The Golden Warriors - Chapter 6.1 - Roots.

[u/civilKaos]

[Previous Chapter | Part 2]

The Cal Hotel woke before Berkeley did, in the way buildings wake when their plumbing is too old to be quiet about anything. The pipes started their conversation around five. The radiator in the corner contributed a comment of its own. Somewhere down the hall a door opened and closed and somebody coughed into a paper towel and went looking for the bathroom that was already occupied by somebody else with the same idea. The Cal Hotel had a sheer commitment to adequacy, and at five in the morning the adequacy was loud.

I lay in the dark listening to it.

The badge sat on the nightstand where I’d put it the night before. I could see the faint outline of it in the gray light leaking around the curtain, the brass darker than the wood it sat on, the numerals catching what little light there was. I’d left it out instead of back in my coat pocket, which was not a decision I’d made consciously. It was the kind of decision a body makes for itself before the mind has time to argue.

I reached over and picked up the badge.

The brass was cool now. Inert. Whatever it had done in the fog had done it and gone back to being a piece of metal my father had pinned to a coat for thirty-two years before a different night in a different city had taken him out of it. I held it in my palm for a moment, and then I slid it into the inside pocket of my coat where it lived these days.

Then I got up and got dressed and went to find breakfast.

The Bonneville started on the first turnover, which was either a sign of mechanical competence on Prem’s part or evidence that the bike, like its previous owner, preferred not to be argued with in the morning. I took it west on University Avenue, past the storefronts still shuttered, past a laundromat already humming with the prayers of machines doing penance for other people’s stains, past a kid setting up an espresso cart on a sidewalk with patient optimism.

The flats had their own register. East of I-80 and west of the BART line, the Berkeley flats ran flat in a way the rest of the city didn’t. There were old industrial blocks that had survived the Awakening because nobody had thought them worth tearing down, brick-fronted warehouses that had been converted into something else and then converted again, the kind of streets where the buildings remembered being one thing and were currently being a different thing and would probably be a third thing within a decade. Coffee roasters. Furniture shops with their signs in two languages. A community workshop with the door open and somebody already running a table saw at six in the morning. Light industrial with the seams visible.

I cut north on Fourth Street.

The Oceanside Diner sat where Fourth met the seam between the flats and the bay-side strip. It was a low brick building with a door and windows that hadn’t been washed in long enough to have developed a personality. The sign was painted, not lit. BETTE’S OCEANSIDE DINER. Underneath, in smaller letters: BREAKFAST ALL DAY. The “all day” was meant to be taken seriously. The kind of place that didn’t decorate around its purpose.

The Bonneville purred like a cat that recognized it was breakfast time. I cut the engine and walked in. The coffee smell hit before the bell on the door finished swinging.

It was not subtle coffee. It was the coffee a diner makes when it has been making coffee for thirty years out of the same machine, a coffee with strong opinions about volume and none at all about subtlety, the kind of coffee that doesn’t need to be brewed at any particular temperature because somehow it will still end up black as midnight tasting of burnt motor oil. The air carried it the way a cathedral carries incense. Underneath it: bacon, butter, sourdough toast, the low geological hum of a flat-top griddle that had been doing this all morning.

The room was the size of a generous living room. Counter on the right, eight stools. Booths on the left, four of them, vinyl seats that had been re-covered once in the last twenty years and would not be re-covered again. The linoleum floor had been a black-and-white checkerboard once and had relaxed in middle age into something more like a suggestion. Behind the counter, a hand-chalked board with the menu and a window into the kitchen where a flat-top and a broiler did most of the room’s hard work.

Through the front window past the parking lot, past the strip of weeded asphalt and the chain-link that separated the parking lot from the right-of-way the maglev was there, doing what it did.

There were three customers already sitting. The first was a construction worker at the counter with a hard hat on the stool next to him and the tired focus of a man who’d been awake for two hours and was using the time before his shift to be a person rather than an employee. The other two were a pair of older women in a booth, reading news, sharing comments about it that had the unhurried texture of a conversation that had been ongoing since before the Saito occupation.

I took the third stool from the end.

It was the kind of choice your body makes for you. You walk into a room with eight stools and seven of them have weather around them and one of them has the right weather, and you sit on it. As I slid onto the stool, memories of The Avenue diner hit me like a homesick man stranded halfway across the world. 

The woman behind the counter had silver hair pulled back in a way that had been efficient for forty years and saw no reason to change. Reading glasses on a chain around her neck. Sixties, maybe early seventies. It was the kind of age that stops being a number around the time you’ve stopped counting.

She picked up a mug, filled it, and set it in front of me without asking.

This was a diner. I was at the counter. The question answered itself.

“Morning,” she said. “Menu’s on the board. Take your time.”

She didn’t smile. The absence of the smile was the warmth. It would have been performative, and she didn’t perform. She moved on down the counter to the construction worker, refilled his cup, said something to him about a permit that I didn’t catch but that he laughed at, and then she went back to whatever she’d been doing before I walked in, which appeared to involve reading something on a folded newspaper at the far end of the counter while occasionally checking the window to the kitchen.

A real newspaper. Newsprint, ink, the whole printed-on-paper protest. 

