He wasn’t supposed to have these thoughts. He was supposed to have a coffee, a croissant. For a moment, he pressed his forehead against the door. Then he left the apartment.
The woman behind the counter was named Bix. When he walked in, she was busy wiping down the complicated metal parts of the espresso machine. Then she turned around and her face lit up. Hers was not an especially pretty face but, like all faces, it was made beautiful by illumination. Back when he was an artist, Jesse had often said this was the reason he’d become one. Once you were a painter—well, as long as you were a painter—there was no difference between the way things seemed and the way they were. It didn’t matter whether the thing—the fruit on the counter, the coins in the tip jar, the glint in her eye—was actually as bright as it appeared to be from this particular angle, at this particular moment. Her eyes were blue just now, but one step forward, into the shadow, and they would be gray. The light didn’t trick you. It actually changed you.
I saw you in a video, Bix said, instead of her usual greeting. Her voice seemed inappropriately loud. Jesse looked quickly around the coffee shop, to check who might be listening, but it was empty except for a man in the corner, wearing enormous headphones, bent over his phone. Flakes of pastry fell onto the screen. Jesse had seen the man many times, but he didn’t know his name, or anything about him. Bix, who made a point of talking with all the regulars, even the ones who wore headphones, probably knew a lot about him. Was that her job, or just her personality? She had gone back to cleaning the spouts and knobs of the espresso machine, but she was still talking loudly. The video had been posted by one of the organizers. It showed the whole room: the banners, the dinosaurs, the museum guards caught in confusion. But there were closeups, too. She had seen him flat on his back, arms crossed, eyes closed. Half his body in shadow, the other half in light. It was really cool, she said. It was really cool to see him like that.
She kept talking—she had strong opinions about the social responsibility of artists, about role models, about finding meaning in life—but Jesse’s mind snagged on this sentence. To see him like what? To see him dead?
The officers arrived at the scene promptly, but it took a while for them to act. They milled around, watching and chatting, and every now and then one of them issued a warning through a megaphone, reminding the protesters that their behavior was unlawful, that they were required to clear the premises. This, Jesse had been told, was to be expected. Arresting two hundred people was a hassle more than anything else—a lot of paperwork. Better to wait the performance out, to hope the protesters would get restless and give up. These guys can get angry, one of the organizers had said, with the weary voice of experience, but probably not about a bunch of people taking a nap at the museum. Not about the climate. The protesters were mostly middle-aged, mostly white. They were well dressed.
Jesse had bristled at this. Wasn’t the whole point to make people angry? But once he was on the floor he was relieved. His only job was to wait for the cops to stop waiting. His heart rate slowed. His eyelids bloomed with lazy spots of color.
He knew this state of suspension well. Hours in the studio: sitting on a stool, staring at the drawer of unwilling brushes and oils, not touching a single one. Entire days on the ward: lying on the rubbery mattress, speaking to no one, staring at his hands. (The claws had disappeared in the hospital, because he couldn’t sleep in the hospital.) It was only now, a big black police boot planted next to his ear, that he understood what he had been doing with all those empty hours that had turned into empty days. He was waiting for them to stop waiting. His friends, his doctors, his wife.
How long had it been? Years had passed since that day in the car, the first time he’d tried to explain it to Christina. It wasn’t an idea. Not an emotion, either. An intuition? It came out of nowhere. No, it came from inside him. On the highway, say, if he looked too closely at the pavement rushing toward him and then rushing past him. Ignoring him. It would be so easy to put his hands in his lap, to put his feet on the floor. To let the car decide. It would be the easiest thing in the world. Stop driving, stop trying, stop playing, stop resisting.
Intuition—or was it insight? On a balcony, on the edge of the subway platform, while chopping an onion with a large, sharp knife. He simply saw what could happen. The light flashed on the blade. He did not feel despair when he saw it, or even fear. If he was being honest, he had a hard time understanding why everyone else couldn’t see it, too. Death was not the world-ending event you imagined as a child, trying to believe in your parents’ impermanence. No, he had told her, death was as ordinary as life. And did he even need to tell her? Surely she knew it better than he did. Death happened every day.
Christina had nodded, held his hand. She didn’t say the things he’d worried she might. Bland, reassuring things: that everything would be O.K., that it was all in his head. But what could she say? It was in his head. There was a difference between death that rolled in on a gurney, seeping through bandages, beeping on machines, and death that hovered vaguely, mutely beside you, ready to tap you on the shoulder, but not quite yet. Most people experiencing panic attacks, Christina had explained to him once, believed they were having heart attacks. They came to the hospital clutching their chests. They were disappointed by her diagnosis. Embarrassing, incurable.
She had squeezed Jesse’s hand, which meant he should squeeze back. He did it, but he barely felt it. His fingers were stiff in the cold, almost numb. While they sat there, silent and stationary, traffic rushing past them, the sun moved behind a cloud. The car got darker. Not by much—just enough for them to realize what they hadn’t noticed before: the car had been full of light. That’s what death was like, he could have said, but he didn’t.
Jesse was relieved when the door to the coffee shop jingled behind him, interrupting Bix in the middle of what she was saying about the paradox of trying to be creative in a destructive world. Jesse had said something similar himself—to Christina, to the psychiatrist—but hearing someone else say it made him embarrassed. He wasn’t failing to paint because temperatures were rising and species were disappearing and everything was made of plastic. He was failing to paint because he was showing up late to the studio and sitting on a stool and staring at his brushes. He tried to count the number of things in the studio that were made of plastic, but lost count.
The man in the doorway had broad shoulders and wore bulky gloves. I’ll take the most normal coffee you have, he said. Normal coffee with normal milk. He had to remove the gloves to get cash out of his pocket. Bix suggested a dark roast with cow’s milk. The man shrugged. Whatever you say.
