Ella was a bassist and did not know it. The way she found out was like this. And like that. “Like this, and like that,” the radio was going off, as she stood behind the counter of Esperanto Café, laying whip cream thick over a cup of hot cider. Change ringing in the slammed register. Crackling noise of piped heat, her co-worker wiping the cappuccino whipper with a gentle towel, holding on to the protruding hot machinery a second too long. The music. Entrance door wheezes. Then the bathroom door. Entrance door wheezes, huffing delivery mans drops the package — pipes sing, register slams, change dangles. Co-worker mixes another cappuccino — shoowhooshawashoo — hiiiigh pitch voice rises from a table in the left corner, someone’s hand goes up “check please” — “excuse me my tea…” — “fuck them and their oil” — delivery man and his boxes, and the boxes’ boxes tumbles downstairs. Register. Hiiiiigh. Register. There is a needle, threading it all, a hungry needle pulling everything together — slam — like Joseph’s coat. “…waited for her, freezing ass and smoking one after another like she was a Messiah” — this last one was actually not anything anyone in the café said, it was someone’s thought, not Ella’s own, she was sure, and it was no telepathy either, though maybe telepathy’s psychotic cousin, nameless cousin — door wheezes — “Grandma, let me be completely honest with you…” — cousin nameless but known in jazz sweat, in concentration-plucked jazz lips, corner of a yes, suddenly unfolded table with enough room for everyone, with enough room, enough, …oughfff, ufff, she didn’t know it, didn’t know she was a bassist for another half-minute. Till the man, whose thought she might have heard, or who maybe heard the same thought she did, or maybe heard something completely different, but heard it, with heard hearing, with shearing uh shredding fingers that he dangled over the table as if playing a slanted piano, or typing on a rock, or stretching the cold-stiff fingers in the warmth of Desesperanto, with its slam! and cappuccino shoowhooshawashoo, across the noise, like an octopus, fingers out, as she brought his wwhipped cider to him, the second the cup sat down, an almost human touch of glass-to-wood, eye-to-eye, her head was grooving a little like this and like that, as his fingers landed on the table beside the cup, around the cup, kept playing the surfaces, percussive, silent across the noise, foot pressing the leg of the table like an invisible pedal protruding them out of the hiiiiigh register, past this winter, and cider, which they both understood, was not cider, but seider, the order, universal seider of the needle that sows Joseph’s fatal coat, out of shreds of the microcosmic café reality, and he knew she was a bassist, and she did too — even before he said — “the Everything is a bass you know, you will lose it trying to play it, or grow very, very large, so some of us chose to play the wooden mama-bass instead” and she retorted with a glint corner of a yes, across the whack-swoosh and like this and like that, said “Bass is the Nothing, a black lamp, but when you hit the string against the fret, the blindness becomes hope, hope becomes sound, which then splinters and dies and then it’s time to look for another note, at least that’s what I think, though I don’t believe we’re in disagreement.”