Flowers

It started as a game, a simple game that they played on Sundays between cups of coffee and blueberry muffins. The endless stream of faces, familiar and new, would ebb and flow and they would take their fun as they could, here and there, in seconds, in minutes, in half hours of down time, moving chess pieces on a board that sat on top of the case displaying crumb cake, cookies, and croissants. Some of the regulars took an interest.
“Whose winning?” they would nod to the board before placing their order.
“He is.”
Or
“She is.”
They would say, never revealing that it was impossible to tell. They each cheated frequently, re-arranging pieces when the other's back was turned, or moving knights like bishops and bishops like queens as though it were natural, sometimes trading color mid game. If a customer paid using a two dollar bill the entire board would have to be reset. If someone asked to break a hundred both players could reclaim a lost piece. The game never ended.
Sun filtered through the dusty windows, crowds of friends gathered at the mismatched tables and chairs. Lonely souls sank into the worn cushions of a maroon couch turning the pages of paperback novels whose covers had been torn off. Men and women dressed in filthy sweatpants, tattered sweaters and knitted gloves with the finger tips cut off, came in to beg or buy with change obtained through begging.

*   *   *

She liked the timbre of his voice, the unruly curls atop his head, the way he gracefully navigated the crowded space behind the counter, never missing a beat. He liked her crazy laugh, the flowers she wore pushed behind one ear, the way she looked deeply into the eyes of whoever was speaking, as though they were the entire world. Sometimes that was  him.
He opened and she came in an hour later. He left after noon and she left an hour later. Once he thought of staying until she clocked out, but the only excuse he could think of was to continue the game. Then it might actually end, so he left.

*   *   *

Sundays came and Sundays went. Crushed leaves littered the sidewalk and were carried in by the scuffling of shoes like jagged orange and yellow confetti. Leaves gave way to rain thumping on the windows, leaving streaks in the dust. Umbrellas lingered in the stand by the door, sometimes forgotten, red, black, yellow, gray.
Eventually the windows were washed clean by the rain and the sun grew meekly brighter, polished by a crisp wind that begged buds out of the naked arms of the tiny trees outside. And still the game went on, hundreds broken, two dollar bills accepted.
One afternoon he was close to winning. He began to evade the game, too busy with foaming milk and shots of espresso, restocking cups, lids, wooden swizzle sticks, and napkins. Tables long neglected suddenly received his orange scented devotion as he carefully polished their scratched wooden surfaces.
Every old lady who passed through the door filled his heart with hope. Surely, in that oversized handbag within the folds of  an overly somber pocket book his salvation had arrived. At last a blue haired woman saved the day and the board was reset.

*   *   *

There were excuses for touching, Brushed fingers as a cup was passed, hands on shoulders as one slipped by the other in the narrow space, a hug to say hello or goodbye. Buds turned to blooms of pink and an idea developed in his mind, a perfect reason to see one another outside of work.
He would take her to see the forest of cherry blossoms in the park, invite her to meet him outside the tea garden. They could walk, get caught in a spring shower, huddle together under a pavilion where he could slip his hand around her waist.
And then one, day, before he could utter those words, rehearsed to ensure perfectly casual delivery, calculated to be an enticing command rather than a question,  “Meet me in the park in the morning.”, the schedule was changed.

*   *   *

He was fated to come in as she was leaving. Though their paths crossed, there was no time, no in for those words, just a wave then absence. The game continued slowly, one move each every Sunday. But it was more than a game now, it was a token of affection that was growing colder, more distant as the words died unspoken and the petals drifted from the blossoms to the earth and blew away into gutters. Green leaves sprang up in their place.
One week she was out sick. The board sat untouched, collecting a fine layer of dust. Someone, midweek, sensing the abandonment, put the board and pieces away. The following Sunday she returned to find that the game was over.

