A girl, sitting several feet away, was examining her boots intently. He watched her try to pull a piece of chewing gum from off the sole of one boot with the toe of the other.

"Someone's gum," she might have apologised had she seen him looking at her.

"Sorry. I didn't mean to stare," he might have offered in return.

A moment or two of silence would have passed as both minds sought another topic. None, as is usual in these situations (akin to the silence after the first few polite words about a sporting result or the weather with a taxi driver), would come to either so each would politely smile and engage a task that the other might construe to be important. Hers was to re-engage her struggle with the gum.

"See ya. My stop."

"Bye."

And she would have disembarked at whatever intersection, to do whatever she was travelling to do. But there, in that scene, a certain level of synchronicity would have been reached. Not a mere coincidence, because coincidences require some kind of ontological basis but a synchronicity... metaphorically, the temporary union of two people in the dance of a city's motion like that which we have all seen captured by time-lapse photography and used for "artistic" trailers to television programs about life in the urban urbane.

"Do you have any tattoos?"

She must have seen him watching her.

"No." He responded.

"You look like you should."

"Do I?"

"Yeah, why not?"

"I don't know really. Never thought of it much, though a lot of my friends have them."

This conversation was not taking the course that he had imagined it would. He swallowed the desire to tell her about a few of his friends and the strange circumstances in which they acquired their body- markings. It was always friends that he talked about. People he met asked about himself but, inevitably, it was tales of his friends which he would regale... as if their lives, and their tales, were somehow a defence against his own... boredom? Too sane life? Stable family scene? Debauchery that was recreational rather than integral? He would always talked about the time that someone he knew... and so it would go.

He had lost a girl or two to his kind of talk. "My friend ----- is so cool" he once started. "Rides a really viscous motor-bike... been lost in the Andes, and the Pyrenes 'were a tear.'" M-- followed the story of his friend's antics straight to that friend's heart. "Got another, named --------- - who does the most amazing things. Rented a car once, rag top, drove the southern States... jumped from a plane... did a solo Fandango! Seen the film?" She went to see ---------- instead. Was it pride? Was it jealousy? Whatever it was, he always seemed to make his friends seem big. Bigger than himself.

"Cool."

The gum was now on the toe of the other boot and he couldn't think of anything else to say.

There was a momentary pause as each sought something to add to the conversation before politely smiling and turning to tasks of relative importance. Hers was the gum. He looked out the window and struck the appearance of engaging in deep thought.

"See ya"

"Bye"

He watched as she stepped off the streetcar and ran across the intersection.

"Why mushrooms? And why toothpicks?"

The coffee in his cup was still swirling after the waiter had poured the refill. The surface was dotted with rising bubbles bursting through the viscous surface.

He sat, absently stirring his coffee, motivating further reactions from the liquid, as though he was scheming. And he realised, within his train of thoughts, that that might just be the case. He might look like a schemer. Refocusing his eyes from the branches of the tree he had not been seeing, he looked around to see if he was being watched.

Stupid. What's wrong with scheming anyway? It all depends on the point-of-view of the one judging the schemer--and whether action is taken. Can there be guilt in thought? Not in the objective sense of the law, but certainly in the self. Take, for example, the road crew who are digging out that intersection three blocks from here. They are working according to a plan set for them by an engineer. Yet, in their moments of passivity, they might be ... scheming... dreaming of the girl on the corner in her short skirt; her, of the shortest route home; the surveyors, of Sunday's ball game... scheming, scheming; clearing their minds of one thought to make room for the next and resting in the momentary serenity granted between each passing moment and of time; so important. Minutes, minute in the grand scheme, but so important for the axiom of being--of actions taken or ignored... of the girl on the streetcar...

Had he asked her name... had he said what was on his mind; "You've got nice hair." Laughter inside. No, no... it was her presence and that she had said what was so unexpected: "You have any tattoos?" What the hell kind of salutation was that? "Someone's gum," now given the moment, that was to be expected but, "You have any tattoos?"

A moment passed and a new thought engaged:

It was the fourth mushroom cap that began to cause him trouble that night, as he recalled. The third he had carefully separated from its skewer with his tongue, shifted to the right side of his mouth where he now chewed upon it. The toothpick, he moved to the left side along his gum line where it rested with the previous two. The mechanics of this operation were carefully detailed but he began to wonder, as the toothpicks dug painfully into his gums, why it was that he was keeping them there.

The silver tray carrying the hors-d'oeuvres passed him and he reluctantly reached for a fifth.

