On Saturday evening, Dirk had received a text message from professor Daly, asking him to specify a time at which they would leave for the summerhouse the next day. Dirk approached this question very seriously. He sat down, promptly realized he needed some paper and a pencil, got up to get them, and then sat down again with even more determination.

He considered the following factors.

Every morning, it would take him at least twenty minutes to wake up, think about the day, take his phone, forget about everything he was going to do in that day, become helplessly lost in seven Reddit threads, and finally fall out of bed propelled by the realization that he had just spent twenty minutes reading about the table etiquette of ancient Sumerians and was now utterly late to something as a result.

He rounded this up to half an hour.

It would take him an additional fifteen minutes to rush through brushing his teeth and getting dressed, dig out a jacket from a pile in the corner of his room, run out of the apartment, remember he forgot his wallet, keys, or both wallet and keys, come back, and eventually end up in his car. The car was actually Farah’s, but that didn’t matter. The drive to Farah’s apartment, where he was expected for breakfast with Todd, took, on average, another fifteen minutes.

He rounded this up to an hour twenty minutes in total.

Though he was perfectly capable of consuming a full breakfast in about the span of a TV commercial break, a breakfast at Todd’s was a different beast altogether, and largely involved not consumption of food but rather a whole private morning talkshow with an average amount of 7.6 full conversations. This usually took about an hour, but considering that Farah was there, Dirk had to increase the margin of error to an hour and a half.

He wrote that down carefully.

The drive from Farah’s apartment to professor Daly’s house was supposed to take twenty six minutes, but Dirk had a shaky, distrustful relationship with google maps and its estimations, so he increased that to forty. He also accounted for the very real possibility of traffic, unexpected road work, and getting lost several times despite the navigator instructions. Forty minutes went up to an hour.

Dirk chewed thoughtfully on the pencil and frowned at all the numbers he had scribbled down on the paper. He then tried to add them up in his mind - which he was theoretically able to do - but had a sudden lapse of doubt in his mathematical ability and counted it by hand - and then rechecked on his phone’s calculator. All three methods gave him the number of three hours fifty minutes, which he rounded up to four hours. And so, he set his alarm clock to 9 AM and texted the professor back with a meeting time of 1 PM, satisfied with his responsibly made decision.

On Sunday, Dirk arrived at professor Daly’s address at 3:22 PM.

It was frankly anyone’s guess as to what sort of space-time anomaly had occurred between the alarm clock going off and Dirk stepping out of Farah’s car in front of the apartment block. Dirk attributed this mostly to three things.

First, the fact that no amount of numbers on a paper could actually give him an accurate and tangible sense of time. Second, the fact that Kevin had insisted on making crepes for all of them and would not allow, under threat of physical violence, to remove the batter from the fridge before it had at least an hour to chill.

Sadly, the crepes were worth the wait, so no one could justify any further complaints.

And third, the fact that he failed to account for a whole day spent away from Todd and Farah, and how that would stretch out their breakfast into a sort of decadent brunch.

To Dirk’s relief, when he ran up the stairs and rang the bell on professor Daly’s door, the man greeted him with a warm smile, not a hint of anger in his expression. Or that’s what it seemed to Dirk, at least. He was far from good at reading subtle facial expressions.

But the man’s tales of how he had used the extra time to do one more search of the apartment, as well as water the plants and make some extra sandwiches for their trip, persuaded Dirk that he was not in the wrong. He helped Roger to carry the snack-filled bag down the stairs, and soon they were sitting side by side, on their way to the summerhouse.

“Just keep driving till you get to the highway,” Roger explained, zipping the seatbelt in the passenger seat. “I’ll keep an eye on the turns from there.”

Dirk, who was delighted to be the driver again, gave him a few enthusiastic nods and gently pressed down acceleration.

*

When Todd wandered into the living room, barefoot and with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, Kevin was occupying the entire sofa. He was staring blankly at the ceiling, one earphone piece stuck into his ear, another dangling off the sofa and swaying, ever so slightly, in the air, like a fob watch in the hands of a master hypnotist. Todd regarded him with a mix of light concern and distrust and opted to take a seat on the puffy armchair nearby.

“Have any meetings to attend?” Todd asked, and picked up an apple from a bowl on the nearby coffee table.

Kevin blinked a few times before sitting up, very slowly, and removing the earphone piece from his ear, also very slowly.

“What, on a Sunday?” he asked, staring blankly at Todd. “I’m not a heathen.”

“Don’t you have a giant company to CEO?” Todd continued.

“Yes.” Kevin nodded. “But CEOs only do the most important work,” he rushed to explain, “not the work that takes the most time. I do meetings on Mondays,” he said, “then Tuesdays are off, and Wednesdays, well, Wednesdays are also off unless it’s February, on Thursdays a few people call me on Skype, and, uh,” he seemed to be putting in considerable mental effort into his speech, “I look at some graphs and answer emails and, sometimes there are other meetings?”

He finished even less sure of himself than he had begun. “I think a lot.” He shrugged. “And make crucial decisions.”

Todd gave him a look that visitors typically give to zoo animals that they had imagined all their life to be magnificent awe-inspiring creatures but turned out in fact to be rather docile and also considerably smelly.

