Dopecentury XLIV --- The Tea Stand
This short fiction is part of Dopecentury, an experimental project where I attempt to channel the aural aesthetics of Dopesmoker into written text. (Dopesmoker is the legendary stoner-doom metal masterpiece by the band Sleep, of which it is said: "the monotony rarely becomes tedious.") My plan is to listen to the single hour-long track of Dopesmoker while writing each of these "Dopecentury" entries. And repeat that 100 times. See the Dopecentury project page for more details.
The line for the tea stand always extended beyond the door, at least during the morning hours; this was without regard for the weather; or maybe it should be said that the line did in fact regard the weather, just not with the cause-and-effect relationship that a person who does not take time to consider such things might expect; for the line was much longer during the cold months, inclement weather drew more people to the tea stand, not fewer; perhaps because on a pleasant sunny day (even a cool one) the people of the city, on the whole, were maybe less inclined to stand in a long line waiting for tea; a pleasant day was one for moving about; on the freezing cold days — when the condensation on the windows of the tea stand froze and then cracked in a pattern that shattered the light coming from within, and the people stood in a long closely-huddled line, perhaps sheltered from foul sleeting precipitation by a flock of bumping umbrellas — those were the days people felt like the best thing to do was to gather with a bunch of fellow denizens of the city and stomp their feet and smoke their cigarettes and blow on their cold wet fingers together; foul weather meant finding out some similar hardy souls to dig out the patience and endurance to form a queue together.
Not that experiencing a line together was the only reason to be out on the sidewalk. No one would deny that the true reward for suffering together out in the hard cold on the pale concrete sidewalk was to eventually secure a cup of tea; It should perhaps also be said that the existence of the line every day (at least during morning hours) was in no small part a function of the size of the tea stand; For it was not a tea shop, but a mere stand: once a patron finally got beyond the narrow glass windows that framed the wooden door (carved all over with a flock of starlings, each exhibiting something of an individual personality) there was room for but two, maybe three people to stand at most; there was only a shallow space and then a thick wood-block counter behind which one or two purveyors of tea (depending on the busyness of the season) worked; and it was narrow enough that a large person with their arms spread could touch the walls on either side.
Behind the workers serving tea was the machine that made the tea, and it was unlike any other method of brewing tea anywhere; full of iron piping and carved brass fitting, a variety of gauges and dials, valves and knobs, tanks of gleaming brass, and wooden control levers worn soothe by the hands of workers over time; the machine had been there as long as the tea stand, at least one-hundred and fifty years.
The machine brewed tea by some alchemic combination of heat, pressure, and time that only maybe three people in the entire city understood; there was a risk at one point of the understanding of the function of the machine being lost entirely to the previous century, and so a formal apprenticeship program was developed; but since there was no notion of building a second machine (or third or more) nor of expanding the business beyond the single tea stand as it was, new apprentices were only taken on once every twenty years or so; this did leave the risk that the small number of living people who understood the machine could be wiped out by some single disaster, but it was risk that was felt appropriate to maintenance needs of the machine and the economic paradigm of the tea stand's business model.
From the machine steam leaked copiously; typically and pipe joins and valves; leaks that had developed over the ages the machine had been running; on occasion the people who understood the function of the machine (and their current apprentice learning how it worked) would gather and discuss how much to tighten up the leaks; it was felt by both the mechanics and the workers that some unspecified amount of steam and pressure leakage was necessary; a full repair and overhaul was once attempted: all the fittings tightened and the leakings entirely eliminated; unfortunately this had quite the negative effect on the quality of the tea, and it was almost a decade before enough new leaks had developed to return the tea to its highest quality; therefore one quality of the tea stand was that it was always quite steamy in the small space; from the back of machine a steel chimney ran up through the building to the roof, from where black smoke bellowed drawn up from the burning bowels of the machine where it was powered.
But the tea itself was the truly special thing; it was served from the machine in a thick cup of paper with no lid (that, if the customer did not bring their own mug); to the hot black liquid was added a squirt of a pale thick dairy substance of some kind, dispensed from a nozzle of brass, carved to resemble some kind of stylized sea mammal, perhaps a dolphin; the tea was server at a very precise temperature that warmed the cup to just beyond the point where it was too hot to be held in the hand; though the tea would cool to a pleasantly drinkable temperature within minutes; the tea was very faintly sweet (most likely from the dairy) and gave off a complex fragrance of spice, wood, dirt, and maybe very very slightly, fish.
To smell the tea was to bring anticipation to the mind; to sip the tea — particularly the first sip — was to experience its full effect; for the tea had some affect on memory; it surfaced memories; usually pleasant memories steeped in nostalgia; some said this was a function of the tea stand itself: the nostalgia arose from people who remember visiting the tea stand, say with their grandparents, when they were children; but the connoisseurs denied this, pointing out that there were lots of people who visited the tea stand for the first time as adults and found themselves steeped in nostalgic memories; the memories we not always pleasant, some people reported facing extremely unpleasant memories of things left unresolved, but that the tea always helped them process those memories and move on; typically their next visit would bring back the more pleasant kind of nostalgic memories.