Triumphant Sun, Pt. 6

Evan stared at the paper before him, trying to decipher the scrawling of the last hour. He took another sip of bitter tea and forced himself to focus on the mess of names and dates that formed the bare skeleton of the story. Coherence hovered at the edges of thought, slipping away whenever he tried to fix upon it. The pieces of the affair lay before him, but he couldn't assemble them. There seemed to be no connection between the various parts – who was the Iranian, Said, for instance? What interest could he have in the scandals of an Egyptian general?

It occurred to him that Carlos might be able to help him after all. He just had to approach it from the right angle. He quickly called and watched the taxis maneuver before him as the phone rang.

“Miss me so soon?” drawled Carlos sardonically.

“Yeah, yeah. Funny. Look, you have Fuad's number?”

“Fuad, like Fuad al-Afghani?”

“Yeah, that one.”

“Well, I got his number, but...no offense on this, but I don't think he'd like it if I gave his number to a journalist. That's just the way he is.”

“Well, maybe you could just set something up for me. Tell him I want to buy something.”

Evan could practically hear the gears turning in Carlos' head as he worked the angles. “OK, sure, where are you now?”

“I'm in an ahwa on 26^th July, the one next to the butcher.”

“I guess that works. I'll give him a call and ask if he can meet you there.”

“Thanks, Carlos. I owe you one.”

“You owe me more than one, Rochester.”

Evan settled back in his seat and asked for more tea from the young boy who sat on his heels, watching a soccer game on a flickering color television. He realized that he had no idea who or what to keep an eye out for – indeed, he knew little more about Fuad other than his reputation as an underworld dealmaker and smuggler, his friendship with Carlos and his Pashtun roots. But if Evan knew about him, than so did other, more important people – and the Aghan's continued presence and survival in Egypt meant he had the right connections, connections Evan could use.

He thought it unlikely that Fuad would agree to go on the record about anything, even anonymously, but he might lead Evan to the loose string that would unravel the whole mess.

A grey sedan rolled to a halt in front of the ahwa and let out a tall, rail-thin man in a tight-fitting black suit, a kaffiyeh wrapped around his neck. Aviator sunglasses shielded his eyes, gold rims flashing in the sun. He walked to Evan's table and peered down at him, long fingers rubbing against each other.

“Carlos tells me you want to talk.”

Evan looked up at his interlocutor. Fuad had a rich, sleek look about him, the kind that comes with plenty of money. “I was hoping we might be able to do business.”
“This way, then,” Fuad said, gesturing at his car.

Evan entered the car behind the Afghan, who gestured at his driver to pull away from the curb. Leather and wood panelled the inside of the Mercedes, old but well-preserved. Fuad took a cigarette from the inside of his coat and lit it, then leaned back. He removed his glasses to reveal disconcertingly bright green eyes that seemed to search Evan for clues.

“I hear you are a journalist.”

“Where'd you hear that?”

Fuad waved his hand dismissively through the curling smoke. “I'm not going to give you an interview, if you think this.”

Evan grinned. “I didn't really expect it.”

“What do you want, then?”

“Hashish, maybe?”

Now Fuad smiled like a shark with gold teeth. “This I like to hear. How much?”

“200 pounds?”

Fuad rapped on the back of his driver's seat and received a neatly wrapped package from him. He snapped open a blade, made a few quick incisions, and produced a thin brick of hash which he wrapped again in foil.

“Where do you get it?” asked Evan, feigning nonchalance. “I mean, which country?”

“Afghanistan, of course. Everything that is the best comes from Afghanistan. You want hash, opium, heroin, jihadis – my country is king.” Fuad said this last with a kind of twinkling, ironic pride.

“Of course,” said Evan, “But I thought the war would make this difficult.”

“Business is maybe a little harder,” conceded Fuad. “But everything is an opportunity. This I learned a long time ago. So for me, I make this war an opportunity. The United States invade, make it more expensive for everyone else, but for me – cheaper. With a little help, so I can bring you the best prices.”

In that moment, it became clear to Evan. The loose string unravelled into a whole messy tapestry, and he had to grind his teeth to avoid gasping in front of Fuad.

