I was putting myself out there. On my return to San Francisco from a bleak Thanksgiving with my surviving relatives in Illinois, I downloaded Tinder, Bumble, and a few other apps I’d seen Instagram ads for. I resolved to pass judgment on several hundred men per day, and to make an effort to message the few I matched with.I’d never liked the idea of finding a romantic partner on an app, the way you’d order pizza or an Uber. To further complicate matters, it was estimated that fifty per cent of men on dating apps in the city were now blots. But what choice did I have? Apps seemed to be the way everyone found each other these days.

After my last breakup, I spent a while “letting something happen,” which meant doing nothing. Years passed and nothing did happen, and I realized that without my intervention, my hand pushing the warm back of fate, it was possible nothing ever would. In the end, it seemed to come down to never dating again or taking the chance of being blotted. Though I supposed there had always been risks. I met one of them several years ago.

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My friend Peter had invited me to a dinner party hosted by a tech founder he’d grown up with in the Sunset, and with whom he’d once followed the band Phish around the country, selling nitrous poppers to concertgoers. Peter and I didn’t really hang out, beyond the meetings we attended in church basements for people who no longer drank. But I was bored, and it was a free dinner, and Peter made it sound as if he’d already asked a bunch of people who’d said no, which took some of the pressure off.At dinner, I sat next to a guy named Roger. He had the telltale blot look—high forehead, lush hair, shapely eyebrows—but I didn’t recognize it for what it was, because the blot phenomenon hadn’t yet broken through in the media. He was solicitous, asking about my family, my work as a teacher, and my resentment toward the tech industry.

Roger seemed eager to charm, but I was not charmed. I felt spotlighted by his attentiveness, his anticipation of what I might want—another helping of fava-bean salad, more water, an extra napkin after I dropped a chunk of braised pork on the lap of my skirt. I would say something self-deprecating, and he’d regard me steadily and assure me that I was a wonderful person, deserving of all I wanted from life, which wasn’t what I’d been asking for. Roger didn’t know me and was not a credible judge of my worth—unless his position was that everyone had worth, which made him no judge whatsoever. When I shifted the subject to him, he supplied a backstory that seemed pre-written.“I came from ranchland in the northern United States,” he told me.

“My father was stern but loving, in his way. My mother is a wonderful woman who raised the four of us into strong, capable adults. My childhood was not without hardship, but these adversities shaped me into the person I am today. Now I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, land of innovation and possibility. I am grateful for the life I’ve been given, and I know it is thanks to the people who have loved and supported me on the journey.”I forced a chuckle of acknowledgment. “Wow,” I said.

“That’s great.”As I drove Peter back to the Richmond in my decrepit Corolla, he revealed that his friend, the event’s host, had sprinkled the dinner party with blots.“Blots?”“It’s an acronym for something,” Peter explained. “They’re biomorphic humanoids. The latest advancement in the field of tactile illusion.” He paused. “Fake people,” he added.I concealed my shock, not wanting to give Peter the satisfaction. “So you invited me to be the subject of a Turing test for some company’s new product, without compensation,” I said.“You got a free dinner, didn’t you?”. It took months to untangle Steve’s work.

His tactics were vindictive, and strangely intimate. He’d sent personalized e-mails to everyone in her contacts, exploiting each scrap of information Alicia had divulged in the weeks they’d dated. On her Facebook page, he posted provocative selfies she’d sent to him or kept on her phone. We had all seen these photos—Alicia, in a lace bralette and thong, posing in a full-length mirror in the dingy shared bathroom of her apartment, her back arched at what looked like a painful angle to showcase her ass.At the diner, Alicia framed herself as a woman with a hard-won ounce of wisdom. “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is,” she said, then kept sucking air through her milkshake straw. I nodded along with the others, thinking that Alicia was an idiot. Steve had not even done a good job of concealing his blot identity, and she’d fallen for him anyway, clinging to the hope that her time had finally come.Blot technology continued to advance.

Blots were now said to be programmed with more complex psychological profiles, glaring flaws, and varied physical characteristics, which made detection increasingly difficult. Blots were always male, because their original creators believed that male blots would more easily convey authority, minimizing the risk of sexual exploitation by unscrupulous hospital employees.

I didn’t want to join Alicia among the ranks of the blotted, so I was vigilant as I chatted with men on the apps.A few weeks into my new routine, I matched with Sam. His profile was brief and inoffensive, referencing his love of yoga, backpacking, and live music. He worked for a tech company, something about firewalls.

