A diner. A timeless symbol. A place of many functions, many meanings: eating, thinking, conversing, being alone. A loophole in loitering; one cup of coffee for hours of inactivity. Patrons going nowhere, patrons sitting for hours, patrons ordering the same thing every day. The diner is a place outside of time. When one wants to step out of time, stop stepping, sit down for hours, there is the diner. It also has the power of feeding, keeping patrons alive. One could sit and feed and stay alive without living in time for as much time as one can afford.
He pushes the door open; the jangle of little bells on a string. The patrons have all been living here, outside of time, for a long time: they all look up and watch him eye the room for a place to sit. Everybody in the diner is locked in a repetitive gesture, no progress, no end-point: opening and shutting a newspaper, wiping off a table, dipping french fries into ketchup and eating them. He takes a booth across from the man with the french fries.
The waitress is older than time herself. She stands at his side with a pad, nodding at everything he is saying and scribbling in her pad. Her scribbles are nonsense, the pad is full of nonsense. A fry cook endlessly flips the same burger, which never renders to ash: the carbon takeover of all life is happening everywhere except the diner. The repetitive gestures protect one from dying and decay.
The man with the french fries keeps looking at him. Maybe he had been staring at the booth before he entered the diner. Maybe everyone here had been waiting for him. The man doesn’t look at his french fries, and he has spots of ketchup all over his face from missing his mouth. The crinkle of the paper in the basket of fries, the wet sucking pops of the fries scooping up ketchup, the chewing licking and swallowing… the crinkle, the sucking, the chewing, the gesture repeated.
The waitress keeps scribbling on her pad. Her pen is tearing shreds in the paper, her knuckles are white. Smoke smelling like grease wafts from the kitchen. The man with fries stares at him with pain in his eyes.
He looks at the man with the french fries. Grabbing fries from the endless basket. Where is the puddle of ketchup? Not on his plate. He lifts a fry and brings it down, past his plate, to the side of his belly. A living, breathing, gaping wound at the side of his belly. Wet sucking sounds, popping. He jabs the fry into the wound and scoops up a wad of blood and eats it. Cannibalism. Autophagy. The closed circle of blood and food. The man with the french fries is eating himself to stay alive. There is no death outside of time, there is only repetition, there is only repetition. The diner is a closed circle. The diner is open all night.
