The Traffic Light

Lunch ended in a frantic rush; the hour hand had already run out of patience and crept to 10. Damn — had to hurry. I peeled off the T-shirt still soaked from the morning at the gym, turned on the shower for a quick hot rinse, stepped out, toweled off, and inspected myself in the mirror for anything improper. Nails! Ignoring my half-dried hair, I hurriedly trimmed them, turning them over to check for any edge left uneven — all fine. I filed them at an unhurried pace, put everything in order, confirmed once more that nothing could go wrong, opened the door, closed it, and with a ding the first floor had been raised up to the metal double doors. Stepping out, I glanced at my watch: 1:05. Good, good. Everything within acceptable error.

Push, pull — today it’s a green-apron coffee shop. Starbucks or Luckin, cheap instant or a home pour-over, none of that is the point at this hour. You have to understand: a coffee shop’s main business has never been selling coffee. It only needs to be coffee — that’s the one requirement, and of course it must be pure, unassimilated by milk or sugar. These fussy little details are obviously beside the point. What matters is finding a place where you can settle in comfortably for a while, a place with no connection to you, a place beyond your knowing — whatever it is, as long as it lets you slip away for a moment. The medium roast arrived in a white mug: steam, a wooden table, a leather bench, a keyboard clacking at the next table. I am a believer in paper books, though not a zealot — a thick pocket-format volume would have been far more conspicuous here than a Mac. Luckily the thing called the internet arrived in time. “Internet!” I cried, and it effortlessly peeled away the bloated wood-pulp husk, leaving the thick soul laid out on a screen.

Not long after, the traffic light sat down across from me and started in with pleasantries. I hadn’t always known the traffic light; I had only seen him a few times by the roadside. After I had spent a few days savoring these fine solitary afternoons, he invited himself over. I felt no dislike for him. Here I knew no one, and no one asked why you had come; he and I were simply doing what one does here, enjoying this narrow, counterfeit space. “Thank you, almighty capitalism” — those were my first words on my first visit. Seeing my attention drift slightly from the screen, he struck up a conversation, beginning, naturally, with an interview-style self-introduction: from the very first moment of his birth straight through to the second before he spoke to me — sincerely, naturally, falsely, affectedly, the purpose simple: keep the interviewer happy. And clearly, I was happy. Then it was my turn, and I offered a compact version of a freshly fabricated lie — some bullshit painter, some freelancer, whatever suited my mood. I could be this, I could be that; none of it mattered here. “Doesn’t matter!” the crowd shouted in unison. Right. This was ceremony through and through. No one here cared who you really were; no one was foolish enough to puncture this quiet, self-satisfied fiction. It was the ad reel before the film — a necessary boredom.

He was quite struck by my reading a book in a coffee shop. I told him there was no need for astonishment — treat it as my watching an atrocious film in a theater, the only difference being that once a film starts it plays beyond your control, your head forced forward while garbage is poured in; a book, happily, is not full, and leaves plenty of detail for you to supply yourself, which gives you the illusion of thinking. “I like this fake thinking,” I told him. “Understandable,” he replied. I still like films, I said — I like experiencing someone else’s life without having to do anything at all. He felt the same; he said that was exactly how he took his pleasure. I was puzzled. “You’re only a traffic light. How do you experience anything?” And he began to explain to me, word by word.

“Humans are strange creatures. They claim to be born free, then draw up all sorts of rules deciding what may and may not be done. I simply exploit that stupid split.”

He went on: “I’m nothing but an iron pole with two lamps. What freedom do I have? What power? But the moment I start blinking — red to green, green to red — without explanation, indifferent, unapproachable, I suddenly become an inviolable truth.”

“But it’s fake.”

“Exactly right. I actually can’t do anything but keep blinking — red to green, green to red. Naturally some people know perfectly well I am nothing inviolable and walk straight across the asphalt ignoring me, which is fine; I certainly have no power to punish them. But here comes the exquisite part: those who dare not defy me can’t bear to see anyone so at ease, so they bound their lives to me, declaring that whoever disobeys my command will have their life taken by an oncoming car.”

