“For six years I’ve felt what I call. ‘The Void,'” he drank his coffee and spouted low. Spouted, yes, but low so as not to let ostentation overwhelm intention and push him into the headlights of pretension.
“Why not in the Swiss Alps?” he asked on the heels of his statement. “Why are we not sipping cocoa in the Swiss Alps, but sitting here by the sidewalk with shitty coffee?”
His partner shrugged, his eyebrows stirring like two St. Bernards lounging by a fireplace in the Swiss Alps. The dogs shifted position, looked up to see if a ski ranger was waiting red-faced and earnest at the door to take them into the blizzard to rescue the lost ski-orphans, then fell back to the floor with a gallumph.
“It’s the Void,” he said again. “I’ve tracked it in my body. I’ve measured it, circum… Shit, what’s the word? Doesn’t matter. I’ve found its borders and I’m having a tattoo artist ink its edges on my back.”
“It’s on your back?” the other man asked.
“Yes.”
“Not your heart? I thought it would be in your hearts. That’s where voids are, right?”
“It’s on my back, in the same place — at the same level as my heart, dead center in my spine.”
“The heart’s to one side, isn’t it?”
“It’s a metaphor, fucknuckle. Don’t you care why you’re not in the Swiss Alps? Don’t you care that traffic passes you and that’s all you see? Birds fuck in the air over your head. The ground under your feet holds the bones of people who trodded this earth thousands of years ago. Day crawls over you like a fungus, and night won’t even give you directions to the bathroom, much less her phone number.
“We get older and pass into the biomass, eventually, the only animals to have invented cocoa, and who appreciate the Swiss Alps — not simply love, appreciate — them enough to build structures perfectly designed for drinking coca in their presence, and you get stuck on a point of anatomy?”
The silence hung there like a broccoli fart. Then the man with the St. Bernard eyebrows said:
“I just need to get laid.”
“Not with those eyebrows,” said the first man, and poured more sugar into his coffee, hoping maybe he could see the Swiss Alps in the bottom of his cup.