*   *   *

She was strangely distant as they crossed paths at the door. It was the fist truly hot day, and she murmured something about Baker Beach and slipped away down the sidewalk after he asked her,
“What’s up doc?”
It felt so cold, the way she barely answered, like a ghost, the way her body moved, shrinking in to avoid accidental touching, as though they were strangers. His mind fumbled with numb confusion as he watched her depart.
When he found the display case neatly polished and the chess board and pieces gone, a hollow feeling seized him. Had she done it? Had she given up? If not, did she think that he had? Did she think hat he would quit their game?
He was in agony between cups of coffee, blueberry muffins, and feigned smiles. He broke hundreds and accepted two dollar bills, the endless stream of faces familiar and new trailing off into an empty Sunday night. He closed the store alone and walked home, his heart feeling as though it were being wrung like a rag by a washer woman in a depressing black and white film.
It was Allegro Non Troppo without music, cartoons, or jokes. It had started as a game, a simple game they played on Sundays. But when the game died, what was underneath it was lost too.

*   *   *

That night he dreamed. As the two dollar bill was passed to him over the register he thought of resetting the board and looked at the empty display top. In that desperate sad moment, instead of shutting the register drawer doling out change and smiling vacuously at the next in line, he doled out the change, took off his apron and announced:
“I’m sorry everybody. I have to close up right now, I’m very sorry.”
He jumped over the counter and ushered them out into the late afternoon sun. He locked the door, ran home, found his car on the street collecting club advertisements and got in. He drove to Baker Beach and found her sitting there alone on the sand in a striped bikini, flower tucked behind her ear. He sat beside her, looked her in the eyes and said,
 “Bishop to King 4.”
She smiled. The panoramic golden gate stretched out behind her, breeze softly ruffling her hair, sun sinking into the golden pacific. 

The Wanderer

He expects nothing of anyone.
He looks out into the dust of the world, scorching fallen bones to white stones.  Water is perhaps days away and he does not expect to find it.  The desert floor is scattered with the fallen, both man and beast have succumbed to their thirst in this vast yellow wasteland, all of them left there uncovered as food for the scavengers. 
He expects nothing and gives nothing.
He takes what he finds, what he needs. Men have died beside him and he has stepped sideways as they fell. It is by chance that bullets and arrows have all but missed the target. 
He continues on, his face cracked and blistered and burning, an unrelenting sun high above that has no mercy for the weak. Sucking on stones as he stumbles over the few patches of withered grass, he has not lost the desire to live, just the expectation that life somehow belongs to him. 
There is no god above to save his soul, to pluck him from this dry bed of dust and wind. There is nothing, no one beyond his own skin, nothing but the determination to keep moving and follow the stars. Perhaps he will stumble upon a watering hole. 
He does not pray for rescue or grace, does not hope to find some other man along the path with a full canteen and dried meat. There are no friends in this place, not in this desert or in any town he has ever been. There is no sweet smelling woman that does not hold her hand out for coin or gift, no act of mercy ever granted without expectation of consequence. 
The men out here come as vultures and thieves and even those he has ridden side by side with watch him with suspicion, as he does with them. 
He expects nothing of them and he gives them nothing. Each man rides until he is unable to do so any longer. Then he is left and forgotten, stripped and left to the sun and rain, to the vultures and time.
Scanning the ridges of far away mountains for signs of smoke and silhouette, for enemies and arrows and bullets aimed at his chest, he walks on, his mouth dry as the desert sand and cracked earth.
The wasteland is for the solitary drifter, each man experiencing the earth with eyes colored by his path and choice.

