The Danger of Being Me (24 page)

I held back the laughter, and held back the tears.  It was a strain.  Because the three of us knew better.  We knew that in the end, all of Ethan's yesterdays had conspired against him to light his way to dusty death.  And we were the fools once again.  Because whatever spectacular joke Ethan had been planning to spring on us this year, he had taken it with him across that Mythic Brink.

Maybe the real joke had always been that there had been no joke at all.  Only the unbearable anticipation of a punchline never meant to be delivered.  I saw the four of us sitting in a window booth at the Creekside Diner – saw it so clearly that it might as well have happened – talking about religion, and politics, and yesterday's season-opener between the Phillies and the Mets.  Philadelphia had lost the 14-inning marathon one to nothing.

I saw Ethan glance up to the analog clock tacked to the wall above the kitchen window as the day ticked down toward midnight.  Pointing up at it with ten seconds to spare, telling us in a low and awestruck voice to
wait, just wait, here it comes, can you feel it?  I know you can.  I can see the hairs standing up on your arms.
  The four of us staring up at that clock.  Watching the second hand march at its elemental cadence, a spoke on the wheel of time.

Midnight would come and go.  No one would mourn its passing.  And when we looked away from the clock ten seconds into the new day, we would find Ethan wearing a trickster's grin of infinite amusement. 
Gotcha
, he'd say, or maybe
you missed it
.  Maybe he wouldn't say anything at all.  Maybe he'd let us figure it out for ourselves.

But now we'd never know.  And as Phil pulled his rickety Newport into a sharply lit parking lot, I laughed, and felt one rogue tear squirt down my nose to my lip.  Because I was sure that Ethan would have enjoyed our ignorance immensely.  It was the perfect joke.

We emptied out of the car.  Phil had parked along the side of the Wenro County Credit Union, and we took turns pulling cash from the ATM at the front of the building.

I pulled my balance, then slipped my card back into the machine and withdrew the maximum on a whim, mostly because I had never held that much cash in my hand at once.  I folded the wad of twenties in half and stuffed them into my pocket.  Then I crossed the street behind Phil and Ben to a brick building with a narrow recessed doorway beside a broad plate-glass window.  A hand-painted sign above the doorway read TETRAPLEX.

A banner hung across the front window announcing the store's GRAND OPENING.  A flyer in the window of the door announced a POETRY READING at 8:00pm.

We stepped into a warm buffer of air that smelled of paper and coffee grounds.  It was a heartening smell.

I paused, breathed, scanned the interior of the building.  The place was narrow, and deceptively deep. A counter and a register stood against the left wall inside the door.  Another counter mirrored it against the opposite wall, scattered with the paraphernalia of a coffeehouse.

A sign on the counter read Free Coffee Tonight (Only!), and a blank blackboard hung above the station.  A dozen paces from the door, three shelves stretched away from the street to create four aisles down the length of the building.  A narrow lectern stood in front of the shelf to the far right, facing a section of seating at the front of the store.

More than a dozen teenagers milled among the tables in front of the coffee counter, and one of them yelled at us: "Phil!"  Helen sat at a table with Bellona Meyers and a kid I didn't know him.  Gale was there, and Dawn and Rose, and Caroline Davis and Lucas Archer.  Charlie Carmichael and Donovan Blake sat at a table with a couple of girls I didn't know: one with black hair in a bob to her chin, the other with sandy blonde hair in a bun that revealed an arc of nine stars tattooed up the left side of her neck.

Phil lead, Ben followed, and I crossed with them to the tables.  Amber sat at the table nearest the coffee counter, talking with Winnie and McCall and sipping from a brown cardboard cup.  Phil broke off to join Charlie's table, and Ben dropped into a seat across from Dawn.  I crossed to Amber's table, and even as I caught a sidelong glimpse of Gale watching me, I leaned in to press a kiss to Amber's cheek, catching the corner of her pastel lips.

"Congratulations," I told her, sitting across from her.

She flashed that beauteous smile, and it quickly spread into a euphoric grin.  "I
know!
"  Winnie laughed as Amber leaned forward onto the table.  "My admissions advisor called this morning, said I'll be getting my letter this week but he wanted to tell me right away!  I got in!"

