Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

THE DEW DROP COFFEE LOUNGE by Cat Rambo

The minute the woman walked in, Sasha sensed it. Her head went up, that characteristic Sasha motion, like a blind bear sniffing the breeze. The well-dressed suburbanite glanced over the surroundings as she entered the coffee shop. Her hair glimmered with red dye and was cut in a Veronica Lake bang that obscured one eye. I couldn’t see more from where I sat.

Sliding her notebook back into her bag, Sasha leaned forward, her gaze intent on the arrival, who looked back, first sidelong, then openly. As though pulled by that stare, she moved through a clutter of tables towards Sasha.

Her interrogatory murmur was inaudible except for its tone. Sasha nodded, gesturing to the seat across from her.

First there was coffee to be ordered, and the obligatory would-you-like-something, no-nothing-thank-you while Sasha cleared an old mug and several napkins away from the shared surface.

Then just as the redhead was pulling her chair back, Sasha’s voice, pitched loud and clear. “I only agreed to meet with you to say I can’t do this anymore. My husband is in Iraq, stationed in Basra.”

The other woman stopped, looking as though she had been socked in the gut, halfway between heart torn out and tight-lipped anger. Sasha studied the table, tracing a finger across the constellations of blue stars. She looked as though she were worrying over a grocery list rather than declaring an end to a romance.

In the other woman’s blank face, her eyes were a shuttered, washed-out blue. The Universe watched as the painful moment played itself out, watched with a grim and inexorable regard that I was glad was fixed on Sasha and the stranger rather than on me.

When the redhead had vanished onto the street without a backwards glance and the door had jangled shut behind her, Sasha claimed the untouched latte and croissant.

“Pig,” I said from my seat.

“Don’t you have some gathering of finger-snapping beatniks to get to?”

“I’m writing a poem about you right now. I’m calling it ‘Sweet Goddess of the Dew Drop Coffee Lounge’.”

The name of the shop was originally the Dew Drop Inn, back when it was a bar. As it had passed through the successive hands of owners who had not understood the original name’s charm, it had become The Dew Drop Restaurant, The Dew Drop Donut Shop, The Dew Drop Take and Bake Pizza and most recently, the Dew Drop Coffee Lounge.

In this incarnation, the owner, Mike, had decorated the walls in neo-mystic. Posters showed translucent, anatomically-correct figures with chakra points set like jewels along their forms, backed by Tibetan mandalas. Sunlight slanted in through the crystals dangling from monofilament line in front of the French doors, and sent wavering rainbows across the glass cases by the counter, trembling on the scones and dry-edged doughnuts. Painted stars and moons covered the Frisbee-sized tables.

At first I hadn’t liked the hearts of space music Mike insisted on, but after hours, days, weeks, now months of it, the aural paint of synthesizers and whale song had crept into my thoughts until mall Muzak now seemed strange and outré to me.

Sasha went back to her reading. I got up and started opening the doors to take advantage of the spring weather. The breeze ruffled the foam heart atop Sasha’s latte and tugged at her newspaper. A skinny man in a red baseball cap came in, looking around, and she caught his eye, gestured him over, preparing her next brush off.

“Everything’s alchemical,” Mike had told me the week before. We were cleaning out the coffee machines with boiling vinegar and hot water. Wraiths of steam rose up around his form, listening as he spoke.

Whenever we were working together at night, he would deliver soliloquies that explained the secret inner workings of the world. While much of it was dubious and involved magnetism, UFOs, and a mysterious underground post office, it was a world that I found more appealing than my own. More interesting, at any rate.

It was a decent job, all in all, and it paid fair money in an economy that was so tanked that my already useless English degree was worth even less. So I tidied up the coffee shop, carried ten gallon bottles of water in, swept, and refolded newspapers after customers had scattered them like ink-smeared autumn leaves. It did mean the occasional late night labor, but Mike was a good sort and helped with the scutwork.

“Yes,” I said noncommittally. I had learned that the best thing to do with Mike was not to stand in the way of the current rant.

“The thing is this. You know Tarot cards?”

“Like fortune tellers use?”

“Yeah, sorta kinda. See, Tarot cards have pentacles and swords and cups and rods, and that’s diamonds and spades and hearts and clubs. With me so far, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“There’s twenty two cards beyond that. The Major Arcana, they call them.”

