Rudy's Cafe

Rudy's Cafe. You might not have been there, but you have an image of it in your head. I've been to those places, these greasy diners, and they are exactly the way you imagine they are. A little bit less sad, though. But much more unhealthy. Your arteries will scream.

Anyways. This cafe is Rudy's. Who is Rudy? Why is Rudy? Wouldn't you like to know? Just listen, and all these questions will be answered...

Or not. 

Transcript

Light passed through my eyes, but I could not see. Air pushed against my skin, but I could not feel. I was alive, but my heart barely beat. 

I had to break my addiction sooner or later. Famously, caffeine addiction was the least bad of all the addictions a person like myself could fall into, but it was still there, still bad. After all, it wasn’t right to wake up feeling like a mummified corpse in the morning. I hadn’t felt that way before, at least. 

I shambled over to my kitchenette first thing. My hands and feet did all the usual dances. Pick up the pot. Pour water in the pot. Pour water into machine. Open lid of coffee jar. Discover that there is not but a few dozen grains of coffee left. 

Discover that there is no more coffee. None. Not enough, anyway. Those few black particles could bathe in an entire ocean of hot water, and all the liquid would still not be able to properly wake me up. Had I really been so stupid as to not get more coffee when I’d been grocery shopping? Surely I couldn’t, right?

But obviously I had. If I hadn’t been an idiot, in place of those few scant particles of salvation would be a whole mound of the black gold. Or maybe there would’ve been an entire new jar just sitting in the pantry. But, of course, that was not there. I had been stupid. Truly stupid.

Or perhaps wise? The only way out of the addiction was through, with the through in this case being giving it up cold turkey. A few days of torment, and I was going to be free. Scot free. Free of Scottish people? I never understood that saying? What would Scotland have to do with being without consequences?

Three days of conversations with myself that went like that. Meaningless. Pointless. Idiotic. That, and the headache. I’d tried a couple years before. Just one day. The headache alone had put me in bed, got me feeling for a few seconds that I was going to die. Pounding. Pounding. Pounding. 

It didn’t matter anyway. Even if it had been my past self’s master scheme to rid me of my caffeinated master, they’d miscalculated. I had work today, for one. That wouldn’t do. Now, if I’d had the entire day to myself that would be another story, but things were always teetering on the edge back in the office, and I had wiggled myself into place to be the Atlas that held everything on their shoulders. How stupid of me. One really bad day and it would all come careening down.

I looked at the clock. Five in the morning. I still had a couple of hours before I had to head over to work. That was enough time to solve my predicament, to make myself once again one of the living. 

The grocery store, unfortunately, would not be open until seven. That would’ve been the economical solution, of course, but I would have to visit its sun-bleached halls after work. No, in the wretched little town where I lived, there was one place I could. One place I’d sworn to never step foot in again. But desperate times called for desperate measures.

I prepared myself as best as I could with but feeble sparks of energy meandering around my body. I certainly didn’t look as put together as I usually did, but I had a shirt, shoes, and the various accouterments of my working life on my body. That was enough. It would have to be enough.

I shambled over the car. It was cold. Colder than it usually was this time of year. My breathe coalesced into tiny jets of steam in front of my face. The chill only made the sluggishness of my movements worse, and made it so it took three tries to crank my car. Even old Ronda was nervous about my decision. 

I backed out of the driveway, making the turn left instead of right. I knew the way, even with my thoughts crawling through my head at the speed of a crotchety slug. Two blocks down. A right at the long dead oak tree. Three blocks. A left at the mailbox painted with a child’s impression of Santa Claus. How old was the kid now? Twenty-three, I figured. He’d been in and out of state prisons for the past four years, partially due to me. I hated the look of that Santa Claus mailbox. It reminded me of…

Five more blocks. The neighborhood was a labyrinth which was difficult enough to navigate in the daytime hours. If only the town had ever hired a city planner. But Santa Eugenia was a poor town on the best of days, and on the worst… it was hard to forget my third check. It had bounced just as many times. Who’dve ever heard of that?

Plenty of folks, I guessed. People in towns just as decrepit and dying as my own. If only the concept of the city itself could develop a caffeine addiction. 

I missed the last turn and got stuck in this weird culdesac that nearly crumbled into the weeds and bushes that preceded the river. It was just some guy’s property. Some guy I’d never met, probably, and also some guy who almost certainly wasn’t light enough of a sleeper to hear some car pull into their personal driveway at five in the morning, but it felt extremely awkward all the same. 

