Foreigners at the Original

I sat down on the red leather bench in the booth by the window facing the public library. I looked down at the Casio on my wrist. It said 9.03 p.m., the seconds passing by in the dull silence of digital time. I couldn’t eat at my usual hour that night because I went to an evening lecture in Kroeber Hall on campus. The lecture was delivered by Professor Laura Burnace. She’d just released a much-anticipated book on Tarkovsky called Tarkovsky’s Cinematic Gaze Through a Glass, Darkly. It was published by Stanford University Press. The lecture was about metaphysical and theological stuff in Tarkovsky’s films.

The sky was starry and there was a new moon, I noticed on my walk down from Kroeber Hall to the diner on Shattuck Avenue. Sitting there in the diner by myself, I thought about the old heretic idea that the night sky is really a big-ass curtain punctured with holes: on the other side from where we’re looking up, there’s this lamp-like thing, which is perhaps infinitely bright, and what we think are stars is actually light from this lamp coming through the little holes. Then I thought about the idea that our mind is a kind of vast curtain punctured with thought-tubes: on the other side from where we project our mind inward and outward, stuff is sent to us through these tubes, so what we think are thoughts is actually this stuff being fed to us, perhaps to make us grow for some reason, a reason no one really knows. I thought how our age is obsessed with growth: personal growth, economic growth, spiritual growth, physical growth, and so on. Then I thought about what Bradley had written about appearance and reality, what McTaggart had written about the unreality of time, and how Borges had referenced Bradley in one of his stories.

The waitress came to my table, ordering pad and pen in hand. Anja, it said on her name tag. I knew her name was Anja because I’d been there before. I found it deeply comforting to eat there, so I went at least once a week. I had to take Tums antacid afterward.

Anja wore glasses, as usual. They looked cheap. There was a lump of white tape holding one of the temples attached to the green rim. As she stood there by the table, I heard clanking and hissing sounds coming from the kitchen. And Spanish. I heard the clicking of her pen.

I ordered my usual, a cheese burger with curly fries and a Coke, hence the Tums. You got it friend, Anja said, clicked her pen one last time, and slipped into the kitchen, started speaking in broken Spanish.

*

Anja brought out the food and Coke. The Coke came in a big plastic cup with lots of ice cubes bobbing on the surface. The fries came in a separate red plastic basket with checkered paper liner.

At the same time as Anja placed my order in front of me, her husband Oleg shot up abruptly from the living room couch in their shitty apartment in South Berkeley.

Oleg was an artist, and a waiter in a cafe called the Musical Offering, which was just off campus. As it so happens, Professor Burnace was a regular at the cafe. Oleg would often serve Professor Burnace and her students, but he had no idea that Professor Burnace gave a lecture open to the public that evening. Oleg had no idea who Professor Burnace was apart from being a regular customer at the Musical Offering who didn’t tip well.

Oleg was panicking. He thought he was having a heart attack. The sure signs were: his chest hurt a lot, breathing was a little hard, and he swore he felt tingles running down his left arm. His father Oleksandr had had a heart attack. His grand-father Viktor had had a heart attack back home in Ukraine. Fuck, oh fuck, oh Jesus, au, au, au, Oleg said out loud, his palms over his chest.

As he stood in front of the empty fireplace, panting, thinking he was about to die, Oleg looked at the figurines on the mantelpiece. 99 identical clay statues of people. He’d made them. Why 99? He’d read somewhere that we know 99 names of God, but also that there are many more that we don’t know. Although each statue was physically identical, when he had made each, he had thought of a different person, the spirit of a different person, including himself, Anja, his father, his mother, the homeless guy down the street, an old mentor, and so on. He called this artwork The Universe of Man. Nobody wanted to exhibit it, so there it was, on the mantelpiece.

Now he couldn’t tell if the 99 little statues all looked the same or if they all looked different. The anonymity and individuality, the material superficiality and spiritual meaning, kind of all blended together into a whole that just didn’t seem to add up to a whole. That disturbed him, and he thought: my God, is this the last thought I’ll have before I die? It was a superficial thought, he felt, and he couldn’t help asking if his art was fundamentally superficial, if he was fundamentally superficial, and so on. He thought of how much he loved Anja.

*

Back at the diner, I heard music coming from the vintage jukebox and turned my head to see who’d turned it on. It was a woman. She put her hands in the big pockets of her long trench coat.

