TWELVE

The World

[2005]

These locations of the new list, twice as long as the first, all in the mountains or east of them, out in the plains, the prairies and the farmlands, in the high desert regions of the state, so different from the west, involved at least a day’s travel and another rental car, likely a hotel for a night as well. Which was fine – fine with me, and fine with the firm, Rick Progress had said, which would cover these expenses, so long as I kept it all within reason.

The rental car was a compact Chevrolet shaped like a bullet and the color of iron rust. I started by driving north out of the city and finally east, into the mountains, about an hour south of Canada. The first mark on the supplied map showed a numbered turnoff that looked as though it should lead deeper into the range, perhaps an alternate pass; it was somewhere that I’d never been before, though I’d crossed this summit a number of times previously.

The turnoff, when I found it, was high up into the mountains, and the road struck me as dubious. It was paved, though unmarked, and ran straight out from the highway at a perpendicular, in utter defiance of the uneven terrain. The only way I could be sure it was the right turnoff was that it was at the indicated mile marker, and I’d driven as far as the next without finding any other. This had to be it.

Gravel crunched and spat out from under the wheels as I drove slowly in, more than once thinking that I’d seen some dark shape move up ahead, to lumber off the roadway and vanish in the brush, where scrub and tall pines lined the shoulder, too dense to see into, to anything beyond their edge. The road continued straight for perhaps two miles before it surrendered its harsh geometry to the requirements of the terrain and started twisting, grading the upward slope. This is where the pavement also ended, giving way to packed and rutted earth, and the road narrowed to a single lane’s width.

My doubts about the route deepened, although I knew perfectly well there was no other road I could have taken. I stopped the car for a moment to check the map again, reassuring myself that it was for certain the right turnoff. The map’s curving line didn’t reflect the long stretch of straight road I’d followed in. What I seemed to be heading for, according to the photocopied atlas, was a point at the end of the twisting line, circled and highlighted in yellow, though as far as I could tell, this was only a logging road out to nowhere.

Eventually, the road leveled, then descended. I crawled the rental car through, deeply uncertain, a sick feeling growing in my gut. This model of car had never been meant to follow this terrain, which grew steadily worse. Large, sharp rocks jutted up through the dirt, and rains had washed deep trenches out of the pathway. Moreover, if somebody came in the opposite direction, I would have nowhere to pull over, and there was no place to turn the car around.

Finally, the road stopped altogether. It didn’t exactly end, but the brush had grown over and across it so thick that nothing could pass. I stopped the car and got out, walked to the furthest edge. From one side to the other, spanning the gap through the trees, hung a spiderweb so thick it looked to be made of string, hung with beads of dew. In the center waited something brown and striped and the size of my entire hand, with what looked like bulbous fangs extended out of its face. When I approached to within a foot of the beast, it twitched suddenly, drawing in its legs, bracing to either run or attack – I couldn’t tell which. I felt a corresponding twitch within my gut, as if my intestines had been plucked. Slowly, I brought my camera up and held it steady, with the spider framed dark in the center, its belly facing me. There was a stillness. I felt the brush of wind. Through some break in the clouds, a momentary brightness washed over us both, and I clicked the shutter. The camera made its noise and the sunbeam passed, and every color in the brush was leeched away again.

•

Back in the car, I put the transmission in reverse. There was no option but to back my way out, perhaps as far as ten miles, before reaching pavement again, where the road widened and I could turn the car around. I’d scarcely gone a foot though before something struck me, and I stopped the car. Something… a thought, almost a voice in my head, told me to take out the film camera now, that it was important, that it had to be film – to take it from the cracked and weathered leather carry-case. I hadn’t yet shot anything with this camera, though I’d loaded its transport with film. I’d brought it with me, as well as the little digital thing for work, because a quiet voice alongside mine, like my own but not quite my own, had advised it. This was the same voice that told me I should take it out now; to step back outside of the car again and look up. I did what it said. I stepped out, I looked up.

