If there was food, it was gone before she said it. There were other things in the course of the conversation, though, the word “dewlap,” maybe. If there were plates, they’d been cleared. She liked to compare things to dinner plates, size and shape. The table was a coincidence, probably. A breeze probably blew when she said it, fluttered the umbrellas above the patio’s tables. If they stood or if they sat, he didn’t know. There was only the timing of the breeze.

“I used to be rich,” she said, her eyes searching him for understanding of the more-than-verbally-conveyed. The umbrellas flapped, maybe. If she’d have looked at him for another second he would’ve broken, the clarity of her intent, the weight, but she didn’t. There was a laugh from behind them, from down the street, if there was one. Interesting or otherwise, she had the mercy to turn toward it.

Time passed. The scene grew harder to piece together. Maybe he’d inserted the romance. Probably definitely he had. He’d done it to all of the memories he could muster, down to tasks as mundane as washing raw chicken in a stainless steel basin, the sensation of bones scratching his wrists as he shifted the flesh. The apparatus couldn’t be trusted, he decided. In the quiet times, it could do nothing more than generate context, arrange the elements of the scenes in ways suggesting significance.

“What are you thinking about?” said this she, a different she in fresh context.

“Nothing,” he said with a smile. “Just daydreaming.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I do that.”

They were halfway to Chattanooga. It was a short drive, but he’d already forgotten why they were going there. He considered asking, but she seemed too intent on the road ahead, too smiley for questions like that to fly. The radio hadn’t worked in weeks.

“A game?” she said.

He wondered if there’d been umbrellas, that night, if they’d eaten. There were only the eyes, though, the cryptic words, and the exit that followed. “Sure,” he said. “A game.”

As they played, he tried to record the details of the drive. It was a matter of preserving the moment with authenticity. If he allowed himself that then there’d be no second guessing, later. He’d know why it had ended without any embellishment or added significance. They were just bodies in space, after all, just large chemical reactions.

“Fix the still,” she said.

He knew this one. “Brecht,” he said. For his turn, he offered the only one he could think of. “The cold from space.”

“You’ve done that one, before,” she said. “You’re not trying.”

“I get things mixed up, sometimes—time and stuff—preoccupied, maybe.”

“Maybe a different game?”

If there were a song on the radio, if the radio worked, it would have made the job of keeping things together easier, a familiar song with no prior attachments. He tried humming, but it added nothing.

“Are you alright?” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Just trying to figure something out.”

“What’s that?”

“A couple things, really. There’s the why—like why Chattanooga? But there’s also this whole thing of now and then—like is now ever not then and how do you keep them apart.”

She looked out the window at the spinning wheels of a semi as they passed.

“Well,” she said, “this has to be now, doesn’t it?”

He looked her over. “Is this the game?”

“The new one? You tell me.”

“Probably not,” he said.

His hand fit nicely on her leg. The silence fit nicely in his ears. They wore it between them for a stretch, up until the outside-Chattanooga signs reading, “Bee alert, arrive unhurt,” and even then it was only a laugh at a remembered moment that broke it.

In the hotel room they watched a documentary about Sacco and Vanzetti. They left the curtains open so they could see the rain, the gray skies over the sleeping elephant of a city.

“Why are we here?” he said, after a while.

She frowned. “I don’t know if I think about that, too much. There was the drive, though. That was nice.”

“It’s not going anyplace,” he said, “this place, this drive.”

“I feel the same way, I think. I know I feel similarly. If it was going anyplace, was anyplace, even, there wouldn’t be any room for these questions.”

“Yeah,” he said. “This is probably then, then.”

She kissed him on the cheek. “Probably.”

“Do you remember if there were umbrellas over the tables?”

“I don’t see how I could, baby. Besides, this is different, I think. We were maybe at the coast, then.”

He nodded. He wondered why more stories weren’t set at the coast. There was more room for loss to expand at the coast—no room for that with all of the mountains now surrounding them. “We probably came for fun,” he said.

“I’m sure of it.”

“Good,” he said. “Let’s have some, then.”

“Like how?” She was already standing, already finding her shoes.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know if we’ve got that in us.”

“We did, though. So we should, right?”

“Maybe. Maybe the moon’ll be out. We can watch it from the patio.”

“Sure,” she said. “We could have a drink, and I could say the moon is shaped like a dinner plate, white as fresh china.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That sounds nice. But you have to promise it won’t be the last time.”

“I would,” she said, “but I think that’s up to you.”

“Probably,” he said.

“Maybe,” she agreed.

Not a coastal wind, he pretended to remember. It was some other kind, colder and more evil. There were no tables, maybe. The umbrellas were below them, strategically placed around the pool. They leaned against the rail. The words came—the pleading eyes—a laugh. She looked away.

It seemed closer to right, but so much remained to doubt, so many added details. It was too much, probably, to ever remember correctly. It was only pictures. It was only what they meant. There was nothing else.

Timestamp: 03.04.08 at 09:10 AM. Filed under: Fiction.