I don’t like it. Never have. White formica carries too many negative associations to be inert in my world. All the late-night travelers, all the sad and broken white-trash families with nowhere else to go, they leave their marks here in the tabletops. Like shadows, or ghosts of shadows that no one else can see, or that no one else really cares to. Pale reflections of things best hidden lay calling behind the tiny golden flecks, and I don’t think I really want to hear anymore.

Ghosts.

Ghosts are what brought me here, as surely as they are everything that serves to profane the place for me. I spend a lot of time running from the things that I don’t have the strength to face anymore. That’s a fault of mine, you see. If you were a direct man, you could call it an obvious lack of courage. You would, of course, be correct. Courage is a luxury that I no longer enjoy. Not the kind of courage that you need to face the big issues. That courage was stripped away a long time ago, and try as I might, I can’t dance the magic mojo dance to bring it back. You don’t get that kind of courage without having something that you love in your life. You can’t keep it without that. When you’re left alone in the world, it drifts away like so much water through your hands. Courage requires love, and love requires courage. I’m so fucking far out of the loop that I can’t find my way back inside and I don’t know what to do.

So, I drive.

That’s what I do. Not for money, sport, or some kind of demented belief that it will cure what ails me. When I’m worn and tired, I drive. When my head fills up with all the inescapable beauty of living, I need to drive and let it all bleed out. It has nowhere else to go. No secret confidante supports me, only an endless procession of empty eyes and painted smiles. No more whispered passions in the warm embrace of enfolding darkness. No true closeness anymore.

I don’t have the courage to deal with that. No closeness. I’m not man enough to just stand in one spot for eternity and silently tough that one out. Nor am I bold enough to take a fucking soulless Stepford Wife who happily goes through all the motions with a deadpan smile on her prettily made-up face. I need to touch, love, and know that I am loved in return. Man is reborn through the love of woman, and I desperately need that. I do.

And, that’s why I’m here, sitting in the middle of a grimy desert diner at three in the morning, and feeling like just another one of those ghosts trapped behind the tiny flecks in the tabletop. Just another fading afterimage that no one really cares to see.

The waitress comes over, pretty from a distance, but as she closes I can see the work that hardship and time have wrought upon those once delicate features. It’s in the creases in her makeup and the tiny little lines around her mouth and eyes that come from smoking too many cigarettes. And, oh baby, is it ever in the eyes. Maybe they were once the eyes of a high-school beauty queen, they’re certainly pretty enough to have claimed such a vainglorious past. Eyes that once could’ve smiled, and melted a young man’s heart straightaway. Now they just float in the vacuum of her face, dull in their orbits, the light of hope gone completely out of them. For one surreal moment, they seem so endlessly deep that I actually convince myself I can see the dead things floating inside, like bits of scum beneath the surface of a cold, black pond.

(I wonder what relics lay scattered there in the windblown ashes of her dreams. What has she traded away to become this automaton that stands before me now? How did it feel to let that all go? I look at her and a part of me wants to pull her to me, carry her away, and show her a different life and a different world where all the silly passions of the heart can be something more than shadow and bitter memory. I wonder, for a moment, if there’s anything that I could do to wake that up inside of her just one last time, anything to make her remember what it feels like to be caught up in the ferocious conflagration of the senses that is love. I want that for her, but it’s not my gift to give. Not to her. No.)

She mumbles her canned greeting and asks me how I’m doing, and as I deliver my canned response in return, I can’t help but wonder at how much longer I’ve got ‘till all of it starts to be that plainly written across my face, too. How much longer do I have until everything that’s worth anything inside of me lies down to take a nap for that final time, and never wakes up again? Will I notice? When all that’s left is the resignation and the pre-fab greetings, will I even remember what it was like to have once been full and alive?

I buckle down and order waffles and eggs instead of choosing to harass her with any of my delusional profundities. As she saunters off towards the kitchen, I find myself drifting back into reverie.

Love.

To hear mundane people speak of it, you would expect that it was the most common condition on the earth. According to my friends, not being in love at any given time is something akin to walking five miles through a rainstorm without getting wet:

“It’ll happen, just give it time.” – Yeah, time. Time is the only irreplaceable commodity that we possess. Spending it lightly is sacrilege against living. We have only this moment, this brief little space in eternity to live out the scope of our lives. Nothing buys it back. Youth and beauty, once gone, are gone forever. Time is nothing to squander on chance. The entire existence of man is just a queer little blip in an endless continuity of silence. Why should I take time so lightly?