“Aren’t there Minor Arcana too?”

“Yeah, those are the pentacles and stuff. Anyhow, each Major Arcana shows a step in our life journey.”

“Which is how you use them for fortune telling,” I said.

“No, well, kinda sorta. But they’re steps that everyone goes through, the stages of life.”

“All right,” I said. I tipped the jug into a tank and drained it, frothing with heat. I sniffed the steam. Was that a last trace of vinegar?

“You should write about it,” Mike said. “A lot of great literature is based on alchemy.”

“Yeah, that’s certainly a thought,” I said. “Is that one done?”

He sniffed at the tap. “Another pass, maybe. Then let’s mop the floor, as long as we have the hot water. Call it a night after that.”

“The thing is this,” he said after a long and reflective silence in which I’d forgotten what we were discussing. “There’s these Avatars that walk around. They’re foci for the Universe’s attention, moments that get repeated over and over again, like in the Tarot cards. Sasha’s one, for example.”

“Sasha?”

“That skinny blonde who comes in around ten, reads and drinks coffee for a couple of hours, turns up in the late afternoons sometimes.”

“She’s a what?”

“An Avatar. It’s the shop. It’s a Locus.”

“I thought you said it was a foci.”

“No, people are the foci. The Avatars. The shop now, it’s a Locus, a place where foci converge. Like Stonehenge, where all the ley lines meet.”

“The Dew Drop is like Stonehenge?”

He laughed. “Yeah, crazy, isn’t it? I don’t understand why, either.” He pulled a bottle of whiskey out from behind a blocky pyramid of stacked coffee bags. “But we’ll drink to it all the same.”

The next day, I watched Sasha.

It was a little before ten, a slack hour with only a couple of customers. I appreciated the lull, since I was hung-over and queasy from last night’s drinking.

A kid came in, maybe fourteen or fifteen. He had long brown hair tied back with a red bandana, bell bottoms, the kind of teenage body that looks like one long stick. He slouched in the doorway until she gestured him over and said something.

His jaw dropped.

I’d always thought that was a figure of speech until I saw him go literally slack-jawed with surprise at her words. And I would have said something, done something, but I felt it. The weight of the Universe’s attention, just for a moment, not on me, but so close that you’d think space and time had collapsed at the point where Sasha sat, looking up at the kid.

He turned and pushed past me to the door. The back of his jacket had a picture of a chimpanzee with the legend “Got Monkey?” under it.

I gave her a little wtf? look and she shrugged at me and went back to the paperback she was reading, The Biggest Secret. But fifteen minutes later, another person came in, an elderly woman carrying a yellow flower in her hand.

She was taken aback by Sasha’s wave, and made her way over to the table like someone advancing to feed a stray dog that they don’t trust. Sasha stood and held the chair out for her, but the woman shook her head, laying her daffodil down.

“He’s not coming,” Sasha said. “He’s happily married, and he asked me to break it to you. He gave me a little money to buy you a coffee, a pastry perhaps.” She fumbled with her wallet.

“No,” the woman said. She wore a lavender pants suit and was carefully made up, her colorless hair freshly combed and set. “No, that will be all right.”

With chilly dignity, she left.

“That was awful!” I let Mike take the register and sat down across from Sasha, indignation pulling at my vocal cords. “What the hell was that all about?”

“It’s my role in life, sunshine,” she said.

“You pretended to be someone else! You’re interfering in those people’s lives!”

“It’s not as evil as all that, Clay.” She pointed at the front entrance. “It’s something about this place. Maybe it’s the dumping ground of the Universe. I noticed it when I first started coming here to get coffee and read. People come here all the time to meet blind dates that never show up. I’ve never seen anyone actually meet here, but I’ve seen plenty lingering in the doorway, looking around, trying to catch your eye to see if you, you’re the one.”

She leaned forward. “So I started leaping into the breach. I give them a reason to run, to have a story they can tell at dinner parties for the next few years, the Blind Date from Hell, who seemed so nice in e-mail, then turned out to be…” She twisted her hand. “…a little cuckoo.”

“You’re not just a little cuckoo, you’re insane,” I said. “There ought to be a law about people pulling crap like that. How many dates have you thwarted?”

