Glassbough and Tarwick in: The Café
Glassbough and Tarwick could not decide how long they had been waiting for the production to begin. Tarwick felt that it had been only fifteen minutes. "Ridiculous," responded Glassbough. "We've been here for hours!" The two were seated upon tall chairs, almost a foot and a half from the ground. Two cups of rather luckewarm coffee sat on the table before them. In front of the larger Glassbough a half-eaten crumb cake resided on a plate. It looked reddish in the dim lights of the café. The patterns on the cups were plain and bland, depicting pastel flowers. The table was of one reddish wood, the chairs of another, and the floor of a darker third. Glassbough took a sip from his coffee and, realizing it was no longer hot, made a disgusted face. "Augh," he grumbled, "where is the waiter?"

"I haven't seen one in a while," Tarwick said.

"In a while... was there ever a waiter?" Glassbough asked, twisting around to look at the dark recess of the café, as if willing a server to appear from the corners of the room.

“Of course there was," said Tarwick.

"How do you know?" Glassbough asked heatedly. "I don't remember one, and I don't seem to see one at all here..."

"He brought us our coffee, and your cake," Tar said benignly. "It musn't have been long ago. The coffee's still warm."

"It's vile," Glass snapped back. "But that's not the point! Do you actually remember this waiter you claim to have seen? Do you remember what he looked like?"

"Well he was... now then, he... I... Why! I don't recall!" Tar sputtered. A look of confusion spread across his face. Tar didn't like to dwell on such subjects, and Glassbough was making him uncomfortable with his complaining and his insistence.

"Aha!" Glass beamed with a wicked grin. "I knew it!"
Tar shifted in his seat and tried to redistribute his wait. "Well, where did the food come from then?" he asked miserably. Glass, however, was filled with righteous pride, nearly puffing off the chair and preparing to take a stroll around the café to find whatever errant waiter was meant to be serving the place. "Glass," Tar said, trying to get his attention. Then, Glass leapt down from the high seat, prowling about. "Glassbough!" Tar said in a panic, "Get back on the chair! You're walking on the stage! The show might start! You'll be in the way!"

"Show?" Glass echoed, "show? What show? Do you see one? There's no show here! We've been waiting for ours and hours, and still nothing. Besides! I'm not on stage! The stage is over there." And here Glassbough shot a finger towards the wall. Indeed there was what appeared to be a stage over in that corner, raised up from the floor. But! There was not a lip where the stage ended, but rather a ramp where it seamlessly joined with the floor.

Tarwick shook his head and pointed to the other side of the resteraunt. There, by the door, was a little drop. There was a tiny space of depressed ground that one, upon entering the café, must step up from. "It's over there," Tar said quietly. "The whole place is the stage."

"Why then, we're the show. We've come to watch each other, so get up and walk with me. We'll have to entertain ourselves, and to feed ourselves as well it seems!" Glass started to laugh but, upon second inspection of the café, stopped. There was a little glass counter by the door, yes, yes, with food beneath it glistening at their perches. An abandoned cash register stood hard by. There were track lights on low, giving the room a cozy feeling. Glassbough's eyes traveled across the room, taking in the doors to both men's and women's bathrooms and another with a gleaming plaque which read "Employee's Only!". There were also other tables and high chairs, some with coffees or bowls of fruit, or a frothy espresso. Yet! There was not anohter soul in the resteraunt. "Where've they gone?" Glass roared.

Tar furrowed his brow. "I can't recall. Wasn't there a couple sitting next to us?"

Glass grumbled wordlessly to himeslf. "I don't know. I thought it was a man in a beard!" Glass was getting angry, frusterated at the lack of service, respect, presence. "What about Chadoff?" He asked. "Wasn't he here? I thought Chadoff said he was coming with us."

"He was," said Tar, his eyes welling up with tears of desperation. "He was in the third chair here. Why didn't he order a coffee?"

"I didn't order a coffee either!" Glass grunted. "Because there was no waiter! The coffee's just... came!"

"He went to the bathroom..." Tar said to himself. "I thought! But if he did, where is he? Why is there no sign of him? He should've left his coat, his napkin," Tar here put his hand over the third chair at the table. "Some warmth..."

"I'm getting out of here!" Glass announced angrily.

Tar, tripping over himself, struggled to stand. Before Glass could leave the shop, his lithe friend had caught up with him. "Wait, wait! Wait for me!" he called. Glass waited for Tar to catch up to him and, when he did, pushed through the plate glass door that led outside.

The exterior of the café was fitting to the kind of place that it looked inside. Glass thought that it was fitting, anyway. He wasn’t certain why. It had a low roofline, covered with slate tiles that absorbed the light from the sun, which had just begun to peer through the clouds. It was the farthest building in the back of a cul de sac, set back from the road by a patch of grass and a single willow tree that draped over the doorway. The long branches cast a deep shadow over the doorway. Glass looked around the alleyway, his mind bubbling with possibility.

