Kurt Vonnegut — Chapter 2: The hairline fracture in an antique cafe mirror — Novella Movement 2

The Hapsburgs built an empire on velvet upholstery and the assumption that somebody else would always be around to talk to. Guarino Fabbri had a laptop, a noise-canceling headset, and a mirror with a crack in it shaped like a lightning bolt that had given up halfway through the job.

He worked for a company in Delaware that made software for other companies that made software. Nobody at the Delaware company had ever met him. His manager was a voice named Todd who signed emails "Warmly," which is a word people use instead of showing up.

The café was called Aranyszarvas, The Golden Stag, though there was no stag, golden or otherwise, only pastries under glass and a mirror behind the counter said to be one hundred and forty years old. The crack ran from the lower left corner up through the reflected forehead of anyone unlucky enough to sit at table six, which was Guarino's table, every day, nine to five Delaware time, which was three to eleven Budapest time, which meant Guarino watched the sun rise on an empty stomach and set on a plate of untouched dobos torte.

The waiter's name was István. He called the crack "the Colonel," because, he said, it had been there since the Colonel's time, and nobody remembered which colonel, and nobody asked twice.

"You are here again," said István.

"I am here again," said Guarino.

"Todd?"

"Todd."

"Warmly?"

"Warmly."

This was the whole of most of their conversations, a call-and-response as fixed as a rosary, and it comforted Guarino the way certain hymns comfort people who no longer believe in the thing the hymns are about.

The rogue's name was Zsolt, and he sat at table four, which had a clear view of table six, and therefore a clear view of the Colonel's crack running through Guarino's forehead like a permanent, decorative worry.

"You know what that crack is worth?" Zsolt said one Tuesday, sliding into the chair across from Guarino without asking, the way certain men slide into chairs and certain governments slide into countries. "Antique. Provenance. A crack like that, it's not a flaw, it's a signature."

"It's a flaw," said Guarino.

"It's a signature," said Zsolt. "There is a man in Vienna. Buys mirrors with flaws. Pays for the flaw specifically. The flaw is the whole point. A mirror with no crack in it is just a mirror. A mirror with a crack has a biography."

Guarino did not look up from his screen, where Todd was asking, warmly, whether the sprint retrospective notes had been filed.

"I'm working," Guarino said.

"You're sitting," said Zsolt. "There's a difference, my friend, though nobody in Delaware seems to know it."

The café had a system for closing time, and the system was the lights, which went from warm to warmer to nearly extinguished, a graduated dimming meant to suggest, without anyone having to say so rudely, that the pastries were sold and the Colonel wanted to go home. The system had names, the way certain systems get folksy names to make them bearable: the Amber Hour, the Last Call, the Lullaby, though nobody was singing anything, and nobody was calling anyone anywhere.

"You should sell the mirror," Zsolt said, on a night when the lights had reached the Lullaby stage and Guarino's screen was the brightest object in the room. "Split it with me. Fifty-fifty. I know the man."

"It's not my mirror," said Guarino. "I don't own the café."

"Nobody owns anything," said Zsolt, with the confidence of a man who had made a career of that exact sentence. "Ownership is paperwork. Paperwork can be arranged."

Guarino closed his laptop. It was eleven at night in Budapest, which meant it was three in the afternoon in Delaware, which meant Todd was, at that very moment, eating a sandwich somewhere warmly, thinking nothing at all about the mirror, or the Colonel, or István's dishrag, or Zsolt's fifty percent, or the particular slant of lamplight that made the crack look, for one second, like it was moving.

It was not moving. Cracks do not move. They only wait to be noticed, and then they wait some more.

"I have a meeting at nine," Guarino said. "Todd time."

"Todd time," said Zsolt, and laughed once, without warmth, the way a man laughs at a joke he has told a hundred times to a hundred different faces, each of them tired, each of them lit by a screen, each of them sitting across from a piece of glass that had, at some point in its long service, simply broken, and gone on reflecting anyway, one face at a time, forever, or at least until closing.

