Lem's Jacket, 2015

The coffee shop menu was engaged in clever pretense. It was printed permanently upon a solid plank crafted to resemble a wooden blackboard, and from a distance it seemed written in cheery, varicolored chalk. Closer inspection would reveal a faint manufactured gloss covering the carefully relaxed handwriting. Jack was standing third in line, third the worst. The nuances of the menu was not the sort of thing that Jack would miss entirely, but it was not information that would interest him.

Nobody else in the shop seemed to notice that the menu was faking it either, so it was certainly getting by okay. It's tedious work being something you aren't and the menu was doing a pretty good job. Jack was in this coffee shop because of Julia. Julia was a short young woman of constitutionally indeterminate age: almost small enough to be scrawny, but charming enough to qualify neatly as cute. Julia was the type to...

So here was Jack in his light gray sweater and uncreased slacks. He was here because of Julia. He wasn't actually the coffee shop kind of guy. At the front of the line he found a wide assortment of mints and small retail items, which he ignored despite their pleasing plexiglas arrangement. He was careful to order an espresso, plain. This would perhaps have been more interesting if he had ordered a plain hot chocolate or something cold with whipped cream wearing chocolate shavings (or even tea), but espresso it was: his coins clinked merrily into the glass tip jar while the barista made twisting motions.

Jack took his drink to a corner table where he could sit and look pensive. Before a proper air of seriousness could be effected, Julia blew into the coffee shop. Jack and Julia. Julia and Jack. The names rolled around together inside Jack's mind and it pleased him.

“Hi!” piped Julia, dashing quickly to his corner table. “Sorry I'm late, " she said putting her purse down. Jack gave her a not-quite wry smile.

“How are you?” he asked.

“Oh, I'm great, good.” She settled down a bit. “Work's terrible of course, but I'm awesome. How about you?”

“Well, I'm doing alright, I suppose. As well as you can say you're doing!”

Julia gave a polite look of interest. 

“Did you end up going to that museum?”

“Yes-- I went last week, on Thursday right after I got off work,” he replied. "I liked the museum, and the exhibition was fine, but...” 

Jack leaned back slightly and made a sucking noise through his teeth as if preparing a package of incisive thought. 

“I had the impression that the artist was riding just a bit too much on the drafts of his predecessors, you know?”

“Oh yeah?” Julia looked genuinely sympathetic. “That's too bad.”

“Don't get me wrong, the he was interesting... just no pioneer.” 

Julia's purse emitted a rhythmic buzz that groaned harmoniously with the table underneath, interrupting his train of thought. Julia retrieved a small black telephone, flipping it open furrowing her brow.

“Oh-- I hope you don't mind, my friend's coming,” she said with deliberate ease. She peered out the window (for Lem, probably, which was the name of this friend) and a constipated spasm crossed Jack's face. 

Who was Lem? Lem was nobody in particular, but so was Jack. Jack didn't know this. Julia tapped the edge of her cup with her index finger and spoke a few more gathered phrases as Jack pretended to listen while imagining who Lem might be. Lem? Was that short for something? Lemmy maybe. Isn't Lemmy short for something? What then? Lem... Lem... Lemen... Lawrence, Lee, Larry; there was no doubt about it, Lem was an odd name.

Lem was an odd guy though, but not in the way you'd think. Something in the way he talked, unattached to his words...

A bundle of wind and sound entered the stillness of the foyer. Lem appeared upon the threshold, half blue jeans, bag in hand. A creamy canvas-looking jacket adorned his shoulders, radiating gently. The jacket was thin and somewhat vinyl looking. Bulky yet fitting. Jack and Julia focused on it simultaneously as Lem scanned the room. 

“Have you noticed,” suggested Lem, lowering himself into a chair, “that the menu here is in fake chalk?”

“It's shameful,” he continued without waiting for a reply. “No one should pretend to be something they aren't.” Lem oscillated his head to look meaningfully at both Jack and Julia as Jack leaned back in his chair.

“They do what they can to cultivate the whole hip and nonconformist attitude,” said Jack, crossing his arms and giving a bit of a wry smile.

“Yes,” announced Lem with a grin, “We all must do what we can.”

"That's a nice jacket,” offered Julia. “Where'd you get it?”

“Oh, here and there, here and there...” lilted Lem.

“That is a nice jacket,” thought Jack. 

They continued. There was some degree of oration from Jack. Lem studied the patterned tabletop while Jill listened intently. Lem and Jill gave specific insights , and it was all extremely dull and overwrought.

Fortunately, Julia took a deliberate look at her watch.

“Oh, I gotta go,” she said busily, and extracted herself promptly. Lem and Jack rose like weeds pulled from soft earth.

“Well,” said Jack, extending his arm, “good to meet you, Lem.”

