The Woman At Front Two

Image of burned-out matches.

The woman at table Front Two does not look happy.

This seems wildly unfair, given that she is drop-dead gorgeous and reeks of money. I am at a stage in my life where I’m sure having a hot body and a little extra cash would solve all my problems, with some self-esteem left over to share with friends and acquaintances. The woman in the caramel-colored suit and white silk blouse should be lighting up that end of the room; instead, she’s generating her own gravity, pulling the light down into herself and smothering it.

Maybe she just needs a nice slice of cheesecake.

“More coffee?”

“Please.”

I top up her cup and stand back. “Anything else I can do for you?”

She takes a sip. I admire her bracelet, a chunky thing made of grayish-blue stones the color of a fresh bruise. She looks up at me, and I see that her eyes are the same color.

“I think that’s highly unlikely, don’t you?” she says.

I make a stupid sort of bow/nod gesture and move away. The man at Back Three is trying to get my attention, holding up his coffee cup like he’s the Statue of Liberty lighting the way for the huddled masses to get their morning dose of Java—but I’m not in the mood for his shit right now.

“Dr. Kimmelman is waving at you,” Katie says. I join her behind the counter, putting thirty inches of Formica between me and the unhappy woman in the thousand-dollar suit.

“I know. Can you take care of him for me? I need a moment.”

Katie huffs and shakes her head, but she takes the coffeepot from my hand and strolls out to do my job for me with a smile.

Table Front Two is in the bay window next to the front door, overlooking the southbound traffic rushing from downtown to the almost-ritzy residential neighborhoods just over the hill. The unhappy woman sits there with her elbows on the faux-marble tabletop, staring out at the view with those smudgy, bruise-blue eyes. I wonder what she’s seeing. Probably not the cars or the tire company across the road.

“Is this going to be one of your loopy days?” Katie asks me as she puts the coffeepot back on the warmer.

The boys at Goodyear roll tires across the parking lot or stand around chatting while other people’s cars ride up and down on the racks. Occasionally, a mechanic does something that makes a clang we can hear all the way over to our side of the road.

“I’m fine,” I say. I may be lying. I’m not sure.

The woman at Front Two stands up and brushes down her skirt and adjusts the cuffs of her jacket. She pokes around inside her handbag, a little boxy thing the same color as her jacket and skirt, finally extracting a couple of crumpled bills and some change. She drops everything on the table without even looking at it, then walks out the door and disappears up the sidewalk.

“I’m fine,” I say again. If I say it a third time, will that make it true?

The money the woman left on the table comes to just enough to pay for her coffee and provide an adequate, although less than generous, tip.

Among the nickels and dimes, I find an old-fashioned matchbook. I pick it up and look at it. You never see matchbooks anymore. After the Collapse, smoking enjoyed a brief resurgence, but supply-chain and distribution problems hit what my one-time macroeconomics professor liked to call “sin-dustries” particularly hard. These days, nobody under the age of sixty smokes in any serious way, and matchbooks are collector’s items.

Dr. Kimmelman taps his cup on Table Back Three, away there in the shadows, and I pocket the change and the matchbook and hurry off to feed his insatiable need for attention.

The rest of the shift is uneventful, aside from old Mx. Brahms putting her hand in my pocket as I’m helping her out of her chair. She tries this every chance she gets, so it’s not really an event, but another customer happens to see her and lets out a guffaw that rattles coffee mugs all over the diner. Mx. Brahms is an ancient widow in perpetual black—her husband died thirty years ago—and she drives a rebuilt pre-Collapse sedan with a dried funeral wreath in the back window. She acts demented, but she’s really sharp as a tack, just bored. She grins at the guy who is laughing and gives my parts a squeeze before she takes her hand back out of my pocket.

At three-thirty, I put on my jacket, make a joke about Katie’s puffy coat—something about blue marshmallows—and clock out.

