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Back
to Nothing
by Jeffrey Rindskopf
My
dim reflection warped before disappearing from the pitch-black
coffee as I tossed in a scoop of powdered creamer. It twisted
like smoke, turning the French roast an inoffensive light brown
like it always does. The sandy-haired waitress asked me if I
needed anything else in her stilted voice like she always does.
No, nothing she could offer me.
I
took my first sip of the coffee—too hot. I folded the burnt
tip of my tongue over itself and watched the surly Filipino cook
grunt his way through a ham and cheese omelet. The other
waitress, his rail-thin daughter, openly fiddled with her phone.
Her eyes were a long way off. Returning from another table, the
first waitress stuck a slip of paper above the grill. She was
painfully attractive. Her bouncy curls, the shape of her ass
stretching the black cotton of her skirt, her porcelain skin—all
taunted me every time I had my morning coffee there on Mondays,
Tuesdays, and Thursdays. Coincidentally, those were the only days
she worked.
Lewis
and I had plenty of laughs daring each other to ask her out, or
failing that, to slap her ass, to seize her in a passionate
embrace, to propose to her on the spot. Passive bullshit, you
know. “Commitment,” Lewis always said, “could
make anything work. Slap her ass, and when she turns to you with
that expression women get when they feel violated but flattered,
just raise your eyebrows like it’s nothing, because it is
nothing.” For all his confident talk, even he never made a
serious move on her that I saw, and I suspected he was kept in
check by the same uncertainty that I was.
Thursday
mornings I’d come without Lewis and fix my thoughts firmly
on her. Her nametag said Linda. Before it happened, I would watch
her in my peripheral and just wonder. I could ask her out
today. It would be easy. Just say it: would you want to grab
dinner with me sometime? Eventually, I’d knock myself
down a few pegs. I’m can’t ask her out. Who
the hell am I kidding? As if I’ve changed overnight, as if
today will be any different from any other day. It all
knotted my stomach and haunted my thoughts as I drained the
coffee down to the few grounds that had escaped the filter and
ordered more. I never stopped drinking coffee, no matter how bad
my twitch got or how many hallucinatory flutters I’d see in
the corner of my eye. She would fill it up for me and flash a
polite grin, and the thoughts would start again, until I had
demolished my self-esteem to rubble. The perfect start to my
Thursdays.
Now,
I didn’t spare a single second on her. It was a Monday, but
Lewis’s usual seat remained empty and I thought only of
him. Or rather, the lack of him. One week before to the day,
maybe to the hour, Lewis vanished before my eyes. Not like how a
magician vanishes, more like how money in the bank vanishes.
Really vanishes. We were talking about coffee. There was nothing
else to talk about, so we felt compelled to fill the silence. We
filled it with coffee. Lewis could make any topic interesting,
and he was railing on the lack of quality coffee in America.
Watching
Lewis on a rant was a treat. I could’ve sold tickets, $10
general admission, eight for seniors and kids. “’Real
Columbian Coffee,’ they say. ‘Taster’s Choice,’
they say,” he barked. “These must be some pretty
fucking indiscriminate tasters. Are they part-time tasters? Do
they get paid for tasting coffee? What’s the criteria to
become a taster—do you need a PhD?”
“They
must get bribed.”
“Exactly,
you think some lowly taster is going to challenge the Nestle
corporation when they could starve him out if he decides, ‘hey,
this coffee tastes like shit’? Or some Columbian grower is
going to have a press conference to say they aren’t
actually using only his coffee beans?”
“Maybe
a courageous grower,” I offered.
“No.
No is the correct answer. There’s no check on their power
or their lies, so they could sell dirt as grounds and rabbit shit
as beans and call it the best thing you’ll ever drink.”
Lewis slammed a hand on the table, adding punctuation. He sat
back, confident that his point, whatever it was, had been made.
He sipped his coffee and grimaced. I chuckled.
We
lapsed into silence. Even Lewis couldn’t keep the
conversation going constantly. We busied ourselves—Lewis
whipped a sugar packet back and forth as I scanned the diner. It
was deserted save for us and the staff. They still seemed to have
plenty to do. The waitresses were out of sight washing dishes,
and the cook had his back turned, wrestling with the sizzling
grill.
