The Stain

At beth’s cafe


There is a stain on the ceiling. It draws my attention like a knife point near my eye. I cannot, for any meaningful period of time, ignore it. It eats at me as I eat at my eggs, consuming more and more of my attention until,…
I look.
At first when I came to sit at this diner I wondered if it was alive. Like a dollop of yogurt might be alive, full of bacteria. Then I wonder if it was alive. Ever, at some point past. I wonder if a ghost haunts it. The area just around the silver dollar sized mark. Mindlessly harassed by it.
Unlike the coin though, it’s not silver, and is formless, without face or tail.
To say that it’s yellow would not be wholly accurate, and to say it’s sepia would be an undue complement, I used to call it jaundiced, but I came eventually to think, that its color was a result of its age and not easily named except to say that it is old colored.
In subsequent visits to the diner, what drew me to it was not any contemplation of its life, or present lack there of, but rather the mystery of its identity. This confounded me greatly.
Perhaps mustard, if only a couple weeks old. Near the grill heat to cure and crack. But not so near as to have come from it. Nor so near any one table or booth as to offer any easy imagining as to how it may have arrived there.
But perhaps, (and perhaps is what drew my attention and held it most firm.) Perhaps it was older than that.
If it were a year older, it could be the yellow of a soft boiled egg.
Or sickening decade old syrup.
Mashed potatoes celebrating their bicentennial.
It could have been jelly at… one time.
“Four hundred score and seven years ago…” Abraham Lincoln intoned solemnly in my head. …”our fore fathers spilled ketchup here.”
Further back still, bleached by age and stained then by time, steak sauce.
I could believe it was, at least as likely, older than newer. there seemed no bottom to how old I was willing to calculate its age before even the slightest perception of nonsence crept into second guess my equations.
How old would it have to be to be blood? Tanned such a curious tired color? A century? The turning of a millennium? Older?
And perhaps I drink too much. And come here too often to feed my hangover, but there was always that. The notion of unlimited age. Of being,…
Older.
That frightening abstraction of time to which the stain seemed to gravitate. More so the longer it was considered. That time so remote that no event or value could be guessed, to which my instinctual response would not be simply, “no, older.” An age so far hoorayed and disused that time had simply cut it down, crushed its memories and recast it into the stuff used to construct the events of the ever on-rushing future.
The entire café indeed encouraged this thinking, as no surface remained in it that was truly white, but deeply browned with age and the catalytic action of grease, and cigarette smoke. It formed barely visible runnels on the walls like sap aged to amber and amber aged again to a slick, seal coat that prevented the passage of time from properly effecting the walls.
Over the outermost of these walls, like the ramblings of an autistic decorator, (Pollok, add hypoxia.)was a mosaic floor to ceiling wall paper of artwork. The submissions of any customer who wished to contribute.
Through some wonder of natural law the tape found purchase on the slickly coated walls.
Uncensored and without regard to tone, message, skill or medium the whole represented exquisitely the population whose donations had given it life, and like them, from a distance, was muddy and directionless. In this way, its jumble of babbling chaos, achieved an order of sorts.
But as one came to rest in a booth near a portion of this mural, the wide static of it was focused and individual personalities came to the fore.
A pencil drawing of the time worn Killroy, peeking over a wall, was rendered in a stiff but confident hand. A top hat adorned with an eye, who’s pupil was twisted into a swirl, sat crookedly on his bald head. Killroy’s own wide archway eyes watched endlessly the dark figure to his left who crept closely behind, no doubt thinking himself unobserved, and who, knife in hand, was prepared for murder. But killroy bellied no fear. His strong fingers cracked the wall over which he peered. He was calm and still, barely concealing a liquid feverish madness that prepared to drive him unstoppably like a violent land slide.
At the bottom of the paper in graffiti style letters “KILLROY LIVES HERE” was blocked out.
Leaves of paper overlapped like decorated scales. A pen and ink warrior vixen sulked beside pastel, water-color water falls that fell up to the sky, and blind crayon mice with guns and iron crosses preened proudly katty-corner from a smudged cadmium and violet interpretation of a passage from the Iliad.
How often a page was added to the greater work I couldn’t guess, but to say that I had never witnessed one going up.
Though, under each leaf was another.
Older.
Inks faded. paper crisp, stained and brittle.
I wonder now, if I were to page deeper, what could I find?
Papyrus with strange runes?
Deeper still?
Clay tablets in Sanskrit ?
Deeper still?
Unremembered gods painted in grease, blood, and dish water?
Above the grill a great black cowling greedily gathered grill smoke and an uncomfortably large and shadowed duct swallowed it. I could imagine the ducts long winding and ragged behind the drywall, taking the smoke to no place wholesome. It seemed carnivorous and hungry. In a near corner pipes and a tank have made them selves at home, and electrical wires wound around the walls as if woven by spiders.
And I see the stain again. It sees me out of the edge of my vision.
The stools once vivid red, when red had first been invented, were now a lustless maroon.
And it whispers to me. “Older.”
Had it been here when the forests had yet to receive its first mammal visitor? Already eldritch and set, in the lush kudzu?
The tiled floor appeared, if ever acknowledged, a still-life of dirt and went largely unappreciated for its accuracy. Though tasteful as far as it went, it was an uncared for print, that ages before the first of things had had a chance to rot back into the earth, had already grown foggy and chipped.
Though it did not move, the stain regarded me.
Had it been here waiting long already when what would some day be this city was at the bottom of the now extinct, monster filled ocean?
I wondered what it must be like, to live for ever, like this place. To be here for ever, and witness the foolish passings of the world. I would see everything change and everything brake down.


Now I am here.
I suppose to my self that the stain attracts my attention because it wants me. as I do it.
Is that so crazy to think? That the stain and the café that have always been here enjoy my company and obsess to see me as well?
I wonder how it would taste. How forever would sit on the back of my tongue. Like dust and honey I think. I don’t know why I think that, but I do.
I mean, it is a café after all, and what’s not to be eaten in a café?

I think, Surely I will grow still over the ages. as I see less and less of what I have not before and encounter more of times recycled novelties. Then finally, with eventual passing, every thing to cross my path, naively thinking its self new and unique, would be to me a memory, vivid now, but also distantly remembered.
With time will I loose my luster? Grow dusty and dry, and brown with the same mechanism that, with age, browns stone? Will some future eye behold me with fear and curiosity? With wonderment of what I had once been?
I find myself wanting that. To live for ever. Even if in such a maudlin way. Always here, existing further and further back against the insistent direction of time.
I hold my butter knife in my hand and wonder how high I can reach. To scrape a little of it and hide the bits in my eggs.
Just a little, that’s all.
There’s no need to be greedy.
After all, there’s plenty of forever to go around.