The Purple Crane

1.

Suddenly Paper

The paper crane she folded is here on my dashboard. Pointed forward at the road. It probably thinks it’s flying. A purple stain darkens its flesh, which is ridged by intricate, straight origami folds.

I feel like a crane that’s suddenly paper. It plummets out of the sky, turning and turning and turning…

2.

St Xavier’s

Audrey was there because she had been ordered by the municipal court to perform 100 hours of community service, and I was there out of spite.

Let me explain.

St Xavier’s School for Aspiring Sommeliers wasn’t a school so much as a rented ballroom in a gaudy hotel in Napa County in which a very hairy man named Thomas Prophete held cheap wine tastings. Do twenty sessions, pay 40 bucks each time, and you’d get a sheet of paper saying you’d graduated from St Xavier’s School for Aspiring Sommeliers. The fine print at the bottom of the certificate, which is on my office wall behind me as I write this, says “Congratulations, graduate! You are an aspiring sommelier.”

About a dozen or so young people shuffled into the ballroom a few minutes before my first class was scheduled to start. Thomas Prophete was arranging bottles on a fold-out table covered in a burgundy table cloth.

The ballroom was huge and empty. Facing west, the window let in the dull, diffuse light of the cool side of morning. Far out to sea, the water looked warm; here, everything was hollow and shadowed like the inside of an empty wine bottle.

Then Audrey walked in, looking everywhere at once. Up at the ceiling, down at the carpet, a quick sweep of the windows, a succinct appraisal of each human face.

It lingered on mine for just a moment longer than the others. I think.

3.

Legs

The third session. Merlot day. We were swirling our wine in our glasses for reasons that Thomas Prophete still had not made entirely clear.

“Legs,” our teacher said simply when a newcomer in a Hawaiian shirt and Tevas asked.

“Legs?” Audrey repeated. It was the first time she spoke. She’d been nervously folding her napkin into a star with her free hand and swirling with the other.

“We’re trying to get a look at this merlot’s legs,” Thomas replied tersely.

“Why? What are wine legs? ” Audrey asked.

“They are also called ‘tears’ sometimes,” Thomas explained. He held his glass up at eye level and swirled it more vigorously, holding it out at arm’s length as if he had a snake by the head and was trying to make it dizzy so he could let go. “Larmes du vin. They indicate sweetness.”

“I thought,” murmured Audrey, half to herself, “ it was correlated with surface tension. Why would it have anything to do with sugar content?”

“I don’t know about that,” Thomas Prophete smiled. His hand was still raised, swirling and swirling the wine. “I am not a physicist or a surface tension expert. I am a mere sommelier.”

Thomas began to rattle off facts about the merlot grape, and then bade us sip. The wine not at all sweet, although I wasn’t confident enough at the time to trust my palette. It tastes sweet to me now. I have a bottle of the same kind on my desk. A different year, though with this brand I’m not so sure that matters much.

As we sipped, Audrey turned to me, and whispered, “I don’t mean to sound like a ‘Karen,’ but I think he’s full of it.”

I laughed. “How so?”

“Well, I am a physicist. Not to be a show-off or anything. A particle physicist. I won’t bore you with the details, but I’d be the sort of person who would know about ‘surface tension.’”

Thomas, hearing Audrey’s whispers, shot her an uncomfortable frown as he passed around the baguette basket. Audrey noticed. She raised an eyebrow, and said, “Oh, we’re not allowed to whisper? So this really is a school after all!” Thomas merely raised an eyebrow and said nothing. Audrey downed her glass and strode out of the room, more annoyed than I’d realized.

On our little round table, beside Audrey’s empty glass (the legs of its late wine were slowly descending) was a crane. A perfect origami crane.

4.

Acrobat

As I walked into the hotel lobby with a pleasant pre-lunch buzz, I noticed Audrey sitting at the hotel bar with a glass of whisky.

I sat down beside her, hoping to keep the buzz going.

“Hello Dr Particle Physicist,” I said, immediately regretting it. Came off as impertinent rather than playful. She blushed.

“Hello Dr Acrobat.”

“Acrobat??”

“I have nicknames in my head for all the regulars. You’re ‘Acrobat.’ Your long legs,” she added, seeing my confusion.

I laughed.

“So why are you hoping to be an aspiring sommelier?” I asked.

“Community service,” Audrey replied, taking a very small sip of her whisky.

“Community service?”

“I accumulated a few too many parking tickets and had to go to court for it last month. I’d been picking up garbage for a few weeks before I noticed St Xavier’s. No brainer. I now drink wine to get my community service hours.”

“Come again?”

“Squatch (aka Thomas) has cleverly set up St Xavier’s as a non-profit meant to contribute to and exhibit Napa County’s cultural heritage. By coming and participating, I’m volunteering for my community.”

“But it costs money.”

“Not for me. Thomas gets me in for free.”

“You don’t even pay?”

Audrey smiled and took another coy little sip.

“What about you?” she asked.

“Spite,” I answered.