“Yeah, yeah!” spurted Lem heartily, seizing Jack's hand with matching enthusiasm. Lem slipped off into the late afternoon and Jack stayed behind to clear the table of napkin scraps.

“Lem,” he thought, “who is this Lem?” Jack was taking everything too seriously, but he didn't know this. “Lem,” he thought, “that Lem with his jacket. That fucking jacket.” Snapping the garbage into the waste basket by the exit, he jerked open the door and moved into the cool river of wind outside.

Jack walked down the street, deliberating at a reasonable pace, making turns and walking straight ahead as necessary. His orientation waned and he found himself on an unfamiliar street surrounded by gray and unpainted buildings. A bumpy road in dire need of repaving flowed between the sidewalks. The street was quiet save for the voices of pigeons and a sort of background whooshing noise. The wind had calmed and the air felt pregnant.

Jack whistled tunelessly, moving over the porous sidewalk. He felt somewhat easier out in the open. Counting the cracks along the sidewalk, he observed the green and yellow colonies of life amid the concrete martian landscape. The whooshing sound drew very near and as the it reached Jack's vicinity he noticed a cream colored light floating across the street several yards ahead.

The space between the cream light, the whooshing, and Jack constricted abruptly and a purple sports car rushed past Jack towards Lem crossing the street in company of his cream-colored jacket. Lem was looking at a shop across the street downstream and his mechanical assailant plowed into him, sending him tumbling over the car and into the air. Jack stopped short, watching this singular spectacle which made very little noise, no more than a soft bump and a prominent whooshing, as if the car was composed of a space-age foam. The vehicle sped off, failng to notice its victim, and Lem hung lazily in the air for an instant before tumbling into the asphalt river. 

The whooshing sound receded. Jack walked over to where Lem lay alongside a rack of bicycles which had jangled in collective protest at Lem's trajectory. Lem was unconscious but appeared unhurt. He had landed as if he had decided upon an impromptu nap. One arm hung with camaraderie upon a yellow bicycle that had shifted to one side in involuntary disgust. Lem's jacket was still somehow spotless, sitting smug in its luminescence.

“The jacket!” thought Jack, his mind a crisp silver. “The jacket...”

Without hesitation Jack reached over for the cream collar and pulled. The jacket slid off like a broken dumpling skin, leaving Lem a lonely lump of meat. Jack donned the stolen raiment, savoring the clutch of fabric around his shoulders. It fit perfectly. The sound of distant motors and city life leaked back into the empty street, and Jack turned and continued without another glance at his serendipitously vanquished opponent. 

“All's fair in love and jackets,” thought Jack with reassurance. As he strode along, a complex feeling of effluence seeped through his being and he found himself feeling positively giddy. The colors and sounds of the city reconvened and Jack found his giddiness fading to the sensation of a tight caffeinated buzz.

Blocks ahead, a flower shop (which was less of a shop and more of a stand) waited. Jack stood radiant among bursts of priced and planned colors. The flower girl, whose appreciation for eye-catching displays had been dulled from long hours of labor, regarded Jack's jacket with dull-eyed acceptance.

“What do you recommend?” asked Jack with confident vigor, pelting the flower girl with a weighted look.

“Well,” the flower girl gave haltingly, biting her lip, “well, I mean... recommend for what?” She brushed her fingertips meaninglessly across a bundle of blooms. “There are lots... of flowers."

“Which one would you want?” Jack asked in a brusque tone that assured the flower girl her answer would be unimportant.

“Oh, um,” offered the flower girl while she pointed vaguely to her left, or Jack's right. “These are very nice,” she said, her index finger moving obligingly. It was nearly five-o-clock and what little enthusiasm the flower girl had for her work had been doled into the insistent hands of her previous customers. Jack made noises of consideration while the flower girl focused her inattention on an invisible geometry approximately 11 centimeters to Jack's right (her own left). Through months of careful experimentation, the flower girl had discovered that a requisite level of soft focus on this entity of neither mind nor reality often provided speedy resolutions to her chronically indecisive customers. While Jack inspected the finer details of two of the more dignified arrangements, the flower girl (whose name tag read “RACH”) maintained her vigil. Soon enough, a tussled gray area emerged from around the street corner behind the pan-dimensional geometry. The gray area organized itself into Lem, limping and furious.

“Hey!” shouted Lem, seeing the flower girl first, then Jack. “Hey!”

“That's a pretty nice jacket , by the way,” said the flower girl as she waved amicably at Lem. Jack whipped around and spotted Lem breaking into a run from across the street. The flower girl settled into a snake-like reverie, eyes at nothing and face blank while a bustling gray area followed a bobbing cream noisily into the distance where the sun sat sinking into a hot tub horizon.

CC A.C. Marlowe, 2015