l i f e
The Thin Air Above
contributions
christopher@30seconds.org
Updike is his inner mass, beyond his boyish grin that lends itself more toward carnivals and naiveté in the face of the obscene. For the moment, at least, it is his source of study. His which he has found alone. Forgotten is the professor with his impossible eyes of amber which preserve within the fossilized sap all the omnipresent knowledge the student could ever hope to possess. Since he can't find it within himself to speak to the man (out of fear) he silently takes the professor's recommendations while dumbly looking into the breadth of knowledge, up the ridge of a particularly pointed nose, into the eyes of polished yellow sand. The professor returns the stare (feeling the fear, knowing it to be intimidation) and waits for the student to realize barstools are shared by everyone, and it is only a subtle line upon which they both tread and that the boundaries betray.
The student hasn't really the patience for Updike and quickly focuses his attention on the girl.
The girl has no name to the student. Truthfully, he likes it that way for as soon as names enter, gone is the total mystery; and, the world of the physically tangible begins to encircle the part of the mind where once there was fantasy.
She works in the cafe. To him she's a part of it. He has never been there when she isn't pouring coffee, resetting the cheap Formica tables or in the symbol of a cafe at rest, reading a book. He doesn't know what she reads but he feels from the posture she carries and the weight behind her stride, she too knows of the Archangel. He quickly pushes the thought from his mind; not wishing to have the two worlds of academics and fantasy come crashing together, each pressing strongly on the other, growing large with their equal actions and reactions until he, the student, ceases to exist, excluded from this new world by his own unimportance.
He leans against a pine and breaks the few pieces of bark he holds. He studies their grain and state of decomposition until he regains control. The pounding in his head slows and the world comes back into focus. He's wiping his hands on his jeans when he notices the toy.
A small metal airplane wing sticking up from the earth like the shells and bodies near Verdun. He reaches down, gingerly pushing with his index finger, half expecting it to disappear, and then before it has a chance, he pulls it free, quickly shaking off the dirt.
The student is now a boy, turning the small airplane over and over in his hands. His smile widens when he remembers dog-fights high above the ground and fades slightly at the image of crashes and the first small chips of paint flaking away. The boy holds every boy's past. He blows on every boy's impossibly intact propeller and flashes in his mind all theaters of time from the Wright Brothers' personable and romantic morning upon Kill Devil's Hill, a morning smelling of gasoline and oil, the puttering of the two-stroke engines roaring like Dragons against the wind, to the flak-filled skies over Europe where tens of thousands of boys died in their dreams of aluminum and wood, to the sun-filled days of streamers trailing behind silhouettes of aircraft that trigger the memory of something beautiful, but no boy can properly remember what. Then one day when they are not boys anymore, but students, they know. The fugues of Bach may remain a mystery. The wills and seemingly empty desires of women will agitate, but flight they will know. They will find it in the weight of those long streamers, and in the defiance of the plane to succumb to the advertisement's need to act on gravity and pull it from its natural element into the unnatural ground where it will be buried like the bodies and shells at Verdun. It is every boy's dream and every student's duty to understand flight. That it is possible to break free, that one can stay aloft.
The student enters the cafe slowly, trying not to jingle the copper bells hanging from the door. To announce his presence could be disturbing a scene already in progress, like an actor who struts confidently on stage to the wrong cue. Instead he strides soundlessly to the last barstool farthest away from the bathrooms but closest to the cigarette machine. The cafe is busy and no one notices his entrance, not even the girl. He opens a book and pretends to study its pages underlining passages at random and occasionally nodding his head as if in agreement with the unseen author. All the while, he sneaks glances at the legs of the girl, the hands of the girl, the round curving of the girl's breasts.
She wears a rosary around her neck. Beads purple like the ocean at night, stamped bronze catching the light and reflecting the five elements closest to God. Her naturally olive skin shines like a serpent's, though there is no poison in her speech. Her calves are as dark and smooth as the arms of a fine antique chair. She lacks the age that defines maturity but her green eyes cut like the professors'; though, in their warmth they seem to say, "I don't mean to do this."
She leans on the counter, almost whispering to another customer, occasionally laughing, apparently indifferent to her surroundings. The student has never seen the stranger at the bar before. He wears wire-rimmed glasses, is of medium build and has curly black hair. His legs are short and in the absence of a bar rail, they hang limply off the sides of the stool. It is a comic physical feature that, to the student, removes a certain amount of threat. The stranger has no book, he studies the girl openly, and she him. His onyx eyes seem terribly out of place, set in his pale sockets and equally pale and pockmarked skin. His small goatee only exaggerates his unusually large Adams apple that moves up and down in an endless staccato vibration supplying the source of the girl's laughter.
He would be handsome on a street corner at night under the relative safety of mercury vapor lights and the company of friends. Like a bat that should be sleeping, he seems out of place in the day. Out of place on the red barstool, rays of sum streaming through the plate glass onto his back. Out of place with the girl who has forever been a part of the daylight, of sweat, and the fringes of reality and dream in an afternoon nap. Her dresses would be awkward at night, cold, their intricate prints and patterns lost to the dark, and with them the mystery and depth that make her beautiful.
The student knows this about both of them. He searches his pockets for change to buy cigarettes and provide an excuse to move away, but comes up short. He tosses the change on the counter and digs deeper coming up with a dollar just as the girl (hearing the coins rattle) strolls over and without really looking at him exchanges paper for silver, rings the register shut, and goes back to her conversation. In about the same amount of time, the student closes his book and leaves without buying anything.
Behind him the copper bells ring against the glass and a warm sheet of wind from outside runs the length of the counter. On one end are the bathrooms, on the other a cigarette machine. In the middle two lovers talk away an afternoon, laughing at each other's mutual happiness. One of them plays with a set of the salt and pepper shakers that run all the way down the counter in front of every stool. Next to the last pair is a toy metal airplane, looking horribly small against its surroundings, its flaking paint dull in the false light of the cafe.
goodnight 1.10.98