Triumphant Sun, pt. 4

The envelope rested on a table between the two men. Carlos drummed his fingers irritably on his chair. A thick silence filled the room as he stared at the envelope. Finally, he pushed it away and inhaled a dense stream of smoke. “It's too much of a mess, Evan. I'd like to help you but...”

Evan leaned forward and took the envelope back. Outside, the storm had slowed and the sun began to gleam through the tarnished light. They lapsed back into a wordless haze. Evan rolled the cool, biting taste of lime and tonic around on his tongue, a perfect antidote to the dry harshness outside. The gin stung in the cracks that the heat and sand had left on his lips.

“Fair enough,” said Evan finally. He rose, finishing his drink and walking to the bar to pour himself another. “You should just forget I ever brought it to you.

Carlos crooked a smile with half his face. “Done. So what happened to your leave, anyways? Weren't you going to head home for a bit?”

“I was. But you know how big this is. If I've got to deal with it, I think I'm going to be here for a bit longer. More than a bit.” Evan ran his fingertips, damp from the condensation on the glass, through his hair.

“Bet you're thrilled.”

“Well, on the one hand it's a month or two more in Cairo.”

“And on the other?”
“It's a month or two more in Cairo,” Evan quipped. He paused, staring out the window. “Anyways, I''m going to head out. If I need to drop some stuff here, could I?”

“No worries,” said Carlos, holding open the door. “Any time you get sick of Stella and tea, I'm your man.”

Evan paused at the bottom of the staircase, standing a moment in the cool shadows. Only one of the bulbs was lit, and it blinked fitfully. The beginnings of a headache teased at the back of his head and he rubbed his temples with both hands, staring out at the almost painfully bright sunlight at the end of the corridor. The bawab had returned and dozed in his chair by the entrance, a cup of tea cradled in his wrinkled hand. Evan walked softly so as not to disturb the man as he emerged into the heavy sunlight.

The island of Zamalek felt quiet compared to the rest of Cairo, and the men armed with Kalashnikovs underpinned the sense of prosperity on every street corner. A group of school-boys in uniform scrambled down the street, bouncing off of cars and walls like so many tumbling creatures. A cab swerved to the corner but Evan waved the driver off and donned his sunglasses before the man could speak. The storm seemed a bit weaker now, and the walk to his apartment would help clear his spinning head.

***

Samira licked the blood from her fingertips. It had a salty taste mixed with the tiny grains of sand blowing through across the Nile. She ran her hands through her hair in frustration, threw a scarf around her throat and headed downstairs to the hotel to get a drink and wash away the dry feeling in her throat that she can't shake. The stares of the porters and clerks bounced off the shell of her indifference. She still felt wobbly though her shoes were flat and the dazed sensation of diabetic lows gave her the oddest sensation of standing feet over her own head and directing her motion like a puppeteer. For a moment she leaned on the banister.

Her finger was still bleeding and she put it in her mouth again before it spotted on to her pale blue dress. A group of rich young Egyptian men wearing garish designer clothes walked by with predatory gazes. She stared at coldly at them, shooting contempt from her steel-gray eyes.

One leaned over and blew a kiss to her. “Yaa habibi!” he called to her from across the hall.

Samira consciously snapped out of her unconsciously coquettish pose. “Allah yuqra baytik,” she snapped back, an Egyptian oath more or less translating to 'May God step on your home'. Patently absurd in English, it was effective as a whiplash in Egypt

He recoiled as if punched and stalked away to the laughter of his companions while Samira glided serenely on and got to the bar without shaking to order a gin and tonic and a tall glass of mango juice, draining half the juice in a single gulp and taking a long sip of the cocktail. Her fist coiled in a tight ball around the fringe of her scarf.

She took another drink of juice and felt the effect as it began to steady her nerves. The only thing worse than a low, she thought, was a high, when her body became enervated and the sugar poisoned her from the inside out. Highs and lows, ups and downs in endless cycles that tore one way and then another.

Her phone jangled and she shut it off after a quick glance. Fourteen hours and halfway across the world, London could wait. She took a palm-sized notebook from her purse and jotted down the number 59 in neat, round characters with a red pen. It added to the crimson digits cascading down the page, every single one representing a low blood sugar, with only a few little islands of black or blue interrupting it. Weren't, she thought and not for the first time, diabetics supposed to have high sugars?

