The Cappacino Maestro
an excerpt

Bill picked up a small bit of foil that had been lying on the coffee table and proceeded to stare intently at for several minutes. The play of light zig-zagged erratically around the living room, running up and down the walls and curtains.

“Have you ever wondered about the duality of the particle and wave theory of light and how it applies to life?” He continued to stare at the foil. “It’s like, a wave, but then it’s a particle too, right? Too right!” He laughed as his own joke. Julie was engrossed in playing with my shoe laces and John kept waving his hand back and forth in front of his face. None of us much cared what Bill was saying, but then again, we were all of us fascinated.

“What about radio, then? They use waves. What if radio was like, functioning as a wave but instead of being particles, it carried particles? And instead of light, these particles were information.” You could see he was hooked on this idea.

“Think of it. It’s like light, right? Alright, so we’ve got a radio station, right? Ummm, KQPG. Right? And so the KQPG DJ’s talking and spinning discs and the advertisers are plying their wares on the air. And the waves go out and out, and each wave is carrying millions and millions of particles of information. And just like light, each particle of information should be illuminating, right? But there’s millions and millions of other radio stations out there, and they’re all sending out their millions and millions of radio waves, and each wave is carrying millions and millions of particles of information! Holy shit, I can’t breathe!”

He fell over on his side and started gasping. John reacted by including his other hand in the back and forth across his face. He looked like someone trying to get the attention of a blind man, only he was the blind man. Julie was untying and tying my shoe for the seventeenth time.

Bill was hyperventilating on the couch, thrashing about. It’s a good thing he was only tripping. It’s like the old joke about Tonto and the Lone Ranger where the Lone Ranger gets bit on the dick by a rattlesnake and Tonto rides into town only to be informed by the local doctor that they solo remedy was to make an incision where the snake bit and suck out the poison. On reporting back to the Lone Ranger Tonto said: “You gonna die, Kemosabe.” There’s nothing we could have done except watch Bill expire. At least I couldn’t. My arms and legs felt like they were encased in tinglely lead. I don’t know how else to describe it. Heavy like lead. But tinglely, like that orange drink they gave us as kids because NASA used it in their spaceships. Tang.

It also felt very weird – cool, but weird – to have someone touching me. It was a distracting experience. Every little brush of Julie’s arm or hand sent shockwaves of tingles up my legs.

Then out of the blue, Bill was off again. “But you know, with the radio, also like light, if a particle strikes something before it gets to where it’s going, then it casts a shadow, right? And think of the gazillion particles of information all racing around in the air. There are so many of them floating in the waves of our lives, man, the waves of our lives that nobody’s being illuminated by truth. Whoa… It’s like with all the collisions and mixing of so much information, all anybody gets is shadows. Shadows of reality, shadows of truth. Worse than half truths because the whole truth is there, but only in negative form. And, follow me here, and when people DO see spots of illumination that do fall around them, these spots are sporadic, erratic and mutated by the edges of shadows seeping into their ‘airspace’ “

“Bill,” I said, “that is so deep for me right now, I feel like I’m still working on the name of the radio station. KQPG. KQPG.” This sent Julie into the giggles. Bill ignored us both.

“It’s just like a horror movie. We’re creating shadow selfs. Selves. Soon, the whole human race will be nothing but shadowed cut-outs of their own ideals. We’ll all just be grayed out moments of the potential we could have been, slowly fading to black.”

John stopped waving his hands and set them in his lap. “Bill,” he said, sounding complete unstoned, “you have touched on one of the three fundamental principles known as the responsibility of communication. We come into this life with those principles stamped on our souls and somehow, like the particles of information, those principles become shadow values. We are ever reaching, but never stretching, to regain what we so freely discarded in the heat of moment of childhood.”

That sounded so profound, even more than Bill’s wandering into radio waves that for a moment, everything seemed to stop and each beat of my heart sounded like the crashing of wave against the cliff of my chest. It really did feel as if I couldn’t breathe. But that was just because each breath seemed to last an hour. Even Julie stopped laughing and stared at John.

John looked at each one us, held our gaze for a moment, then went back to waving his hands in front of his face.