Starshot: Like synthetic doll hair your anger burns out fast.
Seating
Like November, Death waits for you. Death made flesh, your dinner date: wrinkled, three-piece, ivory and geometrically patterned pocket square, linguini-thin mustache. He’s waiting at a table for two in this faux nineteenth century, upscale restaurant, the last joint in the city where you can smoke indoors. Death extends and pendulums his arm. You see him waving, at your table already, displaying inches of white shirtsleeve and a wristwatch without any numerals on its face. White tablecloths, white plates induced to glow by a crystal chandelier, slim white candles beaded with melting wax. It’s late, and the staff is breaking down the remote, back tables in preparation for close.
You take your seat, chair legs screeching on hardwood.
This isn’t your first meal together. You and Death have history stretching back to grade school. Even now, you apologize to Death for giggling at him until chocolate milk dribbled from your nose during that first midafternoon snack you shared. But here’s the last meal. Just like the previous dates, Death lets you do the talking. While Server Winona scribbles “seltzer water/lime” (for Death) and “Maker’s Mark Manhat/x2 cherry” (for you), words windmill off your tongue, platitudinal self-assurances that you are still drawing breath.
Death just curves his lips, nodding those hazel eyeballs in steady arcs.
Condescending Death.
One perk to these dinner dates is that Death will never tell you something you already know. He listens, offering no confirmation or correction; your theories about the end of mortal life vary only slightly from ones Death has heard since his birth.
Rather than speak to order, he taps the menu and nods to confirm. Three courses: feta-flecked walnut salad, grilled Atlantic salmon in a bed of baby coconut shavings, and the night’s special dessert. You order the same and continue regaling Death with a panicked summary of the latest hit Hollywood horror show and your preferred cause-of-death scenarios.
“Sure, we’re all naked under our clothes, but I’d be so much more comfortable dying while wearing pants, stay on the right side of the line between decency and shame. Pants aren’t too much to ask for? Tell me, Death, do quote unquote noble deaths still exist? Cicero altered the course of western language, his speeches moved the wealthiest and most intransigent senatorial fuddy-duddies to action, and tried to protect a republic against a tyrant. But they still nailed his hands to the senate doors. Is that noble? Does it matter to Cicero that we remember him?”
Silence.
Salad
The salad crushes any remaining hope you have of Death letting you live: near-embryonic spinach, confetti-fine carrot shavings, dried cranberries, nuggets of walnuts like California pan-candy. Rinsed, diced, tossed, then draped in a balsamic honey dressing drizzled in the shape of a cabalistic glyph. This is the kind of food convicts get, huddled over stainless steel tables with suicide-proof edges – plastic cutlery – before they take that last, long walk. You’re done for.
Over Death’s shoulder, in a back booth, you Server Winona and Anonymous Male Bartender roll clean silverware in linen napkins and judge you for not figuring out this meal’s portents sooner: there are forks dedicated to each course, gum doesn’t stick to the underside of the table in a quilt-ish globular mass, like the phrase “Ask me if I give a fuck” given a sticky body. Nobody even thinks that here. This is end of life food, parting consolation food, release-me-from-my chains, last meal kind of food, which concludes this one-sided dialogue, the voiceless dry spell. Death, not just participating, but initiating contact.
Part of you is flattered that Death thinks well enough of you to shell out this kind of dough on The Big Day(!). Your Big Day.
Death looks at you with a fork balanced vertically by an outer tine on his right pinky. Tonight isn’t special to Death, it’s only special to you.
Jaded Death.
You eat that salad slow. Leaf by leaf.
Some companion, some raw deal you never agreed to, some single-talented guest to entertain you while time runs out. You brood.
You’re sure Server Winona and Anonymous Male Bartender are sleeping together. He just kissed an errant drop of demi glace off the side of her thumb, showing a reckless disregard for the germs he could pass on to the silverware. Server Winona attempts to dry her smooched thumb on Anonymous Male Bartender’s forehead. They giggle, pretend to grapple without drawing attention to themselves. They settle back to their task but, as they roll, Server Winona leans imperceptibly towards Anonymous Male Bartender every 10 seconds to inhale his scent on the sly. She sips the air like top shelf scotch. He’s sniffing her too, except he takes full capacity lungfuls of her smell at thirty second intervals, flexing his diaphragm until it creaks and frizzy strands of her hair flutter in the negative pressure created. Death isn’t interested in them tonight. They aren’t interested in Death.
Entrée
Server Winona stops rolling silverware, glides away – leaving Anonymous Male Bartender in a blissful hormonal daze – to clear your salad plates and fire the entrees. In the kitchens, line cooks laugh with the busboys about overdeveloped secondary female sexual characteristics while they plate your salmon. Death pats at his mustache with the corner of his napkin. His jacket’s black shoulders are starshot with dandruff.
