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the archive(s):
issue no. 3:
Played / Ilya Zaychik
Something about late night excursions to diners, to coffee shops, to railroad tracks causes me to look back over my left shoulder from time to time, searching for the camera crew.
Sure enough, it was no different last night, sitting at the Café Noir, playing twenty questions with a girl who took my cool and suave and witty and threw it right down and out the window with every toss of her thick black hair. Same old. I looked back over my shoulder as is my custom, but saw only the glare of the dark-faced and dark-haired barista who was cursing me silently for not speaking any French, yet still envying the spotlight above my head, as this French goddess across from me dangled on my every word. I wanted to switch places with him.
'I am sick of talking!' I screamed. 'I can't bear to listen to myself anymore! I have nothing new, have had nothing new since age 6, and yet you make me talk. You make me babble on about my views on politics, relationships, god, family, life, and I can't do it anymore! If I have to talk about my estranged father on his death bed or past girlfriends one more time, I will burst, right here in front of the surly four AM patrons of this establishment!'
I screamed it at her, but it came out a forced laugh, an awkward smile, a quick shrug, a break of eye contact, a string of rapid and nervous hand movements, and, what I dreaded most, the continued sound of my voice.
'What is your favor color?' she asked me. 'I think it is the question at the center of the universe. Anyone who doesn't know what their favor color is, doesn't really know who they are. So, what is it?'
'I don't know', I replied with the most confidence of anything I'd said all night. When pressed, I managed the blue at twilight, when the sun has gone but the night has not yet arrived, and I guess it had a ring of truth‹it is the color that finds me staring up at the sky in the middle of a busy street‹but I still had no idea who I was, and I was praying the stunt double would actually show up for work one time.
But the hours pressed on. Soon I couldn't stop talking, rattling off my menu of experiences, emotions, and ideas, filling the airspace with overworked observations, hoping desperately she would find something she liked and order already because the kitchen was about to close. But no luck, and with every deliberate circle she made with her finger around the edge of her clear coffee mug saw me fidgeting and squirming and speaking more and more, pausing only occasionally to look at her beautiful face and turn away quickly, laughing wryly and shaking my head, and remind myself why I was doing all this, why I was sticking to my script so diligently‹because she had never heard it before, and this is what I had to do to keep her from leaving. I smiled at myself, grimaced almost, and plunged back in, weaving facts and fictions, pasts and futures, such well-worn paths in my mind they were practically ditches.
We left at six, and the bitter wind hit us hard, pimping its out-all-night, pre-dawn epiphany, completely lacking in subtlety and tact.
'I hear it's always coldest right before dawn,' I told her, the last wrapper in a dumpster-full of non-recyclable garbage I had vomited up over the course of the night. We parted ways and before I opened my door, I glanced quickly over my left shoulder and thought I saw the cameraman hide behind the corner bar. I breathed in the cold air and finally got wind of a bit of that early-morning clarity.
What I realized was this...
Everything you think you know is fake
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