When she felt her lack of sleep was starting to effect her work at the magazine, though, C.J. would slip down to the Muddy Waters coffee shop. It was a few blocks from her home and easy for her to walk to before and after work. If she had the time, she’d listen in on the loud conversations that took place at the chairs set up under the awning, outside the front door.
“The whole fucking government is subjective.” A man in a white t-shirt named Robert would shout. “A ridiculous experiment and still in its infancy. We’re talking Petri dish here, folks, and the whole thing could easily get tossed off the lab table with a random flail of the arm.” He flailed his own arm for effect.
The middle-aged men’s opinions were more solid than their facts, but the debate was a reasonably informed one. It was one that you could listen to most any day outside of the coffee shop, since many of the men were either retired or unemployed. As she sat and drank her after-work coffee, C.J. would refute the things that they’d say. “Listen Robert, Thomas Paine told us that while government at its worst is an ‘intolerable’ evil, he also added that at its best it’s a ‘necessary’ one.” They didn’t hear her, though, because C.J. only spoke the ideas in her head. Sitting at her table, the cute girl with the short straight red hair and tired brown eyes looked only into her cup of coffee. No one would even have guessed that she might have rendered many of the men into agreement, if only she had spoken.
She had moved to San Francisco from her parents’ house just two years ago. She worked as an assistant to the editors of a technical magazine, but in her heart she loved the breathtaking language of poetry. Her favorite night of the week was Thursday. That was when she walked to the corner of Mission and Sixteenth to listen to the street poets. The corner was near the site of a newly remodeled MUNI subway station, colorful and shiny, but the colors weren’t fooling anyone. An urban concrete park surrounded the exit from the underground, and as waves of people re-emerged to the surface, they were met by junkies and winos. The loiterers would ask them for money and grew insistent if they failed to offer a few quarters. The smells and sounds of the corner were the sort that most commuters hurried past, except on Thursday night. That was the night that C.J. would quietly sit next to the troupe of poets who filled that corner’s air with words and ideas.
“The city is alive!” One man with a goatee shouted. “But does being alive mean that you are living? I look up in the sky every day and I see the blue of heaven and I let my eyes drop down to this city by this Bay. This Gate, Golden. And I ask, why me? Why? Why here? And then I remember. Because our bodies can leave this place, but as the man said, we’ll leave our hearts behind.”
Another young man played an upright bass, a third shouted his poems and swung his arms, as if by waving them, he could convert his word into matter before they rose into the stale air. C.J. loved each floating word. Very few women performed, and when they did, it was even harder for them to shout out the words and compete with the consistent drunken heckling of the regulars on the corner. Still, they came every Thursday and so did C.J. And as she sat and watched the faces that were by now quite familiar, though in her pocket she held a poem that if read, might have quieted those drunken hecklers, she only smiled and watched.
I called Polly from outside Salt Lake City.
“Polly, it’s Theo.”
“Sorry, I don’t know a Theo.”
I paused for a second to see if I had dialed the right number. I looked at the face of the cell phone from a distance of about six inches, and even then I could clearly hear her shout the next words, “Just kidding, Theo! How are you?”
“I’m doing well, Polly, I’m about half way to Vegas.”
“I still don’t understand how you think that by going to Vegas you’ll be able to luck your way into gas money. I would have thought that a person who knew so much about math would be wiser.”
“I know enough to do alright. Trust me, back in Boston, beating Vegas was a hobby on the MIT campus for a while there. I wasn’t squirreled away in my office every night of the week. Some nights we practiced.”
“Practiced? Should I stop picturing four guys with taped glasses drinking cases of Mountain Dew?”
“Yes. Some of us preferred beer. Anyway, Polly, how are you dealing with things in Portland?”
“I’m doing better. I had to cry for a few days, but much of it is out of me now.”
“I’m glad. You can always call me.”
“Any time?”
“Of course. Polly, there’s something I want to talk to you about. Something here with me. It’s something odd that I discovered on my computer the other day. Something that shouldn’t ever happen.”
“You sound serious. What is it?”
I told her about the software that I’d written, and how SenseUs had found something quite unexpected in the latest batch of data.
“Playing God, how unlike you.”
“Funny, Polly, seriously though, this is really creepy. But first I have to ask, do you believe in reincarnation?”
Day after day, C.J. made her transition from work to the coffee shop, and from one side of the bed to the other, still trying to sleep. Each week’s reprieve was the poetry of Thursdays nights. One particularly enjoyable session sent her to bed with her pillow in its usual spot over her head, when inexplicably, the next thing she knew, it was ten in the morning. She called her boss, who was sympathetic of C.J.’s sleeping in, as she had a nearly perfect record of attendance. She hurried to the bus, and couldn’t help but smile as she ran. She felt as if her eyes had been unlocked from the chains that had rendered them heavy and cast downward. She had slept!
The next night was not one of perfect sleep, but a positive trend began to develop. The amount of sleep that C.J. was getting steadily increased. She found herself grinning more and more, and her head began to hold new ideas as well. She found herself starting to arrange her things in her room. She had formed small piles of clothing, her deodorant, underwear and toothbrush on her floor for no apparent reason. Once the piles were well-formed, it finally occurred to her that she was taking a vacation. She went to a travel agent downtown and without expecting to do so, said the words “Las Vegas” to the smiling blonde woman in the cramped office. And so it was that C.J. had tickets for the first vacation that she had ever planned in her life. As she walked out of the agent’s office, she looked up at the forty-eight stories of the white TransAmerica building and something within her shouted recognition. The triangular building now had a different meaning than the tourist landmark it had always been to her, how it had changed, though, she couldn’t yet say.
Her now regular sleep began to be colored by dreams. In them, she was looking up at very high ceiling of concentric squares. She was talking to someone and they were discussing what she had to do next. She had a feeling of foreboding as she looked upward, and that her life was about to change forever, but she knew that what she had to do was necessary.
On the morning of her flight to Las Vegas, C.J. took the Bay Area Rapid Transit train to the airport. As it glided her out of the city she turned to watch the skyscrapers come into view. Last night had been Thursday night and she had finally spoken her first poem to the people of Mission and Sixteenth streets. No hecklers had shouted and she had managed to read the entire poem without her voice hesitating. It was called “Sleep for the Shell of a Girl” and when she looked up from the page, the crowd looked back with sad eyes. Then they clapped and shouted support for her courage. She walked home and knew that she had spoken her first and last poem to them.
Looking back on the BART train, nearly at the airport, she saw the sharp spire peaking from the clump of downtown. The TransAmerica building was a white point in a mass of grey rectangles. Then her eyes zoomed in on it and soon she could see it large in front of her and in perfect detail as if she had flown to it, and for the first time, she realized that it had the shape of a tall pyramid. It reminded her of a dream, but also of something much older. Something older than herself. She felt light-headed as she walked in to the airport, but soon the feeling was replaced with the excitement of the trip ahead. She boarded the plane for Las Vegas and remembered the poet with the goatee shouting to the crowd on the corner, “Our bodies can leave this place, but as the man said, we’ll leave our hearts behind.”
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