She'd smoothed her rough edges and she finally relaxed a little and allowed herself a tight smile. She had wheedled, bullied, begged and twisted arms but at last the paper had chosen her to take over the Cairo desk and it had been a personal point of honor that she hadn't once mentioned her father's name, even if she doubted they would have understood the importance. She wondered what it meant here. Khalil Mohammed Rahman had been a legend and a terror in his time, and being his daughter would have to mean something, even the daughter of his English widow. And what would he have thought of her gin and tonic? Probably just judged her brand of gin. The thought amused her.

She pulled out a second notebook slightly larger than the first and began to write quickly, the letters slanting more with each word until she held the book almost perpendicular to her body. Without a definite assignment from the London desk, the first few weeks would be impressions, local color pieces and soft features about eccentric characters. Her hotel room was too removed from the pulse of the city – that would have to change. An apartment in Mohandiseen or better yet Downtown, if she could manage it. The western hotels and restaurants of Zamalek were too sheltered and other parts of the city lay too far from the centers of power in the Mogamma and the ministry buildings.

Triumphant Sun, Pt. 2

The cab pulled away, weaving through the pandemonium with practiced abandon. A bus hurtled by, men leaning from its open doors at alarming angles. There were no windows at all, and smoke – whether cigarette or diesel – poured from the vehicle in waves. Evan tried to look through his papers but lurching of the car prevented him from doing anything but gripping the door and hoping the whole contraption didn't fall to pieces.

For his part, the driver carried on a blistering flow of conversation into his cell phone while smoking the battered remains of cheap Egyptian cigarette. Occasionally, he blew his nose with great gusto on tissues from gaudy tin box on the dashboard, painted gold and laced with Qu'ranic verses. Evan wondered if the thing possessed some religious purpose – perhaps tissues needed some special blessing from Allah - or whether it was just supposed to add to the interior design of the car. This already featured a lurid, zebra-patterned acrylic fur dashboard, a Qu'ranic verse in window decals and a good luck charm to ward off the evil, eye swaying from the rear-view like loose rigging on a ship.

The traffic slowed to a crawl. The driver leaned out the window, uttered a few choice Arabic curses, and then retreated from a volley of equally enraged responses like an alarmed hermit crab pulling into its shell.

“It is the government,” he apologized in Arabic. “The traffic is bad because they are coming.”

“To give a speech?” replied Evan.

“No, just driving across 26^th July.” It was one of the major bridges arching across the Nile. Mr. X sighed. An official motorcade locked down the snarled roadways of Cairo for hours as it roared by at full speed with its motorcycles, armored trucks and limousines,. Any politician or officer with enough clout could command one, a privilege abused as often as possible in the otherwise impassable Cairene gridlock. “Inshallah, it will not be long.” The driver shrugged and lit another cigarette and leaned back in his seat.

“Inshallah,” replied Evan, echoing the Egyptian fatalism. Everything in Egypt operated on that principle - If Allah wills it. Inshallah, the work will be done tomorrow. Inshallah, we will have fair elections. Inshallah, I will be paid today – and if not, inshallah it will be tomorrow! All business conducted as if man had but a passing influence on the events of the world. On the one hand, as a philosophy of life, it dissolved many day-to-day cares. On the other, some problems were too important to trust to Allah's inconsistent influence.

“You would like cigarette?” Evan shook his head. “You are American, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Egyptians like Americans very much, you know,” he said, with the air of a man bequeathing mystical truths. “We like the American people very much. It is only...” Here he paused, dragging deeply on his cigarette. “It is only your President. Bush is very bad, and hates Egyptian people, Muslim people. But we know that your President and your people are different. We love the American people.”

“I don't doubt it. Everyone is very friendly.”

“Yes! Egyptian people are the world's friendliest. Did you know that?”

“I'm not surprised.” Evan began to wish he had taken the cigarette, just so he would have something else to besides sit with his hands awkwardly on his lap.

