|
There was a thin, slick,
greasy film covering everything in the tiny diner from the
counter, to the booth, to the menus, to the waitress. That
same film seemed to coat Jack when he walked in, like a
sprinkler full of lard. Hands shaking, he now sat opposite
the man who called him here, sipping coffee from a slippery,
cracked cup with some other restaurant’s logo on it.
The man opposite Jack
never moved. Not a muscle, a twitch, a blink; nothing. “A
blink”, thought Jack? “Can this man blink? I suppose he
would have to have eyes to do that. And I’m guessing he has
them, but I … don’t recall ever seeing them. In fact”, Jack
mused, “I have never seen this man’s face.”
Jack tried to look
straight across the table, but found himself examining the
fake flower arrangement in the filthy booth behind the man’s
head instead. He tried again, this time slower and more
deliberate. There was a deep, dark black covering the space
where the man’s features would be, like the dark side of the
moon in a burlap bag. A sharp pain began in Jack’s stomach
and back, and his eyes slid off the shadowed area under the
man’s hat, as if the grease that had permeated the very air
made it difficult to hold even a gaze for any length of
time.
Jack gave up for the
moment and leaned forward to hover over his coffee. Black,
four sugars. He’d just gotten it the way he liked it when
the aged waitress made her appearance, filled his cup almost
to overflowing, and asked him if he wanted more coffee all
in the same instant. He choked back his rude reply and
continued to stare in the slowly rippling dark. His
cigarette began to burn his fingers, but instead of putting
it out, he pulled another square from his pack and stuck it
in his mouth. Then he lit it with the failing butt and
crushed the old one out.
One long drag and one
lingering sip later, he was ready to talk.
“The nightmares are
always the same, but they are getting worse.” He said. “I
mean, if they are the same, they couldn’t possibly be
getting worse, I know that, but it’s not the dreams
themselves that are worse, it’s how I feel when I wake up. I
never know where I’ll be, what I’ll be wearing, carrying,
covered in …” His voice trailed off.
The man on the other
side of the table didn’t move. He didn’t reach for his glass
of water, or reach to stub out the cigarette burning down in
the ashtray; one of three that Jack had forgotten about and
left to die alone, unused. Jack thought he felt the man
staring at him, but he couldn’t prove it. If he could just
look the man in the eyes … but no, he knew he wasn’t able to
… yet.
Long deeply satisfying
drag. Heavy drink of cooling courage.
“I just kept telling
myself it was only a dream, you know?” Jack continued.
“Right up until I woke up with blood on my hands and face,
without being able to find a cut or scratch on me. Then
there was the knife they showed on the news … that knife was
mine. Or, was like mine. Julia gave me a set of them for my
birthday the year before the divorce. Divorce.” He repeated
it, not wholly to himself, as if he wasn’t sure the word
really existed, and had to say it twice just to make it
real.
Drag. Sip.
“That’s when the dreams
really started, you know? I mean, just small frights at
first. Nothing too terrifying. Falling, snakes, being buried
alive; real textbook stuff. It was just like taking Psych
201 again. I got a book on dreams and looked them all up;
they were all in there. Textbook, like I said. But then the
woman appeared. The one in the ball gown, like something out
of Gone With the Wind. No matter where I was in my dream, I
would always wind up back in my room, in my house, with her
bent over me, hands in my face, hissing and shrieking. And I
couldn’t get away; I couldn’t run. I can’t run in my
dreams.” Jack lowered his head. “I can’t scream either.
That’s how I normally know I’m dreaming.”
The waitress filled his
cup again, then stood there with a satisfied smile on her
face, daring him not to say thank you for her generosity. He
glared at her, then overly-dramatically reached for the
sugar, opened two packets, poured them in the steaming mug,
and picked up his spoon. She popped her gum, twirled on her
heels as quickly as a woman of her advanced age could twirl,
and was gone.
“I can look at her, why
not him?” thought Jack. “What is so special about him? What
am I afraid of?” That question made him nervous. The only
real answer was everything. Himself, who he was, what he’d
done. Or, thought he’d done.
He lowered his head
almost to the grime-streaked table and closed his eyes. He
took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The smell of
tobacco and coffee caressed his face like a well-fucked
lover. When he began speaking again, his voice was low and
deep.
“I don’t sleep well
anymore. Hell, I just don’t sleep.
But sometimes … sometimes. Sometimes I am sitting alone, in
my shit apartment, on my shit couch, drinking shit coffee.
Who care’s what’s on TV, just so long as it’s on, and loud.
And then … and then …” his voice cracked, and a sob caught
in his throat. He looked up suddenly, staring right into the
darkness across from him, looking away just as quickly. “And
then, I’m sprawled in garbage in an alley somewhere across
town, covered in someone else’s blood. Covered. In. Someone.
Else’s. Blood!” He sobbed between each word, and pounded the
linoleum table at the end of his exclamation. A few heads
turned his way, but quickly moved back to their own
business. He dropped his head back down to the table.
Tears began to well up
in his eyes. He blinked, and one ran across his cheek to his
nose and mouth. The salt sting seemed to calm him slightly.
His breath hitched, and he leaned back against the cracked
red vinyl booth. He rested the back of his head on the top
of the booth and opened his eyes. The ceiling tile was just
as dull and greasy as everything else in this shitty joint.
Why had he come there? he asked himself for not the last
time that night. Why had he allowed the man to meet him
there? Surely there were better, brighter, cleaner places,
where the menu didn’t consist solely of fried food, and the
waitresses at least asked before they ruined your carefully
seasoned coffee.
“You said you had
pictures.” Jack said, still staring at the swollen and moldy
ceiling.
There was no visible
movement on the other side of the table, but when Jack
finally looked down at the spot in front of him, there was a
stack of twenty or so photographs.
