0206(or5)23 Where’d that voice come from? He looked around. Did you hear that? This was before it mattered where that voice came from. They laughed it off. This was when the texture of the bark the 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 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), the blond boy, well, I guess you 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 he said, with more aplomb 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, upon hiring him, 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 and seen some shit and had its finer facets roughed up by experience, saying simply this: “If it's not fun, why do it?” The sandwich 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 buffing when them two clueless motherfuckers wandered in off the beams of the golden afternoon. There was a row of airplane-skinny windows near the ceiling, facing mostly south, so when the golden hour struck, in slow motion like it did back then, before precession knocked us all off course, the scattered signals of the star we love and hate and fear and drip with lust for slid across that waxy counter top illuminating everything suspended in our disbelief—dust—invisibility practicing for tonight. Light clinging to the final notes of day, when night arrives on glorious horseback, dismounts, thrusts a hush into the air, still scintillating with the whispers of that slippery silvered 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 sidelit salt grains tumbled—tiny boxes strewn about—across the plate, coming to rest beside a vestigial ketchup lake. “Can I get you something to—” (with just a little exaggerated, faux-southern drawl) “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, what I was thinking about? This is what I was thinking about. Something, too, about the melting ice—transparent white of winter’s lame-duck fading slowly off the oreo-black oak bark, fading quietly into twilight ——- right outside that door. The oak that made a mountain range out of the sidewalk—Patty would complain about it every time she had to push Mike’s wheelchair over the concrete fault lines, over the uplift zone. Mike would just smile. Almost always, Mike would just smile. 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 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 there wasn’t really anything over there besides the backwards view of the other shore, our shore, and we picked up a few rocks and threw some of them in, and idly wondered if you could possibly ever 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? 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 all this a little too long and deep. “Ha ha,” says the back-room rasp. “You said long and deep!” 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 what lay beyond the evening and I’m not sorry about the Cuban sandwich. It was good. It was really fucking good.