Octavius the 1st

Chapter 8

81 Gaylord Brewer Chapter 8 Many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese—toasted mostly. —Robert Louis Stevenson He descended to the basement and, so to speak, rolled away the stone as details of ambience returned to him: the musty smell underscored by fresh coffee, the peripheral aroma of meats and breads and miscellaneous soups and light cooking. To the left, timeless and untouched, the pastoral of Christ, his beneficent eyes, his healing hands on the rotund udders of the ewes, cows, and she-goats surrounding his mossy rock. Octavius took it all in and for a moment was moved, if not to emotion, to something very much like an almost fond memory. Then he stepped to the order counter to conceal his wet legs and study the two Daily Scripture Specials: 1) “The Heavenly-Heavy Herod”™: bent under an excess of rare roast beef and sauerkraut, on a kosher rye Kaiser roll, with or without a side order of fiery Nero fiddle pasta. 82 Octavius the 1st 2) “The Father-Son-Ghost”™: a triple threat of heavenly imported cheeses, with a painfully tasty blood-orange roumalade, all resting atop one of our famous self-rising hot cross buns. A Holy Classic. He couldn’t help glancing periodically at the girl (qua-woman ?) behind the counter. At all times she kept her head bowed and face slightly averted, and Octavius looked directly down onto her pure white hair, the part revealing (somehow erotically?) a flash of pink scalp beneath. She moved—one could nearly say, floated—fluidly (even gracefully?) from cash register to espresso spigot to order window, speaking softly to each charge, coolly managing the desires of the day’s early custom. As Octavius uncertainly decided (why was his characteristic assertiveness so suddenly shaken?) on a #2, with a substitution of chopped chicken liver for the “Ghost” (smoky Gouda) and opted, more firmly, on a side of Jerusalem artichoke salad and, what the hell, a moderate slice of Pontius Pilate Double-Chocolate Decadence Cheesecake (again, he reflected as earlier, dark and light conjoined), during all of this trial and resolution, he could not resist staring at the (yes) woman’s translucent skin, and he realized, and startled himself with the epiphany, that she was an albino. His turn had arrived, and as he stepped closer to stutter his order—looking back to the text of the menu “tablets” for dramatic 83 Gaylord Brewer effect although he knew by heart what he craved—he clandestinely studied the delicate line of jaw, the fine lips, the name tag that read not, as surroundings perhaps demanded, “Mary,” but rather, quizzically, “T-Lo.” When he handed her the money (embarrassed at the grubbiness of the old bills), his forefinger very nearly touched the unpigmented (wc?), powdery skin of her hand, and this close encounter was, he realized, no accident on his part. And indeed, when she returned his change, his “silver coins,” her pale fingernails grazed his palm. Still, though, he could not see her eyes, even when she spoke to him—in a manner he had read of but never experienced—“under her breath”: “Don’t forget your cup, darlin.” Octavius practically reeled to the self-serve coffee counter. As he poured his Old Testament Blend™ and lightened its dark complexion with a liberal interpretation of painterly half-andhalf , he resisted looking back, and in a manner this discipline— this, if you will, faith (in what exactly?)—strengthened him. He took his cup, wrapped snugly in a ring of heat-insulating and imprinted cardboard—“Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a fish-hook? Or press down his tongue with a cord? Lay thy hand upon him; Think [cap? sic] upon the battle, thou wilt do so no more.” Job 40:25,32; well, whatever—and carried it to a booth to wait for his order. 84 Octavius the 1st And as he sat—on the side obliquely facing the counter—he couldn’t have said if it was this other-worldly creature’s precise ballet (which he did not attempt to resist watching) and lovely lowered head, the patient hem of the muraled Christ beneath which he perched, or rather some other unsettling something of an entirely different nature that made him—the Lion, the Wolf (see epigraph)—feel almost as if he weren’t eating alone. In the library, deep within the labyrinth of stacks, Octavius happily...