She Had No Idea

Katherine sat at Hedda & Dean’s coffee shop with her textbooks strewn and piled in front of her. Between the books lurked a half-eaten muffin and a near-cold, near-empty cup of coffee. Napkins blended in with her papers, and forks sat disguised among her loud selection of pens, colored pencils, and other pencil case inhabitants.

She had been eyeing the glitter pens with suspicion since it dawned on her that there was something wildly inappropriate about using them to underline key sentences in textbooks and articles tackling the issue of human slavery over the centuries. She contemplated the fork and how it might be used to draw blood to do the underlining.

Brant, who came to replace her cold coffee with a fresh cup, thankfully tore her from her silent reverie of dark morbidity. Attempting to distance herself from her own awkward dark line of thinking, she gazed into the amber brew and thought about dipping the fork into the coffee instead to extract her original ink. She looked up at Brant who sort of stood waiting and watching – possibly just checking for a sign of life from this young woman who’d spent the last six weeks solidly planted at the coffee shop as she worked on her dissertation.

They smiled at each other before he headed back to his brew bar. ‘He has no idea what I’ve just been thinking about this cutlery,’ thought Katherine. ‘She’s been coming here for months and she still has no idea what she’s drinking,’ thought Brant. Single-origin, Scandinavian roast pour-overs were lost on this patron. But he didn’t mind – good coffee was good coffee.

Absent-mindedly Katherine sipped on the coffee and her mind drifted from the dark heart of the topic to how far along she was and wondering how much further she had to go. Katherine began to feel strong in her knowledge. Maybe it was reflective of reality. It might also have been brought on by the taste of good coffee and the bite of muffin that hit her palate as she reclaimed the fork for its rightful uses. But the myriad textbooks and papers before her – not to mention all her own words she’d penned – did make her feel a master of the subject.

Brant watched the student from behind the bar as he continued to brew pour-overs. He’d inquired once about the subject matter spread out across her favorite little table against the wall – had grasped the first 3 minutes or so of discourse, but lost her at some term she kept using called ‘the perpetuity of grace.’

Brant thought about the irony of how we could know so much about one thing while remaining entirely ignorant of another. He caught sight of the inverse printing of the coffee shop’s name on the glass above the open door – ‘SNAED + ADDEH’ it read. Very Hebrew, he thought, and he wondered if it meant anything in any language.

Marty, the owner, was a post-era Beatnik with a degree in Scandinavian literature. Apparently, he had named the coffee shop after Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty. Brant had read both the Norwegian playwright and the American author and thought it was a pretty à-propos set of references for Katherine’s studies. The marriage of freedom and imprisonment. Humans were always enslaved to protect another’s so-called freedom. He bet himself that she had no idea.

But there were other things. Like that Brant had no idea Katherine’s name meant ‘pure light’, or that frost was going to hit Brazil this season. And more things still that Katherine would never read in books, like that Brant would one day marry her, or that a whole army of people was about to rise up across the world to fight human trafficking.

And there were other things they didn’t know – like that the tastes of salt and sweet don’t interact, or that tomorrow’s weather forecast would be off by 3°. How much Katherine’s mother loved her or how proud Brant’s father really was of his only son. What it felt like to wrestle God all night and prevail, or how to make moelleux au chocolat.

Mostly, neither knew all the things about which they had no idea. It was better that way. The clock read 11:23 – freely he continued to prepare good coffee as freely she continued to enjoy her set-up in the corner.