He Jumped

I drove down the I-45 westbound towards San Diego.  I was headed toward the mall, which was just a few more miles down the long five-lane stretch of smooth cement.  I had slept in and eaten a quick breakfast, spent an hour on my hair and on finding just the right clothes that might help me sell designer sunglasses. 
I was well past morning rush hour traffic and there were only a few cars following behind me- there were none in front of me for as far as I could see. I approached the I-860 overpass 100 feet away. It was a relatively new freeway that gently curved perpendicularly to the I-45. Every day that I drove this stretch of road I looked up at the overpass, drawn to it for some reason.
Today there was a car parked on the overpass.  A thought occurred to me- it was more like a stamp of words rather than a sequential string- ‘I’ve never seen a car parked there, someone must have a flat tire.’
As quick as this thought marked me, I saw a white man in a dark blue suit come around the side of the parked car. He had on a bright blue shirt which contrasted nicely with the deep rich color of his blazer and matching pants- the collared shirt was the same color as the sky on a bright sunny southern California day.
My car continued forward without my attention and I watched as he approached the overpass rail. In a second, without a moment of hesitation, he swung his legs over the side of the metal rail and jumped. 
The wind pressure pushed his body towards the eastbound lanes of the freeway below.  He floated like a lightweight doll, his limbs moving like thin flower petals in the breeze. His blazer rippled like stunted blue wings- flapping but catching almost no resistance. I turned away almost instinctively as his body approached the asphalt, each cell of my body knowing I could not handle the image of impact.
I pulled my car over beneath the overpass.  In the shade of the overpass where his last moments had been, I fumbled for my cell phone within the leather body of my oversized purse. His body lay contorted fifty feet away in the eastbound lanes. 
A few scattered cars passed by, diverting quickly as they saw the obstacle in their path.  The driver who had been behind me had pulled over too. 
I tried to hold onto the phone but my fingers were numb and tingling. I opened the car door and stumbled along the freeway’s edge, holding onto the side of the car for support.  I made my way just behind the car and fell into the dirt. My entire body was shaking. Then the tears burst out. 
I felt an arm close to me and realized it was the other driver.  I could not stop shaking, rocking, I could not get any words out. 
“The police are coming,” he said.
He got my cell phone from the car and I tried to call Maxwell, Sydney, my parents.  Nobody answered immediately. Eventually my mom called back. 
I tried to explain what had happened, but I was crying so hard I was not sure she understood. 
“Listen Doris,” my mom said, “are you and the car ok?’ 
“I’m fine mom, I mean, I’m not hurt, but it’s horrible.’
“Look, listen to me, you just need to go to work and show them you’re a tough cookie, you can’t let everything bother you.  You might feel better if you go.” 
Pure rage came over me and I hung up the phone, my mom could never say the right things.   I called my boss and sobbed into the phone, barely letting her know what had happened. 
“Don’t worry about coming in, just take care of yourself.”
A few minutes later a swarm of police were close to us. I tried to describe what happened.  I could not get it out of my head, it repeated like a loop, he just put his legs over the side and a second later he was going over.  He didn’t stop to think about it.  
“So you saw it happen?” one of the officers asked. 
He had a wide chest and frame, I looked up at him like a gnome in a forest of giant redwoods.  I nodded, trying to speak but only water came from my eyes. 
I cried some more.  More officers came up to me, they wanted the details.  I kept crying and they sat me back down on the ground.
A chaplain, a woman with very pale brown hair and dark blue clothes came towards me.  She sat next to me and took my hands and then I melted into her arms.  I cried and she let me cry. 
I looked up at her and asked: “Are you a mom?”
"No," she said.  “But I want to be.”
“My parents are just so different.  They asked me if I was okay.  They asked if the car was ok.  They asked me that several times.  Then they told me I should go to work and put a smile on my face.  Can you believe that?  I called my boss and she was understanding, she said- just take care of yourself Doris.  Why can’t my mom do that?”
“Everyone has different ways they react to these kind of things.”
“Yeah, but my mom is a social worker.”
“Maybe she is around this type of thing a lot.  Maybe it’s normal to her.”
Everyone told me not to drive, but I got into the car and went to work.  I couldn’t go home, the freeway going in the other direction was closed. 
As I entered the building the store manager saw me- she took one look at me and led me into her office while she contacted my supervisor.  They had me call Sydney so she could drive me home.
My mom kept calling over and over.  I was mad at her for telling me to put a smile on my face. I was mad that the guy jumped.  I was mad that someone wanted me to see that.   Why had god wanted me to see that?  I spent the rest of the day crying and asking the same questions over and over again.
Who had planned all of it? Why they want me to see this?

The Spheres of Galia Part 11

Branan, the former Royal Guard who allegedly leaked hundreds of secret magickal scrolls to Olslo, celebrated his 23rd birthday with the mice in the dark depths of the dungeon under the towers.