“But people still defy you.”

“True. But I’m a lump of iron stuck in the road with cement — being defied is only natural. Obedience is the real oddity!”

I nodded. He continued.

“And so I acquired the power to control most people’s time. I switch off the green, light the red, and they are stuck before me, unable to move. Of course, I’m no brutal monarch issuing ruthless laws — unreasonableness would make them doubt my legitimacy. Just give them a countdown, and they have hope of regaining freedom; wait a moment and they may walk again. And so, until the countdown ends, I am the sole truth, and no one questions my orders. Enduring a few dozen seconds of unfreedom in exchange for the guarantee of life — that is the consensus of everyone I detain.”

“So you abuse it without scruple,” I said.

“Exactly right — utterly without scruple,” he laughed. “But I don’t do it for fun; that would be far too dull, and it grew boring soon enough. You know, as a traffic light, besides wielding the absolute of total violence, once my existence becomes reasonable, I naturally and completely vanish from people’s eyes.”

“Oh? How so?”

“There I shed the meaning of form and became a real nothingness. Think about it: no one studies a traffic light, checking how its paint has peeled away in the wind and rain; no one cares how long ago it was manufactured, what hauled it here, who planted it in cement, when it was wired up and made functional. People only care what color the light is and how long the countdown has left. My concrete existence is merely the physical basis of those two facts — a meaningless thing. If one day I were gone and only a red glow and a green glow floated in the air, doing what I used to do, no one would notice the absurd change. They would still look down at their phones, waiting for the red to turn green.”

I drank my cold coffee. He went on.

“And so I can observe — carefree, bold, wanton — peering at whoever stops before me, whoever walks past: men, women, the able-bodied, the disabled, talkers, headphone-wearers, milk-tea carriers, Gucci wearers, LV carriers, the drunk asleep on the street — so many, so many. It’s like sitting in a cinema with the whole screen to yourself. I need only blink red to green, green to red — without explanation, indifferent, unapproachable.”

“Marvelous!”

“Of course. I slice other people’s lives at will, taking only the present few dozen seconds, ignoring everything before and after, savoring the fresh sliver — if I like it I watch it a few more times, if not I toss it immediately.”

“A film edited at random.”

“Precisely. No need to care whether the story makes sense; cause and effect, right and wrong — all tossed aside. Just splice all the favorite clips together at random, play, watch. Nothing else.”

“Marvelous.” Too lazy to find new words of praise, I simply borrowed the previous line.

The traffic light said nothing more. In a coffee shop — a structure of pure capitalism — you cannot state your desires aloud, because they are fulfilled before they leave your mouth. I knew perfectly well he was waiting for my story, but I decided to wait, so I sipped my cold coffee slowly, not reading a word of the book, only turning pages. Damn it — the nail of my right index finger still had a sharp corner waiting to be filed.

“I’m different from you,” I said reluctantly, as the coffee quickly reached bottom. “I can’t spend whole days living other people’s lives. Whenever you get too carefree, an inviolable force hammers the back of your head, leaving you dizzy and thoughtless; it pries your eyes open to face the tedious reality — reports, prices, deadlines arriving in succession, occupying all the time after before you can react. When you finally lose patience, it mercifully grants you this thing called money, and then all manner of miscellany swarms in and devours it; when you come to, your hands are already empty, and it starts again from the beginning.”

“Utterly boring,” the traffic light ruled, objectively and fairly.

“Exactly — utterly boring. Which is why I have no choice but to spend my afternoons experiencing other people’s fictional lives.”

He said nothing — perhaps it was truly too boring — and I fell silent too. Time took the chance to sneak off; when I noticed, it had long since run far away.

At least there’s tomorrow — that’s genuinely what I thought. A coffee stain had streaked down the white outer wall of the mug. “You filthy thing!” The crowd denounced the mug. I felt ill placed to join in, so I slunk off, leaving the mug alone in the coffee shop to endure the verbal siege.

At least there’s tomorrow. That’s roughly what I believed.