I should have paid more attention, but I was dissecting the sandwich.
I sat in a hard chair at a formica table. The sunshine coming in the industrial bay windows of the gangway was warm and the foot traffic around was light. I’d arrived at the cafeteria grill in that magic lull between lunch and closing when they were still making food but had little custom. The semester was rolling slowly to a halt and the impending finals season had put a damper on the energy of the small, urban college. Pairs and trios of people, students and the hangers-on inevitable in such a place, sat at tables with their têtes- intensely -à-tête. Conversation burbled and fluttered around the deliberately-modern steel-and-glass echodrome of the concourse.
I had walked from my office down the block and wandered over to the grill. The master was kind, and when I ordered two Reuben sandwiches, one on rye and one on sourdough, he put them on two plates without asking so I could maintain the fiction that I wasn’t about to eat two sandwiches.
Once I was properly seated and able to take a moment to ratiocinate, I contemplated why these might be important sandwiches.
I considered them whole. As a device, each seemed inauspicious. The sourdough was toasted golden. The rye started golden and was rent almost brown. Each seemed alike in dignity as to interaction with their constituents. The dressing assailed the craggy shores of both slices of bread, making perhaps more headway in the sourdough’s druse. The grease of the grill sloughed off the meat at similar rates. The cabbage wilted with delicate strength over the afternoon, acting the role of cross-bearing martyr as is its wont.
As the hour passed, I became more aware of a loud discussion to my left. Two people argued with the passion which is so often reserved for fictional things on college campuses: warp drives or plot holes or microscopic universes or some such.
I deconstructed the sandwiches, placing the dry and wet bread on the plates to make triptychs with the saucy wad of sauerkraut and corned beef. I think it was corned beef. I poked it with a plastic knife as if that might somehow endow me with the expertise to differentiate corned beef from pastrami. I licked the dressing off the dull tip of the plastic knife and remained ignorant.
The discussion to my left sounded to have picked up vigor as two men argued with increasing intensity and volume about some kind of mathematical impossibility writ large, perhaps predicting the collisions of galaxies.
To my dismay, I realized that what I was hearing was less the slow increase in volume and more the sudden decrease in the sweet cushion of distance.
“Look, I’ll show you.” I was suddenly less alone. The faded and grubby t-shirt barely covered the belly, the pale bottom of which hung at the level of the table top and almost touched the formica. Quick fingers snatched the dry slices of toasted bread from my plates.
“It’s like this. See, this rye is your universe. This sourdough is mine. They get moving through space and time, and eventually, wham!”
Here, the two slices of bread were slapped together between uncaring hands. The tormentor ground the surfaces one across the other. Perhaps the grating sound was only loud to me, but my vision seemed to blur and tunnel as it happened. Detritus fell from the friction plane and collected across the table, the dressed slices of bread, the meat, and my shirt front.
“And the crumbs, that’s us. We fall out wherever the meeting happens, but all across the face of time.”
I flopped the mangled bread slices back on the plate and gave myself a desultory “thanks.” The look I gave myself was unfamiliar, harder than I remembered, soured by an apparent life of illness and decadence. I was dressed in a filthy shirt and jeans, weatherbeaten sneakers and a lanyard, the self-conscious uniform of the non-student who yet remains on campus.
“No,” I said from the other table, “it’s time travel.”
I pointed across the mangled remains of my lunch. “What part of that looks like time travel? It’s an accident, and this is where we collected.”
“Then why is he so much older than me?”
“He fell off the bread back here,” I poked the end of my finger into the middle of the wad of bread. “And you fell off here.” I dragged the finger back half an inch toward the crust, dislodging a flap of rye. I picked it up and held it out to me at the other table.
“That’s the difference between you and him,” I said, poking myself in the chest with more aggression than seemed necessary. I popped the scrap into my mouth. I started to take a step back toward the table where I waited to continue the argument, then reconsidered. With a blithe smile, I flipped both plates onto my lap.
“You watch yourself with this crap,” I sneered, and then I both walked away, giving furtive glances back at me trying to wipe the greasy remains from my work slacks.