The Hinge

The waitress balanced each white plate, scrapped with food, one on top of the other with a high level of expertise. She held a triplet of the Tower of Pisa on each arm, and walked with feet so light they made no sound. She walked the same figure eight again and again; filling glasses, taking orders, collecting disappointing gratuities. She was twenty-two, for now, but would be eighty-six in a day or so. Eighty-six and rubbing her eyes, wondering where all her time had gone. She miscalculated something. There was a glitch. A glass half full—or half empty, I suppose, depending on whom you ask—of iced cranberry juice toppled off and landed with a flat thud on the cold linoleum floor. It was only then, crouching down on one knee, that she saw Leonard Cane.

But the glance came and went with the brevity of a cough or sneeze. He allowed himself to watch her return to the kitchen, but only for a moment. He went back to his bottomless cup of black coffee and the smoky zoo animals and other dreams that came to life in the clouds of steam and then disappeared into the air. His own waitress returned with his two slices of toast slathered with orange marmalade and three strips of overcooked bacon.

He chewed slowly, cautiously, suspiciously. He watched customers flowing in one door and out the other like the minnows did in some whispering stream from his childhood. He ate habitually—almost mechanically—and without a sliver of joy. Everything—his favorite foods, his favorite songs and sights—only filled him with the bitterness of disenchantment.

A man rose and nearly lost his footing. There was a child trying with admirable—yet somewhat futile—determination to sever her pancakes in two; she made a mess of the table while her parents snipped at one another coldly about financial matters. A bell chimed and an elderly couple entered. The door made its way back shut, but in those brief moments Leonard Cane heard the deep hollow bark of a dog two blocks over, a tire screeching, a few birds gossiping in the spring trees, and the roar of machinery from a construction site nearby.

And he chewed and chewed, because it was a Thursday morning in the middle of April and there was nothing more he could do.

Leonard Cane was not an old man, but he disguised himself well. Now in his early forties, his hair grew thinner and his face was engraved with thick winding lines. His grandmother, he would not recall, told him once in his lost youth that the wrinkles on her wilting face were canyons carved out by streaming tears. Tears that collected finally in the bottom left corner of her sick heart, like lonely rivers running to the warm anonymity of the sea. He rubbed his eyes. He rubbed his ears. He rubbed his shoulders and hands, his neck and his knees. He ached with disbelief. Where does life go? He finished off his meal in one large bite and signaled a silent request for some more coffee, but his desire remained invisible in the swarm of action around him.

There was no other way it could be.

He was scheduled to be at the office—as he was every other weekday and the occasional defeated Saturday morning—in thirty-seven minutes and fifteen seconds. He wiped his butter knife clean and glanced into its silvered reflection. He allowed himself again to notice the young waitress for a moment more. Her dress was white but her apron was late evening blue. He wanted to wrap his arm around the curve of her waist, to leave with her on the next train to a town he was sure did not actually exist, to leave in his youth, before the tears had dragged like sharp nails down his face.

But that is not the way.

He blinked and she rippled like a reflection in a misplaced rain puddle. The scene all around him seemed to shift, in fact, but she especially. He placed his hands on the table firmly and felt that—as he often did—had he placed pressure just-so here or there, it would have shattered underneath him easily, then vaporized into nothing. Because that is all there is. He rubbed his eyes over and over. He was trapped. They all were, and he wanted to tell them all, but especially her. But how could he? It had taken him his whole life to notice it. And, as far as he could tell, very few ever really caught on.

Oh, the burden of knowledge. The bliss of ignorance. Is there nothing…

The phone rang. A spoon fell. Somewhere outside a colony of black ants were building a new hill which would be destroyed in three days with one accidental blow by the trampling sneakers of an eight-year-old boy. The waitress turned her head to an utmost elegant angle. She locked eyes with Mr. Leonard Cane.

Everything was blue.

In a shuffle as swift and uncontrolled as a stack of papers slipping onto the floor in a rustling pile, he had his arm around her, his nose deep in her neck. In his other hand, he held the butter knife to her throat and all the noise washed out of the room. He pressed hard against her, looking for a way to break her apart, to break it all apart. To dismantle their endless fate, to escape like grains of hourglass sand from the knuckles of time and illusion. She didn’t breathe and everything felt tight, like freezing water expanding. It was eight forty-three and the door chimed as it was meant to, as it always did, as it only could. The smile the officer wore, a product of his typical optimistic disposition, melted slowly.

The mouth of the door was wide open behind him, ready to devour them all. Leonard Cane turned his aching neck to watch the door rushing toward its golden hinges. But everything was already broken.

He’d broken it all apart.