I had never stolen anything in my life, not even as a child. I received no guidance from good parents, and to this day, my moral compass remains an elemental lump of shit. Taking things that weren’t mine simply never occurred to me.
When I saw the booth, I had to have it. The color, the texture. The angle of incidence. The psychology of style.
It was crowded in the diner. We had to wait for twenty minutes to be seated.
I drank four cups of black coffee and ate the Porcellus Breakfast, which included boiled guinea pig and rye toast. They only served guinea pig and prairie dog here.
As we waited for the check, we removed the screws from the seats.
As the waitress rung us up, we carried the seats and the table out the front doors.
A cook ran into the parking lot and tried to stop us. I punched him and he went down. We kicked him in the groin, stomped on his chest, and his ribcage collapsed like a bundle of dry wicker.
The cook’s mouth yawned into an impossible gash. I kneeled and smelled his breath. There was a hint of cooked rodent complemented by another, unidentifiable scent.
The clouds that lingered above the buttes maintained an idealized stillness.
We loaded the booth into a truck and drove to the liquor store. Galvanized by the episode, we strode inside and I politely told the cashier that we needed to rob him please.
We allowed the cashier to fire off several rounds, then attacked him with his own hardware, throwing bottles of wine and gin and whiskey at him like so many bowling pins as he tried to reload. A good Samaritan tried to stop us and I pummeled him with can after can of MGD Light. Occasionally, I shook and opened a can before throwing it so as to discombobulate him with slosh and spray.
Drenched in beer, the Samaritan ran out the door, and the cashier gave up.
I realized that I didn’t really want to take anything from the liquor store without paying for it. I looked around to be sure, but nothing made me feel like the booth.
We bought a bottle of cognac and left.
I ordered the Porcellus Breakfast again for lunch. The waitress didn’t want to serve it to me. I told her I needed to talk and invited her outside for a cigarette. Sweating in the midday desert heat, I smoked and fingered her until she changed her mind.
After lunch, we stole another booth and put it in the truck.
Not until dinner did we resolve to steal the entire diner. We ate first. I wasn’t hungry. I forced down an iceberg salad. We all spiked our coffees with the cognac until the bottle was empty.
We dismantled the diner piece by piece. It wasn’t as difficult as it initially seemed. In fact, it was just the booth writ large.
Once the diner was in the truck, we had to decide what to do with the employees and the diners. I didn’t want to kill anybody else. We couldn’t leave behind any witnesses, though.
Unless, of course, we stole the Law, too …
“I wasn’t born bad,” I assured the chief of police as I removed his marionette limbs and pushed them into the sand. “I’ve just been presumed rotten.” His head tried to arrest me as I buried it.
Towards the Curve, I saw the silhouette of a child cast against the face of a butte. I stared at it for hours as my scarves fluttered around my body like tentacles in the wind. The silhouette was one hundred feet tall and didn’t move. This may or may not have been a reverie, a hallucination, a magic trick, or a real cinematic event.
A timelapse of storm clouds rolling across the sky preceded a straw mime rising from the earth. Most of us didn’t expect it.
The mime may have been a quickfire reincarnation of the police chief. No bowlegs, no potbelly, no bearded chins. But the eyes were the same. Upturned, hooded, almond-shaped, steel-gray—unlike his other bodyparts, these extraordinary organs of sight didn’t lie.
I had seen this kind of thing before in an adjacent diegesis.
The mime toddled back and forth as if onstage and tried to accomplish various poses, maneuvers, and freeze-frames, but he wasn’t very good, and he insisted on narrating his act, explaining to the audience what he was doing and what it meant. He even told us what was playing on our collective mind’s screen.
We hired him to be the head waiter at the diner.
During the mime’s performance, somebody reminded me that we had left the staff behind. If we were going to rebuild the diner, we would need new people.
Rebuilding the diner—let alone reopening it—had never occurred to me. The extreme heat, the relentless dust in my nose and mouth, the impossible vastness that seemed to collapse into propinquity whenever I tried to fixate on the horizon—it was difficult enough to think about the present. The future was always a forgotten memory by default.
Between Now and Forever, I recall driving down an abandoned interstate that winded around the escarpment of a great mesa. Overexposed still shots of monstrous cacti and galloping camels crowded my line of vision whenever I tried to bring the Big Picture into focus.
We couldn’t do anything on the other side of the Curve; crossing the threshold was a transgression that invariably saw wrongdoers devolve into extra-diegetic nonsense.
We had to stay within the buttes. There were no rules except the One.
In an effort to be different and innovative, we selected the tallest butte and rebuilt the diner vertically atop the windblown rock. At first, we kept falling down into the scree and talus, but every time we faltered, we immediately climbed back up and returned to work.
Eventually our determination prevailed and gravity ignored us.
During the preliminary stages of construction, I heard rumors about assembling a five-star restaurant out of the remnants of the diner. We could have done it, but that would mean sacrificing the booths in favor of more upscale seating arrangements, among other things. I liked the food and coffee at the diner, too. I deflected all suggestions to the contrary.
The sky moved like a digital ocean, oozing with whitecaps that never crashed.
As we put the finishing touches on the diner, entire muddles of guinea pigs and coteries of prairie dogs reluctantly sprouted into existence, as if summoned by a demigod. They either scampered or free-fell down the butte. We killed and caught as many as we could, then skinned the corpses and stacked them in freezers.
Staff members were hired and trained. Licenses and permits were procured, signed, and processed.
A week later it was business as usual.
The diner quickly became a hot spot, and we decided to surround it with liquor stores. From afar, the compound resembled a modern-day castle hanging from the upper lip of the butte by a string.
I kept my office at the “primal booth,” eating Porcellus Breakfasts, drinking coffee and beer, smoking cigarettes, fingering waitresses, inspecting various documents, fielding complaints from diners, and in general trying to look busy. I wasn’t sure if I was the manager or just another diner. Ultimately it didn’t matter. My Moravaginean impetus enabled me to circumnavigate my identity.
Sometimes, to clear my head, I ascended to the caprock of the butte and surveyed the landscape, searching for a way out.
I never saw the sun.
At night, the supermoon bled sand that dispersed into infinite pastels of stars.
Only when I sidestepped futurity did I recognize my present-day circumstances, but years would pass before it occurred to me to steal history and rebuild it in my own graven image.
D. Harlan Wilson is an award-winning American novelist, editor, literary critic, playwright, and college professor. He is the author of over thirty works of fiction and nonfiction, and hundreds of his stories, essays, and plays have appeared in magazines, journals, and anthologies throughout the world in over ten languages. He also serves as editor-in-chief for Anti-Oedipus Press and reviews editor for Extrapolation.
Image: Ktkvtsh, commons.wikimedia.org
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