Songs for the End of the World

by Saleema Nawaz

  Late on Friday and Saturday nights, the restaurant becomes a hot spot. On Friday nights especially, one of the main job requirements of waitressing at cipolla is enduring comments from men in suits who have had too much to drink. Like the man at Table Two who cups Edith’s ass and suggests they get married. As she steps out of reach, he asks her the word for “pussy” in Chinese.

  “I don’t speak Chinese.”

  “Sorry, sweetheart.” He looks predatory and foolish but not sorry. “Korean? Thai?” He drops his voice. “Can you do that ping-pong ball thing?”

  Fireworks of humiliated fury explode behind her eyes, but all she says is, “I’ll be right back with your drink.” Rebuffed men are bad tippers.

  “Temper, temper, Naomi,” says Alondra as they fall into step on their way to the bar. The words hiss out with a chuckle. “Smile now, go shoe shopping later.” Ed forces her face into something like a smile. Naomi is the kind of person who lets all the crap roll off her back.

  Alondra is one of the waitresses she is friendly with. When Fabbrini told Alondra she had to either tame her afro or quit, Ed sympathized and joined her in calling him a cunt behind his back. Now Alondra has a close-cut cap of hair and a modelling agent, and together she and Ed roll their eyes whenever Fabbrini goes on about how much more beautiful he has helped her become. Alondra is quitting in a few weeks, too, as soon as she has enough saved up to move to L.A.

  When she settles up with Table Two, Ed gets a smaller tip than expected, along with a phone number that she incinerates over the sink in the kitchen.

  “You should save those,” says Tia, one of the other waitresses. “I have a whole pile I’m going to give to my little cousin for prank calls.” Ed laughs.

  At the end of the night, the music gets turned up and cipolla transforms into a private club for the staff. It is Ed’s favourite part of working at the restaurant, when spouses, boyfriends, and girlfriends start to materialize, and the frustrated shouting in the kitchen finally comes to an end. Tip-counting time.

  Lawrence the bartender sets out a tray of shots for the wait staff. Judging by the generosity with which he pours, right to the lip of the glass, he has already had a few himself. Ed downs one with no chaser. She remembers how Owen told her tequila could be savoured just like whisky, but to her it still tastes like burning. Not seeming to notice her revulsion, Lawrence slides over another. Ed swings her hair back, brushing it out of her eyes, and drinks the second shot. Naomi, she has decided, is less serious and more fun than Ed. Naomi is totally normal.

  Alondra, who apparently skipped supper, gets drunk and loud fast. She laughs hysterically about how much of a lightweight she is, as she slings an arm around Ed.

  “Somebody help!” Ed calls out jokingly, as they both start staggering, setting each other off into further peals of laughter. “Al, you’re only a lightweight in one sense of the word.”

  Tia hurries over, giggling, to lend a shoulder until Alondra calms down and pulls herself up to her full five foot ten. “Come on, ladies,” she says. “We look hot tonight. Larry, take a picture.”

  Lawrence obeys, pulling out his phone and coming around the bar. “One hundred per cent babes,” he says, snapping a photo. As far as Ed can tell, he has a thing for both Tia and Alondra.

  “Print me a copy of that,” says Fabbrini, who has turned up without warning to verify the take at the end of the night.

  Lawrence nods, edging along the bar to block Fabbrini’s view of the tray of empty shot glasses. “Will do, boss.”

  Fabbrini squeezes Ed’s shoulder. “I’ll keep it at home, to remind me of my beautiful girls. So international.”

  It’s as if the only people who can see Ed are the creeps, the lechers, and the users.

  * * *

  “Hi there!”

  The man who calls out to Ed from behind the kiosk in the Arts & Science building is standing in front of a banner that reads Campus Esperanto! Speak the Universal Language in hand-lettered blue tempera paint. From the way his eyes occasionally pop with wariness, she suspects he does not have permission to set up a table.

