Fiction: Pooka Dreams Part 3

That evening, he came to work with me. He sat in my section and watched me make my rounds. It was a busy night, yet not once did I ever feel pressured, or that I was losing my patience with the customers.

Seeing him sit there, amongst everything with which I was familiar, lent a feeling of newness to the previously mundanity of the job. For the first time in years, I saw the people behind the hunger and the waiting. People like me, stuck in dead-end jobs, waiting for a break that might never come, saying that “this is just for now“, and fearing that they will become used to accepting less. I saw the pleasure of having a good meal with good friends, uncolored by worry for tomorrow. I saw the pride in the eyes of parents, as they fed their child and caught each other's glance, as if to say, “We did this, didn't we? This is our baby.“ I saw the taking off of the day's coat, heavy with anxious thoughts, and the lifting of the shoulders, strong again, resting after a day of toil, knowing that the hours of work were safely past, and the job had been done.

Somehow, he gave it all back to me: the sense of being an actor on a stage, the patrons as the audience. Every night a new crowd, a new show. Every night a chance to perform afresh, to make the old standards live again. To make the audience forget who they were for a while.

Between tables I realized out of nowhere that I didn't know his name. I went to pour him more water and asked him, suddenly shy and feeling foolish. He grinned and twitched his nose at me and said “My name is Jasper.“

* * *

We talked often, Jasper and I, about everything and nothing. He had a boundless interest in the world that was difficult to restrain. He wanted to know all about everything, and would run up to strangers and talk to them if he thought they were interesting.

“What is that?“ He'd say to the construction worker, jackhammering his way into the street. “What a lot of noise it makes! How does it work?“ And I, following in his wake, would wince away from the shout, or the blow, that I thought must surely come. But instead of the anger that I expected, the accosted person would smile, or laugh, and explain in detail the things that he wanted to know.

Over the course of months I watched him befriend policemen on motorcycles (“That's a strange looking cart!“), computer salesmen (“Make it do that sound again!“), pilots in airports (“But how can it fly without flapping its wings?“), mail carriers (“You really know where all this stuff goes?“), and even the dour old chef at my restaurant (“Can I try that noodle stuff again?“).

There seemed to be something about Jasper that made people want to be nice to him. When I asked him about it, he said it was because people sensed that there was no threat coming from him. “I'm just a silly pooka, after all,“ he said.

I don't want to hold you and feel so helpless
I don't want to smell you and lose my senses
And smile in slow motion with eyes in love
-- "Foolish Love", Rufus Wainwright