Parabolic Reflectors

I spend the afternoon today reading and working on the back patio at Moonbean, the fair trade emporium a block away. Half in sunshine, half under awning, 6 or 7 people reading and writing, silently nodding to each other, resin tables and chairs simultaneously cheap student patio furniture, café society, makeshift library. Library norms for conversation prevail here – only the couple who is studying together is chatting, quiet and giggly. Everyone is reading, working on laptops. Reggae and rockabilly drift in from other unseen parts of the market.

Today, the guy with the bull-like nostril piercing is wearing a red Conformity Training tshirt and tapping his suede-patched knees restlessly as he reaches for words. He's a fixture at Moonbean, but this time there are no over-eager Saturday market tourists grabbing at his jacket in excitement where it hangs on the back of the chair, “where did you GET that?” about some anarchist anti-Bush graffiti he’s sewn into the denim. Just his pen and journal and gentle, absent-minded tracing over of a newly inked tattoo on his forearm with his fingertip. Everyone else is a 20something student, reading and sipping.

Like every library, this one has its off-kilter-masquerading-as-present guy. Unlike the ones at the Lillian H Smith branch, whose Inner Dictators Addressing the Throngs gravitate to the balcony that surrounds the main entrance, this one is a Chinese guy in his 20s or 30s, neatly dressed in a camouflage t-shirt and jeans, carrying what looks like a typical leather bookbag. He sits down, alone, and pops open a can of Coke. He belches, loudly, and immediately burbles with equally resonant laughter. He belches a full series of prolonged juicy notes, punctuated with full-throated merriment. He guzzles the coke in about a minute, then sticks the can in the metal bucket ashtray in the middle of the table and lurches a little, toddler-like, off to the bathroom.

The other seven of us gaze into the centre of the space emptied by his leaving, giggling and quizzical. “Maybe he just realized that pop can make you burp,” laughs the ringletted boy who works the espresso machine sometimes.

Belching boy returns, carefully and elegantly picks up his jacket and bookbag, and leaves, performance over. I return to reading about Skinnerian behaviourists.

**
As the afternoon wears on, the readers dissipate, and the smokers arrive. Two girls who maybe seem to be tourists -- there are maps and some european looking green, yellow and black sneakery things accompanied, improbably, by black legwarmers around her ankles at the bottom of her jeans. They cuddle a bit as they smoke and read.

Around them, beers start to replace the lattes. Guys with lots of hair and tattoos and large ugly sunglasses smoke and talk about roadies, ultrasonic ways to scatter roaches from an apartment. People lie on their cellphones about where they are. The quiet reading space becomes chatter.

Distracted, I notice for the first time the building immediately adjacent to this back yard. A... house? a completely ramshackle structure, patches of exposed wood with ancient peeling insulbrick, water stained flattened corrugated boxes in the windows, a Bell ExpressVu satellite shiny on the roof, cupped to catch the waves.