  “Hello,” he says, when Ed steps up. “I’m glad you heard me.” He has strange skin—fair around his neck, and irritated, bubbling pink along his jaw. In other places, as along his hairline, it is tanned dark as wet sand. He looks to be at least thirty, not a student at all.

  “Hi. Esperanto’s the made-up language, isn’t it?” she asks, hoping that she does not sound unkind. “I remember my high school Latin teacher mentioning it. He thought it was kind of a joke. Too artificial or something. You know?”

  “Some people think Latin is a joke,” says the man. His voice is serene, a warm tenor that makes her think of oak casks and aged wine, of deep flavours being slowly released.

  She nods. “Dead language and all.” She studies him intently, adjusting the strap of her black bag on her shoulder. Up close, she can see his thin-framed glasses and can tell that he has shaved badly, missing a patch of stubble just visible on the underside of his chin. “My Latin teacher was also very down on the French Academy,” she says. “Trying to prevent French people from saying le hamburger.”

  “They’d have a field day here in North America,” he says. “Have you ever been to Montreal? A day there would bring them to their knees, don’t you think?”

  “I do,” says Ed, and she hears a high, coy lilt in her own voice, challenging. She has never been to Montreal, but that doesn’t matter. She gets the idea. “So you agree that language can’t be controlled.”

  The man seems thoughtful, like someone who might never rise to the bait. “I suppose,” he says. “But I also believe that things can be imagined and made new. Made better.”

  He has longish, curly hair that flops onto his face as he reaches down to pick up a flyer from the pile in front of him. Ed notices a gathered corner of his striped shirt poking out from the top of his fly, which is not quite zipped.

  “I’m Jericho,” he says. “Take a pamphlet?”

  * * *

  Ed gloms on to Jericho like wet spaghetti to a strainer. They meet at various cafés across campus, where Jericho drinks green tea and Ed always has two sugared coffees. Jericho talks about his ideals, his dreams of global cooperation through a network of Esperanto speakers. He has a conversational mildness that pleases her, and she likes the way he leans his head to the left when she talks, like a bird listening.

  Looking at him in his neatly ironed shirts, his knobby ankles prominent below short pants, Ed feels her anxious cravings ebb away. In the presence of his simple niceness, something loosens around her hips, and she is struck by a sense-memory of what she used to be like, near enough that she can almost grasp it and shrug it on. An easier version of herself: hair long and held back with a plastic headband, spine hunched from the weight of a purple knapsack loaded down with books. Before boys made an impression on her mental landscape. Before she ever stopped to wonder how and where she belonged.

  Ed also loves how Jericho always gives the kindest interpretation possible of what she says, and never makes her feel like a bad person. He is a little like an alien, a bespectacled, motley-skinned being with a superior temperament. And so Ed vents her spleen: railing against the professor of her summer class, and examining her ongoing grievances with Owen without ever mentioning his name.

  When Jericho asks about her own name, he surprises her with his guesses. “Short for Edelina? Edelweiss? Edwarda?”

  “Edith,” she says.

  Jericho shakes his head. “You’re neither an Edith nor an Ed. You’re something more like Feina.” Feina, he tells her, is the word for “fairy” in Esperanto.

  Ed’s hands fly to her cheeks and she flutters her eyelashes, feeling pleased but also slightly embarrassed. “How many bitchy-ass fairies are you acquainted with?” she asks.

  Jericho pulls her hands away from her face with the barest touch, and
sets them down on the table.

  “Feina,” he says, and from then on refuses to call her anything else.

  * * *

  In late July, Ed goes to one of Jericho’s Esperanto workshops in the evening after her summer course. She finds a strange assembly of six or seven who look to be regulars and a few wary newcomers, standing diffident and apart at the back. Three guys sit on the tops of desks at the front, surrounding an emptying cookie tin of home-baked lemon bars, taking turns reading incomprehensible dialogue off photocopied sheets.

  “This is Feina, everyone,” says Jericho.

  A girl in a wool sweater raises her head as Ed offers a smile. The girl has a neat binder set in front of her, with tabbed dividers in a rainbow of colours, and a sharpened purple pencil. Her eyes are fixed on Jericho.