I didn’t know what those were, and he didn’t care to explain. It’s just a job, he wrote, then changed the subject to bands he wanted to see.On our first date, we went to a Thai restaurant near my house. Sam was tall and reasonably attractive, but not in the polished, male-model way of the blot I’d met at the dinner party. His body was thick, his shoulders broad beneath his black denim jacket. His brown hair reached his shoulders, and his face was covered in a patchy beard that seemed incidental, as if he’d simply run out of razors one day and been too lazy to buy more.Sam brooded over the menu. I proposed that we split curry and noodles, and he agreed, seeming relieved to have the burden of deciding removed.

After we ordered, he provided a cursory sketch of his childhood in Wisconsin, at my prompting. His account was less eloquent than Roger’s had been, and this helped assure me of its authenticity. Sam had done a master’s degree in computer science at U.W.-Madison, then broken off an engagement to his longtime girlfriend. When I asked why they’d split, he said only that they’d begun dating too young and had grown apart over the years. He had moved to San Francisco eight months ago, seeking a new start.I told Sam that I’d lived in the city for ten years, and waited for him to ask why I’d moved here. But then our food came, and the thread was lost.

This had happened several times while we were messaging on the app—I would make some reference to my life, and Sam would fail to ask a logical follow-up question. I savored these instances of human selfishness. Even if the new generation of blots had more flaws than the old ones, I figured they’d still be primed to retrieve any bread crumb of a woman’s past that might help them better understand her, in order to more thoroughly fuck her over when the time came. Sam’s inattention was a kind of freedom. I could say anything, and he’d simply nod, and a moment later begin talking about something else.I allowed Sam to set the pace of our dating, waiting for him to text me and propose when we should hang out next. On our third date, I invited him back to my apartment after dinner, and we had sex. Sam handled my body thoughtfully, like a new pair of shoes he would break in and wear often.

It was not mind-blowing, but early sex rarely was. It wasn’t horrifyingly bad, and in this I saw limitless potential.

He was careful with his weight and with where he placed his knees. As I lay in the dark with my arm slung across Sam’s chest, I waited for the old void-opening feeling to take me, the particular loneliness of lying next to another person. But, for once, this sadness didn’t arrive. It felt good having Sam there, as if the last puzzle piece had been set in place. For the first time in years, my apartment was full. The cats, who usually slept on the bed with me, had been displaced. I sensed their presence out in the dark, on the chair or the couch or in the closet.

Sam had petted them for a while when he arrived. He’d allowed one cat to bite his hand gently, the other to drool on the thigh of his jeans. It was nice to have four mammals under one roof, each of us trusting the others not to kill us while we slept. This was the appeal, I thought, of a family. This was what everyone had been going on about all these years.On Monday, I went to work as usual, though the plates of my life had shifted.

I was dating someone now. My senses felt heightened as I biked down Market.

I saw the world through the eyes of a recently fucked woman.I was a teacher, of sorts. I’d had the same two part-time jobs for years, at a private E.S.L. School and at a for-profit art university that did heavy recruiting in China. In the mornings, I taught Upper-Intermediate English to a class of fourteen students at the E.S.L. The students were in their late teens and early twenties, mostly from Switzerland, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia. The roster changed from week to week.

There was no sense of continuity or progression toward an end point. We worked through the proprietary textbook, then started again at the beginning.In the afternoons, I’d head to one of the art classes for which I was providing what the college termed “language support.” I took notes while the instructor lectured on fashion design or computer animation or art history. After the lecture, I would wait for the international students to ask for my help—to explain difficult vocabulary and American colloquialisms, providing a verbal CliffsNotes of what we’d just heard—but they rarely did.Cartoon by Lars KensethI moved through that Monday in a neurochemical fog.

I’d been single long enough that my tendrils of attachment had dried up and ceased issuing commands. Now they’d been activated again, and I wondered how I had ever cared about anything other than sex. I resisted the urge to text Sam. My single years had made me strong, and I was determined not to sabotage this new relationship. I would wait for Sam to make contact, even if it took several days. I accepted the possibility that he’d never contact me again. Perhaps he would turn out to be a blot, or simply a man who didn’t want a relationship.

Such uncertainty was the nature of existence. We brought things into our lives, and time passed. Things exited our lives.

