The Weather (excerpt)

Scene: A man has sat down with a group of people he does now know in a coffee-bar he is familiar with. He smiles at them and they smile back and he feels words begin to pour out  of his mouth, funneling into their ears, as he flabbergasts and amazes them with his gall. 

That’s how it has always been. He sat down, he said some words and things went, life moved, people spoke. It mattered only abstractly what they were talking about. The words could be almost any words; they could be recited words, false words, poetic words, but they couldn’t be senseless words. He would get up and move if someone said some space-filling sentence about the weather. Smurnov would leave his parents if they started talking about the weather. In high school his friends talked about the rain and the sky almost every day. They would grab their trays and shake them a little bit while looking him right in the eye to talk, talk, talk about the weather. He would stare back into their eyes and put on an interested air, but the next day he would get new friends. Smurnov would plop his food onto his plate and pick a table, any table, to set his new tray on. The process of courting a friend, talking about the weather, and moving to a new table repeated so often he got to know just about every group in the school. Occasionally, he would redouble and rejoin a table to see if he had been mistaken or wrong in some way for moving. In his senior year, his class superlative was “Class Friendliest.”