“You just haven’t met the right person yet.” – Well, actually I have (tales for another day, perhaps). I have met her more than once, even. In that respect, I’m luckier than most by great spans of chance. I believe that love is rare. Perhaps it is even the rarest of all things shared between human beings. It is profound beyond reckoning. The covenant of love is completely apart from want and need. It is a perfect circuit of absolute understanding and honest admiration shared between two human beings (It requires no oath. It requires no ring. And yes, it does endure). If a person can’t understand you, they can’t love you. It’s really as simple as that. In a world that’s populated by people who are too afraid to express their honest feelings, or too hideously malformed inside to risk being uncovered if they did, just reaching the necessary level of communication is rare enough. What scares me so terribly is not that I haven’t met “the right person,” but that everyone I’ve met in a good long while has been so fucking shallow and fundamentally wrong.

There is a good measure of difference between “something real” and “anything at all.”

(Several sharp bursts of profanity threaten to wake me from my piteous state of self-analysis, but I drift deeper still.)

I am not an ascetic. I crave comfort as much as anyone, and from time to time I do give in. I have come to understand the kindnesses of swaddling oneself in illusion. They are fleeting, however. They pass with the casual utterances of indifference, or the coarseness of being treated as an object rather than an entity. It’s funny, that. Never would I have imagined that I would be heartsobbing about having been treated like a piece of meat. Nevertheless, I have, and it hurts. It really does.

Lying does not come so easily to me. Lying to myself is even more difficult, still. There’s a fine line between giving someone “the benefit of the doubt,” and lying to yourself, boldly. Possessiveness, jealousy, that kind of shit doesn’t fit into my concept of love, so I act accordingly. I trust. I give the benefit of the doubt and, boy howdy, there’s been a whole houseful of doubt around these parts lately.

Feelings like jealousy don’t happen when you honestly trust someone. Well, they don’t happen to me, anyway. I mean, isn’t trust the foundation of every relationship, no matter how mundane? Without trust, what have you got? Nothing. At best, you’ve got a fragile little house of cards waiting for the first strong breeze to come along and set things straight. So, you trust when you can, and you hope for the best, because it’s really the only option you’ve got if you’re going to give this every chance. Right?

Yeah.

It’s too bad integrity has become extinct. I don’t know when it happened, but it did. Or, at least, it’s on the ropes if not already down for the count. Why do I say that? Well, I have my reasons. Trust that I do. Until someone comes out of the woodwork and proves me wrong, I’ll just hang on to them. You may call it cynical, but I don’t entirely see it that way. Only stupid men make leaps of faith without first anticipating some kind of impact. I’ll still make the leaps from time to time. What I guess I’m saying is that I’ve learned to brace for that all too uncomfortable landing. And, trust me on this one; it helps to be ready for a landing like that. It can really put a lasting hurt on you if you aren’t. D’ya know what I mean?

(I don’t know…maybe I’m just completely wrong about everything. Either my ideas of human interrelationship are completely off the mark, or everyone for a thousand miles around is completely fucked-up. I haven’t decided which one I’m more comfortable believing yet. I’ll let you know when I do.)

Ah, the wandering waitress returns. This time she comes to me with a steaming plate of pseudo-food, smile wavering but still intact. Once again, I marvel at the dark intricacies of her eyes, and shudder inwardly as I thank her for serving me. They’re every bit as flat and cold as the first time I saw them. Dead.

She shuffles away, and I turn to my plate, famished. Waffles and eggs seem a lot less tempting, suddenly. I mean, they looked a whole hell of a lot different on the menu. There, the waffles were fluffy and tantalizing, the eggs full and perfect. Here on the table are what look like two hastily toasted Eggo’s and a crispy glob of rubbery-whiteness with two faint, yellow smears in it. Egads. I mean, E-fucking-gads…something has been seriously perverted in the translation.

But, beggars can’t be choosers (especially hungry beggars). So, I dig into those funky rubber eggs and I fill my head up with the images on that deceitful little menu, hoping somehow that enough fervent wishing will somehow fill the gaps between the desperate contrasts at hand.

And, just like that, I’m back in the silent place again. Thinking, thinking…always thinking. Something as innocuous as contemplating a plate of eggs has me thrust back into the miasma of my mind, hunting for elusive truth.