Sloppy Death.
Server Winona puts a dish in front of you. It’s loaded with an opportunity and a Scottish Salmon over a bed of mixed greens and shredded coconut. You employ your last survival tactic: bullshit.
You smack your palm against your forehead like it (your forehead) gained consciousness and independent agency solely to run over your pet cat.
“Oh, shucks!” you say, “Oh, dearie me, I just remembered that I’m a vegetarian. To harm a living being for the sake of my own nourishment is, like, wrong; that’s a core principal to my identity as an individual and unique person, but it slipped my mind because I inadvertently inhaled a poor mosquito earlier today.” You load your words with gelatinous emotion, “I cannot forgive myself for such a heinous act. The incident put me in a funk. I’ve been quivering on the edge of a breakdown all day now. Plus, I inhale/annihilate a microscopic organism metropolis every time I breathe – microbes and such; see, I deal with a mass murderer’s psychological fallout, a pain so continual and fiery, that I ordered the salmon in a fuguish guilt-blur.”
You sneak a sidewards peak at Death.
Server Winona promises to inform the chef so he can make a vegetarian meal despite the late hour. She apologizes for your mistake, on behalf of restaurateurs both past and present; she shakes a raised fist to express her rage towards the hunnish agriculture conglomerates’ inhumane treatment of inhuman people.
“That’s right: people!” She says, “Fish are people too. Now, I can’t un-murder this Scottish salmon – to god if I could – but I can give it a decent burial.” She whisks your plate away with one hand, the other still shaking in indignation, and does a crisp about face. She goosesteps toward the kitchens, or maybe a shady hill under a tree with a tiny, open grave.
You think: she works hard but – boy – did she overcommit to the wrong person. You aren’t picking up the check and Death probably doesn’t like people trying to ‘un-murder’ anything. But you’ve finagled more time – if only to sit and argue with your silent companion.
Is Death vindictive, though? Is your last conscious act in this life going to cost Server Winona in much needed tips? Not to mention drag out her last table of the night, denying her and Anonymous Male Bartender an opportunity to have sex at least twice before sleeping spoons until dawn, thereby descending further into love? You wonder about these things.
He (Death) doesn’t express any guilt, though. Nor vendetta-inspiring anger. In actual fact, he’s not even looking at you or Server Winona. Death pokes his skinny fingers into his depleted seltzer glass. Focused. He’s tweezing at his lime slice buried in the ice cubes – like he’d dropped a quarter in an arcade claw machine for the chance to play. The lime slice wobbles, distorts, ever so slightly, through the ice.
Vegetarian Entrée
There are three people sitting at the bar: a server, the manager, and the sous chef, having an after shift drink. Anonymous Male Bartender pours a Guinness into a pint glass up to the golden harp on the glass’s logo, then sets it on the bar while the white foam climbs upwards, bubbles settling, transforming into black liquid. He slips back towards the kitchen where Server Winona, presumably, waits for you and Death to fuck off.
Pots and pans clang. The head chef is either passive aggressively reminding you that you are keeping him from a drink at the bar and hours of sleep or the restaurant has just fallen silent. Probably it’s a dash of each. Yours is the last and most hated table of the night.
You don’t speak to Death anymore. Breath is a limited resource now. Death waits for your meal to arrive before he digs into his own.
Considerate Death.
He’s still trying to extract the lime from the glass.
While you wait for a nonfleshy-type dish, you study Death in a way that you never have before. The past meals with Death left you feeling lucky that you were eating and able to breathe in sunshine. Death loomed over your devilled egg sandwiches and pickle spears for decades. Fear and gratitude. Ice cream cones tasted sweeter because corpses don’t eat mint chocolate chip.
When you first figured out what Death wanted to give you (blackness, blankness, un-ness), you collapsed on a flight of green-carpeted stairs and wept like a glass of ice water in your mother’s arms.
She said, “hush, child, that won’t be for another sixty – eighty years before Death comes for you.” But you didn’t stop your hysterics until you turned blue, hyperventilating on the green carpeted stairway and woke up tucked into your own bed.
–Beddie house –
The blankets marked with special protective glyphs, traced by your mother’s finger, the person to flick the lights and leave her child in total darkness.
Then the meals began.
Hungry Death.