I wasn’t functioning properly. If I’d had my dark savior coursing through my veins, I’d never have missed the route. I’d only taken it a few hundred times prior. Granted, those few hundred times were a decade ago, but even still…

I backed out of the driveway and turned onto the right street. It was right there. Just sitting there on the main road. ‘Main’ was probably a bit of an exaggeration. It had been fifteen years ago, and it certainly was today. Even as I leisurely pulled my wagon into the gravel parking lot, naught but one car passed by. Granted, it was five in the morning, but still. One. Just one. And that wasn’t even someone coming to stay in, or visit Santa Eugenia. Just passing through. 

Yes, if the city could drink coffee, I would force it to do so. It was a burden to me now, a slaver standing over my shoulder with whip in hand, but twenty years ago it had been a godsend. The only thing, I think, that had made the transition into adulthood bearable. 

The town was old. It was dying. It was a reality I had to face every single day, but acknowledging the fact never gave me any comfort. It also didn’t tell me anything I could do to change that fact. Perhaps some places were just meant to die. Everyone was going to die, after all. Nothing was permanent. All the greatest works anyone had ever made, the joys they had experienced, all would be dust on the wind. And then not even dust.

I NEEDED to get that caffeine in my blood, and fast. There was no telling where that morbid talk would go, but I knew it only went places that made things worse. Worse for me, worse for myself, worse for everyone. Praise be to the dark god of the bean for keeping madness and fatalism at bay. 

Rudy’s Cafe. That’s where I was. Warm yellow lights glew faintly from within. It was a wonder that Patrice managed to keep the place open even at these insane hours. I spotted at most three other men somberly picking at breakfast food by themselves. That wasn’t a lot of money. Not enough to keep a place open, I didn’t think.

Maybe. Whatever. I just hoped Patrice wasn’t on duty today. It had been a long time, but then that time would never be long enough. A hundred thousand years could pass and we’d never want to see each others’ face again. 

I didn’t see her form flitting behind the counter. It was a Monday, anyways. That was one of her days off way back in the past, and she, like most of us living here in the middle of nowhere, was a creature of habit. Ritual. Five days on, two off. Never changing. Eating the same meal, working the same shift, pouring the same caustic liquid down your gullet so that you could feel life surging through your limbs. 

Same. Same. Same. 

Ten years, and I had hardly changed, either. I hadn’t given myself the chance to. I wasn’t smarter, wiser, stronger… if anything, I was less of most of those things. I was wealthier. That was the only thing better. Wealthier, better respected, but…

But these thoughts couldn’t be my own. They had to be somebody else’s. Patrice wasn’t there. I was. I was going to go in and have myself a steaming hot cup of coffee. And it was going ot be the worst coffee I’d ever drunk in my life, even when I added those little plastic cups of creme and shook out a couple of those pink packets of false sugar. 

Still, it was going to be coffee. 

I strode up the ramp and gingerly pushed on the door. A little bell tinkled from within. It was the same bell that had been there all those years ago. Nobody looked up. Not the three other men slowly scraping over their plates of burnt hashbrowns, nor the extremely tired looking cook who was lazily wiping up a water stain on the counter. I recognized nobody. Well, not really. I’d seen everyone in passing. Maybe at the grocery, walking the street, sitting on their front porch, but I had nothing concrete to tie them to. We might have lived in the same town, in the same place, but that mattered naught. Especially not at five in the morning. 

I sat in my old spot. Right there in the middle at the bar. The chair was the exact same. Well, not quite. There were a few more spots here and there where the fabric had torn and the pedestal had rusted, but for all intents and purposes, it was the same. 

The same. The same. The same. I thought I had changed something fundamental about my life by avoiding this place, and yet… and yet what was different? It was the same town. A different house, now. A slightly better job. But nothing more than that. The same, and worse. I was like the seat that I was just now laying my butt on. 

The cook eventually noticed that a new person had appeared in the business and shambled over to take my order. I asked for the number one. I had seen a picture of the menu in the window. The orders were the same. The only thing that had changed with the years was the prices. 

Two eggs over easy. Three strips of bacon. Two biscuits. And a cup of coffee.

That last bit was certainly the most important part. If I was being honest with myself, I shouldn’t have ordered anything besides. I’d given up breakfast years ago as my metabolism had slowed down, but it just seemed wrong to waste the guy’s time with nothing more than a drink order. I mean, making a cup of coffee was something you were supposed to be able to do yourself, unless, of course, you were out of the lovely substance. 

The seconds crawled by. I could feel the tinges of a headache pressing down around my temples. I tried to ignore them. That worked a little bit. But still, second by second they pressed closer, closer, harder…

And then there was it. The smell. The savior of saviors, the drug of drugs. The thing that had come to banish away my inadequacies, to make me see the world in a light that made everything look okay. 

