Vi Khi Nao
IF THE WIND DOES NOT SERVE, TAKE THE GENIUS TO HER LIMITS
She has been spending a lot of time at Starbucks eating cereal.
The baristas leave her alone. At night, five minutes before closing, they tell her that they will be closing in five minutes. By the end of the first week, they no longer use words to say they are closing. She meets the gaze of the baristas and they nearly open their mouths, but they don’t.
The reason why she eats Cheerios is because they have only 2 grams of sugar. Everything in life tastes too sweet to her. Everywhere she goes. Even asphalt tastes too much of dextrose, dripping with artificial honey and sugar. Whenever she walks, the earth seems to glue her to its soil. It takes all of her power and force to pull herself together to move forward.
She has just left Panda Express after ordering a small entree of grilled teriyaki chicken with sauce on the side. She knows the sauce is the definition of molasses on a bed of honey on a bed of sorghum on a bed of agave.
When she sits down to pull the chicken from its carton with a pair of chopsticks at Starbucks, she notices the server’s name: Nicole with a Y. Nycole. On the receipt. She originally thought the server was Mexican, with a face of barbacoa, not a white girl whose mother, when pregnant with her, took handfuls of Tylenol as if they were vitamins or maternity pills.
That evening, she tries to use the Starbucks bathroom stall but it is occupied. It remains occupied for another hour. Ten minutes before closing, she notices a tall white boy with thin hair exiting it. His hair is wet, as if he has glued patches of hay on it to make it look human-like. He has taken a sink-based shower at Starbucks. And it looks as if he is wearing a new pair of jeans and an off-white T-shirt. They are wrinkled and it makes his articles appear old and dirty and soiled. When he turns his face, his eyes look like a rattlesnake’s—one that is born in the cold, swirling its body across the desert where undocumented Mexicans emigrate so their labor can be exploited.
For hours, sitting in a corner near a colored photograph of unripe cherries in a mahogany wood frame, a young man wearing a gray sweater has been on a business call with another person. She assumes the person on the other end is a woman because it takes him a while to quote the estimate of a service. He has to assure her that he would pay well. He is willing to pay $500 for two days work. Work that isn’t homemade vadouvan. His rental isn’t French colonial.
While watching David Chang refusing to eat donkey meat on episode 5 of his Ugly Delicious, she hears the businessman saying loudly, “I don’t want to be the middleman. I want to be the boss. Either step up or leave. Exactly. Exactly. I am not going to beg someone to go. Does that make sense? I probably would say to him, ‘Hey, you are probably not ready for this, man. He hasn’t. He hasn’t.’ Give me some room to think and make some phone calls.”
David Choe, the street artist, who chooses payment in FB shares and has a non-liquid asset worth of between 1/5 and 1/2 billion dollars, tries donkey meat for the first time in Korea. The meat is ranked 2nd after dragon, which doesn’t technically exist.
“Because of the shorter lease? I don’t know what to say. Whatever. Gotcha. Are you doing it on your own either way? Let me take you off this list. I will be there Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. I’ll see you.”
“What’s up, buddy. Trying to set up the housing. When is your date of arrival? That’s what I was thinking, too. And, then. Okay. I am working on the housing. For the first week, we will do hotels. Let me walk you through it. It’s a weekly rent. A single. A room where you share with someone. $125 a week and a private place that is smaller. Let’s do that. Okay. That’s up to you. It’s up to you. If you have a car, you can drive here. Basically, most likely, you most likely. Most mobile option. Yeah. It comes with a new bed. New dresser. So everything is new. You can buy it here. And then pots, pans, and stuff, and some cheap stuff. Perfect. Perfect. Oh. Cool. Oh, no. It’s all me. I just need a date and time. Yeah. I can commit for a summer without being everywhere. How much is the flight? I’ll come back with something. Yeah. Yeah. Southwest. Sounds good. Appreciate it. Thanks.”
