"Excuse me!" Ryan had just started to place his hands on the revolving doors, leaning into them but not quite overcoming their static friction, when he heard the woman's voice coming from the lobby behind him. "Excuse me, excuse me!" she said, managing that terribly polite trick some people had of raising their voice without actually shouting. "Young man, excuse me!"
It was the 'young man' that convinced him to turn around. The Seattle Needlework Expo had attracted almost 400 people in its first year, a pretty good turn-out for a new cross-stitching convention, but the number of them that qualified as 'young men' was definitely low enough that Ryan had gotten all too used to hearing his age and gender used in place of his name over the last 36 hours. He stopped and turned, trying to hide a certain amount of mild annoyance as the woman approached him.
He recognized her from the last seminar, of course; even without her nametag, which read 'Miriam' in the sort of infuriatingly perfect script Ryan had been trying to duplicate ever since third grade without success, she was the sort of woman that most people described as 'striking'. Her long black hair was pulled back into a bun so tight it practically screamed, and her bright blue eyes were magnified behind wire-frame glasses that dominated her pale, high-cheekboned face. She wore a white blouse that looked like she'd ironed it under a microscope-the creases were so sharp they could probably slice bread. The long, black skirt completed the 'possibly a nun, possibly a librarian' ensemble, making her look like a woman who had started life at the age of thirty-nine and was only now catching up to it.
She headed in his direction with the extremely swift, gliding walk of someone who clearly believed that running only betrayed a lack of prior planning, and came to a complete stop before saying, "I'm so glad I caught up with you, young man. I'm afraid there seems to have been a minor misunderstanding." She paused, allowing the 'on your part' to remain unspoken. "During that last seminar, I believe you picked up my umbrella by mistake." She gestured to the umbrella he had hooked around his wrist, the one he was getting ready to open as soon as he passed through the revolving doors so that he could grab some lunch without being soaked by the Seattle rain.
He looked down at the umbrella, sliding the loop of string free from his wrist and turning it over to examine it further. It was a basic, cheap umbrella, made from thin plastic in alternating black-and-white panels with a collapsible shaft, easily mistaken for any number of similarly basic, similarly cheap umbrellas. But Ryan remembered picking this one up at the airport, when the flight in made it clear that he was woefully unprepared for the Pacific Northwest squalls. It was definitely his.
He looked back up at Miriam, whose eyes were narrowed in a murderously polite expectation that any second now, the callow youth in front of her would recognize his mistake and hand him the umbrella that she absolutely knew was hers before the police had to be involved. "Um," he said, aware that confrontation had never been his strong suit. "I think we may just have similar umbrellas. If you'd like, we can go back to the seminar hall and look for yours together." It wasn't a solution he loved-he was already late getting to lunch, and programming would be starting back up in less than thirty minutes. But as an alternative to getting into a violent shouting match with Mary Poppins in the lobby, it seemed preferable.
Not to Miriam, though. "I'm afraid I really can't take the time for that, young man," she said, her voice indicating not the slightest hint of doubt. "I've already looked in every room I've been to this morning, and the umbrella simply wasn't there." Which told Ryan it was probably still in her hotel room, but he could tell that Miriam wasn't going to buy that explanation. She didn't have an umbrella, she saw him walk out of the room with an umbrella after sitting next to her, QED. "Besides, my umbrella is quite unique. I'd recognize it anywhere."
Ryan looked down at the umbrella again, feeling his options for getting out of this without an argument dwindle away further with every passing second. The umbrella was anything but distinctive; everything about it screamed 'mass-produced junk that will fall apart after a week', and the only thing that kept it from being completely non-descript was the fact that every other panel was white instead of black. It was the most nothing of nothingburgers, to the point where Ryan would cheerfully have handed it over just to get out of the conversation if not for the fact that the nearest place to eat was six blocks away and it was dumping buckets outside.
He looked around, hoping to see someone who could testify that he'd been carrying around a black-and-white umbrella all day yesterday and today, but the lobby was deserted. Of course it was. Everyone was at lunch, just like he wanted to be. He looked back over at Miriam, who was watching him with the grim triumph of a chessmaster two moves away from checkmating their opponent. "I'm really sorry," he said at last, bracing himself for the fallout. "I think you must be mistaken."