The camera’s only lens was the 18mm that had come with it, an angle all but fish-eye wide. Through it, looking directly up, the overcast sky was an arched dome, darkened at the corners of the frame, pushed away, made optically distant. The gradients of tone and feather-edged clouds roiled and rolled, slowly pulling themselves apart. What may have been especially significant about these clouds in this sky, I couldn’t tell, but I was following the voice. Maybe the voice knew. Everything about the old camera was manually controlled, so I set the aperture and shutter speed according to a handheld meter, then clicked the shutter, adjusted the stop again and clicked, then again, one more stop, just to be sure.

Wind stirred the brush and the trees. It blew across the open stretch where I’d stopped, and the great, long grasses bent and shivered. I sat back down in the driver’s seat and put the camera aside to the passenger floor. Three exposures. Gray sky above. I thought about Vivianne. No, no – I saw her; it was her face, and the sky. There was something in her expression, as if she had just asked a question and now waited for my response. I didn’t know what to tell her. It was really as if she were there. And it occurred to me then that if for these past three nights I’d hoped so badly to see her, why not just call her? I had her phone number.

I pulled my cell phone out, but of course there was no signal, not here.

In reverse, I backed slowly down the mountain road.

•

I’d no sooner reached the highway again – after driving in reverse for nearly an hour – and apparently found mobile service also, when my phone rang. I fumbled to pick it up from the console beside me as I drove, hoping it might be Vivianne.

“Who? No? Rick? Yes?”

“…Progress I’m just checking in to see how it’s going you are on the road aren’t you any problems?” With his telephone voice I could no longer read the pauses. It took a moment to untangle what he’d said.

“No, yes, Rick. It’s going fine. I was just at… look, it was a mountain road, a logging road. It didn’t really go anywhere. I took pictures… of the road… all the way back. I don’t know it’s –”

“That’s fine don’t worry about it I told you just do exactly as it says to the letter don’t worry about what it actually is they’ll figure out what they’ve got when they’ve got it they were very specific on that point.”

“Oh, okay,” I said. “It’s only the one, so far. I’ve just barely started, so who knows what –”

“No pressure but we absolutely need to have these by Monday you can do that can’t you?”

“Y-yeah, of course, no problem. By Monday, yes. Today is what? I’ll have it –”

“In the morning give me a call or just come in but make sure by Monday morning I’ll see you then.”

“Okay, okay, b –” But he’d already hung up.

Folding the telephone closed, I’d no sooner put it back to the console when it rang again, vibrating against the plastic. Vivianne? I snatched it up.

“Oh, hello. No? Wade?”

“I’m sorry to bother you on your day off, but there’s a couple things. You don’t know anything about where Willy has got to, do you? Nobody has seen him for a couple of days, and it isn’t like him to just wander off.”

“Willy, no, he was there last I saw him. I mean, of course, when I saw him, but he was there the other night when I was working. He had these new shoes. I don’t think they fit, though.”

“Right, the shoes… Okay, well, I’ve called the police, but I don’t expect they’ll be able to do much… There is another thing, though, that I need to talk to you about.”

“Mm.”

“We had to send Rose to the hospital yesterday. She’d gotten pretty worked up, and it seemed best that she have the supervision, you know, and to keep the rest of the house from falling into chaos. Well… uh, when she got there, she apparently told the admitting psychiatrist that she’d been raped…”

“By her forces, yes. That’s how she described it to me.”

“No, Proteus, you see, she told them that she’d been raped by the night staff, here at Inn House Manor.”

“Oh. What?”

“Which would be… well, you know who that is.”

“What?” I scratched at a spot on my inner thigh.

“You shouldn’t need to worry about any of this. It’s clear to everyone what she’s doing, but because of the protocols involved with this sort of thing…”

“Uh.” The spot where I’d scratched had begun to itch fiercely.

“An investigative committee will be looking into the matter. I expect you’ll be called in for questioning.”

“Oh. I… Uh.”

