Right Now – DH Reed

April 27, 2026

“..the laughable spectacle of one person milking a he-goat, and another holding the sieve underneath.”

~ Kant, spiraling somewhere in Transcendental Logic about “whys”

It’s best to let go of now. Now, by all advanced scientific measures, is less a moment than a grand central station for realities intersecting: arrivals, departures, clocks disagreeing under the same vaulted ceiling. Your tuning in is a hidden binding, a soul seeking some moiré of consciousness overlapped with another. Who knows why, or even how. Something is clingy to this station.

I don’t believe she wants my existential physics. Not without coffee. Not without wine. Her thumb hovers above the page, ready to scroll as we edit, unmoved- a curious reflection of us in this now, though I have already begun to lose it.

Sulfur stings my nostrils. Yellow, sappy flame. A tiny stick lit by it. I turn my cigar, Gigante, through and over, puffing obnoxiously, making of myself a small, pleased smokestack from the Industrial Revolution. Coal, empire, chimney, child labor, the whole greasy century passing through my mouth as though it were only tobacco.

“Le Bijou?” she asks.

She bends over the cigar, scrutinizing its cursory line work as if it were a little guitar from another country: blades of grass, strings, frets, some handmade object carried across a language barrier. For a moment, she is an old man at a workbench, bleached by craft, holding the thing up to the light. Then she is now. Metaphors lost. She is herself holding a cigar, which is the part I keep failing to survive.

“Mmhmm,” I say.

It comes out too pleased with itself: a Bulldog with Enigma codes, so very Primrose, and then too, U-110 surfacing into her unmoved gaze. Already I have put us in a war. Already she is a key, a machine, a captured secret hauled wet from the Atlantic, a German weather report becoming an English victory. I know this is too much. I know it as it happens. Still the mind reaches for rotors, wires, drowned sailors, the sudden historical mercy of a codebook kept dry.

Maybe she is transcendental. Maybe I was made to misunderstand her.

She billows in just a match-spin-suck, a wise campfire. Then even that will not hold. She returns to her chair, her hand, her mouth, the small practical fact of smoke leaving the body.

This pause: a diving bell, pressure dissolving into the bloodstream. Asphalt burnout for air. A thoughtless spacewalker fixing a myopic Hubble lens above the earth, the whole bright universe blurred until someone touches the flaw directly. I exhale like it’s just smoke, but it is never just smoke for me. It is always nineteenth century, twentieth century, orbit, ocean, code, lens, flame.

She looks at me.

The look has no expectations in it. Whose excursion is this? I wonder back at the pitch and its iridescent halo.

Glittering violets from a disco ball cross the dance room. A salsa class is starting up. Someone laughs. Someone counts badly in Spanish. One, two, three. Five, six, seven. Even the missing beat has more faith in the present than I do.

I look down at the menu, as if the question might be printed there. As if desire were something translated, not risked. One auto-fictional fixed point compressed into a Lerner singularity with no end to its event horizon. Halp.

“Would you like dancing?” I ask.

Her cigar lowers.

“Right now?”

The phone buzzes.

I feel it before I hear it. Then she hears it too. I open the call against my ear and smile at her, as if smiling could keep one world from splitting into two.

“I’m checking out now,” I say. “I’ll be right there.”

There it is. Not a decision, exactly.

Right now might not exist, but a future has collapsed in a real way.

I make the apologetic grimace souls make when they want to be forgiven before they have finished choosing themselves. Bag, bill, the guy up front, the small machinery of departure. My body is already leaving. My mind, for once, is not ahead of it.

Then, as I sign the check, she kisses me.

More than goodbye.

An observation.

The kind that reveals what it measures.

Not historically. Not symbolically. Not as signal, cipher, wound, orbit, code, or flame. Her mouth is warm from smoke.

I am still checked out. I am still going. But now the fact contains its impossible negative: the room where I stayed, the cigar we finished, the dance we missed and somehow entered, the life that passed once through us without becoming ours.

I put the bag down.

Not to stay, but to smile at the credits: a pinhole photograph.

This is our long checkout.

We finish the cigars in looks, my head nodding along to Don’t Lie by Vampire Weekend. I might need some wine before existential physics. I feel like Spaceman, or a potted plant needing growth and a spritz of neem oil.

I finished my water.

I created a lit character to dive deep into something because I have no real love language left but curious rabbit holes that feed my head. She left. I stayed. I should have left.

The Julia character I created held the chaos and nows I was exploring blindly. Yet here, in this cigar bar work, time, attachment, and all my meandering definitions fell silent. My heart thudded in nicotine.

In truth, I stare back from my bay window at the weeks I wrote, projecting forward what it was, after all, that felt comfortable in future plans or past meetings, and how to give myself that more. How do I close over the cues, signs, and signals that brought me back there to sit and ponder by myself? You came back to try this again too many times, and I never felt like I learned much about you.

“Why this quote?” she asks, reading the first line.

“Do you want to share a bottle of wine?” I smile.