Panoptics
smart glasses
The first time Marcus orders the cortado, Sarah has been on bar for four days and her hands still shake on the steam wand.
“Cortado, two-percent, extra shot, dry foam, no art,” he says. He has been ordering this same drink at this same shop for two years and he is aware that the order is fussy, so he softens it with a smile that’s meant to read as embarrassed-regular and not as anything else. “Sorry. I know it’s a lot.”
“No, you’re good.” She writes it on the cup in Sharpie and her tongue tips out at the corner of her mouth. Her name tag says Sarah. “Long second shot?”
“You remember.”
“You’re the Tuesday guy.”
He laughs, the surprised laugh, and goes to the two-top by the window. The shop’s redesign last spring put the espresso machine on a raised counter under a row of pendant lights so that every drink is made on a small stage. The owner had posted about transparency, about craft, about letting customers see the labor. Marcus had liked the post.
He angles his head toward the machine. The pinhole above the right hinge is a millimeter across. The firmware hack he paid for last March strips the recording indicator and pushes the feed to a private bucket. He had not gone looking for the hack; he had been reading a thread about battery life and someone had linked it in passing, the way someone might link a tip about getting around a paywall, and he had told himself he was curious about whether it worked.
He watches Sarah pull the shots. She tamps unevenly the first time, knocks the puck out, redoes it. Her thumb hovers over the timer. She pulls the second shot at thirty-one seconds; the first one she had pulled at twenty-four. When she steams the milk she holds the pitcher too high and the foam comes out wetter than it should. She bites the inside of her cheek when she pours.
The cortado is not bad. He drinks it and does not say anything.
That night, on his second monitor, he watches the footage at half speed and notices for the first time that she uses the left group head for the first shot and the right for the second, that her wrist locks when she locks the portafilter, that she counts under her breath while she steams.
He tells himself he is interested in the craft.
A week later he is back. Sarah is alone on bar, the morning rush halfway through, her ponytail pulled tight in the way of someone who has been on her feet since six.
“Cortado, two-percent, extra shot, dry foam, no art,” he says. “Hey, can I ask a weird favor. Could you pull both shots on the left group? I think the right one’s been running a touch cool, I keep getting a sour note off it.”
“Sure.” She writes on the cup. Then she stops writing.
“And, I know this is ridiculous, but if you can wait like three seconds after locking the portafilter before you hit the timer, that pre-infusion thing makes a real difference for me. I’m sorry. I’m that guy.”
She looks up. Her hand is still on the Sharpie.
“Three seconds,” she says.
“Three seconds. Sorry.”
She does not say anything. She turns to the machine.
He sits at the two-top and watches her hands. They are doing what he asked them to do. They are also doing it slowly, the slowness of someone being watched, except she has been watched by customers her whole short career and this is a different slowness, a slowness with awareness curled inside it. She locks the portafilter. She does not hit the timer. She counts to three. He can see her lips move.
She glances at the window. The window holds his reflection, and beside his reflection, the bright bar of the pendant lights catching on the side of his head. She does not look at his face. She looks at the side of his head.
He keeps scrolling his phone. On the screen, his thumb opens and closes the same email.
She knows something. He can see her knowing it.
She finishes the drink. She walks it to the table with both hands. She sets it down. She does not let go of the saucer right away.
He has already pulled out his wallet. A twenty and a five, on a nine-fifty drink. He puts them on the table inside her sightline, beside the saucer, where she will have to see them to take her hand back.
“Keep it,” he says. “Seriously. You’re getting really good.”
He uses the smile he has practiced for investor meetings, the smile that proposes a shared frame: we are reasonable people, this was a transaction, the transaction is complete.
Sarah is twenty-three. She has rent on the fifteenth and the manager who hired her told her last Thursday that she is still inside her ninety-day window. She does not know if Marcus is recording. She knows he might be. She knows that if she says what she thinks she knows, she will say it without proof, to a manager who will ask her how she is so sure, and that her certainty is built out of the wrong group head and three seconds and the side of his head in the window, and that when she says it out loud it will sound like nothing.
She picks up the cash.
“Thank you,” she says.
She walks back behind the counter and the pendant lights catch her, too, on the small stage the owner built for transparency, and somewhere on a private server the file is already writing.