By Joseph Rousseau
JC King Donuts was cold, sterile, and unbearably bright. The air in the dining room always smelled a little bit too much like cleaning detergent. At all hours of the day its patrons were pummeled by a torrent of blinding fluorescent light, reflecting back and forth between the white, undecorated, fiber-glass paneled walls. The hard, red, molded plastic booth benches sucked the warmth straight from your legs, and they were fixed uncomfortably close to the flat, faux-wooden tables that jutted out from the walls. The ladies who worked behind the counter were not polite; they stared blankly through you as you ordered then thrust the card reader across the counter without a word.
It was Colin’s favorite place to go. He went five times a week. It was halfway between his studio apartment and the sandwich shop he worked at, and the walk brought him through the gardens downtown, which was always nice. The donuts were bad, but the kolaches were pretty good, and he had always been the sort of person who could eat the same thing every day. The coffee wasn’t great, but it was cheap and strong, and they let him dilute it with as many French-vanilla creamer capsules as he wanted.
JC King had fit easily into Colin’s routine from the very beginning. He’d moved to the city as soon as he turned 20, and on his third day, he’d stopped in on the walk to his interview at the sandwich shop for no reason but that it happened to be on the way. He hadn’t meant to establish his routine so early, but he’d liked the donut shop and then had gotten the job; and so it came to be that early every weekday morning, month after month, Colin would stop in, buy two kolaches and a drip coffee for $5.73, and read for an hour or so before work.
He liked that the ladies behind the counter asked for his order every day, even though they obviously already knew what it would be. He liked that the walls were empty and plain because there was nothing on them to distract him from whatever he was reading. He liked that the store never played music because in the silence he could hear the electrical hum of the light panel directly above the booth he sat in every day. He liked that hum. It helped him concentrate.
As time went on, the shop became a kind of refuge for Colin. It was not as if his life was stressful, but when he sat down in his booth on the left side of the store, three booths back from the counter but facing toward it, time seemed to slow down. More so here than anywhere else, Colin felt relaxed, at peace. Able to focus.
But recently, things had changed. Colin’s sanctuary had attracted an intruder.
One day, like any other day, after having finished his kolaches, Colin was sitting with his chin cupped in his hands, his elbows pressed into the table, eyes staring down at the book splayed open before him—completely immersed. He was nearing the end of his book, and so far it had been a fantastic one—maybe one of his favorites ever. He planned to finish it here, now, in the donut shop before work.
He was now reaching the end of its penultimate chapter. In it, his favorite character, “The Priest,” lay wounded in the arms of the orphaned girl he wished could have been his daughter; in his final moments, he remembered at last the long-forgotten words to the song his father had sung to him as a boy. Then, as the girl squeezed his hand and sobbed over his chest, with a tear and a gentle smile, The Priest sighed, and was gone from the land of the living.
Colin found the writing so beautiful, so evocative, that he did not notice he was crying—until he looked up and saw, sitting two booths down, a dark-haired, pale-skinned young woman, staring straight at him. Smiling.
It wasn’t a stranger’s polite smile. It was an intentional, knowing smile. A mirthful, red-cheeked, mocking smile. That smile said she’d been watching him for longer than he knew, that she’d seen him gradually become emotional, even compelled to tears. How stupid he must have looked, getting all worked up over a book in a donut shop.
He looked back down quickly, shaken, and pretended to keep reading as he worked to regain his composure. Inwardly he rallied and resigned himself to continue on and finish the book as he’d planned to.
But as he worked his way down the first page of the final chapter, he found, again and again, that his eyes were skipping listlessly over rows, entire paragraphs of text. He continued on this way—reading, skipping, re-reading—all the way down the page, and when he finally reached the bottom and flipped to the next, he glanced up.
She was looking down at her laptop. Now that he could see her clearly, Colin decided that he had never seen her before. Her dark, almost black hair hung low and straight across her shoulders and was cut into bangs above her blue eyes. She wore earrings, their shining silver standing out against her dark hair, that looked like fish hanging from hooks they’d bitten. He liked the way her eyes were framed by a dark eye-liner, or eye-shadow, or whatever it was called. The wing things. And in the sheen of light from above her head, Colin could see that her cheeks seemed to be sparkling, like she had sprinkled them with glitter. Colin became nervous that she might suddenly look up and meet his eyes again, so he ducked his head down, back toward his book.
He tried to go on reading, but couldn’t. He made it half-way down the next page before realizing that he had not actually processed a single word of it. Did she have freckles? Or was he imagining that? It was hopeless. He gave up reading. Frustrated, he put his book in his backpack and left the shop—twenty minutes earlier than usual—and meandered through downtown in a trance, zig-zagging down out-of-the-way streets to waste time before work. As he walked, he tortured and scolded himself, sent curses to his damnable weakness of mind and will.