He picked them up.
The top picture showed a
girl of around college age, Jack estimated. She would have
been very pretty, if the left half of her face had not been
peeled back and stapled to the right side, which was still
attached to her skull. Her uncovered left eye was moist with
tears as well as blood. In the picture it looked as if she
were still alive. And screaming. Although Jack wasn’t sure
how loud she could have screamed with the bottom of her jaw
slit and her tongue pulled through it. Despite the stream of
blood pouring from her mangled face (I didn’t know the head
had that much blood in it, thought Jack) and down her front,
he could still see where her nipples had been removed, and
little puffs of fat and blood pushed through the new
openings. Thankfully, the photo stopped just above her
waist.
Jack gagged. He had seen
all this in less than a second. He slammed the photos face
down on the table, coffee almost surging over the lip of his
fractured cup. The fine ash from the used cigarettes
billowed up from its resting place, and lightly dusted a
large area of the table.
Jack put his elbows on
the table and rested his head in his hands, sobbing. He took
a few great gulping breaths, inhaling almost enough grease,
ash and tears to make him gag. He had recognized what was
left of the girl in the picture. He had seen her on TV not
even two weeks ago, though the picture on the news had been
her high school photo. Her body had been found in a dumpster
over on Ninth Ave. The news hadn’t given many details. Now
he understood why.
“How could you show this
to me? How could you? I don’t want to see anymore. No more.
No more. No more.” His voice grew quiet, still. A small
dirty pool of tears and ash was forming between his elbows.
The pictures lay scattered from the point where he had
slammed them down to reach in a straight line to the edge of
the table.
“You dropped one,” said
the waitress as she reached over to fill his cup one more
time.
He jerked his head up.
Bewilderment, anger, and surprise registered on his face all
at once. He leaned over and quickly snatched the photo from
where it was leaning against the table leg … thankfully
facing the booth. He calmed immediately. But as soon as he
tasted his coffee he was angry.
“Jesus Christ!” he said
as he stood up. “Can’t you leave a cup of fucking coffee
alone? I didn’t ask you to fill it up every time I take a
sip! Wait until I am DONE, God Dammit!” Every eye in the
place turned to him. Or, rather, would have if there was
anyone left in the diner besides him and the employees.
And the man across the
table.
Who he had yet to look
at the face of.
Which he did now.
The depth of nothingness
in the dark below the hat hit him like a blow to the jaw.
The pure lack of … something, anything … made Jack feel sick
to his stomach. Even a hole was something, but this was even
less than that. It was as if there was a bubble in the air
right above the man’s neck and right under his fedora. A
bubble that lacked everything that exists in this universe …
air, light, mass. Most importantly, a face.
Jack could not turn
away.
Out of the nothing came
… something. Something small. Something pale. Something …
familiar. It came closer and closer, getting larger and
larger until it very nearly filled the nothing it was
hovering in. Finally it stopped, the right size for the body
below it, but that’s only because the body was the right
size.
Because it was Jack.
Jack examined his own
face across the table from him. Jack’s green eyes locked on
Jack’s crooked nose that was slightly above Jack’s thin lips
and Jack’s square jaw. There was an old scar over Jack’s
right eye. He faced himself, and both of him refused to
blink.
Jack was no longer
shocked. He understood now. He understood everything. He
knew where the pictures had come from (he took them) he knew
who murdered those girls (he’d killed them all) he knew
who’s knife had been shown on the news (his his all his.)
He’d done it. And not just this one time. There had been
other girls. He’d tried to get inside them, to find out why.
Beautiful girls. Just like his Julia. But they couldn’t
leave him, now. All the beautiful girls … .
Jack dropped into the
booth. He was numb. Broken. Breathless.
She’d never leave him
again.
Jack stood up and opened
his wallet. He dropped some bills on the table, more than
enough for a cup of coffee, even with a gratuitous tip, and
took a deep breath.
He dropped his chin to
his chest, stepped into the aisle, walked to the front
doors, and out into the mild spring night.
******
The old man got up from
the table. He stumbled over to the door, took a deep
rattling breath, and stepped out into the cold Seattle rain.
The young, pretty
waitress watched him go, as she had every night for the past
two and a half years. Rain, snow, sleet, hot muggy nights;
nothing kept the man from the diner. “He was probably a
mailman when he was young,” she often joked with the other
employees and customers. Sure, he was a little weird, but
things around here hadn’t been the same since grunge hit it
big back in the 90’s, so weird was a matter of course. He
didn’t bother anyone, just sat quietly sipping his coffee.
If he wanted to sit there and look at pictures he apparently
dug out of other people’s garbage, it was no business of
hers.
Those pictures. She
wondered what he saw in them. Obviously not what everyone
else saw: a waterlogged carpet, a wall, half a thumb, a
couple with the tops of their heads running off the print;
these were the photos from the end of the roll, the mistakes
no one wanted to keep. A couple of them had even been burned
halfway or more, and no one could even tell what they were
anymore.
All of them, that was,
except for one. It was old and faded, and it was hard to
make out anything other than the girls’ face. It was
probably a bad picture to begin with, because even though
she hadn’t gotten a real good look at it, it always seemed
as though the girl was unhappy about something, or in pain.
In the image, the girl’s one visible eye was looking off
into the distance as if she was unaware of being
photographed. She also looked as if her face was … raw or
scraped somehow. Maybe she had fallen, and the camera
snapped a photo without her knowing.
The waitress shrugged
the thought away.
She walked over to the
old man’s table and picked up the buck fifty he had left for
his coffee, along with the 75-cent tip. She bussed his
coffee cup and wiped down the table.
The front door opened,
and an elderly couple stepped into the well-lit diner. The
waitress grabbed two menus, and showed them to their booth. |
