The Coffee Cantata

"The separation between past, present and future is only an illusion, though a convincing one..."

- Albert Einstein.

Feet tucked in close, she sighed, picked up the newspaper and looked over the front page, settled on a story and started reading. From time to time she picked up her coffee, took a sip, a little grin crossing her face here, the shadow of a frown there. She found herself in the employment pages at one point, and her hands shook a little as contrary images flew through her mind, but she ventured inside, started scanning -- and daydreaming.

She was a bright girl -- too smart, some said -- and she was something of an empath, which, she thought, had at times doomed her to a life of unwanted insight. Born and raised in West L.A., she had gone to UCLA, then to graduate school at USC, her life ahead always centered on journalism, and then writing. She went to work for the Times a few years after Bill Clinton took office, and the first waves of cynicism broke over her shores as she watched the President lie about Lewinsky and that whole blue-stained affair. She threw away her blinders after that and became a real reporter, or so her friends said, after she won a Pulitzer for her coverage of events at a prison in Iraq a few years later.

She had become, over the intervening years, an outspoken critic of the rich and powerful, and by the time she wrote her first book -- a scathing, fact-based look at what it meant to be poor in America -- she had, of course, made more than a few enemies. Back at the Times after a year off for research, she continued to report on human issues raised by the contradictory impulses she found within America, and she made more enemies. So many her friends weren't too surprised when they heard she'd been summarily fired by the Times one Friday morning. She had packed her Pulitzer in a little cardboard box and walked out into the world with a smile on her face, but then she sold her house and bought a one-way ticket to China -- and she started walking. Walking to the west, always. Her friends didn't quite know what to think about her after that.

She walked most of the time, though sometimes passing trucks stopped and she hopped aboard, but she always did so with her reporters eyes and ears open. She took notes, wrote little penciled sketches of the people she ran across -- and descriptions of her empathic response to other's misery soon filled the pages of her little red notebook. Sketches of pain, but as she walked away from the huge cities of southeastern China, more often of happy contentment, portraits of farmers in Tibet's Racaka Pass, of riverboat operators ferrying passengers, and eventually, about the serene smiles she encountered when she talked to herdsmen in Bhutan. She fought a cobra one morning in the eastern reaches of Bhutan, and lived to write about the encounter, but a few days later she slipped and tumbled down a rocky slope, knocking the wind out of her and hurting her left leg. Badly, she discovered. She was afraid it was broken, and though she knew she was close to her destination, she had never felt more alone, or more vulnerable.

A red-robed monk happened along and introduced himself, and Lindsey told him her name, where she was from, and the ancient man just smiled, nodded his head as he helped her stand. Her left leg buckled as he helped her up, so he helped her up again and shouldered her weight this time, and they climbed back to the path and began walking along the trail again. It took them two days, but they finally arrived at the base of a cliff, and she looked up, saw a monastery in the clouds. They struggled up a steep trail through deep woods, scaled rock walls that led even higher, then he helped her along the last stretch, out along a vast ledge that ended at a cluster of white buildings perched on the edge of forever -- and she lived within that mountainside community for weeks. She lived in a wholly improbable world, an ancient place carved into the side of a sheer face of rock, the waters of a wild river roaring hundreds of feet below -- and she thought about that river for days without end. Where it went, the people whose lives depended on it, and what would happen if the water stopped flowing. In time she saw the river as a metaphor, as a mirror held up to life, human life, her life.

As all things must, she considered, have a beginning, and come to an end.

And one day she realized she had fallen in love with the mountains and the trees, and even the men who lived in solitude with the clouds. She wished she was different -- so she could stay -- but she wasn't. One day the same monk, the same man who helped her that broken day, walked with her down to the river and helped her board a little boat. She watched him recede into the passing landscape with despair, then hope, before she started walking again, still to the west.

She came to a village a day later and fell ill, seriously ill, and deep delirium came for her. In a fevered dream she saw herself being loaded in the back of a truck, then in a hospital of some sort -- at one point she saw brown men in white coats doing things to her she didn't understand -- then one day she woke up and saw the world as it was, perhaps.

A little man, no taller than she, stood by the side of her bed looking at a chart, and she looked at him.

"You are most very ill," he said to her.

"And?"

"I think you must go someplace else. We do not have the resources to care for you."

