text: Just shy of one o’clock in the afternoon, the devil met me for a cup of coffee. Several hours afterwards, at 8:30 AM the same day, it occurred to me that I may not exist. \* \* \* The waitress raised her eyebrows and flashed me a tentative smile. “Give me a moment,” I said, craning my neck and squinting at the menu laid out on the counter between us. Lattes and espressos, a *yuenyeung* tea-coffee mixture from Hong Kong and several roasts that were as foreign to me as the countries they were named after. *Life on Mars* came on the radio. I found my fingers tapping, not quite to the beat, and glanced up. The waitress was swaying from side to side with her arms folded, left hand on top--a posture that put the largest sunspot I had ever seen on display. She must have been sixty, seventy years old. Perhaps this was the cafe’s owner? A waitress would have been more aggressive, knowing that more rapport would lead to a better tip. Was I taking too long to order? “You know, I don’t drink a lot of coffee. Do you have any recommendations?” “Today’s special is a Sicilian iced coffee,” she said in a single breath, seeming to have snapped out of a daydream. “It’s a cold brew, but the flavor is accentuated by honey and lemon syrup, so it isn’t as bitter as your typical black coffee.” I paused for a moment, trying to look as though I was pondering her suggestion. “Sure, that sounds great. But add an extra spoonful of sugar, just to be safe.” “You got it!” she said. “It’ll take a few minutes, so why don’t you get settled in and I’ll bring it over in a bit.” “Perfect.” I turned towards the stairway and made my way up to the second floor. \- With a final step, I set foot into the midst of a peculiar battleground. Rather than soldiers, however, a mismatch of furniture stood at arms. If the room were a pair of jeans, there would be more patch than denim. A red and white striped retro dining booth occupied one corner, a trio of high-backed metal chairs another. Next to them sat a fabric couch. The interior of the room was dotted with tables of various heights, punctuated with an even wider assortment of chairs--none the same color, many too tall or short for their accompanying table--and in the center of it all stood a large cheval mirror. After a moment’s deliberation, I settled for a nightstand that was flanked by two leather chairs overlooking the street. Unlike in here, nothing seemed out of place in the world beyond the window. High and low, the city was letting go of summer and preparing for autumn. An iron fence loomed over the sidewalk, beyond it a row of trees stood in various states of disarray. Some were aflame with red and orange leaves, others still in the process of yellowing. A pair of birds fluttered about, dancing in the air, and below them on the street people walked by in sweaters and puffy coats. A young boy was bobbing back and forth on his tiptoes, straining to read a sign at the bus stop which had (unfortunately) been placed several inches above his head. A blue car drove by. “Coffee!” the waitress’s voice called out behind me, followed by footsteps and creaking stairs. At the risk of coming off heavy handed, the best way I can describe her voice is that it sounded like people in commercials look when they’re holding a cup of coffee. The steam reaching up to caress their faces, morning dreariness melting away. Pleasant, intimate even. I closed my eyes and sank a little deeper into the warmth of her voice, listening to the clicks of her heels panning left and right as she navigated around the furniture. The footsteps disappeared behind me, the scent of roses crept up to my nose and I opened my eyes at a soft *thud*, the sound of the waitress setting my mug of coffee on the nightstand. “Thank you,” I said, turning my head and looking back. “Don’t mention it.” “It’s an interesting place you’ve got here, ma’am.” The waitress smiled at me. “It’s a metaphor for life, sort of.” Wrinkles formed around her eyes. Squinting made her smile appear all the bigger, as if her teeth were pulling back on her lips in order to see me better. They were slightly yellow. “How so?” “Well, not all of the pieces match, for one. You see that booth in the corner?” she pointed with her chin to our right. “Originally, the whole place was full of ‘em. That was the style back then. Big band jazz music on the radio and roller skates on the floors. Sometimes we even had live stuff, too. My husband cooked and I bused the tables. *Man*, those were the days.” The waitress closed her eyes and took a deep breath, the tips of her lips seemingly compelled upwards as her lungs filled with air. For a single moment at the very top, in that space between an inhale and an exhale, her face became so soft and sweet that I imagined I had never cared for anything half as much as she cherished whatever was on her mind. And then, almost before I had finished the thought, the inevitable puff of air escaped her nostrils. Her wrinkles re-emerged and, laden with the weight of bygone years, the curve of her smile flattened out. The waitress aged a