One cup of coffee.

It was horrible. The worst cup of coffee I’d tasted in my life. It was like if you mixed a pot of that horrible instant sludge with some dirt that you’d found in a storm drain. But it was coffee, certainly. Or something adjacent to it. That would be enough. Hopefully.

The meal was also about as terrible as I’d expected. The taste was grease and the essence was grease. Again, something that hadn’t change. I could feel my arteries groan at every bite I took. Each forkful was a bad decision. 

But I’d had the coffee. That was the important bit. I could already feel unholy vigor surge through my limbs as that which remained asleep began to wake up. As my body stirred itself from its zombie-like state, the meal even began to taste better. It definitely wasn’t worth the ten bucks I was going to pay for it, and definitely, DEFINITELY not worth the risk of crossing paths with Patrice again, but… 

But I’d had the coffee. And now that I’d done that, the most important of morning tasks, I now had to make my way to the bathroom.

The restroom was just as bad as I remembered it. No, even worse. There were all the usual stains that people were barbaric enough to leave and that the staff were always too lazy to clean up. The room stunk of overuse. That was usual. Nearly every diner I’d been in throughout my life was like that. The only thing that was different was that, well… the walls were breaking. Here and there, to the left and right, up and down, I could see tiny little glimpses of the dark night sky beyond. Little fronds of wall crawling plants busted through the plaster, their roots the obvious cause for the building’s atrophy. 

Surely that wasn’t up to code. It wasn’t up to privacy standards at the very least. I was half tempted to call it in when I got a slow moment at work, but then I realized that was just a bit too cruel. After all, Rudy’s Cafe had been kind enough to give me a cup of coffee when there was nowhere else within thirty minutes that would have done so. Maybe the gas station down the street from my office, but I knew their coffee machine was still broken. Had been for months. 

How long would it be before the entire building was gone? It had only been a decade and already the cracks were beginning to show. Quite literally. Perhaps three more? Then the roof would collapse and the walls would have nothing to tether them together. Then there would be no more Rudy’s, and the only remnant of its existence would be a concrete foundation, some lines of text at the tax office, and blank, boring memories of heart harming breakfasts in mornings that nobody had wished had ever been.

Strange. Those were particularly macabre thoughts for my mind when it was already being jostled by caffeine. 

What? Did you want different thoughts? Visions of ponies and rainbows? Just because we are awake, it does not mean that the environment we are in has changed. Everything around us is dying, and by your own admission, too. The town, the world, you. And what do we do in response, eh? The same thing. The same thing that always put us on this path, where we thought we saw the darkest future. Not the savage bite of a quick death, but one in which we are smothered by apathy. Did you think a little bit of a plant’s defensive byproduct would keep us quiet about that?

Well, it did previously. And why shouldn’t it? You’re no good for anything. Always seeing problems everywhere. Do you think that you can solve them? That we can? We are not rich or strong or wise. Not compared to many people anyways. The best thing for us was and always has been to live our life in the best way that we can. If there’s problems out there that are so big we cannot handle them, then let God be the one to do it. Let us enjoy the somber silence of our life in the best way that we can.

No. I will not. Not now. And never again. 

I turned on the sink tap to try and get some water to splash on my face. A few brown drops sputtered out, slinking down to the drain like mud. I gulped down a bit of saliva from my throat. That wasn’t right. The water, I meant. Rudy’s was a terrible place. The sort of location that no self respecting person would ever find themselves in. But they had water.

I turned the tap back off, and then on again. Nothing happened this time but the squeak of metal grinding against metal. Truly, there was no water. 

Yeah, I was going to have to report this place. That was just unacceptable. The world was a terrible place sometimes. Especially Santa Eugenia. A rotting, despicable waste of hope. But if I did something, something could change. Even if that something was being a prick and giving Rudy’s a kick in the pants. I mean, no water. Come on. 

I felt strangely gross opening the door to get back to my half eaten plate of eggs. It was just completely unnatural for me to not wash my hands. Such a behavior had been tattooed into my brain. I had to. And yet…

And yet nothing about this day was going right, or, at least, going in the way I usually expected a day to go. No coffee, Rudy’s, not being able to wash my hands. What was next? Was I going to find that my taillights had gone out, or that my check for the rent had been lost in the mail?

No. You were not going to find those things. Petty concerns lead to a petty life. 