“Ah, but we are very bad, too. Many will try to rob you – try to cheat you! You must be very careful that nobody tries to cheat you.” The driver shook his head sadly. “It's a great problem, really. Nobody follows the law, and everybody tries to steal. Especially the government, they are the worst. Look at this – all these people waiting, and why? A minister in a hurry.”
E leaned forward. “Do many people feel this way? About the ministers, and the government?”

“Of course! Everybody is tired of it. But what can you do? Things are like that.”

“Yes. Still, maybe someday things will be better.”

“Inshallah.” That seemed to be the end of it. The traffic began to flow again as the police escort's wailing sirens disappeared back into the city. They moved forward by fits and starts that became the dashing, swerving combat of traffic.

*|*

“Of course I'm not smuggling drugs!” Samira Mohammed Crane folded her arms and tossed waves of thick, black hair over her shoulder. The customs official, a fat, passive man with the obstinate demeanor of a camel, stared back at her. Her eyes, like round obsidian flakes, sparked with anger. He held up a clear packet of syringes and three vials of smoky liquid.

“What is the purpose of these, please?” he asked in English.

“For the millionth bloody time, I'm diabetic.” The man stared blankly. Samira switched into a stiff but educated Arabic. “I have sugar in my blood and I need to take injections. Understand? Diabetes, the disease.”

“Ah, diabetes. Marhaba,” he replied, accented with the heavy drawl of a Saidi, from the south of Egypt.

“Finally.”

“Do you have a letter?”
“A what?”

“A letter, for permission.”

“Permission for what?”

“Permission to have drugs for the diabetes.”
“I need the drugs. I don't have any letter. You, you absolutely...” She burst out into English, “You silly little man!”

He shrugged with all the resignation of a bureaucrat at last back on comfortable ground. “I'm sorry, but without a letter of permission it is not possible.”

Samira looked around the terminal entrance in dismay. All around, tourists lugged behemoths on little black wheels across the spotted tile flour. An Egyptian man wearing alligator loafers and a pinstriped suit with a turqoise shirt stood amongst a small group of them, holding a sign saying A&O Tours.

“Excuse me,” she said, picking the plastic bag and striding over to the tour guide. “Yaa raab,” she greeted him quietly.

The man's expression leaped from boredom to leering enthusiasm. “How may I help you, madmoiselle?” he replied.

“I'm sorry, but the customs are giving me trouble. Do you think you could take me with your group.”
“No problem at all, madmoiselle. My name is Tareq Ramadan. But what is...”

“Not important.” With a smooth handshake born of tipping maitre'des at a hundred London restaurants, she slid twenty Egyptian pounds into his hand.

“It's my honor,” he said with an oily smile.

She loitered for a few moments, watching the customs official stolidly inspect the bags of unlucky travellers. When the group finally gathered, more than a few stared at the slight, dark woman with the finely tailored suit who had joined into the little huddle of nylon windbreakers, khaki shorts and digital cameras. With a smirk and a nod from the tour leader, the whole group swept past customs with grand indifference.

As she slipped away from the group, Tareq tried to interrupt her exit. “Pardon, madame, but please tell me your name. Perhaps...”

“Fatima,” she replied, letting her hand linger in his for a moment and then peeling off into the turbulent crowds of Cairo International Airport.

The Finn, Pt 3

On the way out I wrapped myself in despair as thick and soft as a cashmere coat. I had the coat, too, a velvety job custom-tailored overseas in Hong Kong. It was like wearing a grey herringbone cloud. I couldn't afford it on what I made; and then again, maybe that was the whole point. Outside of the daily grind of my job, I took every effort to appear as elegant and refined as possible. If I had to subsist on bread and cheese for a week to afford a bespoke suit or a pair of English-made boots, I would do it.
But beneath the clothes I found myself drifting aimlessly. I once spent an hour sitting on a stone balcony staring vacantly out at nothing, not asleep but not awake, until I suddenly snapped out of my stasis. A dispassionate feeling of not caring about anything had crept over me and trapped me beneath it. Like a beetle in amber I could see myself struggling to move and slowly giving up.