As you aged away from the green-carpet episode, you invited Death to show himself by driving your car like a Spanish bull during peak rush hours, swerving for the sake of swerving. You ate frozen pizza that reported “Low Fat,” plus Dead Sea sodium levels. You had X number of sexual partners that you suspected might have been axe murderers or, at least, sadly unstable in the small hours. Why? Because the young you thought Death competed for your life. You believed for years that every day above ground was a victory over your silent nemesis, not realizing that your life was never yours in the first place.
Anonymous Male Bartender returns to the bar to put a head on the Guinness pint. Server Winona appears from the kitchen carrying a steaming bowl.
The chef made you roasted tomato and basil pesto penne. The sauce is vomit green, but the garlic and olive oil smells stimulate your saliva glands, filling your mouth and making your lips shine.
Server Winona grates snowflakes of Parmesan into the bowl. She smiles with her mouth alone, plus her imperative to “Enjoy!” sounds like a threat. Her frustration makes you shift in your chair, but while she is close you sniff her as much as the food, trying to imagine what Anonymous Male Bartender must feel when Server Winona nuzzles into his young man’s chest. Love and the last traces of coconut moisturizer, you expect.
Death tucks the corner of his napkin into the collar of his shirt; the otherwise virginal linen bears a salad dressing smear. If you squint the splotch is either the profile of John F. Kennedy or a balding Martha Stewart.
You dine.
Why am I here?
Not an existential thought: a practical question. Why haven’t you just left? Stood up, extending both middle fingers to Death and then jetted out into the night? You stop stabbing at your pasta.
To preclude Death stopping or following you out onto the street, you could fling the tablecloth and what rests on it over his head, turning him into a spooky, fishy, ghost. Being Death, though, he’s probably capable of extricating himself from the shroud; then he’d extricate you from the world on the spot.
Poof. Cease to exist as flesh.
If you drape him with the tablecloth, then beat him vigorously with your chair before he even realizes why his vision has gone black or why the butter tray is staining his crotch, thereby incapacitating –
Why not get Server Winona and the rest of the staff to help? You should shout, “Hey, this is Death in the flesh and evening dress! This is for Gam Gam, this is for Mittens and Fido and The Notorious B.I.G.!”
You imagine the chef flinging a pan of cherries jubilees onto Death, Anonymous Male Bartender smashing the end of a bottle of domestic light beer against the bar and lunging towards our common foe, slashing at the sweetly smoldering figure. The whole restaurant would rejoice. Caramelized lamb chops all around! Huzzah!
But who knows what exists out in the night.
Death is looking at you, as you slow-cook this crock of shit. He’s smiling without showing his teeth. You are a child who’s almost managed to not burn his morning toast.
You can’t kill Death; you can’t even offend him by trying. Sisyphus was the last person to cause a major upset in the whole life-death cycle when he chained Thanatos to a pole, ensuring that no human could die. Even then, with an apparent mortal victory, Sisyphus got the raw deal: a few extra miserable years on the surface followed by eternal torture in Tartarus. Continual darkness, that’s the best you can hope for.
You look longingly at Anonymous Male Bartender and Server Winona, their heads inclined, whispering, because whispering feels more natural to people in love. They’re experiencing something so personal and intimate that to share even a sentence fragment with a passing dishwasher would expose the illusory cloud world that lovers create for themselves. The private-love world where passion lasts indefinitely and the warning words of trusted friends are laughed at. “Nobody can rain on this parade,” they say. “The initials cradled inside hearts, tattooed into the skin of an oak tree can’t ever fade.”
But they’ll find out soon enough.
Even as you long to be the third half to their whole – if only for the length of a dessert course – you take a vindictive glee from knowing that Server Winona and Anonymous Male Bartender’s happiness will one day fracture into anger, bitterness, and loss. Server Winona will lie about her whereabouts; Anonymous Male Bartender will be insensitive towards Server Winona’s best friend from high school; one will cheat on the other; the collapse approaches. Thinking about this, you take the same kind of joy misanthropic youths take when setting fires in alleyway dumpsters. You want to join their whispers, to lean close, sensing Server Winona’s spearmint gum she uses to mask the scent of decay and asexual oral bacteria that stain her teeth, piling like yellow snow drifts.
What a foul world.
You’re done. You’re so fucking done with this whole fucking scene. You didn’t ask to come here, to be born on this American continent, to have these non-reciprocal interviews with an effete Grim Reaper – so effete, condescending and taciturn he might be an exaggerated cartoon Frenchman! Fuck cartoons. Fuck the French. And fuck America, not just the United States but the entire continent. Fuck the western hemisphere and the east for good measure. Fuck Death, fuck restaurants, fuck classical mythology, fuck lovers who haven’t figured out that the love is all in their heads yet, fuck pewter serving utensils, fuck pesto, fuck white linen napkins with black piping, fuck twenty percent tipping, fuck tablecloths, fuck the smokers’ section, fuck the non-smokers’, fuck apostrophes, fuck the second person, fuck you, fuck me.
