Rupert and Albert stood between The Coffee Shop With No Sugar and The Coffee Shop With No Cream, they walked into the first one, beaming with pride at the choice they were able to make.
“Rupert, do you ever wonder why we are only placed between these two shops?” Albert inquired.
“Albert, do you ever wonder why we always see ourselves as being placed between only these two shops?” Rupert inquired further. Beaming with pride at the reassurance of choice once again, they both ordered coffee with no cream and no sugar; the waiter informed them routinely that the order could only be coffee with no cream, for they did not have sugar available in the first place for further denial. Soothed again by the sense of familiarity provided by fulfilled expectations, free will, and routine, Rupert and Albert waddled in a broth of warmth.
They sat down at the table by the window. Albert sat with his back to the window, and a view of the red vintage armchair in the left corner of the coffee shop, the fireplace lying straight ahead, and the counter at which they ordered their coffee lying on the right, facing the door. Rupert sat across from Albert, his back facing the armchair, the fireplace, and the counter, but he had a view of the rain and darkness outside the window. He considers supporting the collapsing reality beyond his vision with the affirming, meaning-assigning, definition-giving bolster of his gaze, but smiles as he decides that today, the weather is sufficiently warm for reality to remain buoyed by the goodwill of his audacious faith
The armchair’s existence in this coffee shop preceded Rupert and Albert’s; it sat in the corner with such dignity and certainty that Rupert and Albert never sat on it. They experienced the armchair in the same way they would experience a regular guest at the coffee shop. Rupert had wondered whether the armchair experienced itself. Did it experience itself as an armchair in the way the armchair is an armchair to him? Or did it experience itself as a Being of depthless dignity, agency, and purpose seething below the crumbling inorganic shell of its semantic signifier of 'armchair' ? The Being would be sitting just as tight within the Armchair as the Armchair appeared to be sitting tightly inside this coffee shop, so tight that it would not have to make contact with the Armchair. Unable to formulate with certainty its experience, Rupert feared for a second that Albert saw him as no different from the armchair.
“Tell me, Albert, what is it that differentiates how you perceive me to how you perceive that armchair over there?” Rupert took a sip of his coffee, and awaited an answer in prickling anxiety.
“If I thought you weren’t able to experience yourself other than the way I experience you, that you did not exist in an unenterable Being, then I would not think you were capable of acknowledging me as such a Being either.”
“But do you wish for me to do that, Albert?” Asked Rupert, in slight reassurance.
“Yes, for I wish for that reciprocity. Moreover, I wish for you to assume me as such a Being capable of acknowledging you as such a Being as well.” Albert answered, and took a sip of his coffee.
As they waited for the cakes to be served, Rupert noticed a frog was standing outside the window. How peculiar, Rupert thought, the frog was dressed in a bright red raincoat, holding a bright yellow umbrella. The rain peeled away from the umbrella, the frog stayed indifferently dry, effortlessly cautious, acknowledging the rain and refusing to share its traits, placing itself intrusively and abruptly in the rain with such intention that it left a gap in the weather, reducing the rain to its secondary nature. The frog didn’t seem to be there for Rupert, and that was both a relief and a worry. A relief, because it meant Rupert could shrug off the guilt of ignoring it. A worry, because even if it wasn’t there for him, it was still there—stuck like a gaudy toothpick in the rain, poking itself into Rupert’s thoughts over and over, bite by bite. It was absurd, really. The frog had no business being so bold, so shamelessly present, as if it had every right to jab at the edges of Rupert’s mind. The nerve of it! To just sit there, colorful and pointless, demanding attention without even having the decency to explain why. Before he knew it, Rupert was no longer able to look at anything else in the coffee shop nor outside of it, but could only fixate on the frog, as if it is in some dimension sandwiched between Rupert and reality. In his moment of paralysis, the frog, without lifting a webbed foot, politely sliced away the larger portion of Rupert’s cake, and after a second thought, claimed the strawberry on top too. The frog began quietly, unblinkingly, to eat his cake, spoonful after another. Rupert tried to discern its lips, its teeth, its tongue, to make out its mouth that is feeding on the cake, a vigorous attempt to objectify the mouth with definition. Yet, the frog’s mouth bore no lips, no teeth, and showed no tongue. The cake simply entered the devouring darkness, spoonful after another; to put in better words, the frog’s mouth overcame and engulfed the cake, bursting forward onto the cake as if it was a pair of missing dentures that the mouth was reclaiming. Rupert could not see any indicative signs of its mouth, yet that ticklish primal acknowledgement of the existence of the mouth even when the frog is not feasting on the cake, is strange and invasive, an itchy spot he couldn’t quite scratch. Slowly, the frog took away all of Rupert’s cake.
