31

Mateo Cruz hoped for the best once he heard the first sparrow and garbage truck and saw the dark sky give way to gray, settling into some final overcast. The 64-hour performance project involved writers and painters on two-hour shifts making art in a downtown gallery window. He was into his second hour and still didn’t know why he was there. Kiki Lamonica had guilted him into signing up, even though he was a cook, because she did not want her friend Babs Deutsch, poet and organizer of the event, to have to pull a double shift in the middle of the night. In the spirit of the project, he tried to write a poem but got stalled at the ninth word.

So at 6:15 a.m., a scribbled idea about salmon poached in carrot broth and a possible new vinaigrette recipe behind him, he wondered what to do about the old man pacing back and forth in front of the window.

Kiki, as pushy as she could be sometimes, meant well. He had a boss like her once, always suggesting new experiments for the menu. On special occasions he would try the new dish, declare it a special for a week, like the balsamic-glazed rack of lamb over chili-corn bulgur, but most of the time Mateo wanted to be moved more intuitively before changing the bill of fare. Kiki wanted children, even more than she wanted to get married, but she never pushed him too hard on the issue.

“Can I help you?” he asked the man through the glass. The man glanced up and then down but could not read Mateo’s lips. He turned to his pacing like a new row of soybeans that needed to be walked. “What are your kids’ names?” Mateo said to the man’s back. “Did you hear the river was being moved? How many syllables in a tanka?”

Kiki was afraid her career would make her infertile. She thought of it the way she thought chocolate might eventually ruin her figure, but for now she enjoyed her clients, the depressed or manic, the court-ordered or compulsive. She knew she could help them, if only a little.

One afternoon, Mateo stopped by her office on the fourth floor of the Northwest Building and found it brimming with an almost liquid light. She wore sunglasses inside on such days, blaming the glare off the concrete floodwall a half-mile away.

“Sometimes the sun goes so deep inside me,” she said. “I feel like a part of it stays there permanently, spinning out new planets in everyone else’s direction.“ In the gallery window, he thought of Kiki naked in her office chair, bathing in blinding white at her desk, her hazel eyes hidden behind dark lenses.

If the man would have simply looked his way or made some other gesture that acknowledged him, the situation may not have felt so strange. With twenty minutes left on his shift, Mateo stood up and started pacing back and forth himself. Cramped as he was in the display area, that meant he turned around about every eight feet and marched back where he had come from. Even though this was clearly provocative, he was tired and really didn’t care. The old man paid no attention to Mateo and kept walking his longer, invisible rows.

Babs showed up with five minutes left. It was her job to cover if the next person was late or didn’t show. She had a small valise with her, and Mateo imagined the scores of sonnet drafts on onion skin that might be inside it.

“When do you suppose you’ll offer that rack of lamb again?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I’m a little tired of meat these days. I’m thinking poached salmon, maybe, or maybe a cod fillet wrapped around an aggressive chutney.” He looked for any sort of skepticism in her eyes.

“That might taste good,” she said, nodding. “Especially with couscous and an IPA.”

He gathered up his own drafts. On one sheet was an entire column of synonyms for "bright." He wished Babs luck and passed through the front door.

“Thirty-one,” the old man said.

“What’s that?” Mateo barely turned in his direction. He had been thinking of oranges, how they were made of countless tiny reservoirs of taste. “What did you say?”

“Syllables.”