Her Name Escapes Me

The girl can't be older than twenty-five. She's wearing a simple, white shirt and a flimsy blue sweater, unbuttoned. Her hair hangs loose and light. She tilts her head to keep it out of her eyes. She hovers over a big, thick book. Watch her flip the same page over. She's supposed to be reading there, in the diner. She's well settled in her booth with her coffee and a tiny plate of collected crumbs. She looks like she belongs in this diner. Perhaps the booth is reserved for exactly this sort of behavior. If she were to pack up and leave, within minutes another young woman would sweep in, throw her jacket across the seat opposite, lay her hat next to the salt shaker, and pull out a huge, old book to flip through idly.

But the girl does not leave. She had been sitting for hours, ordering just enough food to keep the manager from throwing her out. She'd picked apart a muffin twenty minutes ago. Watch her eyes scan a page. See her fingers run under the edge. She flips the page over. The action is purely mechanical. This is how a person reads a book. This is how a book is read. The words evaporate in her mind, the meaning of the page leaves her. She turns back to the previous page. There is something to decipher there, among those words, something evading her on that one specific page. Watch her eyes scan it again.

And now here is a man. He can't be younger than fifty. Wearing a plain, old suit. He wears it in just the way every man should, simply, naturally. He wears the suit like every man should, but no one does anymore. He is the only man in a suit in this whole diner. No one wears suits anymore, even though they should. Watch him move slowly down the aisle. A waitress is leading him to his own booth, but he moves slowly, falling behind. He does not want to sit where she places him. The waitress reminds him of a nurse in a hospital, the way she moves, efficient. She places a black, folded menu on the table of the booth where he is to sit. He smiles at her and she leaves him. He does not want to sit at that booth. He'll find another.

Watch him hover down the aisle. See how his hands touch each chair as he passes, like he is counting them. But he is not counting them, or perhaps, just not adding the numbers as he counts. One, one, one. Each chair, each booth, each table is singular like his footsteps. They add up to nowhere.

And then he sees the girl.

He does not speed up or slow down. This is important to remember. He sees the girl and knows that he will go and talk to her. He will tell her everything if he can, answer any question. He does not speed up or slow down because he knows that he is mistaken. Watch him now, smiling in a tired way. Watch him smooth his thinning hair. He knows that he is wrong.

Now he is interrupting her and excusing himself. She doesn't want to chat with anyone, but he caught her off guard. She invites him to sit. She curses her own politeness, all the manners her mother buried in her brain. She doesn't want to be so polite. She tries to smile, but she's not really listening. This works out just fine, because the man is talking, but not to her.

He tells a story. There was this girl, you see. This was all a long time ago, but he met a girl with an Egyptian name. She worked at this gallery, hanging pictures and paintings, dusting up, watching the register. Everything was painted white, and she'd wear black, but her eyes were blue. She had a way of talking like she was laughing.

'You remind me of her,' he tells the girl in the booth. She nods like she turns the page, mechanically. This is how a person listens to a story. This is how a story is listened to.

The man married the girl with the Egyptian name in the story. They lived together and things happened. Some things were scary, some heart warming, some tragic. This is a sad sort of story, it has to be. Watch the man talk to the girl. The way this story goes, it has to be sad.

The man asks about the book. The girl turns the cover to show him the title. Bullfinch's Mythology. She's reading about some king or something. He asks if she likes to read that sort of thing. She tells him that it's for a class. She is lying. Watch her lie about the book. She just grabbed the biggest thing on the shelf as she walked out the door. She doesn't want to go back anytime soon.

'And which one are you reading right now?' he asks her. He wants any topic, any excuse to stay away from the other booth, the place where he is supposed to sit.

The girl looks back at the page, the one she keeps reading. There was a king and he was very clever, but he made the gods mad. When he died, they made him roll a boulder up a hill over and over.

The man smiles, he's heard that one. The girl asks him about the girl with the Egyptian name. What happened to her? Where'd she go?

The waitress walks by. She wants to take his order. He asks for a few more minutes, a little more time. The waitress leaves, she doesn't really care either way. He watches her hips sway as she walks. There was a hallway in a hospital somewhere and a nurse pointing to a door. So casually she pointed to the bed where a woman was going to die. He never had a say. No one ever asked him anything.