placeswherepeople

[placeswherepeople]

heart of gold diner

The Heart of Gold Diner sits just off the interchange, an oasis of yolk-colored light and endless coffee cups. Here, the populace convenes, stepping out of the cold, out of the news cycle, to digest the day. The frycook goes by Gus; he has a map of Zion National Park tattooed on his arm, prominent veins plotting, to scale, the course of rivers running through it. Tilda, the waitress, gives a gilded smile to a man with a nickel-plated goatee, who tells her he likes his coffee like a car window at night—black enough to see his reflection. “I start every morning,” he explains, “with a hard look in the mirror.” And out in the exurbs and in the leafless North, the war of lawn signs pits neighbor against neighbor: friendliness is a foreign language, and peace an animal afraid of its shadow, and love a two-way street with a dead end both ways. But here the drops of rain on the window form a plate-glass star chart. And in the quiet hours before the morning rush, Tilda dreams of stairwells from her childhood. And when it rains she wonders: Do houseplants grow jealous of the weeds and wildflowers?

[placeswherepeople]

in preparation, the door

In preparation of the uprising, the divorcés living in roadside motels form a voting bloc, and the squirrels in the park shave their tails in solidarity with the rats of the sewer. Meanwhile, officials at the Bureau of Nostalgia workshop yesterday’s trends, and the theology students of Orlando Florida congregate beneath a screensaver sky and consider that God is like a manmade lake—no less real for being artificial. In the meantime, financial advisors shuffle out of city centers—they watch buildings turn to brick-colored leaves on train windows, and gathering at dusk they swim out into municipal water, marveling at the endless profitability of end of day. There are certain critical moments: noon turns to afternoon—and the door, as it opens, feels itself become a door; while the room becomes more than a room.