Binaries
By Laura Schiller
Based on: Star Trek: Voyager
Copyright: Paramount
She comes into his cafe every weekday at 12 p.m. sharp. Her order never changes.
"Black coffee, please, and a Sandwich of the Day."
She nods at him gratefully when he hands her the food. She never complains, even if the bread is stale and he's forgotten, for the millionth time, to put a cardboard sleeve over the hot cup. But she never smiles.
Joe Zimmerman, owner of Cuppa Joe's, likes to get to know his regulars, but she makes it more difficult than most. She answers his questions as briefly as possible, with a crisp Northern European accent that reminds him of pine forests and log cabins in the snow.
"Your English is excellent," he dares to ask one day. "Where are you from?"
"Stockholm, in Sweden."
"Ah. Lovely place, I hear, though I've never been there. My family's German, but that's several generations back. So you work for Voyager Tech?" He's seen the stylized spaceship logo on her briefcase, the same one that appears on the glass-and-concrete skyscraper across the street.
"Yes."
"As what, may I ask?"
"A programmer."
"Fascinating." And he means it. "I'm hopeless with technology myself. I'd still be counting change in my head if it were up to me. Isn't that right, Kes?"
Joe's assistant manager pokes her pixie-cut head out from the kitchen door and smiles in agreement.
"Keep the change, sir," is the customer's only reply.
He watches her sit down, always at the table by the radiator, sitting with impeccable posture underneath the fern in the hanging basket. Its leaves throw shifting shadows over her face as she eats her sandwich and drinks her tea. The sunlight turns her gray pantsuit to silver and gleams on her pinned-up golden hair. He catches himself wondering if she ever wears it down.
From the way she half-closes her eyes, the tiny hint of a flush on her face, and the way she holds her coffee cup in both hands to absorb the heat, he can tell she enjoys her lunch. He feels more pleased by this, strangely, than if the city's top food critic were to give him a starred review.
And she is alone. Every single day.
It's not right for such a beautiful woman - for anyone, really - to eat alone.
"Why don't you just ask her out?" Kes comes up behind him so suddenly that he sends a handful of change clattering across the counter.
"I haven't the slightest idea what you mean. I'm just being friendly. I've always prided myself on my customer service."
"Mm-hm." She pats him on the back and helps him gather up the coins. "If you say so."
/
An important part of good customer service is observation.
She taps her fingers on the table to the beat of a Chopin sonata playing on the radio. He makes sure to tune in to the classics channel every day around noon after that, all the more so because he likes them too.
When his Sandwich of the Day happens to be tuna, she nibbles on it slowly and wrinkles her nose, although she still eats every bite. Tuna is banished from the list of Joe's daily specials from that moment on - although he still serves it, of course, since plenty of other customers like it - and chicken salad, which is her favourite, appears just a little bit more often.
On some days, she comes in with purple shadows under her eyes and an unsteady step, bracing her hands against the counter, even as she argues with someone over her Bluetooth headset. He bites his tongue against an unprofessional urge to lecture her - what's she doing, letting Voyager Tech work her to death? - and instead, he makes her coffee extra strong.
And when he sees her gesturing fiercely with one hand at whoever she is addressing - "I don't care if it's over budget, I refuse to compromise on the security protocols. If the customers can't trust us with their data, what's the point?" - that is the moment he knows he's falling in love.
/
Another day, he comes around with a thermos and offers her a refill for her empty cup. She refuses politely, and he takes the chance to peer at the smartphone in her hand.
She's texting someone, probably a co-worker, since the one glimpse he catches is so full of technical jargon it makes his head spin. But it's enough to see her surname: Hansen.
"Hello, Ms. Hansen," he says the next day, smiling at the methodical way she shakes the rain from her umbrella. "Nasty weather, isn't it? If this goes on, you'll have to swim to work."
She startles at the sound of her name but does not appear displeased. "Oh! Yes, but I don't live far. Do you have far to go, Mr. … ?"
"Zimmerman, Joseph Zimmerman. But everyone calls me Joe, like it says on the awning. And I live above the shop, so I count my blessings."
"Oh … my first name is Annika."
A beautiful name.
He gives her a silly grin, which only widens to an embarrassing size when she says "Thanks, Joe," upon receiving her cheese-and-chutney panini.
/
Sometimes he suspects she may be watching him in return.
After seeing him fumble with the digital cash register one too many times, she takes to paying in cash instead. When Cuppa Joe's looks unusually empty, she makes small additions to her order - a cup of yoghurt, an apple, a smoothie. And once, while he and Kes are laughing at the tall tales of their friend Tom and his disaster-prone vintage Camaro, Joe finds Annika focused on the small group with steady attention, as if they're actors in a play that fascinates her. She's holding her cup in both hands, and her eyes are bright from the steam.
