The Way to the Lighted Cafe

 

The Way to the Lighted Cafe

Though privately in a rush, that didn't come through in her movements. She drove calmly to a rest area off the highway, bought and languidly drank a coffee, sitting for an hour at a long table in front of the window wall reading a book while people came and went. She was reading, as she appeared to be, but also waiting, though, again, this wasn't apparent. Everyone passed by. Many conversations took place all over the plastic cafeteria, amplified and disfigured by the acoustics but ultimately rendered as one loud murmur. She shut them out to keep reading until the sky started going dark and she still sat in front of the windows, now watching the cerulean deepen by the minute. Road lights and headlights came on, their light fractured and splayed upon the glass and, at the same time, the world just behind her – the tables, bathrooms, fast food, customers, travelers, and her own self – rapidly came into focus and melded with the asphalt, traffic and trees into a single glass-pane reality. Her reflection looked back at her semi-clearly, and then from the left a large van turned a corner going a little too fast before ramming directly into her chest and blinding her with its brights.

After coming to she blinked, looking down at the table surface through the the dim yellow lighting. To both her left and right she heard the murmurs of conversations carried on between the muffling cafe walls. Past the window was a dark sea, its waves lapping upon a smooth, faded indigo shore. Only the whitecaps in the distance glowed in the moonless night. A moment ago the sea had been a long stretch of highway dotted with distant white lights from occasional cars. A lone lit ship on a night sea and a rest stop oasis in the middle of a six-lane highway were not so different; they could contain a different spirit and mood, but were easily linked.

“...As I'd been saying, when things in the world are uncertain – as uncertain as they are now, at least – you can discover laws. And then you can discover laws of laws, such as 'all laws are temporary' or 'in an uncertain time, the lifespan of laws is brief'. Laws come into effect (that is, are discovered), are applied by some people in the world to their benefit or to other effects, and then cease to work and can no longer work again,” said the man at the table to her ten o'clock, the only other occupant. “Anyway,” he gestured at her expectantly, then sat back and waited.

She opened her mouth. But before she could speak another man walked through the door and stole their attention, an apparently homeless man who drew expectations of hassling the cafe patrons but who instead took off his smelly coat, his hat, his torn baggy pants, and hung them on a hook by the door, who pulled out a comb and tidied his hair, who slipped into the bathroom and came out a minute later in a long sleeve black shirt and nondescript pants and sat down at their table with his arms folded and his eyes alert, most calm.

“Welcome back,” he said to her.

“She was about to speak,” said the first, older man.

“Ought we to wait?” asked the not-bum. All three of them looked out the window at the shore. There, a far distance from the windows of their beloved Nicht-hier-by-the-Sea, a figure moved slowly toward it, as if very tired, coming a long way through another life started a long time ago.

The first man tutted but looked with sympathy. “He'll be here soon.”

Then he himself went on: “We are living with a massively long, infinitely deep, thin black crevasse that has cut through actuality. It has cut through our laws, but at the same time, no death is without riches in return, the caveat being that those riches are new and unimaginable to our previous iterative selves. Often death even brings forth a disproportionately greater reward than the loss. But it's on us to stretch our minds enough to realize it, see it before us, to accept and assimilate it. In doing so we always gain entry into new realms. Not many want this and, while the crevasse is with us, these will be silently disappeared. They will be unable to cross.

They will have not death, but worse: annihilation. Made to have never been. To be made no longer being is nothing compared to being made to have never been, which is the true death. Our death is nothing. Our death is a trick. Instead of one being wiped out of human history, annihilated forever, something merely snaps its fingers and we're immortal. Death is not the big thing. Immortality is the big thing. Death is the little thing, a momentary grin on the face of forever. The necessary light trick before our image is hung upon the veil.

Immortality doesn't mean alive; our victory is not how we desire it – with our personalities intact and moving as we know them to here, continuing our search for perfect sex and love.

To be immortalized is to be carried on after interaction in a mind that adjusts itself to jump the crevasse, a mind that has recognized death's rewards offered (the only ones offered) and accepted a new state, let go of its old dreams and visions that had become dead weight in shifted context. A person who lingers only in minds that refuse to do this is wiped out with them. Yes, whole nations may have never existed.

Death isn't required for immortality; it is merely the shortest path to it. What vistas he may see in his final moments, the grandest of his life! The travels come quick. A thousand emotional states, never recorded but by and for the All, lands nonexistent crossed, as his timeline rapidly approaches negative infinity.... It is through pain that beauty unfolds to us....”

