Chapter 2 - Gravity

 

Chapter 2

Gravity

Gravity has no rainbow.  You are not an arc.  You are not even an explosion. Were you, you might trace the narrowest ellipse of desire. A likelihood of doomed footprints, your trajectory realized then abdicated like all the hopes you had when you were younger.  There is no hope.  You won't leave a foot print, not even were you to walk through your own ashes. Hold onto the lie.

Work ends at 10:00 but closing starts at 9:30.  This is not a lie. 

Here are the things you will do.  You will work. 

If there is a god, he is one of those people that can’t have more than one friend at a time.  This evening between 9:16 and 10, god was friends with Cole.

There can be art in a kitchen, even magic, but mostly it's brain damage, blood shed and acts of the impossible stacked all the way up and forever.  Acts of complexity and timing that attract only critics, like a tobacco chewing cousin, spitting tobacco juice into an empty big gulp cup while watching you play solitaire on the floor and pointing out the matches as you see them, as an accusation of your stupidity, futurelessness and incompetence.  A kick to the back when you are a dog is still a kick, it does not matter that it comes from another dog. This kitchen was not any different.   

Breaks will be had.  Floors will be swept, dishes done, prep stored, grills dumped, jokes told, trash heaved and tossed and then then that glorious cool down.  sometimes its just one cigarette in length, sometimes it's an hour.  Its a gift the slaves give themselves, that and the peace of stealing from their own future, of shortening their lives for  shade in the shadow of servitude to the rich, or even just those with more than you. 

A relief that is not rest, a break that is not a finish.  A long drag from fountain drink when the three seconds you just spent were all you had.  when not thinking is the reward. Where there is no budget for speculation, just moving moving faster, and doing more.  

There is a gesture you can make with you right hand, and it can be hidden with a cigarette, or a soda can, where your index finger can roll a tumbler whose combination shows on the faces of those gathered.  it will push a huff to the surface, after back and forth you have reliably surfaced agreements and disagreements in conversation. And just then, the thumbs interphalangeal flexion crease, if it is dragged by the tumbler finger's finger nail, or pressed on the folded lip of a cold soda can, you can water level your peace from the well of repose in the souls of the overworked around you.  I do it nightly to Cole's coworkers after closing. It is the closest I come to sharing in their self sacrifice.  The closest i have ever come to earning it myself; this act of stealing it from others.

Cole does not know.

There is one day a week where this can happen. The other days I work the night audit. but tonight, i have off, and at 9:00 I walk across the highway and down the gravel frontage to the lone high pressure sodium street light on Cortez. I stand under it like a fly on an arm. a spider in the tub. I stand and wait for the lighting, the universes fly swatter, or the unremitting thumb of god. each night, despite my work against The Threads, pulling uphosltry tacks from the Great Divan, and all the smudges i have made with my own thumb on the Great Pastel Work, i remain alive. I check into the universe, present my ID. i look into the eye of the universe and it is seen, while it striping every idea of myself bare, see's me. 'this thing I am doing, i am going to keep doing, you know this right? i am right here, if you want me to stop, stop me.' and each night, i think it will and i wait for the end, 2-3 seconds, knowing i will be stopped, finally stopped. But the universe hands me back my id and gestures for me to pass on through. and so I do.