"Hey, Earth to Joe!" Tom claps him on the shoulder. "I just told you Satan's Robot hijacked my car and you didn't even blink. Where's your head today, in a different galaxy?"
"Oh, a lot closer," says Kes, "About ten metres away, I think. Isn't that right, boss?"
He shoots his assistant the most threatening glare he can muster - if she tells Tom, he'll never leave Joe alone about it, not that there is anything to tell - but she just looks back at him innocently and he raises his eyes to the ceiling.
"If I were you, Paris, I wouldn't bother blaming any fictional robots. I'd worry more about what B'Elanna will say. Between you and the car, which one do you think she'd choose?"
"Ow!" Tom grunts and doubles over as if he'd been punched. "Dude, that was below the belt."
"Oh, relax. We all know B'Elanna's crazy about you, although the reason why is a mystery."
"It's not my driving, that's for sure."
Annika's probably never seen such a bunch of weirdos in her life.
No wonder she's staring.
/
What a good barista also learns, aside from observing, is how to judge a character. Nothing says more about a person than the way they treat the ones who serve them.
When a nervous Joe, talking with his hands as he always does when nervous, knocks over her coffee cup and spills it all over Annika's hand-knit sweater, his first reaction is to panic.
"I'm terribly sorry!" He goes beet-red and lunges for the napkin dispenser. "So clumsy - I didn't mean to - "
"It's all right."
She blots at the spreading stain with a napkin and frowns, but is it a how-do-I-fix-this frown or an about-to-explode frown? Cold sweat runs down his spine. The last time this happened, it was with a businessman in a Hugo Boss suit who shouted for several minutes and stuck him with a wildly expensive dry-cleaning bill.
"I'll pay for your dry-cleaning," he offers. It's worth it to keep her coming back.
"What? Oh, no. That's - you don't have to" She looks down at the crumpled napkin in her hand, the brown splotch on her sleeve and the droplets hitting the floor and - for the first time he can remember - smiles.
"I never liked this sweater anyway," she says wryly. "So impractical."
/
Another day, when Annika takes out her wallet to pay him, she holds it upside down and a photograph slides out. He catches it instinctively before it can fall into her sandwich, but he needn't have bothered. It's laminated, like an ID card, to protect it from just this sort of accident.
It's not an ID. It's a picture of a teenage boy in graduation robes. His impassive face, the proud angle of his head, even the blue of his eyes resemble Ms. Hansen.
"Is this your son?" asks Joe, trying not to sound dismayed by the idea. If she has a son, the boy's father surely must be somewhere in the picture - although he wouldn't have guessed her old enough to be the mother of a high school graduate …
"My adopted son, yes," she says. "Icheb."
Joe catches the eye of Kes, who is wiping a table across the room and watching them out of the corner of her eye. Kes ran away from home as a teenager and lived on the street for a while, falling in with a gang called the Kazon, before she was rescued by a social worker. She owes her life to people like Ms. Hansen, people who take in unwanted children and help them thrive.
"He looks like a fine young man," says Joe. "You should bring him around here sometime."
"He's at Delta U." Across the country. "Studying astronomy."
Which explains why she works so hard, Joe realizes. Out-of-province tuition doesn't come cheap.
"You must be very proud."
"I am."
Ms. Hansen tucks the photograph back in her wallet, but not before giving it a look that speaks volumes about how much she misses the boy.
Joe wonders if Dr. Lewis Zimmerman, PhD, ever in his life wore a look like that.
"Your son's a fortunate young man," says Joe, before he can stop himself. "My own father thinks running a small business in this economy is financial suicide. I'm lucky if he remembers to send me a birthday card."
He has never once told a customer something so personal. It's against his unspoken barista code. For a moment, he's tempted to duck into the kitchen and let Kes deal with Annika every day from now on. But when he looks up, he sees that his customer's eyes are two blue flames of white-hot indignation - on his behalf.
"Then your father's an idiot," she says bluntly.
A muffled giggle from Kes in her corner makes them both break eye contact. "Just what I always said myself," the young girl says. "Although I've never phrased it that way."
"I'm sorry, Joe - " Annika looks mortified. "That was rude of me. I only meant - "
He's never seen her off-kilter like this, her whole face pink. He didn't think she could surpass herself in beauty, but she is.
"I'm not a - a people person, you see," she stammers. "I could never create something like this - " She sweeps her hands out to include the cafe. "Not just the food, but, the way you make everyone feel welcome even when you're being sarcastic - you light up this place, it's a sanctuary, and anyone who can't see that is an idiot. And … and I've said too much. Excuse me."
