Chapter 4

I can envision that poor girl over there, as she first appeared to Warren Spicks in that bustling little café. What a marked difference between the confident, assured gaze with which she met his and the defeated, silent plea which crosses her lips now? I have said it already—you can see her now. What can I say to elucidate her sorrow, to expound on what you have seen in her shoulders? Nothing. You would realize the change if you had seen her that warm afternoon, basking in the afternoon rays of the sun, intrigued to say the least, at the elegant, youthful stranger who had just entered. This mystery that flashed in her eyes took Warren without warning. And for a moment, I imagine both couldn’t breathe.
Until they simultaneously gasped. The hobo was directly responsible for both. When Livingstone entered the café, he edged past Warren and headed directly for Sofi; Warren deduced in a moment she was the purpose of the visit and gasped at his luck. When Sofi saw the hobo enter behind the curious young man, she deduced as quickly that the two had arrived together and that they had come to talk with her and subsequently gasped at her luck.
Warren somehow managed to get his feet in order to follow Livingstone to the lady’s table—a small curved sort, jutting from beneath a window, with room for two. The hobo took the only other seat—directly across from her—and greeted her warmly. She nodded with a slow blink and a slight blush. Warren felt his gaze fell too heavily on her—but he couldn’t do a damned thing about it. There was something mysterious in the way she tried to reign in her smile, when the hobo introduced them. In fact, Warren nearly forgot speak.
“And this, my dear, is Warren Spicks—who should have been a dead man,” Livingstone was saying over the whir of an espresso machine.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Warren” Sofi offered quietly, but averted her eyes from his the moment she finished, and so missed Warren’s nod of affirmation.
“Warren, this lovely lady is Sofi Gio, whom I have know for…hey! Focus, lad.”
Warren snapped to attention, searching right and left. “What?” was about all he could manage and Sofi giggled.
“Maybe he wasn’t worth saving; quit your gibberish and shake the girl’s hand, now,” Livingstone demanded, but was barely understood in the hustle of the café. Warren nodded with a silly smile plastered to his lips and extended his hand politely. Sofi took it in hers lightly, with such finesse that Warren would shiver just thinking of the sensation afterward, and then reclined back in her seat.
“So what brings you here, Oscar?” she asked the hobo, of course absorbing Warren’s full attention at the mention of his name.
“Oscar?” he somewhat involuntarily inquired. “Is that? Are you? Why didn’t you tell me?” The hobo ignored him, but addressed Sofi about the inquisitive nature he had been attempting to corral within Warren.
“He asks the most impetuous questions, it seems the very moment they occur to him. I’m working on a cure. Aren’t I, my dear Watson?”
Warren could see the slight undercurrent of confusion cross her brow, then pass without giving it voice. “He seems to equate me with Sherlock Holmes’ Watson—don’t worry, my name remains Warren all the same. But Oscar?” he began again.
Sofi replied first, glancing from the hobo to Warren and back. “I see your point, Oscar; and I think I should like to call you Watson as well. It fits.” There inhabited her speech a bit of propriety he found a little unsettling. She spoke as if Oscar Livingstone were a congressman—I’m sorry, bad example—a priest, librarian, or the like. It was also clear to Warren that names meant very little to these two, provided one did have a name in the first place. But Sofi was a memorable name with a memorable face—he would have a difficult time forgetting such beauty.
For a moment neither party spoke. Sofi made a point of passing conversational obligation to the other two by sipping at her tea. Livingstone picked up the conch and turned to face Warren.
“You have business with her. So I’ll let you to it. I need coffee,” he said simply and stepped toward the end of the small line at the ordering counter.
“Oscar, have you heard from Trent?” Sofi called out.
Livingstone spun, replying, “Yes. No. What?”
“Trent,” she tried to clarify for him, but apparently failing. Warren had missed something entirely and stared blankly between the two of them. “Have you talked to him, recently?”
Warren watched the hobo run a hand through his dreads and stare at the ceiling. “Trent?” he finally managed to spurt. Sofi leveled her eyes at him.
“Yes. Trent. Where is he?”
“Somewhere. Probably. Let’s hope, at least.”
“So you haven’t heard?”
“What? No. Well, you heard of the Utah Experiment, right? That’s the last I talked to him. He’s lucky to be alive after that, you know?”
“No, I didn’t…” she said, but he had already moved to the line and now read the designer chalk menu with such fascination that she looked back to Warren with a sigh of frustration.
“Is he always like that?” Warren inquired.
“The dreadlocks are new. But the impossibility is the same.”
“Impossible is a fantastic modifier to describe him, that’s for sure,” he stated with a raise of his eyebrows. She detected something in his quip which obviously put her on guard.
“How long have you known him?” she asked, without masquerading her unease.
Warren checked his watch and she winced. “Six hours or so…yeah,” he replied. She rolled her eyes quickly and almost imperceptibly.
“You have no idea what an impossibility he is…well, can be,” she said, her implications coating her voice like a thick jam on toast.
“You mean it gets worse? How long have you known him?” he replied in a mild terror.
“You do ask a lot of questions,” she commented, touching her lips to the mug’s edge and blowing slightly to cool her tea.
“Well how else am I supposed to figure out what’s going on here?”
“Listening usually works,” she said, smiling at her tea.
“He doesn’t say a thing if I keep silent,” Warren began, but she cut him off.
“Just because you’re quiet, doesn’t mean you’re listening, you know…”
Warren chewed on that thought while she pushed a few rogue strands of her hair back behind her right ear and sipped again at her tea. Just the way the sunlight illuminated her, he imagined himself talking to an icon, a saint of ancient and infallible wisdom. In fact, it was a comparison he found difficult to shake loose.
