Dinerside, Part 1

Sunrise, like a creeping rot, seeps in. Silently, it wipes away the darkness, cuts the earth off from the new-lit sky. The sight of it fills me with untold horrors. I pray for the swift coming of the night.

It wasn’t always like this. It hadn’t felt this way in the beginning. There was a time when light and birdsong were of warmth to me. There was a time when my heart overflowed with love.

***

The waitress is a plump, no-nonsense woman on the upper side of forty. She always offers something extra when she fills my coffee cup. A fried egg, a piece of pie. I like her. She makes me feel the pang of guilt I get from people who are good.

When I first came in, I had wanted to talk to her. To tell her my lives’ stories, ask for hers. Not the covers that we make up, but the real ones, as they happened, from the start. Instead I ordered breakfast food and lied. Pretended to be storyless. A nobody. And that worked well, at least until tonight.

I keep my eyes fixed past her shoulder as she gets her pen and notepad, at the clinking double door and the front counter with its sweets. I don’t smell anything, not yet. But I can hear the trouble howling on the wind. I had wanted rather keenly to order a steak and eggs. Now I realize I’d be wiser to stay light.

“Cup of soup,” I say, before she even asks.

“Chicken noodle or clam chowder?”

“Chicken noodle.”

“That it?”

“Another coffee.”

She knows I take it black. I’ve been coming here a while. Too long, I realize, now one night too late. I’m always catching on to things one night too late.

The door clinks open and a suit steps in. Dark hair, sharp shoes, dull eyes. I can smell him from my booth in the back corner: the scent of aftershave and AB negative. He’s a climber. He’s hungry. But not for me. Not at the moment. I’m tempted to get up, to walk past him out the door. But one bloodbound lackey can’t ruin my meal.

He looks around the restaurant, sizing the place up. I must seem unimposing at my table. Half-read newspaper with coffee rings. Old blue jeans and old grey sneakers. He makes his way up slowly to my booth. His blood type sends a shiver down my spine.

At the table next to mine, he pulls a chair out. Once he’s settled in his seat, he clears his throat. It’s evident he wants a conversation. I want to drink my coffee while it’s hot. I pull the paper up from underneath my mug and scan the headlines, walling off the possibility of eye contact. But I can feel him, past the pages, feel his focus boring in, feel his sinister mind’s pulses and squirmations.

“You mind if I join you, friend?” he asks, a bold voice from a place behind the sports section. Lowering the newspaper to meet his gaze head-on, I motion to the seat and in he slides. “You know,” he says, “there are almost a hundred diners in this city. But only a few that go all night. I knew it was just a matter of time before I found you out.” The waitress comes back with my chicken soup.

“Anything for you?” She asks the suit.

“Steak and eggs,” he says. It makes me wince.

The waitress leaves. The scumbag sits across from me and smiles. I can feel my patience dying a swift death. “Please know,” he tells me, reaching in his pocket, “that I understand the value of your time. There’s no reason to assume I’ll be a nuisance.”

“Who said anything like that?” My annoyance is thinly veiled. Among the things you learn by being prey is that the wrong distractions take up too much time.

“What I have here is not trouble or a warning,” he says, pulling out an envelope. “What I have inside this package is an offer.” Now I almost laugh. The last thing I need these days is a job.

“Not interested.”

“Hear me out.” His hands pinch at the corners of the package. I raise my eyebrows, take another sip. “I bring tidings of the utmost admiration. From parties who would like to see you at your fullest form...”

I more or less zone out from what he’s saying. My lives have offered time to meet a multitude of fools. It’s nothing new. Some leech’s thrall stuck to my tableside, no doubt asking me to kill another fool they’re both afraid of. I catch a few words of his pitch—bonefire, sacrifice, trepanning—between lazy sips of mediocre coffee.

“Things aren’t so bad here at the bottom,” I chime in. “I get to meet such interesting people.”

“We are in an era between eras,” he now tells me, arms spread wide, eyes growing even wider. “A transitory phase between the old world and the new. The ancient ways are dying, and the future ones are waiting to be born.”

“Now is a time of monsters,” I say, finishing the quote without enthusiasm.

“Precisely.” He looks giddy. “And those who seize this moment, they will tower through the future. Come now, Louis” - not my name - “I know you. I know you all too well. I know exactly who you are, exactly what you’re capable of. You were a titan once. A king. Tell me, what is it you crave above all, now?”

“The chance to read in peace,” I say, cracking my newspaper on the table.

“You could have the world at your disposal. You could have a city of pure silence. A night that never ended. You could shape the tilting of the moon...”

I’ve heard enough; I find his overconfidence oppressive. I rear back in my seat and flash my fangs. They aren’t what they used to be, but they put fear into his face. “Okay,” he says, “okay. I’ll leave this here. My master will expect me to. If you want to find me, I’ll be at Good Richard’s Sins each night this week from ten to twelve. But do take the envelope. You must.”

I fully growl now, and with a flourish and a pardon me, the man is gone.

I never touch the package on the table. I eat his steak and eggs, and then I get into my car.

***

The lights blur on the highway, Midnight Special on the box. My station plays it every night at four. On a ride like this, I like to have a blood-dipped cigarette. Smoke curls slowly through the car, and I feel dry and warm despite the pouring rain.

I don’t work very often. Maybe once or twice a year. But jobs have a way of tracking me down anyway. Jobs and other nasty kinds of things. I keep a mint green toothbrush, yellow comb, and clipper in the glove box. A straight shave razor hides under my seat. My clothes and all my worldly goods fit neatly in my trunk. I’m a wanted man in Texas, but I don’t plan on winding up there soon.

I had, however, needed to skip town. If the haircut man could find me, god knows what else would be sniffing around. I look for a motel, somewhere I can get to sleep before the sun comes up. Deer crossing signs flash by me as the night fades into mist.

The place that I decide on is miraculously perfect, on the outskirts of Ashtabula, Ohio. Near a truck stop diner promising me steak: bloody. The girl behind the counter wears an aquamarine eyeshadow, chews slowly on a matching stick of gum. She points my room out on a bird's-eye-view map of the complex. Then she looks me in the face for the first time.

I’m not the kind of thing most folks encounter. My appearance sort of...changes, like a dream. One moment no one will make eye contact. The next they’re hanging on my every word. So now she shows me to my room, even leads me in and sits down by the lamp.

“You been driving long?” she asks, chewing on the gum.

I need to check the closets and the bathroom.

“Not too long,” I say, laying down my suitcase.

“Where you coming from?”

“Bit of everywhere.”

“I’m from here in Ashtabula. Born and raised. Everybody wants to get out. No one does. But it has its charms like any place.”

“I need to get some rest,” I say. “I’m sorry.” I gently guide her up and out the door.

“Of course.” She’s better off if she’s not here.

Looking at the clock, my timing’s perfect. The sun is only peeking through the blinds. I close my eyes, lay back in bed and smile.

And then the phone beside my head begins to ring.