That closing, as it turned out, was not permanent. Some weeks later, Zsolt came back on a Thursday with a man named Pál, who wore a scarf indoors and introduced himself as a "consultant in decorative antiquities," which is a phrase that means a man who has never once been asked to consult on anything.

Pál looked at the mirror for four minutes without blinking. Then he touched the crack with one finger, the way a doctor touches a wound to confirm that yes, it is there, yes, it hurts, yes, there will be a bill.

"Provenance is a problem," Pál said. "But provenance is always a problem. Provenance can be discovered. Provenance is a matter of the right paper and the right patience."

"You said Vienna," Guarino said to Zsolt.

"Vienna, Munich, does it matter," Zsolt said. "A crack this good travels well."

István came by with two coffees nobody had ordered and stood there listening the way waiters listen, which is to say completely, while pretending to wipe a table that was already clean.

"The Colonel is not for sale," István said.

"Everything is for sale," said Pál, warmly, the way Todd said warmly, the way people say a comforting word right before they take something from you.

"The Colonel," said István, "watched my grandfather propose marriage to my grandmother at that counter in 1961. He has a crack because a Soviet officer's belt buckle hit it during an argument about a dance. Nobody remembers the officer's name. Everybody remembers the crack."

"That's provenance," said Pál, delighted, writing something in a small notebook. "That's exactly the kind of provenance that adds forty percent."

Guarino's laptop made the sound it made when Todd wanted him, a soft two-note chime like a nurse checking on a patient who was not going to get better no matter how many times she checked. He opened it. Todd wanted to know, warmly, if Guarino could hop on a call in five.

Guarino did not hop on the call in five.

He watched Pál measure the crack with a small brass instrument that looked older than the mirror, and he watched Zsolt watch Pál, hungrily, the way a man watches a slot machine he has already decided is rigged in his favor, and he watched István stop pretending to wipe the table and simply stand there, holding the rag, not doing anything with it at all.

"Fine," Pál said at last, closing his notebook. "We come back Monday. We bring the paperwork. The mirror comes down Monday."

"The mirror stays until I say," said István.

"You don't own the café," said Zsolt.

"No," said István. "But I own the rag."

Nobody understood what this meant, including István, but it ended the conversation, which is often the whole function of a sentence like that.

They left. The lights went from warm to warmer to the Lullaby, and Guarino sat with his laptop open and Todd's chat window blinking its small persistent demand, and he looked at himself in the mirror, at the Colonel's crack running through his forehead like a lightning bolt that had given up halfway through the job, the same crack that had watched a marriage proposed and an argument about a dance and four years now of an American in Delaware pretending, nine to five Delaware time, to be somewhere he was not.

"They'll come Monday," Guarino said.

"They always say Monday," said István. "Monday is where things go to be forgotten politely."

He took the rag and, for the first time in Guarino's four years at table six, actually wiped the mirror, the glass, the crack, all of it, slow circular motions like a man polishing something he intended to keep.

"I filed the retrospective notes," Guarino typed to Todd. "Sorry. Bad connection."

"No worries!!" Todd wrote back. "Warmly."

Guarino closed the laptop. In the glass, his reflection stood up in two pieces, the left half of his face on one side of the Colonel, the right half on the other, neither half quite lining up with itself, the way a man looks when he has spent four years being somewhere without ever quite arriving.

Monday came. Nobody came with it.

Pál did not call. Zsolt did not appear at table four. The mirror stayed exactly where it had always been, holding its crack the way old buildings hold their cracks, not because anyone decided to keep them but because nobody got around to the alternative.

Guarino kept coming at nine, Delaware time. István kept saying "You are here again," and Guarino kept saying "I am here again," and the Colonel kept splitting his forehead into two reflections that never quite agreed with each other, and this, as much as anything in Budapest or Delaware, was as close to a marriage as Guarino had managed in four years: two blurred halves of a face, held together by a crack neither one of them had asked for, going on, one shift at a time, forever, or at least until closing.