French Pressed

     Bob had bought a French press for twenty dollars at the Starbucks a couple blocks down from his dorm. As the water boiler was starting up, he stole a glance at the empty beaker, filter, and blue Kona bag with the remainder of his coffee powder. The whole operation was roughly timed in anticipation of a friend who was wading through the snow after a lonely bus ride.

     Two weeks had passed since the first beaker had cracked. It was on the same day that buying a French press seemed like a good idea. Starbucks was sold out at the time, so they went to a nearby Marshalls, and just when they were about to give up, they happened upon a shitty ten-dollar press pot hiding in the dog section. It cracked on the first try.

     But today they would enact all the words and ruminations of a warm ritual, make real an image that was constantly refracting with the weather and the words. He was certain. This coffee was going to get French pressed!

     The phone rang.

     “Hey, we should go down to the basement. They have chairs and tables there.”

     “What’s wrong with your room?”
      “Ah… there’s just not as much space… I actually want to sit down for this. Come up to my room.”

     Rob was restlessly absorbed in his own thoughts. He carefully peered through his enclosure, at the water boiler, headphones on the bed, books lined up overhead, Bob’s eyes on default. The words became less oppressive as they conversed about their day.

     “Was that six? I need eight.”

     “Ten scoops! ” Rob gesticulated like a wild referee. “Dump it in there!”
      “No man.”

     Bob tipped the boiler over the beaker. The water browned instantly as it hit the powder, and the shell of a ritual began to brim with hot Kona coffee. He carefully placed the filter over the beaker, and gently pushed with a long exhale.

     The metal screen slid down like a heavy elevator. The liquid browned even more.

     “Oh man, look at that. Your coffee, it is getting French pressed.”

     “I know right?”

     They took the brown beaker, two mugs, a spoon, some sugar packets, and started towards the basement four floors down. They glanced at the beaker, then at the stairs, then at the mugs, and then the stairs…

     “What I like about this is that you don’t have to make too much, just a little over two cups.”

     “Uh-huh.”

     The basement was a crude white space resembling a laundry room with tables and chairs. They seated themselves next to a white pillar obscuring a small TV set mounted on the left wall.      

     Rob remembered the time they had coffee at Espresso Royale, a small throbbing prison house of language, throngs of students screaming from image to image, eyes pacing like hungry animals blinded by flashes of repartee. Now they were in a quiet basement.

     “Aw yeah, that’s the stuff,” said Bob. He was reading his own mind. “Yup, it’s so much better with sugar.”

     “I shouldn’t have put in Sweet’n Low…” said Rob, lost in a careful scowl. “It’s…”

     “It’s… yeah it’s a little… the taste…”

     “It tastes kind of… artificial I guess?

     “Mmm… Yeah,” said Bob, bobbing at an angle. Rob had seen this bob many times before. Bob deliberated, assumed a scowl in his image, then latched onto a rough strand of inflection, anything he could find.

     “You know what pisses me off? All my Asian friends, they only talk about two things, games and tests… and… there’s this Chinese girl in my film class… the professor asked something about composition and she was like…. 'Oh, um, that dress she’s wearing is pretty.'” He shook his head and squinted his eyes. He was shaking with thoughts that never saw the light of day, not with his friends, not with his girlfriend, not through a backlog of essays. He had been in the states for four years. Every utterance meant catching-up.   

     “Yeah… I used to hate that shit,” said Rob. He took another sip and placed a hand over his heart. It was beating hard. “But I know where they’re coming from you know?

     “Yeah I guess, but like… when I talk about games with my friends… at least… like it’s in depth, but this girl… she just can’t…”

     “Mmm yeah,” muttered Rob. Bob chuckled defensively, and Rob lapsed into guilt, but he quickly assumed deliberation. “No like, yeah but what can you do? I think… um… I think if you… imagine what keeps them going, the underlying momentum…. Then it makes more sense… the things that they say… but yeah it’s kind of gross.”

     Rob was tense, but the tension was good. He saw the ideas connect and fall apart, the rapid slip-ups, cut-offs, tunnel-vision flights toward reckless domination. Flashes of personal history formed an oppressively fractured panorama. He shuddered at the patchwork of sound, image, and dialogue, all the delusions sutured onto faces locked in day-to-day fervor. Accusations swelled and subsided in his breath, in Bob’s eyes, in every direction. He saw the big ugly jugular, pulsating with pure error, grabbed his mug, and drank. The crude white room reverberated in silence.  

     “Ha ha oh god, this is so strong…” said Rob.

     “Yeah. You know, I lent these books to some friends… I wonder when they’ll return them… it’s kind of pissing me off… Philip Roth…”

     “Hey. Press them about it. French press them.”

     “Have you ever read Dune? Great book… it’s like… an entire world. There’s a glossary in the back.”

     “I tried to get into it a few summers ago… it looked good.”

     “Yeah I just… I was looking for a fantasy world to escape in… you know, like Lord of the Rings?”

     “Oh man, me and my friends back in high school… every summer we were looking for that… like we would look for it in an RPG game, or an anime, but… I think it left us hollow. I think it was the… pure play of emotion, like oh this is clearly a bad guy, oh no he died so sad, but with just enough variation you know?”

     “Oh yeah, anime’s like that.”

     “Yeah and... oh god this is so embarrassing... it just doesn’t translate. We wanted to be a bunch of pirates, like in One Piece. Oh you know, that grad seminar I dropped... in anthropology you can study pirates. Sing songs with them. I just thought my friend might be into that…”

     “I don’t know…” Bob tried to look skeptical.

     “Yeah but anyway, anime… anime’s so over the top. It ruins you.”

     “Ha ha yeah.”

     “I think we were… I know I was trying to relive something that was lost… like in middle school when I beat Chrono Trigger. That shit was life changing.”

     “I think,” Bob paused. “Yeah Asian kids…  they’re so goal oriented… like they just can’t—”   

     “The advantage of being an Asian male is that they just gloss over you!” Rob laughed, and overlooked Bob in his image. He paused to feel around the maelstrom obstructed by his eyes. He made sure to glimpse at the abyss, the wasteland repressed by apathetic hunger, before it congealed into laughter.        

     “Mmm. This is so good.”

     “Oh shit, I have to go. Gonna get Caine’s with some friends before the show. They talk about cheap food places and records and things like that and that’s great but—“

     “Yeah shit you have to go.”

     They took the empty beaker, the spoon, the two mugs, and left the sugar packets on the table. They glanced at the beaker, then at the floor, then at the mugs, then at the floor…