quarter century in the time it took to open her eyes. “And then he disappeared. As abruptly as that. I woke up one morning and he was gone. Shortly after, furniture from the diner started going, too. Once every several months I’d show up to discover that something had gone missing. Booths, tables, neon signs, the toaster; nothing was safe. We had quite a few regulars and they would help me keep an eye on things, and the police chief went out of his way to make sure somebody was on our street every night, but no one ever saw anything. It was like things were slipping away into the void that Andrew had left behind. That booth in the corner there is the last remnant of those days, but at this point, it looks just as out of place as everything else. I suppose it’ll see itself out some night, too, before long.” Behind the counter she had talked like a woman unaccustomed to being interrupted; now, like she wasn’t used to having anyone that listened to her. Perhaps that indifferent confidence had been too heavy to lug up the stairs behind herself. The more I looked at her, the more I saw a decrepit old woman. You know the type--alone at a wedding table, hunched over and quietly eating with a plastic spoon. Eyes too heavy to lift off her plate, one leg crossed over the other. Someone’s frail little aunt that had never married, or maybe a complete stranger who had just shown up and everyone assumed must be related somehow. “...What I mean is, well, I can’t cook, you see, but I’d still go to the diner in the mornings for the old people who gathered there, even though all I could do was make them coffee...” *She had been talking the entire time*. The waitress had withered to such an extent that, if you took your eyes off of her lips, you might not notice that she was speaking. “... And after work I would travel all over looking for Andrew, eventually returning with other people’s discarded furniture and ideas for new coffees instead. Somehow it worked out, though. I built a base of new regulars--a cafe attracts people who like coffee, after all--and got featured in a few magazines. Suddenly, the pieces I’d snatched from other puzzles became just as real as the original ones. It was a damned mess,” she paused. “But it was worth putting together, at least once.” “Huh,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t notice I’d tuned out and not having the heart to tell her that I’d never drank so much as a drop of coffee in my entire life. “I’m sorry to hear about your husband, ma’am.” “Oh, don’t worry about it. It’s in the past. Thirty years is a long time,” she said, “Anyhow, it’s me who should be apologizing. You didn’t come here for an old woman’s life story. I’ll leave you to your coffee, sugar. ” The waitress spun on her heel and walked away, but not so quickly that I didn’t notice her cheeks were flushed. I guess she had shared more than she intended. Or maybe she did that to everyone. I didn’t mind, anyhow. On the contrary, I wish she’d have stayed longer. It had only been a couple minutes, but that was all it took to understand why people flocked to the place. In spite of whoever’s discarded furniture you might be, when you walked through the doors of the cafe, you became just one more odd or end that didn’t quite fit; in short, you belonged. \- I took a moment to reorient myself, then took measure of the coffee: Ice cubes floating on top of black bile, coated in a layer of what was presumably lemon zest. My nose wrinkled at the smell. *A cafe attracts people who like coffee*, I told myself, then inhaled deeply to steel my nerves and took a drink. Bitter. Incredibly bitter, in a vile and oppressive way. I couldn’t help but scrunch my entire face shut. Moreover, the lemon lent it a fetid overtone. I choked it down, then sat frozen for a full ten seconds as my body processed what had just happened to it. The flavor clung to my taste buds and lingered in my throat. All sense of time disappeared. When I eventually unscrewed my face and opened my eyes, I flinched again: there was a ball sitting on--in?--the mug of coffee. Red, plastic, flimsy. Like what you’d find in a ballpit. I shook my head, incredulous, and blinked. The ball was still there. I spun around, wondering if the waitress had played some sort of trick on me. Nobody there. I poked the ball, which gave slightly under the weight of my finger. It was an ordinary ball, but why was it here? I reached up to rub my eyes--and when I opened them, it was gone. Unobstructed, my gaze carried through where the ball had been and proceeded on out the window. The little boy from earlier was staring straight at me. He had abandoned the bus stop, walked to the curb of the street and raised his head--only his head--to look at me. His arms hung down, flaccid, and his shoulders slumped as if burdened by a heavy weight. There was no bend in his knees, though; in fact, his posture was otherwise straight as a needle. Only his head broke that line, lolling upwards nearly sixty degrees. It was like his eyes were affixed to mine, and his body merely dangled lifeless