I corner her in a corner cafe - a copper-colored amalgamation of notions that fell carelessly out of mouths and came together, like ribs, for her.

Her coffee pulls itself to her lips, effortless and completely independent of her. 

“We do not speak Spanish in America,” she says.  “Comprende?  Most of the time, we do not speak at all, at least not to one another, unless we are shouting.  It’s hard to hear here, so we shout.” 

The mouth is long cremated, I assume, but the echo rings down the avenue past the hat-man and into the door, looking out, suspicious. 

“Me?”  She asks, offended.  “No, I’m not French, I’ve lived here longer, parts of me were born here, now, added over the years.  I’m French-American.” 

She says that red is the color of energy and is often, in a polychromous gaggle, the one seen first but forgotten last – it stimulates the appetite. 

I ask her where she read that.

“Wikipedia – no, no, I don’t need to check my facts.” 

She says that the end is near, it’s a certainty and that there are no “facts” to check – that it is in itself a “fact” and that therefore there are no prerequisite “facts”. 

I ask her if she can see the newspaper on the table outside but she won’t stand to check the title. 

“This is America,” she says.  “Where you cannot separate, from a distance, at least, the Washington Post from the Penny Saver.” 

I shake my head and mutter something about willful ignorance. 

“I do what I like!”  She says. 

I tell her that willful ignorance is the antithesis of what it is to be human – a position and a craving for knowledge; intellectual curiosity. 

“No, no – human nature?  Is that original sin?” 

Maybe I said something about fighting willful ignorance being a violation of conscience – a persistent effort to destroy ones humanity in order to preserve ones hubris and beliefs. 

“No, no – this is America, to be an American one has to wage a constant war of attrition against ones own conscience, or it doesn’t work.”

Soon she’ll ask me where I go to church and then someone will tell me that God has a plan for me.  When I ask them which God they mean, they do not seem to know His name.