That was about all that ever happened. I didn’t tell my friends about Sam right away. It was going well, which I knew they would take as an ominous sign. I had opened myself to the possibility of being blotted, and I didn’t want to hear my misgivings echoed by others.When Sam and I had been dating for a month, I was out at the diner after our Tuesday-night meeting with Peter, Kevin, and Dan. All three men were in their forties, and single. Dan told us about a neighbor he’d been sleeping with; she now expected to come over every night to watch TV, but Dan preferred to watch TV alone.

Kevin asked if I’d been seeing anyone, and I mentioned Sam, careful to downplay how invested I’d already become.“You met him on Tinder?” Kevin said, skeptically. “Yeah, but I’m pretty sure he’s not a blot,” I said. “He’s very casual about the whole thing.”“What does he look like?” Peter asked.“I think he’s attractive,” I admitted. “But he’s also kind of ugly.

Not like a blot.”The men exchanged meaningful looks. “Does he have a car?” Peter said. Blots couldn’t get driver’s licenses; it was a sign the articles mentioned.“Well, no,” I said. “But he doesn’t need one. He takes BART.”“Have you seen his place?” Dan asked.Sam lived in the Oakland Hills. I’d slept at his apartment once, at my insistence. He warned me to be silent as we descended the carpeted stairs to his room.

He’d lived there for only a month, and wasn’t sure if having overnight guests was cool with his roommates. So I was asked to pretend I didn’t exist, something I had plenty of practice with. It was a little degrading, which I took as another promising sign.Sam slept in a sleeping bag wadded at the center of a king-size bed. There was a closet in the hallway where he stored camping gear, and from which he retrieved a spare pillow for me, still in its wrapping, as if he’d bought it for this purpose. At the foot of the bed was a Rubbermaid container in which he kept folded T-shirts and socks.

On its lid sat an electric kettle he used to boil water for coffee, so that he wouldn’t have to go upstairs. He did this on the morning I woke up there. We passed a single mug back and forth.

I asked if he had any milk. “I think there’s some in the kitchen,” he said. I waited for him to get the milk, but he continued sitting on the edge of the bed, drinking the coffee. I would have got it myself, but I wasn’t supposed to betray my presence to his roommates.I highlighted this detail as evidence of Sam’s humanity. “If he were a blot, he wouldn’t act that way,” I said. “He would jump at the opportunity to get milk for my coffee. They wouldn’t program them to be completely selfish.” I paused.

“Would they?”Peter shook his head doubtfully. “I don’t know, man,” he said. “The technology keeps getting more advanced. You need to be careful.”“Maybe he isn’t a blot,” Dan said, standing and tossing a twenty onto the plastic tray that held our check. “He might just be kind of a dick.”The early blots didn’t live anywhere. They stalked the streets and the park all night, waiting for their next date. There were still some of them out there, blots who’d never managed to attach to a host.

The company that unleashed them had apparently forgot, or didn’t care, leaving them to wander eternally, like those scooters you saw abandoned on sidewalks. Sometimes I passed one on the street, his eyes frantic, his clothes rumpled, his skin and hair still perfect.Once I’d seen Sam’s place, I was satisfied. We never stayed there again, as my apartment was objectively superior. I would clean it the day he was coming over, and I always made sure I had eggs and coffee for the morning. Before we went to bed, Sam would put his Japanese selvedge jeans and horsehide boots on a high shelf in my closet, so the cats wouldn’t scratch them. I had never known my cats to scratch shoes or clothes, but I didn’t want to insist on their harmlessness, in case I was wrong.I allowed Sam to take his protective measures, and, in turn, I took mine. I slept with my laptop placed on the shelf built into the wall on my side of the bed, my phone tucked under my pillow.

I locked my devices with pass codes, though it had been documented that blots were able to hack these codes. If Sam was a blot, and he tried to reach over me for my laptop, I was sure to wake up. I was a light sleeper, naturally anxious, especially with a new man next to me. Not that we slept much when Sam stayed over.

We usually had sex two or three times, then again in the morning. Each round yielded diminishing returns. Sometimes, toward the end, Sam couldn’t come at all, and I would feel satisfied, as if I had drained a reservoir.Months passed, and Sam and I fell into a routine approximating a relationship.

I continued letting him take the lead, reminding myself that anything I held too tightly would slip through my fingers like sand. I lived for the one weekend night we’d go out for dinner, then head back to my apartment and have sex. On a Wednesday, I was bored enough during a three-hour fashion-design class that I dared to text Sam first. I was relieved that he hadn’t proposed a trip to Big Sur, but I’d been thinking it might be nice to go somewhere else. I had a long weekend coming up in a few weeks.I sent the text— Prez Day soon! Any interest in a weekend getaway?—and returned to my notebook. I took meticulous notes during the instructor’s lecture, but everything after that, while the students worked individually on their design projects, was gibberish I’d scrawled in an attempt to look occupied.Sounds good, Sam had written, when I next checked my phone.Great!