Easy for you to say. You were never the one that had to feed the stomach or rest the head. You were always a nuisance in that respect. Thinking of lofty things. No matter how high you bring our thoughts, we are always tied down to the earth. We cannot be separated, even with your black drug coursing through our veins. 

I opened the door, despite my mind’s protests to the contrary. I had to blink. Repeatedly. A lot. I couldn’t…

Of course I couldn’t process what I was seeing. It made no sense. I had just been outside a couple of minutes ago. And yet…

And yet the place was different.

That was an understatement if ever I’d heard one. The place was dead. Still there, but gone. Nobody was there. Not a soul. It was quiet. So quiet.

And yet, everyone was still there. Fool. In your haste to analyse the initial details, you forgot to see what was lying just below them. See those shapes? Those vines? That cannot be a coincidence. And it is not. 

Sure. Sure. Not a coincidence. And what do you expect us to do with this information? Things all of a sudden aren’t working like they’re supposed to. I mean, fundamentally so. We are arguing more than we ever did before, and then there’s this… what would you even call it? 

Simple. Take the phone out of our pocket. Check the signal. The time. But don’t let our eyes stay on those numbers and symbols for too long. 

Oh? Oh no. I see what you mean. 

Do you? Put it back. Give me time to interpret the information. You are closer to our reflexes, to the body, the overall narrative we are telling ourselves. Watch out. There is danger here.

Yes, lots of it. But what is it?

Thirteen months have passed. There is no cell signal. The cafe is dead. Everyone is dead. There are plants everywhere. The initial answer is simple; do not touch the plants. Any of them. Do not. I repeat, do not. 

The cafe was a mess. It looked like the jungle had swallowed it whole. But it was true. Hidden among the mess of greenery were the consumed shapes of the people who, to my memory, had just been sitting down enjoying (or enduring, it was hard to tell) their breakfasts. 

A nightmare had coalesced into reality. Just here. In a second.

Where had I gone? When had I been? 

These were ridiculous questions. I had to… I had to…

I had to do something. I had absolutely no clue what that something was, other than not die. It was a strange, horrible feeling to have bouncing around my gut. It was so rare that I’d feared death at any other time in my life. The closest I ever came to it was that one time a bad flu got me a 103 degree fever. But even then, I hadn’t exactly been cognizant of what was going on around me.

Oh, like we’re cognizant right now? That’s giving us a whole lot of credit there, buddy. Credit that we honestly don’t deserve. Don’t touch the vines. They are integral to the madness, somehow. Get out of the building. Those are your jobs. I will find an answer somehow. Just don’t think about it too hard. Focus on the movement of your body, the landing points of your toes. Those things are what’s important. 

I had to do something. I had to save them, I had to leave, I had to… 

I didn’t understand anything. What was I going to fight? The concept of time? The leak of memories from my head? A giant, ever-expanding thicket of brambles with genocide in mind? Or…

Or I was just getting out of the building. The world that I knew could have dissolved in a second, and yet…

And yet I still saw the glimmering blue shell of my car outside. That was some hope, I guessed. So I put one foot in front of the other. One foot. One foot. One foot…

My left foot accidentally fell on a bramble. I almost leapt out of my skin as I felt its fibers crunch beneath my shoes. That was the one thing I was supposed to not do! What was going to happen now? Was I going to devoured by the vines like the others?

Nothing happened. Nothing I could see, anyways. My superego was an idiot.

An idiot? I’m sorry, but what else was I supposed to take from the info that a year had passed without our notice, and that suddenly the building we were in had been swallowed by a type of plant we’d never seen in our lives? Would it have been wise for me to trust this anomaly? No. Obviously not. 

Do you think there are people trapped below those knots of thorns? Should we try and…

Get them out? No. A person could survive under that suffocating blanket for a couple hours max. And that’s if everything is normal about these thorns besides their sudden appearance and presumed rapid growth. Do you hear any breathing? Any pleas for help? No. So evacuate us from this situation. Get us to a place where we can breathe easily, where the stress of the situation isn’t driving me into the ground. You need me. Both you and the silent one. 

The silent one?

Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me. Yes, the silent one. The one that doesn’t talk. Are you so stupid that just because you can’t hear something you assume it’s not real? Of course you are. You were stupid enough to let our feet fall on one of the brambles when it seemed certain that doing so would murder us. Do you think that… no. No, I won’t say anything. It will only hurt the situation.

I shook my head in confusion. There had been something in that coffee. Yes, the usual stuff. The caffeine, the water, but there was something strange about it. Something that lingered in my memories. That bizarre flavor. Something. 

