New Zen
“What are you afraid of?” the man covered her palm with his, “Talk to me.” Their hands were about the same length, although hers was two tones cooler and had a slight green tint. The ultraviolet barely left its marks on her freckly skin.
She breathed in noiselessly, glanced around and placed her hand on the cup. Ten minutes later, after they had come in, there was nobody else at this coffee shop. Nobody would come to this place. The faded black, slender arrows of a round clock face on the wall behind him stopped at incorrect figures. Underneath the clock hung a small rectangular plate, swollen from time and with crumbled burnt edges. Bold deep blue font stated Call if maintenance needed. The tablet mounted below was off, its paper-thin translucent screen showing no signs of function. She looked back at him and caught his piercing.
The woman breathed out as if something had drilled a hole inside of her: “I fear that I'm deceiving myself, and that I ought to open myself to the world, but I sit here on Earth and wait for you to come back.”
The bar counter was, with occasional buttons flickering pink and yellow against steel and off-white aged marble. The machine clicked timidly, as the steam it released was making the ceramic coffee mugs on top of it clang. The soft arms of the robot were inanimate.
“Open yourself to the world?” He frowned, and she could distinguish a sarcastic note in his voice. She mumbled something and looked at the dusty membrane covering the small round table for two. The reflection of the red and blue neon OPEN sign, a relic from the 21st century, which hung outside the window, overlooking the hazy street, blinked in it with a slight delay. There were an Eiffel Tower, a whiskered waiter holding a tray with beverages, and some French words painted on the table-top beneath the transparent film cover. She looked up at him and noticed how calm and confident he was.
The man looked at the mist outside the window and added: “They overdid the greenhouse effect, and made the temperature equally stable low all year round in all parts of the planet, the climate however was warm enough to conserve most of the life forms.” He watched her gaze closely.
“How long are you going to stay on New Zen?” She sharply raised the dirty-white cup with her free hand, hiding her look, as if she wanted to hide bitterness in her voice. The smell of mold in her coffee stopped her in the middle, and she put it back to the saucer, without lifting her eyes.
“The time will show if those precious stones will bring me luck.” He smiled, satisfied with his own joke, like a countryman who just tamed a horse.
“What if you deceive me, and one day I’ll be quenched in immense solitude right before the moment love shows up my porch?”
The French waiter looked complacent. The air conditioner was out of service and the room started to feel stuffy. A big hot drop of sweat slid down her the neck to her chest underneath the tight fabric of the thermo suit.
“We have two more weeks on Mars until we are to get transferred to another encampment on Europa.” The voice of the man softened, and he looked away, pressing his lips together.
“What if when you are back, I won’t recognize you? Another person?” The girl persisted.
“You did recognize me at first sight, didn’t you?”
“What if you’re never back?”
The air was still, so was the tone of her voice. Her body was motionless, his hair was fluttering in the wind, and he squinted his eyes blinded by the sun. She looked at her watch. The coffee break was about to finish.
“I have to be at Sky Garden in 10 minutes. Are you returning to serve?”
“Back to wo-r-k.”
The hologram broke up, and his voice shattered as he was finishing the phrase. The man froze in the air with his palm still on top of hers. She didn’t rush to cut it off, and stopped for a moment to take a peek at his three-dimensional projection in high resolution. The faded dark brown fringe with gray hairs froze fluttered, and half of his face was brighter. His uniform was heavily covered in red dust, and she could see the dark green paint chips here and there on it. He was smiling. She hung up, and he vanished into the empty, low-lit space of the coffee shop behind him.
“Leave a note on the windshield of my truck, if you happen to see it in town,” he texted. “When it gets freezing cold.” The neon green bubble of the message swished again in front of her eyes, and disappeared right after she read it.
