You wander in from the dark. You pause to stamp the slush from your shoes. You check to see if Byers is here. You nod to Flash and Fats in the back. You pour yourself a cup of coffee and settle in for a long night. One day, you somehow know, you will look back and think “This was good. This was true.” You think this now because it’s 1966 and Hemingway isn’t passé yet. But he will be one day, and you’ll be old.

But for now you have to read Red Badge of Courage before your eight-o’clock. You pull it carefully out of your back pocket before you slide into an empty booth. Got to be careful with these Signet pocket books – the covers come off pretty easy, and then the pages start to peel, one by one.

OK.

The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting….

Cold! Tell me about cold! Jeez, I had icicles in my beard when I came in here. You think of everyone else in the world racking out for the night.

The sound of a quarter clinking down the chute of the juke box. You look up: Byers.

“T6,” you call out.

Byers, hunched over the box, slides one hand slowly behind his back and gives you the finger. Then he punches up his three songs and sits back down.

“Cristo Redentor,” Donald Byrd. Mood music for a mood you’re not in the mood for. But fine, nonetheless. Crane can wait a little bit.

Byrd is followed by “Mystic Eyes.” Them. Who is Them? Who are Them?

“One Sunday morning, as we went walking, down by the old graveyard…”.

It’s a long way from Chuck Berry, isn’t it? you think. Can we get some reading done here? Better refill the coffee first. Hungry. No, too early. The cold passed reluctantly….

Oh, jeez! “I Got You Babe.” Byers turns to look at you and grins wickedly. Redundant, that. That face: wicked, sinister, saturnine. You’d like to have that face. You put the book down again and walk over to his booth. He smoothly moves his hands to cover the notebook he’s been scribbling in. What is that, you wonder for the millionth time. Some say it’s an epic poem. Some say a novel. No one has ever read any of it. It must fill several notebooks by now. You try to read his scrawl upside down; nope.

Desultory conversation. He’s supposedly an English major, but you’ve never seen him in one of your classes. He gives away nothing. You go back to your booth, and he picks up his pencil and resumes writing the Great American Notebook.

Coffee’s cold. First, bathroom. Phew! Flash hasn’t mopped yet tonight. Check out the graffiti. Some of it is beginning to fade into the background dinge. Stupid stuff. Except the quotation from Heidegger, and this one: “Samuel Flagg Bemis is a very ugly man.” Terse; pointed; who?

Read. Keep reading.

Absurd ideas took hold upon him. He thought that he did not relish the landscape. It threatened him. A coldness swept over his back, and it is true that his trousers felt to him that they were no fit for his legs at all.

“It is true?” Why say that? It’s just the same if you don’t say it. You say a thing, “it is true that” is understood, implied. You weren’t a philosophy major for two quarters for nothing.

How do my trousers feel, you wonder. Do they fit? Trousers. Odd word; no obvious derivation. Nobody says that anymore. Oh, but “trou.” Stupid. Coffee. Byers? Yes, still here, but not scribbling – dozing. Where does he live?

“You gonna be here all night?” Irv, the owner. You suppress the impulse to mouth off; anyway, you can’t think of a snappy reply.

“Yeah, probably.”

“You gonna eat, or what?”

“Later.”

He grunts. Asshole. No, not really. Pain in the ass, though. Except he lets you sit here all night, night after night. He could smile once in a while, though. Wouldn’t kill him.

The corpse was dressed in a uniform that had once been blue, but was now faded to a melancholy shade of green. The eyes, staring at the youth, had changed to the dull hue to be seen on the side of a dead fish. The mouth was open. Its red had changed to an appalling yellow. Over the gray skin of the face ran little ants. One was trundling some sort of bundle along the upper lip.

You wonder what it felt like to be “the youth.” Sixteen? You try to imagine yourself into the story and you can’t. You’ve walked in the woods a few times, and gotten muddy, but nobody ever shot at you and you’ve never seen a dead person and you always knew that you’d be home soon. How did Crane know about this? He wasn’t in the war. Dad wasn’t in the war, not really, even though he was in the Army. Even in war some soldiers aren’t getting shot, turning colors. He feels bad about that. Sitting in an office. Somebody has to, though. 2-S.

Tap on the shoulder. Left shoulder. Your reaction time is extended by microseconds as experience overrules instinct. You’ve trained for years to look the other way, catch the joker. Look right. Nobody. Left. Linda. Jeez. Girls just don’t understand the game. How can you win if they don’t play?