Katie Mayo is a single mom who lives in a Nazarene enclave out in the suburbs somewhere, huddled with her three-year-old daughter in an unheated two-room apartment over her mother’s garage. Said mother, Violet, believes that only a whore walks out on a husband, no matter who or what he turns out to be, and she treats Katie accordingly. She also blames Katie for the breakup of her own marriage, twenty years ago, when her husband took off one weekend and never came back. Katie gets up every morning, delivers her daughter to a neighbor’s house for safekeeping, and then rides the bus for an hour to dispense coffee and corned beef to businessmen at Gabetta’s Diner. Unlike me, she doesn’t have a well-to-do father out in Bluff Park or an expensive MBA from a respectable university. Life stomps on Katie Mayo again and again, not out of malice but merely from habit, like a bored child kicking the back of the car seat. Also unlike me, when the going gets tough, Katie smiles and dusts herself off and does her job and lives her life, unfailingly competent, pleasant, and uncomplaining.

We get along well at work, but we aren’t really close. Her goodness befuddles me.

I walk up the hill, admiring the way the pigeons navigate the awkward little gusts of wind bouncing around the landscape. They’re not graceful or beautiful, but they always end up exactly where they want to be, in spite of the turbulence between here and there.

I’m still young—well, youngish, if you figure the average life expectancy is about seventy. I still have time to fix things. To grow up. My father has a dry-erase board on the refrigerator at his place that tracks my “Total Days of Being a Sensible Adult.” The number hasn’t moved since I finished college. Pouring coffee at a diner does not qualify as adulting in my father’s view of things. Somebody has to pour the coffee, he’s willing to concede; he just doesn’t think it should be me.

I’ll grow up tomorrow, Dad. Promise.

There’s a bus stop at the top of the hill. I don’t plan to catch the bus, but the bench is a convenient place to sit for a moment under the cold, milk-white sky and think about the unhappy woman.

I dig the matchbook out of my pocket and look at it. Inside, five matches are just stumps and five remain. The cover is dark gray, matte-textured. On the front, a design consisting of two overlapping circles fills the space; the circles are colored a pale blue except at the overlap, which is white. On the back, the letters OT are embossed in silver, set in a conservative, old-fashioned serif typeface. I bring the matchbook up to my nose and sniff it. In addition to the sulfur of the match heads, there’s a hint of jasmine or gardenia—some tropical flower that probably only blooms in moonlight, within the sound of the surf.

If this were a work of fiction, the unhappy woman would have written her phone number inside the matchbook, but it isn’t—as far as I know, anyway—and she didn’t. I wonder about the logo. What does OT stand for? OrganicTurnips? OperationalTrauma? OvereagerTelekinetics?

I tear off one of the matches and light it, and I guess a spark flies off and hits my wrist because I feel a kind of electric sting, like someone touching me after scuffing their shoes on the carpet.

An old man is sitting at the other end of the bench. He wasn’t there when I sat down. He isn’t paying any attention to me; he’s just sitting, staring off into space, maybe reading the sale prices posted in the plate glass windows of the Piggly Wiggly across the street. (Chicken thighs are cheap this week, and red onions are an absolute steal.)

The breeze blows out the match, and I drop it.

The old man sits with his hands cupped over the head of a cane, a polished black one with a steel cap on the end and a silver knob on top. He looks like someone who was important once but got over it. His hands are bony and strong-looking. He has a neat white beard, and his clothes have that plain, spartan look you only see in really high-class men’s haberdashery. His profile is jagged and hard, a rock formation that has collapsed, leaving sharp edges and raw textures exposed to the sun and air.

The bus pulls in, and the old man climbs to his feet, pushing down against the top of his cane for leverage. He gets to the top step and pauses, turning back to look right at me.

“Orbis Tertius,” he says, speaking slowly and clearly. His eyes are set so deep into his skull that I can’t make out what color they are.

The door folds shut, and I see him work his way back to a seat and drop into it. The bus pulls away with a grumble and a snort.

Orbis Tertius.

If I need to know something, I go downtown.

My father hearkens back to a day when all of human knowledge could be accessed with a few keystrokes, back before the Collapse turned cyberspace into a suppurating wound. I never knew that time. I was born just as civilization was coming out of its once-in-a-millennium grand mal seizure, still changing its underwear and wiping off its chin. Cell phones and the World Wide Web are interesting stories to me, nothing more, like sabre-toothed tigers, or Superman, or Florida. Things that may or may not have actually existed Once Upon a Time.