“I know, I know. But you really shouldn’t have to worry. Like I said, it’s pretty clear to everyone what’s going on. But when someone uses the word rape there are certain things we have to do. That’s all this is. We can talk more about it later. I just wanted for you to know that’s happening. That’s an issue. It’s going to be alright.”

“Uh, okay.” I hung up, pulled the car over, and vomited.

•

And so I wound down the side of every mountain, through sudden curves at each descent, a snake’s course, cut vertiginous and narrow, as mountain streams ran beside and turned to rapids, leveled out and drained to rivers, where trees grew thick in clusters, their leaves just begun to change from green to orange to rust. The taste of bile, I learned, could be masked with coffee, but the fear could not. My skin crawled with it, my intestines were cold and clenched. Leaves shook in the warm wind.

If… if Rose said I’d raped her… then had I? I mean, I knew perfectly well that I hadn’t, not really, but… if she said I did…?

•

The list was organized so that each destination fell easily along my route, one to the next. I just needed to get to each and take the pictures, whatever they were. I no longer cared.

Next came a park not far past the foothills that required a short detour off the highway, across a small bridge and into thick woods. In this case the turnoff was clearly marked, so that I knew at least I’d not taken the wrong road. But the park, I found, had been neglected and left overgrown, its wide and empty lot of broken, black asphalt shot through with weeds and blackberry shrubs, their thorny vines thick with late-season berries. No one else was around. I took several photos of the cracked blacktop with its white demarcations, and the vines that pushed through it, and the regular array of tall lightpoles, their metal hoods turned green with clinging fungus. What may have once been pathways were now so overgrown that nothing could pass, so I contented myself with picking all the berries I could hold and driving straight back to the highway. I did not want to waste any time. As I started up the car again though, I felt the same hesitation as before, as at the last spot; a certain, distinct thought, almost a voice, that told me I should get out of the car with my second camera and point it at the sky.

It wasn’t my voice. It wasn’t my thought. I did what it told me.

Through the lens, an arc of blue stretched across in a wide dome, fading toward white in the center, fading darker and toward feathered clouds at the sides. The streak of a contrail ran through, off center, in a mild diagonal, its one end semi-sharp, the other dissipating. I read the light meter, clicked, adjusted, and clicked twice more.

The next mark on the map took me into a small town, where a particular phone booth seemed to be the point of interest. I shot the town from several angles – it was all of two blocks long – just to make sure I had coverage, then featured the old phone booth on its own, dramatically, from low, from high, in three quarters, from straight on; like it was a fashion model, like it was a movie star. The sunlight bounced off it, glass and steel, in bright spikes of glare that made starlight flares in the lens. It could’ve been the Chrysler Building. It could’ve been fucking Godzilla.

I didn’t hesitate this time but, compliant with the voice, aimed my ancient Nikon straight up, bracketing three different exposures onto film. I found, strangely enough, that doing this helped to pull the sick fear out of my skin and guts, and with each place that I stopped, and with each photo I took of the sky directly overhead, the twisted gut-clench lessened incrementally.

The point of intersection of two highways formed, on my map, where it had been emphatically circled, what appeared to be a small town, its name highlighted in fluorescent yellow marker. This turned out to be an abandoned house, set back some distance from the corner. The intersection didn’t even warrant street signs. I pulled the car to the shoulder and approached the building through the deep grass on foot. It still stood, though its walls and porch and shingled roof were rotten and gray, and the windows all broken. Some part of a wooden sign remained over the door, though most had rotted away and was missing; all that remained of it spelled “GEN.” I peered through and inside a cracked window pane beside the boarded-over door, and from what I could see, the house had last served as a grocery store, full of chest-high display shelves, all empty now. I snapped photos of everything. I stuck the camera in through a hole in the window and shot inside. I took pictures of the grass beside the road and the power lines overhead. Lastly, I grabbed the old Nikon and aimed up. I didn’t look through it. Snapping three photos, adjusting the f-stops for each, I felt immediately relaxed, a subtle, inner pressure relieved, like whatever thing was chasing me had decided, for the moment, to take its time in catching up.

