Written by Jonathan Aryeh Wayne, February 10, 2016

I was sitting in a coffeehouse surrounded by mostly women staring at screens. I was sipping my medium latte in one hand while my other hand clutched my smartphone. Why was I one of these people? I would have rather read a newspaper or sit on a high speed train somewhere in Great Britain. Suddenly, I watched a mildly autistic man walk into the coffeehouse and heard him say hello to every woman in the room. Hello, hello, hello, hello. Some of the women returned hellos but some politely rejected him when he asked if he could sit at their table. I was trying not to show him any attention, but he didn’t care about me anyway. Two tables from me on my right he was turned down a seat when a young woman claimed she was waiting for her friend to come join her. The autistic man finally approached the community table and sat across from a young woman. As he swallowed the iced coffee from his straw, he said hello and described how tasty his drink was. He didn’t receive much of a response from the young woman other than a subtle smile. I pretended that I was trying to be busy staring meaninglessly at my smartphone but I was more interested in observing the people around me. When I was a young man I used to stare at people without judgement and without fear. Where did this shame come from, where staring at strangers now might be deemed offensive?

As an adult, I’ve not recalled ever being stared at in a coffeehouse, except from mentally challenged people, such as schizophrenic old men and demented old women. I swore I must have spent at least 10 seconds staring at the autistic man at the community table, and watched him slurp and burp down his iced coffee. 10 seconds! It was uncanny of me. 10 seconds. How dare I, how can I, how should I? People continued staring at their screens except for him and I, as I stared at the autistic man, while he stared at his beverage. Both of us were unimportant. Both of us were aliens from another planet. Suddenly, our stares triangulated on a cosmic level. While the wrinkles on our faces decreased in every breath we took, the walls in the coffeehouse deteriorated, and plaster and paint chipped away. People all around us began to vaporize, burning off radiation from all directions. The roof above us was being ripped apart slowly, and laser beams of light were streaming down, increasing every second. The humans with their laptops and their phones and their music players and their earbuds were melding to their bodies. I continued staring at the autistic man and noticed him and I were becoming younger and younger while everyone and everything around us fused into subatomic particles. Multicolored laser beams protruded from the floors and we fell from our chairs into an abyss of liquid light, slowly swirling and spiraling downwards before we were pushed through a wormhole ever so gradually.

“The humans with their laptops and their phones and their music players and their earbuds were melding to their bodies.”

In this new coffeehouse did we find ourselves, and everyone including myself was autistic. It could have been a parallel universe where only autistic coffee drinkers appreciated the minimalism of newspapers and books, but it wasn’t. It was a brave new world, where humans were all idiot savants, all serving their specific purposes for artificial intelligence. We two men were the coffeehouse savants amidst the apprentices. Everyone said hello in this coffeehouse, and all of these autistic women were not handicapped but in tune with us on the same spectrum. Hello, hello, hello. There were no laptops, there were no smartphones, there were no earbuds, there were only these people. We were the future now, in this other universe, where we stared without fear, bared our souls, surrendered our egos, stood as heroes. Having survived the ravages of genetic manipulation in that dumbed down era, we were society’s norm now. The world as we knew it was running on autopilot, and artificial intelligence provided everything for us, whether it was transportation, protection or digestion. We didn’t need an education in Liberal Arts any longer, and our abstractness was our finest contribution to one another. There was no antiquated civilization or society any longer, but a world of collective individuality.

We had been propelled into the distant future from that place we were before, when our interlocking stares upon blank faces resulted in faint traces. Just as those humans of yesteryear vanished in the Bermuda Triangle, were we in our places, never to return to that time again. We were the greeters of the coffeehouse communal tables. We were all age 25 in this fine future of idiot savants being provided for by the brilliant machines of the earth. All of us were engineered for a purpose, as evolution predestined our destiny. All of those chemicals that made us crazy so many thousands of years ago shaped our genetics, and those that once called us handicap became the minorities, as they faded away over time. Humanity as a whole evolved into a perfected autistic humanity, when feelings returned, when emotions became uninhibited, when eyes fell upon eyes, and words resonated through layers of thick skin. We acted out rarely nowadays, because the cosmic alignment was finally here. No longer ignored, we all emerged out of that coffeehouse together as the artificial sun hid behind superficial clouds. We danced and hummed under the genetic trees, and we pushed those buttons for the electromagnetic movables to take us down those neon, paved grassways. There were still ways to experience mother nature of the old world. We didn’t need force-field protected biospheres. “Hello you”, and “hello me” we kept saying over and over again until it became syncopated over a 5 mile radius. The course-correction of the human race in light of our polluted past was actually a Godsend for our brilliant species. In this perfected world, thanks to artificial intelligence, could we finally be understood as individuals. Time and space had finally aligned, the seconds were no longer hours. But as these thoughts permeated our minds, I thought of myself in that other parallel universe, where I still found myself too self-conscious to stare at that autistic man.

“I sat there still, as silence erupted. I heard the clicks and the clacks of plastic meeting flesh.”

He must have sat there for only 8 or 9 minutes before he stood up and started saying goodbye to all the coffeehouse women. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye! “Goodbye” was all I heard for a good minute or two. He took his plastic cup with seven ice cubes remaining inside, and said goodbye to the only man in that cafe on his walk to the waste basket. He walked back towards me, and said goodbye once more to two more women who were glued to their laptops. He did not look at me. I watched him depart the premises. I sat there still, as silence erupted. I heard the clicks and the clacks of plastic meeting flesh. I put one glove on and neurotically opened the door, fearing human germs on the door handle, even though I did not hear one cough in that coffeehouse. In the distance I saw somebody hovering over an ice cream parlor. It was that autistic man again. He had died from an ice cream overdose. I saw his disembodied spirit emitting psychedelic colors of Red Velvet Cheesecake and Orange Dreamsicle. I saw him off-gassing Polysorbate 80, Mono & Diglycerides, Carrageenan and Propylene Glycol. I saw his chem trails continue off into the night sky, intersecting with distant Hollywood spotlights giving credence to the twilight horizon. Faint sonic booms of robotic hellos and goodbyes reverberated off of buildings and houses. He hadn’t received the attention he deserved in the coffeehouse, but now he had the starring role in an everlasting movie watched by only the stars in the sky.