in her hands, now loosed, now falling around her shoulders. Still she continued to move, and then reached down, a hand on each side of her fly, then peeling off, down, down--she had it down to her knees, and bent, her poise faltering just a little as she tried to maintain balance and keep the flesh of her stomach smooth as her body curved, fell to a position horizontal to the viewer, her eyes, though, never leaving for a moment mine. The pants were off and delicately discarded, and the motion began again, and still the voice of that female vocalist mewed and trilled, singing what I and what the girl in front of me so dearly wanted, so badly--and here were the straps of her brassiere, held by finger tips, and here the shoulders, and here the frozen frame and an offer to subscribe for 19.95 a month for full and unmetered access. It didn’t matter. I had come, achingly and emotionally, long before, when she had given her hair an extra little swing in conjunction with an especially sweet inflection in the song. I sat now and stared, unbelieving of how I had gotten here.
“For here or to go?” She asked.
“For here,” I said, and she left off the lid to my styrofoam cup.
Cash only and no receipt, unsmiling, hairnet, and the tiniest fleck of cigarette ash on the lip of my cup. The counter is surrounded by stools that have been hijacked from a bar and dressed up in pleather circus costumes, sitting and gleaming on too-wide posts, upholstered in red and blue. There is bunting in the windows and there are pictures of sad clowns on the wall. These thrift-store oils have been here since 1975--I can tell by the fading and the way these walls have accepted the frames as extensions of themselves, in the way that a tree will absorb a nail driven into it senselessly.
The coffee is burnt and bitter and the doughnut is impossibly light and fluffy.
Dancers exit from the strip club next to us and I see through the front windows that they all enter a single car. The old woman begins to sing from a back room and I wonder if she has forgotten that I am here. Eventually she emerges pushing a cart taller than she, trays of doughnuts one above the next, almost to the ceiling. She puts them in the glass display case at the front and I ask,
“You make your own doughnuts?”
“Huh?”
“You make your own doughnuts?”
“Oh yeah,” she says, scrunching up her face and nodding in small oscillations.
“Not everyone does.” I say, by way of explanation.
“That’s the truth,” she says, and disappears into the back.
She emerges a few moments later.
“We actually supply the doughnuts for a lot of places around here. The coffee shops, businesses, the college.”
“Huh.”
“Would you like more coffee?” She asks.
“I’m good,” I say.
Two men walk in, talking loudly.
“—what the market doesn’t yet have is a truly American Chinese fortune cookie—one reflecting real American tastes and proclivities--”
“I’m with you one-hundred-percent, but I think what we can really boil that down to mean here is that we need a cookie that addresses the consumer directly—an individualized cookie--”
“’A Fortune Cookie Made for You!’”
“Exactly!”
They bite eagerly into doughnuts and continue talking about market shares and infrastructure costs. I take another sip of bitter coffee.
There is a poet who stands outside of bars offering his poetry to passersby. A friend at Kinko's gave him a numerical passkey to the copier, and his stack of hand-written sheets have been facsimiled into a kind of digital leprosy, spotty with reproduction and ink blots. He writes in the cursive they taught in southern schools in 1967, a loopyness unlined and unsmoothed and falling across the page and careful. He gives these poems away and will read them on request. He doesn't drink and he rises at three in the morning. He claims there is inspiration in the quiet post-bar-closing-time, that dawn in empty streets is good for his lines, but I suspect it is the cough and cancer in his lungs that prompts him to keep these hours. I’ve caught him unaware, checking his appearance in the cardboard-backed glass of an abandoned business. He prides himself on the darkness of his blue jeans, on the cleanliness of his long white straight hair. He drinks Pepsi and rises at three in the morning. When I hug him I feel his bones.
The poster shows a retro television, a hamburger on its screen and a halo hovering between its antennae. I go in.At the bar a girl wearing a tee shirt with something clever across the front looks directly at me and asks.
“Do you know the PBR game?” She says. “Every cap has a card symbol--like, the seven of diamonds--on the underside. If you can guess it your beer’s free.”
The music was so loud I ask her to repeat.
“Three of clubs,” I say.
She twists off the cap and showed me the seven of diamonds underneath.