Where should we go?I regretted this text immediately. Sam might feel pressured by my eagerness and withdraw. Sure enough, he didn’t write back for three hours. Let’s play it by ear, he finally replied. Still plenty of time.On the Sunday before Presidents’ Day weekend, Sam sat on my love seat, eating the eggs I had made, while I sat at my desk by the window. He’d retrieved his clothes from my closet and put them back on, a black T-shirt with a shallow V-neck and his selvedge jeans.

I knew that in another twenty minutes he’d be gone. I didn’t see how we could delay making a plan any longer.“So,” I said carefully. “Where should we go next weekend?”“Oh, right,” Sam said, as if he hadn’t been thinking about it at all. “Let’s check the weather.”. We considered alternatives to camping, and landed on some hot springs up north. I’d heard about this no-frills resort from friends, a place where swimsuits were optional and guests cooked their meals in a communal kitchen. Sam made the call, using his credit card for the three-night reservation, with the expectation that I would Venmo him my half.

I listened as he slowly repeated his name to the person on the other end of the line. It was the first time I’d heard him speak his own last name aloud, and I was surprised by the way he pronounced it, the hard “a” that I’d assumed was soft.After he hung up, Sam slung his arm around my shoulders and asked what my plans for the day were. Normally, he left right after the eggs. I felt a clawing need to make him stay longer.

“We could make juice,” I proposed.I remembered that on Sundays there was a small farmers’ market on Clement Street. The morning fog had burned off, and we walked to the market beneath a cold blue sky. We bought kale, green apples, celery, beets, and ginger, splitting the cost evenly. I watched Sam make small talk with the venders. He spent several minutes asking a teen-age boy about the different types of apple his family’s orchard cultivated, and I felt proud, imagining that the boy was impressed by Sam’s masculine competence. Back in my kitchen, we washed the produce, cut it into pieces, and took turns feeding the pieces into the hopper of my juicer and plunging down with the special stick.We moved back into the main room with our glasses of tart, grainy juice. I felt a new ease unfurling between us, as if making juice had sealed us within a bubble of domesticity.

I asked Sam to teach me how to pitch an imaginary baseball, knowing this request would gratify him. He often referenced his years as a left-handed pitcher in high school.

He’d almost been recruited to a Division I school, whatever that meant, but was thwarted by a vindictive coach who refused to let him play the day the recruiters visited, for reasons I didn’t quite understand.We stood in the middle of my apartment, and Sam showed me how to turn my upper body, channelling my full energy into my pitching arm. I watched us in the mirrored wall that slid to expose my closet. As I drew my arm back for another fake pitch, I remembered my dad teaching me how to throw a ball, in our small back yard in the suburbs of Chicago; he’d taken pride in my not throwing “like a girl,” though that was all I was.I mentioned this to Sam, and, before I could stop myself, I’d begun talking about my dad’s descent into drug addiction, well under way on the day he taught me to throw. We settled into the love seat, and I recounted the full story of my dad’s diminishment.

He’d disappear for weeks, then return in worse shape than before. He went to rehab at one point, and when he came back he’d grown a beard. I told Sam about the uncanny feeling of seeing my dad with a beard, as if he had been replaced by a similar man, the details slightly off, like when a TV show switched actors between seasons.

I was fourteen then; it was the last time I saw him. For five years afterward, he sent me and my mom the occasional letter, full of apologies, along with promises that he was cleaning up his act and would be back with us soon. Eventually, the letters stopped coming, and my mom thought it was best we move on.There was little emotion in my telling; I’d told the story in therapy, and in meetings, and in the early stages of past relationships, at the juncture where I hoped they might become more serious.

The feeling was sucked out, the bare facts remaining, like the fibre disgorged by the juicer. Sam listened attentively. When I finished, he placed his empty juice glass on the coffee table, cupped my face in his broad hand, and kissed me. It was a nice gesture, but it felt a bit affected, as if it had been lifted from a movie—some scene where a character reveals scars on her body, and the man gravely kisses each of them, confirming that he still accepts and desires her.But, for once, when Sam left my apartment I didn’t feel desolate in his absence. I felt we had forged a new intimacy, like a hot stone tucked at the base of my throat, keeping me warm.The night before our trip, Sam slept over, and in the morning we drove north in my Corolla.