Meanwhile a newspaper sitting across from him, abandoned on a high metal chair, announces the death of 76-year-old Linda Brown, who was the center of the 1954 Supreme Court decision to end public school segregation. He is white and does not care. He wants his menu and his ammunitions to rent. Because the newspaper is made of paper, and has not crossed the dangerous, gelid desert to be here, the barista won’t deport it. At least not until the end of the day. At the end of the day, she’ll toss it into a garbage bin.
However, there are others, those who know how to make non-Arab- style tacos so well, with chicken chicharron and salsa mocha and coconut fat and ginger, and who are banned from the United States for life.
And so she hears, not like bleached broccoli deep fried in chicken fat would sound:
“Hey. How fast can you get the menu done? I am trying to get the housing done. Do I need to write a letter? Can we get the stuff all go? Call Chris. What is the target date we are trying to shoot for? Yeah. Let’s get it done today. Oh, yeah. I am not mad at anybody. Alright. Shoot me.”
The barista passes by her to inform a man in his early forties that they are closing in five. He turns to her, “But your website says you close at 10 p.m.”
“Our hours change. It’s now 9 p.m.”
He gives her the kind of gaze one would give a crawfish, a Viet-Cajun crawfish, and in one swift mental gesture he could decapitate her and suck all of her hepatopancreas and membranes out. In his mind, he is breaking her antennas, her central nervous system, which crawfish do have, and her receptor cells.
She walks away and begins to sweep an area that requires little to no sweeping.
When the five minutes pass, the patron approaches the transparent exit door. He points to the hours sign. “It says 10 p.m. 10 p.m! I’m not joking!”
Then he leaves, meaning both of his feet are completely negated from Starbucks’s ceramic floor, he screams to the nocturnal Vegas air: “If the wind will not serve, take the genius to her limits!”
“Foie gras, mudbugs, paprika, and butter are transcendent mistresses of the tongue—who am I question the stucco, U-shaped ranch of Starbucks’s operational hours? Who am I to crave foie gras?” The patron shouts and shouts these words.
“If Starbucks would operate their businesses as stated on their website and at their business locations, I wouldn’t be so crazy. I just wouldn’t. I just wouldn’t.”
He climbs into his black Volkswagen Jetta sedan. In the dark, it’s hard to tell that it’s handsome. The dealer had informed him that it’s subcompact, but having owned it for nearly three months, he thinks this is an inaccurate assessment of the car.
He lives in the information age. The information highway always kicks him off, always asks him to de-emerge, always kicks him off the ramp.
After he turns on the engine, he pummels the steering wheel with his fists.
“It’s not fair. It’s simply not fair.”
He backs his sedan out of the Starbucks parking lot. Once he gets on the highway, he drives really fast. Thirty miles per hour over the speed limit. Even for Vegas, it is fast. Everyone here drives fast and wicked. They drive the way they gamble: recklessly. Except for the gunman. The gunman knew the rules of gaming and taking chances.
Just five minutes into his semi-manic driving, red lights flash in circular motions behind him. He pulls over and a tall police officer climbs out of his car and walks towards him.
“Do you know how fast you were driving?”
“Starbucks closed at 9 p.m. when it says 10 on their main door.”
“Your license and registration please.”
“Starbucks closed at 9 p.m. It says 10 on their website.”
“Your license and registration please.”
“Starbucks closed at 9 p.m. when it says 10 on their main door.”
“Have you been drinking?”
“Starbucks closed at 9 p.m. when it says 10 on their website. Starbucks doesn’t serve alcohol.”
“Your license and registration please.”
“Starbucks closed at 9 p.m. when it says 10 on their main door.”
“I’m going to have to ask you to step out of the car, sir!” the police officer barks.
“If the wind will not serve, take the genius to her limits.”
“Sure.”
“My vocal cord is the genius. Not my driving!”
“Step out of the car now!” the police officer orders.
“I think I’m wrong here. I don’t think it’s my vocal cord. Do you think it’s my vocal cord?”
A talented young poet in a writing program once told her, “I used to grow the nail on my pinky so that whenever I ate crawfish I could dig all of the meat out. I love crawfish, man. I just love it. I just don’t like it when there are leftovers. Do you know what I mean? Even if it’s hidden.”