Another short burst of profanity draws my attention. I glance up from my food and notice a couple sitting across the restaurant, in another booth. Of her, I can see only the full head of long, blond hair. Of him, I can see nearly everything (layers beneath layers beneath layers). Creased, sunburned face dominated by a monstrous, bristly mustache. Cruel eyes nestled beneath a heavy brow. My initial assumption is redneck, my second more calculated assumption, sub-man. Grimy baseball cap, denim jacket with a pack of Marlboro’s half stuffed into the front pocket.

I could have stopped at redneck if I hadn’t caught so close a look at the eyes.

Again, the eyes.

Cruel, beneath that heavy brow. Cruel, and filled with agitation. I’ve seen similar weight behind the eyes of rattlesnakes about to strike. Men with these eyes are not strangers to me. They haunt my dreams as surely as any of a number of other things. Sometimes I feel as though I spend the greater part of my life trying to pretend that they don’t really exist. It’s easier for me that way. Again, illusion and its comforts come to bear. How often I retreat.

Furrowed brow, flushed cheeks, I could smell the sub-human nature on this guy from where I sat, at least twenty feet away. I should have seen it coming then, and in a way maybe I did.

(A very good friend of mine used to be fond of saying, “An animal, at it’s worst can only be savage. Man, at his worst, can be inhuman, and that is far more base and disturbing a thing.”)

Turning my attention away from their shame, I return to my eggs, but not my reverie. I am here now. Things are on alert inside of my head. I don’t like that feeling, I never have. I’ve heard that some people chase the feel of a good danger-high, and I don’t understand it. To me, it’s the most uncomfortable feeling in the world. If I could have my peace and love, I would spirit it off to the last uninhabited corner of the world remaining, and I would live with it there until the silences return to claim me. That would be enough for me. It would be far more than I deserve.

So, I sit and regard my eggs coldly. The first few attempts at biting through the chitinous layer surrounding them meet with some resistance. My teeth are good, but the damned pseudo-eggs are better, I guess. Completely indigestible, I’m still perversely determined to consume them. I don’t know why. It’s become a sort of challenge in my mind. Man vs. egg, and only the winner is going to walk away from this table. I was going to win.

“LISTEN TO ME YOU FUCKING BITCH!”

I look up squarely at that one. There’s nothing veiled about the promise of pain behind those words. He’s low on the table now, leaning towards her and mumbling again. Placating, begging, contrite in every aspect except the viper’s gaze. In my opinion, the sub-men never seem able to hide that one very well at all.

I watch for a moment as she brings her hand up from her lap and dabs her eyes with a handful of Kleenex. It’s no mystery that she’s crying, although she’s doing a damned brave job of keeping quiet about it.

“HEY BUDDY, YOU SEE SOMETHIN’ INTERSTIN’ OVER HERE?”

I shift my gaze slightly and look squarely into those fucking reptilian eyes trained directly on me.

“YEAH, I’M TALKIN’ TO YOU. MAYBE YOU’D LIKE TO COME OVER HERE AND JOIN US?”

I hold the gaze for a moment and then look down at my plate, inedible scrap of egg trapped midway between my throat and stomach. Yeah, I’m scared. I’m scared that I’m going to find myself in that place again, just one last time. Only maybe this time, I’m not going to be the one walking away. Of all the things we take for granted, seeing tomorrow is the grandest assumption of all.

Conflict and fear walk hand in hand. For every one of you that claims you don’t know fear in the face of conflict, you’re either lying or flat out stupid. Either that, or you’re one of them. That’s one really charming aspect about the sub-men. They don’t seem to be afraid of hurting people. They enjoy it. They revel in it. They hunt it out, look for it, and where it doesn’t exist, they ultimately create it. With them, it’s the first resort, never the last. I know them all too well.

I hear his wife trying to calm him down with a flurry of mumbled imprecations. No, I don’t look up again. If all you’ve got is your pride, maybe you’d be forced to. Me, I lost that long ago. I just keep on staring at the plate and trying to keep things cool.

I can no longer eat, but I can’t get up and leave either. I can’t, not in good conscience. I know what’s here in this room and I can’t just get up and walk away now. I need to be here until things get better. It’s not a goddamned hero complex. God knows that no one who knows me would ever accuse me of having anything like that. I just can’t walk out and leave her unprotected. She’s probably convinced herself that she’s in love with this monster. Either that, or he’s convinced her of it, somehow. Don’t laugh. I’ve seen the sub-men work before.