While Bix poured the coffee into the cup and the milk into the coffee—the espresso machine sat clean and useless behind her—she extracted information from the man. He wasn’t from the neighborhood, wasn’t even from the city. He owned a business with his wife of thirty-five years. Bix wanted to know what kind of business, but, before he could answer, the man with the headphones appeared at the counter, holding out his empty cup and empty plate expectantly. Pastry flakes clung to the front of his sweater. As soon as Bix took the dishes from him, he retrieved his phone from his pocket and hurried out the door.
The man with the normal coffee frowned. He couldn’t believe how few people said thank you these days. Basic manners. He threw his hands in the air: poof! But Bix just shook her head and gave him his receipt. He has a hard life, she said.
There was a silence then, which might have been an ordinary silence or might have been a meaningful silence. Everyone waiting for someone else to speak. Jesse looked at the pastry case of crumbs to avoid looking at Bix.
Well, the man said at last. He had to say thank you, of course, but he said it uncertainly. Then Jesse was the only one left. Bix knew his order already. At some point, he couldn’t remember exactly when, she’d stopped even asking. No doubt she meant to be kind, to spare him the small humiliation of saying it out loud: the usual. Well, maybe he should have to say it. The same as yesterday. The same as tomorrow.
The machine made its unthinking sounds, whirring and grinding and gurgling, and when it was done Bix bent over the cup in silent concentration, tracing a flower on the surface. Hundreds of roses in a single day, each one identical to the last, or else she poured the whole thing out and started over.
The cops were surprisingly, ostentatiously polite when the time came—when they were done waiting. They cleared their throats awkwardly. Jesse opened his eyes and instead of the dinosaur’s bones he saw the police officer’s face, ruddy and stubbled. They had been instructed not to resist, and Jesse had always been good at following instructions. He stood up, put his hands behind his back, spoke only when spoken to. They were lined up in twos. Like boarding the ark, someone ahead of him said. Or like walking down the aisle. An officer stood behind each pair and pressed between their shoulder blades when it was time to start moving. The banners were being pulled down, but the protesters took up the slogans, chanting as they walked through the marble hallway toward the museum entrance. Some of the other museumgoers were clapping, and almost all of them had their phones out.
The children, to Jesse’s surprise, were still there, racing up and down the hall. A boy with long curly hair stopped in front of Jesse, an accusatory finger directed at his chest. That’s him, the boy said. That’s the man from the Neanderthals. A girl with identical hair pointed, too. That’s him. That’s the caveman.
They ran away, but Jesse could still hear them laughing, or thought he could. He tried to picture it: his heavy jaw, his stooped spine, his tiny skull. Hair that was more like fur. He laughed, too. Why not? He filled in the rest of the picture. Giant plants, absurd animals. Untouched stones, uncorrupted seas. The vast horizon of prehistory. The police officer told him to stop laughing and he didn’t—couldn’t. He probably sounded crazy, but he had always suspected that. Hadn’t the doctors said as much? In his mind, he painted the sky implausible purples and pinks, brighter than he’d ever seen.
When Jesse emerged from the coffee shop, the man with good manners was climbing into the cab of a truck. It idled beside the curb, a gentle growl emerging from under the hood. A few weeks ago—no, longer than that, before the hospital—Jesse had read a newspaper article about a new law in the city that fined truck drivers who left their vehicles idling for more than three minutes. At one point, he’d known exactly how many pounds of carbon dioxide an engine released per hour, but he’d forgotten. It was too hard to visualize. What did a pound of gas look like?
Anyone who filmed the idling trucks could claim a portion of the money collected through the fine. Jesse had considered joining in. Doing his part, he thought. Once or twice, he’d even taken out his phone and started recording, but he never followed through. He was too afraid of being caught. Caught trying to catch someone else. The whole thing filled him with a vague guilt he wouldn’t have been able to explain.
The man was sitting in the passenger seat of the truck. From where Jesse stood, he couldn’t see who, if anyone, was in the driver’s seat. He watched the man take the lid off his coffee cup and blow on the liquid inside. He held it carefully, almost tenderly, his fingers interlaced. Normal coffee with normal milk. Jesse took a noisy sip from his own cup, and as he swallowed he brought one hand to his throat—warmth inside and out. His pulse was faint but steady, and not for the first time he marvelled at the body’s quiet: you couldn’t hear it without touching it.
The truck idled for three minutes, then four minutes, then five. At six minutes, the man put down his coffee, rolled down the window, and said, What the hell are you staring at?
Jesse flinched, as if he’d been hit in the face. If only he’d been hit in the face, he thought. He opened his mouth and said nothing. Later, he’d be able to think of exactly the right thing to say. The thing to make the man ashamed. Better, the thing to make the man understand. But for now he could do nothing but close his mouth and stare at the blank in his brain. The man’s breath froze in the air between them. Tiny drops of coffee clung to the hair above his lip. The invisible driver pulled away from the curb, plumes of exhaust dancing in the truck’s wake.
Jesse climbed the four flights of stairs to the apartment. The drink in his hand was cold and unappealing. But so what? He could make his own coffee, or quit coffee altogether. In thirty-seven minutes, he was supposed to sit in his chair and turn on his computer and tell the psychiatrist how he’d been. But so what? He could start a new routine, or abandon routine altogether. At the top of the stairs, he tried to turn the doorknob, but it resisted. He turned it harder and it resisted more. His fingers were turning white with effort when it occurred to him that there might be someone on the other side, turning the knob in the opposite direction. He couldn’t see Christina, but he could imagine her. As soon as he let go, the door would spring open. She would look surprised, then relieved. The light would stream through the window behind her, setting her hair on fire. She would see him clearly, but for a moment—just for a moment—he would close his eyes to keep from being blinded by the sun. ♦
