With Nicolas Cage
It is a vast smooth marbled indoor concourse, bravely pillared and high domed. It is all englassed and on a scale so huge, the cosmic nothingness that stretches on the other side of the monstrous glass walls proves terrifying to anyone who walks past and dares stop and stare.
Even the stoutest hearts are unnerved, quietly unsettled, by the incomprehensible void, the gurgling of the unseen beast of desolation leering back at them from the outside.
At night, they are haunted by what they didn’t see, and the darkness that surrounds them only serves to remind them of the oblivion, shaped as nothing, colored as nothing, but vast and endless, and they can no longer find their way to the sanctuary of their own inner darkness, their sleep, guarded by closed lids and shuttered dreams.
And yet the Project is a shuddering marvel of civil engineering, interdependent, interlocking and interpenetrating functionality, and gigantism. Wherever one is within the complex, one can feel, even hear, it vibrating with an energy that is not altogether well-meaning, rising slowly to a droning gothic hum and then dropping suddenly, only to start again, in long relentless cycles.
From higher up, perhaps from the height of an airplane, what the ground-level eye cannot see, one would immediately make out as a long progression of colossal many-storied quadrants covering Earth, snapped together lengthwise as by some angry god who was bad with Legos.
The small table where Saint Stephan sits having coffee with Nicolas Cage is set along one of the concourse’s many pinprick stations arch-spanned and patterned after the classical arcaded plazas of America, the lighting puttering out its farce of intimate and service-friendly lobby warmth like a slow-working lethal gas.
Fronds of potted palms and a long rim of stairs glazing the space from one end to another, either end diminishing at opposite horizons, vanish toward invisible points. The line is so long, it no longer looks straight, but, parabola-like, bends with the curvature of the earth.
The coffee is still quite hot, and Nicolas Cage is going on about something, so Stephan looks up from the cup, for he does not quite know where he is.
Business center and shopping mall follow on upscale hotel lobby, where Stephan believes he is, one changing into another as the space then appears to continue as an airport.
But as his eyes adjust to the immensity rising and stretching before him, Stephan perceives that he cannot see the end of things, and while he now has a better idea of the things and structures that surround him, he feels even less certain as to where he might be.
And it is a mystery to Stephan where the waiters come from to bring your orders and arrive regularly to see if everything’s all right. He is confused by the computerized table menu board that Nicolas Cage uses with such alacrity and acuity of motion, bringing almost immediately to their table waiters out of nowhere carrying their orders.
Here and there, Lossers walk singular and in groups: “Nyug nyag nyaaoow… nyug nyag nyaaoow…”
Like everything else here, they seem to rise and approach from nowhere – malefic, vicious, ill-intentioned, porously nasty.
You are in their way.
Stephan looks at Cage for his reaction, but it appears there is none. Nicolas Cage is in a good humor. He is talkative, happy, and relaxed, enthusiastically telling Stephan of things that he knows, and behaving much like a busy person would enjoying that rare day off. He either does not see the Lossers, or they mean nothing to him, Stephan concludes.
Cage pops a finger against the computerized menu board with great assurance and does something with a credit card. In minutes a waiter appears – doubtless, out of nowhere. The order: another extra-large Coffee Cabriolet and crullers for Cage and for Stephan a stack of blueberry pancakes, with butter and maple syrup, as well as another Coffee All-America – Regular.
Stephan shudders.
“Yeah,” Cage says, “I first ran into something like this a couple years ago, between flights at Newark Airport. I had a few hours to kill, and so I’m walking through the place and it’s wall-to-wall with all this diner-like seating, and it just stretches on and on. Now, I had a pretty big meal on the plane I was just on, but I see all this food everywhere and like hundreds of people eating and so I’m suddenly hungry, and not just hungry, man, but I mean like a fucking wolf hungry! Oh, it was just crazy, you know, like the zaniest thing. And so there’s all this food and I can’t tell where it’s coming from, but I know I want some and it’s driving me nuts, right up the fuckin’ wall – oh, man – so now I’m determined to crack the system with all those, whatever these things are called, computerized menu boards I guess, and get me something to eat and I don’t care WHO the fuck recognizes me! Ha ha ha!”
Stephan laughs along with Cage, as he genuinely does see the humor in the situation as Cage has just described it.
“It’s truly amazing,” Stephan says, “I mean, now that you explain it, I don’t find the whole thing so strange, you know, so impersonal and, ah, I don’t know… even in some sense intimidating.”
“Yeah, that’s right, so anyway, I finally take a seat at like this long counter, and I’m like, okay, so what happens next, I mean, do I talk into a fucking microphone or does the food come on some kind of conveyor or fall down a chute of some sort – ha ha ha – or, or, you know, does like a panel open in the countertop and the food pops up through it – ha ha ha – or does like some flying-saucer waiter gizmo out of The Jetsons zip in out of nowhere and hover over me with the food? Know what I mean?! Ha ha ha ha!”
“No, not really.”
Biting into a cruller and luxuriating in his extra-large mug of steaming joe, Cage takes no notice.
“Just relax, baby,” Cage says after some time. “Have your coffee, Saint. Enjoy the day. Remember, you’re with Nicolas Cage…”
Again, out of nowhere arrives a toasted cream-cheesed bagel. Cage undoes the two halves and puts one of them on Stephan’s plate, getting part of it into a pool of maple syrup Stephan has poured, for Stephan prefers to dip a cross-section of unvarnished pancakes on his fork into the syrup rather than pouring the syrup over the pancakes to start with. With respect to the bagel half, Stephan nods acknowledgment and is grateful.
A side plate of Nova Scotia lox arrives – more for Stephan than for Cage, if he wants some – well, for the bagel, that is, of course.
From the lobby where he sits with Cage, Stephan looks up at the mezzanine level and sees – a Losser!, the fat stubby fingers of the gout-stricken hands gripping a shiny metallic railing, and then more Lossers behind that one, peering down at Stephan and Cage with their bloated animus. “Nyug-nyaow, nyiggets-nya,” they evilly murmur, “riggets rqru naaarr,” they snarl.
Filed by Jack Step, December 10, 2016