Her enthusiasm was infectious, and I smiled.  I couldn't help myself. "I heard you blew them away." I glanced over Amber's shoulder, spotted Gale still watching me.  We regarded each other for a few seconds, and I was sure that Amber would turn to look behind her, but she didn't.

Then Gale turned back to Dawn, forgetting about me.

"I must have," Amber said with soft disbelief.  I had to laugh at that.  At the way that her own talents still seemed to fascinate her, as if she were still discovering the amazing aspects of herself.  I laughed, because I understood her amazement, because her talents still fascinated me.

"The first Creeker to get into Curtis," Winnie said.  She sounded a little starstruck.  McCall grinned, and Winnie told Amber.  "They'll probably give you a plaque."

"God, I hope not," Amber laughed, shaking her head, closing the topic.  She stood with her empty cardboard cup and looked to me.  "You want a coffee?  It's free."

"Tonight only," I said, standing, rounding the table.

Amber crossed toward the coffee counter.  "This is going to be Erin's job starting tomorrow," she called out, "but I taught her everything she knows.  You mind?"

The dark-haired girl turned in her seat, and I saw her shockingly green eyes from across the room.  "Go ahead," she answered, laughing.  "You're the damn expert."

Amber stuck out her tongue, then turned back to me, flashed that beauteous smile.  "What can I get you?"

I looked up at the blank blackboard.  "Whataya got?"

"Anything you like, any way you like it," she said.  "Espresso, cortado, cappuccino, frappé, Americano, cà phê sữa đá, macchiato, frappuccino, affogato —"

I blinked twice, then again.  Amber trailed off.

"One thing I've learned," she started over, glancing to Erin, "is that you can tell everything worth knowing about a person just from the way they take their coffee."

"I have no idea how I take my coffee," I said.

The answer seemed to delight her.  "Telling."

"What do you recommend?" I asked.

She watched my eyes for a moment, her lips wrinkling into a mercurial smirk.  She considered the matter of my coffee for longer than coffee ought to be considered, and then she made her decision.  "You strike me as a caramel flat white kind of guy."  I stared at her mouth, saw her tongue dart into the corner of her pastel lips.  She had annunciated all three syllables:
CAH-ruh-mell
.

I shook my head, feeling drunk.  "Why's that?"

She winked as she poured the espresso, tapped the side of her nose: "trick of the trade."  She pulled up with a third of the cup full, setting the carafe back on its warmer.  "It'll mean more when you discover the
why
for yourself."

"Doesn't it always?"  I said.

She turned to the counter against the wall, returned with two smaller urns, decanted the first.  Steamed milk rolled into the darkness of the coffee in abstract helixes until the cup was nearly filled.  Then she tilted the second urn, angling a thin flow of smooth caramel, and I heard all three of those delicious syllables again in my head.

"Tell me when to stop," she said, watching the cup.  She knew I staring at her.  Of course she did.  She was enjoying it.  And I enjoyed knowing that she liked being watched.

"Never," I said, staring into her caramel eyes.

Amber tried to bite back a laugh at that and failed.  She tipped up that third urn and returned it to the counter, leaving the caramel, milk and coffee to mix and mingle.  Steam drifted off the cup and made for higher ground, and that smell flooded me like a thrilling aphrodisiac.

I picked up the cup, sipped at it gingerly, scalded my lip and tongue.  I cringed as the liquid burned a trail down my throat and held the cup down, looking up.  "Hot."

Amber grinned at me.  "You get used to that."

I nodded, sipped again, scorched my throat.  Amber stepped out from behind the counter and we crossed back to her table.  "You can wait for it to cool, you know."

"I could," I agreed.  "But where's the fun in that?"

She laughed and turned back to Winnie.  I glanced across the room at the assembled teenagers, at kids I had known for years, and kids I had never met.  I didn't know any of them, not really, any more than I knew anything at all about myself, and I felt entirely comfortable with them.  They were extended family, not of blood, but of ink.  They were in-laws and outlaws, fourth and fifth cousins three times removed by the turn of a page.  We were descended from Whitman, and Ginsberg, and one or two from Poe, and we all spoke the same gibberish language.

Even if none of us understood it.

7.

By the time the poetry reading began, the crowd had swelled by another dozen.