“Midterm?”

“Yeah. Should’ve read this last week.”

“It’s tedious, don’t you think?’

She slides in next to you. You wonder why she doesn’t sit on the other side, facing you. It’s hard to talk this way, and you can’t stretch your legs out sideways. And your coffee cup is now up against the salt and pepper. Then her hand is on your knee, and you forgive her. How do your trousers feel?

“Yeah, but interesting. War, you know. Being a man and all that.”

“Oh, swell. Like you could be a man in Vietnam. Who needs that?”

“Nobody needs it. You’d just like to know, sometimes, how it would be. How you would be. Shooting at guys. Getting shot. Bodies. You know.”

She stares at you. No more knee.

“You going to be here all night?”

“Until I finish this, anyway.” You flip the pages. “I’m halfway through, almost.”

“I have to be back at the house. See you tomorrow.” And she slides back out, leaving a hole. You ease back to the middle of the bench seat and spread a little, but you don’t fill the hole. Coffee.

He wondered what those men had eaten that they could be in such haste to force their way to grim chances of death. As he watched his envy grew until he thought that he wished to change lives with one of them. He would have liked to have used a tremendous force, he said, throw off himself and become a better. Swift pictures of himself, apart, yet in himself, came to him--a blue desperate figure leading lurid charges with one knee forward and a broken blade high--a blue, determined figure standing before a crimson and steel assault, getting calmly killed on a high place before the eyes of all. He thought of the magnificent pathos of his dead body.

Yeah. “Calmly killed.” That’d show her, you think. Magnficent. To be magnificent. Yeah.

Clink, clink, another quarter. You look up. Byers, awake again. Alright! “I Am a Rock.” English major’s anthem. “I have my books and my poetry to protect me.” Go ahead, shoot. Your weapons are no match for my Norton Anthology. “No kiddin’, Padre, I felt the bullet hit, but look…” as you pull your copy of Cat’s Cradle out of your breast pocket. “It’s a miracle.” So much for calmly killed.Walk away. Another day. Yeah.

Damned eight o’clock. What is he going to ask? Always the essay questions. Lucky last time. “Explain the moral oppositions in Billy Budd.” Almost blew that one, you did, but as you started to write it came to you somehow that Billy isn’t the hero of the story. Good thing you read it, though. Can’t count on a brainstorm if you haven’t read the book. Aced it.

You think of the night, just a week ago, when Schick showed up here with Cradle. “Man, you got to read this!” No, man, midterm tomorrow – Psych.

“You got to read it!”

“Can’t.”

“OK, just read the first page.”

Like a damn drug dealer. Read the first page, then the next; next thing you knew it was five a.m. and you had about two hours to cram for Psych. Your long-term education, let’s say, versus short-term problem-solving. Always go long-term.

Linda. You could do magnificent. Would she then? Magnificent but not dead, of course. Absolutely no point in dead.

Call me Ishmael. Good opening. Biblical thing, the wanderer. Like Dion. “Rosie on my chest.” There you go; tattoo to complete the magnificent. And a face. Whatever happened to the Belmonts? One day a Belmont, next day a nobody. Like a frog. Jeez it’s late.

“Hey! I said, we’re going to clean the grill. You want anything first?”

When the youth awoke it seemed to him that he had been asleep for a thousand years, and he felt sure that he opened his eyes upon an unexpected world.

You zoned out, you realize. What time? Oh god. Look around. Byers is gone, the jukebox is dim. Nobody here but you.

“No, I’ll wait for the donut guy.”

He grunts again and walks back to the kitchen. You pour some more coffee, though your stomach objects. What are the odds he’ll ask something about the end of the book? He’s more into themes, character development, big-picture stuff. It’ll come to you, you’re pretty sure. Sure. Like the Billy Budd thing.

At last! Yes! two beautiful trays. Get one of the chocolate ones, still a little warm. Oh man. It is true that it is delicious. Death can definitely wait.

Getting light out. “A winter’s day, in a deep and dark December.” Alone. Yeah, that’s you. Alone, studying to be magnificent. Better get going. Take a peek at the last page, for luck. Then to class.

The procession of weary soldiers became a bedraggled train, despondent and muttering, marching with churning effort in a trough of liquid brown mud under a low, wretched sky.

Oh yeah.

Next: Byers Sleeps