I
noticed then that Lewis’s expression had changed and his
body seized up. His grin disappeared and his face went empty,
expect for the eyes. There was fear behind them. He didn’t
move and neither did I. I chuckled, confused, and looked around
to see if I was missing something. I asked something useless but
he didn’t respond.
It
started at his hands. I looked down at the table, where his hands
lay flat, eager to escape his unrelenting stare—I’ve
never been good with eye contact. His fingers had turned
translucent, showing the checkered-red-and-white of the gaudy
tablecloth beneath them. I tried to blink it away and moved my
mouth stupidly so that I might say something useful. I slid my
hand across the table to where his hand once was. It was gone
now.
The
hallucinatory phenomenon of transparency, of total disappearance,
spread outward from his fingers. Crept up his arms and along his
chest and didn’t stop until it had consumed him whole. We
were both silent, his face still frozen. His torso disappeared
but for the fluorescent lighting that bounced off it and the
shadow that darkened the linoleum booth behind him. His head was
the last thing to go—his eyes, it seemed to me, but maybe
that’s because I was staring into them the whole time. Eye
contact wasn’t quite so painful all of a sudden.
An
adult contemporary song played faint over the speakers.
Otherwise, there was silence.
It
must have lasted ten seconds, but every second stretched to
hours. There were no thoughts abuzz in my head, no concerns for
my appearance, no self-imposed pressures to fill the silence.
Only my eyes and his, nothing else, in Lewis’s last moments
on Earth. Or in this dimension, or in this universe, or in this
time. Hell, I don’t know. His last moments in some form or
another.
He
left me staring at the crack where red linoleum met creamy
drywall where he once was. I remember that square foot of wall
and those seconds of immovability better than I remember my first
sexual experience, my first day of school, my first kiss, even
the look on my father’s face the last time I saw him.
No
one else saw. The waitresses blundered on in insufferable
ignorance. Linda returned, ending my trance, and asked if I
wanted anything else. “No.”
His
coffee cup was still there, the weak Peruvian blend swirling
slowly to a stop. He had been stirring it mindlessly only seconds
before. Linda swooped it up along with the plate that had held
his beloved blueberry muffin. I had to say something.
“Excuse
me,” I managed. “Did you happen to see my friend
leave?”
She
gave me a curious look, probably the longest she’s ever
looked at me. “I don’t remember you being with
someone, sir. I’m sorry.” She returned to the
kitchen. I watched as she threw the dishes into the industrial
sink, pouring out the coffee and dissolving the artificial
blueberries he left behind.
*
* *
I
haven’t been to work since that day. I sat through a
typical day, but I couldn’t take another typical day after
that. My mind roamed wildly through possibilities as I went
through the script for calls, assuring dissatisfied customers I
sympathized with them plenty, but was unable to do anything.
“Let
me speak to your supervisor,” a hefty-sounding woman said.
But I was lost, weighing the possibility of alien abduction
again. “Are you still there?”
“Yes,
I’m still here,” I lied.
I
promised myself I wouldn’t return to the library this
morning. I had spent most of the subsequent waking hours poring
over research books and sifting through the internet on a
computer that operated at a snail’s pace. I needed to busy
myself with other things. Go to a movie, play a sport, go
hiking—No, not hiking. Too much time alone to think.
Realistically
though, I knew I would be back at the infernal gothic building
come tonight, searching through periodicals in vain until closing
time when I’d hide in the men’s room stalls to stay
undetected for the night.
I
ended up at home last night, somehow. I remember leafing through
a hefty volume on Kierkegaard and watching a blond slink by in a
skimpy tank top. Then a stretch of foggy darkness where memories
should have been—the longest one yet. I came to standing at
the door of my apartment, which I’d left to rot for who
knows how long. A dozen notes were taped to the door, one
on top of the other, each complaining about the smell. I opened
the door, and after that, I couldn’t blame them. Chaos, the
natural state, was reclaiming its 500 square feet. The
overwhelming odors from the dishes left in the sink and the
compost in the trash bin made the air thick. I managed some sleep
despite it all but found the bed too soft and woke up with my
back killing me. I stared up from the bed for an hour or more,
insisting to the blank walls and stucco ceilings of my apartment
that I wouldn’t return to the diner or the library again.