"What's wrong with me?"

"You have a disease I can not understand," he said, struggling to find the correct words. "I am not sure I may care to you."

"You can't care for me?"

"Adequately, I think is the word I seek."

"Ah. So what must I do?"

"You must take us to Paro. When you are strong enough. When we have a truck."

She drifted away again, and when next she woke she felt a rough road underneath an ancient truck, and through flapping canvas sides she watched a dusty road pass by, just out of reach, and she wanted to be down there, walking. Walking and listening. Sketching portraits of lives she didn't understand.

"Do I understand my own life?' she thought once. 'The purpose of my life?'

She saw the outskirts of a city pass beyond the tattered canvas, and she recognized the hospital for what it was. Careful men came for her and carried her inside, and she felt IVs being started, then doctors or nurses at the foot of her bed talking in hushed, excited tones. She could feel her sweat-soaked gown when chills came, then as suddenly she could feel she was being baked alive -- and she would call out for help, for water.

And one morning an American was standing beside her, looking at her almost ruefully.

"Hello."

"Yes, hello there. My name is Carter Freeman, and I'm from the consulate. How are you feeling?"

She shook her head. "Not good."

"I'm not surprised," Freeman said. "You've picked up a bad bug, and apparently you broke your leg recently. It wasn't set properly and there's some sort of infection in the bone, and that's when they called us."

"What do they need you for?"

"They think you should try to get home, to a more well equipped facility than this, anyway. They're afraid you'll lose your leg otherwise."

"Ah."

"So, you're Lindsey Hollister. The writer?"

"I've heard that rumor too."

He smiled, tried not to laugh. "Well, I've come to get you, to take you home."

"What if I want to stay here?"

"That's your call, Miss Hollister, but frankly, I'd want to know why?"

"Because these mountain, and these people feel like home now."

He nodded his head. "Understandable. There's magic in the air up here."

She remembered turning and looking out the window just then, looking to the mountains as if looking for an answer to the most important question of her life.

The question. What was it? She had seen it, but now it was gone...

"You feel it too?"

And he had nodded his head. "Impossible not to, I guess. You came through China, walking all the way?"

"Yup."

"You landed in Shanghai, eighteen months ago. That's the last recorded entry on your passport. Have you been walking since."

"Yes, aside from the two months I rested after I hurt my leg."

"Where was that?"

"A monastery, I think it was in Bhutan but I'm not sure."

"I came by yesterday," he said, suddenly a little nervous. "I went through your things, read through one of your journals, trying to figure out where you'd been."

She looked at him like he was a thief who'd stumbled into her room.

"I found myself weeping at one point," he continued, "weeping at the beauty you found. I wanted to read more, but I couldn't. I felt like I was walking where I shouldn't. Not without your permission, anyway. Do you plan to write about all this?"

She looked away. "I don't know."

"You should...I mean, I hope you do. I was lost in your words, in the things I saw through your eyes. I wanted to know more, too. About those things, and -- you."

"Me?"

"I fell in love with you, I think -- or with your ability to perceive the human, I suppose."

"Nothing so personal as a word, I assume."

"Yes. Exactly."

"So? What have you planned for me?"

"Lufthansa, tomorrow morning. To Frankfurt, then Los Angeles."

"I see. No choice, eh?"

"It's the recommendation of your government. Mine, too. Unless, of course, you want to die here."

And so early the next morning they moved her to the airport, and Freeman was there, waiting, and he went to the airplane with her, saw her settled in her seat then he asked her to write, to share, and then he was gone. She seemed to sleep and sleep, and never saw Frankfurt come or go. She woke up on a gurney, another IV flowing, and she realized she was in another aircraft -- and she thought that strange -- then sleep came again.

She woke up one morning and felt wonderful, completely refreshed, and she looked out the window in the room she was in and saw palm trees in the distance, swaying in a Santa Anna, and in an instant she knew she was home. The brown air seemed familiar, even the color of the sky seemed to scream 'Home' -- and she felt an unexpected surge of happiness.

A mountain of a man came to her a little later -- he looked like a football player, or a wrestler, but he said he was an infectious disease specialist and that he had been treating her for ten days...

"I've been here ten days?"

"You have."

"And just where is here?"

"UCLA."

