The just-arrived coffeehouse patron approached the counter, but before he could order his drink he spotted his journal in a lost and found box by the register. “That’s mine!” he blurted.

The young woman at the espresso machine spoke unexcitedly. “Someone turned it in last night.”

Michael picked up his book, unable to account for his absentmindedness in leaving it behind. He was relieved to have recovered it so easily, and even relieved that in his haste to leave the house he had forgotten about bringing it. The fortuitous turn had spared him a panic attack in looking for it. With his thank you, he took his latte and moved off to the same window seat he sat at the night before.

The idea someone might have perused his writing was unsettling. It was not only someone seeing what he wrote that disturbed him, but also how he wrote. His handwriting was barely legible, though more incriminating was his rewriting the same passages over and over. His way of working bore little resemblance to the recognizable practices of a given medium, and to the degree he crossed paths with other proficients of a craft he never ceased feeling like an imposter. There was a necessary learning curve in all he undertook, as well as strengths and weaknesses in his abilities, but once he mastered something he was too embarrassed to share the unorthodox means by which he came to it.

A pen was fished up out of his jacket pocket, and the moment of re-gearing provided an opportunity to size up the landscape by daylight: A puce-colored thrift store sofa resided near the door; a Jim Jarmusch film flyer was taped up over the condiment bar; Nina Simone played on the speaker system. As for the patrons, many students were hunkered over their laptops, or holding them aloft to trawl for a better wireless connection; there were even a few barnacled, unwired men his age, or older. Every detail was an archetype of coffeehouse society he knew well, and maybe on another less happy day, too well.

At some point in his writing, the dwarfish yard gnome character (still in costume) came in to get a coffee to-go. He eyed the new townie in a friendly way; Michael sized him up as another person to be avoided.

Undeterred, the man strolled up his table with his beverage. “You must be the new artist-in-residence. I saw you pull your trailer into the Willis Quadrangle yesterday.” A chalky hand was extended. “My name is Jacques Cretier. I’m a performance artist over at the college.”

Michael rose to cordiality. “Michael West.”

Jacques pulled up the seat without prompting. “That place you’ve moved into used to be the home of the architect and designer, Daedalus Monet.”

“I don’t know much about him,” the painter confessed.

“He designed a famous miniature golf course not too far from here.”

The sight of the performance artist in the window turned few heads, but Michael, somewhat embarrassed by his presence, joked nervously. “You look like a powered donut about to dunk yourself in your coffee.”

The performance artist explained between slurps. “Believe me, I get all kinds of remarks in this outfit. Documenting them is the whole point of what I do.”

“I see. Society’s reaction to nonconformity.”

He grinned with a touch of self-mocking. “That’s how I originally pitched it. But now I say it’s about how vertically-challenged folks are viewed as dehumanized novelties in our culture.”

“Oh?”

The dwarf embellished. “I figured I might as well jump on the P.C. gravy train, too. Dress up an old Modernist saw in new Affirmative Action parlance.”

“Has it worked?”

Jacques sighed. “There aren’t enough angry midgets in the world to achieve critical mass on making shortness a recognized victimology, so funding has been a slog.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

The man sallied on. “I pose in the better-off yards, mostly. Although I think I’m just pissing-off the faculty while they’re trying to do yard work. One professor recently ran me off with an electric hedge trimmer.” (A bandaged hand was held up.) “Artists get no respect. Not even from tenured art professors.”

“I should think caffeine would be an liability for a man in your line of work.”

Jacques tapped his plastic cup. “Decaf.” He then turned a studying eye back at the painter. “What are you writing?”

Michael shrugged evasively. “A memoir, I think.”

“A memoir?” The performance artist looked around. “If you spend all day in coffeehouses, you’re not going to have much of a life to write about.”

“True.”

Jacques was dry. “The idea of coffeehouses is one where everyone wears berets and argues about French poetry. But this place is more like an outpatient clinic.”

The tables being turned, Michael thought to defend his own life choices. “For people like me, hanging out in coffeehouses is the solitude of angels, and only occasionally pathetic.”

“I guess we’re all posing in some small way in this world, then.”