Colin got very little reading done in the following weeks. Each morning he arrived and sat down to read, only to look up at some point and see her sitting there. The two never spoke, did not interact at all; but always she was there, her presence impossible to ignore. Some days she wore her hair in a ponytail, sometimes hanging free but with her bangs brushed aside; once she wore a big, fuzzy beanie. Sometimes she wore one simple earring on either side, and other times each ear was studded all the way up in shining iridescence. Her look was always cohesive; each detail seemed always to have been curated with every other detail in mind, and every day the whole assemblage spoke to an aesthetic competency Colin could not have conceived of on his own. She never looked the same one day as the day before, and each day Colin found he could not help but glance up occasionally and ponder the differences, however broad or minute, from the last.
Colin left the shop every day loathing himself, always the same litany of criticism ripping through his mind; how could he be so pathetic as to let something so mean, so trivial, stop him from doing what he wanted to do? He had always thought himself a diligent and strong-minded person, yet with no effort of her own, the girl was having a profound influence on his day-to-day life. Reading, to Colin, was more than a hobby; it was a framework, a central hub around which his daily habits revolved. In his mind his days were broken up into discrete blocks of time, many beginning or ending with each regularly scheduled reading session; he kept track of time at larger scales by remembering the books he was reading when certain things happened in his life. To make so little progress for so long, to spend so much time on a single book, had thrown his thoughts into chaos and tainted his otherwise steady, affable disposition.
And yet, as he approached the shop each morning, Colin found himself looking forward to seeing her. In what little deliberate thought he had given the subject, he told himself that he simply liked to look at her, nothing more; but really, he knew—even if he had not faced it consciously—that he was holding on to some hope of… what? Of something. These kinds of thoughts are never very well-developed; really they are impulses which the brain tells itself are thoughts. Colin had never thought of any situation that might justify his speaking to her, nor had he thought of what he might say if he ever did. But still, he walked in every day with the conviction that this time, for some reason, he might not leave feeling so disappointed in himself.
On one such day, Colin pushed open the doors of the shop and saw, with dismay, that her seat in her regular booth was empty. He ordered at the counter as usual, paid, and collected his coffee and kolaches. He turned back toward his seat, then halted in a shock: there she was, right there, sitting in his spot.
With a series of graceful, fluid steps he redirected himself toward the bathroom, where just inside the door he stood, breathing, collecting himself. This is it, he thought. Why fear it for so long? Now is as good a time as there will ever be.
He wet his hand in the sink and ran it through his hair, then stepped out into the dining room. He approached her—his—booth, not knowing what he was going to say. There had not been time to think of anything. He could improvise something. He slowed his steps, getting closer, and as he did, she looked suddenly up at him. The motion sent her earrings—which today were metal feathers—swaying back and forth, glistening sharply in the white light from overhead. Her blue eyes shone bright, and the corners of her lips curled upward, revealing dimples Colin had never before been close enough to see. Her lips parted and exposed a row of teeth, their white contrasting sharply against the black of her lipstick. She was smiling at him. It was not the same embarrassed, guilty smile she had given him on that first day. It seemed a genuine, even hopeful smile.
In that moment, Colin felt himself perched atop a great fulcrum, on the verge of tipping in one direction or the other. He felt that special breed of frantic, nervous excitement one might feel only a handful of times in all their life. In that single, most consequential fraction of an instant, the infinite universe stretched itself out before him, unfurled its unending array of possibilities, and where it collided with Colin’s consciousness it curled back in on itself and collapsed, all contingent futures converging again into one.
Colin flicked his eyes away from hers, straightened his path, and continued walking on, as if he had not even seen her, all the way out the front door of JC King Donuts.
He ate his kolaches on a bench in front of the Episcopal Church, down a side street, and sat watching cars go by until it was time for work. All the while his mind was empty, silent. There was no anger; he did not berate himself; he did not try to justify himself. He simply sat, then walked to work.
The next morning, Colin stood across the street from the donut shop. He had approached from the back so that he couldn’t be seen should someone happen to look out through the front door from inside. He had spent the previous night cleaning, organizing, and re-organizing his apartment, all to distract himself from the torrential rabble of insults and anxieties he’d unleashed upon his mind in anticipation of this single, crucifying moment.
And now it had come.
For the entire walk to the shop he had tried to work himself up, to soothe his nerves until he believed that he had what it took to walk inside and face her, like he’d believed himself capable of doing the day before. But as he stood there, staring at the white-painted cinderblock wall that was the southern limit of JC King Donuts, he knew: inside himself, he did not have what he needed. He could not do it.
He looked down and hurried forward, shaking his head. In his mind there arose an uproar, every fear, every insecurity he’d ever harbored, screaming, competing for dominance over Colin’s brain; the chorus rose higher as he walked, and crescendoed as he passed by the front door of the shop and continued on toward downtown.
He ducked into “Grindhaus,” a coffee shop he had frequently passed but never entered. Inside it was dimly lit, and the air smelled strongly of wet coffee grounds. Everything was wooden, from the walls to the floors to the tables, made to look raw, as if recycled from scraps. They didn’t have kolaches, so Colin paid $11.52 (before tip) for two scones and a small coffee. The booths were all full, so he sat in an over-sized leather chair in the corner beside a small side-table, which wobbled when he set his book on top of it. The chair was too soft and hurt his back. A large speaker directly above his head played a jangly, reverb-drenched indie-pop song that left him hopelessly unable to focus on his book. The coffee was pretty good, but the scones were dry.