‘Italian' coffeeshop. Best in Montreal.
...
Wearing a faded leather jacket, a week-old blonde beard and a smile with a hint of exhaustion on his creasing face, he alternates between an unknown brand of cigarettes and a porcelain cup half-full with dark coffee. We shake hands and I tell him my name, spelling it out. He doesn’t tell me his.
Next, I meet gnomon, an Azerbaijani hacker with a PhD in cryptography, wearing a plaid sweater that looks like it hasn’t seen the inside of a washing machine in a year. He wears it as an extension of himself, as if it has diffused into his skin. He has chipped nail paint, a different colour on each fingernail. Runs his fingers through dirty brown hair in the interstices between his sentences.
I smile. I’d romanticized them, mapped them to cultural stereotypes and reduced them to a pastiche.
...
He smokes and sips. He’s quitting soon, he remarks offhand, so he’s trying to go through as many as he can before he does. I order a slice of cake and a cappuccino. When in an Italian coffeeshop...
The French man behind the counter pours the coffee into a tiny cup and slices a slice of coffee cake. Outside the coffeeshop door the day dusks delicately, the daylight demurely dying. I drink. My cappuccino is delicious.
gnomon slides out his laptop - a silver machine with an EFF sticker obscuring the manufacturer logo. We start.
