MONDAY, NOV 3, 2025
The new room was in a brownstone on 113th Street, three blocks from the Columbia gates. The landlord was a retired transit worker named Delgado who had converted the upper floor into two independent units sometime in the nineties and had never filed the renovation with the city, which meant he preferred cash tenants who asked few questions about permits. The room cost fourteen hundred a month — steep for a single room, manageable given what he had now, and worth it entirely for the location. It had a window that looked out over a narrow strip of garden that no one used, and a radiator that made sounds at night like something large settling its weight.
He moved in on a Sunday with one bag. He'd accumulated slightly more than one bag's worth of possessions in Washington Heights but had sold most of it — the accumulated practical purchases of a man setting up a temporary life — and started fresh. The move itself took forty minutes. He spent another hour organizing the room into the specific configuration he preferred: desk facing the window, notebook and current cash in the desk drawer , bed positioned so the door was in his sightline when he lay down. Small things. Habits he'd developed not from paranoia but from the understanding that environment shapes cognition, and he needed his cognition in good shape.
Orientation was on Monday. He went.
Columbia's orientation for transfer students was shorter and less ceremonial than for freshmen — the institution assumed you'd already done the ritual elsewhere and needed only the practical information: here are the buildings, here are the IDs, here are the systems, here is what is expected of you. There were perhaps forty transfer students in the cohort, herded through informational sessions by a graduate student named Ryan who had the specific energy of someone three weeks from the end of a commitment he'd agreed to six months earlier when it had seemed manageable.
Dan sat in the back during the welcome session and watched the room. Forty transfer students — older than freshmen on average, more settled into themselves, quieter in the particular way of people who had already had one version of college and knew what was and wasn't worth getting excited about. He was not the youngest. There was a girl in the second row who looked about nineteen and was taking notes on everything Ryan said with a focused intensity that suggested she had come here to work and intended to hold the institution to its promises.
Her name, he learned during the icebreaker portion he had been hoping they'd skip, was Yara. Graduate of a community college in Queens, transferring into environmental science, here on a merit scholarship that she said in the flat tone of someone who had answered that question many times and still wasn't sure how she felt about it being the first thing people wanted to know. She had a pen behind one ear and had clearly cut her own hair recently, with mixed results.
"What about you?" she said, during the small-group portion where Ryan had strategically abandoned them to talk among themselves. "What are you transferring into?"
"Biophysics," Dan said.
Her eyebrows went up. "Junior year?"
"Yes."
"That seems difficult."
"Probably," he agreed. He meant it. The coursework at this level was real, and his knowledge from his previous life, while genuine, was not infinitely portable — there would be gaps, and those gaps would need to be filled by actually doing the work. He was not under any illusion that the degree itself was a performance. He needed it to hold up. Which meant he needed to actually learn.
"I'm Yara," she said, unnecessarily, since Ryan had made them all say their names already.
"Dan."
"You're not from here."
"No." He had decided to be vague about this in a specific way — not evasive enough to seem suspicious, but short enough that it didn't invite follow-up. Most people accepted vague answers if you delivered them with enough settled confidence. The anxiety about a lie usually came through in overselling the explanation, not in giving too little.
"Me neither," Yara said, which was obviously not true of a girl from Queens, but he understood what she meant. Not from here meaning not from this institution, not from this particular world, not yet at home in it. "You want to get coffee after this?
He looked at her. The invitation was genuine — he was good at reading the difference between social overtures that were tactical and those that were simple — and there was nothing in it except the particular loneliness of the first day at a new institution and the desire to have at least one point of contact before the day ended. He had been going to say no. He had been planning on going directly from orientation to the library to get his bearings on the course syllabi he'd pulled online.
"Sure," he said instead, and meant it, which surprised him slightly.
· · ·
The coffee place was small and took itself seriously in the way of establishments run by people who had opinions about extraction temperature. They ordered and found a table in the back and the conversation happened in the easy, rolling way of two people who were both accustomed to managing their own company and therefore didn't require the conversation to be performing at all times.
She was studying soil contamination in urban environments — the slow accumulation of industrial residue in city ground that nobody thought about because it was invisible and its consequences took decades. She talked about it the way scientists talked about the things they were actually interested in, which was with a kind of restrained intensity, as if the enthusiasm was the truth of it and the restraint was just courtesy. He found it easy to listen to.
He told her about cell membranes — the way the lipid bilayer was not a passive container but an active, pressure-sensitive structure, the way it responded to its environment. He told her about his research interest in how physical forces acted on biological systems at the molecular level, which was both true and a useful way of talking about his field to someone outside it. She asked good questions. He answered them honestly.
They didn't talk about where they were from. They talked about what they were doing. It was, he thought, one of the better early conversations he'd had, and when they parted on Street an hour later with a loose agreement to compare syllabi notes sometime that week, he felt the particular lightness of having been, briefly, just a person talking to another person about things that actually mattered to him.
He walked back to 113th Street and let himself into his room and sat at the desk and opened the notebook — the criminal one, not the academic one — and picked up where he'd left off. The operation he was designing for Marco had a target now, a location in Midtown he'd been watching for two weeks, and three possible approach windows. He worked through the details until the radiator started its night settling and his eyes began to feel the specific gritty weight of sustained concentration.
Two lives. He'd done his first real day of the second one and his first real day of the first one, and they had both gone adequately well, and they had not touched each other at any point, and he was still in one piece.
He closed the notebook and thought about Yara's question — that seems difficult — and decided she was right, that it did seem difficult, but that difficult and impossible were different categories and he had never been particularly impressed by the former.
He was asleep by midnight. His first class was at eight.