I instantly recognized her from the lecture on Tarkovsky. She’d asked Professor Burnace a series of questions in the Q&A period at the end: Do you think Tarkovsky died from inhaling poison at the abandoned factory where he filmed Stalker? Do you think he wanted to die? Do you think that he had come to see a dead-end in everything, in science, metaphysics, theology, history, politics, love, and just couldn’t go on living following roads that promised something beyond the horizon of suffering, but which invariably led to miserable, meaningless, brutal, ugly, painful, dead-ends, to more forms of suffering? The professor scratched her head and said something academic, referred to Deleuze, Baudrillard, and so on, and ended by saying: does that sort of make sense?

*

I made the woman up. Just like I made up the diner (which is based on the Original in Berkeley, where I used to go by myself to eat what the waitress had just brought out). Just like I made up Professor Burnace, and Oleg, and Anja (who’s based on an actual waitress from the Original who actually wore broken glasses). Just like I made up the jukebox. And the stars. And the thoughts about the stars. Just like I made myself up and sat myself down in the Original with these other made up things and people.

I created Oleg based on this friend of mine. My friend was an artist. He once thought he had a heart attack, just like Oleg. My friend was skinny and bald, and always wore black jeans that he’d buy at a cowboy store. It’s the same jeans Oleg wore standing in front of the fireplace thinking he was about to die. I’ve decided that my friend’s fate will turn out to be Oleg’s fate at the end, but of course Oleg doesn’t know that yet.

*
I wanted to talk with the woman standing in front of the jukebox. So I made that desire up too in the last sentence.

The song she had chosen was a song by Tom Waits. Tom Waits had visited the Original at least once. I know this because my friend, who was a waiter at the restaurant across the street, told me how, one day, he saw Tom Waits come out of the Original carrying a bag of food.

The woman noticed that I was looking at her and turned her head in my direction. I smiled at her, trying not to make it look like a creepy smile, but more like a subdued, shy, smile. She smiled back confidently. She walked over to my booth and asked if she could sit down. I nodded my head. She sat across from me.

Now I was able to take a good look at her features. Her hair was long, wavy, and colored blond. Her eyes were brown, big, pretty far apart. They looked lost. They looked lost only because she dared to explore reality, go wherever it took her, which inevitably meant getting lost all the time. Her face was rich in expression. By this I mean that she thought a lot about things, all kinds of things, and that she had lived through many things, all kinds of things. She had survived a brutal war, for example, just like me—the same war, actually.

I offered to get her something to eat. She said can’t we share? I don’t really like to share food, but I couldn’t say no out of politeness, so I said yes out of decency.

I cut the burger in half and gave her a half. She ate her half, I ate mine. We picked fries from the basket, which I’d placed equidistant between us. She ordered an ice tea. That surprised me. She didn’t seem like an ice tea person.

We were both famished, so we ate fast. Too fast. I felt my chest squeeze up. For an instant I worried that I might be having a heart attack. Relax, she said, it’s probably just gas.

What did you think of the lecture? That was her.

I honestly don’t remember much of it, I said, but added that I liked her questions. What did you think? I asked her.

She shrugged her shoulders and took out a match box from her trench coat. She brought out one match and broke it. Then another, with which she lit a cigarette. That’s us now, she said. Broken and burned.

Anja scurried over to our table and said no smoking allowed inside. But I decided that the woman could smoke, and an argument ensued between myself and Anja. She cited all kinds of good reasons for why smoking inside is a bad thing, and unlawful. I agreed with the arguments, but still wanted the woman to smoke. Anja gave up on arguing with me at some point. I felt bad, didn’t want to put her in a bad spot with her employer, so I made sure her boss never found out about it. The way I did that was by making sure Anja and the rest of the staff, all of whom were undocumented Mexicans, liked each other and looked out after each other. I could hear a male voice telling Anja in the kitchen “fuck that pendejo customer, we got your back.”

The woman took out the remaining matches from the box, made a thick bundle and tried to brake it, but couldn’t. That could be us, she said.

She then took out a sheet of folder paper from her trench coat and slid it to me across the table. I took the paper and asked what her name was. She sighed and shrugged her shoulders. Sanja, she finally said.

What else do you have in there, in your pockets I mean? I asked. She said dunno.

Read it, she said. I read it. This is what was written on Sanja’s paper:

We know your earth: there are moments when our weathered hands find shelter deep down in the black soil, like a blanket moist and cold.