The patron waxed on it. “I would say each regular who shows up gets a table, an allotment of caffeine, and as much time as they need to sit and stoically justify their existence in the universe. When they abandon their wishful sandcastles to make room for another, the tide moves in to bus the table.”

Jacques cut to the chase. “But, of course, there are always cute girls to look at in the meanwhile.” He glanced over at a pretty-ish barista behind the counter, though acerbically. “That’s Erica,” he grumbled. “She’s a local dead-ender. One of those off-the-shelf bohemian-types with more piercings than sense.”

Michael had yet to notice her.

The performance artist stood up. “If I were you, I would make up stuff for the book. Set myself up with a lot of hot chicks.”

The writer both smiled and shrank at the suggestion. “It’s hard to escape wish-fulfillment when you’re holding a pen.”

Jacques was not dissuaded. “Artists are always painting women they’ve slept with, or doing self-portraits. There’s narcissism in every creative endeavor.”

“But in art it’s generally not spelled out so plainly.”

“True,” Jacques admitted. “I guess you can slip more under the radar if you show rather than tell.”

As the performance artist turned to leave, Michael thought to seize his second opportunity of the day. “Do you know a good place to rent a camcorder and tripod?”

Jacques beamed. “I can do better than that. I can set up at no charge!”

Leaving the coffeehouse together, the two men walked a few blocks to where the graduate student lived in a ramshackle trailer. The small tract of land around it was landscaped with spastic clumps of potting soil. Ceramic geese marked its corners, while plastic petunias in small pots (still bearing their price tags) dotted the property line. On ducking to get through the doorway, the farraginous décor continued inside. The narrow enclosure was dark, dank, and possessed the unmistakable sickly sweet detergent smell of dried semen. A thin mildewed mattress, half-covered with an uncooperative fitted-sheet, was propped up on a piece of splintery plywood supported by cinderblocks. Kleenex-like crustaceans were sprinkled liberally over a pile of pornographic magazines underneath the Spartan arrangement.

Jacques was pulling together the video equipment, but caught his guest looking at his handiwork. He quipped, “That’s my origami collection.”

Michael smiled uncomfortably in lieu of a verbal response, and turned his attention to a heap of unmarked videocassettes against a warped wall. A corroded-over hot plate, in dire want of elevation, was almost tripped over in spotting toothpaste spittle and strands of discarded dental floss in among the stacks. The painter had known poverty, but never such hopelessness. He lifted his eyes above the dross to meditate on a poster of Balthus’ Tweedledum and Tweedledee painting, The Street.

Jacques intruded on his guest's thoughts. “You know the grocery cart with the squeaky wheel?”

Michael was sardonic. “I always get that one.”

“Well, this recorder makes a funny noise when it rewinds.”

The borrower accepted the caveat.

Jacques slapped a videocassette into the video camera. “You can record over this old tape, if you want.”

“Thanks.”

Michael was handed the camcorder and a tripod, and was about to leave when the resident extended an invitation. “A professor is throwing a Halloween wingding tonight for the fine arts students. His house is near where you live. It would be a good chance for you to meet some of the locals. Interested?”

The retiring man normally stayed clear of such things, but seeing he was turning over a new leaf, and the fellow artist had helped him out, he was agreeable. “Sure.”

With everything tucked under his arms, he ducked out the door.

Michael was determined not to let the squalid detour detract from his good mood, so basked in the purgative sunshine as he walked along. Shortly ahead, a glint caught his attention above the treetops. At first he thought it might be a meteor, but then realized it was a slender metal joist being hoisted into the air by a crane at a construction site. It was flickering erratically, and for the brief second it took to sink in something was wrong the beam slipped its harness to plunge below the tree line. From a distance, it appeared to fall in slow motion, though Michael knew the workers would have a very different view of it. He was too far away to hear any scream of alarm, but tightened in anticipation of a reverberating crash.

None was forthcoming.

The confounded man slowed before coming to a complete halt on the sidewalk. Dry leaves rustled in the branches overhead; the chain of a swing squeaked across the street in a park; but nothing else was heard. He took a hesitant step forward. As he leaned into a second step, hundreds of crows—like shattering black glass—sprang from the trees. They flew out in a sonic net over the street, and except for the flap of their wings, no other sound chased them along.