Beyond, Beyond, Beyond

The passionfruit vine from the balcony downstairs has started growing over the railing of hers. It never seems to fruit; Liz doesn’t have the heart to cut it back.

All around, the city air choking life and color out of everything it can get its smoggy hands on. The dimly orange sun aches rings in the sky, obscured by copious factory smoke, accessories to an art piece that would have been beautiful had it been art and not reality. Liz looks past it, checks her watch even though she doesn’t need to.

She slides open the screen door and treks through the apartment, side-stepping notebooks and paper scraps scribbled over with now-abandoned stories, grabs a bag at random, and stops a brief moment in front of the mirror at the door to put her hair up. Her face blinks back at her, aging, ever-unrecognizable, all eye bags and stress lines. Twenty four? She feels thirty.

She tugs on her shoes.

The apartment has been home for five years now, the city escape she grew up dreaming of. It had been everything. In the same way as life, as if copying it subconsciously, the apartment, somehow without her realizing, has shifted its position to be in her peripheral vision. She walks down to the elevators, doors on either side, empty air straight ahead of her. No path in sight.

The air hits her when she exits the building, a backhand slap to the face. She walks a little faster than usual, turns the block, and ignores the light in favor of getting there quicker.

Horns blare from the next street over, the screeching of tires, a cacophony of people creating dreams and losing track of them and ruining other lives and clocking in to work and paying taxes and getting so drunk they forget their own names and doing it all again.

The barista is a different one today, a lot younger than Misha. Liz eyes him apprehensively. “Black coffee, one cheese and ham sandwich,” she mumbles over the counter.

He beams like a puppy. “Will you be eating in or taking out?”

“In.”

“Card or cash?”

“Cash, please.” She fumbles with her wallet and produces the currency he demands. Taking a number off the counter in front of her, she picks a stool in the back corner.

Her laptop powers on with a faint but futile struggle, light sputtering on and off on the screen before it whirrs, and settles. She opens her document and sits in silence, fingers poised over the keyboard. She stays there until her food arrives, and then she eats, expressionless. The white page remains blank.

I dream of, she reads off the beginning of the unfinished sentence, mouthing the words. I dream of something. I dream of something I cannot explain. But this is a children’s book, so she substitutes.

Some three hours later, the barista walks over. “Watcha working on?” he asks. His fingers play with an unlit cigarette, as if he’d been considering going outside for a smoke and changed his mind. She mentally recalculates his age, almost by habit.

“Manuscript,” she answers.

He frowns at her lack of explanation. “I’m Francis. You are?”

“Do you get paid to make small talk?” she replies.

The dimples in his cheeks get wider. “Maybe I do. Who knows?”

“I’m Liz. Can I get back to my work now?”

“Well, Miss Liz-can-I-get-back-to-my-work-now, you’ve asked the question. What if I say no? Are you going to keep talking to me?”

She glances up from her laptop to take a proper look at him. He’s young, with a face she initially clocked as being something like seventeen before she saw the cig. Like she would any other person, she makes a character profile. Name: Francis, barista, old enough to smoke but fairly young by appearance, pretty face, enjoys small talk, strangely cheerful for a city person. And she pauses. Waits for her brain to supply the descriptive word she’s snagged on.

Waits, and it doesn’t come.

She feels her expression slowly soften from the surprise. He looks back at her, young and only just starting to age. In a few years, he will be near unrecognizable.

“So you write manuscripts,” he ventures. A little bit of awkwardness has crept into his tone.

“I write lots of things,” she says. “Children’s books. Youth fiction. Essays. Crime. Fantasy.”

“Does it sell?’

Liz winces. Ouch. “Do you think I’d be eating here and using the free wifi every day if it was?”

Francis breathes out a little. “Sorry,” he tells her guiltily.

“It’s alright.” She thinks she might even be telling the truth.

He seems to wait for her to say something more, maybe ask him a question in return. Liz goes back to typing instead, and he hovers for a moment, fingers brushing the edge of the table. He gives up after a moment, realizing she has no interest.