Since his capture, Branan had spent most of those two hundred days in solitary confinement. The sound-proof cell removed even the possibility of finding comfort in the screams of those being tortured. He had not even been permitted to touch the hand- written note from his family, rather, the guard read it to him through the small slat in the iron door. There were of course, no windows. No sun, no moon, it was life without seasons, color or natural pattern. In all respects, his birthday had been no different than any of the other days spent in darkness, it was by a small miracle that one of his guards had wished him a “pleasant birthday.” Perhaps it had been sarcastic given his situation, but he took it as an amazing gift, it gave him a way to count the days since his imprisonment, thus restoring to him a small measure of sanity.

His life had become a single endless night spent alone in a damp and cold narrow cell. His world, a sink, toilet, and bed. He was denied the luxury of sheets, pillow or blanket from the chill. Exercise was forbidden, human contact was a forgotten pleasure. In the earliest days of his imprisonment, when he was still permitted visits, he was forced to wear shackles and had to sit behind two rows of metal bars for the entirety of the interview. Now, he couldn’t bear to even hope for that long, difficult walk down the corridor in metal restraints, nor would he permit himself the dream of seeing another human face. The faces of people had become a diffuse thing in his memory. The harder he strove to recall a particular countenance, the more illusive it would become. His mother was a blur of pale pink and white. Remembering the smiles of old comrades was like looking at the world through rain-soaked glass, every color ran together, blurring into a palate of warped shapes. He had never seen the guards by the door, he heard their voices when they issued a command through the slat and though he resented his captors, he now lived for their voices, for that small reminder that there was life and humanity beyond the endless night.

On his birthday, he accidentally tore a toenail by bumping it against the hard leg of his bed. It had hurt for only a moment and the small sliver of nail served as a great diversion. He would toss it to the floor, then search for it in the darkness, fingers scanning the rough surface of the floor and delighting in its tactile stimulation.

Branan’s future remained uncertain. While he searched with eager fingers for a lost piece of himself, Councilman Coyar was in a meeting of the Council. The councilman called for calm and a measured response to the new challenges that Olslo’s actions had presented. The Kingdom had changed dramatically, not just with leaked magickal scrolls, but with the subsequent rebellion. The Council needed to find a way to move fluidly with the changes. "When everyone in this capital is joined together calling for someone's head, it's a pretty sure sign that we need to slow down and take a look," the elderly councilman suggested to his peers.

Councilman Pushkar responded with a call for punishment. “I have no sympathy for the alleged thief in this situation. He’s no better than a common street thug that deals in stolen merchandise and sells it to the highest bidder,” he spat angrily.

Councilman Coyar glanced at the empty seat of Willem the Bright. Where was his old friend, the champion of reason and justice? Times being such as they were, it was hard to distinguish reasonable fears from paranoia. Could Coyar himself expect his own seat to be empty tomorrow for expressing an opinion unfavorable to the King and his watchdogs, zealous men such as Pushkar for whom everything within the Three Spheres was painted black or white? Could Willem himself be in a dungeon beneath the towers after his recent denouncement of the King’s war in Vitnu? Long gone were the times of respectable debate and measured compromise. A glance into the face of Councilman Argus, the retired torturer, gave Coyar cause to shiver. There, he was sure he saw the answers to his questions. They made his blood run cold.