beneath. He squinted, and then a brilliant flare of pain struck me like lightning, leaving me blind. I convulsed. My windpipe tightened. And then, as quickly as it came, the pain disappeared. When the world came back into focus, the boy was nowhere to be seen. Nobody sitting at the bus stop appeared alarmed. He hadn’t walked off; at least, I don’t think he could have made it to the next block so quickly. A chill raced along my spine. There was no sign of his existence, save the coffee and lemon zest that I must have splattered at the window during one of the spasms. My hand, and the mug it clutched, was still trembling. I sat it back down on the table. “You are going to die in twelve minutes and thirty-seven seconds.” I looked left so forcefully that my neck popped and its muscles strained. “This world will end shortly after,” the boy said. “Presumably.” “Exc--” “I’m the devil,” he cut me off with a wave of his hand. “And I’m here on business. I need your help, Alfred.” “Why do you know my name?” The boy turned to me the moment I opened my mouth. “Did I not just tell who I am?” His eyes bulged. “You’re... I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “The devil?” “Mastema, Supay, Yanluo Wang--I’m fond of George, personally. Call me George, Alfred.” I recoiled, surprised at such an unassuming name. On second thought, though, it did suit him. If this really was the devil, he seemed like a typical young boy. No horns, no tail. Ten, eleven years old. There *was* a somewhat foul smell, but that was most likely the coffee. “And you’re here on... business.” The devil audibly exhaled and then closed his eyes. “I’m looking for a ball.” “A *ball*?” “Yes.” “Any old ball?” “No. It’s a red ball.” “A red ball.” “The shiny plastic kind, like you’d find in a ball pit. I lost it.” My ears became hot, and a different kind of tremble began working through my body. “A ball? All of this,” I gestured out at the spilled coffee. “For a fucking ball?” The boy cast me a sidelong glance, and as seamlessly as testicles entering cold water go from grapes to raisins, my anger became fear. “It’s the most important thing in the universe, Alfred.” “If you’re the devil, why don’t you get it yourself?” George did not respond immediately. “Ten minutes and forty-three seconds, Alfred.” As soon as the thought entered my mind that this was all ridiculous--and rightly so, I still think--the tightness in my throat returned. My muscles contracted, the bones in my spine cracked one by one. George’s hand crept through the air towards my forehead. The collision was jarring, as if I’d belly-flopped out of a helicopter, and then it melted into a tickling sensation. I felt light-headed. The gravity of my entire body gathered in my eyelids, like a startled soul discovering an exit to its pot. “See for yourself, then.” Gravity pulled stronger and stronger at me; within a few seconds it was all I could do to keep my head upright. Next it drooped, and then I collapsed on top of my thighs. Still heavier it grew; the force pried apart my knees and, inch by inch, I descended into a standing pike position. My hamstrings reached their limit; something snapped. I could not scream. The force got stronger and I was yanked into a prone position, and then the dragging started. Led by my eyelids I was dragged across the cafe floor, body limp behind me, more and more quickly until everything became a blur. I bounced down the stairs, sailed out the door and flew through the park. Eventually a clocktower rose in front of me and, with one final yank, I was left dangling in front of its face. “What time is it, Alfred?” George materialized upon the ledge in front of me. “12:57,” I said, surprised to not feel the presence of any bumps or bruises. “And 4 seconds,” he added. “The Bulge will occur at 12:59.” “The Bulge?” George looked up at me and rubbed his chin. “Are you familiar with the concept of perdurantism, Alfred?” “I can’t say that I am, no.” “It’s a philosophical take on a physics problem, to be brief.” George stepped off the ledge and walked through the air to where I was floating, then placed one arm around my shoulders and gestured towards the clocktower with the other. “What do you suppose we’d see if I were to remove some of these bricks?” He asked. “The inside of the building, of course.” “Precisely!” he said. “Your current position prevents you from physically observing that the tower extends back a ways, but you know that it does. Although you can only see its face, your experience tells you that there is depth to the building, too. It *is* three dimensional, after all.” “That’s correct,” I said, frowning. George nodded. “When we approach the building from a different angle, we confirm that there is more to it than originally met the eye,” He walked towards the corner of the tower, taking me with him. “Perdurantism assumes the same of your temporal being--that it has a persistent depth, of sorts, which is beyond our perception. Fitzgerald put it more romantically: *I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.