If you wonder whether or not you’ve ever been involved with one, let me ask you some questions:

Have you ever caught your lover in a position where he’s completely in the wrong and sat down to end things with him? I don’t care if it was wearing your panties or sleeping with your sister. When you start to end things, he begins to apologize…at first. When that doesn’t work, he begins placing blame elsewhere. When that doesn’t work, he shifts the blame to you for being untrusting enough to have accused him of such nonsense in the first place. He tries to make you feel like some kind of monster for even considering him capable of such a thing in the first place. As your resolve hardens, his reactions shift with kaleidoscopic rapidity, going from one extreme to another, as he tries desperately to find that chink in your armor that will let him back inside. I know his kind. I do. He has to be inside. It’s the mark of the emotional parasite that he is.

The anger and destructiveness are never far from the surface for him. You may not see them for years, but eventually you’ll be on the receiving end. Maybe it’ll be the night he comes home with another woman’s perfume on his clothes, or maybe it’ll be something tragically more direct. This “man” knows only want. To be the object of his attention is to simply be an object and nothing more.

His kind are a product of this broken world, and all the lost graces that we’ve let slip, so casually, away. Inhuman.)

I sit there and I look at the remainder of the eggs on my plate. I remember the mental game I played to choke them down and wonder if her marriage must be the same. Does she close her eyes at night and think of all the good that she can remember about him? Does that, somehow, make the suffering of it more palatable? Are those the illusions that she swaddles herself in to make the hurt go away?

I wait and listen to the exchange continue…

“Come on, baby. I didn’t mean nothin’ by it. You know I love you, baby. I wouldn’t do nothin’ to hurt you…not really. I love you. You’re my baby doll. C’mon. Smile for me.”

She mumbles something unintelligible to him and his voice lowers dangerously, becoming more heated and insistent.

(He who fights…)

And I sit there, struggling to quell the rising urges inside of me. I am sickened in the presence of this thing. This monstrosity.

(…when you gaze long…)

“Thmitch! Thmatch!” the unmistakable sound of a fist striking flesh, and I look up in time to see him rising out of the booth to come around and comfort her.

(Fear. Fear becomes the appetizer, leaving behind a palate thoroughly whetted for the taste of something greater. Something more fulfilling. I am the white-hot core of man’s existence. I am the now, and every man who went before me and ultimately fell, existed only to see me here. They came and passed only to grant me the power to carry their will. An infinite line of fallen torchbearers stretch out behind me, off into the vanishing point. Every yearning, every passion, every scalding tear shed in sorrow or joy. They were shed for me, as all that I endure must stand for those who come after. Now, I alone carry their honor, their purpose.)

She cringes back and he begins again. “Goddamit baby, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s just that you make me so fuckin’ mad. You know I love you, baby. C’mon.”

And, already I’m halfway across the floor and closing in, my entire body thrumming with seething rage. His back is to me, one knee on the seat beside her, as he tries to slide into her side of the booth. It’s lovey time, and that’s all right with me.

Sensory awareness heightens as the adrenaline dumps again, and my heart pounds like a war drum. I feel its echo on the tips of my twitching fingers as I reach out with my right hand and…

(…he himself does not…)

…thrust it between the back of his legs, reaching up and grabbing a handful of balls and bluejeans.

Realization hits like a bolt of lightning and two hands reach down to pry my fingers loose, unthinking.

My left hand rises up between his shoulders and shoves forward as I simultaneously pull up and back with the right (Start the lawnmower for me, would you son?).

Physics class is in full swing now, as his back legs come up and his head swings violently downward, bouncing first off the edge of the table before coming to land hard against the floor.

I kneel, one knee in the small of his back, and reach my left hand into his tangled mass of greasy hair, knotting a fist and pulling hard. Response time is lagging, so I decide to liven things up a bit by balling up my right fist and punching him in the ear. It’s just a matter of time before he offers me his hand. I know.

“I’M SORRY, BABY! I DIDN’T MEAN TO HURT YOU, BABY!” I hear myself yelling, but it’s oddly distant and muffled. Gauzy, thick, dreamlike. Away.

(…monster.)

Ta Da! The magic hand comes up from underneath his body and claws for the fist that I’ve got knotted in his filthy mane. He’s bucking now. Coming fully awake. For all of the deadly seriousness of the moment, I can’t help but think of The Three Stooges, and the way that Moe always used to reach over and pull great tufts of hair out of Larry’s head. “C’mere porcupine,” keeps shooting through my mind as I pull back and feel the tiny strands break from the increased tension.