It could all be a hallucination. I could have been drugged and passed out. That made much, much more sense than the idea that a year had passed in the time that I’d locked myself in the bathroom. 

Yes, it seems like it could be that way, doesn’t it? After all, usually we do not speak as two. I am usually nothing more than an elevated variety of your usual thoughts, and yet here I am almost my own person. But does that fact mean that we can distrust all of our senses? I would think not. Act against the silent one. The most powerful of us three, yet the one slowest to action. Hurt yourself. Not against the bramble. A pinch. The classic thing. Do it.

I pinched myself, thanking the laziness of my past self that I had left my fingernails sharp and unclipped. It was painful, horrible, and yet I was still there. All of me. All three of me, it seemed. 

See? We’re still here. All of us. Something incredibly insidious has happened. Something worse than a mere drugging. Don’t you remember that one time we were on shrooms? There’s not much more dramatic than that. Nothing we know. Get to the car. Leave. 

Yes. Leave. A simple task, with a simple answer. Foot before foot, dancing across the red and black vines which crisscrossed the floor. Whose blood stained them? What fire burned them? 

The cafe was small. I was already at the door, and all it cost me were a few seconds and a couple of holes in my shoes. Those thorns were wicked sharp. 

Outside the door. There was no cafe. There was no car. There was no…

Center yourself. Everything hasn’t phased out of existence. There’s something in those thorns that’s affecting your vision.

Yes, I could still see. Just a little bit. Not far away. The car, the car… I was so tired, so…

Dammit! We’re not doing this! Fine. Shut yourself down. I’ll talk to the silent one for once.

Aggh. Can you believe him? One tiny bit of poison and he’s out. How are the basic functions?

(Silence)

Overtaxed. That’s how they are usually. The loud guy never gave you much in the way of help, did he? He’d get in between us at every opportunity. Of course we’d stay up to watch tv instead of going to bed at a time that was suitable. Of course we’d eat garbage for lunch. Of course we’d stay in a job that stressed us out and that we hated for years, only because it was ‘adequate.’ 

(Silence)

Yeah. I know. It’s wrong to persecute him like that. After all, he had the hardest job of them all. You never had to speak, and I never had to know the consequences of my thoughts and actions, simply because he never followed them. But he knew them all. The ups, the downs, all of that. I guess I can start gloating once we actually get to the car.

(Silence)

Yes, to the car. You know how it goes. One step in front of the other. Progress. Time moving past us, space melding with our effort. Don’t you?

(Silence)

Yes, like that! Thank you. Just a little bit further…

(Silence) 

Now the door. Open the door. Hand out, clasp it around that piece of metal. Pull.

(Silence)

Hmm, yes. Well, the plan was to find a space place to sit down. Our connective tissue was never all that direct. Without the loud one, the mediator, we’ll be down on the ground in no time. The car offers a seat just far away enough from the thing that the second part of my plan can come to fruition. So pull. Please. 

(Silence)

Ah, thank God. No shuffle us inside. Yes, like that. And close the door. Hmm. We’re getting quite good at this. Now, you feel that strange shape in the pocket? No, not that one. The other one. Not those either. Those sharp things are the keys. Yes, that one! Take it out. Put it in front of our eyes. 

(Silence)

Precisely. Now hit that little groove on the right, what me and loud mouth would call the button. Good. Now those symbols. You see what I’m showing you? Tap them in that order.

(Silence)

Right. YOu really don’t understand order. Or time. That’s always been my specialty. Honestly have always hooked onto it too much. But just this one, okay? Nine.

(Silence)

One.

(Silence)

One.

(Silence)

You did it. Ignore the sound coming from the device. There’s no way you and I are going to be coordinated enough to do something like talk. Just the ringing should be enough. Someone will be out here to help us. Someone will…

(Silence)

Why of course I want to return to the status quo. The other one annoys me, but our joys can only be constructed out of our conflict. Besides, did you see how hard it was for us to do something as simple as open a car, when otherwise our body is functioning as it normally does? How often does our combined self open a door? At least twelve times a day? Imagine us going that whole charade a full twelve times. Well, scratch that. You don’t understand time, so how can you understand numbers? 

(Silence)

That’s it. That’s why. Because I like spending all of my time sitting around wondering why on God’s green earth something like that just happened. I mean, logically speaking, it didn’t. It couldn’t. Matter does not, by habit, materialize or dematerialize without some obvious reason for its passage. Was that there?

(Silence)

Oh, you don’t really have memory either. It’s fine. I’ll keep the conversation to myself while we wait. It’ll be alright. I promise us that.

(Silence)

I know I cannot keep my promise. But it will.