I’m sitting on the couch, trying to focus on my notes for that marketing project I’ve been putting off, but my mind keeps drifting back to something Pandora said earlier about John Mercer leaving his dirty socks on the floor again. I thought she was joking at first. It sounded like the sort of ordinary complaint anyone might make after nearly tripping over a pair of socks that had somehow migrated from John’s bedroom into the hallway. But there was something about the way she said it. Her tone seemed a little tense. Or deliberate. No, no. Don’t jump to conclusions, Hal. She was talking about socks. People complain about socks every day without secretly communicating anything. Probably.
The problem is that Pandora looked directly at me when she said it. Not at John. Not at the socks. At me. She said, “John really needs to stop leaving things where people can find them,” and then gave me this tiny smile before walking into the kitchen. At the time, I barely noticed. Now I can’t stop thinking about it. Leaving things where people can find them. That’s an oddly specific way of complaining about dirty laundry. Why not just say, “John needs to pick up his socks”? Unless the socks weren’t the point. Unless Pandora was trying to tell me something without John realizing she was telling me something.
I stare at my laptop and attempt to return to work. Three sentences into my notes, I’m thinking about the socks again. John is sitting in the chair across from me, completely absorbed in his phone and apparently unaware that his laundry has become the centerpiece of an emerging intelligence operation. Mr Whiskers is stretched across the back of the couch, watching all of us with the detached expression of someone who already knows how this ends and isn’t impressed.
Pandora comes back from the kitchen carrying a cup of coffee and sits beside me. I wait for her to say something. She doesn’t. She takes a sip and starts scrolling through her phone. Fine. Perfectly normal. Then she glances at me. Just once. I glance back. She looks at her phone again. There it is. A signal. I’m almost certain of it.
Of course, I immediately realize that I have absolutely no idea what the signal means. Maybe she wants me to ask about John’s socks. Maybe she wants me not to ask about John’s socks. Maybe the socks are symbolic. Maybe there aren’t even any socks. I look toward the hallway to verify their existence and, unfortunately, there they are: one gray sock near John’s door and another several feet away beside the wall. So at least the socks are real. That’s comforting. I’m not sure why.
John looks up from his phone. “Why are you staring at my socks?”
“I’m not.”
“You’re staring directly at them.”
“I was looking at the hallway.”
“The hallway containing my socks?”
This is exactly the sort of defensive response I would expect from someone who doesn’t know he’s accidentally involved in whatever Pandora is trying to tell me. I decide not to pursue it. Pandora suppresses a smile. There. Again. She definitely knows something.
I start replaying the morning in my head. Pandora asked what time I was planning to work on my project. She asked whether I had anything scheduled later. Then she mentioned John’s socks. Individually, these things mean nothing. Together, however, they form what I’m beginning to regard as a fairly sophisticated communication sequence. First establish my schedule. Then determine whether I’ll be home. Then introduce an apparently meaningless object into the conversation. Finally, make eye contact. I’m not saying Pandora is sending me a coded message. I’m saying there’s mounting evidence that Pandora is sending me a coded message.
Mr Whiskers suddenly jumps down from the couch and trots into the hallway. He stops beside John’s abandoned sock and sniffs it. Interesting.
John looks over. “Don’t let him take that.”
Pandora laughs. Even more interesting.
Mr Whiskers grabs the sock in his mouth and starts walking toward me. I freeze. John groans. “Seriously?” Pandora is laughing harder now, but I barely hear her because Mr Whiskers has just delivered the object at the center of this entire mystery directly to my feet. He drops it, looks up at me, and sits down. That cannot be random. Cats do not retrieve socks and deliver them to specific people for no reason. Well, maybe they do, but that explanation isn’t particularly useful right now.
I look at Pandora. She looks at me. Then she looks down at the sock. There. That was absolutely a signal.
“What?” I ask.
“What?” Pandora says.
“You looked at the sock.”
“So did you.”
“After you looked at it.”
Pandora stares at me for several seconds. “Hal, Mr Whiskers brought you John’s dirty sock.”
“I know what happened.”
“I’m not sure you do.”
John gets up, retrieves the sock from the floor, and disappears toward his room while muttering something about needing better roommates. Mr Whiskers follows him, presumably because his role in the operation isn’t finished yet.
I try to return to my project, but now I’m thinking about something Pandora said yesterday. She asked whether I’d talked to Dave at work about the proposal I’d been working on. At the time, I assumed she was making conversation. Dave is my coworker, so asking about him isn’t unusual. But what if that was part of the signal too? Maybe Pandora knows I’ve been obsessing over the project and is trying to tell me something about it without coming right out and saying it. Maybe she thinks I’m overlooking something obvious. Maybe “stop leaving things where people can find them” wasn’t about John at all. Maybe she saw the project notes I left sitting on the coffee table.
I look at the table. My notes are still there. One page is slightly crooked. I straighten it. Pandora watches me.
“Did you read these?” I ask.
“Some of them.”
My heart skips a beat. “Why?”
“They were sitting on the coffee table.”
Exactly. Leaving things where people can find them. I knew it.
“What did you think?”
Pandora shrugs. “I think you’re overcomplicating it.”
For a moment, everything becomes perfectly clear. The socks. The notes. The glances. The questions about my schedule. Pandora has been trying to tell me that I’m overthinking the project. She knew if she said it directly, I’d probably argue with her, so instead she constructed an elaborate series of subtle clues designed to lead me toward the conclusion myself. That is actually brilliant.
“You could have just told me,” I say.
Pandora lowers her phone. “I just did.”
“No, before that.”
“I told you yesterday.”
I pause. “You said I was overthinking the proposal?”
“Twice.”
That complicates the theory considerably.
From the hallway, John calls out, “Has anyone seen my other sock?” Pandora looks at me. I look at Pandora. Neither of us says anything. Then Mr Whiskers trots into the living room carrying the missing sock. Pandora bursts out laughing.
I don’t.
Because now I’m wondering whether that was the real signal. And judging by the way Mr Whiskers is looking at me, I’m pretty sure he knows I finally got it.