Again, he moved his tongue along the shaft of the stick, bent the back of his tongue upward and pushed the cap forward with the tip. He slid the mushroom along the back-side of his teeth to its chewing place but found he could not shift the toothpick. A brief panic gripped him as his tongue started to spasm but he collected himself, took a deep breath through his nose, and began the procedure again. The toothpick slipped. It was now balanced precariously near the opening of his throat. He tried breathing again, but the toothpick was tickling his epiglottis, making him gag. Coughing would surely have dislodged it, but his mouth was full of food and he was in a formal setting; thoughts of embarrassing himself settled the option against histrionics.

Then it was down. He could feel it; it was lodged sideways just above his heart. He dropped to his knees as if the downward motion would counteract the direction of the toothpick's movement. He started to wretch and...

It was morning. His sheets were at the foot of his bed. He was in a sweat. Tentatively he swallowed the saliva in his mouth, breathed a sigh of relief, and turned to look at the clock beside his bed. 7.35 am. "That was then."

It struck him, when he was sitting on the streetcar thinking about what his dream meant, that he had lived in the city for 16 years, knew many people, yet could be in such a small area, with so many others, and recognise no one. He surveyed the car and wondered if he ever would know the people travelling with him--struck him whether anyone on the car had seen him before, in the same, or perhaps another circumstance... that perhaps a traumatic event would bring them together. But, of course, in big cities, traumatic events only happen on the TV news--the medium of reality offers only modicums of excitement at an infrequent trickle with newsworthiness only happening to the "others" one sees on the tube. Or, occasionally, when a friend is surveyed by the local news for his opinion on something trivial like a park being renamed "The Glenn Gould Parkette" (in memory of the composer's time spent in the city) from the less ostentatious "Charles St. Playground"; he said, "Who? Where?" and became the object for the newscaster's next 15 seconds of "witty" repartee. Or when another was asked to introduce City TV's late great movies by a roving reporter. Andrew said: "You're watching "Killer Clowns from Outer Space" on City's Late Great Movies! Stick around. Woo-hooo!" And then he had met the gum-boot girl. That particular environment would from now on always be flavoured, to him, of that encounter. Somehow it had become more personal. He would watch for her.

Toothpicks, mushrooms. 10.15, he observed.

Scheming. Why the stigma attached to the word. Dreaming is acceptable; scheming is not.

Had he said something though, things could have worked out differently. Oh, it wasn't a case of being in "love" with her. That's too grand a decision to be made on a moment but she did seem so different; her actions with the gum so deliberate. And why tattoos?

He remembered so many other meetings, encounters... but just the ones that became significant... so many others slip into the uncatalogued recesses of the memory, undefined, without a context to reference the meaning...

"Ed and I dropped acid and went to the Zoo..." began a friend.

"What's the zoo?" The girl, whose name was no longer remembered, interrupted him.

He remembered laughing at her, at her drunkenness... "A zoo! A god damn zoo... lions! tigers! and bears! A fucking zoo! Where the hell did you think they had been?"

"Oh my god. I thought it was a club or something! I'm so embarrassed."

But he didn't remember the Chinese girl being there, though she must have been. It had been the zoo girl who he recalled meeting at the Hungarian restaurant 'come bar. But later that night it was her friend, the Chinese girl, who picked him up. She had sat on his lap, at the billiard's hall and made him "teach" her how to shoot pool...

"Schemer!" He chortled into his coffee. He remembered too that a week or two later she had kicked his ass in pool. "She was a schemer."

But what of all the others? All the faces that you see each day... that pass you on the streets. You never remember them. You might meet and know that person in the future, have seen their face a hundred times before and then remember "the day we met." It's not "the day" at all. Likely never was. Meeting is all context and construction... one should be able to know at a whim.

He remembered Brian. How they would sit and talk in the front window of Sneaky Dee's for hours on end during the long winter months and talk about dreams and passions and desires. They would see the cars turning past the corner or racing through the intersection on their way to a planned destination; or just driving about, needing to build the charge in a deadened battery. And their dreams of sailboats and motorcycles and trips and that 750 cc's are what you need to really feel the rumble in your gut; racer or roadster? He always dreamed of a red Harley; Brian of something with a number and acronym in its name. So much in common; two different sets of goals; needing the same vehicle to get there... there, to the money, to the fame. And agreement on the basic dictum, the ontological essence of all things: dreams. Dreams which give hope to mundane existence. And how they met. How they talked from two sides of the same city, on the same line, to a writer's chat-board.

"Meet you some time?" ended one message.