I departed the bus and walked quickly through the stiff breeze, staring up at the Citgo sign, now glaring down at me. This part of Boston was grim and dirty, and I kept my head down and walked forward through the overpasses and the colonies of the homeless around the ATM booths. It had begun to rain now, and the drops fell in streams around me in the silver lamplight. My umbrella leaned on my shoulder without much conviction – I wasn't sure if umbrellas represented an elegant stylistic touch or a foppish, almost effete affectation. It was probably too much thought to put into such a minor detail anyways. So I waited with my umbrella, leaning against the doorway and trying to look inconspicuous.

To get into my girlfriend's dorm, I had to check through a security point run by bored, irritable campus police. It made me feel like a burglar or a rapist, as if I was a paroled felon who can't vote, drive, or visit his girl-friend. On an all-girls campus, I was the intruder, an alien element in the neatly paved, trimmed and tailored walkways of Simmons College. It couldn't have been more different from where I lived - all traditional Boston red-brick, old ivy and manicured lawns. This was what a college was supposed to look like.

I found myself wondering what sort of school the Finn had gone to. In my mind, European campuses all looked like Oxford or Cambridge or Hogwarts from Harry Potter: elegant and stately arches, bell-towers and grand halls and stuffy headmasters with antique studies. What would a Finnish college be like? Perpetually drenched in snow, surely – that was the only way I could envision the country. Perhaps they sleighed to class, or skied. I couldn't see a Scandinavian landscape that didn't involve those elements.

The academic paradises of Boston seemed blasé to me, with familiarity divorced from contempt. Harvard Yard was like comfort food – known, remembered, and somehow separate from the school that had rejected me. I could sit in the Yard and reminisce or philosophize without feeling envy towards those who the Yard really belonged to. Maybe the Finn had gone to Harvard. It would explain his presence in my slumbering little suburb.

She poked her head out from behind the door and nudged me, her hair falling like a damp picture frame around her face – from the rain or from a shower I didn't know. She was wearing a long white coat belted around the waist that made it look as if she was wearing nothing underneath.

“Hey, babe.” For such a short girl, her voice was always surprisingly deep and throaty.

“Hey,” I said, giving her a quick kiss and a glance sideways at the police. “Let's get inside, OK?”

The Finn, Pt. 2

The Finn, continued:

When I returned to school I did not go back to my dorm. Rather, I walked slowly up the almost deserted paths of Brandeis to the top of the hill that dominates the campus. The buildings and trees seemed ghostly and derelict in the electric light. Its not that there
was no one about, but the palpable sense of emptiness suffused the campus. The paths were paved in a moist layer of dying leaves. All the pictures of the school show it in spring, when the trees are rich with foliage and the flowers and bushes are in full bloom. But that is only a tiny portion of the year that we spend here among the bare skeletons of the oaks and elms.

From the Castle that dominates Brandeis’ campus, all of Boston and its suburbs are spread out, the skyline twinkling on the horizon. I watched the glow of the iconic Citgo sign slowly cycling its way next to the Prudential building. Its neon brilliance seemed curiously out of place to me.

As a child, I always wanted visit the base of the sign, to see where it lived. For a long time, I thought that Citgo was the city’s real name. From my home and from the river, the red triangle seemed to hover over the cityscape, independent and above it. I still want to go it every night, launch myself from the top of the castle and soar over the woods and roads and homes. But that is for a different reason.

I stub out my cigarette – I only ever smoke at the top of the hill, leaning on the fire escape of the Castle. I don’t know why, although maybe its so the exercise makes me feel less guilty. Smoking down amongst the buildings and classes of campus it feels dirty. At the top of a stone tower at night it feels lonely and noble, like a sentry burning the night away in the red cherry cupped in his hands.

I stop in the library on the way home to look up Finland in the Encyclopedia. Actually the Wikipedia, because who bothers with paper books anymore? I find that “Finnish is one of the few European languages not of Indo-European origin.” I guess that means the Finn spoke a language nobody but Lapps and Nokia officials could understand. That’s an immensely depressing thought.

I also find that Finland is the world capital of cellphones, with 103% cell phone ownership. That 3% is puzzling. One has to wonder what would compel someone to own multiple phones that way. In my imagination, the only people who need them are the double agents in gangster films who call their Mafioso bosses on one phone and their police bosses on the other. I have a hard time imagining the Finnish mafia. What would they fight over? Snow? Reindeer? Maybe cell phones.

