The Coffee Pot  

When the plague came, it trapped me in the city. There was no time to prepare. In a matter of just a few days, life was turned upside down. Martial law was declared overnight, everyone was told to stay home and indoors, the police patrolled the streets, assisted by the National Guard. It was like living in a ghost town, only this ghost town was not empty. It was full of people, but they had become invisible.

            For a while, not much happened in my daily routine. I caught up on correspondence, and started in on a long novel that I had always wanted to read, thinking how virtuous I would sound when I could say that I had finished it, but not sure if I was actually enjoying it. I looked out of the window at the silent, empty streets. I watched birds fly across the sky.

            When it was clear that the crisis was going to last more than just a few days, the authorities set about organizing. People were allowed out on alternate days, depending on whether your address ended in an even or an odd number, for just an hour, in order to buy essential provisions. That was it. The police checked everyone coming and going, and infractions were not tolerated.

            When my food supplies started to get low, I ventured out on my assigned day to the Franprix at the bottom of the next street over. It was late afternoon, the light was starting to go, and the streets were eerie. There was almost no one else about, and those I encountered all seemed shifty, vaguely suspicious. At one point, another person retreated into a doorway and turned away from me as I passed. Someone else crossed the road to avoid me, pulling their scarf even further up their face so that only their eyes were visible. I had seen people like this before, but it was in the desert where people wrapped their heads to keep the wind from whipping sand into their faces, but this was a city. Now the city had become a desert of its own. People hurried by, avoiding eye contact along with any other kind of contact.

            In the supermarket people moved swiftly and silently, pulling what they wanted off the shelves. There were limits on how many items you could buy in order to prevent hoarding. People didn't stop to exchange pleasantries or gossip, their focus was sharpened by need. Even if you thought you recognized a neighbor, it was hard to be sure, because everyone was muffled in scarves, covering as much of themselves as they could. The cashiers at the checkout were wearing what looked like haz-mat suits and were completely unrecognizable as human beings. Payment was by credit card only, no cash changed hands. People bought their essentials and left as quickly as possible.

            I brought my shopping home, put things away, and then prepared a simple evening meal. Again. In one pan, I cooked some spaghetti, while I heated up some red sauce from a jar in another. I took some pre-chopped salad from the plastic bag, put it in a bowl, and seasoned it with oil and vinegar. A glass of red table wine washed it all down. I had bought some yoghurts for dessert, a bit of a splurge in the circumstances. I like the kind with the more unusual flavors – fig, pistachio, gooseberry, rhubarb – so I had one of those as a treat to finish off the meal, then I washed the dishes, dried them, and put them away, leaving the kitchen neat and tidy. I settled down to read for an hour or two. The fact that I had been out and stretched my legs made it feel like a big day, even though the exercise had been minimal. Still, I felt a little tired, so I turned in early and went to sleep.

            I awoke the next morning feeling a little out of sorts. I lay in bed, in no hurry to move, letting my imagination drift. I thought with anticipation about a lovely bowl of café au lait, a leisurely breakfast, about dipping a fresh buttered baguette (if only I had one!) into the coffee, how it would soak into the bread and melt the butter, making a delicious spongy mess. As I became more fully awake, I realized that I had forgotten to buy more coffee. Damn! Say goodbye to that pipe dream. I had been making do with some instant from the bottom of a jar, but even this was low now, I remembered. I dragged myself into the kitchen, boiled some water, spooned the last of the Nescafé into a bowl, and added a couple of sugar lumps. The little milk I had left had spoiled, so I poured the lumpy remains of that down the sink. I soaked the dried piece of leftover baguette in the coffee. It was something, but not the feast I had wanted. I looked regretfully at the unused coffee pot on the stove. It was one of those old-fashioned espresso makers, a classic design dating back to 1930s fascist Italy. The two pieces came apart. You put water in the bottom, inserted the metal filter and filled it with ground coffee, then screwed on the top part. When you heated the water, the pressure forced it up through the coffee, and the result collected in the top half of the pot, ready to pour. But today the pot would go unused. It would be a few days, at the earliest, before I could go out to buy more coffee.

