I don’t know. I still don’t know.
But I know that as Jus and I strolled slowly home across the fields she trickled out of my existence as fine dry sand might trickle away through my fingers, until by the time I got home all traces of her had vanished. And I was entirely at ease with this—on one level.
“Did you have a good time down by the river?” asked Mom as I kicked the mud off my boots. And: “Isn’t it about time you got yourself a steady girlfriend to go on these walks with you, John?” And: “I’ve made a meat loaf for supper. Dad should be home any minute. I’ve already opened him a beer. Would you like one too?”
Yet on another level I wasn’t accepting of the new non-Jus future at all. The Jusjohn being was still there. There could never be a Pollyjohn, or a Veronicajohn, or a Katiejohn, or…
I say that I live alone in my apartment. But that’s not quite true. Sometimes Jus is there also. I have never seen her or heard her, but there are times I walk from the cramped kitchen into the cramped living room and I’m aware that the sound of her laughter has been there just a moment before.
None of this could I have said on the telephone. None of this can I ever hope to explain to Mrs. Baldeen’s hard gray eyes.
I stare at the phone. Will I be able to pick it up again and call Bill, as I originally intended?
I’ve been living a wrong existence, I now know, since that afternoon when we walked home from the river.
Parts of the truth I got right, parts I got wrong.
As I was washing my hands and going back downstairs for the beer Mom had poured for me I assumed, as I’ve been assuming ever since, that the future I’d created was somehow the lesser reality, the subsidiary one—that the primary reality had reasserted itself, compelled my version of creation to converge back towards the mainstream of time’s flow. It had chipped my conviction, then stood aside to watch it crumble.
But now I know, having spoken to the other John Sudmore, having heard the voice of Jus, how mistaken I’ve been.
The effect of my conviction crumbling was not that Jus faded away into a rejected subsidiary reality.
It was that I did.
I shrug my shoulders, as if I could discard the weight of infinity from them.
I reach out to pick up the receiver. I’m going to call Bill and arrange to meet him for a drink at the Tobermory Inn or O’Riley’s or Duncan’s Place, and we’re going to talk about old baseball games and new movies and I’m going to submerge my knowledge of the reality I’ve lost. Of the reality that lost me.
But the receiver is only halfway to my ear when I change my mind and return it to its rest.
Tonight…
Tonight is a night for drinking alone.
THE DEW DROP COFFEE LOUNGE
by Cat Rambo
The minute the woman walked in, Sasha sensed it. Her head went up, that characteristic Sasha motion, like a blind bear sniffing the breeze. The well-dressed suburbanite glanced over the surroundings as she entered the coffee shop. Her hair glimmered with red dye and was cut in a Veronica Lake bang that obscured one eye. I couldn’t see more from where I sat.
Sliding her notebook back into her bag, Sasha leaned forward, her gaze intent on the arrival, who looked back, first sidelong, then openly. As though pulled by that stare, she moved through a clutter of tables towards Sasha.
Her interrogatory murmur was inaudible except for its tone. Sasha nodded, gesturing to the seat across from her.
First there was coffee to be ordered, and the obligatory would-you-like-something, no-nothing-thank-you while Sasha cleared an old mug and several napkins away from the shared surface.
Then just as the redhead was pulling her chair back, Sasha’s voice, pitched loud and clear. “I only agreed to meet with you to say I can’t do this anymore. My husband is in Iraq, stationed in Basra.”
The other woman stopped, looking as though she had been socked in the gut, halfway between heart torn out and tight-lipped anger. Sasha studied the table, tracing a finger across the constellations of blue stars. She looked as though she were worrying over a grocery list rather than declaring an end to a romance.
In the other woman’s blank face, her eyes were a shuttered, washed-out blue. The Universe watched as the painful moment played itself out, watched with a grim and inexorable regard that I was glad was fixed on Sasha and the stranger rather than on me.
When the redhead had vanished onto the street without a backwards glance and the door had jangled shut behind her, Sasha claimed the untouched latte and croissant.
“Pig,” I said from my seat.
“Don’t you have some gathering of finger-snapping beatniks to get to?”
“I’m writing a poem about you right now. I’m calling it ‘Sweet Goddess of the Dew Drop Coffee Lounge’.”
The name of the shop was originally the Dew Drop Inn, back when it was a bar. As it had passed through the successive hands of owners who had not understood the original name’s charm, it had become The Dew Drop Restaurant, The Dew Drop Donut Shop, The Dew Drop Take and Bake Pizza and most recently, the Dew Drop Coffee Lounge.
In this incarnation, the owner, Mike, had decorated the walls in neo-mystic. Posters showed translucent, anatomically-correct figures with chakra points set like jewels along their forms, backed by Tibetan mandalas. Sunlight slanted in through the crystals dangling from monofilament line in front of the French doors, and sent wavering rainbows across the glass cases by the counter, trembling on the scones and dry-edged doughnuts. Painted stars and moons covered the Frisbee-sized tables.
At first I hadn’t liked the hearts of space music Mike insisted on, but after hours, days, weeks, now months of it, the aural paint of synthesizers and whale song had crept into my thoughts until mall Muzak now seemed strange and outré to me.
Sasha went back to her reading. I got up and started opening the doors to take advantage of the spring weather. The breeze ruffled the foam heart atop Sasha’s latte and tugged at her newspaper. A skinny man in a red baseball cap came in, looking around, and she caught his eye, gestured him over, preparing her next brush off.
“Everything’s alchemical,” Mike had told me the week before. We were cleaning out the coffee machines with boiling vinegar and hot water. Wraiths of steam rose up around his form, listening as he spoke.
Whenever we were working together at night, he would deliver soliloquies that explained the secret inner workings of the world. While much of it was dubious and involved magnetism, UFOs, and a mysterious underground post office, it was a world that I found more appealing than my own. More interesting, at any rate.
It was a decent job, all in all, and it paid fair money in an economy that was so tanked that my already useless English degree was worth even less. So I tidied up the coffee shop, carried ten gallon bottles of water in, swept, and refolded newspapers after customers had scattered them like ink-smeared autumn leaves. It did mean the occasional late night labor, but Mike was a good sort and helped with the scutwork.
“Yes,” I said noncommittally. I had learned that the best thing to do with Mike was not to stand in the way of the current rant.
“The thing is this. You know Tarot cards?”
“Like fortune tellers use?”
“Yeah, sorta kinda. See, Tarot cards have pentacles and swords and cups and rods, and that’s diamonds and spades and hearts and clubs. With me so far, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“There’s twenty two cards beyond that. The Major Arcana, they call them.”