Rupert could not tell, after each mouthful by the frog, whether there was a mouthful eaten at all, or was the frog always holding the cake, existing as its current size, and in its current shape. Rupert could not convince himself whether the frog was a fake. Rupert had no choice but to latch onto the territorial look he still occupied, unblinkingly watching the frog eat cake after cake, each movement only to disintegrate after the explicit motion was resolved.
Rupert continued to look at the frog, wondering in fantastical fright whether the frog was looking at him as well, and wondering the same thing.
“Rupert, I had a dream last night,” said Albert, buried in cake and unaware of his friend’s duel.
“What kind of dream?” Rupert asked, still fixated on the frog.
“I was sitting in a coffee shop.” Albert swallowed a spoonful of cake. “Such as this one. And I suddenly found myself perplexed, there was a familiarity to everything, but I did not know where it all came from.” Albert did not look up from the cake.
“Was it a projection of some distant memory?” Rupert lifted his cup absent-mindedly as the waiter slid a damp towel across the table.
“No, it was not so specific, nor did it seem distant. The distance was not what made the experience seem familiar.” The waiter dabbed underneath Albert’s plate as well, swerving away with his towel in a graceful advancement towards the counter.
“Was it a rationalisation of what is yet to happen?” Rupert shuffled in his seat. “Sometimes the mind is a boy sinking to an old armchair, both the one acting and the one acted upon, as if there is some blankness it can latch onto while the conflicting acts occur.” The frog continued to stare at him, slightly enraged, Rupert imagined an emptiness within him, engulfing the frog, just as the frog was engulfing the cake with its unmeasurable empty mouth. The frog’s action served as a constant unsettling reminder that Rupert, in fact, could not fully engulf the frog, for the frog was capable of the same engulfing, so if he tried, their lips would smack onto each other, forced against one another until the skin rubbed off in bloody pink bits and they melt into one huge lump.
Albert munched away, now turning to look at the waiter behind the counter, “No, it was not a rationalization of what is yet to happen. The familiarity was so immediate and present. There was no beginning, and there was no end, although the familiarity seemed to waver a bit as I got hold of it.” The waiter placed himself in between the coffee machine and the sink, Albert wondered if he tapped the waiter on the nose, would black coffee come out, or would it be readied with cream?
Rupert shuddered, bewildered at the sudden pang of strangeness of the frog, whom he did not remove his look from. The frog seemed suddenly so full, brimming to the edge of his consciousness with its existence. Yet the frog was seeping into Rupert’s awareness in disjointed, liberated fragments—its legs no longer obedient to the idea of a whole frog but instead lashed to the earth like synthetic green twigs, brittle and poised to snap or shoot skyward into the form of a tree. It was baffling, really, why the frog even had legs at all. Its arms clutched the yellow umbrella as though they were mere extensions of the handle, bent at an angle so unnatural they seemed like errant branches sprouting from a slippery, pill-shaped green mass—better suited for pruning than belonging. The eyes, so grotesquely round, as if their perfect shape might shatter under Rupert’s teeth with a sickening, satisfying crunch. The frog was no longer a coherent being but a chaotic salad of shapes and colors, each piece twirling and swapping places whenever Rupert’s gaze drifted to another part of its form. It was as if the frog had unraveled into a puzzle that refused to stay solved, its essence scattered into a kaleidoscope of absurdity. Was it a different frog, or was the rain playing tricks on him?
“And you think there’s some strangeness preceding this familiarity?” Rupert squinted, in unyielding persistence, tears streamed down his face, he briskly wiped it away. Dumbfounded, again, for he did not recognize his hands. He wondered if he simply raised his hands and someone else wiped away his tears while he wiped their tears away in exchange. The hands he felt were too smooth, too hot, for a moment, the natural, usually inescapable sense of embodiment paused, Rupert’s face was not reassured of its embodiment through the mutual contact with his hands. The elastic space provided by familiarity, like a reunion between two old friends, was replaced by a brimming foreign greeting. Did his body, such as his hands, his face, forever appear to him so unquestioningly like the armchair in the corner of the coffee shop?
“Yes I do think there is some strangeness in relation to the familiarity, but perhaps not preceding it. Like an unfrosted layered cake, if you were to flip the cake around, it would still stand.”
Albert decided that the waiter was simply a waiter, not a coffee machine, but a waiter he could call when he needed a refill or his table wiped. “Oh dear Rupert, why are you pinching your face?”
“But you cannot flip the cake?” Rupert, in weariness tinged with excitement, fumbled at his face with his hands, pinching the flesh, squirmy, warm, and alive, in an attempt to come into contact and sense, with fear, this new detached sensation. “Oh dear Albert, please do not look at me, look at the cake, it is more welcoming of your attention.”