“Really, Dad? You carried a phone around with you? In your pocket? What a life that must have been.”

My world is a simpler place. If you want to find out about something, you go to your local branch of the Library. If you want to know something really obscure, possibly dangerous, you go all the way to the Main Library downtown. Orbis Tertius sounds like something you don’t want your parents or your therapist to know you’re interested in. My Eve was wearing a tailored suit instead of a fig leaf, but the apple from the Tree of Knowledge is just as tempting for all that.

The library welcomes me with warm air and a smell of dry rot and inadequate plumbing. It’s like being hugged by your great-grandmother, comforting and a little disgusting at the same time.

Orbis Tertius, “Third Sphere.” Every reference leads back to the same place: a work of fiction from more than a century ago. The logo, at least, checks out: the description of the symbol in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” sounds a lot like what I’ve got on my matchbook.

Meaning what? Was the woman at Front Two familiar with mid-twentieth-century Argentine short-story writers? Her sorrow didn’t seem existential. If I had to guess, I’d say she had found out that her husband was cheating on her or that her Borzoi had heartworm. Something personal, visceral. Was the logo just a coincidence? Was the old man at the bus stop really talking to me? Am I weaving a big crazy blanket out of moonbeams and mistaken impressions?

Maybe. Probably. Yes, no, but what if?

I have the matchbook in my hand, and I’m tapping it on the massive wooden reading room table, turning it forty-five degrees, tapping it again. Corner. Flat side. Corner. Flat side.

Turn and tap.

There are a few people at the other tables, but my notebook and my little pile of books have one big table all to themselves, with only me to disturb their repose. My chair is one of four at the table. Three are empty, purposeless; one has my ass in it. There’s a meaningful occupation for you: keeping my butt off the floor. Somebody has to do it, Dad.

Turn and tap. Turn and tap.

Fiction about another world, where the universe operates according to different principles. Another world so close to ours that the only thing separating the two is a trick of perception.

I’m losing myself in all this nonsense. I like the feeling. I climb out of my chair, excusing myself. The books wave me away, all benevolence.

I go into the bathroom and look at my face in the mirror. I light another match.

Zing. The shock again.

Should I make a wish?

“Astonish me,” the person in the mirror says. I run water over the match and throw it into the wastebasket.

When I get back out to the reading room, there’s a man standing at my table. He is looking down at the assortment of books I’ve taken from the shelves. He’s younger than I am, absurdly pretty, with curly blond hair and a wide mouth with sculpted lips. His clingy gray pullover displays his chest to advantage. He raises his eyes and sees me coming out of the corridor where the bathrooms are, and he nods once. By the time I get to the table, he’s gone. Somebody beautiful and mysterious was standing right here a moment ago. Now, there’s just me. The chairs are deeply disappointed.

I collect my things and go to the desk.

“This one’s yours, Mx. Merritt.” The librarian stacks most of the books on a cart to be re-shelved, but she pushes one across the counter toward me. “It’s not a library book.”

“Oh. How odd.”

The librarian is a woman of about fifty-five, the age my mother would have been had she survived the bad years immediately after the Collapse. Like Katie, she seems terribly good, too good for me to argue with. Her calm kindness would crush me like a bug if I pushed her too far. She’s the librarian, and I’m somebody who works five days a week at Gabetta’s, pouring coffee and smiling without wanting to.

“I must have brought it from home without noticing,”

The librarian nods politely. “I’m sure that’s what happened,” she says, and her saying it like that makes it the truth.

The book has four hundred and ten pages. How do I know this? Because I spent over an hour after supper sitting at my kitchen table counting them, starting over when I zoned out somewhere in the upper two hundreds. The paper is creamy, smooth. Every page is completely blank.

The cover of the book is charcoal-gray fabric glued over boards. The fabric is pale at the corners and along the edges, where it has roughened and frayed with use. The double circle occupies the exact center of the front cover, blue and white. At the top of the spine, the letters XI have been embossed in silver. I assume this is the Roman numeral eleven, although I could be wrong. At the bottom of the spine, small and dignified, are the letters OT.

Orbis Tertius? Why not. Let’s go with that.

In the morning, I leave the book where it is and head for the diner half an hour early. I stop in at the bank to deposit the last few days’ tips. The teller is only half awake. He pushes a few coins back through the little window.

“Can’t take these. They’re Old Euros.”

He picks up one coin, something I had assumed was a quarter.

“I can’t take this either,” he says, handing it to me. When his fingertip touches my palm, I receive a faint electric shock. “I have no idea what it is. Maybe it’s not even money at all. Might be a transit token from somewhere. Good for a subway ride in Shanghai or Kuala Lumpur.” Taking a closer look, I can see that the coin is bluer, shinier than a quarter, and it has a narrow bronze rim. Instead of George Washington’s noble jowl, there’s a map, just borders and seacoasts, no text. The back displays an old-fashioned compass rose: North, South, East, and West. A four-pointed star superimposed on a circle marked off in degrees.

I thank the teller and pocket the rejects.

Dr. Kimmelman is settling in just as I arrive at the diner. Scuttlebutt tells me that Kimmelman is chairman of the psychology department at the University; personal experience tells me that he doesn’t do fuck all at the University. He spends five hours a day sitting at one of our back tables reading magazines and guzzling endless refills of coffee. He never tips.

Katie hasn’t appeared yet when I clock in, but I see her puffy coat up the street, headed this way, so I clock her in, too. It’s very much against the rules, but I’m feeling adventurous.

“Sorry I’m late,” she says as she shucks her coat and pulls on the short white jacket that we all have to wear. “Mandy was crabby as all get-out this morning. I almost missed the bus, then there was a traffic problem over on Telegraph.”

She’s flustered, which is unusual for her, and I am angry, angry at her daughter for being difficult, angry at the traffic on Telegraph. I’m angry that Katie, who deserves to have things go right at least sometimes, has to put up with all these aggravations.

“I’ve got it under control. Take a few minutes to catch your breath.”

Katie looks startled, and I realize that my being decent and helpful comes as a surprise to her. Upon consideration, it surprises me, too.

A quartet of doctors arrives, attached to the hospital’s prestigious cancer research institute. All four are newly minted, still awed by their professional success. Occasionally, they forget that they are who they are and that I am who I am, and on those occasions, they smile and ask how my day is going as I pour coffee and hand out cinnamon buns.

The morning passes smoothly. The lunch rush is hectic but painless. The people who come in for lunch want to get in, get fed, and get out, with a minimum of fuss. Since that’s what we want, too, everybody gets along.

After lunch is over, I clock out for half an hour to grab something to eat. The kitchen makes me a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich, and I take it out onto the loading dock.

Amin is there, on a smoke break. Amin is seventy or thereabouts, constructed entirely out of driftwood, all traces of flesh and blood long since eroded away in the currents of time. He was born in a country that no longer exists, a member of a culture whose thousands of years of history ended in a single week thirty years ago. Once Upon a Time, he was a copyright attorney, living in a small but pleasant apartment overlooking a park where his three kids played soccer with other kids from the neighborhood on the weekends. Now, the apartment is rubble, the park is a crater, and his wife and two of his children sleep in the ground in a place he is not permitted ever to visit. His third child, the youngest, was in the park when the bombs fell. All that remains of her is a photograph Amin carries in his wallet, wrapped in plastic, faded to the point that it might as well be a picture of Abraham Lincoln or maybe a loaf of bread. This man has washed dishes at Gabatta’s for almost twenty years.

Amin can converse fluently in any of five languages but chooses not to. He pats his pockets, an unlit cigarette bouncing on his lip.

“I have matches,” I say.

He grunts and turns to face me, his cigarette accusing me of something. I take out my matchbook and light a match. Amin and I both reach to shield the flame, and our hands connect, his hand cupped for a heartbeat within mine, like lovers sleeping spoons. I feel an electric shock in my palm, where his knuckles press against my flesh for that one instant.

Amin nods his thanks, and I shake out the match and toss it away.

“All this,” he says, blowing smoke off to the side. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

That sentence is probably the most I’ve ever heard Amin say in all the years we’ve worked together. I feel off-balance, almost frightened.