The hands on the clock hit six and with them the sun begins to set. Liz pushes her laptop back into her bag and gets to her feet, brushing her skirt free of crumbs.

“See you next time!” Francis sends her off cheerfully.

She waves back halfheartedly. “Yeah, see you next time.”

The city is the same as it was in the morning, a great big swelling of white noise that slams into her ears and rings there for an interminably long time. Liz comes to a stop at the crossing and considers hunkering down on the pavement and covering her ears with her hands like a small child.

She wades through crowds, watches them swim by in her vision, bobbing up and down. She is vaguely aware of her own body swaying, and knows somewhere in her mind that it is she who is moving, not them. Still, she imagines herself standing outside the aquarium, staring at exotic fish, everyone with their heads down at phones, earphones blocking their hearing. If they could see properly, she wonders, would any of them seek change? If the horrible sounds of the city were audible to them?

Beyond, beyond, beyond. All she sees is sky. All she sees is the grey sky, and the way it seems to twist itself in pain around the skyscrapers that pierce it.

Beyond, beyond, beyond. Somewhere out there the city buildings get shorter and shorter until all human civilization fades away entirely, the barren landscape of acreages and cows and unpaved roads and driveways longer than the motorway between Ocean Shores and Nerang. And somehow she is here instead, in the place she pictured to be better, lost in translation among people she doesn’t know how to communicate with.

Liz unlocks the door to her apartment. Her phone lights up with an email from a publisher as she fishes it out of her bag. She skims it—draft was enjoyable…unfortunately not exactly what we…perhaps another time…look forward to further—and ultimately chooses to ignore it. Tossing both the phone and the bag down, she steps out onto the balcony.

The tiles are cold under her feet. Everything is a means to an end.

Liz lights a cigarette and leans out over the railing, trying to avoid the passionfruit vine digging into her arm. The nicotine has got into her, and to an innumerable amount of people here. The environmental pollution isn’t half as bad as the corruption that has pervaded her soul. She smokes, she drives, she drinks, she consumes all the factory-made products they market to her on the damn television that never shuts up, even when she turns it off.

Out on the street, the crowds of humanoid creatures are wading through artificial light, blowing great big bubbles with every breath.

She wakes reluctantly the next morning and takes the same road to the same cafe to sit at the same table. Like yesterday, Francis greets her. She responds as enthusiastically as she can, which she knows is not very enthusiastic at all.

Today, Liz decides, is a day to work on the other book. Today is not the kind of day on which to write a whimsical piece of fiction about finding flowers in a forest.

I am living just to die, she tries writing, and shrinks away from the screen. The paragraphs are poorly formatted, the sentences strung together unnaturally. She wonders if her writing will ever be worth the hours she has spent on it, if publishers and journalists will in some distant future vie for her attention and jostle each other in the lobby of her apartment building. She erases the last three words, and all that remains on the screen is I am living.

I am living, she repeats in her head. I am living, I am living, I am living. And then, am I?

Francis gives her a muffin to take home with her. She offers to pay, and he refuses. “It’s on the house,” he tells her. “You looked like you could use it.” She thanks him and traverses the city, all the while holding it in her hands delicately. How forlorn had her expression been, she thinks, for the barista to have thought that?

I am living—.

“Is Misha on holiday?” Liz asks the next day when she walks in and finds Francis there again. He is playing with a coin on the countertop, and it flashes when the light on the ceiling reflects off it. Grabbing the coin between two fingers, he lets it spin.

“He’s attending a funeral back home,” he replies finally.

She stops in her tracks, and turns back to face the counter, her beeline for her usual table forgotten. “A funeral?” she echoes.

“His mother passed away.”

“...I’m sorry to hear that.”

Francis shrugs, violently, as if trying to throw weight off his shoulders. His eyes remain fixed on the coin, which is still spinning wildly. “Yeah. It was devastating to hear.”

Liz swallows. “Were you close with—with his mother?”

“You could say so.”

She doesn’t know what to say, so she repeats herself. “I’m sorry.”