"Yeah, got some words to give you. Say, Sneaky Dees? Know where that is?"

The next day he had responded. "Yeah! I do. I go there all the time. 9 is fine."

And they met, and knew each other's faces. They had been in the same place, at the same time, countless nights before. And drank the same coffee, and stared out the same window, and dreamed the same dreams, but had never "met" formally.

"More coffee?"

"Yeah.

He watched the waiter as the coffee was poured, and catalogued his image in his mind for moments to be written about later.

"See that table?" he had asked Brian. Told him about the time that they had sat there. A first date sort of time with a plate of natchos and a pitcher of beer. Where she rested her shoulder on the wall and led her hands over the table to hold his and her smile. Her smile and questions asked as she moved her hands over his fingers, ran her thumb over his knuckles... stopped on the scars. And another pitcher. She had moved to his side of the table and pressed his thigh against hers with her hands and leaned over to kiss his cheek and whisper and laugh. And then the tumble home...

Where is she now? He put a couple of bills under the coffee cup's saucer and left the cafe's patio. 10.45 am.

But dreams. Dreams. They always create hope within you... and delude you. Prevent you from abandoning your past... make you judge, jury and executioner of your own self: "I did *it*." Whatever the "it" might have been, it was done and it is the done moments and things which teach you of your present and lead your presence through the future until that too becomes a past memory of experience and lost innocence in the context of growing-up and becoming.

Where is she now. Where are all the "shes"? All the hoped-fors and desireds? And where is the "I", he asked himself. "Where is the "I" that each of her eyes had seen and beheld and cast into the role of the desired? Where and who am I now in their thoughts?" And what of place? The space between the sheets, in a park, on the street all the places that lovers like to meet? Are they vacant? Who fills them now? And what of their thoughts? What of their thoughts

Where are all the objects of a time's importance? The Star Trek guns that he and Donnie had begged and pleaded for? They were of that time and then, very important. The guns came armed with a dozen plastic disks. He and Donnie would set-off on their games... usually using the "Trek" equipment for their variations on Star Wars. He'd be Han Solo and Donnie would play Luke and the little Czech boys from across the road would be the Storm Troopers and Hope (that was really her name) would play Princess Lea and Rosie would watch. And one summer afternoon Donnie went to raid the Empire's bar fridge for Pop Shoppe coolers (he remembered the particularly plastic taste of the Black Current flavour he loved so much; maturity told him to love coffee as much now) and he and Hope sat with their backs against a tree feeling the not-quite-sweat bursting through the pours of their browned skin... waiting... and she kissed him... long and hard on pursed lips the way you did when you weren't quite sure of what you were supposed to do.

When Donnie returned, Han didn't seem to care too much about letting the Czech boys play with his gun. He moved neighbourhoods for the third time in three years shortly there-after. Never saw Donnie or Hope again. Wondered now why Rosie had always just watched... wondered where Donnie was... wondered how much Donnie had been hurt by the loss of his fascination with guns...

And he set off, down a boulevard that he had walked a hundred times, ridden on on his motorbike, peddled along on his bicycle and seen with glasses tinted by numerous shades of rose and blue--walked to settle a scheme: an idea held by his mind of hope and desire; of things said and not-said; written and not-written; things to be dreamed, emotions to be wrenched and cherished: the still unknown length of the string that he knew pulled and tugged him, and he on it. String and strength: one will tire... one will break; resolve? or integrity? Tugging.

Mountainous meaning! Knew now that having a girl meant comfort: a home for feeling; for marble slates and central heating; for washing away solitary whiskeys that said, "I win". Lonely nights and bottles of gin: the iconoclasts of being. Knowing now that what he felt--what he feels--is the celebration of the hope for a union of presence and being; of knowing place and time... but most significantly, place. Of knowing "here" and "what I am". Of being and feeling: the cause and effect of winding back causal sequences and seeing their evolution to this state of fruition. Of being human and humane. Of understanding Marcel's datum. Of knowing which hopes are shared and not hearing the silence of loneliness; of not hearing the echos' howl...

"Darling!" He pleaded "Can't you know me? Can't you feel me... I want to talk to you... on the phone... on the line... live... live... knowing..."

The pavement passed-by under foot... the sky drifted... the trees stood... the grass grew and the homes along the boulevard changed: now a pram on a porch; now a ball; now a trike; now a bike; now a hammock; now a rocking chair and a pipe... now standing empty waiting for the next incumbent with his plans and schemes for a certain tomorrow.

(c) Ian Firla 1995