“You’re not listening. I don’t thwart them. They only show up here if the other person isn’t arriving.”

“Bullshit.”

“Watch.” She pointed at a small ginger-haired man as he stepped in. “I can spot them a mile off. I can hear it in the cadence of their steps coming along the sidewalk and read it in their faces when they open the door. But I won’t catch this one, and you’ll see what I mean. He’ll linger and wait.”

I rose and took his order, a double espresso. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and a robin’s egg blue cashmere sweater. He looked around as I prepared the coffee, glance falling on Sasha. She didn’t look up, just kept on reading.

He took the drink with a thanks and sat down by the door, checking his watch. Each time someone came in, he looked them over. After forty minutes and a dozen people, he drained the coffee and exited, shoulders a tight line of anger.

I went back over to Sasha, not sure what to think.

“See?” she said.

“How can you field all of them?”

She gestured at herself. “Online I could be anyone.”

“So you stand in for the men too?”

“Sure.” She licked crumbs from her fingertips.

“How do you make them think you’re the same person they’ve been talking to?”

“They come pre-fooled,” she said. “Ready to drop into the seat and talk to the one heart in all of the universe that knows them.”

“You disillusion them.”

“I teach them what the world is all about. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and what you can laugh at, you can live with.”

“Is this tied in with that crap Mike was spouting last night? You’re an Avatar?”

“A whatty-tar?”

“An Avatar. Mike said something about Avatars and Tarot cards and focuses.”

“Mike says all sorts of crap and only ten percent of it actually makes sense. You should know better than to pay attention.”

“Like any of this makes sense? Sasha, it’s just weird and awful that you do this.”

“Fuck you, emo-boy,” she said.

I guess I wouldn’t have minded so much if I hadn’t been having shitty luck with blind dates myself. I’d set up match.com and yahoo.com and OKCupid and FriendFinder and all the rest.

I got replies from women who wanted me to send them money so they could come visit, one hard-core rock chick in Alaska who said flat-out that she didn’t do in person but was fine with “long distance commitments,” and a Chicago woman who said she’d seen me at a poetry slam when visiting Seattle. She wouldn’t post a picture of herself, leaving me to believe that she was actually a fourteen year old boy.

But at least I was getting a trace of hope every night. I’d log on to the computer and check my messages, send a couple of Woo!’s or raves or whatever the flavor of the flirt was. And here was Sasha, skinny unappealing Sasha, dirtying the taste of it. Making it meaningless.

“You’re a sadist,” I said. “A goddamn sadist.”

“Do you think I really like it?” she said.

“Yeah, I think you do. You get off on it, the power of crushing people’s dreams,” I spat out.

“So I can sit here and watch them die, or I can give them a little closure.”

“Seriously, it’s screwed up,” I said. I stood and went in back to rinse filters.

Mike caught me there later.

“Hey, did you and Sasha have some kind of fight?” he said worriedly.

“I told her she’s a twisted fruitcake,” I said. “I know you’re a friend of hers, but the blind date crap… Jesus, it’s wrong!”

He held up a hand, forestalling me. “Yeah, well. It’s a long story.” He looked unhappy in his long-nosed, spaniel-eyed way. “Look, you know how she started coming here?”

I guessed. “Did she work here at some point?”

“No. See, I’d answered this ad in The Stranger personals, couple years ago, you see?”

“I don’t know what you’re trying to say.”

“I stood her up,” he said. “I told her to meet me here at 10:30 on a Thursday morning, and I was so ready, but then there she was and I chickened out and just served her coffee and watched her wait. She waited half an hour, ate a warmed butter croissant and drank a hot chocolate and left. The next day she showed up at the same time and brought a book with her, something by Camus. Ever since then, she shows up three, four times a week, sometimes more.”

“Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

“She’s an Avatar,” he said, his voice dropping in awed intensity. “You felt it too, didn’t you? Larger than life. It’s what’s so frightening, so appealing about her.” He stopped, looking at me as though the thought had just occurred to him. “You’re attracted to her, too, aren’t you? Is that why you’re so pissed at her?”