It was raining as we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, the view obscured by thick fog, as if the landscape resisted collaboration in the romantic narrative I’d spun around the weekend. We stopped at a Trader Joe’s in San Rafael, and ticked through items on the list we had made. As we waited in line with our cart, I imagined doing this with Sam, year after year. We would buy a house in some region where buying a house was possible. We would work in separate rooms, and bring each other juice.

In a surprising twist of fate, I would have what other people had.The resort was east of Mendocino, accessed via narrow roads carved through dense forest. Sam had offered to drive on this last leg, and I sat tensely in the passenger seat, my old car feeling like a plastic toy that might splinter apart.We checked in at the lodge and found our room, one of the tiny, freestanding cottages lining the gravel path to the pools.

The door didn’t lock. We were advised not to keep anything of value in our room, and I was happy to leave my phone in the trunk of my car. I’d planned to wear my swimsuit, but it was clear when we entered the locker room that this would make a person stand out, in a bad way. Everyone used the pools naked. We saw them through the locker-room window, mostly couples and a few solo middle-aged men, strolling across the wet concrete. Judgment glimmered through me—something about hippies, people who moved through the world with unwarranted confidence—a prejudice I hadn’t known I harbored.

I felt shy as I removed my clothes and stacked them in a locker; being naked with Sam in this context felt different from being naked with him in my apartment.We sat on a ledge in the first pool, a cold drizzle falling on our shoulders. After a few minutes, nudity no longer seemed like a big deal. Without swimsuits, the human body was a neutral thing, detached from eroticism, though I still wrapped my towel around myself as we moved from one pool to another. We explored the resort’s attractions: the large, lukewarm pool, several hotter pools, a small cold pool walled in colorful tile, a sauna and a steam room separated by a cedar deck. When we’d completed a full circuit and were back in the first pool, I glanced at the clock above the locker-room entrance and saw that only an hour had passed. My chest tightened, and I wondered if perhaps we had come for too long. As we sat in the lukewarm pool, I allowed my gaze to alight momentarily on other people.

Across from us was an older man with long, stringy gray hair pulled into a ponytail, his eyes closed, his thin lips serenely compressed. A couple emerged from the sauna. They seemed oddly matched—the woman was average-looking, in her late thirties, with a soft body and a pinched, unremarkable face, while the man was tall and muscular, with the striking good looks of a young actor.I nudged Sam. “Do you think he’s a blot?” I whispered, nodding toward the couple.

“A what?”I didn’t know how anyone could have missed hearing about blots, as there had been extensive news coverage of the latest advancements in pirated blot technology. I explained the phenomenon, and Sam nodded, his face set in mild bemusement. I felt agitated by his disinterest.

I wanted to provoke more of a reaction.“When we first started dating, I was worried you might be one,” I said.“Oh yeah?” Sam said.“I was on the lookout for clues,” I said.Sam shrugged. “Well, sorry to disappoint you,” he said, giving my left thigh a playful squeeze under the water.The conversation lapsed again. I was annoyed that Sam wouldn’t join me in speculation about the mismatched couple, who had retreated into the locker room. On the drive up, we’d had music as a buffer, allowing us to pass long stretches without speaking. As we settled in for a last pre-dinner soak in the hottest pool, I waited to see what he would talk about in the absence of external cues.

He began complaining that the resort forbade cooking meat on the property; he was worried about getting enough protein to maintain the muscle mass he’d painstakingly built at the gym. I asked him what he ate during the week, when we were apart, and he said mostly skinless chicken with mixed greens, and vanilla-flavored Muscle Milk.“Wow,” I said. “You’re a protein fiend.”. Sam gave me a cross look. “I wouldn’t say that,” he said.“No?”“You make it sound stupid.”“That wasn’t how I meant it,” I said, though I realized it was.

I was nervous, eager to lighten the mood. I began telling a story about an ex, a younger guy who played bass in a Tool cover band called Stool. I’d met him at a meeting. Before he got sober, he’d spent a year eating only sardines in mustard sauce, which he bought tins of at Safeway on his liquor runs. In his first six months sober, he’d eaten only ice cream, a gallon a day.“When we dated, though, he was back to a pretty regular diet,” I said. “Well, regular enough.

He still ate a lot of ice cream.”. This caught me off guard.

