"You find the place okay?"  She had changed her hair color again.

"Yeah," I said.  "I just looked under the potato and there it was."

"Oh, ha ha."

"Yeah," I said.  "Ha ha.  So, what's good here?"

She pointed with her chopsticks to her plate.

"What's that, fish?"

"Salmon, to be exact."

"Teriyaki?"

"What is this, a test?"

"Okay, okay."

"You can see the sauce from where you're standing, right?"

"Okay, okay."  I walked up to the small counter, where the tiny woman was trying to rub a spot of grease more deeply into the glass counter.  I waited until she looked up.  "Could I get the teriyaki salmon, with no sauce?"

"What?"

"Um, teriyaki salmon?  With no sauce?"

"Drink?"

"Uhhh, Sprite?"

The woman nodded, hollered something to the beaded curtain behind her,  and then pressed buttons on the register.  "Seven ninety-six."

The change she gave me, like the glass counter, was greasy, occluded.    "Do I get a number?" I asked.

"No.  No.  I call you."

I went back and sat down.   Carrie rolled her head loosely, scaling it forward and back. She was almost done with her food.

"Thanks for waiting."

She stopped rolling her head, glanced  at where I sat, then started rolling her head again.  "I did wait."

"You were eating before I came here!"

"I've been here for half an hour.  I was about to pass out."

"Really?  What time did you get here?"

Her shoulders also started rolling.  The tiny woman yelled, "Teriyaki salmon!!"

I got up and took the plate from her. I looked at the plate and hesitated.  "Uh...." The emulsified teriyaki sauce gleamed in the light.  The tiny woman looked at me.  I walked back and sat down, then got up and got plastic  utensils from a tiny row of styrofoam cups.  I went back to my shining food and sat down, sighing.

"What?" Carrie said. "it looks great."

"It looks amniotic. I ordered it without sauce."

Carrie shrugged, and started reaching around in the pockets of her crusty leather jacket.   "Take it back, then."

"No," I said.  "It's fine."

Carrie snorted, and removed a battered box of Pall Mall cigarettes, then patted the front of herself with one hand.  The salmon was cold and the sauce was warm and sweet.  I poked at the vegetables, cross-sections of carrots and samples of broccoli.

"These vegetables are less than sprightly."

Carrie lit her cigarette with a disposable pink lighter.  "All you ever do," she said as she flicked at the lighter, "is bitch about your food."

"You'd bitch, too.  You just can't taste anything anymore."

Carrie took a long loving drag  on her cigarette, and her eyes fluttered in what was either ecstasy or maybe just the memory of ecstasy.  She exhaled, and the small cloud of seppurating smoke spun around her head.  "And that's just the way I like it," she said.

"In fact, that's why you like this place.  Not because the food is any good, but because they let you smoke in here."

Carrie breathed in again, the ash measuring the intensity of her desire.  "That's simply not true," she said.  "If there's a lot of people of here they make me smoke in the kitchen."

"You get to smoke in the kitchen?"

She nodded, pursed her lips to one side and exhaled.  "I'm their best customer."

I looked around the empty restaurant, the stained tables, the mirrored walls striated with dirt.  "You're their only customer."

"That's not true.  This place gets packed at lunch.  All these places do. All these office buildings around here?  It's like the elevators release ravenous hounds every day at noon."

"Whatever.  You can't deny why you made me come here--so you could smoke and I could get food poisoning."

Carrie exhaled and shook her head.  I pushed my plate away, leaving my white plasticware lodged in the middle of the fish like flags of surrender.  I watched her finish her cigarette.  She ground it out on the styrofoam plate.

"So," I said, "how are you?  Are you okay?"

She rolled her eyes.

"What?"

She lit another cigarette.  "Nothing.  It's just a bullshit question."

"I want to know how you are."

"That's what everyoen says, but they don't really.  Generally, it means 'let's talk about something else besides me for a little while.'"

"You think that's what I'm saying.  All I've done is complain about my impending fish-related death."

"Oh, I know."  Carrie looked up at the ceiling.  "I didn't mean you."

"Well, I was the one asking the question, Carrie." I decided to give the food another try and reached for the plate again.  "Who else did you mean?"

"You know, everyone.  All those playahs, the datahs, the girly-hatahs.  The world is about them.  Even the most generous wisest person lives their life like it's about them.  Even their attempts to see the bigger pictures are always 'where do I fit into the big picture.'"

"Hmm." I was developing a taste for the beansprouts, which had been dipped in something sweet.  "Sounds like transference to me."

"Oh, sure," Carrie said.  "I'm not saying I don't do it.  I'm just not a hypocrite about it.  When I get tired of talking about me, worryig about me, sharing my latest breakthroughs about me with everyone around me about me, I don't go, "Soooo, how about you?  How are you?'

"You don't?"

"No.  I just smoke.  My lovely friend the cigarette, who wants nothing more than for me to be happy and contented."

"And dead."

Carrie waved her hand about, like expelling the smoke around her head, the miasmatic halo that hung around her.  She smiled.  "I think I should be dead, Pud."

I looked down at my plate.  No appetite at all.  Under the light, the fishmeat looked like it had been colored with children's crayons.  "Don't say shit like that."

"Well, even if I didn't, I'm going to be dead soon anyway"

"You're twenty-seven, Carrie."

"I mean in the vast scope of things.  Even if I live to be 205, some disembodied head floating in a jar of brine, that's nothing compared to how long the world has been around.  Or the sun, or most of the stars. We're just little flashbulbs, winking out over the landscape.  Like cities seen at night."

"Are you writing these days?"

"Don't change the subject, Pud."

"Sorry."

"So--" Carrie exhaled.  "Shit.  Where was I?"

"Flash bulbs."

"Oh, right." she thought for a moment.  "Ahhh, fuck it.  Anyway:  cigarettes are my friend, my only true blue friend."

"Do you want this?"

Carrie pointed with her cigarette.  "That?  No way."

"I thought you liked the food here."

"You gummed every piece of it, than put it back on your plate.  I swear, Pud, your manners are something terrible."

"I don't smoke when other people are eating.  "

"That's not manners," Carrie said.  "That's California pussyism."

"California pussyism."

Carrie waggled her eyebrows.  "Like it?  This dickhead in accounting said that the other day on the elevator.  What an asshole.  He  wasn't talking about smoking, but you knew what he meant.  One of those east coast guys who thinks the entire state is effete and mincing just because we have same-sex partner laws in a few cities.  I really hate pricks like that.  I wanted to tell him, "listen, you dick, this state is filled with redneck shitbirds that think you're the effete mincing fuckhead just because your asparagus green socks match your asparagus green tie."

Carrie shook her coke can, then dropped her cigarette inside it, lit another.  "It's a shame because generally I like accountants.  They're so mild.  They're like the little unbarking dogs of the business world.  They just stand there in the hall and shake. I think it's because they actually know the financial status of the company where they work.  They're always aware of money, and what people are willing to do for it, like the company is always on the verge of bankruptcy and they can't tell anyone."

"Nice theory."

"Yeah, I'm proud of it.  Anyway, I like accountants.  Except this dickhead."

"Sounds like I'm really missing out on corporate life."

You are, Pud. "  Carrie inhaled on her cigarette and it was as I could see her shrink before my eyes doing it.  "You surely are."