can tell you’re off. Like you ate some bad street tacos and are waiting to throw up.”
I wished I could tell him. That I needed to find someone quickly, but also someone who I would be bound to indefinitely, but that wasn’t the kind of thing you could tell a girl on the first date.
No use wishing for something I couldn’t have, though.
“I’m just…” I waved my e-cig around. “I’m looking for… a connection with someone.”
“Then let’s go to Chico’s, spend a few hours salsa dancing. You’ll find your connection that way, yeah?”
I’d tried that already twice this week. The totem in my pocket was too distracting; it was like a constant ticking in my head, throwing off my entire rhythm. Nobody wanted to dance with someone who kept bumping into them. Not to mention the damn sweat that wouldn’t stop trickling down my head.
“Not feeling salsa,” was all I said.
Josh threw his hands up. “Dunno what you want then, home boy. Go try Tinder if you want to blow off some steam.” He smacked me on the shoulder as a farewell and disappeared back inside the bar.
I stared after him, thinking.
I’d never tried Tinder before. That shit was too impersonal for me. I liked to get to know a woman first, in a way that a few texts couldn’t convey. The chemistry from an in-person interaction couldn’t be imitated by swiping in one direction or the other.
But I was running out of options…
I went back to my apartment and download the Tinder app. I felt stupid entering my information and then trying to think of something to write in my bio, so I wrote, “Crypto-currency trader by day, salsa dancer by night.” I felt stupid, but my head hurt too much to think of anything more clever, so I saved it and started looking.
Ten minutes of that was useless. I got matched up with half a dozen women, all of whom turned out to be bots trying to get me to sign up for their “premium content,” on external websites. To my great embarrassment, it took me a long time to realize they were scams.
I wasn’t in the right state of mind. This damn totem.
Besides, Tinder wasn’t how I wanted this to go—no matter how insistent the need to find a mate was. I wanted to connect with someone, physically and emotionally and intellectually. Especially if what Ethan said was true: that we’d be bound together forever.
Forever was a long-ass time.
I laid down on my couch and stared at the ceiling. What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t salsa, and bar-trawling had been a failure. Tinder sucked, and speed dating was even worse. I was losing my mind, and it got worse every day. How was I supposed to find a woman, a mate, when I was like this?
What Margaret said suddenly came back to me: drugs and prostitutes on the dark web. I’d never done anything like that, but I knew people who did.
It was stupid, and normally I would have bucked at even considering such a thing, but I was getting desperate.
I texted my buddy, and less than a minute later my phone rang.
“What the fuck you doing?” he demanded.
“Hey, L’Trell…”
“Don’t ever fucking send something like that in a text or email,” L’Trell said. “You got me? What’s gotten into you?”
I took a deep breath. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Can you talk?”
“Yeah I can fucking talk! That’s why I called you, so your stupid ass wouldn’t keep texting about illegal shit!”
“Sorry, sorry.” I paused. “So, yeah. You remember that… service you told me about two months ago?”
His voice completely changed. “Mmm hmm, I remember. I could never not remember, let’s put it that way.”
I stared at my ceiling with my phone held to my ear. Making this request was something completely unnatural to me. A random assortment of words that didn’t make sense.
But here I was, and the words came tumbling out.
“Can you set me up with that service? For the escorts?”
I heard L’Trell cackle on the line. “You got the itch after what I told you, huh?”
“Sure.”
“Yeah, I can give you the info. But it ain’t some simple shit. They run a background check, you gotta get a physical. And after all that it ain’t a sure thing. They still gotta choose you.”
There was my opening to back out. If it wasn’t simple, or a guaranteed thing, then I shouldn’t do it. I was better off going back to the bar, or signing up for an online dating service, or any of the other number of options.
But the totem felt hot in my pocket. It had a personality all its own, and right then it was pushing me forward more than my own conscious decision.
“I’ll jump through all the hoops,” I said. “I don’t mind.”
“You sure about this, Orlando? I mean, you don’t seem like the kind of guy who needs this, and it ain’t cheap--”
“Just do it,” I said.
The moment the words were out of my mouth the totem’s intensity cut off like someone had thrown a switch.