“Spite? How so?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Tell me.”

“Over a drink?”

“This is a drink.”

“Over a future drink?”

5.

The Future Drink

Audrey was one of these people who give the impression of having some kind of dark secret. It’s in the way they never initiate or return a greeting. In the brief time I knew her, Audrey never once said “Hello” or “Goodbye.” This has a queer effect. You kind of slide into their presence like a car merging on the highway, or when you look up and the moon is there but you didn’t see it rise.

So when I got to the bar, she was already there, and returned my “hello” by wordlessly retrieving a small cardboard box from her purse and setting it on the bar-top with a grin.

“Nice box you got there,” I offered.

Audrey laughed and called over the bartender. She ordered a glass of merlot. I did the same. The bartender openly sighed and went to the back room to fish out the one lonely bottle of wine that they kept in stock just in case two old nerds like us ever wandered in. I doubt it was merlot, but who knows.

“Thank you,” she said, finally, when we had two over-full glasses of thick, dark liquid in front of us. “It’s a nice little box. It used to hold a ring, I think.”

“Romantic.”

“Indeed. I brought it because I always feel more confident when I bring a prop to a first date.”

“That’s a good idea.”

“Thanks. Helps with nerves.”

“You can’t be that nervous,” I chuckled.

She shook her head. “I’m not, but why break a good habit?”

“So what’s inside?”

“A cat.”

“That’s a pretty small cat.”

“It’s a hypothetical cat, and hypothetical cats can be as small or big as you like.”

She brought the hypothetical cat-in-the-box, she explained, in order to illustrate an interesting point in particle physics. She apologized too much for this, and hedged too much, telling me that we could change the subject at any time if I was getting bored. I insisted that I thought it was interesting. After half her merlot was gone, she slid into her mini-lecture with a bit more ease.

“You know the whole ‘Schrodinger’s Cat’ thing?”

“I’ve heard of it,” I said.

“It’s an analogy meant to illustrate paradox in particle physics. You have a cat in a box.”

“Okay. Like this one.”

“Yeah, like this one. We have this little cat in this little box.” (With her right hand, Audrey held the box; with her left, she was fiddling with her napkin, making intricate folds and tears expertly, unconsciously: a nervous tick). “The story goes that there is some poison in the box along with the cat. There is also a little device that detects radiation. If this device does detect any radiation happening (this is supposed to just stand in for any random input; you could just as well have a device that detects burps in Times Square, or lightning over Mt Everest), then the poison will disburse, killing the cat. Schrodinger’s interpretation of physics says that from an outside perspective, as in, not being able to see inside the box, the cat is literally alive and dead at the same time. Because, according to Schrodinger, that’s what’s literally happening on the quantum level. But look inside the box, he says, and obviously you’re going to see whether or not the cat is dead. So it’s a question of perspective. By not looking, you permit both realities to be true.”

“Can physicists look inside the box?”

Audrey smiled cryptically. By way of answer, she put her fingers into the folds of the box, and slid them under the tape. She pulled the folds apart. From inside, she pulled out a small object: a little origami cat.

The stereo system in the bar was playing an Ella Fitzgerald song: “Just One of Those Things.” The cat glimmering in the low bar light.

I felt like a bell that only rings now and then. And tonight, I was ringing.

6.

The Purple Crane

“We never exchanged phone numbers,” I pointed out. Audrey had half a glass left, and I’d finished mine, and the clock showed a late hour. The natural flow of the date was winding down, and I thought, now’s my chance.

Audrey smiled that mysterious smile. She took a pen from her purse, and a fresh napkin, and wrote down ten digits. She then quickly and skillfully folded the napkin into a paper crane and handed it to me. I gently placed it next to my cat.

As we rose to leave, a careless movement of Audrey’s arm struck her glass of merlot and sent it tumbling. Red liquid flowed over the bartop. An errant splash struck the crane.

In the Uber home, I was half angry at myself for not asking Audrey to come back to my place but half triumphant in securing the phone number and the implicit promise of another date.

When I got home, I carefully placed my new origami pets, which I’d been carefully carrying in the palms of my hands, on my kitchen table. It was now that I saw that the crane was covered in wine.

Totally saturated. It had half-dried by now, so the crane wasn’t too limp and still retained its shape quite well, but completely red.

One digit poked out from a fold. It was blurred; the left half was illegible, but the right half resolved into what looked like the side of a “9.” The rest of the digits were concealed inside the crane.

Beside the crane was my little paper cat.

Schrodinger’s cat.

I’ve gone back to that bar maybe a dozen times in the last year, always on the same day and time as our date, but I haven’t seen Audrey. Nor has she come back to St Xavier’s School for Aspiring Sommeliers. I even once Google searched physics professors in the state, and tromped through faculty directories, but didn’t find anything.

The crane lives on my dashboard. Inside its ruby-purple body, Audrey’s phone number is both intact and destroyed. I could open the crane and find out, sure. The numbers might in fact be readable.

Maybe someday I will. Probably not.