  “Esperanto means ‘one who hopes,’ ” says Jericho, “and I hope we’ll all get a lot out of tonight’s session. Why don’t we go around the room and introduce ourselves, for everyone here tonight who’s new?”

  Afterwards, Jericho tells Ed that he has been leading the workshops for four years. She is hole-punching her scrawled notes from the class, putting them into a binder with her handouts, determined to at least give the appearance of someone attempting to learn the language.

  “And how many more Esperanto speakers do you think there are now?”

  He looks startled by the question. “You mean, because of me? I don’t know. Maybe one?”

  “Only one?” Ed is surprised. “And you don’t think that’s kind of sad?”

  “Don’t you think one person can make a difference?”

  Ed considers it. “I guess I do, sure.”

  “Well, one by one, that’s how change happens. And then imagine if there’s a catastrophe, like another flood or an ice age or whatever happened to the dinosaurs.” Jericho speaks in the calm tones of a flight attendant pointing out the emergency exits. “We’ll need a way to communicate with people all over the world.”

  “What about English?” Ed blurts out. It is a question she has been attempting to repress for weeks.

  Jericho looks disappointed in her. “Just think of its colonial past.” Then he crooks an eyebrow. “You know who doesn’t need to be convinced of the need for an alternative? The frontman of your favourite band.” One side of his lip curls with this last remark; he claims not to be a Dove Suite fan himself.

  Now Ed is the one who is startled. “Stu Jenkins speaks Esperanto?” Jericho nods. “I’ve never read that. And I swear, I have read every single interview.”

  “It’s true. At least, he has expressed an interest in it to me, via email.”

  Of course it is too good to be true. “Ah. Email.”

  Jericho has a curious expression on his face. “You don’t believe me.”

  “I didn’t say that.” Ed doesn’t want to pry into the details of how exactly her friend has been catfished. She changes the subject without asking any more questions.

  When he isn’t promoting Esperanto, Jericho works part-time as a veterinary assistant. He claims that the animals speak to him.

  “Not so much in words,” he says, “or sounds like woof woof or meow. But with their eyes, the way they breathe. The way their fur moves.”

  Ed is skeptical and calls him the “dog whisperer,” but Jericho doesn’t laugh. He says, “I can make my own fur move. See?” He holds his forearm up to her face like a crossbar between them and closes his eyes. After a minute his skin ripples with goosebumps, the fine dark hairs standing on end in one slow but definite motion, like the raising of a drawbridge.

  “That’s incredible,” she says. “What a trick! How do you do it?”

  Jericho is fervent but grave, shaking his head. “No trick. I think about the animals. Put myself into an attitude of complete sympathy. Then it just happens.”

  She’s reminded of a story she heard on the news, of a zoo worker who was killed after entering the enclosure of her favourite tiger, convinced it wouldn’t hurt her. Ed decides not to bring it up.

  * * *

  That Friday, Ed is lingering near the corner of the bar where the waitresses pick up their drink orders when she sees Alondra approach, distress flickering at the corners of her mouth.

  “Naomi, do me a favour and take that table, please?” she says, nodding at the next table over, where two older gentlemen are having dinner with half a dozen athletic-looking young men and women. “My ex, Lucas, is over there.” Alondra points out a black guy with a shaved head and a button-up shirt. “It’s his kung fu group. Look, I’ll trade you for Table Four.”

  Table Four is a bunch of Wall Street types, already drunk. Big tips for sure, but probably with some unwanted phone numbers and groping thrown in.

  “Deal.”

  The kung fu group is loud, shouting good-natured in-jokes up and down the table and ordering an astounding amount of food. Ed appreciates that they are not cipolla’s usual clientele, and definitely not Fabbrini’s preferred demographic of wealthy, well-connected social climbers. As Ed refills their water glasses, she gathers that the older gentlemen are kung fu masters: one, the head of a local kung fu school; the other, a visiting expert from China. The younger people are their students.