As he finished, the beachcomber seen from afar walked into the cafe, shaken and bearing a thousand mile stare looking all that distance behind him. But quickly it softened, he shook the sand, and much more than that, off of himself, put on a neat jacket, and joined them at the table. Now they were all present.

The man who had been there before any of the others now pulled out a paper, a pen, and a deck of cards. He cleared his throat, put the pen and paper into the middle of the table. She put her book in. The beachcomber put in shells he had acquired along the walk. The once-bum had nothing. He who is left empty-handed shuffles the deck. It had been operational for a long time, and it worked. The elder man handed him the deck to shuffle. Then he dealt it and they played until the last suit remained: clubs. Previously it had been hearts, and hearts again would mean “status quo”. Spades meant the opposite. Clubs meant one to the left. Diamonds one to the right.

Each of them got up and shifted one seat left, so that now she was the bum, the beachcomber was her, the paper-keeper was the beachcomber, and the bum held the pen in his hand.

She cleared her throat to their expectant faces and said, “Gaining entry into new realms is always accomplished through pain. Pain is a gateway to an unseen reality, to ways of being and seeing that are otherwise inaccessible to us, that the pain itself forces us to reach out to and find in order to escape it. This method of pain is one such rule, the rule I have discovered for myself. People wonder how to achieve new states of consciousness; never mind psychedelics. But pain is a complicated mechanism because it requires the payment of our care, and far from everyone can raise the sum. This, also, is why rules can only work temporarily: their users are changed with each use of the rule. From any endeavor of man, it is impossible to extract and separate man. He is part of the endeavor, the living vessel that makes it possible, and, as such, if he changes the world, he also changes himself.”

The former beachcomber, now holding the book, added, “One cannot use the law of pain forever, because a payment must be paid every time, and never quite the same kind. One cannot repeat the pain indefinitely. But if one has, say, a lot of hope, difficult to exhaust, he can use the law of pain for a while.

For a different caliber of mind, hope is less a factor, mental precision more; pain stops working more quickly here. One has come to see one's own heart, applied mind to conceptualizing its destiny, and, burdened with specific knowledge, cannot muster care, and so can gain no entry. But perhaps, he has already gained entry and remained, and so does not need to enter again. They are in that land all the time now.”

To this, she continued: “For the rest of us, we require a psychic fingerprint to enter the Nicht-hier-by-the-Sea, a fingerprint of a state created by specific pains. And one secret of it is, it's by going here repeatedly that we keep it alive. So I keep throwing myself in front of the car to get there, keep sending myself into pain, whether I am crushed by a van, crushed by love, crushed into dirt and destitution absorbing readily into my loosened psyche the dirty names that are but passcodes through the doors that guard the secret land where it lives – ”

The former bum interjected to add, “I will be whoever I need to be to obtain those passcodes. Don't mistake my earthly guise for identity: it is merely my ticket back, because I am such a coarse form of life I require one. But I can pay for it with their laughter, their mirth, their devouring force. I take off what I'm wearing when I step through the door. When I wake up here I'm not who I had to be to get here. Here they know who I am, or see me at least.”

He had also been fervently taking notes on all they had said of pain since the pen transferred into his hand.

She continued quickly. “We discuss ideas in a land encased in a bubble of borrowed energetically altered space, a bubble about to pop, and, when it does, what has been decided will have been decided, but all else will be destroyed. And if its rules have ceased to function, it will no longer be reachable, like a burned message.

Rules themselves are like this, like encoded, burned messages. A rule of rules: a rule written down or spoken is robbed of much of its power. To prolong the life of a rule, do not write it down in a known language. If you must write it down, write in a secret language, and throw away the code, or hide and disperse the code so that it may almost never be found, so that finding that, too, requires a code, or a game and recognition of being in a game, and of what the game may be for – ”

It all makes sense to me. I'm filled with urgency as I look up and I – on one side of the glass window – collide – on the other side – with the lights of an off-highway vehicle. These are crude elements but they are directly within my reach; we use what we have.

She sighed and finally left the rest area to go home to a too-expensive apartment. Unfortunately, the next morning she was laid off. It was surreal to simultaneously read online about the massive cuts their new CEO, somewhat reckless and raving for the public about company transparency, had enacted. Everyone said the old CEO wouldn't have done this, but he had shocked them all by taking an early beachfront retirement.