I reach out slowly and take his questing hand in mine, gently at first. Once my grip is assured, I let go with my left and with both hands together I twist clockwise and back as I rise to my feet, drawing his arm to full and thoroughly uncomfortable extension.

Squealing and moaning from the fresh shock of pain in his wrist, he pushes his shoulders back down onto the floor, stretching out and revealing a whole new side of himself to me.

I don’t even have to look. His arm is the guide. I run my knee alongside of it and snap my foot along its length, burying the steel tip of my boot into the bony plane beneath his armpit. I can only imagine the shock of his pain as…

He tries to turn, powerfully, reflexively, reacting to the fresh and overwhelming stimulus. I ease my tension on his wrist long enough to let him, and he bears his stomach to me, again unthinking.

Powerful snapping kick to the solar plexus. A little more angle and I would’ve pushed right up into his mediastinum, giving his heart a final massage perhaps.

Sub-man goes fetal, unable to breathe, and for a moment, I know that he is very afraid.

The adrenaline begins to subside. Hearing returns as I back away, panting. I wonder if he'll realize, later, just how close he came.

“OH, HEATH! MY BABY! YOU HURT MY BABY!”

What seemed to take minutes in my state of heightened senses, in reality, took only a handful of seconds. Just long enough for his wife (?) to recover from the shock of the moment and turn on me.

I look at her for a moment, and immediately understand why she had been sitting with her back turned toward the door. Her face is a living memorial to Heath’s good-ole’ hometown lovin’. Her lips are split and swollen from an earlier encounter with his passionate side. Her right eye sports a mouse so dark and blotchy, that it has spread to the other eye across the bridge of her nose. A nose, by the way, that I’m not entirely sure isn’t broken in at least one place. The right side of her jaw is swollen to the point that it looks as though she’s sporting a bad case of the mumps. If not for the dark smears that the makeup can’t completely hide, I might even believe it to be so.

But, the eyes. Deep behind the blind, helpless rage etched into her features, I see my reflection there. I see myself through the bruised hollows of her wild eyes.

Monster.

(He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.)

(There is no shock or sorrow. I know what I am. I learned it long ago on other shores than these. In a very real way, I am even less than Heath. )

She twists in the throes of her own anguish, deciding whether she’d like to try and stab me with the butter knife in her fist, or rush to Heath’s assistance. After a fraction of another precious moment, her gaze breaks away from me and she goes to him, changed perhaps.

(And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.)

I turn and make for the door, body trembling as the adrenaline begins to fade. As I pass the counter, I notice the cook standing outside the kitchen with a short club in his hand. Too much longer spent teaching Heath, and that lovely piece of wood might have kissed my skull without me even having seen it coming. What a matrix of possibility life is. What an amazingly complex web of intricacies.

I hear the strident, nasal voice of my lovely waitress, suddenly. “Hey you. Hey mister, where do you think you’re going? Hey. HEY!”

Fuck that nonsense. We monsters gotta get the hell out of dodge before the cavalry arrives and locks us up. I stride out the door and jump into my car, start it and speed up the road to the west. Of course, once out of immediate sight, I turn around and track back toward the East, making good time and trying to keep the car in control despite the wracking shudders that pass through my arms and shoulders. See, when I get the adrenaline, I get it good.

(Saints and serial killers are just different sides of the same tarnished coin.)

A couple miles up the road, I pull off onto a little dirt trail and drive slowly out, into the enfolding darkness.

I love the desert and all it’s austere beauty. I turn the lights out, ease back the top, and lay back taking in the cold wonder of the starlit sky, and I think.

I think of that sad, beaten lady. I wonder what she tells herself to justify Heath’s actions in her mind. Does she blame it on herself? I think that maybe she does. Or, maybe she understands the sick, infected horror of what she’s got, but refuses to let it go because it’s just that…all that she’s got. Daddy’s little girl fell in love with a wife beater, and now she can’t go back. She’s all alone and there ain’t no rider on a white horse come to save her. Sad.

In all of my most fervent wishes, I hope that I can someday merit something better than that. I want to believe that I’ve earned it (But, the days grow shorter and the earth spins onward, still).

I sit there, eyelids drooping, breathing deep and even, and play out a thousand happy endings that I know in my heart will never come to her (or me), as I drift and watch the stars fade to morning.

Honor the covenant.