* The Bulge is a sort of singularity in which all of those tendrils extending throughout time collapse into a single moment, rendering the rest of eternity nothing but empty space.” At that moment, as if on cue, the clocktower bulged. That’s not the right word, exactly, but it’s hard to describe what happened. Imagine a nuclear bomb detonating beneath an indestructible rubber. The building swelled up like a balloon castle, as if it were special effects in a low-budget movie, and then deflated in upon itself. Upon reaching the ground, a blast surged off in all directions, distorting everything it touched. The wave extended beyond the horizon before my eyes had finished widening in shock. “Look more closely, Alfred.” I was too stunned to respond, but the devil continued, anyway. “Any second, now.” And then I saw it: an encroaching darkness. “With every second that passes, more and more of the world will step off the gangplank of time. You are witnessing the Void--or as Henri Bergson put it, *the pure present, the ungraspable advance of your past devouring its future*. In less than a minute nothing will remain of the city,” he said, “nothing except for you, Alfred.” “*Me*? Why *me*?” The devil grinned. It began as something small and measured, quickly reaching the limits of what could be considered a polite smile before suddenly stiffening. His chest heaved once--he appeared both relaxed and tensed at the same time, if that’s possible. Like someone in the shower who had just barely managed to keep hold of their bar of soap, breathing a sigh of relief but not quite ready to move yet, lest the slippery thing pop out after all. At last, the soap won: a monstrous grin ate away at his face. The smile itself looked pleasant enough, friendly even, but it was spoiled by his eyes: within them were the depths of hell, a million helpless souls gazing back at me. I had not yet made up my mind about him, but with that single glance I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that before me stood the devil. “Because someone loved you very, *very* much.” I blinked. His words struck me of my terror, or perhaps they resonated with something deeper. “*Who?”* I heard myself blurt out. “I’m not at liberty to discuss that, unfortunately. Business, you know.” The devil straightened the tie of his school uniform--silk, judging from its shimmer--and then yanked on his lapel, ridding it of wrinkles and any trace of his outburst. “Suffice it to say that you do not belong here, and this world can not coexist with you. Brick by brick the clocktower will fade away, and once it is gone, the Void will consume me, too. You will be a ghost condemned to forever wander the alleys of a neighborhood without neighbors, long smothered but with nowhere for your soul to go,” the devil said. He gave his blazer one final tug and then looked back up at me, seemingly satisfied with his tidying. “A Soviet biophysicist once wrote that the fading of a mind is much more terrible still than that of an entire universe. I agree, Alfred.” “Can’t you stop it?” The devil bit his lip, then released it into a small smile that contained none of the passion it had a moment before. I’m not sure if he had read my mind or simply peered into my eyes, but whatever he saw caused his entire demeanor to change. He contemplated me; weighing his words, uncertain of their consequences. “I can not change the future,” he said, finally. “I merely see it.” We stood there staring at each other as the clock approached one, silent, the world falling away around us. The darkness advanced--not in a hurried or uniform fashion; rather like a toddler only half certain how to maneuver its feet. In lulls and meandering, but tirelessly nonetheless. “Twenty seven seconds, Alfred.” It had reached the clocktower now, and as its bricks disappeared, the gears and levers they hid peeked out at me. “I’ll help you.” The devil once again placed his hand upon my forehead--moving much more quickly this time, I might add. My feet became anchors and I was pulled into the depths of the void. Eventually my toes touched the street and the world rebuilt itself in front of my eyes; my heels were pulled out from under me and everything melted into a blur. \- When I came to, I was sitting in the same armchair as before, the devil next to me. “What now? Rather than responding, Gorge stood up and walked over to the cheval mirror. He reached up, grasped its upper frame and then spun it twice. The pane was now pitch black. “We’re the reflection,” he explained, taking a step back. “There is no light coming from the inside of a mirror, so you can’t see anything from over here.” “What now?” “Just step inside.” “But it’s a mirror?” “Touch the glass.” I hesitated. “Do you need to see the world end again?” A lump formed in my throat. “Me first?” “Of course,” he said. “God knows how troublesome it would be if you changed your mind and I had to find my way back here again. I might not make it back in time!” I took a step and was immediately stricken by a blinding light. “Welcome,” said the devil, “to the other side of the clocktower.