The restaurant has two levels: one higher than the other, opening into a wide patio with long wooden tables and a floor that has strips of grey pebbles embedded in concrete that you can feel through your sandals. This is where Liam usually sits when he goes to the restaurant, which happens when he realizes he has been in his room for the entire day swallowing unhealthy amounts of movies and YouTube. This realization sets in when he pulls aside the black curtains which he had installed and sees that the daylight is turning to a pale wash of orange and grey. The upper level, however, is filled with people today. There is a crowd hanging around by his usual spot and the waiters are carrying fully laden trays of food, and Liam understands that service will be slow. He eases into a spot far from the crowd, by a corner of the lower level, which has orange colored chairs and aluminum tables which bears marks of spilled coffee and shoddy wiping. Across him, two tables away, is a group of five, one man and four women, huddled around plates of what seems to be french fries and tall glasses of juice, all of their heads leaning in to the table. Now aware of his own posture, his neck and upper back bending without grace in the hard plastic back of the chair, Liam corrects himself, straightens up, and realizes that this renders him incapable of bringing food to his mouth without risking it falling down, staining his brown cotton trousers as they travel towards the ground.
As he looks up, a woman, about twenty-five or so, enters the restaurant. Liam tries to identify the book she has in her hand, but he can’t, partly because the book is hidden by her hand, and partly because her figure distracts him. She pauses for a second, still talking on her phone, and looks around, and seemingly unable to find the person on the phone, climbs up the few steps to the upper floor. She moves out of Liam’s sight and reappears near his usual spot, which by now is empty. She sits down and is promptly hidden from Liam’s sight once again.
The waiters are wearing an orange and black uniform, which matches the orange of the chairs. One of them approaches Liam’s table and places down on the table a plate of grilled cheese sandwich and a cup of tea. The grilled cheese is covered with a bed of potato chips, misshapen and of varying colors ranging from the golden shade of deep fried potatoes, to the deep red of the chilli powder that coats them. Liam takes a sip of the tea to gauge its hotness, and concludes that the tea will go cold by the time he finishes the sandwich. This, he accepts with a sense of dejection, as there is nothing he can do to stop the tea from going cold. To drink the tea before it goes cold would mean he would be left with nothing to lubricate his throat when he eats the sandwich. The potato chips are a little stale, and as he takes a bite, they snap off like limp twigs, bending far too much before finally breaking off. This Liam understands signals how long they have been left out in the cold and how soggy they have become. However, he simply cannot eat the sandwich before he finishes the chips. This is a compulsion that Liam feels, out of nothing. In his mind, it complements how you must take out the block of jenga completely out of the tower before you are in the clear, and it complements how you must lift off the books on your table if you want to dust the table. He understands that this compulsion might have a psychopathological origin, but you do not think about psychopathology when you are eating potato chips. So he concentrates on the chips themselves, allowing himself to finish the bed of chips before he can move on to the sandwich.
The sandwich has parallel marks charred onto its surface, which now appears grainy, from all the heat of the panini press. Liam knows it must have been a panini press and not a griddle, because the slices of bread are squished, the crusts jutting out of the bread in their hard, chewy way. He spies the innards of the sandwich as he brings it to his mouth, just to see the cheese, once melted and now hardened again.
ps: Am reading Intermezzo these days, hence the tone and ‘Liam.’