0206(or5)23 get in the fuckin cockpit here... he grumbled. this was before he was a thing. Where’d that voice come from? He looked around. This was before it mattered where that voice came from. THis was when the texture of the bark th tree making a near-silhouette in front of the fading grandeur of the rambling rectangles of 1800’s windows in the slanting sun was all that mattered. Let’s have lunch. They went into the place. The place was called The Cockpit. They didn’t realize upon pushing open the great heavy oaken door that it was a gay bar. LOL! They were so stupid then. They were like, Hi! How ya doing! And because that day, because it was the middle of the afternoon and not a lot was going on quite yet that early in the day, that early in the life of the city (which was not really early at all, in the grandiose scheming of things), and so the blond boy, well, I guess I could say “young man” behind the bar had plenty of time to look up from what he was doing, blink, take in what he was seeing, feel the rubber bands of his brain begin to flex, quiver, and sing their short mellifluous treefrog notes—the code that told his body what to do or say—and because he had only moments earlier become *almost* aware that this, today, whatever this was, was going to be somehow good, if not momentous, then at least a cheap thrill, he felt his muscles warm, get taut, relax, and said, with more aplimb than he would’ve thought he possessed had you asked him outright (he was still learning—was still effervescent with surprise every time his mouth knew better than his mind what words would come out next, and perfectly), “I’ve just made a new kind of sandwich. Would you like to try it?” This is what I'm thinking about. Then all three of them—the two newcomers, too naive to be nervous, and the young man, the blond bartender with just-hatched crows feet—maybe he’s not as young as you thought? “God bless you the ones with young faces” the manager had said without needing to wink—all three of them heard it at once, from around the dark corner of the corridor connecting the bathrooms, a raspy voice, a voice determined to declare, a voice that lets you know it’s been there, saying simply this: “If it's not fun, why do it?” This is what I’m thinking about. This is what I was thinking about. It was basically just a slight variation on a Cuban sandwich. DGMW, it was fucking good. It HAD A SLICE OF SUNSHINE IN IT, if you really want to know. It had a sliver of the sunbeam that sliced sideways off the bar that boy had been assiduously polishing when them two clueless motherfuckers wandered in off the beams of the golden afternoon. There’s a row of airplane-skinny windows near the ceiling, facing mostly south, so when the golden hour strikes in slow motion, the way it did back then as a matter of course, before precession knocked us all off course, the scattered signals of the star we love and hate and fear and drip with lust for and in among and under slide across that waxy counter top and illuminate the dusty everything suspended in our disbelief—invisibility practicing for tonight. Light clinging to the final notes of day. Night arrives on glorious horseback, dismounts, thrusts a hush into the air. Still scintillating with the whispers of that silvery slippery sun—and also a hint of something else—I’m not sure—coriander maybe? In any case, the sandwich was fucking memorable, as were the rough-hewn fries. Rhombohedral sunbeams sidelit every grain of salt that tumbled—tiny boxes strewn about—across the plate, coming to rest beside a vestigial ketchup lake. “Can I get you something to (just a little exaggerated, faux-southern) *wash that down* with?” You bet! What you got on tap? “If you can't wax rhapsodic, what *can* you wax?” asked the raspy voice from the back hall. So I guess when you asked, the other day, when you asked what I was thinking about? This is what I was thinking about. I don’t know, exactly. What. What was it exactly. Something, too, about the melting ice—the transparent white of lame-duck winter disappearing slowly from the oreo-black bark of the oak right outside that door. The oak that fucked up the sidewalk, but the city was never gonna do anything about it. Remember when Patty would complain about it every time she had to push Mike’s wheelchair over the concrete fault lines? Over the mountain range, over the uplift zone. Mike would just smile. Almost always, Mike would just smile. This is— This is what I was thinking about the other day when you were packing your suitcase. Everything is changing. Everything was changing. This is what I was thinking about when the bedroom was cold. When my fingers were too cold to write or type without fumbling. One letter, one backspace, one more letter at a time. There is no actual backspace when you’re actually writing—of course. This is, yeah, but I guess this is what I was thinking about at the staff meeting, at the garage waiting to pick up the car, in the park last week dodging dog shit, on that ferry we took across the narrow part of the lake, and then when we turned around and came back because SURPRISE! there wasn’t really anything over there besides the backwards view of the other side of the lake, which was normally our side of the lake, but now it was backwards, and so we were like, well, what do you want to do, and we were like, I don’t know, I’m not really hungry yet, and we picked up a few rocks and threw some of them into the water and idly wondered if you would be able to tell the difference in the height of the water, if you were on the other side, which we usually were of course, and then we were like, fuck, well, I don’t know, I guess the ferry’s getting ready to head back, you wanna just go ahead on back? And this is also probably what I was thinking about when we got a little snack to hold us over. God it was like five fucking dollars for a little pack of cheez crackers. I was going to get a beer but that shit was like ten dollars, and I was still thinking about this anyway, so it wouldn’t have been the same. It wouldn’t have been the beer I actually wanted. Rivers that both caused and resulted from erosion slither slickly down the mud cliffs on our side of the lake. You can see the sunlight glancing off them, streaks of sudden sparkle in the day’s departure. If I got a little melancholy then, perhaps this is why—because I let myself think about this a little too long and deep. “Ha ha,” says the back-room rasp. “You said long and deep!” Ha ha. OMFG WHHATEVER DUDE. Before the night comes, the day must be on its way, and in its wake it leaves a trail of forgotten shadows, and we call this ghostly remembrance “evening” and that’s what I was thinking about, and it’s what I’ve been thinking about for YEARS NOW, and I’m sorry I wasn’t able to tell you that before you left, before I left, before the day departed, but I’m not sorry that I couldn’t let myself forget and I’m not sorry I held out for the evening and I’m not sorry about the Cuban sandwich. It was good. It was really fucking good.