“Where did we come in from?” Glass asked. He was beginning to feel really and truly lost. The anger that had ulcerated in his stomach was fading and Glassbough was starting to experience true worry. Tarwick came out of the café after him and stopped dead in his tracks. Glass mumbled something unintelligible to himself in response to Tar’s reaction.

The cul de sac was made up of several brick buildings, set up in a semi-circle. Where the exit would have been, another building had apparently been erected. Tarwick’s mouth worked for a second before he began speaking. “Well,” he said. “That must be how we got here,” he said uselessly. He was looking at the space where the asphalt of the road ran straight into a building and, apparently, under it. Glass laughed in a manner that was not quite hysteria.

“That’s nonsense,” he said. “How could we have come in – Bah!” Glass exclaimed. “I don’t remember this at all. I don’t remember any of it. Was Chadoff even with us?”

Tarwick put his hands in his pockets, blowing out a big puff of air. “His things were in there. His seat was warm. He must have gone to the bathroom. Should we go in and look for him?”

Glassbough snorted. “He wasn’t with us. And even if he was – he’s gone now. That’s if he ever even existed, Tarwick. Do you realize that kind of trouble we are in? This isn’t about whether or not we’re going to see the next performance of Gogol’s Opera on Loidrill street tomorrow; this is serious! I don’t remember what we were coming here to see,or whether Chadoff is with us, or whether I ordered my food, and now there’s a building between us and the way out!”

Tar gulped. “We just forgot. Or, we, we ate something bad. We must’ve eaten something bad, or had something bad to drink. That’s it. We came through this way; we’ve just forgotten.”

“Forgotten?” Glass asked. “We haven’t forgotten anything! Do you remember what it was like before you were born? That’s what it’s like. We were never here, that’s what it’s like. We were never here.” Glass’s voice began to fade away. “We were never here.”

“We were...” Tarwick said hopelessly. “We were here. We had to have been. It doesn’t make sense otherwise. We must’ve been.”

“Were we? Were we ever here? Did we ever go to plays on Loidrill Street? Or did we just imagine it? Were we sitting in that café until just now, imagining everything?”

“We both remember Chadoff!” Tarwick complained.

“And we both remember Loidrill Street, and we both remember that we were coming to the café… the café…” Glass turned and looked at the low slate-roofed building, trying to discover a sign. When he saw nothing, no sign and no information, Glassbough threw his hands down and groaned. “You see my point! It doesn’t make sense, but that doesn’t stop it from being true!”

Tarwick sat down on the grass under the tree. He placed his head in his hands and began to hum to himself. It was a tune from Gogol’s Opera, which the dear Glassbough had so recently criticized; though likely, he wasn’t directly assaulting the Opera but rather the situation, because as Tarwick knew, Glassbough loved Gogol. He was one of the few authors that the rotund little man could actually stand. So, Tarwick hummed to make the trouble go away. He kept the music going so he could envision the dancers during the Nose’s song doing their pirouettes.

Glassbough, meanwhile, was exploring his surroundings. It seemed as though none of the buildings facing the inside of the cul de sac had no ground floor windows, nor did they appear to have doors facing the inside. For a few futile minutes he tossed stones at the casements higher up, but no one seemed to hear. It wasn’t long before Glass gave up on throwing rocks or calling for people inside the buildings.

He tightened his belt, adjusted his jacket, and brushed the dirt from his shiny shoes. He tapped the packet of cards in his jacket pocket and jingled his change. After a few moments of staring haplessly at the brick wall in front of him, he turned around to examine the café a second time. He saw Tarwick sitting on the grass, hanging his head and humming. He left him there, going into the café a second time – or a first, depending on whether or not they had actually walked inside. When he got inside, he sat down at the nearest table. There was a lukewarm cup of coffee there, and a half-eaten crumb cake. He took out a folded piece of paper from his pocket and undid the corners. There was a faded poster for Gogol’s Opera on the front, which he placed face down on the table. He smoothed out the wrinkles with his open palm and removed a pen from his jacket pocket where it nestled next to his silk pocket-square. He shook it a few times, to get the ink flowing. Then, he started to write.

He could hear Tarwick humming to himself outside. That was his way of dealing with it. Glass knew that he had another way. First he was going to write, then he was going to get up and walk around, and try to see if there was anything else. He had no illusions about finding anyone else or of even finding a way out – he just wanted to see what there was. But he would write first, to help Tarwick understand. He couldn’t sit with his head up hiss ass for the rest of his life. He touched pen to paper and began to work.