Surprisingly, Miriam didn't blow up at him. She merely put out her hand expectantly, and said, "Here. If you'll hand it to me for just a moment, I believe I can prove to you that it belongs to me." She wore white linen fingerless gloves, because of course she did. She also looked like she could stand here waiting like this all day, and quite probably step in his path if he tried to make a break for it. With a sigh, Ryan handed her the umbrella.
She smiled graciously at his tiny concession. "I know, it's bad luck," she said, as she popped open the umbrella. "But if it's the only way to settle this...there! You see?" She angled the canopy towards his face, her expression triumphant. "It's a very distinctive pattern. I assure you, this umbrella belongs to me."
Ryan leaned in a little closer, looking for some kind of watermark or optical effect or anything at all beyond the simple black on white on black on white. But he didn't see anything. Then again, he didn't really expect to. "I'm sorry," he said, continuing his unbroken string of conciliatory comments into what felt like the third straight day. "But I'm just not seeing anything distinctive."
Miriam didn't seem bothered by his confusion. If anything, she looked like she expected nothing more out of him. "Well, here," she said, her voice filled with tightly controlled exasperation. "Watch this and tell me you don't notice anything special." She began to twist the handle with one hand, while holding the shaft in the other. The canopy began to turn slowly, the edges of the black blurring into the white as it began to gently spin.
Ryan watched for a moment, certain that he was being subjected to some sort of elaborate psychological experiment about what it took to get people to believe a blatant falsehood. The umbrella wasn't doing anything special at all. Sure, the panels looked kind of funny when you watched them spin like that-there was an optical illusion that caused you to see very faint rainbows where the black met the white, he remembered hearing about that somewhere. But it wasn't 'distinctive' or 'unique'. It was just your brain playing tricks on you. "It's, um-"
That was as far as he got. Miriam leaped into the tiny pause and said, "You're not watching closely enough, young man. Just keep looking, look right in the middle where the black and the white are so close together that they're almost constantly exchanging places. Do you see that rainbow there? It makes it look like the center is spinning faster than the edges, even though you know that can't be possible. The edges must be moving faster, because they cover more ground in the same amount of time. But it looks like the center is swirling so much faster, doesn't it?"
Ryan blinked. It actually looked more like Miriam was spinning the umbrella faster and faster, like she was deliberately twirling it around and around quicker and quicker until his eyes almost hurt looking at it, but contradicting her on that point seemed like a meaningless argument inside a meaningless argument inside an argument he wanted nothing more than to get out of without any more stress than he already had. He decided to let it go and try to steer her back on track. "Well, yes, but-"
Miriam cut him off quickly at the first sign of contradiction. "But then you look at the edges, and it's so dizzying. Because they are moving faster, so as your stare moves further and further out, it feels like everything's speeding up. It feels like it's spinning faster than your eyes can possibly keep up with, faster than your mind can possibly keep up with, and you find yourself overwhelmed with vertigo that makes your gaze, your thoughts helplessly turn back to the center just so that you can refocus yourself. You have to keep staring at the center now. You can't possibly look away."
Frustratingly, Ryan wound up proving her exactly right. When he did as she suggested and glanced away at the edges of the spinning umbrella, the speed of the panels as they flashed past in alternating bursts of black and white, each one with a dizzying rainbow aura trailing along the edges, made him feel like he was about to fall over. He could feel his head wobbling on his neck as he followed the spinning canopy, instinctively matching the round-and-round motion with his body, and he had to hold out his hands in a sudden attempt to keep his balance. Reflexively, he stared at the center again, locking his vision on the tip of the umbrella in an attempt to keep himself steady.
Miriam must have noticed his eyes focusing back on the center of the canopy, because she said, "That's right. You see? You're starting to recognize the patterns. Swirling, spinning rainbow patterns in the middle. Dizzying, flashing blur along the edges. The more you look, the more attention you pay to those smooth and relaxing patterns, the easier it becomes to pick out the details. You can see those beautiful colors, and the more attention you pay to them, the more distinctive and beautiful they become. You see those deep, shimmering colors, don't you, now?"
