SALTY DOG

First encounters are notoriously tricky, and much depends on the first question that you ask yourself. The very first one that pops into your brain (still limp, still unprepared!) before the tongue gets unstuck from the roof of your mouth and the facial features are fully formed. It's a sorry figment, a millisecond of time, and Christ help you if you wish to control it and ask yourself something of consequence. Because this time, it's not about the answer. It's about the question.

Take me, for example. Standing there, under a Portuguese umbrella, staring at random office workers hustling for lunch, I could have asked myself: 'Why would she eat hamburgers, a girl like that?' I could have asked that and looked elsewhere. Instead, I asked: 'Why is she looking at me as if I can save her?' In other words, I collapsed under pressure.

It could have begun with a ukulele, but thankfully it did not. It began with a 12-string acoustic guitar which I had to deliver to the top floor of an office building. Generally speaking, it was not a world you would normally encounter on my job. The doors were getting into my face, and the elevator kept going down instead of up. In the end, when the guitar was delivered and a red-haired girl in black-rimmed glasses paid the money and said thank you (without once looking into my eyes), I did not immediately turn around to leave. Instead, I listened up: all that silence, all that noise. I guess what I want to say is - I was mesmerised by that world.  

When the building released me back onto the street, it did so reluctantly. Suddenly, I realised I was in no hurry to go to my studies. I wanted to stay and watch a million of them, journalists, project managers, copywriters, programmers, red-haired girls in black-rimmed glasses, go to lunch and discuss matters of great importance and of no importance at all. I was a pragmatic youth, you see, the only kind that existed, and I had suddenly hit upon a gold mine. All these long months of working as a courier, I now knew what I wanted to do with my life. 

So even before I saw that office girl for the first time, by Salty Dog, waiting for two hamburgers to arrive, I had been coming here for days. For an hour or so (lunch hour, invariably), I was skipping my college classes, delaying my orders, living inside some complex mechanism filled with incessant whirring. Initially, it felt like listening to chess commentary. You understood little, you barely tried to make sense of it, but you were moved by the underlying logic that held it all together. I did not try to listen to the conversations and I never tried to copy their looks. For me, it was enough just to be there and take it all in. The clothes, the hairstyle, the gait - different and nondescript yet so distinct that you would never be fooled by anyone from the outside adopting these features. Besides, I loved the distance and derived great joy from asking myself, again and again, how they managed to be so busy and so aloof. Every day I was delivering musical instruments to all sorts of people, but no one else had that kind of grip over me. So, the office. That's where I wanted to be at some point in future, and dreams are the only thing in life you have no right to question.

In the meantime, even the places they chose for lunch had the power to fascinate me with their everyday charms, their mundane mysteries. Like Salty Dog, for instance, a small fast-food joint with its permanent lunch-time queue. Tired of walking up and down the street, I would sit on a bench in front of that place and eat my egg sandwich - all the while making unconscious notes and trying to figure out my role. Which, as I came to view it, was to decode what I saw.

This day, it was raining and so I put the viola on the bench (I still had to make my last delivery for the day) and looked at the Salty Dog queue. There were five of them hustling for lunch and it looked like a girl at the front was waiting for her order. Which was a hamburger, a seafood sandwich or a coffee in a plastic cup. The look came out of nowhere, and initially I did not fully register it. You see, I was not supposed to be anyone here. I was not supposed to be noticed, never mind looked at. And yet here she was, this girl with translucent white hair, staring at me. More than that: it barely took me a second to realise that she was in fact wanting something from me. It was an imploring look, ten metres away and yet so close. Incidentally, what I asked myself was this: 'Why is she looking at me as if I can save her?'

It was a fleeting moment, and it was easy to look away. Well, not this time. Because whatever I was trying to decode here, this look was different. It stood out, and it felt like a design flaw. As I say, it was brief, and seconds later she turned around and looked inside the black hole waiting for her order to come out. 'Two hamburgers', and then she disappeared around the corner. And the office world was back to its former self, intricate and inaccessible, and I was left alone with these fascinating creatures that were quick to contradict my recent experience. Surely it was the rain. It was the fucking viola. I must have made a mistake.

But the very next day I made my delivery fifteen minutes earlier (thankfully, the customer did not mind and even came up with a generous tip) and was on the bench before the start of the lunch hour. I was of course sitting in front of Salty Dog, waiting for its steady queue to appear. I did of course fully realise that I came earlier because of yesterday's incident (or non-incident, if you insist). Apparently, what she wanted, albeit facetiously, was for me to come over and cover her under my umbrella. This was the idea that put me to sleep last night and, if anything, the sky today was white and non-threatening and I had the perfect chance to prove or disprove yesterday.

