The Edwardsaga

At the foot of Alvern Hill in Lesenstadt, Lancastre boulevard ran from Schloss Mohnton to the river where it crossed Ulysses bridge into the city proper. Along this boulevard was café row, which university students kept full during the learning semesters. 

Édouard was there having lunch at Chez-Bordelaise, his favorite spot from his Alvern stint. Dejeuner with professors Dr. Blossange, who always allowed him to turn papers in late, and Dr. O’Donnell, who did not, was interrupted by his fixation on a new radio tower that’d gone up in the Wyomissing neighborhood of the city. The profs looked over at it and mentioned “we saw the thing go up last month.”

“But why is it there? It’s excessively tall.”

“That’s the new Lord’s Beacon,” said Dr. Blossange. “The span of its highest tension cables from their points of contact with the ground are almost a mile wide. There are three sets of five of guy anchors holding up the structure.”

“I want to see it up close.” 

Their lunch went back to previous matters of conversation. When concluded, Édouard couldn’t help but be drawn to the tower. It wasn’t out of a sense of wonder at the engineering feat but more for a sense of morbid curiosity. The thought of being at the top did not inspire from a suicidal desire but the opposite. The feeling of being so close to death and rejecting it, was the source. To look at one’s hand clenching the metal lattice and acknowledge the fact you could simply let go and death be ensured. He saw a complete control over the momentary binary between the clenching hand of life and the open palm of free fall. One may argue that such a feeling could be inspired by any structure where life sits on the edge of the will. But for Édouard, it is only the most extreme and heroic places that lend this feeling any value. The value of this feeling itself is in the conquest of the temptation to never feel the nearness of death. By feeling the nearness, you feel the presence of life. His survival from the fall a week earlier perhaps fueled a desire to put himself back in that scenario, despite not wanting to relive the old outcome.

He had to go see this marvel for himself. He took an omnibus trolley north through Kenhorst tunnel and past La Musée de Lire. He disembarked at Bocksheer and walked the rest of the way to Wyomissing plain, the home of the spire. The plane rolled up the side of a low rising ridge. The tower’s base and tower house sat a quarter up the slope, which rose to the ridgeline overlooking a large manmade lake. 

He walked down the lane to the tower transmission house, peering up the whole way. The facility was retrofitted onto the historic Rundgren farmhouse. The front half of the house was not occupied by the transmission apparatus, but by a coffeeshop. The tower’s base rested 30 yards from the house. Outside were four young women and a matriarch dressed in Mennonite clothes, all tending to the garden. 

Édouard approached them and asked, “Could you tell me about this tower.” He pointed to it and looked way up to the top, resisting vertigo.

“Yes, it’s quite tall. It’s a lightning rod for our coffeeshop.”

“Really? Why is it so tall?” 

“We power all our operations with the electricity we capture. Lightning likes to strike the tallest thing it can find. We wanted the best odds.” 

“Oh, I see. Is the shop open?”

“Yes, go on in,” said the matriarch. 

The sign on the door said Lightning Rod Coffee. He looked over at the tower again and felt his stomach wrench slightly. When the wind whipped across the plain, you could hear the cables stretching and contracting. The tower swayed slightly. The base of the structure looked like it tremored slightly, resisting an imagined imminent buckling.

Through the door brought him into a modernist Italian style café, with smooth silver metal and red geometric shapes placed about the interior. The lights were dim in the seating area but bright behind the bar for illuminated espresso preparation. 

A barista with an uncanny resemblance to a local well-known actor took his order. He introduced himself as Phil. He was tall and had reddish self-elevating curly hair.

“Hi, I’m Phil,” he held out his hand to be shaken. Édouard gripped the hand that did not grip back. Phil held his hand straight like a board. 

“Hi Phil, I’d like a double please.” 

Phil broke from the register at a running pace and pulled an espresso at breakneck speed, flinging the demi-tasse onto the bar almost sliding it over the other end. 

“Whoa, thank you!”

“4/5th mohnote please.”

Édouard handed him a 2M coin and said keep the change. 

“Thank you, sir,” Phil said with dilated pupils and a faint coloring of red veins encroaching from the corners. Édouard took the coffee and sat down, chuckling a bit.