She grabs her coffee cup and her sandwich in its red-and-white-checked packing paper and backs away.
Joe is frozen to the spot. A sanctuary? His cafe with its cracked floor tiles, its ingrained smell of cigarettes although no one has smoked there in years, the plants that tickle everybody's hair, and Kes's abstract paintings ("Beyond the Subatomic") that nobody can make sense of?
He loves the place, of course. He's put years of work into it. But sometimes, all he can see are the empty tables, and today is one of those days.
"That's very kind of you, Annika. I just wish my banker saw it the same way."
She looks around, as if realizing for the first time that she's the only customer. It's not the first time this has happened - the lunchtime rush is generally at one p.m., rather than noon - but lately it's been less of a rush and more of a trickle. The Tim Hortons that has opened down the road may have something to do with that.
"You really should have a website," she bursts out. "I looked for you online and didn't find anything. Not even on Facebook. How do you expect to get customers this way? I could design one for you. It's easy."
Later on, he will realize that she is only trying to be nice, but it's her tone that rattles him. She sounds cold and arrogant (especially after being so passionate a few minutes earlier), the tech genius talking down to someone hopelessly behind the times. Worse, he's reminded of his father, for whom he could never do anything right.
"I get them the old-fashioned way," he snaps, gesturing out the door to where snow has almost washed away the writing on his chalkboard. "If there's anything I can't stand about today, it's the internet, and social media most of all. It's all so fake, it's dehumanizing. Why smile at someone when you can send an emoji? Why talk to them if you can just send a text - and not even spell it correctly? It's laziness, that's all. I don't want anything to do with it."
For the second time in as many minutes, Annika's eyes go white-hot - not angry for him this time, but at him.
"You have - no - idea," she says, every word an effort, as if she can hardly think straight. "It's easy for you to - to talk, to smile, to - you don't know what it means to someone like me, the connections, the community - behind a keyboard, I can - I can actually pass for normal … "
She breaks off, wipes her face with the sleeve of her coat, and gives him a look more unnerving than any degree of anger.
She looks, in fact, as if she'd just given away an enormous secret … and received nothing but silence in return.
Dear God, he's an idiot.
And she's out the door.
"Why didn't you answer her?" Kes asks softly.
"I - I didn't know what to say … " He throws his hands up in a bewildered shrug. "Apologize, of course, but how? I always knew she was … different, but I never meant to insult her about it."
"Oh, Joe … "
"Or about her career."
Why Kes would shake her head in such a pitying way, change the radio channel from classical music to news, and volunteer to take the counter so that he can hide in the kitchen, he has no idea.
/
The next two days are Saturday and Sunday, which means Annika doesn't show. It also means Joe has two extra days to overthink the encounter.
So maybe she did give away something about herself. But what was it? That she's not an ordinary woman, obviously. All this time when she didn't smile or gave short answers, she was never hostile or indifferent. She just has trouble communicating. But what did it mean when she suddenly chose to tell him so much? Was it only because she felt her profession had been insulted - and by an ignorant barista, no less? Or did she care about what he, as a person, thought of her?
You light up this place, she said. It's a sanctuary.
Does that mean she's a lonely woman who envies his gift of the gab? That she wants to be friends? (If she still does, after that argument.) Surely it couldn't mean anything more than that. He likes to joke about how irresistibly handsome he is, but he knows perfectly well he's got the face of a frog and the hairline of his 65-year-old father.
He worries about this all weekend. On Monday, however, he finds even more to worry about.
Kes finds him in his office, a windowless cubbyhole with a 20-year-old computer that wheezes when it overheats, staring bleary-eyed at an Excel spreadsheet on which the numbers refuse to make sense.
She takes one look at him and says, "What's wrong?"
"My father might have a point regarding my choice of career."
"Don't say that." She places a steaming shot of espresso - his favourite - on a stack of papers nearby, but even the smell fails to cheer him up.
"No? Look at this." He jabs his finger at the screen. "All our suppliers' prices are going up, and our income's going down. I don't see how I can pay back my loan from the bank. And if I can't … "
"We'll have to close?" Kes's voice drops to a hush, and her cheeks pale.
He immediately feels like a selfish idiot. If they close, all he will have to deal with is his father's smirk and a few variations on I told you so, while he crashes at their suburban family home and hunts for a new job. If he acts humble enough, Dr. Zimmerman might even finance the university education Joe dropped out of as a young man. But what will Kes do? She's eighteen, has no family worth speaking of, and lives with roommates she met online, who will kick her out if she can't pay her share of the rent. Cuppa Joe's is the closest thing she has to a home.