Erin stepped to the lectern at a few minutes past eight, peering out over the group.  "Nice looking crowd."

The buzz of murmured conversation dulled and died.  Erin looked down at a page on the podium, then looked up.  She flashed a smile that reminded me Amber's and said, "Thanks everybody for coming out for the opening of the Tetraplex."  That earned a sprinkling of applause, and I watched the girl's shockingly green eyes.  "I'm Erin."

A handful of people responded: "Hi Erin."

"Oh, thanks.  No," she said, laughing, "those meetings are held at Transcendence Unitarian Universalist Church down on Worthing every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday."  She grinned.  "Not that I know about that sort of thing."  This received a knowing sort of laugh, and Erin laughed.  "I'll be your resident barista here on nights and weekends.  I'll also be opening tonight's reading with a piece that was recently published in
Strophe
."

She looked down to the page on the lectern, paused.  Then she recited a rambling free-verse elegy that she had written in a sitting area of the Prophecy General Hospital while she waited for her great-grandmother to die.  It was a poem of relief and release, of eternal rest well-earned, of a life sentence served in a prison of the human body.  Her great-grandmother had lived to the age of 109.

Erin's delivery earned her an energetic applause.  A bald man wearing frameless glasses and an unobtrusive silver stud in his left earlobe snapped his fingers with both hands.  She thanked the audience, then glanced down at a second page and asked for Geoffrey Hume.

The bald man with the silver stud stood, stepped to the lectern, introduced himself.  He received a chorus of "Hi Geoffrey," which was followed by a round of laughter.  It became routine for the evening, each new poet standing before the audience was greeted as an addict in recovery.  And that was fitting, because, in a sense, we all were.

Hume read a bucolic villanelle that had been published in his alma mater's
Gettysburg Review
before turning the podium back over to Erin.  Nine more poets read works ranging from sonnets to blank-verse to a cycle of haiku, ruminating on love, pride, hate, greed, justice, lust, charity, fury, courage, grief, and hope.  It was the litany of vice and virtue that had played for a thousand centuries, strutting and fretting their hours upon a stage of human history.

And as ten o'clock neared, an elderly woman finished delivering a poem about losing her virginity.  Erin stepped back to the lectern, glanced at her page, nodded.  "Looks like everyone who signed up has read.  Unless someone else wants to read a piece or anyone wants to go again, , I was thinking about rounding out the evening with —"

She broke off her sentence as she looked at me.  I had stood.  It wasn't something that I had decided to do, but it happened anyway.  Erin's shocking green eyes flashed, and she grinned.  Her smile really did look like Amber's as she said, "We have another fearless lyricist?"

"I don't know about fearless," I said.  I heard laughter.  It all sounded very far away.  I wove between the clustered tables and teenagers, passed by friends and strangers and reached the podium wondering what I was doing.  Erin stepped aside, gesturing me in.  "Give `em your best."

I looked at her shocking green eyes, and nodded.  Then I stepped to the lectern and considered.  "My best."

I had written more than five dozen poems in my short career. Some were good. A few were great. But as I looked from one face to the next across a small bookstore crowd, every word of every one of them went scattering across the desolate wilderness of my mind like the dead leaves.  In that moment, there were no words.  I stood in front of two dozen friends and strangers, desperate for anything to tell them, and all I knew then was that I knew nothing.

I saw Amber, saw the look of compassion and fear in her caramel eyes. And I saw something else, something out of the dark recesses of my memory.  It was an image I had seen that morning and would never, ever forget.

I leaned over the podium, gripping its sides.  Hot fury flashed like heat-lightning, and I spoke to be heard.  "Four rows back and eight rows in is an empty fuckin chair."

The room went silent like someone had hit the mute button.  Maybe it had been silent, but now I felt the dark pulse of that silence, smelled its breath, looked into the cavern of its soul as it looked back into me.  It was silence like peace.  Silence like rest.  Silence like death.

"I didn't see it yesterday," I went on, remembering, "because it wasn't there.  Its raging orange plastic surface violates my eyes with barren purgatory glee—" I paused, briefly, and found what I needed as I continued "—with terrible surprise.  This madness shouldn't happen here, to such a brilliant mind," I said, gripping the lectern.  "`Cause now he'll never get to live the life that he designed."