For a cup of coffee more

None of these people are me, obviously.

“Housekeeping” a drilling, broken voice shrieked.

“You do the dishes, we do the squishes”

I was just enjoying the architecture of the bathroom. A bidet next to the toilet, opposing each other. No doubt useful to some insane architect. Not that I had anything to do here, my insides a burning mess, but empty now.

“Housekeeping” the voice, a second time. I do not know why he chose that part of the password as I realized I was wrong, and hurled away more of whatever little my stomach contained.

“We clean the rug, you …”

Sweet Jesus. I had met him only earlier, my ride to the airport. I had cried after the encounter with that devilish capsicum (please, dear reader, trust the skull-shaped bottle, as well as the warnings from the waiter), and when I returned to my table, he sat there. A gun, and a Lego rose. All my pain-addled brain could focus on “You were looking for…”

A little hot air left my burning throat.

“I see you are occupied.” He nodded, and left instructions for the pickup. Clearly disinterested to witness my selfdegradation.

“Housekeeping” it droned in my head. I could not listen to that nonsense anymore.

“You do the smut, we clean it up” I could not listen to this anymore. Not in any way. Ungluing myself from the porcelain god I had just prayed to, I grunted a “yes, yes” to the door and entered the walk in closet. I slipped into my tux, grabbed a book I had failed to comprehend and a plushie I was supposed to throw away and opened the door.

I expected a cacophony of visual styles, but simply saw a average figure holding a surprisingly thick book. “My turtlesquisher” he lied, and dragged me outside. His walk looked like his legs could give out at any second, but I was dragged with a surprising amount of determination. I caught the title of the book. “Das kalte Blut”.

“Sorry for the rush, but…” He brumbled some explanation that sounded more outlandish than anything else (“hear the toads sing? “see the crow swing?”), and continued dragging me to the waiting sportscar.

Why did it have to be at night? I was sleepy.

“You can sleep in the car” he read my mind and pushed me into the passenger seat. I adjusted my legs just fast enough to not be hit by the door slamming shut, as he jumped over the other end.

“Wub wub” He yelled in a joyous voice, but I did not need a dictionary to understand the translation. Not that I could contemplate this any further, as he stepped on the metal, and we whisked away.

Before I could even grasp the paradox of this clearly stolen car, the rolljam device on the backseat, a car that he had nevertheless managed to make his (no sane person would have this amount of bobbleheads in a Porsche, a nodding Albert Einstein assured me, flanked by dog, Jesus and Elvis), we had left Sevilla. And as we headed north along serpentine roads, I realized that I would not sleep on this ride. There was, for one, the decorated interior of this car. For two, there was a praying mantis slowly scaling the dashboard, looking at me with deep green eyes as it was chased by an octopus in what looked to be a small version of my tux.

“I have watched enough…”

but he cut off my feeble attempts at prescience faced with the . “Sorry for the mess.” He semi-apologized, smiling. I had to cut off this nonsense, and attempted to make conversation as we entered a particularly snaky chaos. The playlist was playing Bach, Swan Lake Suite, Opus 20a. Still, that was a way in.

“You a Bach man, hm? More into Mozart myself, although the young…”

He snortled at my feeble attempts at understanding. “Whiplash”

Before I could question whether he was referring to the movie or the condition, I was treated to the latter as the playlist switched seemlessly from Bach to Busta, who was replaced with the Guns and Roses and then Britney over the next centripetal acts of violence against my neck.

He felt my discomfort as I suffered in silence, the praying mantis staring into my eyes, as if to decide whether I would be a proper mate to chop the head off, just as a tentacle wrapped around its tender lime neck. A menage-a-trois that he freed me of as he asked about my favorite law of nature.

“Newton’s law. And how it fails on a societal level.” I stammered, trying to sound smart, stealing phrases from some Slovenian philosopher. He did not ask me to elaborate. “In that an extraordinary amount of violence is needed to keep society going the way it is.” I really thought I was being smart.

He rolled his eyes. “Duality”.

He took a chug out of a bottle of vermut he unearthed from between his knees. “Personally prefer orange juice and coffee, but you know… when in Rome”. Though I seriously questioned whether that pepper had been laced.

“Mind body duality?” I tried, but no.

“No, simply the duality between a space and the space of maps from it. A location and its direction. It is, simple, but once you understand it, my god. It opens up, a light in the chaos. And when those duals meet…”

A man of magic, that was clear.

“Existence. Uniqueness. Everything. I shall explain it to you.”

Another curve, taken more violent as we switched from Keren Ann to Genesis. Not bad. The randomness takes, and it provides. I would not make my flight.

“Meow” A kitten had emerged from the backseat, and had replaced me in the insectoid-cephalopod twosome as the third contributor of mayhem.

It, too, in formal wear. A Chanel dress. Quite risky.

“Meow” It was too much. All that to get out of family therapy. Was the airport even this way? I realized it was difficult to arrive anywhere when one was just having no goal to begin with.

“What’s our conflict? Our goal?”

SXTN switches to Billie Eilish. His taste in music was cancer.

“We don’t need one”

He seemed disinterested. But I needed one.

Alright. He seemed to think, while I tried to think what he would come up with. The war? Science?

“Once, a friend showed me the city I thought I knew. A city I already loved. That was close-minded and messy and strict on the surface, and yet when you arrived, every idea was possible. Because, perhaps ideas like the fight. And if nothing else is allowed, you want that freedom. If you cannot talk about calm, talk about all other things.” He seemed to wait, to take in some air.

“That friend took me into a school, just at dusk, when the city below us was loudest and most chaotic. The students had long left, there was but a single guardsman watching the ancient stone corridors and that we had to sneak by. We scaled steps, silently traced corridors and then emerged to see a dome, lit in the dark. It was the gift of seeing it. It was the conflict, to the loudness of the street below, the conflict between everything that made this city. Everything in this city and that point in time came converged. And still, you need to move to understand it.” He smacked the glove compartment, and a few pictures fell out. One of them, the city. Another of them, a child’s drawing. The word for frog, made to look like a frog.

When you lose someone so young you did not get to know them, then you start to imagine all possibilities of what they could have done. And that, perhaps, was it. Not the city, not the child. But the personal connection. How we could, at times, use our personal mess to create something beautiful. It could have meaning or not, but it was special, because it emerged through our personal pain and love. Chaos shaped into order, the braincells burning with fear and exhaustion until something emerged. Whether you called it art or science, in the end, it could send a message so simple and so condensed it could not help but cut through the nonsense. For someone, perhaps everyone, yet special to yourself. I looked at the teddy I failed to throw away.

“Is that it?” I offered my interpretation

“Nonsense. I was just very very wasted.” He grabs the teddy, and adds it to the collection of bobbleheads.

Confusion begot panic. Handel begot the techno edition of Jim Knopf. I looked at the time.

“I am going to miss my flight.”

“What flight?” He asked, a lonely little frog on the steering wheel looking at me with big eyes.

“Now let me tell you about duality” I hated this guy.

Anyway here is an otter eating