Get What You Don't Deserve

Marianne leans back and lets the smoke slip from her lips, simple, unremarkable but perfect lips that moments before she'd pressed to my cheek. She doesn't blow it out, the smoke. She never does; rather, she just let's it escape on its own. It curls toward the ceiling, sliding along the coffee shop window, illuminating an array of sticky child-size fingerprints.

"What time is the funeral?" she asks.

I stare, knowing that my eyes are bloodshot on hers, a cool blue. She stubs out her cigarette, only half smoked, in the kaleidoscopic candy-colored ashtray between us, waiting, giving me time to catch up in my head.

"Last night I dreamt I was a soldier," I finally say. This isn't the answer to her question, but she nods like I've just told her a secret password.

"Where?" she asks.

"Here. Chicago."

"Okay."

"There wasn't a war," I add. "Maybe I wasn't a soldier. I remember I had a uniform though, a shoulder holster. The sky was dark and I was trying to corral people down ... I guess it was State Street."

Her eyes were taking me in, like a mouth drinking a glass of hot water, hesitant to be burned. She's looking at me, though; at me and into me. I know mine is a face she hasn't seen in a long time. I know I don't look like I used to. But if it's worth anything, she still looks every bit like the picture that I'd placed on my nightstand in Los Angeles, every bit like the picture I snapped eight years ago, one foot inside my Honda Accord, my arms resting over the top of the open door. The sunset made her hair look red then, in that photograph. I remember thinking that it would soon be summer. That I'd see her again soon, not after eight summers, not after eight years.

"There were elephants there," I finally say, as if to nothing. "Ridiculous, right?"

"It's a dream. They're allowed to be."

Behind the counter, a coffee grinder suddenly banishes beans to a fine chocolate dust. The sound makes me flinch, and our table, shoddy with one leg shorter than the other three, teeters in response. Black coffee sloshes from Marianne's cup, making a run for the edge of the uneven tabletop. She catches it, throwing a napkin, like a blanket, onto the spill. I can only stare as the wet impression seeps, Florida-shaped and dark, into the paper like a bloodstain. When the shape stops growing, I look away at a potted Ficus in the corner, at the glowing orange exit sign above it.

"Sorry I didn't call you," I say, my eyes on that sign, glittering over each neon letter, slithering around them like the gas inside. "Not once."

"Tell me more about the elephants."

"I don't remember anymore. I ... I don't remember much. They were from the circus, maybe. And—"

A siren, as if resonating from underneath our table, halts all train of thought. It's vicious and cutting. My eyes go wide or, maybe, slack; I'm not sure. Outside, on the other side of the double-paned glass, frosted along the bottom with touches of winter, a fire truck spirals into view. Vehicles honk in protest of one another, all trying to move, get out of the way. The truck inches forward, the cars crawl aside, one by one, as if dancing in slow motion. All the while the wail, a random blast of devastating and incomprehensible noise, white noise, static. The window vibrates under its shockwaves. Then, with enough of an opening in the gridlock, it goes. The glass stops reverberating.

Marianne's coffee cup is shattered on the floor, creating a mess that just one tiny square of napkin can no longer clean. Packets of sugar are ripped violently open, their tender pink packages feature irreversible wounds, their contents spilled like fine powder sand along every inch of our table. A handful of wooden coffee stirrers, thick like long Popsicle sticks, lay there too, some snapped clean in half, others uselessly bent. The ashtray, Marianne's wasted cigarette, are completely out of sight. I did this. And I realize that underneath the table Marianne is now holding my hands in hers, holding them square and tight.

The eyes in the coffee shop, some blue, others hazel, one pair green like Japanese moss, fall back into their books, back into their laptop computers, Vanity Fair magazines and smoldering coffee cups.

"Do you want to leave?" I whisper through paper-dry lips.

Her eyes hold mine, keeping them safe from everyone else, keeping me safe inside. They say nothing, those eyes; but they hum.

"I'm very sorry," I finally muster. Dripping into those glaciers, so blue: "I'm very sorry."

"It's just a mess," they reply, quietly, unblinking. "Never impossible to clean."

"Not that. For everything else."

Still locked, I feel my hands pulled to her lap now, to the soft cotton of her red and yellow dress. Our knees touch, mine in worn indigo blue jeans.

"Never impossible to clean," she repeats.