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An interminable wait. An opening in the muck of time that equals a century, eight centuries, the full trajectory of the human experiment. I have become familiar with the sudden simultaneous mosaic apparition of my biography, bent and mortared with so many doubts and desires. Life flashing, as before internal eyes.

Then it comes! The first drop. It seeps out, plunges reluctantly, clinging, dark and turbid, reminding of blood. Someone will drink this. It seems a shameful secret. I am overcome with the responsibility implied by my having witnessed the fall of the first drop. First betrayal. Of unifying sinews. I am in the first drop. I am that act of clinging to the spiget from whence I fall. I am alone on the bottom of a steel basin, losing my form, dispersed, walls of intended containment rising on all sides, the light above, streaking in from around the spiget, unreachable. I am responsible for my own predicament. I will be drunk by some craven consumer of this soon-to-be-beverage, this liquid imagining itself before my eyes, taking the place of my would-be mosaic biography, my supernova self-delusion. I am fated to act as fodder to the appetites of a post-human money-changer, swallowed in a contained compulsive, almost orgiastic repetition of the one indulgence that manages to fit into the daily patterns of this woman’s life, the woman who has summoned me.

It seems an awful fate, and as the second drop falls, less reluctantly, chased closely by a third, I find myself scanning the proud up-tilt of a Bolivian geography. There are hunched forms milling about in what looks like some grandiose exercise in the principles of the abacus. Something is being calculated. My existence perhaps. My right to exist or survive. This abacus works, its parts, these farmers, beads in a spanning schema, so that I might avoid the strain of calculating these karmic numbers myself. I can move through my days flush with the confidence of a colonial magnate: I have minions, laborers underfoot, ballast; I cannot be shaken; I will easily live to see tomorrow, and tomorrow, and...

And I can smell the coffee brewing as I watch the Bolivian farmers at work. They seem to understand that I am there, but they do not stop working. I, a visitor to this remote place, armored with my good intentions, a colonial magnate for God’s sake, and they do not slow down. They are not seeing me but rather imagining me, I imagine. I imagine how frequently the beans these workers cut and handle are eventually manipulated by my own hands or by mechanisms in turn manipulated by my hands. My presence here is an event; it has a certain meaning, a taste that remains too long to be insignificant. I am a loose bead offending the lines of the abacus, it is clear. And yet, eventful and unusual as I may seem, they do not fear me, but rather they seem to smile in that careful way that says they are afraid for me. They know that in some sense, I am their charge.

My psyche (because it is predicated on a world-view favoring contract, exchange, and perennial progress [i.e. growth, intensification]) is fragile and intricate. The deeply concealed ossature of my life of convenience and progress is the daily toil of these farmers, among others. I am in the parched palms of their hands. The presence of this perspective in my mind, in my line of sight, because it relates their reality to mine, allows me to see how profoundly they suffer... if only because I believe their lack of knowledge of what occupies my mind is in itself a form of famine, or suffering, to be laid on top of the material scarcity already tatooed into their flesh.

All of these visions come with the percolation of one shot of our espresso. Suddenly, I find myself surrounded once more by iron and plastics and glass, leaning my weight on perfectly flat surfaces, thinking about mechanical timepieces and what they’re trying to tell me and why. The one strapped to my wrist, for instance, is telling me than in 2,747 measured steps of its most slender hand, which is potentially several dozen brewings of espresso shots, which would mean several million millennia worth of involuntary autobiographical reformulation, I will eventually be allowed to leave this counter, this work-day, this semi-solid box where my imagined societal meaning and my will to survive are given legally referable labels (barista, server, retail sales agent, purveyor of cooked Bolivian blood).

I will be free, as we say, in just over forty-five minutes, that is the verdict, and so I am forced to search out the metaphysical implications of the question of my freedom, my access to air and light, if you will. I was in the first drop, and have since been consumed by a steady stream of dripping Arabica essence. I am buried, or mixed in with the rest. The light has ceased to penetrate. The stainless steel demi-tasse is filling up, certifiably... I would sign an affidavit in order to certify that this bit of nectar is half-extracted from its mother-dust, looming just above the spiget. I can hear the Bolivians working... there are columns of Bolivian abacus beads laboring away inside each small burst of percolation... their feet stepping routinely, with rhythm like a slow tenacity, their blades cutting rows of the cash crop, their hands dusting one another off, baking under the sun, they work on my mind like swarms of August cicada, clicking and whistling their nameless song.

The song becomes me, or I become the embodiment of it; the last drop is on its way; there is steam screeching out the steam-tube; milk is churning under the steam; there is a sense of yearning in the air, anticipation. The drink is about to be poured; the customer watches, intermittently, anxiously awaiting the moment in which her orders will be carried out. She wants to feel again today, as she does every day, that she has summoned this bittersweet nectar straight from non-being into being; she will experiment with a vision of herself as possessed of just such divine word-worth. She speaks; the universe obeys; the void offers up its essence. As I catch her gaze, her eyes turn down, as if to cloak these very thoughts.

I am about to give away the one thing of value my custodians have given me... the rest of their sacrifice cannot be measured in worldly terms... the execution of this task, this woman’s colonial mandate, is a betrayal of my own frailty, and of my owing to the calculations of that distant Andean abacus. I must not allow this drink to be had! Let the mechanical timepieces chatter themselves into Oblivion. I cannot be bothered to keep their self-esteem up endlessly at the expense of my own, as of the inherent dignity of the Bolivians. In short, I am no longer willing to sustain this faith-driven, virtual, farsical system of toil. I am no longer willing to let life’s meaning be so easily obfuscated by the mechanics of convenience.

There is only one course of action that, under these circumstances, my fragile and intricate psyche finds justifiable: I will hurl this twelve-ounce ceramic mug, now full of the blended drink, against the far wall. I will be seen doing this by all present, there will be a great but timid commotion, and then I, and all of this perversion will cease to be, because They will ask me to hand in my apron, swear off the operation of any and all espresso vehicles, leave my legalizing titles (barista, server, etc...) behind, and step hopelessly out into the afternoon, forsaken by law and by language, for what will amount to an act so incongruous as to be classifiable as nothing other than the act of an unsound mind. I would be stepping straight into the nullification of my civic humanity.

Indeed, I am overcome by the responsibility of having imagined the Bolivian abacus; it is too much weight to carry for the rest of my days. I lament the comfort that comes with admitting this diabolical weakness to myself. In the comfort, I find myself repeating the rhythm of the farmers, conjuring up accordingly the gestures of my own routine, handing the drink to the woman who paid for it, and saying above my frailty:

‘Have a nice day, Ma’am.’

[from Mortal Coils, by Joseph Robertson]

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