“Why not?”“Especially if they’re weird dudes who eat only sardines.”“That was just one thing about him,” I said. “He had a lot of good qualities, too.”“I don’t think it’s wise to talk about previous partners,” Sam said.

“You’ve done that before, and it was a turnoff then, too.”I watched myself descend into a familiar, sulky silence. Sam tried to cajole me on our walk to the showers.

I sensed his desperation when he pointed out a set of ceramic goose planters near the lukewarm pool. “Cute,” I agreed, absently.We rinsed the minerals from our skin and dressed in the locker room. As we walked down the gravel drive toward the main lodge, the kitchen in which we’d stashed our meatless groceries, Sam took my hand.“Are you O.K.?” he said.“I’m fine,” I said stiffly.Cartoon by Edward Koren“It’s fine,” I said, meeting his gaze. “I won’t talk about my exes again.”“No, don’t say that. I want you to talk about whatever you want.”He was smiling, hopefully. I could see that he really was sorry, though I suspected he didn’t know why he should be.We went inside and made wraps with vegetables and tempeh, stir-fried in a cast-iron skillet.

We ate in a section of the lodge that resembled a train car, with tables pushed against windows that overlooked a lush, forested ravine. Though Sam had apologized, I still felt distant from him, as if something had been left unresolved.“I’d like you to talk about whatever you want, too,” I said.Sam’s jaw clenched in response. He must have thought he’d escaped this topic. “O.K.,” he said.

“Pretty sure that’s what I’ve been doing.”“I mean, I’d like to hear more about your past,” I said. “Your exes, for instance.”. “Why does this feel like therapy all of a sudden?”“Have you ever done therapy?” I said, perking up at the reference.Sam’s face reddened. “A few times, with my ex.

Couples counselling.”“Was it helpful?”“I dunno,” Sam said, unfolding his wrap and picking out chunks of tempeh. “I’m not good at talking about feelings. It’s just the way I was raised, I guess.”I reminded myself of the importance of accepting a partner exactly as he was in this moment, as I’d advised my friends to do when they came to me with complaints about their relationships.

But our first minor conflict had broken a dam of judgment within me. As the second day proceeded, I picked up on additional things Sam did that annoyed me. At one point, we had the sauna to ourselves, and I’d begun telling a story about a friend from college who was having problems in her marriage when Sam emitted a false, barking laugh.“What’s so funny?” I said, startled.“Nothing,” he said. “It’s a thing my brother and I do sometimes.”. “Are you not interested in what I have to say?”The mismatched couple entered the sauna.

The woman draped a towel on the bench below us and lay across it, tits up, while the blot-looking man sat in one of the Adirondack chairs, legs spread wide. He briefly met my gaze, his full lips curling into a smile.“It’s not like that,” Sam said quietly, patting my thigh. “It’s just a joke.”Later, as we sat in one of the warmer pools, I told Sam about my work at the art school, the long hours of idleness, my feelings of shame and worthlessness as I continued collecting a paycheck for simply existing in a room.“So you’re getting paid to do nothing?” he said. “Sounds pretty great.”I found that I couldn’t properly convey the absurdity of my role. I probably just sounded spoiled. I switched tack, telling him about the meetings I went to, the recovery program I worked. Sam had been supportive, early on, of my sobriety, saying it was good that “you figured your shit out.” But, as I talked about the beauty of how meetings brought together all types of people, I realized I must sound brainwashed, as if I belonged to a New Age cult.

I lowered myself onto the love seat. I didn’t reply to Sam’s text immediately, but I already had an idea of what I would write, and that I might come to regret it.A week ago, I was walking through Golden Gate Park on my way to the Haight, to have dinner with my friend from college, who was now going through a divorce. I passed a clearing where five identical men sat at a picnic table. It was a strange sight, one that made me pause.

On further inspection, they were not identical; their features were slightly different, though they all possessed the same height and build, and held themselves with the same prim, upright posture. They spoke calmly while playing a card game. I was struck by how comfortable they seemed with one another, as if they’d been acquainted long enough that they did not have to say much in order to be understood.Then one of them spotted me. His golden-brown eyes lit up, his energies activated and channelled in my direction. “Hey!” he said, extricating himself from the picnic table and jogging toward me. “You look like a fascinating, intelligent woman, a person with much to offer. Do you want to go on a date?

Have you ever witnessed the beauty of Big Sur in the summertime?”The others turned, eyes flaring, long, perfect hands laying cards on the table.I moved toward the space they had cleared for me. ♦.