The woman rushed to the door. She finally breathed again. The street air was cool and humid. A warm, unearthly, inexplicable feeling shed softly and conquered all her senses. All that she could think of now was that fateful improbability of the meeting at the shuttle departing to New Zen, the planet people have been dreaming to inhabit for a hundred years now, and which takes a life to get to. The improbability that brought them together at 10 o’clock on that strange Wednesday was beyond the power of her will.
Suddenly the green thermo suit felt tight, she stopped feeling her body. She looked around – tropical plants crawled the wet asphalt up to the tops of the concrete buildings on both sides of the street. The bubbles of hand-blown glass vessels for rain water collection and natural lighting, mounted here and there in the bushes, shone in the weak rays of sun, breaking through the fog. Her dry lips moved on their own, and she whispered something in an old language: “I will wait for you to come back.”
December came soon. They haven’t talked for 4 months. She heard the mining was going slow due to weather conditions, but she never heard from him. The next shuttle for New Zen was scheduled next month. And this was the last one, it was supposed to take the rest of the people who volunteered. The garden was taken care of by the robots.
“Let’s go out”, a man’s voice in a dynamic said. Andrew was passionate and energetic. He just returned from the western hemisphere expedition where they discovered white powdery precipitation, a sample of which he’d brought to the laboratory of the Sky Garden. He knocked at the glass door of her office. She let him in with a glance.
“Look at this”, he showed her white shiny fine crystals, “This is a new type of chemical compound unknown to Earth conditions before”.
“Ha, what are you going to do with that?”
“We are checking if that has to do with the Pangaea measles spread in the western hemisphere, but according to the preliminary data we collected upon our return. This thing is the new gold. It makes you telepathic.”
“Haha, what? This can’t be real, can it?”
“Me and Matt are testing it ourselves.”
“Andrew, you know how I feel about your experiments…” She looked down and turned to check her plants.
“Hey”, Andrew sounded less intense; “I came to ask if you will go out with me tonight?”
She turned around and looked in his eyes.
“I’m free at 5pm.”
“Deal, I will meet you here.”
She checked her watch, and it was half past four. Maybe this time it’s going to be different. She is going to open herself to the world. Nobody loved this dying planet like she and Andrew did.
At 5, he was there at her office door again. He looked strange, different, calm and focused. He took her hand, and they went to the only food place in the area, Sorby’s. At Sorby’s, they served warm mashed vegetables.
“Me and Matt”, he started, “We took the powder”.
“What? Are you guys joking?”
“On this planet, there is nothing to lose. We are the last experimentalists. So are you, right, Alex?”
She shrugged her shoulders and responded nothing.
Andrew continued: “So right now, me and Matt seeing what the other sees.
“So technically I’m on a date with two?”
“Yes. There are no other girls like you in this dying town, babe”
“I can’t even…”, she let the air out and pressed her lips hard.
“Matt and I, we were talking about this last New Zen shuttle. I’ve got two tickets”
“Oh, you are leaving?”
“Yes, and I want you to go with me.”
“But isn’t the other ticket meant for Matt?”
“Not quite. You are going with me to New Zen, Alex?”
She picked her mashed vegetable dish with a fork and put it aside. The robot refilled her glass of water.
“So what is this powder, Andrew?”
“We call it G. It makes me feel like a biscuit after being dipped in tea.”
“But do you actually talk to Matt?”
“Haha, no. That was a joke.”
“Come-on, this is not funny.”
“Hey, are you coming with me, Alex?”
“No, Andrew, I’m not coming with you. I never wanted to.” She stood up and went to the door. A colorful couple of mutants were watching her leave. She blushed, and the green suit was restoring the temperature as she entered the cold night.
Alex ran in the Sky Garden building, went on the top floor where her office was, she switched the mute on, and the door locked, the windows dimmed and thickened. Alex rolled the chair and sat at her desk. She dropped her head in her arms and a sharp and loud scream burst out from her lungs.
The room was mute, nobody heard her. Just a heavy cold night rain was falling on top of the window ceiling.
“Iman”, she sobbed herself to sleep.