The big picture
September 15, 2008
"How can I help you?" The barrista asks brightly. She has more energy than looks, but somehow it evens out pretty well.
Mark hammers his fingers like drumsticks on the granite countertop.
"Can I get a mocha, mediumish, with two extra shots of espresso?" He smiles weakly while he speaks, holding out a debit card. The barrista is pressing flat buttons on the register.
"Okay, that's $4.96," She smiles.
She hands Mark his card back, and then a receipt with a little line for a tip, one for a total, and one for a signature. He fills it out quickly, tipping a dollar and four cents for a total of six dollars, then signs it and pushes it towards her on the counter. He moves to the end of the counter as she says thanks or come again or something else he doesn't pay much attention to.
Mark just quit his job. He has $614.70 in his bank account, well $608.70 now, and owes $475 for rent next week.
"Medium mocha two extra shots!" Another girl calls anonymously from behind the counter, setting a cup down. Mark takes it and sits down at a small table next to a window with two chairs pulled up, facing each other. The coffee shop is in the ground floor of a skyscraper, and the windows are some 5 feet wide and 16 tall each, they tile across two of four of the interior walls. Mark looks outside at the busy street, at the other skyscrapers, some still under construction, shooting up into the sky. There are groups of men in business suits, talking on cellphones, striding quickly and stopping abruptly according to the pedestrian traffic lights. There are messengers on bicycles with greasy hair and greasy skin and greasy bikes, weaving between cars and honks and shouts. There are bums on street corners shooting their stories at passersby. There are window washers, driving their squeegees on long poles against the huge ground floor windows. They thrust them up like a spear without touching the glass, then landing on the surface, drag them down fast making turns in tight little angles.
Mark sips from his cup and stares through the window, thinking. When a human fetus is formed, it doesn't have bones. Over time, it forms some, but they aren't very big or hard yet. Little organisms scoot around up and down the rubbery bones, leaving little trails of hard stuff behind them. Layer by layer, they get bigger and stronger. Up to half of the body weight of an average human adult is non-human; the non-human parts are all the little things that live in and on you. All the little things that scoot around, breaking things down and building things up, they're all just living their own little lives - and a good thing too. Even the mitochondria that live in each of your cells aren't human, but something with an entirely different set of genetic materials. You need these to produce energy, they're as necessary as could be. People are an ecosystem, a miracle of cohabitation.
When mark was a little boy, a leathery wise man with beady black eyes, some ninety years old, changed his name to "I stand back and watch."
Bones are built to last. When someone dies and all the gooey stuff rots and turns into dirt, the calcium sticks around for a long time, Mark thinks. Those bones were the infrastructure for an unfathomable host of living things. Mark looks at the machines and the scaffolding that sheath the brand new skyscrapers. He watches the workmen swarming on it likes ants on a hill. They're laying down little bricks and big bricks, and spraying cement everywhere. If one of the workmen dies, he'll get replaced. He looks at the window washers, they've moved on to a different building now. Nice, clean windows. If one of them dies, someone else will have to do it. When a civilization dies, they leave their buildings behind for a long, long time. All of us just playing our little parts all day long, worrying about our little lives, without a clue of what it is we are a part of.
After rent, I'll have $133.70, Mark thinks in a flash. And then he is looking at the bum on the corner.
When seeds are scattered across the ground, they land in a variety of places, Mark thinks. Some seeds land in rich, fertile soil, and they grow sturdy and strong. Some seeds land in the little cracks in the pavement, and they don't do so well. They dry out young, rely on spattered rain that reaches their tiny crack of soil, get trampled or even uprooted on purpose, on account of being unsightly.
Mark has trouble focusing on details. Details like money, details like relationships. Even keeping friends and an apartment or a hobby can get pretty complicated. The problem is that he's smart, and he's capable, and his dreams could swallow whales.
He drinks more from his cup, pushing all those details to the back of his brain. The window washers are working on the coffee shop now, and he watches the soap go on and then get scraped off. After a few minutes, the older of the two window washers comes inside to get his invoice signed. Mark stops him on is way out.
"Hey man," Mark says, not leaving his seat, "can I ask you a question?"
"Shoot."
"You own this business right, the window washing I mean, it's yours?"
"Sure is."
"That's awesome, is it pretty competitive?"
"Cutthroat." The man flips his little sunglasses, the color of gasoline floating on water, up to his forehead; perhaps Mark is thinking of starting a window washing company.
"How do you get business?" Mark asks.
"Most our accounts are ten or fifteen years old, I've been around quite awhile." The man smiles.
"But if you lost an account somehow, someone would pick it up?"
"In a second. Sometimes we lose accounts over a few dollars." The man flips his sunglasses back down, he is in a hurry.
"Thanks," Mark says, "Have a good morning."
If this guy dies, he''ll get replaced. In a second. Sometimes Mark makes sure that he's not way out there. He sips from his cup again, and then he looks at the bum outside, relying on spattered rain. A bad seed, or rather, bad soil.
People grow and develop in strange dimensions, Mark thinks. Our roots dig down into education, into relationships and finance, and into experience. Our leaves bask in affirmation, in respect, in our accomplishments. Sometimes, fungus grows for miles underground, vast and complicated; it struggles with other organisms for resources, for the right to live. The mushrooms are the part we see.
More than a decade after Mark's name was changed, he changed it back. It didn't work the way he 'd figured.
Tags for this piece: story city weakness plants coffee