She comes back with two more cups; they're steaming hot. Her expression is unreadable. I hadn't heard her fixing the coffee. Her hair is tied back now. A brown ponytail, revealing her ears. Her ears are exquisitely round and thin, like they are molded of ceramic. The slope of her neck disappears into her sweater beneath her collarbone, into darkness.
She doesn't speak and kneels again on the pillow, watching her coffee. Whether she had heard my thoughts, or intends to answer, there is no indication.
Over an hour had past. It's precariously close to ten thirty. It's both a lifetime and an instant.
"Most people," she says, "don't realize the significance of something like coffee."
I say nothing.
"Coffee, which seems so simple, a luxury, a necessity, a fact of life, straight from the cup, ordered as injection mold defaults or custom tailored sacraments in exchange of a few coins or plastic cards - and we go on our way. It takes a few minutes, longer if there is a line."
I see where she's going.
"But when I look into a cup of coffee, I see its history, spread out before me like a field of stars and all the galaxies, light that takes millions of years to reach the earth. They're not all necessarily in specific chronological order - just strewn casually, like the sower. Like the parable of the sower, coffee begins like any other plant, any other flower, as seeds, planted, raised, in carefully cultivated climates and locations all over the world. The location matters and has its own distinct flavour. After three or four years, a coffee plant will bear fruit, then harvested with meticulous control and painstaking effort for the finest of fine beans. They are subject to processing, either dried naturally or through complex procedures before they are hulled, polished, and sorted by hand, inspected for flaws and defects. No doubt, unsatisfactory products are discarded, removed, eliminated. Just like us. Those of us who step out of line, those of us who cease to function normally in the System."
Silence.
She closes her eyes for a moment.
I know she isn't finished.
"There's cupping, the expert 'tasting' of beans, in a regulated laboratory environment, measuring its raw flavour and aroma, multiple times, detecting every subtle difference between batches, determining its value, its weight, proper roasts or blends, and constructing its ultimate destiny, deciding its future. The beans have no choice in the decision. They are roasted and withdrawn and cooled with rigorous attention to timing for honed tastes. There is much variety of selections and blends. But also an innumerable amount of the same virtually indistinguishable bean. They are placed into predetermined pathways, categories, classifications, designs, its life mass-manufactured by the divine."
She takes a breath to inhale the scent of her coffee. I do the same, like a meditative ritual.
"So we are like the coffee bean."
She looks at her fingernails. "Those are not my own words. They're partially yours."
"Mine? How?"
"You think you're not thinking, but no one really stops thinking, until you become an Image. Sometimes I simply regurgitate and reveal what's hidden beneath."
I stare blankly at her.
"Your subconscious thinks, even your unconscious does. Your unconscious connects to the Collective. Thoughts flow from one layer to the next. They call the unconscious, soul."
I wonder if her mind is the same.
"I'm not an exception," she says.
"I can't tell if that's good or bad."
"Me neither." Her eyes twinkle from behind her cup.
I drink from mine and then I ask her what I should do from now on.
"We."
"What do we do now?"
She leans forward so that I can make out pores and strands of hair. "We've done something naughty," I smell coffee from her breath, "so they're after us. And so, it always comes down to the question of life and death for people, to die or live?"
"I don't know which is better."
"The choice is yours."
"I'd prefer to die, to expire, but it seems you think I want to live."
"I know you want to live."
I laugh. I laugh heartily in our strange corner of the System.
"If you want to live, we need to leave this place."
"Leave to where?"
"Leave the city."
"So, you're essentially asking for a vacation, but there's no vacation pay."
She also laughs in reply.
"Usually the man asks the woman out."
She says nothing as if inviting me to ask.
"Depends on where we're going."
"Anywhere but here."
"Then what?"
"We haven't left yet."
"You're implying it may not be possible to leave," I say, "how do we begin?"
"Each day has to be completely different than the last. We cannot do the same things; every moment has to be made new. We don't want to be coffee beans."
"What happens if we do that?"
"Then we are constantly breaking Etiquette and They will come knocking."
"Which They?"
"Both They."
"Okay, so you want Them to come knocking."
"Yes, we want Them to," she says and I frown, "if They come knocking, the way out may open then."
"Do you know how?"
"I have an idea."
"A hypothesis. That sounds lovely."
She smiles.
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