•

Staring out over the wide, white arc of cement that crossed the river, blue water high to one side, to the other side recessed, while the crushing sound made as thousands of gallons moved through it and spewed out, fell and shook the ground where I stood, shook the bones and the body, I raised the small camera to frame it – not a difficult thing to do; the scene all but framed itself – and clicked several shots in succession, each a little different. The dam was legitimate, I could see that. It made sense why this spot was chosen. The scale of its construction was sublime, and the surrounding landscape – small mountains to one side, and the river, now widened into a new lake where the level had risen, beyond that the purple-gray scrub of sage through the lowlands – made me all but weep at the beauty of it. but with no eyes, no body, mind or form – no beginnings, no motion – because the object in motion and the object at rest are the same object, the same shape – the two sides, the other things – other sides, two things, other, other – which in motion or rest, there is no difference – no ending, no completion, no motion or gesture, but in which the gesture is begun – this is what I can tell no one – how the lighted sun has grown thick and dim and still – how the heart grows still, with no movement at the center – to begin, to make, to recover – to begin – in order to –

Floating particles of moisture in the air formed rainbows, faint but visible, while the sky, all stretched out, was an unmarked blue above, was glassine, was deep and blank and empty. I pointed the Nikon straight up. I didn’t know how this would translate on film, but then I didn’t know what I was shooting, either. By now, the voice and its compulsion had lessened, but that was only because I did what it told me to do.

and how I was the space that was not formed – empty and not empty – and for that reason wasn’t there – shape and shapeless both – how it was all I ever wanted, to not be there, to have no shape, no sex, no self – and how it was granted – by God, by whomever – that I became invisible – and was not there –

The itch of my inner thigh burned. I tried not to scratch because that only made it burn worse, and if I started I could hardly stop.

Of my list, only one item remained, and with the afternoon light now starting to fail, there seemed some small likelihood that I might drive the remaining distance and finish before the sun had entirely gone. This last site, thirty miles further out, had the unlikely name “The Metal Tears of St Stephen” – I could scarcely guess what that meant – but it was a point on the map, highlighted and circled, apparently some kind of monument at the very end of a long, straight road that ran almost as far north as the border with Canada, stopping just short of it.

•

“You won’t drink with me? What? Think you’re too good, the likes of me?” He was big all around, broad-nosed, dark-skinned, and approached me at the bar, spilt beer already in hand, where I waited with my coffee for the burger that I’d ordered.

“What? No. You? No, it’s not… I just don’t drink. At all. Nothing personal.”

“Nothing personal? So what is personal? In that case? When nothing…” he sat beside me, “…nothing’s personal. What are you saying? That I’m not a person?”

“No. No. Not that.”

“Then what?”

I looked around at the brown-paneled interior, the bodies at tables, the bodies along the bar, the dimness, the infrequent neon glowing through a sheet-haze of tobacco smoke that hung just above center throughout, and lit, backwards lettering framed in windows by the door, windows revealing only darkness outside, reflective as thick, black oil. The man leaned on an elbow and waited, his face inches from mine, scowling, eyebrows furrowed, his breath thick with beer and cigarettes.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell you. But you have to listen. Okay?”

“Who’s not listening? Are you saying I’m not listening?”

“And don’t interrupt.”

His wide face wobbled near to mine, breathing in and out as if winding a spring of gathered fury. “I’m fucking listening to you.”

I took a sip of my burnt coffee, lit a cigarette of my own and coughed, then said, “I’m no one, nothing. I know this. Sometimes, people even see straight through me.”

“No one. Nothing. Straight through. I’m liss… lissning.”

“But I’ve been places. This, at least, is what I’m told. Some of these places… I don’t know what they are. When people tell me that I’ve been there, I don’t know what they mean. And the things some people say I’ve done? In these… places… I don’t know about that either. All I can do is deny it. The accusation… listen…”

“I’m lisssssning. Goddamnit.”

“The accusation counts for something, that’s true. It counts for a lot. But if it does, then so must the denial. Others will have to decide for me what did or didn’t happen, and where I have or haven’t been.”

“I’ll bet… I’ll bet you did it. Don’t know what it was, asshole, but I’m damn sure you did it.”

“What? Why? You don’t know the first thing about me.”

“I know you’re white people. And white people always did it.”

“Hey, Jeremy!” came a voice from the floor. “You tell him, innit. You tell him the way it is.”

Looking into the darkness, I couldn’t see who’d spoken. Bodies sat at tables, others stood, throwing darts. Those at the pool table seemed unconcerned with us. Only the beaming, broad eyes of my companion stared back toward me, hovering a little too close for comfort, perhaps even, I don’t know, invading, like, my personal space. “Do you want to hear the story or don’t you?”

“I want you to tell me what happens.”

“Okay,” I said, after taking another drag on my cigarette. “One place that I have been, that I know, very definitely, just today in fact, was this place at the end of a long road not far from here. Let me tell you about that. I drove out there as fast as I could. I was hoping to catch the last of the light, but I didn’t make it. It was already dark by the time I got there, at the road’s end, and then I had to leave the car behind and walk, and follow a trail into the woods. The sun had already set behind that range of small mountains to the west, so that when I got to where the trail stopped, hardly any light remained, just the very last of the twilight, the last, barest glow still in the sky. I could hardly see anything at all. But do you know what?”

“Do I know? WHAT?”

“It was beautiful. Really. Like at the bottom of a lake. The way it’s dim and far off and quiet. The way the light has to filter through. It was like being at the bottom of the ocean. Where entire schools of hundreds of fish turn suddenly and flash past. Where strange creatures flap along the mud, chasing smaller things that are even harder to imagine. Where everything that doesn’t eat you seems distant, like in a dream. It was the perfect end to the day, really, but no good for the pictures that I’d come to take, the whole reason that I’d gone out that far in the first place.”

“Pictures. Asshole.”

“Do you want me to tell you what I found there?” “…What. Where?”

“At this place you call ‘The Metal Tears of St Stephen’. Although I still don’t understand why you call it that.”

“I don’t call anything anything. Fuck you. What are you calling me?”

“Nothing, nothing. I’ll have to go back in the morning. For the pictures. But also to be sure that what I saw there was real. Because I’m not sure about that. Not now. And even if it is real – even if it is, it may not be anything. It may not mean what I need it to mean. But I think it still might help me.”

“Help you… I’ll help you.”

“You will?”

“I’m going to fucking help you. Asshole.”

“But I don’t know if you… How…?”

“I want you to tell me what happens.” He reached a hand out unsteadily, missed my shoulder, then corrected his aim and gave me a shove. I didn’t quite fall off the stool, but wobbled.

“Do you want me to tell you what I found?”

“Fuck… you… I want you to tell me the future…”

“Oh,” I said. “That.” The bartender set my burger in front of me, open-faced and smeared in melted yellow cheese, surrounded by fries and a pile of lettuce. At the sight of this, my stomach tightened, turned inward and started to eat itself. “I can’t do that.”

“Sure you can.”

“It’s…” assembling the food, picking it up, “not something that I do.”

The man beside me stood and knocked his stool back and over, where it fell with a clatter. He leaned in and pressed his nose and forehead against mine. “Tell me the future. Asshole.”

“Uh, it’s… not my business. Really.”

“I’ll tell you about your business. You tell me the future.”

“I… just want to… eat this…” but I’d dropped the burger as he moved forward, wrapped his thick arms around my waist and lifted me off the stool. I hung perilous for a moment, kicking my dangling legs back and forth, when he threw both me and himself onto the floor. He probably just meant to throw me, but our momentum carried him down also. Other people cheered at this, people I didn’t know, and I couldn’t tell if anything hurt yet or not. I also couldn’t move. He had both my arms and legs pinned, and my face pressed against the sticky linoleum.