            The breakfast left me unsatisfied, and with the feeling of acid in my stomach. It was unsettling. I decided to go back to bed for want of anything better to do. Thinking about how much I wanted a really good cup of coffee, and how long it would be before I might expect to get one, did not help. I lay in bed fantasizing about coffee, because the one thing you can't have is always the one thing you want. I thought about my morning café au lait, about the energy bomb that is a good espresso, about the tasty treat of a cappuccino the way they served it in the little Italian restaurant down the road that was now closed: with a stiff, thin foam so compact it was almost a crust, and the finest chocolate shavings that added just a hint of sweet to the flavor when your lip broke through the shell of foam to the coffee underneath. From where I lay in my small studio apartment, I could see from my bed into the kitchen area, and my eyes were drawn to the coffee pot sitting idly on the stove, tantalizing. I drifted off to sleep thinking about which of the various caffeinated beverages I wanted most and what I would do when lockdown ended to satisfy my craving.

            I awoke a few hours later, feeling decidedly worse. I had a headache. Too much sleep? Perhaps I had been wrong to give in to the nap. I felt stiff. Well, lying in bed all day wouldn't help. I got up slowly, went to the kitchen and fetched a big plastic bottle of Evian, brought it back to bed, took a few swigs and decided to lie down again until the achy feeling passed. It was probably nothing more than caffeine withdrawal. I fell asleep.

            I woke up. I felt chilled. I found some thick socks to put on. I fell back asleep.

            I woke again some time later. Now my head was pounding, and felt thick. I was definitely not myself. It was late afternoon. The shadows that fell across the kitchen were starting to get longer. I thought I should probably care that I had lost nearly the whole day, but I didn't. I felt too awful to care. Should I do something? What? Take some aspirin or something maybe? Better yet, some ibuprofen. That would help with the aching? Aching? As the thought presented itself, I realized that all my joints were aching as well as my head. More time had passed while I was lying in bed trying to sort through these thoughts, and now it was early evening. I was hungry. I pulled myself up, swung my legs over the side of the bed, and immediately grasped my head to steady myself. Slowly does it. I stood up, went to the kitchen and opened the fridge. There was some spaghetti left over from the night before. I took it to the table, and ate it cold, straight from the container. I couldn't really taste it, but the blandness almost seemed like a good thing. Plus, the feel of the stringy pasta on my tongue was sort of pleasant, and the coolness of it was welcome. For a moment I felt a bit better. I sat in a daze at the table for a while, unable to focus on much. Maybe, in addition to caffeine withdrawal, I was dehydrated. I hadn't been drinking enough water. Then I realized that I was cold all over, not just my feet. My head felt hot, but I felt cold. I shivered. The shivers made me ache more. Time to go back to bed. I lay down again. I fell asleep.

            When I woke next, it was the middle of the night. There was moonlight streaming into the kitchen. The coffee pot on the stove caught my eye. It was glowing. The moonlight seemed to endow it with a silvery aura. Ha! My holy grail! It was calling to me. I was reminded of the way Chrétien de Troyes described the grail: covered in precious gems and emanating so much light that it was blinding. But of course! You were so dazzled by it, that you could not quite see what it actually was. A plate? A cup? Who could say? Clever Chrétien!  He avoided being pinned down by bothersome details, and as a bonus it allowed everyone to imagine the grail they wanted. What is it? It's a grail! Come on, everyone knows what a grail is. Look, can't you see it? I tried to focus on the coffee pot, imagining it was made of pure silver, imagining that the black knob on the lid was made of something precious. Onyx? A ruby so big and dense it looks dark? A smaragdine? (I just liked the word.) I fell back asleep.

