Brains in a Bottle (2007)

Brains in a Bottle

I was there Thursday—you were there the day before.  I suppose it was just not meant to be.  I mean I thought I was clear on the time and the day of the week and you sounded confident that the little coffee shop would be impossible to miss and it was!  It was.  A dandy little coffee shop with very hip Philly type art students sketching away and sipping coffee.  I knew I was in the right place.  I just knew it.  But after a half an hour I began to have my doubts.  

I decided to check a half a block away at Starbucks though I was perfectly sure you had said the word “Starbucks” with such disdain.  Could I have been wrong?  I decided to check anyway.  There were perfectly hip people in Starbucks They were a tad older—graying actually--but in earlier lives they had been “sketchers” as well.  Now, instead of sketch books they had shopping bags and leotard tops with table cloth looking skirts wrapped around themselves.  They were waiting for husbands. The husbands were parking the cars on the side streets--fine gray Mercedes autos-- but would be back in a few moments to have a coffee and decide where to have dinner.  None of them looked like you.  I suppose.  I have no idea what you look like but I found myself guessing that none of them could be you.

I tried to calculate your age by recalling all the things you had told me about your children.  One was in college—or was it two?  And you’ve talked about your husband as well but there were no clues there.  I had spoken to him over the phone and he had an older voice.  Yours sounded much younger that one time we talked.  I looked at all the women’s faces and their bodies at the tables in Starbucks…none of them could have been you.  It was more likely, I decided, that you’d be at the first place.  I went back there again.

I took a seat outside prepared to order a coffee I didn’t want if the waitress insisted.  She never even came over.  No one else sat outdoors.  The hip people stayed inside where it was cool and the soft music played.  Eventually I was joined by a man with a ponytail and a tee shirt with a Grateful Dead Rose.  He took up a seat a foot or two to the south.  He had been inside buying a cup of coffee which he’d brought outside to drink.  “Have you been here long?  I asked.  About nineteen years he replied.  No, I mean in the coffee shop.  Oh! I thought you meant in this part of Philly.  Before that I lived in Manayunk and for a while in Germantown.  I thought that was what you wanted to know.  No, I said, have you seen a blond woman (you’d sent me a lot of ‘blond jokes’ in your e-mails -which I read sometime- so I guessed you were blond) waiting here in the past half-hour?  No, sorry, he said.  I used to live around here, I said.  507 South Street.  Long time ago.  It’s a Greek place now.  Yes, I know.  I don’t like Greek food, he said.  

We watched the parade of people pass north and south along fourth street and I began to have my doubts again.  I began to wonder about Starbucks again.  I was so comfortable in the cushion chair in the shade in front of this little, hip place that I dreaded having to move—to check out Starbucks again.  But I felt compelled.  I leaned my weight over my stiff legs and pushed myself up out of the chair.  My feet were swollen and hurt me but I slid away on them towards Starbucks.  I’ll keep my eyes peeled, he said.  Thanks, I said.

There was a woman in the bright sun in a chair drinking an iced drink.  I circled her and decided to take a shot.  Age about right, blond, seemed to be waiting for something—maybe me.  Are you ______  ______? I asked.  She looked puzzled and I knew right away it was not you.  There was no easy way out.  I almost bowed and backed away apologizing for any mistake I had made.  She followed me with her eyes and head and kept me in her sites until she was sure I was no longer a threat.   I was outside her sphere.

I looked for someplace else to rest.  A comfortable chair in the shade like at the hip place down the street.  There were plenty but I knew this was not the place to wait for you and I was becoming too nervous for coffee.  A few minutes later—after checking the inside, and second floor seating and the outside tables I fled Starbucks for the comfort of my chair down at the hip place.  The ponytail was gone and you never came.  I was sure.  I didn’t have any doubt.  I would have known you if I’d seen you, no matter how little information I had about your physical appearance.  I just would have known.  

Some day, in the future, we may not have bodies any more.  Our heads—maybe our very brains—will be kept in bottles like bell jars and our thoughts will be transmitted like tip-tapping electrical impulses to machines that might talk for us.  Well not talking exactly but communicating without the indelicacy of lips or the imperfection of mere words.  Perhaps we will float in warm scented oil and dream in our bottles on shelves.  Each of us an address on a jar in a city full of shelves,  in a country full of buildings.  Printed circuits will carry our thoughts to a jar in Missouri or a soul-mate on a shelf # 1222 in Breecher, Kansas.  We will dream of families and cars breaking down and tattoos and whether or not short skirts will be the rage next season.   It will all seem real to us.  There will be no anxiety.  There will be no fat bodies or gray hair or fights for parking spaces.  There will be no Starbucks or missed appointments or tired feet or comfortable seats in hip coffee shops.  No disappointing let downs or internet relationships to live up to or down to.  Just brains in bottles.