I look closer at her chest and cannot tell if what's written there is a joke or an advertising slogan for some kind of medication. A woman behind me is speaking now.
“I’m, um… I forgot what it is I usually order here…”
I turn around and see her squinting at the beer taps.
“Oh! An IPA. That’s it!”
“I’ll have a Diet Coke,” her husband says.
“Leave it open or close it?” The girl asks.
“Um… go ahead and close it up!” The husband says, in an unreasonably affable tone. At a look from his wife he calls back,
“Oh, never mind! Leave it open!”
The wife smiles playfully and looks at me.
Things are better at the front. You can always tell which girl in the crowd is dating the singer. She always stands close to the stage, dancing, a slow swaying in which her head bobs and hands glide, over hips, palms open and fingers splayed, every smooth thing about it a nod to the shattering blows of music. The music increased in volume until I was unsure if it was the pounding of the drums or dancing of the girl in front of me that caused the felt vibration in my genitals. On the porch, two men:
“So I says, so--listen--something simple, see? Something really, real simple. A couple sandwiches, just your basic--yeah, turkey, beef, maybe we throw in a vegetarian, pork, yeah, a couple soups, a couple sandwiches. But what’m saying is, keep it simple, ya know?”
This man wears a tracksuit and holds a bottle of Peroni. His hair is short, stands up, is brushed back, grey and black. Age has set his nasal bridge into promontory and recess, his eyes pulling back the profile while the rest juts out.
“And look--there’s nothing wrong with the pre-ordered soup. One time, that one time he ordered the pre-ordered soup--”
He holds up his hands, palms out, fingers splayed, as if he were a magician revealing a sudden absence--
“Sold out. Completely sold out in the first two hours. So I’m just saying. Why don’t we. You know, hey? That’s my plan.”
I go back to the bar. There's a different girl there now.
Do you know the PBR game? She asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “Three of clubs.”
She twists off the cap and shows me the underside. I squint in the dim light.
“Oh well,” I say, unsure of what I'd just seen.
She tosses the cap into the garbage can at the back of the bar and it bounces off the rim, falling to the floor.
The music ends with a crash of chords that sound as if the sky is being rolled back, revealing something else new and unfathomable in its stead. Everybody is cheering and we are suddenly surrounded in a hail of little slips of paper, white rectangles half the size of my finger, like outsize confetti. I grab one as it descends, stilling the flutter by crushing it in my hand. When I open it I see writing. It is dark in the bar and the writing is too small for me to read. On the back there is a slogan of the manufacturer, written larger, sufficiently bold that I can make it out in the dimness: “A Fortune Cookie Make For You!”
“Listen. You guys rocked so. Fucking. Hard. Listen to me. I’ve a
lways been, I've always regretted being born too late for the Inexorable Combustion of '67. And after tonight’s show, I regret--”
“Thanks man, thanks, it--”
“Hey man! Hey man!”
A man walks toward them with a megaphone in one hand and a black book in the other.
“My man! What're you doing out here?”
“Just, uh, just enjoying the music. My friend here was playing. It--”
“No, hey, come on, come on out here with me man, we're witnessing!”
“Look, I think--not right--”
“What's the matter?” He raises his bullhorn to his mouth and continues: “THE LORD IS NOT SLACK CONCERNING HIS PROMISE, AS SOME MEN COUNT SLACKNESS; BUT IS LONGSUFFERING TOWARD US, NOT WILLING THAT ANY SHOULD PERISH--”
Noise is a symbol of our collusion with our own destruction. A death-wish in sound. Not for nothing do people warn of the dangers of rock and roll, but the doctors have mistaken cause for symptom.
“--BUT THAT ALL SHOULD COME TO REPENTANCE. BUT THE DAY OF THE LORD WILL COME AS A THIEF IN THE NIGHT--”
Scientists have been monitoring the background radiation of the universe for clues to our origins. The entire spectrum of electromagnetic waves is being funneled into antenna dishes and underground catch basins for space-borne particles of unimaginable strength and velocity. These hums and oscillations of the stars are echoes, reminders of the explosion from which we and space have been born.
“--IN WHICH THE HEAVENS SHALL PASS AWAY WITH A GREAT NOISE--”
“Now I—now I might be going