No. 10

The cacophonic free-for-all of a multitude of conversations. The smell of cigarettes and coffee. The students, the artists, the tourists and young couples. Jazz music played too loudly.

Nighttime at a café in Osaka.

An old Japanese man, seventies, wearing heavy-rimmed glasses and grey tweed blazer; one renegade lock of his comb-over has broken free and hovers about his shoulder like a wisp of cloud, a haunting ghost. He is missing a front tooth. Entering the café he is preceded by two young women carrying shopping bags in each arm. The old man takes their orders and heads for the counter. The women sit.

The women are dressed provocatively enough to draw stares: garters and fishnet stockings; very high heels and very short skirts; one girl has a tongue ring, they’re both peroxide blondes.

The old man returns and the women take their drinks. This old man is shabby in every way. He reminds me of a dusty, watermarked book no one has bothered to open in many, many years. He is a profligate, a degenerate. You wonder what he is paying these girls for their company; what they are taking him for.

One girl alternates sips of an iced caramel macchiato and drags from a cigarette as she solves a Sudoku puzzle in the back of a magazine. The other is looking about the smoky room, bored, a quick flash of lime-green panties as she works down the hem of her dangerously negligible skirt.

This old lecher is nearly beside himself. He can’t keep his eyes, or his hands, off either of them. The women play their roles apathetically: now humoring their patron with a smile or an occasional glance; more often ignoring him and texting on their cell phones.

By now you can hear snickers and muffled giggling throughout the café aimed at this pitiful burlesque. The old man doesn’t seem to notice; the young women don’t seem to care.

After a few moments of groping about these two disinterested dolls the old man gets to his feet and shuffles off.

What is longing if not memory made self-aware?

Longing is memory’s awareness of the limits to its mimicry. It is memory’s recognition that it is not a duplicate, not a representative – hardly even an echo – of what it seeks to imitate but rather a sort of vendor that ultimately peddles in deception.

Longing is memory’s attempt to replenish a past that never was through a present that cannot be.

When the old man returns from the restroom the two women and their many shopping bags are gone.

Standing he takes one final drink of his coffee and surveys the crowd. Some are blatantly staring, others secretly dart their eyes at him and then away again; he does not lower his face; he will not be judged in either victory or defeat.

The old man puts his blazer back on and leaves the café, that renegade lock of hair still bobbing defiantly about his shoulders.