1988
Earlier in the bleached-out day a bird had gotten in, and the attempts to remove it were still visible hours later, a handprint on the window, the tented yellow caution sign where in the chase a pitcher of beer had spilled. A busboy had stood on the back booth’s table and held up a broom, waving it like a carnival barker. Also a smell, the collective perspiration of the lunch crowd who had forgotten their fries to watch it play out, and the tiny bit of blood high on the wall of windows, noticeable only if you knew where to look. From the line at the counter of spinning seats and the two-tops that ran down the middle of the room, people had called out imperatives, close the shades, turn out the lights. The staff had nodded like this was helpful, but the diner was twenty-four hours, and the lights were on timers they had not been trained to change. The shades were mostly cosmetic, the floor-to-ceiling windows designed with tinted glass. Its shape was famous to every American, the peaked eaves that had once seemed futuristic, the color of its logo instantly recognizable, a yellow that only meant one thing. The chain’s promise was a basic sameness, mild, uniform.
“—need is a sheet,” someone had yelled, a voice that sounded like it hadn’t been used in weeks. “Create a wall that di-rects it out of there.”
So many had offered suggestions, loud with apparent feeling, but the bird had not survived. The table where it had finally fallen was seated now by a traveling family, a mother with wet wipes in her fanny pack, children in souvenir hats purchased at the theme park six hours away. Its body was wrapped in the promotional glossy about the seasonal waffles and deposited in the industrial trash out back. By the encampment of Dumpsters the line cooks smoked, holding their cigarettes like small, powerful tools, arguing about things that could not be proved.
There was a sign, identical to all others at locations across the country, that said PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED, but he had curved around it and settled at the counter. He was the sort of person other people noticed, particularly here where the only sound was the highway, particularly because he was hard to place. Nothing distinctive about him but the woman’s ring on his finger, no accent in the way he asked for a hamburger medium. Of course, there was his face, there was who he looked like. But it had been long enough that even that was slow to surface in the minds of people who stared at him. Was it a celebrity or just some man you had wanted to love you, some man who had gotten the job you deserved. The idea of a person on the moon felt like a curious outlier, something that happened at the close of that furious decade like an isolated remark made at the end of a wild dream, and so instead of knowing, immediately, who it was he resembled, the people at the diner only behaved with a breath more deference, treating him as something familiar and beloved, nodding at him if he caught their look. Even the waitress, whose life turned on the appearance of a new face, who asked questions about marriage and money before the second cup was approved for refill, somehow felt it right to be quiet around him. Instead of asking what he took in his coffee, she brought out all possible answers, milk, nondairy creamer, nonsugar sweetener, more wooden stir sticks than could be needed.
The light was the biggest part of the room. It caught on the laminate dessert booklets, gave a forgiving glow to the baby’s breath and carnations dyed antacid pink. Coming from the back was the sound of an argument, Alejandro who had tried to usher the bird through the doors and the cook who had mocked him out back for saying a prayer over its collapsed rib cage. There was the industrial fan from the kitchen and the crushed ice settling in enormous sodas and the highway, less like a series of sounds than a circle that hemmed all others in. Management encouraged staff to keep the television off. This would entice the customer to put his money in the jukebox, to make that meal his own by the songs that would recall it. People chose almost anything over silence. The waitress, who had woken up in the dense blue of four thirty A.M., crossed to the wall-mounted Sony above the bottles of liquor. She took down the remote attached to its side by Velcro and began to assault it, flipping channels for the reminder of options. In this life, the television said, or close to it, there was a terminally ill child, a toothy beauty in purple, who had made a miraculous recovery. There was a high-speed chase in a city that buried its dead aboveground, a woman who had fallen from a parking garage and survived, a millionaire who had lost it all, a lottery winner who had gained it. There was a cat who could sing, a house you could buy with a pool at the edge of the horizon. Her thumbnail on the rubber button moved with the instinct of hunger, orange polish put on yesterday and already chipped, three seconds better than six, each channel a wish made and granted in the same moment.
It was when he spoke that she really looked at him. “Could you turn it back,” he had said. He had the sort of grainy complexion, freckle on tan, that made it hard to tell how clean he was. His fork he held in a way that was both very feminine and somewhat crude, like the practice was a new one, and he was being careful with it. “Could you turn it back.” He repeated this with a look on his face that was too big for the request. “The—the shuttle,” he said. She snapped the fluorescent yellow gum in her mouth and she pressed the button in the other direction, three times, five.
. . . niner, the television said. Soon to go subsonic, the television said. No changes to wind or weather. Sixty-five miles from the landing site at Edwards Air Force Base. Thermal protection heat shield. The first mission since the Challenger explosion two years ago, and a real feeling of pride in the audience. We’ve got celebrities in the stands, we’ve got Vincent Kahn. On-screen a gray face, briefly, then the return to the blue.
Before its shape could be seen it was just an interruption in the sheet of sky, a manic deviation that needed to be corrected. Over and over, the camera lost it and found it again. Cutting through the blue, finally it revealed itself, a shape like an inverted Y, its chase plane beneath it then behind it, loyal as a child. Then it was a thing with wheels and decals on its side, and then it painted shadows on the dust. It prompted applause from hands unseen as it rolled through desert, whiteness of land so complete as to seem like water.
She was watching it, too, so she couldn’t see his face when he spoke again, but later she remembered his last words. She always remembered walkouts. In her ten years waitressing she’d had something like twelve, and their faces were with her like old boyfriends, asking the same questions in her memory. Could she have seen it coming, their leaving? Was it a decision made in minutes or seconds? Was it anybody they would have let down, or just her? Was there anything she could have done? It upset her more deeply than she cared to admit. The feeling was not just being robbed but something under that, your time and voice and how you used your body, how you offered it to the comfort of someone you didn’t know—that, also, made worthless.
In this case what was strange, what she told friends over all-syrup margaritas later, was that she’d watched him leave, turned around to see him pass through the first set of double doors and didn’t think to look down at the bill he’d left untouched. He’d been so calm, stopping to use the restroom, knocking the wood of the hostess stand on the way out, that she hadn’t suspected a thing. He had approached a truck in the lot and removed his keys from his undersized denim jacket and then—what? Thought better?
“He didn’t get in the car,” she told them, her hand cupped a little as if to catch the missing information. He looked left and right, then crossed the highway, walked into what she knew was a long patch of nothing, three miles of heat uncut by shade that led, eventually, to the border.
“Anything strange about him?” they asked. “Funny last remark?”
He looked like somebody, she said, who she didn’t know. It would come to her. In her impression of him she was hushed, trying to communicate how he had spoken, like everything he said was something he had already, and didn’t want to again.
“That’s all I needed to see,” he had said. “You can turn it off now.”