“How is your being watched feeling?” Todd asked.

“Not present,” Kevin responded, shaking his head in quiet disbelief. “But hey,” he beamed, “maybe moving places worked! Maybe I’m safer here.”

“Sure,” Todd said, and bit into the apple. Very. Slowly.

*

The car sped down the highway and the world blurred around it, reduced to a background of flashing lampposts, trees, and passing by trucks. Roger made his third attempt to find nice music on the radio, but only deepened his conviction that modern pop music was produced by a bunch of monkeys pushing buttons on some music-making algorithm machine. He glanced sideways at Dirk, and Dirk glanced sideways at him. For a while more they were silent. Then, professor risked a cautious remark.

“Thank you for helping,” he said, and looked away, as if embarrassed by his words.

“Oh you’re most thoroughly welcome, professor,” Dirk beamed, “it is my job to solve cases.”

Saying it out loud made Dirk unreasonably happy. There were few people in the world who could honestly say they were that proud and delighted to have their particular occupation.

“A job, indeed, dear fella.” Roger chuckled. “And yet it’s been two days and you haven’t said a word about payment.”

Dirk glanced at him again and smiled with the corner of his mouth.

“Payment is priority number two,” Dirk insisted. “Or occasionally number three, if first priority is to not get killed. Which is kind of often, actually, but, in any circumstance, the case still comes before payment.”

“Still,” Roger continued, “this all must seem awfully silly to you, searching for an old man’s lost trinket.”

“Not at all,” Dirk wanted to reply, but the professor wasn’t done talking yet.

“But this music box…” Roger paused, suddenly dark and thoughtful. “Well, let’s say, when someone you loved, loved for a very long time, leaves you forever, every tiny thing they’ve touched becomes sacred in your eyes. Especially gifts. Especially ones they’ve made with their own hands.

“Like something to remind you that they lived, they cared… that good times have happened, even if they’re over.” He paused again, and the next words to come out of his mouth were barely a breath, full of a mellow, distant ache. “It’s been five years and sometimes it still hits me all over again that he’s gone.”

Dirk frowned, and blinked rapidly, trying his best to subdue the momentary burn in his throat and eyes from a brief but sudden avalanche of feeling.

It’s been years. More than five, more than twenty, even. He could hardly remember his parents anymore. How old was he, when he was taken away from them? Ten? Eleven? Hardly older than that, and not a word from them ever since, not a visit. Never even found out what happened to them, blocked in his mind all accounts of how he was taken from his house. Taken to not be returned for a decade.

He searched for them after being released, obviously, he searched. He found no records and no graves - his childhood home sold to a family that has never even heard the surname “Cjelli”, all traces of his old life wiped from the world. His childhood toys rotting in a dumpster somewhere, no doubt.

Perhaps they were dead. Perhaps they weren’t, but rather fled the country decades ago, fearing another raid from Black Wing. In either case, he would never see them again, ever, and he had almost made peace with it, except for rare moments like this when tears would swell in his eyes briefly, momentarily, before he would force his mind to switch away.

His new name was Dirk Gently. Dirk Gently. Not Cjelli. Never again.

“How did you and Arthur meet?” Dirk asked, in what was supposed to be a cheerful voice, but came out just a smudge too forced for his liking.

“In university.” Roger smiled. He appreciated this turn of conversation. “He was already a graduate student while I was an undergraduate. He was the professor’s assistant in my electromagnetic theory class. Yes.” He chuckled quietly to himself. “My entire group couldn’t stand him!”

“Why?” A range of emotions, from surprise to light confusion to humorous interest, flashed across Dirk’s face.

“Oh, well,” Roger began to explain, “Arthur was a strange man even by our academic standards. The kinds of things he used to say, it took a real effort to understand him. In a perfectly casual conversation!” He chuckled merrily again. “Not a good combination in a confusing physics subject.”

Dirk nodded. He himself often said things and did things that took other people considerable effort to decipher. Years ago, the Black Wing psychiatrist had attributed this to either autism, ADHD, or both - the man didn’t feel qualified enough to specify. Dirk himself spent most of his early childhood convinced that he was secretly adopted from a family of space aliens.

“But he was delightful,” Roger continued. “So passionate, so dedicated. Very funny. And kind.” He nodded to himself. “Very kind, to everyone. He showed me the level of respect no professor or grad student has ever shown to an undergraduate in my time, especially to a black undergraduate. He stayed with me till midnight helping with all the assignments I had troubles with.” He sighed, and smiled warmly. “We were inseparable ever since. Best friends virtually overnight.”

Dirk smiled back, hands gripping the steering wheel. Yet another feeling he could relate to fully.

“A turn in a few dozen meters, son, a left turn,” Roger said, and Dirk sternly ignored the warm feeling in his chest that the word ‘son’ had given him. “We’re almost there. Finish line, so to say.”

The car exited the highway at last. The gray asphalt disappeared, replaced by coarse sand and gravel, and walls of green appeared on either side of the road. The city, with its faceless apartment blocks and anonymous crowds, was behind. Ahead was a quiet, welcoming village.