“My wife, late-wife, now, wrote a book about the illusory nature of stasis and its somewhat dismal, at least overwhelmingly incongruent nature with how the human soul wants to make itself out, it was a short novel about the inventor of a new detergent, I read it once. She is dead now, the book gone to perhaps a modicum of what now covers the ground. She never learned English. She hated English. I learned by weighting tables. I once waited for the CEO of Pepsi, well he served as CEO for three years in the mid something, 80s or 90s or I’m not sure, he was a black-haired bastard with rotted teeth. He ate a Sea Bass with orange glaze and spit each bone onto the hexagonal patterned carpet.... I had rituals even then, before all this we used to have rituals, me and my wife. I used to fill a saucer with milk and watch a cat come crawling from under the rotted boards, or watch as midges of gnats swarmed near a street post’s global shed of light, untangle the knots of her plump back…“

The old waiter was speaking, not necessarily talking to me, he probably did not speak to many people, he would ask if they wanted a refill, apologize, count out change; but the litany and minutiae crept only inwards. The letter the waiter held ransom, began emanating a sound or psychologically my mind forced this into reality, or some pastiche of reality, which perhaps is the only type of reality. The letter humming like a cicada.

“I have spent the last few months wiping away ash from table tops, and the flat square of wooden chairs, sweeping up hills of grey, later after a surface has been baptized, the ashes will gather again. No one comes to eat; they pass by covered in grey. I’ll wipe ash 5-6 hours a day. Reveal down trick waters minutes, mesmerized sardines, the articles refugees, loan to Songs, bearing apparent visible ceremonials. I read my wife’s book once and at times lines will come back to me…”

Leaving, I found that it was nearing curfew; the sun readying to set. Time had prolapsed or gently eroded at its edges. I needed a dentist. Checking my pockets, I found the letter missing. I was three blocks away from the bistro. Running back, I stumble twice on the gray masses of things that remain unknowable, scraping my knees and palms. The waiter was still at the table. My letter was open and slowly the waiter was reading what I had written for my landlord. His swollen face turned down. I wonder why he would open a letter not addressed to him? Hearing my footsteps, he looks up and our eyes meet, perhaps for the first time, they are milked over and he is far older than I had first thought.

“I think I can help you.“

The waiter’s voice took on the pulse and meandering rust of a man near a final edge. His chin was still bleeding.

“It’s nearing curfew and I have to deliver that to my landlord, or that is his conglomerate, or perhaps him or her, their self, or their secretary, I have not worked that out quite yet.”

“I understand your situation; I think I can help.” Placing the letter into the envelope, the old waiter placed it into his inner coat pocket, which was an alarming site. Why had he taken my letter? The envelope paper had darkened, now almost a grayish tone, a humorless gray like the amorphous shape of a synthetic cloud, or the dead eye of a river fish. I had no choice. Leading me into a labyrinth of alleys or half alleys hieroglyphed in graffiti. We were at the edge of two zones. On the right the sacrificial zone and the left the glass towers, that now, as the sun was setting, reflected a soft honey color.

Sailor moon

“My wife, late-wife, now, wrote a book about the illusory nature of stasis and its somewhat dismal, at least overwhelmingly incongruent nature with how the human soul wants to make itself out, it was a short novel about the inventor of a new detergent, I read it once. She is dead now, the book gone to perhaps a modicum of what now covers the ground. She never learned English. She hated English. I learned by weighting tables. I once waited for the CEO of Pepsi, well he served as CEO for three years in the mid something, 80s or 90s or I’m not sure, he was a black-haired bastard with rotted teeth. He ate a Sea Bass with orange glaze and spit each bone onto the hexagonal patterned carpet.... I had rituals even then, before all this we used to have rituals, me and my wife. I used to fill a saucer with milk and watch a cat come crawling from under the rotted boards, or watch as midges of gnats swarmed near a street post’s global shed of light, untangle the knots of her plump back…“

The old waiter was speaking, not necessarily talking to me, he probably did not speak to many people, he would ask if they wanted a refill, apologize, count out change; but the litany and minutiae crept only inwards. The letter the waiter held ransom, began emanating a sound or psychologically my mind forced this into reality, or some pastiche of reality, which perhaps is the only type of reality. The letter humming like a cicada.

“I have spent the last few months wiping away ash from table tops, and the flat square of wooden chairs, sweeping up hills of grey, later after a surface has been baptized, the ashes will gather again. No one comes to eat; they pass by covered in grey. I’ll wipe ash 5-6 hours a day. Reveal down trick waters minutes, mesmerized sardines, the articles refugees, loan to Songs, bearing apparent visible ceremonials. I read my wife’s book once and at times lines will come back to me…”

Walking down into a darkened hole. The subway stairs falling deep into the space beneath the city. Suddenly the old waiter stops and we open a door that did not appear to be there at first. In the abandoned hull of a subway cart, someone had set up a white room smelling of disinfectant. A woman behind a black desk sits in an all-white suit, only her eyes showing.

“They turn blood into medicine. It pays well.”

Lifting his sleeve, he showed me his arm. Though it was hard to tell what was radiation poisoning and what might be scars from needle entry, or from the age of the skin itself with its translucent and speckled canvas.

“You can still sell it, even with radiation poisoning and burns like that?” Though the old man did not answer. Taking off his suit jacket and resting it on the waiting chair, he walked up to the desk, and was greeted like an old friend. My watch showed 4:52. In this sunken place, I had no access to time. Shaking the jacket, my letter falls to the white floor. Disappearing behind a medical partition, the woman in white and the old waiter embrace in transfusion. The envelope leaves a small tracing of its shape in ash on the white floor. Getting lost twice, I find my way to the surface. A failed light cools in the edges of the horizon. Unsure of the time, I run, breathing in deep lungfuls of rotted air.