R. O. Mayer

He might have been looking at Malcolm, were it darker.

But in this light he was probably admiring the long lines of the ancient factory car he’d made his own.

Malcolm did, too, in a way.

The words from the rider’s stereo were unintelligible, probably more so inside the car than here in the hotel restaurant.

But the bass line pulsed the envelope of air, and Malcolm could feel it passing through the wide window.

He wondered at that, whether the slow sound-wave pulse became a sea of particles as it vibrated the window.

He pondered how the visible waving of the glass must have replicated the pitch and yaw of the music, if that’s what it was.

Malcolm twisted the smaller, weighted glass in a stationary circle, clockwise a little and then back; it was a good glass for bourbon.

Outside, the traffic light changed, the low car pulled away, and a young professional couple passed by.

The young woman laughed beautifully once before grabbing the man’s arm and pulling him to her left breast, shrugging.

Malcolm allowed himself a shallow sigh inside the Oxford bar, where the vibrations had faded and the waitress was new to him.

After a moment with the syntagm and paradigm of the menu, he caught her eye and ordered the salmon.

“Sock-eye,” she answered when he asked her what kind, holding her at the table a moment while she tucked the menu away again.

Malcolm closed his eyes so as not to watch her recede and then turned chastely to the book beneath his hand

This sort of forbearance was, he knew, his only hope. Without it every man is lost.

He opened the old-board binding flat upon the table and thumbed his way to the last page he remembered reading, a third of the way in.

He could, of course, see himself in the boulevard world of that novel, where words still mattered and insouciance had not yet grown obscene.

Opened again, the book smelled of its time on the shelves, more than twice the years Malcolm had behind him.

Its thick paper was pleasantly rough and beige and reassuringly dry to the touch.

"Perhaps, dear Andreas," the dialogue rose from the page, and Malcolm read on: