She came to in a red booth, forehead pressed against a linoleum table flecked with mustard-colored sparkles.
Behind her, the sound of a throat being cleared, as if its owner sensed himself being overlooked. A reptile wearing a suit and tie squinted into the glare of a laptop. The room contained two rows of identical booths, each outfitted with a personal jukebox. She used the side dial to flip through music choices. Every song was Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire.”
Copper lamps hung above a wide counter. Beyond the counter, a swinging door. She sensed a stillness on the other side. Empty shelves and an oven. Except for the reptile’s claws tipling against his keyboard, there was no sound in the diner. No staff. She could not see out the fogged windows but knew it was evening. On the other side of the counter, a bank of coffee machines made her stomach growl. Coffee could correct a series of wrongs inside her. The reptile did not look up from his screen.
“It’s serve yourself.” He flicked his eyes toward a shelf of mugs nearby.
She crossed behind the counter and stood in front of the mugs. Each was emblazoned with the name of a state or country, as if collected in gift shops across the world. She chose Spain and pulled the plastic lever, releasing a stream of fragrant coffee. She stirred sugar into the coffee, tried it. Too strong. She added more sugar, poured creamer in and watched the liquid turn beige.
The reptile felt her shadow over him and glared as if she were the sun.
“Do you mind?” she said. “Normally I like being alone but it’s been a strange week.”
“You are the bride?” he said.
“Spooky. How did you know?”
“You’re wearing a wedding dress.” He slid a pile of newspapers away from the tabletop, as if to make her comfortable, which didn’t match the character she had built on his scowling face and lack of eye contact. She sat across from him, blowing on her coffee.
“Do you mind if I ask,” she said, “where we are?”
“Not at all.” He appeared to weigh different tacks. “In a manner of speaking, we are in a diner at the end of the world. But in another manner of speaking, we’re also not. There are many, many worlds, and many diners at the end of each one.”
This sounded reasonable. She wanted to ask which world but worried it was a stupid question. She chided herself for being intimidated by a reptile. She couldn’t be expected to know everything. He had to expect questions. She sipped her coffee and focused on his laptop. “Are you working on a novel?”
He laughed. “I’m a daysleeper. I run a Japanese lifestyle blog,” he said. “Tokyo is thirteen or fourteen hours ahead of America’s East Coast, depending on daylight savings time. When it’s evening here, it’s day there, so I sleep during the day and set my alarm for 7:00 p.m., to wake up when their market opens. I blog tips and advice for the day’s trading, with culture and fashion thrown in.”
“You’re a vampire,” she said.
“So are you, it appears.” His tone was pleasant. She had really gotten him wrong.
“How often do people ask you for tips?” she said.
He braced, in anticipation of her asking for a tip.
“I have no money,” she assured him.
“I wouldn’t be able to help, anyway,” he said. “I deal mostly in futures. Guessing how valuable commodities will be. If people will want rice or gold next year as much as they wanted it this year.”
“You’re a gamb—”
“I’m not a gambler.” He caught her comment on its rise. “People who think of the market as a gamble don’t understand it.”
“I don’t understand the market,” she said. “I can’t even explain the Internet.”
He shrugs. “The Internet is a tapestry that covers the entire world. Billions of people hold its edges. It’s similar to the market.” He pretended to hold a cloth in his hand. “When one person in Australia goes like this”—he “lifted” the fabric then “lowered” it to its original height—“the people in Sweden feel the ripple effect in the market. When someone goes like this over here”—he “yanked” the fabric back—“the people over here feel it. With everyone lifting and yanking, the area in the middle is a sea of waves and flat places and movements and is constantly shifting. And then there are rumors. You hear that people holding the fabric over there are about to drop it. So you want to drop your side. But then they don’t drop it, and then other people you hadn’t anticipated drop theirs. Others pick it up. It is ever changing and impossible to predict. Gambling implies that there is rhyme or reason and those who are able to count fast enough can figure it out. The truth is, the market is influenced by forces impossible to chart. It’s like fashion. It never ends.”
“The Internet is nature,” she said. “Wind that doesn’t begin or end.”
He jerked his chin to the counter, the windows etched in condensation. “There is nothing you can think of that the Internet is not.”
“Are we the Internet?” she said.
His laptop emitted a sound like a tiny wave crashing. A familiar voice broadcast from an overhead speaker. “We’re working on it. You’ll be down in a jiffy.”
The diner tilted to one side. Nausea lurched in her stomach. The diner tilted back, righted itself, but the ground no longer felt solid. She touched her cheek and felt indentations made from the plastic booth, chevron stripes.
“Is this a ship?” she said.
He blinked several times but did not answer. The crashing-wave sounds increased in volume.
“Friend,” she said. “Am I awake?”
A scorpion hissed from the bottom of her cup. She hurled it into the aisle. The overhead voice assured her that James was on his way.
“There’s been a mid-session rally,” the reptile said. “Stay calm.”
The fog crept higher on the windows. The reptile pressed a button on the jukebox and Jerry Lee Lewis sang. She widened her eyes to clear her suddenly misty vision. Sound of foghorn. Sound of bells. She balled her fists and swiped at her eyes and opened them again. The music emanated from within a miles-long expanse of fog, tuned by distance that continued to grow. When will James get here? she wondered. Everything will be okay once he arrives.
She stared backward from a force that was pulling her away no matter how she struggled. “I can’t leave before James gets here.”
“We haven’t reached our lowest numbers,” he said from the end of a long tunnel. “Your grandmother says even though we’ve gotten off the floor, we can always go lower.”
“How do you know my grandmother?” I say, cruel reality waking me.
“You’re fine,” he said. “So kind … I’m gonna tell this world that you’re mine, mine, mine, mine.”