She

She is very slim with long blond hair and a very pretty face. High cheek bones. Full lips.   Her nipples protrude through the thin fabric of her designer blouse.  She is wearing blue jeans with a rhinestone studded belt. One leg is curled under her as she sips her latte in the comfortable living room atmosphere of the Swiss coffee shop.

Other than the two barristas behind the counter there is only one table taken.  A thin long haired man with scraggly beard  is sitting with his computer by the great stone fireplace.  It is not lit.  The scene outside the window is that of snow and winter.  The fireplace is lit in the evenings.  Midday the modern efficient furnace suffices.

‘It is now,’ he is saying.  The man she is sitting with is wearing a herringbone brown jacket with leather elbow patches. They are both  wearing jeans, His shirt  is flannel.  He too is sipping a latte.  Handel’s water music is playing on the sound system. 

‘Obviously it is now,’ she says, her green eyes flashing.

‘It is now and everything and everywhen and everywhere spirals out from this very moment.  That’s the Big Bang.  Creativity. It’s happening now, here and now as the old mystics tried to warn us. They did, you know, they warned us. Here inside.  There’s no yesterday or tomorrow.  No there and then. Just here.  The bits we piece together are abstractions.’

‘Constructions.’ 

‘Some call them that but that idea lacks the miraculaous and sacred.  There’s a dry intellectualism about constructionism.  Something coined by aetheists to approximate God. An orgasm described by a robot.   I’m saying this is Brother Lawrence. This is the Holy Spirit. This is very unfolding.  Here and now.’

She sipped her latte and looked at his eyes. 

Hé really was quite mesmerized by her eyes, he thought then as if it was an original thought.   He thought he could get lost in them too and had a mixed mental flash of nerve gas attack and pheromes but he couldn’t really grasp what he thought. He had enough sense to feel scared and awkward. She really was awesome.

She was at that moment thinking about bedding him.  Would she or would she not.? She’d pulled petals off flowers as a child. ‘He loves me. He loves me not’.  ‘Fuck him. Fuck him not.’ She thought. She felt her fingers twirling her blond locks.

‘It’s either fate or free will,’ he said when an unknown quantity of time had passed. .  ‘What happens next is either a conscious decision that selects one of a myriad of possibilities from the string theory of infinite, or almost infinite, dimensional reality, or it’s just a linear fixed thing. We are experiencing this set play as if we had choice when in fact it’s all determined. ‘

She imagined she chose him.  He’d smiled at her in the lecture theatre, she remembered. She thought he was cute.  Obviously clean and well dressed and from her own sort.  Outsiders wouldn’t have been at his lecture. It was that sort of selection process. She vaguely felt she was an alpha and that he was an alpha and she should get to know him better, marking her territory so to speak. The other girls drifted away when she first approached and began  to talk to him. 

The coffee was his idea, he thought. She knew that she could have him then if she wanted him.  She could always have a man if she wanted them.  That was choice. I don’t think it’s fate, she thought.

‘Fate  may be everything.  It may also be that nothing unfolds and it’s all just appearances. Appearances and vanity.’

‘Why vanity?’ She asked, her attention once again drawn to the conversation.  She wore East Indian gold earrings.  Heavy.

‘Eclessiastes. Wolfe and Bonfires.  Man’s insignificance.  Bacteria on the planet.  Yet in our minds so much more. God like in our opinions but really quite insignificant next to the imagination we have of history and even of the future. These abstractions of past and present and future with time a flow and relative as well.’

The top two buttons of her blouse were undone. She chose that, didn’t she.  He had thought to say something about digital worlds and fractals  and one and two and one two and well, her breasts were somehow perfect, he thought.  They could even be said to be Godly..

She smiled.

That was an old story. An orthodoxy.  He was a virgin academic of good and old  family. She was a whore, of noveau riche origins. The father got rich selling cannibis.   She preferred to call her self a courtesan at this time in her life.   Before and after she became a princess.  

Today she’d throw a hissy fit and pout with lies and no elan..  

It was in jail with time  on his hands that he wrote the masterpiece.  The great Canadian novel which contained the bon mot  ‘ poutine of the soul.’ It was mentioned in all the media.    The star was a green eye woman who would be played by a fatuous famous Hollywood actress who learned how to read in her third drug rebab.   The book was called the  Countess of Montreal  It wasn’t very original but gender gave it the twist that put it ahead of Fifty More Shades. The author kept his buttons done up after his time in  penitentiary.  She was thankful for the changes.  

Anonymity was next to godly.  No one recognized him.  She certainly didn’t remember him.  She might never even have existed.   The fiction and non fiction was no longer divided in the multicultural relativism. Truth was lost.  

‘Could we go back to the part where you were looking into my eyes. ‘ she asked.

Hé looked up, blushing.   Her face really was pretty and again he was lost in her eyes.  There was a timelessness there.  She understood time.  He didn’t. For her it was something finite and particulate.  Her eyes twinkled as she did up one button.  Two had been overdoing it.  She  reached out her hand to touch his cheek intentionally breaking the spell.

‘You had a splash of cream there,’ she said, her voice nore husky.

She was a witchy woman, he thought much later,  much much later.  But still here.  Still now.  Within, where it all begins.