Diner
“I just want to be a good person.” It spilled out of my mouth without any warning. The waitress stands there not knowing what to say. She attempts a nervous smile. An awkward silence hangs between us. I feel like I’m causing her some sort of pain by not saying anything else. I manage to choke out, “I, uh, I’ll have two eggs sunny side up and sausage”.
She smiled; a resurgence of normalcy. Her pen scribbles down the order. “Whatkindofbread?”
“Uh, wheat.”
Her smile redoubles and she scuttles off. I was alone again. A young couple staggered out the double doors when I walked in but no one entered since. Big panes of black surround me. I hear the popping of a bad muffler in the street, but I don’t look up. I watch my spoon dance in the black coffee.
I always like to think about other people’s lives. A person catches my eye and I fill in their entire history. The waitress for example, some would call her homely but I think that there is no exquisite beauty without a touch of strangeness in its proportions. That’s profound I know and I wish I could take the credit, but I read it somewhere. This exquisite beauty, in my head anyways, is a second generation American born Serbian. Her father was a shoe maker that married late in his life. Her mother was forced to marry him and hated her life. She used American romance novels to escape her miserable life milking various livestock and on one Wednesday morning as she milked a cow named Chastine (named after a popular heroine from her novels) she vowed that her daughter would not lead the same life. As soon as my exquisite beauty was of age she was sent to a distant cousin named Sergi in Moscow because he promised he would take care of her. Unfortunately Sergi was not related to them at all. He was actually an internet entrepreneur that sold mail order wives to old rich American men.
“And the cycle continues.” I mumble to myself as I sip my coffee.
My thoughts fall back into my life and the real. It makes my insides feel like an ashtray. The type of ashtray that gets emptied a hundred times but never washed out. I hate to breathe when people walk by me. I hold my breath until I’m sure that whatever they may have left behind won’t go up my nose, in my mouth, or into my lungs. I’m rational enough to know that there is a very small chance of me catching anything from them but it’s not that. I simply don’t want to be on such intimate terms with a stranger and for as long as I care to remember everyone has been a stranger. Maybe that’s why I’m here now. I don’t know I can’t make any sense of it. I can’t stand to be around people but here I am giving my exquisite waitress her romantic history. It’s better than the nightmares, the dark horses running in my head every night.
She returns and sets the plate in front of me without a word or a look. I make her nervous. Well, sometimes it’s nice to return the favor. She’s gone again and I feel empty. If I really wanted to be alone why do I come out at all? I have eggs at home. I’m the new man of the crowd. It’s only when I grab my fork that I realize I’m not hungry. I wonder if I ever was. I can’t remember tasting food for months. My eyelid twitches in some sort of muscle spasm I touch it with two fingers to get it to stop and sit there with my eyes closed. When I do I see her in a way I never saw her in real life. She looks at me with a smile in her eyes like she’s known me for years; my exquisite and homely waitress of the all night diner. My Dulcinea. My Cosset.
It’s then that I feel the pressure at the base of my neck. Something has grabbed me and is pressing hard. I’m confused. A hand has grabbed me and is pushing me forward but why? I don’t struggle at first. I give a little. Maybe someone tripped and is trying to catch themselves. My eyes snap open but all I can see is my breakfast inches from my face. I jerk back and try to look at whoever is doing this but I’m pushed down harder.
“Get the fuck down and don’t move!”
My heart jumps and my stomach sinks. Why is this happening? I can’t breathe. I turn my face right as it hits the plate. The food burns my cheek and jaw.
“Stay fucker down!”
It makes no sense. The man is desperate and upset. He pushes my head down harder as if it would go through the table. My mind tries to understand. I can hear a woman scream in the kitchen. I put my hands on the table and try to push up. I see white and the pain explodes like movement through a spider web. The blow knocks the front of my face against the plate harder.
“I’ll put a bullet in your head motherfucker.”
I think I can feel the barrel of a pistol to the back of my head; two inches behind my ear. The warm yoke drips off my forehead, maybe blood. I cough when some thing goes into my nose and for some reason my confusion turns to anger. I hear a different man yell about money and tell someone to hurry up. As quick as I can, my hand darts around the table to the right of my plate. I feel him press my face down and scream at me in a guttural voice. My hand finds a fork and I whip it back with a lunatic’s strength where I hope he is standing. It hits and sticks. The hand loosens.
I stand up and spin around.
The man is shorter than I thought. Greasy curls of black hair frame a square face. His eyes, his eyes are dark, as black as his pupils. When I look into them I see he’s not on the same plane as I am. He’s not thinking right. He has separated himself from me and the others. He’s better, more entitled.
In his left hand he pulls a bloody fork from his thigh and his right points a pistol at my head. We stand like this for eternity, maybe seven feet apart, with his sweat in my nostrils and in my lungs. At this moment I can see and hear everything. I can hear the footfalls of the man behind me as he sprints out the door. I can hear my waitress sobbing and the cook moan. I can see a droplet of sweat fall from one of the greasy curls around the square face of the man in front of me. I see his nostrils flare. His eyes look confused for an instant and then they blink as if that somehow helps regain focus. I see the muscles in the back of his hand flex and his finger pull. The flash from the end of the barrel expands in slow motion. Then I hear the shot and the crashing of glass behind me simultaneously. My mouth gasps for air quick and with violence.
I look down. My arms are at my sides, all my fingers painfully extended. I search every inch of my torso and there is no hole or spreading of blood. He missed. I look back up. My heart pushes my blood through my veins so hard I can hear it inside my head. I look back at the man in front of me. My eyes meet his. Then the waitress screams. He jumps as if he’s awakened from a trance and runs away. I exhale deep and full. I see him run out the door into the gray morning then I sink into my seat. I can feel every inch of my body fill with the complete satisfaction of having a negative stimulus removed. There is a unique ecstasy caused from the elimination of pain. I look down at my plate as if it was foreign to me, as if it was something that I remembered from childhood, as if it had disappeared for a while and suddenly reappeared. I pick up my napkin and wipe my face off as my stomach growls. The smell finds me ravenous. I can’t help but pick up a sausage and take a bite and it is amazing. As I chew I look over to the others. I laugh a bit thinking it’s funny. The first thing that pops into my head is how ugly the waitress really is. I’m going home to bed. Tomorrow morning I’m going to cook my own breakfast.