Super Ball

Who sits with me this morning?
My grandmother is here with bare feet, even though in life I never saw her stand on bare feet but always shod in fur lined booties, boxes of which were stockpiled in the guestroom closet. I saw her feet bare only if she lay down on her bed to watch talk shows on the beautiful old Zenith on her dresser.
That television had a special smell about it and of course it looked different from our televisions at home, even though I can barely remember the precise details of its form. I can remember that it looked stylish. This was a television set from the old school, a television built with a modern luxurious look in mind. A television that was good to look at even when it was shut off. I used to get close to it and press my nose against it to smell its special smell.
My grandparents had a way of preserving everything as if their house were a comfortable museum. Nothing ever got dirty or wore out. Things maintained the smell they came out of the box with and contributed that odor to the mix so that a new Zenith television set mingled with vanilla and licorice and coffee and wood and clean linens and sand.
Did you know that the sand of the desert has a smell? That even inside of the house you can smell the desert beyond the four walls? You can. It has its own special smell, clean and dusty all at once. Maybe the only way for you to understand what I’m talking about is for you to get into your car and drive to Phoenix.
I loved it there, not only in the house and yard which, against nature's desire, was a lush green paradise, but also on the streets. I loved the stark nakedness of everything, the sun tormenting all surfaces with its unashamed glare, the cacti and sand in center dividers and planters boxes, the hundred plus degree heat bouncing back up from asphalt and concrete, making waves in the view of the world and warming scrawny little girls like me so that I could never feel cold again, never as long as I could recall Phoenix.
My grandmother is here with her bare feet, perhaps to remind me of that warmth that saturated me to the bone.
When I was very young she would come out onto the porch carpeted with Astroturf and furnished with an electric reclining lounge. There was a lovely wooden shelf fashioned by my grandfather especially for holding a collection of little painted pots.
Inside of the pots we kept an assortment of small round super balls, the kind you could get for a quarter out of those red toped machines that lay in wait at the front of every grocery store. I had hot pink and electric green super balls and rainbow swirled super balls. We played with several at once, in no particular way that I can recall, because those little balls were so unpredictable. Once they had been released from the pots there was no stopping them, they bounced around like popping corn and there could be no joy in trying to catch them or pass them, only in setting them free to bounce like mad, then rescuing them once gravity had at last gotten the best of them. I would scramble around on hands and knees to retrieve them when nature had beaten them. I rescued them, my little friends who needed just a little help to begin their wild dancing again.
I never felt that I was too hot out there on the porch or in the yard. It was always too hot for my grandmother and she was very careful to take me back inside after a reasonable amount of time had passed and there re-hydrate me with a mixture of apple cider vinegar in water.
No one could ever reproduce my grandmother's apple cider vinegar and honey. I remember returning home and feeling the desire for one. I asked my mother to prepare it. The taste was awful. Being an honest child I told her, so that she could try again, and she did, again and again, to no avail. At last I stopped asking.
It must be terrible to discover that there is something that someone else can do for your child which you cannot emulate, especially when that someone is the mother of your husband and comes to your house for the holidays to complain of everything.
My grandparents could not be satisfied by my mother's pathetic efforts at home making. Unconvinced of her ability to even launder linens properly, they packed their own wash cloths and towels when they came to visit. Certain that they liked the expensive apple turnovers from the town's only doughnut shop, my mother bought them for breakfast every time they were with us, until at last my grandparents complained that she only ever gave them one thing. She was stung. I can remember her saying that they couldn’t be satisfied.
After that she no longer wished to go along when my father and sister and I visited them in their desert. She said that they made her feel unwelcome in their home. She told me once that they insinuated that they didn’t have room for all of us.
In retrospect, now that I can eat and bath myself without my family’s assistance, I feel that I would not invite my mother to my house either, nor my father for that matter. Most days I think that I would not invite my grandmother either, but now she is here, barefoot.