They didn’t buy it for one second. More likely I wouldn’t
return to the damned apartment, now a foul-smelling relic from
another life. I didn’t go for Linda anymore—I had
come to loathe the sight of the waitress whose modest beauty once
entranced me. I went now for myself and for Lewis, for some shred
of hope that drifted further from reach each second that passed
without hearing Lewis rant on and on.
The
books and online articles started out relatively concrete. From
the Wikipedia article on spontaneous combustion, to books
attempting to shed light on history’s most mysterious
disappearances, to endless literature on abductions and
cover-ups. And down, down, down the rabbit hole. I’m
surprisingly well-versed on philosophical history by this point,
but little good it does me. Aristotelianism, cynicism,
objectivism, utilitarianism, existentialism,
postmodernism—useless trash for my purposes, unless I
needed kindling to start a fire. I read one book by Kant that had
no ending. The last ten pages or so were ripped out—some
kind of sick joke, I guess. It tortured me to no end until I
became convinced that those ten pages had the end-all, be-all
answer. The universe itself, I imagined, was the one playing the
joke.
I
never considered how few friends Lewis and I had in common until
he was gone. I had no way of contacting his family or friends. He
was self-employed, some daring modern artist, pushing the
extremes of what can be aesthetically beautiful or some shit like
that. I never asked to see his art because I didn’t want to
lie to him, say it was beautiful and that I understood his
intent. His other friends were the same, artists of his ilk that
would find me intolerably passé. Our
friendship was self-contained to the diner. The bastard didn’t
believe in social media even, pretentiously condemning it as the
new opiate of the masses.
There
was no one to contact. I considered calling the city pigs, or
taking the L train to his neighborhood to start knocking on
doors—hundreds upon hundreds of doors.
I
realized only after his disappearance how little I really knew
about Lewis. He struck me as a lively extrovert with little use
for routine or silence or passivity or conflicting
opinions—everything I was not. Maybe that was simply the
self he projected for my sake, while his artsy friends knew him
as a shy, tortured soul.
How
little I knew, how little I know, how little I will ever know.
Linda
approached the table, the cook a few steps behind her—probably
the first time I’d seen him away from the grill. Linda’s
false smile didn’t flicker across her face like usual. She
stopped at my table’s edge, the cook practically growling
behind her.
“Sir,
I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” she mumbled
delicately, wringing her hands. “You’re scaring the
other customers.”
I
was scaring customers? They should have been more worried about
the ogre sweating and shedding into their omelets, or about the
possibility that they too might fade from existence like the man
none of them remembered. But sure enough, every pair of eyes
populating the silver-rimmed tables was squarely on me. I checked
myself in the adjacent windows, but they were too smudged to make
out any reflection.
I
needed to escape this diner anyway, I decided. It reeked of
Lewis. Then again, I felt reckless.
I
turned my face back to her and snarled, “Make me.”
*
* *
The
joke’s on them, I thought as I rubbed my sore ass, bruised
after landing on the cracked pavement. I didn’t pay for my
coffee, nor could I have paid if they’d let me stay—my
accounts are all overdrawn as of yesterday. One too many cups of
coffee and one too many packs of cigarettes. My wallet is little
more than a useless lump of bovine skin in my pocket now. Same
for my cell phone which powered down after idling a few nights in
the library.
I
hopped on the M train west, back to my apartment. I stood the
first half of the ride, and distracted myself by trying to stand
steady without the help of the steel poles.
In
the dark tunnels between stops, I spotted my dim reflection
looking back at me over the heads of businessmen burying their
noses in pulp novels. I understood then why they booted me from
the diner so unceremoniously. Matted hair hung past my cracked
eyes to my sunken cheeks, and each article of clothing threatened
to fall from my withering frame of a body. My reflection looked
lonely, so I tried to imagine Lewis’s next to mine. It
flickered in and out of existence, but I couldn’t will it
for longer than a millisecond, even in my imagination.