"I thought the air smelled familiar. Is that a Santa Anna blowing?"

"Yup. For a few days now."

"So, what's blowing through my veins right now."

"Oh, a cocktail of Vancomycin, prednisone, fluconazole, and acyclovir. Maybe a little Red Bull, too," he said, grinning.

"Is that why I feel so 'up'?"

"Your white counts were in the basement yesterday, so you got another transfusion last night. That accounts for the feeling of energy. What did you do to your leg, by the way?"

"I fell down a mountain."

"Oh? Where?"

"Bhutan."

"Bhutan? What on earth were you doing there?"

"Taking a walk."

"A walk?"

"Yes."

"Uh, yes, admissions wanted me to ask. We can't find a home address for you?"

"I don't have one?"

"But you have insurance. How'd you work that out?"

"I have friends in low places."

"Well, they're going to need an address. Some place to send correspondence."

"Bills, you mean."

He chuckled. "Yeah. Probably a few of those, too."

"Well, as soon as I find a place to live I'll let you know."

"Are you looking? For a place, I mean?"

"I suppose I might as well."

"Well, my parents have an apartment building over on Gayley. It's surrounded by frat houses, but it has a pool. Kind of nice, and it's close to the hospital."

"Sounds nice. Tell 'em I'll take it."

He looked taken aback. "You don't want to look at it first?"

"No, not really."

"Do you have any furniture, any thing at all?"

"No, I burned all those bridges a while ago."

"So, you really want me to call them?"

"Yes. How long will I need to stay in here?"

"As soon your counts stabilize and the fever abates," he said. "Maybe a few days."

"What's your name, by the way," she asked.

"Oh, sorry. Doug Peterson."

"You grow up around here?"

"Yup. You?"

"Beverly Hills High," she said.

"Small world, isn't it?"

She looked at him and laughed. "Never smaller than now."

And he helped her move over to her new place that weekend, and when she went inside the little apartment she found the place furnished. Clean-lined Scandinavian furniture, bright fabrics on the sofa and teak chairs, very modern, almost cheery.

"I hope you don't mind," he said, "but I didn't think walking into an empty place would be all that fun. I had this stuff in storage," he added, wistfully, "and it needs a good home."

"Oh?"

"When my wife and I got married I, well, Madeleine didn't like the way this stuff looked so I put it all in storage. Out of sight, out of mind, I guess."

"You couldn't part with it?"

"No, I guess not."

She walked around the little place, found plates and silverware and pots and pans all set up in the cupboards, and the 'fridge was stocked with a few necessities too. She walked into the bedroom, found the bed made and toiletries on the bathroom counter; her eyes welled with tears and she turned to him.

"Why, Doug? Why did you do all this?"

"I don't know, really. I think I want you to be happy."

"Happy?" she asked, as she looked at the need in his eyes.

"I have an old Mac set up in here," he said, leading her back into the living room. "All the software has been upgraded, my old stuff's been cleaned off so there's nothing on it. A blank slate, I guess you could say. In case you want to write or get caught up on email." She went over to the little sofa and sat, a line of perspiration beading on her forehead, and he came to her, felt her with the back of his hand.

"Do you know where my stuff is?" she asked as he went into the kitchen. He came back with his little black bag and sat in the chair next to the sofa.

"Yeah. I put it in the closet, over there," he said, pointing to the entry closet, but he had a thermometer out and he rubbed it across her forehead.

He looked at the readout, shook his head. "Time for bed, Lindsey," he said as he helped her stand. They walked to the little bedroom and he helped her go into the bathroom, then helped her into the bed. He pulled the sheets up around her neck and tucked her in, and he ran his fingers through her hair once before he left.

She had a difficult time falling asleep.

+++++

She scanned the ads, looking at jobs in the Westwood area, preferably something mindless and uninvolved, and she saw one at a coffee place just a few blocks away. She looked at the time and went to the bathroom to shower, then she dressed and walked down the hill into the old village. She found the place and went inside, ordered an iced coffee and sat, looked out the broad windows at people walking past on the sidewalk.

The place had, she thought, kind of a cool vibe, a mellow hipster thing going as she watched people come and go, and at one point a girl came out to clean tables and she asked her a question.

"Do you like working here?"

