“Can I help the next person!” It’s not spoken as a question. Nargiza (so says the gold bar name badge pinned to her black polo) calls me to the newly opened register. She, the manager, is hopping on to open the relief valve on a line building up behind me.
“I’ll take a number one,” I say, “with no mustard or mayonnaise.”
The number one comes with no mustard—only mayonnaise and ketchup. Did I want just the ketchup then? Yes. With cheese on that? Yes, with cheese.
“Nargiza. Is that how you say it?”
It is.
“What a beautiful name.”
“Order number five,” says Nargiza and hands me my receipt. For a moment, half a moment, she smiled. “Next in line please!”
I step back into the school of circling passengers, waiting with one hand resting on the raised handles of our roll-away suitcases and the other cradling our smart phones. Reflexively, I reach toward my pocket, to sate the ever-present hunger for a morsel, just a morsel, of email. That’s when I see her.
Over the counter, beyond Nargiza’s round, sloping shoulder, through the cut-away window linking the broiler room to the registers, I see her. She’s sixteen, maybe seventeen or eighteen with a young face, her features delicate, long, dark hair pulled off of her neck by the strap of an oversized visor that matches the polo shirts. She’s wearing crystal studs in her ears and, visible when she smiles to herself, braces on her teeth. Both her lips and earlobes are like her visor, a little too big for her head, a little bird-like and cartoonish as a result, and all the more lovely for it.
She’s absorbed in her work, which I watch, a theme with variations. First she looks up at a screen of some kind, invisible to me, hanging slightly above her (she is quite short). Her eyes move to precisely that point on the hidden surface where they will glean the information they need. Then her chin and attention tilt down to the stainless steel counter, she reaches to her right, presses her fingers onto the corner of a square of wrapping paper upon which an open-faced burger lays prostrate for its adornment, and slides paper and burger in front of the hard plastic tubs nestled in front of her. Her hands, wrapped in oversized plastic gloves, move quickly to the pale tomato slices, the ridged pickle chips floating in saline juice, a pinchful of diced onions and a handful of shredded lettuce—then out come the flat-edged blades to slab ketchup, mustard (not mine), and mayonnaise (definitely not mine) on the naked half of the bun, which she then flips on top of the veggie-and-patty pile—immediately, her hands move outward to the corners of the waxy paper, which she folds into triangles and brings in to the center above the burger, tucking in the edges with her spare fingers all the while. She turns the package, lifts it; her right hand produces a black artist’s pencil and marks something on the paper. Finis. At last she turns outward, through the window, toward me, drops the burger down the sloped aluminum chute, where it rests for a moment, before Nargiza picks it up, puts it in a brown paper bag already steaming with fries, folds down the top of the bag and says:
“Order number two!”
It’s horrible, of course, what lies behind that burger. You think of the cows. There are many, many sharp machines between a calf in her momma’s belly and the burger in that bag. You think of the kids in college who became vegetarians over that.
I think they became vegetarians because they hungered for the real, for Reality, more than a comfortable hamburger. Wake up! This is really happening, and you’re a part of it! That’s what their choices said. It’s pretty unimpeachable, that witness to, not just violence, but hidden violence. Shine the light on reality. How does a burger really get to you in the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport?
And yet, and yet, and yet…Reality is like a germ, or a bamboo plant, that you can’t snuff out, can’t quite root out of the system, no matter where along the production line you find yourself, because part of how a burger gets to you in the lonely, invigorating amoeba of strangers in the airport food court is through that girl.
Three bags later, Nargiza calls my number. She almost smiles at me again, and then I’m gone, she’s gone, the girl in the window is gone, just like all beautiful things eventually.
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