The Matchmakers

"So, have you ever tried following someone, you know, without them seeing you?" Theo asked to break the latest awkward silence.

"That's stalking…" Katie, the psych major seated across from him in the Cafe at the Loren let her silence hang, as if accusing him of some unspoken crime.

Theo had thought her shy at first, but over the past 20 minutes bordering on infinity, he'd come to see that she reveled in these painful pauses. Like some self-satisfied boa constrictor, she'd squeezed the life out of every attempt at conversation while staring wordlessly at some point above his head as he fought for air.

He tried to outsilence her this time. He broke first.

"I don't think it's stalking if it's random. It's more like pretending to be a secret agent."

Silence.

"Come on, pick someone. It'll be fun," Theo begged.

"Treating fun as a social obligation. Would you say that you believe people are obliged to have fun?" she asked.

He didn't want to respond to another awful attempt at pseudo-analysis. He was beginning to think she'd only agreed to coffee to gather source material, probably for some crappy term paper titled "The Trivial Pursuit of Dating in the New Millennium: A Post-Jungian Perspective."

Why was he even still here?

The whipped cream from Theo's mocha frappuccino had settled to the bottom of the plastic cup, untouched after Katie had implied that people with a sweet tooth had serial killer tendencies.

He eyed the dregs now, trying to come up with an excuse for leaving.

Then, he saw it. Or him. A particularly well-dressed man picking up his to-go order from the cafe counter.

"Yeah, that's really interesting about fun. You see that guy over there?" He nodded in the direction of the man, who was wearing a grey fedora and had gathered up his covered cup. "I'm going to follow him, so I have to go now. Sorry, I guess it's a compulsion of mine. Anyway, it was nice to meet you."

"Fine... I guess I'll go with you," Katie said, standing as Theo did the same.

Damn, perhaps the word "compulsion" had triggered her psych senses.

Still, walking was better than sitting as they left the Loren and trailed the man down Riverside drive.

The guy they were after was wearing a full flannel suit despite the sunny September day in Austin, but that wasn't what struck Theo as odd. As he and the psych major hung back for cover behind a lady walking her beagle, he realized the man's gait was strangely perfect.

Watch anyone walk for long enough, and there'll be some kind of fluctuating asymmetry—a foot turned inward or outward, one shoulder higher than the other, a slight tilt of the head, a human imbalance. Not so with the man in the grey fedora and suit.

He moved like a metronome come to life, making an exact 90 degree turn towards the river. Back ramrod straight, he took a seat at the first open bench that overlooked the walking trail along the water.

Theo and Katie stationed themselves under a nearby tree.

"Pretend we're talking about something," Theo said as the man's head scanned the horizon, making a smooth arc from left to right.

"Um, uh… something something something. Mhmm so something and then something," she said.

"Oh yeah haha, something is something, and I'll tell you something else about something," Theo said, then smiled because this was better than their actual conversation in the cafe.

He felt a tightness in his chest when Katie smiled back.

The man at the bench was now examining his coffee cup, then he removed its lid and inspected that. A group of pigeons had gathered near the man's grey shoes.

The man looked at the birds and poured some coffee into the lid as if to offer it to them. There were no takers among the pigeons, so the man sipped the coffee from the upturned lid instead.

The birds skedaddled for the sky as the man sprayed coffee from his mouth.

Katie giggled then Theo fake coughed in case the man looked their way, but their target was already back up and on the move, his forlorn coffee cup left behind on the bench.

"But he can't just leave his coffee," Katie protested.

"He probably doesn't know that because he's an alien." Theo started to follow the man down the walking trail.

"Wait… wait!" Katie grabbed the rejected coffee, then walked gingerly after Theo because the open cup was still steaming hot and nearly full.

He slowed down. "You know you just can pour some or even all of that out, right?"

"It's bad for the environment."

"The coffee?" He asked, stepping closer.

"No, the cup. And I can't just throw it away and waste the coffee."

"You're going to drink it?"

"No, what if that guy put drugs in it? Here, you take it." She held the coffee cup out to him.

"Are you trying to roofie me?" Theo asked.

He groaned inwardly when Katie stared at some point above his head again, but then her eyes drifted down to meet his.

"Maybe," she said.

Their hands met over the coffee cup and they stood there, caught in a different sort of silence.

Theo and Katie.

Maybe it was the smell of coffee caught on the river breeze coupled with the excitement of stalking a stranger, however briefly. Or pheromones.

Who knows? These things just happen.

Completely forgotten, the man in the grey suit took off at a light run down the trail—still perfectly balanced, of course.

He cut across Riverside before the river railroad bridge then zigzagged through some trees before making his way onto the tracks where a train was idling.

He strode past graffitied, oxidized boxcars before stopping in front of one that was completely grey without a mark in sight. The man hoisted himself up through the open sliding doors.

Once inside the grey boxcar, he stared at another man in a grey suit, who did the same. Both men had no eyebrows, but that didn't seem to bother them.

The man already waiting in the box car held a sort of clipboard, if one could call it that. It looked like it was made out of multi-colored fireflies. Two yellow lights drifted closer to one another then turned a pulsating blue.

The man did something with his hand, and the clipboard twisted out of sight. Now there was nothing to distinguish him from the other man who had just arrived.

As the train began to move, they stared at each other for a moment more then brought their hands up in a solemn high five.