"Yeah," the girl said. "It's never the same day twice, ya know. Something different every morning."

"It seems laid back."

"Yeah, I suppose so. Uh, are you here for the job?"

"I was thinking about it."

"Oh. Okay," she said, then the girl disappeared into the office behind the counter. A few minutes later an older woman came out, and Lindsey watched her approach through a reflection in the window, trying not to smile...

"Excuse me," the woman said, "but Melody told me you might be here about the job?"

"Hello, Sara."

"Oh my God!" Whiteman almost screamed. "Lindsey?! Is that you?"

And she stood, hugged her old friend from high school.

"What in God's name are you doing here?" Sara whispered. "I read about you in the paper a few weeks ago...about that walk you took, and getting sick. What on earth were you thinking?"

"So, does this mean I get the job?"

"What? Lindsey? What's going on?"

"I need to get out of the house, be around people. I haven't been in a while, and it's eating away at me."

Sara sat down by her old friend. "Really? You want to work here? Why? I mean, why don't you go downtown, get a real job? Do what you do best?"

"I want to do what I do best, Sara. I want to talk, and listen, to people."

Whiteman sighed, shook her head. "It's counter work, minimum wage, no benefits for three months. Is that what you want?"

"Sounds good."

"When can you start?"

"Tomorrow soon enough?"

"You sure? Sure you want to do this?"

"I think so, yes."

"Next question. Are you up to it? It's not hard manual labor, but it does entail some physical work. Clearing tables, preparing orders. Are you ready for that kind of thing?"

"Yup. My doc thinks it would be a good thing."

"Nothing infectious, right? You're safe?"

Lindsey nodded her head. "Yup. Clean as a whistle."

"God, I can't believe this, Lindsey. It's so good to see you, but this too? Wow...I'm just blown away."

"Me too. Look, do I need anything weird in the clothing department, anything like that?"

"No, not really. Comfortable shoes, only arms and hands visible, per health codes, as you'll handle food. That means slacks and shirts, but shoes are the big thing."

"Would these be okay?" she asked, pointing to her jeans and scuffed hiking boots.

"As long as they're clean, sure."

"Cool. What time should I be here?"

"Only time the shop is open is five to one, so it's an early morning shift. Are you a morning person?"

"Not a problem."

"Well, how 'bout I see you tomorrow morning?"

"Front door?"

"Yup. Bright and early."

"Okay, I'll be here."

They hugged, then Lindsey walked out into the flow of people on the sidewalk, and Sara Whiteman watched as she disappeared. Melody, her assistant, came and stood by her side then, and they watched her leave.

"She's so skinny, like she's been sick or something," the girl said.

"She has been," Sara Whiteman sighed. "Since the day I met her."

+++++

And a week later there's was a new, if an almost familiar routine. Not quite like school decades ago, but close enough. Friends are just that, after all, and it felt like they started up again where they'd left off, as good friends often do.

Unlock at five, tidy the place up and get coffee going, set out baked good in the counter and get specials marked-up on the chalk board. Open the doors at six and get to work. Within a few days she'd learned how to use the most complicated brewing machines, and the techniques to satisfy even the most hardened caffeine junkies, and she worked the counter efficiently, even gracefully, and soon people came in and said their 'hellos' and 'goodbyes' on their way through her day, and new patterns developed in her morning.

In the very early morning, when commutes began and sometimes ended, the shop filled with harried executives dashing off to work, and coveys of nurses unwinding after long nights on the floor. Professors from the university across the street constituted the next onrushing wave, often before lectures -- yet usually after, and students came on this riptide, lingering long after their coffee grew cold, lost in lecture notes or lining textbooks with bright yellow highlighters.

Lunchtime in the shop was a mad rush. Iced coffees and cold, house-made sandwiches flying over the counter at a breakneck pace, then she was helping to clean up as the shop closed for the day. Her day done, she walked up the hill to her apartment, and soon she was grateful for the swimming pool. On sunny days she sat under the sun for hours and hours, often watching her legs dangling beneath the water's surface -- lost in thought. There was a table by the gate and she liked to sit by a eucalyptus tree there, notebook in hand, eyes focused on distant memories -- and one day she was sitting by the cool blue water, adrift in a conversation she'd had with a boatman almost a year ago, when like a passing cloud a welcome break came by.