I feel that I have to explain.
In the early days when we played super ball on the back porch or turned the barstools over inside the kitchen to make me a doggie house, my grandmother and I were bosom buddies. My grandfather seemed rather too grouchy for my taste during that time and if I had had to pick just one to keep and one to throw away, I would have kept my grandmother.
As I grew older this changed. As little breasts budded on my chest and acne swallowed my face, my grandmother could no longer bear the heat outside at all. If I wanted to go out I went out alone. Her favorite thing to do with me now was to discuss awkward subjects such as premarital sex and homosexuality and the use of condoms.
My grandfather now enlisted my help in running errands. He enjoyed leaving early before the heat had fully come to settle on things and preferred to visit various different specialty stores to obtain all of the things my grandparents required to maintain their existence.
I soon intuited that part of his motive in getting one thing here and another there had less to do with the quality of this or that item and more to do with the interactions he had with each of the shop keepers. Even in the chain grocery store the manager would come out to say hello and the clerks could call him by his first name.
One day as we cruised down those scorching streets in his white Buick, my grandfather asked if I enjoyed running errands with him. I told him heartily that I did which put him into a great state of peace and contentment.
My grandmother could rarely be coaxed out of the house. This had been going on since before I was born. My father later revealed to me that back during my super ball days my grandfather had come to him in a shambles. He told my father that he wanted to kill himself because he was so lonely. My grandmother would never leave the house with him, not for dinner, not for a movie, not for dancing or ice cream or to watch sunrises. She gave the same strange excuse for every occasion; she was afraid of picking up fleas. My father begged my grandfather not to do it. He suggested that my grandfather try having affairs with other women before he turned to such a drastic measure. My father was always glad to conclude the story by saying that his suggestion had done the trick.
Slowly it was my grandmother who began to appear to my adolescent eyes as a grouch. Now that I was at an age to understand, she could do little more than tell sad stories again and again, and ask those same awkward questions suggested to her by day time talk shows.
My grandfather, on the other hand, could now interact with me in ways that he had been unable to interact with a connoisseur of super ball and games of doggie. He taught me to bake, and tried to show me how mechanical things worked. He took me to a vineyard to pick grapes, and to a sandy place where we watched people fly remote control gliders. And he introduced me to all of the little casual acquaintances that made his life worth bearing. He beseeched me not to reflect on the dark side of life but to embrace beauty while it was there to be had.
“Dark times always come. They will find you. So don’t go looking for them, enjoy the sun while it is here.” Then, with difficulty, he told me a little of his experiences in WWII as a young German fighting on the Eastern front.
“We were just kids. We didn’t want to be there. We would have preferred to be dancing, listening to music…people here don’t understand, we had no choice. Dark times.” He shook his head and looked out the window, gazing far away, into a place beyond the scope of the window, a place I couldn’t see. “Maybe you‘ll be lucky and never see such times.”
I was much closer to him by the time that he passed away, whereas by the time my grandmother left the world I hardly recognized her. Confined to a wheelchair, she unable to do more than grunt and exhibit behaviors that seemed selfish and cruel.
That was how I last saw her before she died sequestered in that house with my uncle as her keeper. At that time both house and yard had fell into terrible disrepair.
But now my grandmother is here again, standing with bare feet in the yard where green grass is beginning to push up through the old yellow stuff. She is standing and talking, just as she could when I was a child, and she is asking me if I will help her by playing with tennis balls on the porch. I feel that this will make her stronger but it is difficult for me to hold the tennis balls in my hands. They are too large and I can not juggle them.
Slowly it dawns on me… I know what we need. If my grandmother is to be fully restored, what we need to pass between us is not these furry offish tennis balls. We need super balls, tiny, lively, uncontrollable super balls. Then I will have my grandmother again. Then, at last we will be reunited. This is why she has come to sit with me this morning, unshod, to be alive again. Like a super ball that was lost under the recliner and now waits for me to set it free, my grandmother is here with bare feet.