“All what?” I ask.

He thrusts out his chin and waves his cigarette to indicate the little courtyard, the dumpster, the mop bucket and mop at the foot of the loading dock steps, the fence, the funeral home on the other side of the fence, the plains on the other side of the funeral home, the ocean beyond the plains, the desert, the olive trees, the place where his children used to play, the place where two of them lie sleeping next to their mother; all that, away, away, gone, gone, gone. The smoke of his gesture hangs for a moment, then dissipates.

“We live in the world we choose,” he says. He speaks a cultivated British English with an accent full of sandpaper consonants and vowels that bubble out from deep in his throat. “Our perceptions shape the universe, just as the universe shapes our perceptions,” he says.

He takes a drag off his cigarette, exhales the smoke slowly, a reverse waterfall coming out of his mouth and rising past his eyes.

“We humans, together, have created all this. There is no God, no Demiurge that we can blame. We live in a world built on fear, on terror, because that is what we want. When we inflict terror on others, we feel strong. When our neighbor suffers terror, we feel virtuous because he is the one suffering, not us. We believe in our hearts that we are spared because we are better than he is. It is a seductive philosophy.”

He smokes, and I stare, my sandwich forgotten.

“We have made this world, all of us together. We could make another, but we are afraid. We are afraid to live without the fear. The bloody, clinging embrace of our foul offspring.”

Amin finishes his cigarette, flicks the butt out into the courtyard. He spits onto the pavement at my feet, not a gesture of disrespect but merely something unpleasant caught on his tongue. He nods in my direction and goes back inside.

On Friday, I meet someone in a bar after work, and we come back to my place and have sex. The sex is exciting only because it is something rare in my life, something I’ve given up without realizing it, like eating in nice restaurants or separating the lights from the darks at the laundry. Afterward, we agree to do it again in a few days, knowing that we won’t.

I sit at the kitchen table, naked and empty, and look at the mysterious book. Orbis Tertius, Number Eleven. I leaf through it idly, reading my life story in its 410 blank pages, then I open it to the center and let it lie that way while I light a match. I hold up one page and bring the flame to the corner. The paper shrinks, trying to escape, but I hold it in place. It catches fire and burns with a smoky blue flame that smells of my father’s hair after he has been burning sycamore leaves at the end of the driveway.

The flame incinerates only a small section of the page, and then it burns out.

I begin to cry.

To the best of my recollection, I haven’t shed a tear since I was very small. Now, I discover that the tears have been accumulating all this time, fermenting, crystallizing. Oil becomes asphalt, seawater becomes coral, rain becomes trees. My tears have become glass. I’m weeping broken glass, and my belly clenches and heaves as though I were about to give birth to something monstrous. I slowly collapse out of my chair and onto the cold linoleum, clutching at myself, my knees to my chest, the sobs stretching my face into bizarre shapes as they force their way out.

A few hours later, I wake up cold and bruised. According to the clock over the stove, it’s four o’clock in the morning.

Actually, that clock is slow. It’s four-ten.

I have one match left.

Katie is neither attractive nor unattractive. She’s just Katie. She could be pretty with some effort, or she could be ugly with the same amount of effort. Katie Mayo chooses to do neither. She has more important things to think about.

“I’ve given my two weeks’ notice,” she tells me one morning during a lull.

“You’re kidding.” My face feels as if I’ve just bent down to get something out of the chest freezer in the back.

“Nope.” Katie’s excited, but she’s trying to be nonchalant. I admire both her excitement and her efforts to hide it. “That agency I applied with. They found me a job. The Berkeley Institute.”

“What’s the Barkley Institute?”

“Berkeley.” She spells it. “It’s like the Christian Science Reading Room. They have a library and a meeting hall. Members give lectures.”

“It’s religious?” Katie was born and raised among the Nazarenes, which I believe is something to do with religion, but she and I have never talked about that.

“Not so much religious as philosophical, as I understand it,” she says. We wash the coffeepots, then we set up filters and grounds. I press the red switch, and we stand back, side by side. When the coffee starts to flow, we watch the carafes fill as though it were something new, spellbinding.

