“Welcome to Starbucks,” says the young man stationed there. “May I take your order?” The man’s voice is cheerful but there’s something strangulated in it that startles Billy, gets him to pay a little more attention. He looks the Starbucks Guy in the face. The guy — a blond kid, can’t be a day over twenty-one, wispy hints of a starter goatee around his mouth — is smiling at him expectantly, but something in the smile looks fixed, knocking Billy from alert to on edge.
“Uh, sure,” says Billy, suspiciously. “Can I get a … Grande Americano?”
“Grande Americano!” the kid hollers to one of the other workers back there, a woman, who jerks into motion with the gracelessness of a dusty animatronic figure, a robotic Abe Lincoln in a forgotten Hall of Presidents.
Billy looks into the kid’s puffy, red-rimmed eyes and spots the raw terror in them. They come so close to screaming Call the police that Billy reflexively pats his pockets, looking for his phone, which of course is still in a Dumpster somewhere.
The guy rattles off how much Billy owes, and Billy looks over his shoulder to see if Ollard is going to offer to pick up the tab on this. Billy figures that if you have your own personal Starbucks with the employees held in some kind of terrifying mystic bondage then you might as well make all the coffee complimentary. After all, you can’t exactly be expecting the place to meet a quarterly profit projection. But Ollard is paying no attention: he’s gazing out the windows. Out is perhaps the wrong way to put it: it’s really more at, because the windows are great panes of solid blackness.
Billy pulls the three dollars out of his pocket, unfolds them, and hands them off to the terrorized-looking kid, who returns him a handful of change. Billy considers dropping the coins in the tip jar but he has the sense that no one working here is going to get around to spending their tips anytime soon. He makes eye contact with the cashier for a second in which both of them understand that their transaction has concluded, that there is nothing more that Billy can or will do for this kid right now. Billy’s the one to break the glance, and as he pockets his change he’s scorched by a rising shame.
“Grande Americano at the bar,” shouts the young woman at the other end of the counter, with that same fracturing cheer. Billy makes the mistake of looking in her eyes as she slides his drink across to him, checking in the hope that maybe the kid was a one-off, but no: she has the exact same please-help-me look, the exact same fake frozen smile.
Billy wonders for a moment whether his ward protects him against this kind of enslavement. Tries to remember exactly what Lucifer said. Ollard is unable to harm him — what was it — through magical means or otherwise? The Starbucks workers don’t seem harmed, exactly, but it certainly looks like their experience is sucking. Maybe he should just get out of here while he can?
But when Billy turns to face Ollard again all he sees is a guy, just sitting there in his corduroy suit. He looks placid, really, almost bland. Pasty. Wan. It’s hard for Billy to feel like he’s actually in danger. So Billy goes and sits in the other overstuffed chair, which leaves him positioned at about a forty-five degree angle to Ollard. He puts his Americano on a little round table. Knowing that it was served to him by zomboid slaves makes it seem a little creepy. So instead of drinking it, he just sits there, looking at the black panes, waiting for Ollard to speak. The two of them sit side by side, staring. At blackness. This lasts for about a second before Billy begins to find it disturbing.
“So,” Billy says, groping around for a way to kick-start the conversation. “You must really … like Starbucks, I guess?”
Ollard shows no signs of having heard the question, for a long minute. The song by the British soul singer ends, and then it begins again, a second time.
“I think better when I’m in here,” Ollard says, finally. “I’ve spent most of the last year in one Starbucks or another, thinking. They’re all over the city, now, did you know that?”
“Um,” Billy says. “Yes, I guess I did.”
“I used to alternate between seven different Starbucks,” Ollard says. “A different one for each day of the week. Of course, now that I have the Neko, I haven’t been able to get out. It’s not … safe for me outside any longer. So I decided to set one up here.” He turns toward Billy and smiles weakly.
“Starbucks every day, huh?” Billy says.
“For hours. Hours every day.”
“That’s a lot of thinking.”
“It is. That’s the thing I’m good at. Thinking. That’s all there is left to do, really.”
“Yeah, um.” Billy’s still trying to find his grounding in this conversation. He feels a bit like he’s on an awkward date. He has begun to detect an odor, like meat left out in the sun, which he assumes is coming from Ollard, and he notices that the corduroy suit, which looked so sharp from a distance, is actually quite dirty, filthy even, going nearly translucent in spots from grease and wear.
“So,” Billy tries. “What do you think about?”
Ollard makes a sucking sound with his mouth before he answers. “What do I think about,” he says. “I think about the world. The world and all that is in it.”
“Okay,” Billy says. “That’s cool.”
“Is it?”
“Sure.”
“I don’t think so,” Ollard says. “I don’t think the world is cool.”
“No?”
“No. I think — and I have considered the problem at some length — that the world, ultimately, is repulsive.”
“Okay,” Billy says.
“It’s not okay,” Ollard says. “I am grateful to this place, though. To Starbucks. It helped me to think, during this time. It helped me to focus. It reminded me. Every day. Of the world. Of just how little the world has to offer.”
His expression suddenly cracks. His eyes clench shut; a network of deep lines emerges across his forehead; his mouth tenses, widening into a distorted black hole, rimmed with bad teeth. You’d think if you were an all-powerful magician who’d been alive for a century you’d at least be able to take the time to fix your terrible teeth.
“Hey,” Billy says, in a voice that he hopes is therapeutic. He momentarily considers reaching out, putting a hand on Ollard’s shoulder, although the idea creeps him out too much for him to get far with it.
“Ollard,” Billy says, expending enormous effort to sound very calm. At this point he’s past thinking that this conversation is like an awkward date; he’s instead realized that it’s more like a hostage negotiation. He tries to remember anything he knows about hostage negotiation, any movie where a hostage negotiation situation was handled effectively. He gets a vision of Denzel Washington, stern and commanding, but he can’t come up with any immediate way to put it to use.
“Timothy,” he tries, with his soothing voice still on. “Where is the Neko?”
“I’m so tired,” Ollard says. He presses the heels of his hands into his face, as though he’s stuffing thoughts back into his head. “I’m tired,” he says again.
“We’re all tired,” Billy says. “Take me to the Neko.”
Ollard draws a long, shuddering breath, and then looks back at Billy, his face having regained some of its composure. “You want to see the Neko?” he says.
“Well, yeah,” Billy says. “I mean. Eventually. We can keep talking for a bit if you want.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Ollard says, rising. “We can talk on the way.”
“All right then. Let’s go.” Billy claps his hands on his thighs and gets out of the chair, leaving the creepy Americano on the little round table, untouched. They walk behind the counter, weaving between the three workers, who are involved in polishing nonexistent spots off the machines at the bar. Ollard hooks around into the supply room, and just past the big industrial refrigerator and the sinks, right in the spot where labor practices posters should be hanging in mandatory display, the Starbucks abruptly opens into a long corridor, grim and dingy, its walls a sort of dulled avocado, gone rippled from layers upon layers of paint. It has a dusty whiff about it, like a rarely visited back wing of an underfunded natural history museum, like a stuffed bison slowly rotting in an alcove.