“No, I cannot flip the cake. But very well I will refrain from staring at you, for it seems hardly fair for me to stare at you while your look is devoted to something else completely.” The waiter, as determined by Albert, with a sudden whip of his head, began to stare unashamedly at Albert. He stared with such dominance, it was as if a ginormous mouth began bursting forward towards Albert, just as Albert’s mouth did for the cake.
Unaware of his vulnerability, Albert continued, “It seems the strangeness would always be the bottom layer of the cake, the familiarity always the top layer. So that as I flipped it, I became immediately dumbfounded and saw the new top layer in the exact same way as I did with the old top layer, but I did not see the new bottom layer as the old top layer, it is nothing else than a bottom layer, and the top layer nothing else but the top layer.”
“What did you do about this in your dream, Albert?” There was no progress in the duel with the frog.
“I tried to recall the origin of my situation, of how I wound up in the coffee shop. There was a nothingness.”
“I suppose that’s understandable, but how could there have been ‘a nothingness'?”
“It was indeed ‘a nothingness,’ not a blankness for there was nothing preceding the nothingness either. But it was still a specific nothingness, the specificity I could only faintly recall as I was trying to retrace my origin.”
“And had that nothingness something to do with your cake?”
“Yes, the nothingness is the strangeness, the moment where I am supposed to see the new top layer as the original bottom layer, but I know I could never be in that moment.” As Albert finished his sentence, he froze. He gazed up at Rupert, yet failed to collect his gaze, and Rupert expanded in front of him in a teary blur, “Rupert,” he whispered in a quivering voice, “please do tell me if the waiter is staring at me.”
“Ah my friend, I wish I could but my gaze seems utterly sacrificed already.” Rupert answered wistfully, for he himself no longer wished to stare at the frog.
“I’m going to be quite frank now Rupert, I am in terrible fright that I am going to be reduced to an object in the waiter’s subjectivity! Help me Rupert, for I will surely drown!” Albert’s plead crescendoed from a wavering confession to a piercing cry, and Rupert couldn’t help but think of the pigeons they’d seen struck mid-flight, sucked from the sky in a shedding of pigeon feathers, death overcame them so quickly that the shriek erupted from their beak seemed nothing but a ringing in the ear.
“Stare back! Stare back! Albert!” Rupert chanted.
“Such an aggressive act! What if he is not staring at me! It would be an utter violation!” Albert downed his coffee.
“I could only barely hold the gaze of a frog, Albert. I refer to it by ‘it’ and yet it pierces my subjectivity, you refer to him by ‘him’ and clutches your subjectivity in sweaty palms. I say it is a worthwhile risk.”
Albert turned in reluctant helplessness, consoling himself by imagining a world where he did not turn. The waiter was indeed staring at him.
Their stares locked. Albert knew immediately that even if his body was torn up from the chair, thrown up and turned inside-out in the palms of a mightier god, he could not unlock the staring duel.
“I fear it is the worst, as we imagined, Rupert. What do we do?”
“Right, don’t fret. We shall continue our staring, but must save the subjectivity of each other in our consciousness, so we must stand with our backs against each other. Then we move out, crab-like.” Rupert’s eyes were bulging and flaming red.
Albert, with his head twisted to the right, stood up. Rupert grabbed his coat and slid against Albert’s back.
Vivaldi: Violin Concerto in F Minor, Op.8 No.4, RV 297 "Winter"
Their soles struck the tiled floor. The dusty red armchair flared up in the hue of the flame in the fireplace, the window caved in. Cream flushed out the sink in tidal anguish, sugared coffee shot from the machine in sticky broth. The tiles slid under their feet, switching places masterfully as if in retaliation against the freedom of chess pieces on the tiled chess board. The coffee shop crumpled in a manifestation of some preconceived plot of rancor. Enraged and shocked in their blinded illusion, Rupert and Albert grasped each other’s hands, swinging to-and-fro in an inverted waltz. Their sleeves caught wind, in a shedding of pigeon feathers they ascended into the raining night, and through a timeless mercy, they were shoved against the walls of Rupert’s bedroom.
Massaging his sore eyes in a sorrow already retreating into the primal hut of the past, Rupert announced, “what a strange night! Let us go to bed.”
Bewildered, Albert stood on the bed, and uttered in a furored frenzy, “What an abomination! Absolute distraught! To be plucked from a life of meaning into a disintegrating strangeness! To be an object of an inferior reality! How can I be sure of any meaning in anything anymore!”
“You must embrace this lasting freedom with utter confidence in approaching reality. Have faith!” And so both stood under the warmth of a pouring shower on tiled floors, knowing with certainty the placement of shampoo bottles .