Also, Finland was invaded by Russia. Five times. That has to be enough to make anyone depressed. I try to imagine fighting a war in a frozen arctic landscape of ice and fir trees, but my imagine fails me. In my mind, wars are hot, brutal, and steamy, like Vietnam, or urban nightmares like World War II and Kosovo. The thought of waiting for frostbite and pneumonia to cripple your adversary is profoundly depressing.

Coming home from Starbuck’s I am dirty. Covered in sweat, shards of coffeebeans and splashes of chocolate and vanilla. I feel like a walking dishrag, studded with all the most disgusting things in the world. Lady Macbeth scrubbed at a black spot on her hands in vain – Starbuck’s partners have to rinse their whole bodies of blacks spots the same way every night.

Today, of course, was a thousand times worse – the feeling that blood was on my hands, on my shirt, on my face. We had never even touched the Finn’s body but the sensation was there. How could I help but feel guilty that a man had stared at himself in the mirror and then blown his brains out less than two yards away from me? The worst was, in the roaring noise of the Starbuck’s, we hadn’t even noticed until a customer had pointed out the door was locked for half an hour. I’m not sure why he locked the door. Was it a sense of privacy? Maybe he didn’t want anyone to walk in unprepared. He was a remarkably neat suicide.

I step into the shower and turn it up as high as it will go. The water feels like a scourge on my skin, and it is good. I can feel layers peeling away, scoured away by the blast. Unexpectedly, I am crying, the tears blurring instantly with the jet of water. I turn my face into the stream to clean away the tears, clean away my face, clean away everything until I am a soft, featureless creature.

With only a little warning, the water becomes icy, shocking me to the bone. Have you ever seen those videos of a seal lying peacefully on an ice floe when suddenly its whole world erupts and a killer whale lands on top of it? That is exactly how I felt. I flailed for the spigot and managed to slam it shut. For a while I stood there, dripping, and then I heave myself out and get ready to go back downtown.

to be continued...

The Finn

A few months ago I posted a fragment of a story of mine that was being turned into a graphic novel.

Well, that project never came to much because the newspaper was just too disorganized and it sort of fell apart midway through the semester. But I've been playing around with the story and some of the ideas in it so I'm going to post the first portion of the story, which leads up to that point:

The Finn

The day the Finn shot himself in the bathroom was one of the worst the store ever had. It was probably fairly bad for the Finn too, but unfortunately no one had a chance to ask him how he was, or indeed why he shot himself. Mark suggested it might be because he was Finnish, a line that met with awkward laughter until we remembered that Finland had lost its quarter-final round game in the World Cup to Bahrain. After a quick search the internet to ascertain whether Bahrain was a real place, the store turned its attention to the more pressing problem of what to do with a self-created Finnish corpse.

Starbuck's has manuals and procedures for every eventuality. The company's overriding policy was “Just Say Yes,”as in 'Can I get two coffees instead of one...Yes! Can I get them for free because I had a bad day...Sure! Will you bring them to me on a gilded tray in porcelain cups and then shine my shoes...Absolutely! Unfortunately this didn't help as the only question the Finn might have asked was “Can I shoot myself in your bathroom?” and that particular path of action had already been settled.

Oddly, Starbucks doesn't have a concrete policy on in-store suicides, so we had to ad-lib it¹. The police were nearby, and after assuring the customers that everything was under control and perfectly safe, we resumed business. After all, as tragic as the death of the Finn was, it paled in comparison to what might happen if we denied our clientele service for an entire afternoon. There were recorded instances of physical violence in response to unscheduled closings.

So we called the cops and stood around awkwardly. People would come in for coffee, and, not knowing what else to do, we sold it to them. That’s what we were there for. We had been programmed, like a cadre of automatonic hipsters, to vend coffee to any and all passerby. The mere fact of life and death playing out a room over, while disturbing and tragic, wasn’t about to throw us out of our rhythm. Indeed, the police sirens, EMTs, and firemen attracted such a crowd that we did record sales that day.