A
third of the passengers got off at a stop. I took the open seat
farthest from the other passengers and avoided my reflection like
a Gorgon. I looked at my fingers. They smelled like stale metal,
with city soot embedded in the curves of my palms and dried ink
deep beneath my fingernails.
My
thoughts circled back to Lewis. I was so god damned sick of
thinking about Lewis, every second of every hour of every day. I
had no solace in sleep. I dreamt of him constantly, telling me
reassuring things or terrifying things or morphing into a fleshy
monster. His words would vanish with him each time I awoke.
I
pondered the possibility that I was insane—that Lewis had
never existed. I was a pitiful man, I reflected, the exact kind
of isolated, insomniac wacko to concoct a glamorous companion to
fill those long hours spent in a miserable all-night diner
waiting for the sun to rise. Not the most comforting idea, but I
tried to talk myself down. I had heard Lewis, felt Lewis, seen
Lewis, even smelt Lewis. Hadn’t I? It seemed lazy, like
some contrived twist ending to a bad movie. If I was truly crazy,
what suddenly ended my lengthy delusion called Lewis? I turned
the thought over in my mind for five stops or so, but I couldn’t
accept it as a real answer. Like so many other possibilities, I
abandoned it. Another one on the pile—a possibility but one
that just didn’t feel quite right.
And
like that, nothing was left. I’d exhausted every
option—alien abduction, spontaneous combustion,
enlightenment, kidnapping, teleportation, holograms, aurora
borealis, existential dilemma, solar flares, poison, invisibility
cloaks, self-actualization, black magic, possession, paranormal
activity, and now my own insanity. Deep down, I knew each could
be true. I could stumble upon irrefutable proof that any one was
true, but I still wouldn’t be satisfied. A simple answer
wouldn’t make it all better.
Time
sped around me, unstoppable, but I didn’t care. My stop
came and went. I was still staring down at my hands, but I didn’t
focus on the soot between the grooves, but the intricacies of the
fleshy grooves themselves. These hands could blend in with the
subway seats behind them at any moment and for any reason. Or for
no reason. Maybe then I would join Lewis wherever he was. I
alternately flexed and relaxed fingers, skin tightening and
loosening around bone and muscle beneath.
My
hands enthralled me in some bizarre way. I felt everything
against them and within them. I felt the thousands of blood cells
coursing through purple capillaries surrounded by a vast system
of nerve endings, each made up of more cells that together
contained a blueprint for this great, hulking being they were
unwittingly serving with their every movement. Muscles dyed red
with blood contracted and released because of some instinctual
reflex drilled into them by my ancestors, our ancestors. Layer
upon layer of skin protected it all from the malicious atoms that
I could feel, even see bouncing against the outermost layer of my
skin, which contained more cells, more living things ruled by
function and habit, each believing it acts alone. And all of it a
part of me, another being likewise surrounded by more and more
living. And all us living stretched on and on beyond this planet,
beyond this galaxy, into an infinite nothingness, which itself
was another enormous living being inside another infinite
nothingness, like a Russian nesting doll that never ended. That
being, like all of us, would die before any time at all had
passed to feed new budding cells that might one day join together
to create a different being, still somehow the same. And on and
on and on, all in these hands. For a moment, I saw the spotted
tile behind my fingers as the flesh faded.
The
bus screeched to a stop and a lanky dark-skinned man came on
board. He held a stack of flyers above his head. “Excuse
me, ladies and gentlemen! I am truly sorry for disturbing you,
but I am not asking for charity! Rather I’m…”
A
homeless man with leather skin took the seat across from me as
the train lurched back into motion. He gave me a steely look and
nodded his head once. I turned my eyes down, and let my hands, as
solid as ever, fall back to my sides.
Damn,
I thought as I shut my eyes and sprawled across three seats and
drifted off. I almost had it.
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