We look into your past: our long fingers traverse the time plotted on the petroglyphs by the sea fading away into the smoothness of oblivion.

We dwell in your sky: our dark bloodshot eyes heavy in the clouds hanging low, like the kitchen lamps that keep you cozy on winter evenings.

Like drops we fill your little sea, shallower, darker, than the one we swam in,

the one where the depth seemed to lead only up, and up, and up,

to some paradise where you would die if you stayed too long.

We are not the others who you leave for dead on dying boats bobbing between living shores.

There are those who came here as foreigners before there were such things as foreigners.

There are those came here as nothing more than becoming, before there was your land, your sky, your sea—before there was before.

Now, as to your wretched archives.

We inhabit your archives

as assigned number-letter combinations,

as letters slumbering in boxes made of ink,

as truncated stories you type up about us, yawning,

as data points for your police and border guards and judges.

How real this must seem to you.

How the earth must shrug its shoulders.

I said I thought it was sad, haunting, and beautiful. And meaningless. She shrugged her shoulders, exhaled smoke through her mouth and nostrils. The smoke danced like a world dreaming itself into existence.

She handed me another paper.

It was a story about a person observing a willow tree and what’s happening to it every month during one year. It had sentences like this: “June 10. Looks thirsty. It’s very dry”; “October 3. The pigeon perches and looks at me furtively, flits, swoops down, flies off somewhere”; “January 14. I swear it’s Brueghel in the morning, and in the evening just before sunset”; “March 6. 8.30 a.m. In the morning light, the new leaves are almost fluorescent. Suspended waterfalls, waterfalls within waterfalls, strings of DNA, something mirror-like about it”; and so on.

These read more like half-baked thoughts, I said to her. She shrugged her shoulders and said it’s a work in progress and that it’ll never be finished.

*

We must have talked for close to an hour when Sanja said this: You know, most people don’t get the chicken and the egg thing.

How’s that? I asked.

They think it’s some kind of trick, or that it contains some kind of big mystery. It doesn’t. It’s simple: the chicken comes from the egg and the egg comes from the chicken. By the way, we kill 70 billion chickens a year. Yes, billion. We breed them so they grow up in five weeks. They’re in agonizing pain during their whole existence, an existence made up for them by us. It’s all a minute science.

What about cows, how many cows are slaughtered every year? I asked, I don’t know why. Around 300 million, she said. Common knowledge.

*

At ten o’clock, Anja walked up to our table and said it’s closing time.

Outside, I said goodbye to Sanja and headed back home. I don’t know where Sanja went. I think she appeared to me as the ghost of someone who’d died an awful death in the war. Truth be told, neither of us knew what to do with the other in our brief chance encounter.

I trudged down Shattuck with thoughts of Sanja lingering with me like the world she exhaled into being in the diner. How could I possibly write the world? I looked up at the sky to the sound of crickets around me.

*

I’d only recently arrived to Berkeley. It was my first time in the United States. The city was still a maze to me, save a few memorized routes with my rented in-law on Russell Street as the fixed point of origin and destination. I walked south on Shattuck and turned left on Russell.

When I was close to Russell, Anja started heading home from the Original on her bike. Even though I left earlier than her, and even though my place was closer to the Original than hers was, she, zooming down the empty streets on two wheels, arrived at her and Oleg’s apartment before I arrived at mine.

As soon as she walked through the door, her feet sore and aching from working all day, she heard Oleg sobbing and wailing in the living room. He’s such a little bitch sometimes, she thought. She said are you okay, what’s going on, with feigned enthusiasm, just because she knew he was a drama queen, not because she didn’t care about him.

He said I think I’m having a heart attack, I need to go to the hospital. She said first of all moron, it’s gas, just like all the other times, and second of all, don’t be an idiot, you know how much it costs to go to the ER.

Oleg’s an absent-minded guy. Things easily slip away from his mind. Anja helps him remember, and resents him for it. At Anja’s reassuring, even if tired, tone, overflowing with the certainty of past experiences and practical wisdom, Oleg’s body relaxed. He let out a twenty-second fart, followed by a ten-second burp, and instantly felt the weight of pain in his chest disappear. He felt an irresistible need to make the 100th statue, to complete The Universe of Man, and went to what an artist like Oleg calls work.

Anja went to bed, dead tired. Before she fell asleep, she thought that tomorrow would bring a new day, a new beginning.