“So why did he say we had business?” Warren wondered aloud, finally taking Oscar’s vacated seat. Sofi folded her arms and leaned forward, as if to indulge him with a secret.
“Well, I suppose you could say that I’m a benefactress of his. And he…well, recruits for us,” she said, keeping Warren’s gaze locked with hers.
“What? Do you mean he? Wait..but how?”
Sofi’s eyes rolled, with greater agitation this time. “Does it really matter how? Here you are, despite your questions, so you must have a sense for adventure. And we need people like you, Watson, who really don’t mind…”
Livingstone interrupted her with a shout from a rack of tea on the opposite side of the café. “Sofi, dear? I need you.” She dipped her head to Warren and strode across the room, squeezing through the more-crowded entrance to get to Oscar.
Warren was mesmerized by the girl. Her long body was slim, but didn’t seem fragile, rather, she swayed firmly like a sapling aspen in a spring breeze. When he finally managed to rip his gaze from her, questions flooded his open mind without mercy.
For what was he being “recruited?” And what sort of recruiter was Livingstone? And would he ever be able to figure out his real name? And as far as he knew, was Sofi really the girl’s name? Could he be expected to keep his own? Names seemed as fluid to these two as the swirling tea in Sofi’s cup. A bitter sort of taste came to his lips as he wondered if they were trustworthy at all. And would he even consider working with them? Sofi already appeared to him the more down-to-earth of the two. Livingstone walked with his head in a fog that he doubted he would ever understand.
Warren’s thoughts drifted back to his family—was he going to have to hitchhike back? It certainly seemed doubtful to him that Livingstone would give him a ride back. Perhaps he could find a bus to Alamosa from Colorado Springs. That would be at least a step in the right direction.
He glanced back towards the conversing pair. It was ridiculous to stay with them. He knew extremely little about them—and what he did know was only simple and potent frustration. He watched them carefully; she mostly listened, while he kept glancing around the café while speaking. They didn’t seem to mind the other customers around them—but Warren couldn’t possibly hear a thing from this far side. But again, he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to.
At once, he made his mind up; he shuffled to an organic oils display and feigned interest, stealing quick glances at the conversing two. Out the window in front of the café, a couple with fingers interlocked seemed to be debating entering. Warren prayed they would. He looked back to Sofi; she had her back turned to him, a hand placed firmly on her hip, the other gesticulating with firm emotion. She had Oscar’s attention for the moment—something she was saying intrigued him, that much was certain. He stood, shifting his weight from foot to foot, and all the while his eyes moved. Warren assured himself that when he made his move, the chances of Livingstone seeing him would be minimal.
Warren discovered the couple had decided on the café, and had opened the door. As the two approached the order counter, Warren slipped behind them and out of the door. He figured he had but a few seconds before Livingstone would notice and he surveyed the street: he wanted to head east, out of the valley and towards the Springs—but that might be expected of him. The river to his right, in its deep and hushed canal, seemed a fine choice to escape, but he would have to sneak past the windows right beside Sofi and Oscar. In front of him, the road curved uphill—perhaps the woods beyond the town would provide him enough cover. He would have to sprint across a fairly wide-open space, however, and that would draw immediate attention to himself—an easy spot for Oscar or Sofi upon exiting the café.
All this flashed through his mind in a matter of moments—he rejected every option and rather found himself moving to his left, around the building. He made a quick move past a window, trusting his luck. As he moved around the corner, he heard the bell ring as the café door sprang open. He didn’t look, but rather moved around a path towards the back patio of the café. Giving himself a few moments in the shade, he looked up and downriver. A bridge about a hundred yards upstream presented itself to him as his best option. Once on the far side of the river, he might be able to sneak downstream and then cross back over, walk towards the interstate, and hitch hike home.
When his heart had settled a bit (eased, of course, by the forming of a plan) he entered the café through the rear entrance and sat in the most non-conspicuous corner-table he could find. Neither Sofi nor Livingstone were in sight—probably both were scouring the streets, searching in vain for their newest recruit. He opened the newspaper left on the table by its previous visitor, and buried his face in it. The article at which he found himself staring was entitled, “God: seer of a thousand paths, king of a few.” Warren’s eyebrows lifted as he read.
I could not find the article—as much as I searched the IGDB. But the impressions left with Warren from the article I can relate. Although written in such broad and somewhat grandiose language, the ideas of the article, or at least, the ideas as Warren perceived them seemed to place God as a groundskeeper of time—a man working to his satisfaction in the infinite “garden of forking paths” as Borjes had termed reality in his well-known short story of that name. According to the author, an S.G. Seville, God trimmed and planted and watered some parts of the garden—not capriciously, the author had been quick to point out, but rather artistically. Which meant some areas received what some might call preferential treatment, while others were allowed to grow in their own, wild, natural ways. But the real point, besides the issues of judgment and intervention and miracle, was that in the ever-multiplying paths of time (of which we really only consciously exist in one) caused by free will, God worked more in some than others and to say that he is focused on ours alone is as ridiculous as saying he is dead for lack of his work. While the idea of God as an artist of times intrigued Warren, he had been counting the taps of his index finger on the table—when he hit 50, he abandoned the newspaper, strode out the back and headed northwest towards the bridge. Thoughts of seeing his family replaced the ideas of the paper and he barely managed to keep from breaking into a dead run. Ten yards from the bridge, he glanced behind him—not a sign of pursuit. He sighed and proceeded to cross over the river, free from expectation and the unknown weight of Livingstone. With a quick dash to the trees, he scampered into the forest, up the far hillside, most certainly out of sight of any seeking eyes. One final little adventure to get himself home, then he would have a couple days to figure out how to tell his parents what had happened. But first, to the highway.