"Please tell me you have some kind of miracle up your sleeve," he says, talking to her or to God, he's hardly sure.
"I'm afraid I don't." She frowns at the screen, which has frozen again, and jiggles the mouse as if the computer were a lazy cat that could be coaxed to play. No effect.
Seeing the machine must have given her an idea though, because a slow, knowing smile begins to spread over her face.
"We don't need a miracle, Joe. All we need is a website. And a few social media accounts, of course. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram … "
That reminds him all too vividly of his argument with Annika, and he knows what she's driving at.
"Oh, Kes, really?" he whines, like a little boy who has to eat his broccoli, all the while knowing she's right.
"She'll probably set them up for free," Kes adds cheerfully, "Or at least for a free meal. This place is her sanctuary, don't you remember? Or she can just show me, and I'll do the rest."
"My dear, I don't know if I should fire you or give you a raise." He rubs both hands over his nearly bald head, summoning courage. If he looks like an old man, he'd better show some damn maturity already.
"I'd prefer the latter," says Kes, "But I know you can't afford it."
"It all depends on what Annika will say, I suppose. All right. Let's ask her."
/
He's been dreading the possibility of her never showing up. He is not sure how to contact her. Even he knows how to google, of course, but "Annika Hansen" isn't that rare of a name and Voyager Tech is a huge corporation.
She does stay away for an entire nerve-wracking week. But on the following Monday, a January snowstorm fairly forces her through the door at five p.m., the time he'd normally be closing.
She stamps the snow off her boots and brushes it off her coat, keeping her hood up so he can't see her eyes.
"The music at that other place is terrible," she says, meaning his franchised competitor down the road. "Nothing but Top 40. It makes my head hurt."
Joe can't decide whether he's amused, insulted, terrified, or wildly happy to see her.
"Please tell me that's not the only reason you're here."
"It's not." She brushes back her hood. The faux-fur lining has played havoc with her hairstyle, little blonde wisps escaping their pins like sunbeams from the static.
"I wanted to tell you I'm sorry," she says."My colleagues … they tell me I shouldn't always take things on such binary terms. Just because you hate computers, it doesn't mean you hate everyone who works with them. Does it?"
"Absolutely not!" he says, with a vehemence that startles them both. "I don't hate computers per se, I'm just embarrassed that I can't work with them. And speaking of that, I would be honoured if you'd design a website for me. You were right. I really do need one."
"It doesn't have to be complicated," she says eagerly, dropping into the nearest seat and digging her smartphone out of her pocket. "I've been doing some research. There are some very user-friendly platforms out there, and I have a high-res digital camera for taking pictures of the food … " She types so fast, her thumbs almost become a blur, talking about mailing lists and search engine optimization while scrolling through a rather pretty sample website with a creme brulee pictured in the background.
Neither English nor Swedish are her native languages, Joe thinks. This is. And she's mesmerizing when she's speaking it.
"You see, it won't happen overnight, but the more online visitors you have, the more likely it is they'll visit here in real life," she winds up her explanation. "The internet and the real world don't necessarily exclude each other. Life isn't written in binary code. You can … you can have both."
He will never be one of those people who treat their smartphone like an extra limb, but the things do have some advantages. Their small size, for example, which makes it necessary to lean into someone's personal space to see what they're trying to show you.
She looks up at him from the screen. The pupils of her eyes widen as she realizes how close their faces have become while she was talking. Close enough for him to learn that she has a star-shaped birthmark under her left ear, and her hair smells like chamomile.
"I think I understand," says Joe. "And if you come back tomorrow evening after closing time, I'd be happy to discuss it further. But in the meantime … would you mind very much if I kissed you?"
"Me?" She stares at him as if he'd offered a trip to Mars. "Whatever for?"
From any other woman, he'd find this insulting, but he's beginning to understand how her mind works. He will need to be direct.
"Because you're brilliant. And beautiful. And every time you walk in here, I fall in love a little more."
"That's … really good to know. I thought I was the only one." She still looks confused, but a tiny smile lifts the corners of her mouth, and she's blushing so hard he can feel the heat waves from where he's sitting. "But I should warn you. The last time someone kissed me was at university, and it was disgusting."
"I'll try not to disgust you too much."
He takes her face between both hands and kisses her, meaning to be cautious and not frighten her. But before long, caution is a word they've both forgotten. When she leaves that night (he insists on walking her home), more than one of her hairpins is missing.
Kes will find the pins while sweeping the floor the next morning, smile to herself, and not say a word.