At a nearby table, two middle-aged men debated whether their preference was justified. Both were drinking in a way that suggested years of habit had shaped their choices, one with a missing right hand. The narrator ordered a coffee with milk, and the service took longer than expected. The pair drank several bottles of beer and shared skewers of potato omelettes. The one-armed man, who had lost a limb in a hunting accident, asserted that having a hand was preferable to not having one at all.
“Why?” asked his companion, sporting a thick mustache that curled into handlebars, if he couldn’t feel the loss physically anymore.
“Because the brain hasn’t registered the absence yet,” the one-armed man replied. “An invisible hand lets me pick up invisible things.”
They laughed at the idea and eventually the coffee with milk arrived for the narrator as well.
“Come on, let’s try something invisible,” the mustachioed man teased.
The single arm pointed toward a spot on the table and mimed lifting a glass with a nonexistent hand, bringing the imagined drink to his lips. After placing it back, he licked his lips with a mock seriousness.
“This non-beer is much better than the real one we were given.”
“Better in what way?”
“I’m not sure. It feels fresher, it has more body, and besides, they won’t charge us for it.”
After that joke, the topic shifted and the narrator stopped paying close attention. He found himself absorbed by the idea of an invisible limb that could manipulate immaterial objects. A thought about invisible eyes emerged, eyes capable of seeing everything that does not exist. He mused that, even though the world is filled with tangible things, there might be more that do not exist than those that do. Some even say that much of reality consists of dark matter. He wished for a spiritual sense, a faculty that would allow him to grasp the unseen. Meanwhile, the coffee with milk tasted off, so he imagined a second imaginary coffee that tasted wonderfully real, and he walked out of the establishment with a pleasant, lingering aftertaste in his mouth. (Citation: Observer, 2025)