As consolation, we all got $75 dollar mental stress bonuses in our next paycheck and an extra day of paid leave. I suppose that was to help us cope with the psychic damage that the suicidal Finn had thoughtlessly inflicted on us. In reality, the only lasting impression of the incident was the reddish stain we were never able to thoroughly excise from around the toilet. In what we judged to be typically Scandinavian fashion, he’d blown his brains out directly into the bowl. I guess he was trying to spare us the trouble of cleaning the whole room.

We never did figure out why he chose our store to end his life. It wasn’t as if he was a regular or anything. Or maybe he was a regular and we’d just never figured it out. I fancied that maybe his whole life was like that, a permanent fixture at a job, a gym, a coffeeshop, maybe even in his own home, never recognized from one day to the next. Just a tall, blonde cipher drifting through life.

My reverie was interrupted by the manager politely but firmly² asking me if I didn’t have anything important to do. Sometimes, waiting at the register, watching people approach and then retreat as if testing your defenses, you doze off a little and find yourself staring into space, counting the cracks in the brickwork or the stains on the ceiling.

At Starbucks, you learn not to work too fast. I guess it’s true of any retail job. Do nothing and you’ll get something horrible to do. So you find something that’s time-consuming but mindless, and then lose yourself in it. As long as you can claim that you are busy aligning all of the cups so that the logos are straight or rearranging the bags of coffee by region, you have a protective amulet against being forced to scrub grout out of tiles behind a dairy fridge.

On this particular occasion, I was making sure that each and every tray of sticky, nauseatingly sweet pastries was perfectly straight when I turned around and bumped into one of my coworkers carrying a pot of coffee. She dropped it into the sink and breathed a sigh of relief that it hadn’t gone on to the floor. It was at this moment that, perhaps in response to some primitive defensive instinct, looked up and was hit in the face by an encyclopedia.

To be fair, it was only one volume. The other volumes were busy tumbling down amidst the urns, grinders, brewers, and assorted paraphernalia of the coffee business. In some distant Paleolithic era, when the store had only just been converted from Joe’s Coffee or Jack’s Beans or whatever into a Starbucks, some enterprising manager had sought to lend the place an air of intellectual authenticity by stacking rows upon rows of books in the store. At ceiling level. In rickety wooden bookcases. Indeed, it was a miracle that the literary downpour we were currently experiencing hadn’t happened earlier.

Standing amidst clouds of decade-old dust, shattered spines, and dust covers lying half-in pools of dingy water, I heard a voice oh-so-quietly saying…”excuse me?”

I turned around and found myself staring at a pretty, timid-looking young girl, half-wrapped in a bright yellow balaclava and peering at me from behind a pair of thick-rimmed, square glasses. Her hair fell across her face in a diagonal line, as if someone had been cutting her hair and suddenly slipped violently to the floor.

“Welcome to Starbuck’s,” I replied. “How can I help you?”

***

I worked but I didn’t manage to find satisfaction. That was Boston’s fault. This town had dulled me with its persistent winds, and I was slowly wearing away in the rain, the snow, the battered sidewalks and cracking roads. In this city, every thing was a defense against the elements, every day was a task. And the people, clannish and irritable, could become as cutting as shards of glass. Every one shuffled around in coats and scarves, each a castle, a fortress, with layers of battlements and almost never visible. Boston wore at my soul and I could not escape.

A vast melancholy swept over me as I sat on the embankment, waiting for the train to take me home. It was one of those cold New England nights where your breath comes in freezing clouds that glow in the stainless steel moonlight. I could see the train coming half a mile away along the tracks, its running lights reflected in long beams down the rails. The track ran straight and then curved at the last minute before the station, so as it approached all I saw a was three flashing lights bearing down on me with an increasing roar. The cars blew by in a blast of hot air and roaring diesel that splashed through my mind like an ocean wave.
On the train, I sat facing the wrong direction, watching Belmont and then Waltham slide silently by. Staring through the scratched glass of the windows, I watched the tattered remnants of New England's industrial past slide by – battered redbrick buildings covered in cracking paintwork and dying ivy, junkyards filled with rusting trucks and stripped tires, men standing around in flannel shirts and dirty workboots the color of old wheat, smoking cigarettes. I looked down at my own shoes, chestnut boots polished to a waxy sheen, and then at the shoes I wear at work, scuffed and filthy with cheap leather. Why did I feel the need to change them every day before I left?