She appeared again, at more or less the same time, and yet again she was ordering two hamburgers. This time, I came a little closer and heard her voice, low, soft, slightly sexualised by cigarettes. This time, however, she did not turn around and look at me. The one second that she got distracted from waiting for her order, she glanced at her phone and I could see the expression on her face (oh perfectly). That girl was on edge.

But apparently, it took a lot more effort than this to dispel a myth, so I approached Salty Dog one more time, and this time I fully expected to let the whole thing go and return to my past experiences. But the office people were like clockwork: at one-fifteen, they were queueing for hamburgers and sandwiches and coffee. And this time I was not ignored. I was well taken notice of. Because it did happen again, and the girl did look at me and this time I could not be mistaken; this was not the rain and this was not a walking stick umbrella. She was not staring idly. She really did look lost, and I could clearly see that she wanted to tell me something. I think I blushed, and my eyes got watery, and I struggled to unclench my throat. I could not do it though, and remained standing there, waiting for her to pay the money and leave the fast-food stand. I  confess that I feared (a recurrent feeling in the near future) that this time it would be for good.

Funny how such a small thing could change your perception of something as big as a whole world. And yet there was a crack. It was as if I managed to decode something I should never have decoded - only I did not even have to do anything. I was a passive spectator, a violin carrier, a delivery boy. And my view got distorted. In the lunchtime, it was more or less the same - with only an occasional misplaced whisper, a sideways glance. Much worse was in the evening (and I did start coming in the evening, at the expense of my classes and sometimes my work). The place got darker, the workers were shedding their office mystique and the girl was nowhere to be seen. The white-haired girl, the sole reason for my being there, never came out in the dark.

Over the next few days, I was growing restless because clearly there was something troubling going on. Even the way she established the eye contact was furtive and created an odd sense that she was ashamed to do so. A couple of times I could see the way her whole body shrugged and how she jerked her face back to where she was supposed to be looking. And of course I got closer. By the end of the first week, I was actually at the back of the queue studying her at close range. The pale skin. The red marks on her arms showing through her transparent blouse. The trembling hands holding the bills. The huge bags under her sleepless eyes. And, of course, the look that begged me to intervene. 'Intervene!' I whispered to myself in utter despair. How? Where? Why?

In the meantime, the rest of the office world would barely exist in those rare moments that she was outside. Which was less than ten minutes as afterwards she had to rush to the corner and return to her office with a paperbag holding two hamburgers. One for her, presumably, and one for someone else. And then, when she was gone, it sometimes took minutes for me to get over this latest episode and try to get back to the world outside Salty Dog. Which did still exist, comfortably, and which still had the power to shun and to stun me. Though not as much as before.

When I made the move, it was to my own surprise. I grabbed her by the arm on her way back (that day, I was right behind her, feeling her breath of lavender and Dunhill Gold), and she threw me a tortured look that was full of submissive aggression I had no name for. She then slipped her hand from out of my grip and whispered: 'Don't'. Don't. I let her go, I had to, and someone addressed me from a mile away: 'Coffee, same as yesterday?' But I could barely answer, and kept thinking about a million things at the same time, all through the rest of the day, knowing that in the evening she would no longer be there, and the next day I would have to correct my mistake. I would have to do it differently. I would ask about her name. In other words, I would have to do it again.

The red mark I had left on her arm was still there, and I was taken aback at how similar it looked to what was there from the start. I wanted to say I was sorry and I would never do that again, but before I had a chance to apologise, or even to blush, she turned around and asked me to leave. But the look was the same, the look was no different, and it was begging me to save her. 'I want to help you', I whispered, realising I had two full minutes to say my lines. 'I've been seeing you here for many days now, and I know you are in trouble'. 'You don't understand', she said, quietly, so as not to disturb the other customers. 'You shouldn't be here'. At which point she took the hamburgers, paid the money and ran away.

I left him hanging, that invisible seller whose face I had not seen yet. For the second day straight, I did not order my coffee. I could no longer be standing there, you see, by Salty Dog, with my latest musical instrument (what was it, anyway?) and the belated understanding that I should do something. But then it came, all of a sudden, that crushing thought: 'Who the hell was the second hamburger for?' So I followed her into the corner (why hadn't I done it before?) and entered a long black tunnel that still bore the smell of cigarettes and flowers and the echo of her receding footsteps. I dropped the music case on the pavement to make my way easier and ran out of the tunnel and straight into a half-closed door.

The familiar warmth of the office engulfed me, and the relaxed complacency of the sounds gripped me by the ankles and dragged me almost to a complete halt. And there was still one full flight of stairs to overcome before I could hope to catch up with Mary and claim that second hamburger I never particularly liked in the first place.