They stand on either side of the counter. The coin spins itself out of orbit and clatters to a stop on the metal surface, heads up and tails down. She wonders if Francis made a bet, but doesn’t ask, and contemplates the pros and cons of continuing the conversation or going to her table. He saves her the decision by straightening his back and moving behind the till.

“The usual, Liz?”

She fumbles with her wallet, and produces cash. “Yeah, the usual please.”

Neither of them say another word throughout the day, as several other customers come and go. The business must barely be keeping itself afloat with how little people frequent it. The flower in the forest has yet to be found, the main character from the youth fiction novel is racing around to solve a mystery without a clear end, and the author is still stuck on the sentence, I am living—. She turns the words over and over until Francis approaches her, suddenly and without warning.

“Do you reckon she’s happy?” he asks her.

Liz closes her laptop. “I never knew her,” she admits.

Francis seems caught off guard. “Oh—I just assumed—”

“It’s a fair thought to have,” she assures, waving off his stuttered words. “I’m close with Misha, so it makes sense. Will you tell me about her, maybe?”

He pulls up a chair across from her, and leans both elbows on the table. “Misha grew up in the country. You know that, right?”

“That’s how we bonded, initially.”

“I didn’t peg you for a country person.”

“I’ve been here a long time.”

“Figures. You’ve got that dreary look in your eyes.”

She glares. “Is that an insult?”

He raises his hands in surrender. “Never, just an observation.”

The light through the window slowly shifts its position on the table. Shadows warp and change their shape. Outside, people hurry by, fragments of their lives seeping in through the crack underneath the door that does not open, with its mounted bell that does not ring. A cafe starved for customers.

“I guess it just reminds me of our fragility.” Francis grips his upper arm, elbows still resting on the table. “Any of us, at any given point, could simply cease to exist. And—it makes me remember again what it means to be alive. What it means to be living. That death is always near.”

Liz feels her shoulders go still. “Do you see life as a way to die?”

Francis laughs. “No, of course not. I love being alive. It might lead to death, but nothing can be summarized by just the way it ends.” He sounds so assured of himself she feels deeply jealous, from the roots of where her tendons connect to each other, through each of her joints and from inside of her ribcage where her heart thumps on like a drum.

“Excuse me?”

Both of them turn to the door. A businesswoman, dressed in grey, airpod still in her left ear and the right one held in her hand, is standing at the entrance. Somehow, Liz has missed the ringing of the bell. Francis slides off his seat. “How can I help you today?” He flashes his brilliant puppy dog smile.

Liz reopens her laptop. I am living, she thinks anew. And, I am living. She dots the period in her mind with something difficult to describe, something between satisfaction and nostalgia. Mentally, she steps back and looks at the sentence floating there in the darkness.

I am living.

She looks out the window, at the sun slowly sinking below the skyline. For the first time in a while, she feels refreshed. The light fades for a brief moment, and in the shade she sees her own reflection looking back at her. Aging, ever-unrecognizable, she thinks to herself. But she tacks onto the end, living, and she swears something changes, although she can’t say what.

The hands of the clock hit six. Like any other day, Liz goes to leave, but this time she pauses. She turns around, fixes her gaze on the cookies on display at the counter. “Thank you.”

Francis looks at her with surprise. “Whatever for?”

She feels herself smile a little. “Couldn’t tell you. Thank you anyways.”

He watches her leave, too stunned to say goodbye, and she closes the door behind her with the soft rattle of the bell. The smile is still on her face.

The light turns green. She steps onto the road in a city full of color, and as she crosses the road, she hears the great shattering, looks down as she keeps walking and watches the shards of glass cascade around her feet. The aquarium broken, she feels the world come to a stop around her, still and yet tumultuous, moving unceasingly. The fish are no longer bobbing, no longer blowing bubbles, no longer looking ahead with their dead eyes.

Beyond, beyond, and beyond that. All she sees is sky. All she sees is the gaps between the clouds where it is bluer than anything else could ever dream of being.