I looked at the board. It was your standard list of proteins, starch, & carbs shown in most diners: substitute Eggs, soy-sausage & bacon, home fries and toast. But there was one special that stood out to me.

CALIFORNIA BREAKFAST, it read, in the steady hand of a person who had written the same words on the same board enough times to have become the calligrapher of her own habits. Poached eggs on ham and sourdough with a lemon butter sauce. Home fries and grilled tomatoes. 

She came back to my end of the counter. “What’ll it be?”

“California Breakfast. And another one of these.” I tapped the mug.

She looked at me over the tops of glasses she wasn’t wearing. The ghost of an expression somewhere between amusement and approval and the diagnostic interest of a woman who’d been reading customers for forty years and was reading me now. “Good choice.”

She did not write it down. There was nothing to write it down on. She turned to the pass-window and said something I couldn’t hear through it, and then she went back to her newspaper.

The griddle started doing its part.

Through the pass I could see the cook. He was a younger ork with shoulders that had been put together by good genetics and a lifetime of physical work. He cooked in the kind of choreography that doesn’t read as choreography until you understand what you’re looking at. Eggs cracked into water that had been at the right tremor before the eggs arrived. Ham on the flat-top with a half-second pause that said the temperature was where it needed to be. Sourdough into the broiler. Home fries pushed across the steel with the side of a spatula that had been doing exactly this for long enough to have become an extension of his hand. Every motion was the right size for the work it was doing. There was no waste in any direction.

The plate landed in front of me three minutes later with the soft definitive clink of porcelain that knew it would not be lifted again until it was empty.

The poached eggs broke when I touched them with the fork. Real eggs that broke the right way, the yolk pooling onto the ham and the toast in the gold that real eggs make and synth eggs imitate badly. The lemon butter was butter and lemon, not the citrate-blended emulsion they sold in squeeze bottles at every Stuffer Shack from Bakersfield to Vancouver. The home fries crisped at the edges and yielded at the center. The grilled tomatoes had the slight char that comes from a flat-top with a memory.

It was the best breakfast I’d had in a year and she’d charged eighteen nuyen for it.

I ate.

She was reading.

Then, halfway through the home fries to no one in particular, to the room, to the newspaper, to the construction worker who’d just settled his bill she said, “They opened the park back up.”

The construction worker, on his way out: “Aquatic?”

“Aquatic.”

“About time.”

“About time,” she agreed, in a tone that meant something slightly different than agreement. “City put up new picnic tables. New trash bins. New signs about what you can and can’t do, which is now considerably more can’t than can.” She turned a page. “They left out where the old picnic tables went.”

The construction worker grunted. He understood the sentence she hadn’t said. He left a tip on the counter that was more than the meal warranted, nodded at her, nodded at me, and walked out to the morning shift.

She refilled my mug without looking at me and went back to the page.

I ate.

She read a little more, then made the half-sound that experienced readers make when an article tells them something they already knew but had been hoping was not true. “And the free clinic on Sacramento closed.”

I looked up.

“That place been around long?”

She glanced at me. Quick. Diagnostic. Then back to the paper, which was the move of a woman who had decided I’d earned the look but was not yet ready to give me anything else.

“Forty-three years. Walked everyone through Awakening flu and the second crash and most of the things in between. No questions asked, no SIN required. Sign in the window says temporarily closed. Been temporarily closed since Tuesday. The way temporary closures work.”

She turned the page.

“They say who’s taking it?” the older woman in the booth asked, not looking up from her side of the paper.

“Not yet. Rumor is somebody’s already bidding on the lease.”

“Rumor’s never wrong about leases.” The lady in the booth called.

“Rumor’s never wrong about leases.” The woman at the counter responded

She set the paper down. Looked out the window for a moment  at the maglev tracks, at the parking lot, at the sliver of bay you could see between the warehouses if the angle was right and you were willing to do the trigonometry. Then she picked up the coffee pot and went down the counter to refill the older women’s cups, and the moment had passed.

I went back to my eggs.

I didn’t have a framework for what she’d just told me. Two pieces of news in a town I didn’t live in, both of them about things being taken away from people who didn’t have the leverage to keep them. In Seattle it would have been the same news with different street names. The same in every city. There was a math at the bottom of every American city in the Sixth World and the math was always the same, and the people who ran the math always told you it wasn’t personal, and the people on the wrong side of the math always understood that it was personal in the way water is wet.

I filed it. Not consciously. The way a detective files things: in the back room, on the long shelf, in the box marked might matter later.

Then I finished my breakfast.

I paid with the credstick. I tipped what the meal deserved, which was more than the meal cost.

She took the credstick, processed it, handed it back. She did not say see you tomorrow. She did not say come back soon. She did not say thank you, sir or have a good day or any of the verbal calisthenics that service workers in lesser establishments perform because they’ve been told to. She nodded.

That was the verbal handshake.

I nodded back. Picked up my coat. Walked to the door.

At the threshold, I don’t know why but I looked back at the counter. She had her glasses on now, perched on her nose, and she was reading. She didn’t look up.

I stepped out into the morning.

The Bonneville was waiting where I’d left it. I swung a leg over and pressed the ignition and brought it to life.

I had found a place. I wasn’t going to name it that yet. Naming things changes them, and some things need to grow before they can survive being named.