The Temple Bar

The wind is blowing icily, causing my trench coat to whip around my bare legs like the wings of startled bats. I shiver as my friend and I stuff three quarters in the meter and start digging for dollar bills. He dips into his wallet. With his face turned down to watch his fingers pull at the paper bills, the crown of his balding head shines like the crest of a well waxed apple hiding a star at its core. My bladder aches all the worse for my shivering, holding the bottom of my coat closed with my hands where there are no more buttons left to fasten. He lays the crisp rectangular papers in my waiting hand and I run to the corner, to a building that I’m too uncomfortable to appreciate or be too curious about. Under the awning blocking the bright red front door with its little glass portal, a woman leans back smoking a cigarette. I look at her and then immediately past her, over her shoulder, at the closed transparent door behind her.
"Is this place open?" I ask her.
Her eyes are small and unfriendly, peering out from under her dark wavy bangs, her mouth has left a red lipstick stain on the end of the half smoked cigarette.
"Yeah." She says it as if she couldn’t care less about the state of this place or any other place for that matter, and I brush hurriedly past her, grieving over the misfortune that leads her to stand in this particular doorstep where I would come to encounter her. The door swings eagerly open as I press against it and I find myself in a very big dark room with several different doors and dark hallways at either end of a luxuriously long bar. I walk sure footed inside, without taking the time to recover from the momentary blindness, as my eyes adjust to the dim atmosphere.
There is a television hung over one end of the bar, but no bartender. Three people sit on their individual stools, two next to each other at one end; a young woman and an old man. The third is alone at the end of the bar. The woman is dressed casually but nicely in gray and blue athletic wear with a healthy dose of black make up adorning her eye lids and her dark hair pulled up in a bun. A slew of cosmopolitan magazines are spread on the bar in front of her. She is reading one, occasionally looking up at the television. The old man is also dressed well, in slacks and a white dress shirt. His hair is white and the creases in his face are new and thick. He glances at me momentarily, revealing his sour faded eyes. Then he looks back to the papers he is holding and proceeds to divide his attention between them and the television.
After a brief hesitation in which I am perplexed by the absence of the bartender, I determine that I will be unable to delve into the mystery of this chamber effectively until after I have found a place to urinate. Either my need to pee is so great, or I have reached a point in my life where I no longer feel that I require anyone’s permission to do anything, maybe now I see the request for permission as just a quaint gesture, like putting little brass rings on the napkins for a dinner party or pulling my left foot back and up as I bow to say hello. I walk into the darkness, as if I know where I’m going , walking in a straight line parallel to the bar towards a blackened hallway. As I pass the end of the bar, I notice the third man. He sits with his laptop open, working on something, the blue light of the LCD screen reflecting off of the lenses of his spectacles while his almond shaped eyes dart here and there watching the data scroll by. As I enter the hallway, I am gratified to find that I have chosen the right direction. The bathroom doors are marked with gold plaques reading "Women" and "Men" respectively.
Hurrying through the door that is marked "Women", I am both surprised and pleased to find that the bathroom is spacious and bright and pleasant smelling. There are 5 stalls, more than I expected, and the walls and floor are clean. I select the largest stall and lay down the thin toilet seat covers after shutting and latching the door behind me. As I urinate, I hold the dollar bills in my hand and think about the unyielding scene in the main room, how perfect it is, how still and quiet, how resistant to any attempt at change or disturbance. Succumbing to the intimidation of this unfamiliar environment is not an option. There is nowhere else nearby where I can complete my mission. As I pull my shorts back up and drop the length of my coat back down, I resolve to get what I want, kick flushing the toilet. I stride out of the restroom and back towards the bar, holding up the two dollar bills.
"Anybody got change for a dollar?" I say it in a loud, clear and confident voice that, for an instant, echoes through the room like an explosion.
They all look up reticently, unhappy to be budged from their private realities. The man at the computer looks up towards me, up towards the roof and back to his computer screen before I can register his movements. The old man barely lifts his thick eyebrows. The woman with the magazines gestures to the woman from outside who is now seated at the bar. The woman with the small and unfriendly eyes, looks back towards me and reluctantly rises from her seat as if her ass is the heaviest object she has ever been asked to lift.
While she opens the register I say, "Actually, I could use two dollars worth."
"Alright." She sounds disappointed and at the same time so resigned to disappointment that it hardly seems to matter. Her mouth barely opens as she speaks that single word. She takes the dollars from me and shells out a fistful of quarters. I accept them and look into her tiny squinting eyes with sincerity.
"Thank you… very much." I speak slowly and with great emphasis on each word. "I… sincerely… appreciate… it." She scarcely nods but her face seems a little softer, as if a tiny whiff of soft wind broke through the ossified barrier of her sour expression. I turn and push back through the red door into a blast of cool air which whips up my coat again, letting me know that the world outside still remains, the vast open world still surrounds the musty and perfect heart of the lonely bar, as much as its inhabitants would like to forget it, as much as they would like to be forever left alone.