            Next morning I felt utterly terrible. My head was throbbing and every joint in my body ached. I was hot, I was cold, I was dizzy. I tried to drink some water, but after a few swallows I gave up. Moving hurt too much. I had a dry cough, and coughing made me move, and moving made me hurt, and the only way to avoid coughing was to try to stay perfectly still. I burrowed down under the covers and tried to make even my mind still. That part wasn't too hard, my mind was shut down, gone awol. I didn't care about anything. I just wanted to be left alone. The world could have come to an end outside, I didn't care. It occurred to me that perhaps I had the plague. Tentatively, I tried to feel my armpits. Everything felt tender. Were those lumps I could feel? The beginning of buboes? Hard to tell. But the mind plays such tricks. Back to sleep.

            At some point I woke up and was hungry. I had yoghurts, but the thought made me gag. No energy to cook. I ate one of those little cheeses that comes wrapped in its own red waxy cover. I always keep some of those to hand in the fridge, they are convenient. Unexpected company, late-night snack, a packed lunch, you never know. My shaking hands struggled to pull the waxy bit off, but I managed. I stood, wobbly, in the kitchen and nibbled.

As my mind wandered, I reached out and touched the coffee pot in front of me. It was warm!! How was that possible? I was sure I had not so much as touched it in several days now. Had I tried to make coffee in my sleep? Could someone else have come into my apartment while I slept? Even allowing such an unlikely scenario, why would they have used the coffee pot? What are the odds that a burglar breaks in, heats some water in a coffee pot (there was no coffee), then leaves without touching anything else? It was preposterous. To reassure myself, I looked inside the pot. It was dry as a bone. Then how was it warm? I forced myself to be logical. The only thing that made sense was that for several hours the sun had been shining into the kitchen, directly onto the pot, and that this had warmed the metal which then retained the heat. What other explanation was there? I finished the cheese, threw the wrapper away, and tottered back to bed.

            I lay for a while looking into the kitchen. Then I swear the coffee pot winked at me. I know that sounds ridiculous. How can a coffee pot wink? But it did. I wrestled with the thought, then told myself that it must have been a trick of the light, the way a random ray of sunshine filtered in through the blinds and bounced off the pot, creating an illusion. That must be the explanation. But it unsettled me, I have to admit.

            I could not concentrate for long. I cycled in and out of sleep for a long while. In my waking moments, I tried to drink a little water, and if I could stand, I ate what I could find to hand in the kitchen. I couldn't remain upright for long, though, and soon returned to bed and to sleep. In my waking moments, I let my eyes roam around the studio. It seemed as though the coffee pot had turned around. Where the handle had been on the right and the spout on the left, now it faced the other way, with the handle on the left. Was it possible that I had done that? I had no memory of having moved the pot, but my head was so foggy I didn't trust my own judgement. I reasoned that if I could eat and drink while only semi-conscious, then I was probably capable of doing other things without thinking, too. There really wasn't a better explanation, so I had to let go of the thought.

            I lost track of time, a day, perhaps two or even three days, passed in this manner. I felt so awful I could do nothing but lie in bed with my eyes closed, letting sleep take over to numb the pain. At one point I woke in what seemed to be evening. It was dusk, the light fading but not yet dark. Once again, I had slept the day away. I no longer even knew what day it was, and it didn't occur to me to wonder if this was my designated day to shop or not. I was in no fit state to go anywhere or do anything. As I cast around, wondering, my blurry vision settled on the coffee pot again, and this time I was sure it was changing shape. Usually, it was tall and straight, but now the sides seemed to sag, and it looked rounder. More like a teapot. And it kept leaning over to one side. Then I understood: it was taunting me with the rhyme about the little teapot, short and stout. "Tip me over, pour me out." The coffee pot, with handle on one side and spout on the other, was doing a little dance, pretending that someone was "pouring it out." If coffee pots can be said to stick their tongue out, then that's what this one was doing. It was mocking me. "Stop that!" I shouted, angrily. But shouting made my head feel worse.

            I closed my eyes and tried to stay still, mentally as well as physically. I was being pranked by an increasingly mischievous coffee pot. That was impossible. Then I remembered a story by Théophile Gautier about a coffee pot that came to life and turned into a dancing girl who seduced him. But those guys were stoned most of the time on hashish, Baudelaire even described how to drink it in coffee, so of course they had visions. This coffee pot on my stove was never going to be some houri, I was just hallucinating. "Stupid coffee pot," I said. I was talking to a coffee pot. I turned to face the wall to stop thinking about it, and drew the covers up over my head.