“I’m pissed at her because she’s acting out some sort of outrageous psycho-drama that you’re enabling and messing with people’s lives in the process,” I said. “Does she know you’re the one she was supposed to meet?”

“Don’t you get it?” he said. “It’s a genuine supernatural occurrence that happened. I brought her here and she became an Avatar. I don’t know how.”

My head throbbed. “I need to go home,” I said. “I’m going to throw up.”

“Go, go.” He flapped a hand at me. “But come back when you feel better and don’t fight with Sasha anymore.”

I didn’t show up for work for four days. I went out with old college friends every night to a hip bar in a former barbershop. Vintage hair dryers had been lined up like studded alien helmets along the wall and baggies stuffed with peroxide curls were thumb-tacked to the ceiling. Band after band sang each night’s anagrammatic lyrics in smoke-hoarsened voices. When I came back, I was still tipsy. Mike didn’t say anything, just eyed me and served up a jumbo mug of the coffee of the day, a Tanzanian roast, before I swept the floors and used clothespins to clip the day’s newspapers to the rope racks on the north wall.

Sasha came in a little before noon, pausing when she saw me. She laid her book—some Charles Williams title—down on the table in front of her while sorting through her pockets for bills.

“Clay,” she said, carefully unfolding the crumpled ones. “Clay, man, I wanted to say, with the blind dates, I don’t mean they can’t work. I’m sure they can, I’m sure they do.”

The words tumbled through her lips like pebbles, like diamonds, like some fairy tale princess speaking truths.

“The ones that end up here, those are the only doomed ones, you know what I mean? I’m not dissing the love thing. You’re a nice guy, and I don’t mean to be saying anything about that at all.”

The sun gleamed through the window and fell on her straw-like hair, as yellow as the daffodil. I said something reassuring and offered to buy her next coffee, and realized somewhere in the middle of that transaction that one thing Mike had said was true. I was attracted to her, an attraction as mysterious and unexpected as though I’d found an impossible door, opened a closet to find Narnia waiting instead of coats.

What could I do? I lapsed into silence. From then on, Mike and I exchanged glances whenever she came in, both of us acknowledging that lodestone pull, so elemental and so deep within our bodies that we couldn’t imagine wanting anyone else.

And I wondered about the Avatars. Was Sasha right, did she fill some cosmic gap? Were there others? Did I know them, had I seen them walking down the street or taking a double hot chocolate, no whip, from my hand?

When he appeared, when the magnet that governed our movements jolted in galvanic response to his presence, Mike and I both knew it instantly. It was something in the way Sasha’s breath caught, something in the way her shoulders shifted, the way she set down her cup and lifted her head.

He was clean-jawed as some young Galahad, and there was an aquiline elegance to the planes of his nose, to the curls that clustered on his scalp in Greco-Roman order.

His stare went to Sasha and for once she didn’t smile or beckon. She just sat there staring wordlessly at him, her eyes as wide as windows. He came over to her table in three graceful strides and stooped to say something.

“Yes,” she said, giving him her hand. “That’s me.” He drew her hand to his lips and kissed the palm, a gesture as startlingly intimate as though he’d taken off his shirt.

Was he an Avatar as well? Was his job to console selfless women? To pick up people in coffee shops? To piss off unrequited lovers? What role did he fill?

Mike and I stood side by side, watching, ignoring the customer trying to get a refill on her mocha. We stared while Sasha gathered up her things and the young man helped her into her jacket, tucking his arm around her hand.

For a moment she looked back, and it would have been the time to say something then, but Mike’s heel ground into my foot. I yelped and she half-laughed, and waved at Mike, and left.

“Give the poor girl a little happiness,” Mike said. “Breathing room.”

“Will she be back tomorrow?”

He shrugged, finally looking to the counter and the empty mocha cup sitting there. “Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe she won’t be an Avatar any more.”

The customer gathered her drink after he refilled it and looked around, meeting my eyes. She took a step towards me.

I felt an ethereal weight, as though someone were watching me from just past her shoulder.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I’m supposed to meet someone here at two fifteen…”

The bell over the door jingled as another customer entered: plaid jacket, crew-cut, elderly, his gaze scanning the shop.

I squared my shoulders.

“First off,” I said, leaning forward to touch her sleeve. “Everything I told you in my e-mail was a lie.”