1. In/Action

            She'd come this way every Thursday, Joshua knew, for he had watched her move down the sidewalk rich as a samba, as loaded with promise and verse. The first time Joshua'd been reading a Superman comic book, half-marvelling at the four-color exploits but with one eye on the street before him. She had entered the cafe, the swishing noise of her skirt catching his full attention, and, upon breathing in her full visage, the Man of Metropolis was promptly of little import. Someone new had stolen his heart..

            Her skin was the soft bronze of enduring summer, and her dark eyes shone black like space. Joshua had seen space, through the telescope at MIT, first as an exuberant fourteen-year-old anticipatively scouting colleges, and now, as a sober lad of eighteen, nearly daily. It was among the many mundane thrills of Joshua Valor's young life, the galvanizing normalcy brought on by his dislocation from the bosom of his beloved Apex City. The others included these afternoons at the cafe, a pile of glossy-covered comic books, pages of yellow legal pad branded with his own deep scrawl calculating meta- and quantum physics, and now, suddenly, there was her.

            Black hair, black eyes, a body lithe as something sprung from a jungle book or planet. Her arms long and thin moved so barely as she walked, as if only reacting to the trace breeze of her movement; her eyelids closed and opened in a blink that slowed down time. In one of his comic books, she'd be an arch villain, the refined nemesis of some muscled superman. But here she was only an invitation to the light. The patio warmed as she passed through it, the cafe glowed after she entered.

            It was early yet, not quite noon, too early for a lunch and cigarette break for the secretaries whose dank offices were stacked down Massachusetts Avenue. He could not imagine her as a part of their finger-pecking throng anyway. Could not conceive of her perched behind a cheap metal desk set, admonishing callers to "please hold" or diligently taking dictation.

            He could not imagine her voice at all.

            She entered these past days, trailing an incipient scent of spring, and exited with one warm coffee in a paper cup. She was alone, then.

            In the week since he'd first seen her swimming atop the border of his Action issue, Joshua had malfunctioned. His equations were carelessly inept, his sleeping patterns erratic, he'd given identical lectures to unrelated study-groups. His professors wanted to know: was it drugs? No. The cusp of another breakthrough? No. Ah, then it must be a woman. Well, yes, sort of.

            Only, who was she? It didn't matter too terribly to this young man finding his way in the cosmos and away from his fair-haired motherland, yet her identity made all of the difference. Why was it she who had finally tickled his nigh-unticklable fancy? What atoms bumping atoms were busting humps to stir his cerebellum--or was it his heart?--to cross his eyes and cause him to swoon as she passed him by. And what paralysis was this? The sonic sprays and atomic rays he would later audaciously face were nothing to this stultifying incapacitation he experienced in her presence.

            Because all Joshua needed do was smile. Glance in her direction as she passed into the cafe, greet her with the warmth of everyday recognition as he did with the postman, the countergirl, the newspaperstandman. But he couldn't. She hadn't been borne down from heavens, glowing green with biology-disarming radiation, but she was his weakness nonetheless. She was of this world--he thought South America; he was good at placing people and further hazarded Brazil, but a coastal village and not the capital city of Brasilia, though he conjectured that she'd lived there as well--but still he could not master his own folly.

            She was inside right now; he'd watch her enter and shined his own face upward from his seat in a vague way, not meeting her eyes. She would emerge soon, taking that light she carried with her, and she would pass and be gone, and another day without her would pass and be gone too.

            So make a difference this day, he told himself. Meet her eyes and begin something. It was an order from the man who lived inside the boy, lived in his brain or in his heart.

            It is easy. You can be fearless. You've stared down supernovas and you've been these two doctorate-casting years away from home. So smile if your heart is aching for her; don't simply sigh and watch her walk away again.

            When the door opens, Joshua is already red, beading with sweat. He remembers the volumes of eastern religion and Zen Buddhism, and he recalls medical tomes about childbirth and panic-displacement he ingested as a child, and he begins to breathe again slowly.

            He hears her footfalls; Joshua's auditory sense is acute, and his ability to place sounds as precise as his capacity to deduce persons and their motives. She, of course, he cannot read. So he listens to the soft tap of her steps and he knows she is closer, closer. He smells the muscular incense of her coffee cup contents. In a moment she is beside him, then beyond him, and he smiles but she doesn't see.