“Ow.”

“Tell me… what happens.”

He tightened his grip and I couldn’t breathe. “Eh…”

Somebody from the crowd behind shouted, “Yeah, hey, you better tell him what’s gonna happen, innit. Hey, yeah, Jeremy, you make him talk.”

“Tell me… the… future. Asshole.”

“…Okay, fine, okay, I’ll talk…” my lips smashed against the floor.

•

“Hey. Buddy. You still have to pay for that.”

•

I looked at the swelling in the mirror. It hadn’t started yet in earnest, but there was a bruise across my face, and I told myself the noisy fluorescent light in here made it look worse than it was. The television in the room was on, but turned down low, just a whisper, free HBO, and I brought in my cellphone from the car, where I’d left it on the console, and found there was signal enough that it should work.

I took her number from my wallet: the scrap of notebook paper, folded into quarters and bent to the contour of the wallet’s spine, with Vivianne’s looping script. I dialed, then realized, sitting at the edge of the wide, stiff bed, I had no idea what I wanted to say to her. I just wanted to see her. It didn’t matter. I wedged the toe of my shoe into the shag carpet and waited as all the necessary connections were made, then heard the rising three-tone interruption, followed with, “The number you have dialed is no longer in service. Please check the number and try again if you believe you have reached this message in error. The number you have dialed –” So I did just as it said, checking the number carefully, trying again, but got the same message, folded the phone shut.

“Fuck.”

I lit a cigarette. The cluster of large, red bites I’d discovered on my inner thigh itched like it should catch on fire.

“Fuck.”

I stared out through the open, purple door of the motel. The half-lit sign blazed pale against the sky’s star-specked fabric. Crickets chirruped, frogs croaked in resonant chorus, either near or far, I couldn’t tell.

“Fuck.”

•

By dewy morning, my car the only one in the gravel lot behind me, I crunched across to the dirt path that led into the woods. I took one photo of the sign at the trailhead to mark the location, telling me as much as I already knew – THE METAL TEARS OF ST STEPHEN – though with no explanation forthcoming, and perhaps, those who’d named it figured, none owed. I walked through spiderwebs and hanging branches. My shoes became dark with damp. It was different now that I could see this, and the trail didn’t seem to lead as far as I remembered until the woods abruptly opened out into a wide and grassy field, where predatory birds circled overhead and the path led forward through bent stalks toward the center of the clearing.

I could see it from here, partly. Taller than a man, it stood above the grass, reflecting the cold sunlight in its dull sheen. Photos from here looked like some bald head poking its skull-shape out from a fuzzy horizon. When I reached the monument, there was a radius cleared out from it of a couple feet, seeming less to have been cut back than burned away with acid. The ground around it was dry and dead.

The metal sphere stood silent and familiar. Its burnished surface shone gray and flat.

I held up the camera. I lowered the camera. I held the camera up.

“Fuck,” I said. “Fuck you,” I said. “Fuck.”

I circled around and kicked it. It didn’t ring. My foot just kind of flopped against it.

“Fuck you,” I said. “It’s not enough. This isn’t enough. Not nearly,” I said. “Fuck. Fuck.”

The metal sphere sat in the dirt and did nothing. I put my ear against it (cold) and thought, after a moment, that I could hear something scratching around inside. “It’s nice. I’m not saying it’s not nice. It is. It just isn’t…”

“Enough?” There was no wind. It did not stir the grasses.

“No. Right. No. Not nearly, it isn’t.” I sat down hard in the dirt. My hipbone hurt where it was all bruised up. My spine felt shook. “No,” I said, “nothing like it. Not at all.”

A falcon swooped in low overhead, hovered a bit, then flapped away.

“I’ll see within…” I said, “what is the body. Within the body, what. The bird, metal tears, whatever. I don’t have any.” Scooping a fist of dirt in my hand, then dropping it. “Oh. Right.” I pointed the Nikon, strapped around my neck, up. “Almost forgot.” Clicked the shutter and wound, clicked again, wound again, clicked, adjusted, clicked, wound. “Where is the body?” I looked straight up. “WHERE IS THE BODY?”

