5 His coffee shop, with its lack of any repelling pretense coupled with a genuine palpable warmth, seemed to draw a disproportionately high number of these people. Over time it drew him more and more as well so that he often ignored more pressing matters at one of his other business concerns in favor of a newspaper, his corner booth, and an occasional cursory glance at receipts.
6 And during one of these times he stepped behind the cash register to strike its typewriter-type keys and watched generally then intently as Marybeth entered the shop for the first time, sat on its most isolated stool, and wondered aloud what was supposed to make Colombian coffee so great anyway.
* * *
THE trail of dead is long but Man must follow it to its bloodiest point. He knows the deranged mind of the rebel and how it explains the ghastly discards he keeps encountering as he tracks them in pursuit.
2 The rebels will take everyone like they did here but as they retreat into the jungle like suddenly-lit vermin they will deem some of their civilian captives not worth the effort needed to remain their captors and those bodies will litter the ground like routine road markers.
3 He has violated his own rule and taken a pair of shoes from one of the bodies. They cover his feet and soon become red from his blood but with their protection he now moves twice as fast.
4 That means he comes upon the bodies twice as fast as well and each time his breathing tightens intolerably until he can be sure the body is not a woman or a girl.
5 This is a woman but not his. Her neck vivisected by a wide red smile. Esta es la diferencia con estos malparidos, he thought. The difference is that while true that he was a man of violent sin he knew this and it often made him sad. He didn’t revel in it.
6 The rebels represent a new iteration of human evil. There is nothing to them beyond it. No boundaries either, nothing they respect. On the contrary they seem to delight in a pointed inversion of a long-established moral taxonomy that protected groups like clergy, women, children. Anything that sought to create order out of entropic chaos was suddenly attractive target.
7 So they could march into a church on a Sunday morning, leave substantial dead including many of the above, and exit with a kidnapped congregation.
8 He has trouble understanding this.
9 But they will not be getting him in a confused or conflicted state. He is going to give them the only thing they understand, savage destruction, and even alone he is excessively capable. There will be no deliberative caution either. He has yet to see a female rebel so women are safe; otherwise anybody crossing his path is going to be blotted from existence and let God sort them out afterwards. He steps over the latest body and continues.
* * *
BIRTH is less the opposite of death than it is its cleverest symbol.
2 For the seven months they knew what was coming he wanted nothing more than a daughter. He followed all the wildly unscientific procedures required. At his insistence, they chose only a girl’s name. But when the moment actually approached he wanted only that his wife should survive what was imminent, the concept of a child no longer existed.
3 The desire to be responsible for adding to the world only a female made perfect sense to him. Women, all of them, were beautiful. Every woman and all of that woman.
4 He’d often looked at a woman’s hands for example and been amazed. The same structure that in him and others exuded such brutality quickened his blood in excitement when on a woman.
5 Beyond that, the physical, was the capacity of their souls.
6 His woman’s screams filled the same house his father had decades earlier built for his birth and all he could think to do was bring and heat water. The midwife had helped birth half the village by then and she gave him orders more to keep him busy than out of any genuine need.
7 The moment, when it came, was more terrible than he’d even imagined and the preceding hours had given rise to some truly gruesome imaginings. The very real possibility back then that new life would cause death created an almost visible aura of potential horror. The screams of his woman intensified until they were indistinguishable from those heard on a descent into Hell. Also the violent emergence of a bloodied human form was not miraculous. For him it had become incidental to the larger insight she brought: our entry, like our death, must be violent to befit a strenuously combated interruption of Nothingness.
* * *
HE said “I’d explain it to you but I fear you’d start your own coffee shop and steal my few, if loyal, customers.”
“Sorry,” she laughed. “Didn’t realize. Just that coffee’s coffee isn’t it?”
“What do you do? I mean when you’re not making wholly inaccurate declarations.”
“I work at the flower shop across the street,” she pointed.
“Why?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean aren’t all flowers pretty much the same?”
“You cannot be serious.”
“I can but I’m not.”
“Comparing flowers, in their infinite variety, to coffee?”
“Let’s do this then,” he started carefully measuring out grounds for an espresso. “Drink this, on the house therefore no risk, then we’ll continue our debate.” She smiled and it was one of the great ones.
2 He started by ensuring that the particulars of the shot he was about to pull were precisely calibrated to produce the desired effect. There was only one legitimate way, regrettably long forgotten or ignored since: one ounce of water (these are not approximations) through eight ounces of single-bean coffee at 200 degrees Fahrenheit and most importantly pulled for exactly twenty-two seconds. He put the result in front of her.
“Not a very generous sample is it?”
“That’s intentional neophyte. Drink. Slowly.”
3 She drank it, slowly, her pinky extending naturally. She looked up, her chin rising only slightly.
“I don’t know what to think of that.”
“Perfect.”
“It’s slightly confusing.”
4 He smiled and she repaid him with another great one. Then she said:
“Wait. It’s great, I love it. Just needed time.”
“See?”
“Explain.”
“What am I explaining?”
“Why it’s so great. Remember I thought coffee was coffee.”
“Right. Well there’s two explanations: a highly technical one implicating the precise particulars of Colombian climate, soil, and other factors; and the other just reducing to the fact that life is a lot more tolerable with a craft.”
“There you speak truth.”
5 She drank the rest and nodded yes.
“Makes you wonder how many other things there are like that, doesn’t it sir?”
“You mean?”
“That are susceptible to great enhancement through human craft but sadly remain unexploited. As for you, I hope your craft’s not businessman.”
“Really? Because?”
“Because my craft is assembling flowers artfully and I came in here with the intention of spending money on food during my very brief coffee break only now I realize that said break is almost over and our profitless-to-you conversation consumed just about all of it.”
“I see. There’s more than one form of profit though.”
“Can I see what you offer so I can get a leg up on my next visit?”
6 He handed her two clean laminated menus. One dealt exclusively with coffees and all their possible permutations. It was extensive and wordy and took on almost novelistic qualities. The other one looked like this:
7 Her response to this menu was to assert that it required more explanation than even the transcendent espresso, to which he replied that his kitchen was not comfortable operating at the whim of any customer who chose to walk through the door. Accordingly they’d drastically reduced the available options to force their clientele to voice only their most elemental desires which they then met in whatever manner they saw fit.