            Much later, I awoke with a start. Something or someone was shaking me by the shoulder. Who? Why? What was happening? I felt panicky. Had the coffee pot grown legs after all and walked over to my bed to prod at me? I realized I was shaking. From cold. The tapping I felt was my own body shivering in waves, which my sleeping mind had interpreted as someone else doing it to me. I grasped the fact that the fever had made me sweat, and all the perspiration had soaked into my clothes where it cooled; now I was freezing from lying around in cold, clammy, wet clothes. In a word, night sweats. No one was tapping me, I was just shivering. Get up. Change clothes. Go back to bed. Try to get warm again. Go back to sleep. I drifted off to my next meeting with Hypnos, who lately seemed to be my new best friend. Good old Hypnos, I was always glad to see him.

            Now, suddenly, the coffee pot was screaming at me, the irritating little troll. I was pulled rudely from my sleep. Shrill noise everywhere. Ugh. A fire alarm? Fire? What was so urgent? On fully regaining consciousness, if my befuddled state of mind could be called that, I realized that the noise was emanating not from inside, but from the street. An ambulance was tearing past my building, siren in full warning mode. I mentally followed it down the road. I heard it come to a stop a bit further on, then the sound of doors slamming. Some time passed. Minutes? Hours? I was still too out of it to tell. There was more slamming and the ambulance set off again, with siren still blaring. Evidently, someone was being taken to hospital. Plague, or some other emergency? Heart attack, a bad fall? I didn't want to know. I didn't want to think about the way the plague was invading us all in our homes, insinuating itself, slipping under doors and sliding through tiny chinks and cracks in the walls. Other crises were part of normal life, things happened, but one more victim of the plague was one more notch on the belt of a monster. Is denial a defense? The question was too hard to dwell on for long, so I didn't. I couldn't muster the energy to care about anything at all. I fell back into unconsciousness like falling into a deep pit.

            Again, I slept for a long time, occasionally surfacing just long enough to take a few sips of water, to stumble to the bathroom, to crunch on some dry breadsticks. The coffee pot was quiet and still. Ha! I thought. Maybe inanimate objects like coffee pots could get the plague, too! I wondered what that would look like. With luck, my tormentor would get it instead of me! A comforting idea that lulled me back to sleep once more. This time, an untroubled and restful slumber without dreams and interruptions that lasted I know not how long.

            And then I woke up. And I felt amazing! Compared to the state I had been in, it was like night and day. Sometimes normal is just the best feeling in the world. I opened my eyes and looked around. My head was remarkably clear, and though I was still a bit groggy, I felt like my old self. I took a deep breath. It felt so good to breathe, and I inhaled several more times, feeling the cool air rush down into my lungs and bring life to every little part of me. I sat up on the side of the bed. My joints no longer ached, though they were still a little stiff, but some gentle stretching eased the tightness. I was very thirsty, and gulped down some water greedily. It was delicious, the best water I have ever tasted. I felt a little cool and slipped on a robe, and was comfortable. The effects of the fever, the toggling between hot and cold, seemed to have passed. My head felt normal, I was no longer shivering, and my clothes were no longer soaking wet. The thought that I might soon take a shower was enticing. I would feel refreshed. Goodness knows how many days had passed without any attention to personal hygiene, and I was anxious to put those days behind me and wash all memory of them away. And then eat. I suddenly felt ravenously hungry, my empty stomach reminded me that I had been subsisting on the meagerest of rations for … well, I don't know how many days, exactly, but many. Now my appetite came roaring back. I would have to look in the cupboards and see what I could rustle up. And then wash it all down with a lovely cup of coffee. Coffee! I went into the kitchen and picked up the coffee pot. It was cold and lifeless. I wondered what day it was, if it was my day to shop or not. At the first opportunity, I was going out to buy more coffee.