Future Imperfect

This story is one in a series that is posted on Salome Jones’ Red Phone Box Series. Please go there and enjoy the rest of them.

The ash on the end of her cigarette is just about to fall. That’s what I think when I look at the woman sitting across from me in the cafe. She hasn’t taken a drag from it in ages, as if she’s forgotten it, but now it’s burned down so low, it’s going to singe her fingers. I’m waiting for that. For her to notice when it does.

It falls like one of those empty office buildings they demolish in a controlled manner, and the ash detonates on impact in a trail of little grey flowers along her black skirt. She doesn’t notice. She’s waiting for someone.

I know that feeling. When you’re so caught in up in imagining how the whole meeting will play out, you move into a parallel universe where time doesn’t run evenly. Parts of the scenario speed by like cars on the highway: a blue one, a silver one, a red one, the one where you meet and smile, the one where you meet and cry, the one where you wait and wait, but the person you’re waiting for never arrives. Other parts of the scenario crawl along: the blue car changes lanes and passes the silver one only just avoiding its bumper, or two almost identical cars pull up beside each other and the world almost freezes as the drivers glance at each other while keeping pace, wondering if they’re driving by enormous mirrors. Those slow moments where you pull me down to you and kiss me. Where your bare back slides against white hotel sheets. Where you look at me just before you enter me. Then time flips speeds and races again. The hand that cups my chin. The arch of a spine. The gratifying rustling sound of a disposable toothbrush wrapper.

The woman is old. She’s been careful with her appearance, but she can’t fool me. There are lines at the base of her neck where her skin has decided not to cling to the meat beneath it anymore. Her mouth is turned downward at the sides, as if the life she’s eaten disappointed her and she’s allowed it to drool out the corners because she’s too polite to spit it out.

Just then, she notices the burnt out filter between her fingers. She drops it into the glassy black ashtray beside her chair and, after methodically searching through her purse, which is perched like a pet cat in her lap, she lights another cigarette and gets lost again.

I’m a little shocked she doesn’t take the opportunity to check the time and grumble about the lateness of the person she’s meeting. Only in the absence of that set of reactions do I consider just how long she’s been there waiting. You only stop looking at the time once it ceases to matter. Once the waiting stops being anticipation of something else and becomes a state of being.

She scares me a little. With her legs crossed just so and her shiny black high heels twinned to the side in a gesture of long lost femininity. We are wearing almost the exact same shade of nail polish. Her fingers are not pretty either, and they shake a little as she brings the cigarette to her mouth and takes a puff that emphasizes the wrinkles around her lips.

For all her neatness, she’s a woman without dignity now. A woman who has turned waiting into a profession and has a trail of grey ash on her nice black suit. I consider going over to her and brushing the ash away, but I realize she knows the person is not coming, and so the ash no longer matters. How long, I wonder, has it been since the ash ceased to matter?

Stranger still, I’m overcome with the certainty that if I were to talk to her, to touch her, the world would snuff out like a candle. Because I think perhaps she might be a future version of me. And you know what the rules of time are like — you encounter your future self and the universe explodes and gets sucked down an enormous black hole.

Perhaps she’s waiting for you. Like I’m waiting for you. She’s me having waited a lot longer, having turned into a middle-aged mouse with good posture and a bad nicotine habit. I look for dust on her side of the lobby. As if the space between us is time/space. But of course, that’s silly. The invisible dust banishers will have been diligently keeping this sterile hotel lobby dust free as the future becomes the present.

I don’t want to be you, I think as I glare at the woman. Get out of here. No one is coming for you, you idiot. And I’m not going to let you trap me in your sad inevitability.

That’s when I get up and leave the hotel lobby. I know you’re not coming. I always knew you wouldn’t. I knew it before I met you. Perhaps I knew it before I was born. The bright red paint on the phone box reminds me to take out my mobile and SMS you to say that you’re a shit. But I don’t want to look at it. I’m positive it will contain a message from you with some incredibly understandable and valid excuse.

And if I read that, I’ll turn into her. Suddenly, I’m convinced there’s only one way to disrupt the horrific future I have seen. I open the door to the telephone box and leave my mobile phone on the little metal ledge.