“I think it’s inside.”

“What? Inside here?”

“I think so.”

“Oh, okay. Good. Good that we should find it, know at least where it is. I think… that… the body…”

The sky deepened, stiffened. There was no wind.

“Is that really… so good?”

•

The long, straight stretch of interstate freeway cut through fields and farmlands and high prairie flats, wound about rocks, crossed rivers and dead spaces, empty, dry horse spaces, and edged gradually back toward the mountain pass, prior to crossing into the western, rainy lowlands and back to the city of Seattle. The small city of Ellensburg, outside the foothills, provided a perfect stop for gas and a necessary meal.

The diner, large as it was, was packed near to capacity. I waited as harried waitstaff rushed about, and once the three large families ahead of me were seated, a girl no more than seventeen and clearly exhausted asked how many were in my party.

I was the last person waiting in the foyer. “Me?” I said, pointing at myself.

She gave me a look. Next I found myself led to a booth large enough that a truck could park in it. She set a wide, laminated menu in front of me and another directly across. Throughout the dining room small children screamed, climbed the tables, and ran serpentine patterns over the carpet while their parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins ignored, scolded, or pleaded with them, all tactics achieving the same utter lack of effect. “Your waitress will be with you shortly,” she said, already walking away, past a cluster of small, empty tables. I buried my face in a book. I knew what I wanted.

When I looked up again at the shape that approached, the waitress, a middle-aged woman with an order pad held in front of her, unfazed by the surrounding chaos, took a look at my face and all but gasped in horror.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I just had an accident.”

Now she gave me a look, though it seemed she didn’t want to ask.

“Coffee and chicken fried steak? With eggs? Scrambled. Whole wheat?”

“Is that everything?”

“Yes, thank you.”

She looked across the table to the empty bench and the menu laying there, then back at me, her eyebrows raised.

“Really, that’s everything.”

“Okay…” She took both menus and I stuck my face into the paperback. When I looked up again to thank her for the cup and thermos of coffee she’d brought, the dining room was all but empty. The families had all cleared out. Family time was over. But Proteus sat across from me, looking confused. His face was similarly bruised and, now, badly swollen. Just like mine.

“I don’t think,” he said, “you should have told him the future.”

I ignored him, put my face back into my book.

When I looked up again, when the waitress brought my plate of food, he was gone. He’d wandered off.

The wide, ceramic plate reflected dingy sunlight from outside, the same light that spread thin through the dense, gathering clouds, and the peaked light from those fixtures in the ceiling overhead, weak and sick as they seemed, weak and pale in the wash of gray daylight. The plate was bigger than the food, but it was a very big plate. I stared down at it, white and round and scuffed from use, scuffed around the edges. The food was a pile in the middle. It was covered in gravy the same color as the sky, and flecked with little dark dots. My hands reached for a fork and a knife and hovered above it. They hovered above the food. They hesitated. I watched.

I watched as the plate changed. It changed into a paper plate. Like a movie crossfade. My chicken fried steak and my eggs and toast changed into a round little loop of dough that sat within the plate; they changed; they changed into a doughnut (la-la). The light was different too. The light was full and strong and yellow-white, and bright through a whole bank of windows. I looked around. The entire room was windows. And the plate with its doughnut (it looked like a really nice doughnut) was on top of a bright orange table, beaming bright, reflective orange, a little sticky with something spilled, I could see, but altogether, candy-colored.

What?

I reached; I reached my hesitant hand forward; I reached forward to touch the doughnut, and then I – just barely – I just barely touched it. Just a little. Just barely.

It was a little greasy. It was covered in sugar. It sprang back where I touched it.

And as I pulled my hand away slowly, it faded away slowly, a slow dissolve, back into the food I’d asked for, and I was once more in the diner, in the pale light, and everything was normal again. And everything was normal again.