Mike Allen - Clockwork Phoenix

But at least I was getting a trace of hope every night. I’d log on to the computer and check my messages, send a couple of Woo!’s or raves or whatever the flavor of the flirt was. And here was Sasha, skinny unappealing Sasha, dirtying the taste of it. Making it meaningless.

“You’re a sadist,” I said. “A goddamn sadist.”

“Do you think I really like it?” she said.

“Yeah, I think you do. You get off on it, the power of crushing people’s dreams,” I spat out.

“So I can sit here and watch them die, or I can give them a little closure.”

“Seriously, it’s screwed up,” I said. I stood and went in back to rinse filters.

Mike caught me there later.

“Hey, did you and Sasha have some kind of fight?” he said worriedly.

“I told her she’s a twisted fruitcake,” I said. “I know you’re a friend of hers, but the blind date crap… Jesus, it’s wrong!”

He held up a hand, forestalling me. “Yeah, well. It’s a long story.” He looked unhappy in his long-nosed, spaniel-eyed way. “Look, you know how she started coming here?”

I guessed. “Did she work here at some point?”

“No. See, I’d answered this ad in The Stranger personals, couple years ago, you see?”

“I don’t know what you’re trying to say.”

“I stood her up,” he said. “I told her to meet me here at 10:30 on a Thursday morning, and I was so ready, but then there she was and I chickened out and just served her coffee and watched her wait. She waited half an hour, ate a warmed butter croissant and drank a hot chocolate and left. The next day she showed up at the same time and brought a book with her, something by Camus. Ever since then, she shows up three, four times a week, sometimes more.”

“Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

“She’s an Avatar,” he said, his voice dropping in awed intensity. “You felt it too, didn’t you? Larger than life. It’s what’s so frightening, so appealing about her.” He stopped, looking at me as though the thought had just occurred to him. “You’re attracted to her, too, aren’t you? Is that why you’re so pissed at her?”

“I’m pissed at her because she’s acting out some sort of outrageous psycho-drama that you’re enabling and messing with people’s lives in the process,” I said. “Does she know you’re the one she was supposed to meet?”

“Don’t you get it?” he said. “It’s a genuine supernatural occurrence that happened. I brought her here and she became an Avatar. I don’t know how.”

My head throbbed. “I need to go home,” I said. “I’m going to throw up.”

“Go, go.” He flapped a hand at me. “But come back when you feel better and don’t fight with Sasha anymore.”

I didn’t show up for work for four days. I went out with old college friends every night to a hip bar in a former barbershop. Vintage hair dryers had been lined up like studded alien helmets along the wall and baggies stuffed with peroxide curls were thumb-tacked to the ceiling. Band after band sang each night’s anagrammatic lyrics in smoke-hoarsened voices. When I came back, I was still tipsy. Mike didn’t say anything, just eyed me and served up a jumbo mug of the coffee of the day, a Tanzanian roast, before I swept the floors and used clothespins to clip the day’s newspapers to the rope racks on the north wall.

Sasha came in a little before noon, pausing when she saw me. She laid her book—some Charles Williams title—down on the table in front of her while sorting through her pockets for bills.

“Clay,” she said, carefully unfolding the crumpled ones. “Clay, man, I wanted to say, with the blind dates, I don’t mean they can’t work. I’m sure they can, I’m sure they do.”

The words tumbled through her lips like pebbles, like diamonds, like some fairy tale princess speaking truths.

“The ones that end up here, those are the only doomed ones, you know what I mean? I’m not dissing the love thing. You’re a nice guy, and I don’t mean to be saying anything about that at all.”

The sun gleamed through the window and fell on her straw-like hair, as yellow as the daffodil. I said something reassuring and offered to buy her next coffee, and realized somewhere in the middle of that transaction that one thing Mike had said was true. I was attracted to her, an attraction as mysterious and unexpected as though I’d found an impossible door, opened a closet to find Narnia waiting instead of coats.

What could I do? I lapsed into silence. From then on, Mike and I exchanged glances whenever she came in, both of us acknowledging that lodestone pull, so elemental and so deep within our bodies that we couldn’t imagine wanting anyone else.

And I wondered about the Avatars. Was Sasha right, did she fill some cosmic gap? Were there others? Did I know them, had I seen them walking down the street or taking a double hot chocolate, no whip, from my hand?

When he appeared, when the magnet that governed our movements jolted in galvanic response to his presence, Mike and I both knew it instantly. It was something in the way Sasha’s breath caught, something in the way her shoulders shifted, the way she set down her cup and lifted her head.

He was clean-jawed as some young Galahad, and there was an aquiline elegance to the planes of his nose, to the curls that clustered on his scalp in Greco-Roman order.

His stare went to Sasha and for once she didn’t smile or beckon. She just sat there staring wordlessly at him, her eyes as wide as windows. He came over to her table in three graceful strides and stooped to say something.

“Yes,” she said, giving him her hand. “That’s me.” He drew her hand to his lips and kissed the palm, a gesture as startlingly intimate as though he’d taken off his shirt.

Was he an Avatar as well? Was his job to console selfless women? To pick up people in coffee shops? To piss off unrequited lovers? What role did he fill?

Mike and I stood side by side, watching, ignoring the customer trying to get a refill on her mocha. We stared while Sasha gathered up her things and the young man helped her into her jacket, tucking his arm around her hand.

For a moment she looked back, and it would have been the time to say something then, but Mike’s heel ground into my foot. I yelped and she half-laughed, and waved at Mike, and left.

“Give the poor girl a little happiness,” Mike said. “Breathing room.”

“Will she be back tomorrow?”

He shrugged, finally looking to the counter and the empty mocha cup sitting there. “Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe she won’t be an Avatar any more.”

The customer gathered her drink after he refilled it and looked around, meeting my eyes. She took a step towards me.

I felt an ethereal weight, as though someone were watching me from just past her shoulder.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I’m supposed to meet someone here at two fifteen…”

The bell over the door jingled as another customer entered: plaid jacket, crew-cut, elderly, his gaze scanning the shop.

I squared my shoulders.

“First off,” I said, leaning forward to touch her sleeve. “Everything I told you in my e-mail was a lie.”

Bell, Book, and Candle met for the five thousand and fifty first time on a rainy November night.