Iris Has Free Time. Iris Smyles

Bruegels and Manets, or whatever I could find on sale at The Salvation Army, up and down the walls of my new West Village one-bedroom apartment in an ongoing effort to make the place look more like how I felt, which was, increasingly, like having a party, before I decided to throw one in celebration of my twenty-fifth birthday.

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      I invited all my friends. But because I’d been living wholly within Martin’s world for the last three years, I had only a few. So I asked my old friend Jacob to throw the party with me, to invite his friends and then ask his friends to invite theirs. Reggie, who’d found me on Friendster after our run-in at the Halloween store, wrote back that he was definitely coming and also, would I mind if he brought Felix?

      Finding me within the large crowd of strangers huddled noisily inside my small one-bedroom apartment, Felix handed me a beer and also his cell phone. On the other end was May, calling from the edge of oblivion—California. And so, just as I had brokered May and Felix’s first date a few years earlier, Felix brokered a reunion between me and May.

      It was as if we were a movie being played in rewind. First there was May and me, then May and Felix and me, then May and Felix and Reggie and me, then May and Felix, then me and Martin, then me. Then Reggie and me, then Reggie and Felix and me, then Reggie and Felix and May and me. See what I mean?

      When May came to New York for a week’s visit a few months later, the four of us all went out together. Now Reggie and I were dating while May and Felix were negotiating a friendship/romance. She explained this to me by confessing that though she and Felix had kissed the other night, it was more out of boredom than out of attraction. Did I understand?

      It was like a rubber band snapped back. Or rather, like a ship returning from the furthest reaches of space. Proof that the universe is just like a game of Pac-Man—I read this recently in Scientific American. The universe is not infinite, some scientists suppose, but shaped like a donut giving off the appearance of infinity while actually just looping. So there we were—rounding the other side of the universe, returning through the act of departing—a chain of acquaintances made, broken, and reassembled in reverse. Pac-Man exiting on one side of the screen only to reappear on the other.

      After May’s visit, we began emailing each other pretty often. We were both single again—she and Felix were over, while Reggie and I had re-started only to re-stop—so we had a lot to discuss. We’d write to each other about our dating adventures, exchange advice, and occasionally even implement a new “science experiment” via correspondence.

      I’d send her an email that I planned to send to some guy, and she’d hypothesize his response, laying down a small wager with it: “Twenty bucks says he’ll call you Tuesday but not Monday, and if you don’t call him back within three hours, he’ll follow up with a text referencing the theme song to Knight Rider.” “You’re on!”

      That Valentine’s Day it hardly mattered that I had no boyfriend. I wrote an email that included the address of a local flower shop along with the window of time during which I’d be home to receive presents, and cc’d it to a list of guys I’d recently dated or was still dating. May enjoyed this experiment particularly and called me in a peel of laughter.