“Is it a good job?”

“A little more money, regular hours, some health benefits. The Institute is closer to my apartment, too. Less of a commute.”

The Institute. Katie will be working at a place that calls itself The Institute in a couple of weeks, while I’ll still be pouring coffee all day for Dr. Kimmelman.

“What will you do there?”

“Receptionist, mostly, but also some office work. Typing and filing and some bookkeeping. Stuff like that.”

Katie is a stranger to me. A person with skills. A person with choices. She has, with this one step, traveled to a different place, a new world, a place that doesn’t have me in it.

We live in the world we choose, Amin said.

“I’m glad,” I say. I mean that, and I don’t, at the same time. I’m glad something is going right for Katie, but I’m also unhappy that a change is looming. My inertia is easier to overlook when it’s shared by the people around me.

A young woman comes in and sits at one of the two-tops. She runs her hand over the table and places a stack of typewritten pages squarely in the middle.

“Good morning. Would you like to see a menu?”

She’s about my age, freckled, with straight, shoulder-length blonde hair cut in bangs across her forehead. She smiles up at me.

“Not just yet, thank you. Some tea?”

Her voice is crisp and new. She might have only taken it out of the packaging yesterday, and it still has bits of tape stuck to it. I’m sure that if I got close enough to her mouth while she’s speaking, I would be able to detect the bright, plasticky, new-thing smell. I bring her a pot of hot water and a cup and a little ceramic tray containing a selection of teabags.

“The pot is hot,” I warn her, smiling.

She smiles back, and I’m fairly certain I’m in love.

Dr. Kimmelman makes a rude noise back there in his corner, and I bring him the coffeepot, thinking how pleasant it would be to stab him in the eye with a fork.

After work, I walk up the hill and sit down at the bus stop. There’s no one else there. I’ve ridden the bus a few times. I own a car, but I rarely drive it. Where would I go? What would I do when I got there? I have my book of blank pages in my lap. I took it to the diner this morning, intending to show it to Katie, but her news flustered me, and I forgot.

I sit upright on the metal bench, looking alert, as if I had somewhere important to be, friends to meet, lovers to embrace. My deception is successful: a blue and white city bus is lured in, and the door pops open. The driver waits exactly 4.10 seconds, then he closes the door, and the bus rolls away.

We live in the world we choose.

I have one match left.

We have made this world, all of us together. We could make another, but we are afraid.

I have one match left.

We are afraid to live without the fear.

I have one match left, and I light it carefully, feeling the spark in my fingertips. I hold the corner of the matchbook in the flame, and it burns cheerfully. When I drop it at my feet, the last embers quickly become ash and vanish on the breeze. My fear clutches at me like a desperate child. No, please! Please don’t leave me!

A bus pulls in, and the door opens. This is not a blue and white city bus, but a sleeker, more austere bus, charcoal-gray and sage-green. The driver looks at me. I climb the three steps and the coin box confuses me for a moment.

“Do you have a token?” the driver asks. He’s used to confused people and isn’t terribly interested in why they’re confused.

I fish around in my pocket and bring out the strange coin. I drop it in the slot, and the turnstile clicks.

“Where are you headed?” the driver asks.

“I don’t know.”

He nods. I guess this is a popular destination. Over the windshield, a display alternates between “Terminal” and “OT.”

I pass through the turnstile and take a seat.

There are half a dozen other passengers, reading the newspaper, dozing, looking out the window.

The door closes, and the bus moves smoothly out into traffic.

# # #

2 thoughts on “The Woman At Front Two

  1. Hi Dave, I’m sure I won’t articulate this very well but I used to be an avid reader. One day for some reason nothing could hold my attention any longer. I had a stack of unread books that I wanted to read but just couldn’t focus. Your short story had me engaged every second. I loved it! All I can think is that I strongly relate to anything one step above or below reality. It reminds me of the fiction I always read in the New Yorker. The ending left me hanging. I hope there’s more. Thanks!

    1. Thanks! I’m working on a novel that extends some of the ideas from this story — the strange book, the other world overlapping our own, the idea that our reality is not objective, but a kind of passive consensus, etc. I’m glad you enjoyed it!

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