  Later, as they’re settling up the bill, a uniformed police officer comes in and joins the table after a swift appraisal of the room. Like her, he is alert, poised with potential energy. Ed’s thoughts fly to the envelopes of undeclared cash handed to her at the end of each shift, though she banishes this thought as the officer is hailed by some of the younger guests and the head of the kung fu school gives him a smiling nod. A guy sitting next to the visiting Chinese master slides over a half-finished beer, and the cop downs it in a single swig.

  “I’m off-duty, I swear,” he says to Ed, when he notices her watching the table. “Just had to say hi to my pals.” She likes the congenial, unvarnished way he observes her, as simply another human being or perhaps even a fellow citizen. Not the late-night stare of a patron with the mistaken impression she might be on the menu.

  She’s about to ask if he wants a drink when a lout from Table Four waves an empty glass in the air and shouts over the din, “Can I get some freaking help over here already?”

  The officer spins around in his seat. “Maybe you should watch your tone with the wait staff.” With a sour look, the customer falls silent as Alondra hurries over.

  Ed enjoys the intervention but knows Fabbrini would not. “Haven’t you heard?” she asks the police officer. “The customer is always right.”

  “Nobody is always right.” He adds five dollars to the pile of cash amassed on the table before getting up to leave.

  “What’s that for?”

  He grins at her before replacing his hat. “To make me a customer. I wouldn’t mind being right, for once.”

  * * *

  Ed and Jericho are having ice cream, and she is back to obsessing about Owen, having slipped up and met him for a drink that turned into a quickie in an alley.

  “Everything I know about his childhood I read in one of his magazine essays,” she says. “Do you think that’s normal?”

  “I don’t like to use that word, normal. It creates a false dichotomy of social acceptability.”

  Ed spears the plastic spoon into her mound of ice cream like a flagpole at the summit. Shrugging back into her green sweater, she waits for an answer.

  Eventually, Jericho says, “No, not really. I guess not.” He is always reluctant to pronounce judgment, as much as he seems to want to please her.

  “He’s a withholding son of a bitch,” says Ed.

  Jericho’s face is solemn. “That may be, Feina,” he says.

  * * *

  —

  Ed thinks Jericho must be on a mission to cheer her up, to keep her from falling into her aggrieved and sordid thoughts about Owen. He spends the next few days tak
ing her out for more ice cream, for bike rides, for long walks. He takes her to a series of concerts put on by NYU’S Department of Music—the examination pieces and free recitals. Seizing her hand at key moments, he fumbles for words to describe his elation at certain passages. The satisfaction that comes in a sonata; hearing the recapitulation of the theme in the original key. He tries to relate it to rock music, for Ed’s sake.

  “It’s like that moment when a drumbeat finally kicks in at the second chorus. Like in that Dove Suite song you love.”

  Ed nods, noticing how when Jericho’s face is animated it bestows an unexpected unity on his strange features. And that his eyes are huge, brown reflecting pools of intelligence and sympathy.

  “Maybe you should make up a word for it in Esperanto,” she says.

  He frowns. “I can’t just do that, Feina. There are rules about those sorts of things.”

  The music starts up again then, and when Ed is about to press her point, Jericho leans over in the creaking auditorium seat and whispers, “Okay, maybe. I’ll look into it.”

  * * *

  Fabbrini has been on edge all week because of a visit from the health inspector. Eight patrons have fallen ill with a mysterious illness following dinner at cipolla the Friday before. There is to be no end, it seems, to Fabbrini’s outrage over the matter.

  “It’s a travesty, targeting us! Why didn’t everybody get sick, if it was the food? Why not the whole restaurant? Almost everyone ordered the zuppa, and one-third the osso buco.” He knocks a pile of folded napkins to the floor. “Dio mio!” Ed has noticed that Fabbrini has begun mixing more Italian phrases into his regular speech over the past month. His clientele seem to appreciate this extra touch of authenticity. “They can’t hold us responsible for the common cold and the promiscuity of our customers.”