“Fuck your salmon, you pallid fuck!” You say this last part aloud, forgetting that nobody, including Death, has access to your mind’s tickertape scrawl or climbing internal anger-barometer; you are totally alone with your thoughts.
You stiff-arm Death’s plate toward him, spilling grilled asparagus and fatty amino acids onto Death’s tuxedo shirt and slanted bowtie. Death is holding his fork inches away from his open mouth, balancing a morsel of pink Scottish flesh.
Like synthetic doll hair your anger burns out fast.
You’re left ashamed, numbly nodding while Server Winona makes excuses for your clumsiness. She hurls napkins into Death’s lap, offering comped glasses of dessert wine, as if the chef had greased the plates through either negligence or a suspect sense of humor. She really just wants you to pay up and leave; she doesn’t understand what that means for you.
Death is looking at you, still gently steaming from the chest and crotch. Is he disappointed in your lack of composure this close to the – your – end or are you projecting your own self-disgust into his flat little eyes?
Dessert
Server Winona flies out of the kitchen like a paper airplane from a middle school delinquent’s grubby paw. The chilled plates she slams in front of you and Death sport Art. Dessert Art. Heaven-white buttercream frosting embracing three layers of black chocolate cake, each separated by blacker strips of chocolate ganache. Three raspberries and a mint leaf nestle on top like twin clutches of Phoenix’s eggs.
Anonymous Male Bartender sprints from behind the bar with two small glasses. The wine sloshes way high up over the crystal lips but each drop slips back into the respective glasses. He releases the glasses several feet away from your table; he freezes in position after letting go: crouched, pointed fingertips towards the floating dessert wine, impersonating a wizard (or a bowler) without the beard or purple robes. The glasses float to the table and land before you two, filled to the brim.
You wish you could explain to Server Winona and Anonymous Male Bartender that Death is the man you’re sitting with. Death, buying you a meal, the last meal, the most unnecessary meal you’ve ever eaten because he’s going to snuff you out – wetted thumb and forefinger pinching a candle wick – before you can even begin to digest it.
These nutrients will never absorb in your colon; bacteria will flee your sinking Titanic, like all living organisms aboard the Titanic tried to flee, leaving this last meal to ferment in your belly – rotting like the rest of your inanimate meat.
Death tucks into the cake. His eyes roll up and his lashes flutter. Under the table, his legs jiggle. After each bite he shoots his tongue out to search for crumbs trying to escape. His slice vanishes in seven rapid-fire forkfuls. Death sighs through his nose; the candle flames shudder.
You take a bite of cake. Your mouth is so dry, the cake is so moist; chocolate fills your sinuses and smothers every taste bud. Your throat muscles don’t want to function. The single bite is trying to choke you. You spit the dark wad into the cradle of your napkin, gasping like a butt-struck newborn in the doctor’s arms. Death sees.
Death reaches over the table. For a second, you think he wants to hold your hand and you recoil. Instead, Death pulls your plate towards him, and pushes his glass of wine across to you.
Merciful and fair-minded Death.
Greedy and silent Death.
Your cheeks burn at your inability to handle cake. Confusion, shame, fear, anger, exhaustion – what are you feeling right now? If life were a physical object, you’d slather it in Vaseline and lodge it in your rectum or sprint to the Yukon and bury life behind your log cabin – six feet deep.
Thoughts chase themselves like rats in your head. You hear their hairless tails dragging along your sticky gray matter, nibbling the frontal lobe. You sip your wine to stop yourself from vomiting –
But, oh.
The wine banishes the rats. It’s Port, technically – from Portugal, thicker than water and darker than blood. The first taste curls your toes; a tiny moan escapes you. It’s as sweet as the cake yet the alcohol’s bitter burn balances the wine, rendering the otherwise cloying liquid into a celebration of contrast, a brew master’s metaphor for the tension between hope and surrender, joy and gloom, April and November.
Death ate his second piece of cake at the same speed as the first. He drops his fork onto the bare plate, leans back, pats his stomach, and signals Server Winona with his thumb and forefinger in the shape of a check. The clatter of silverware on the white dish drags you out of your reverie.
You hold up two fingers in Death’s smug face: “wait a moment there, I’m going to need a third one of these.” You toss the glass back, roll the wine in your mouth like a mid-Atlantic squall while Server Winona approaches the table and waits for you to swallow. She’s tapping her foot, hand on hip, lips puckered, but you don’t care anymore. This woman can’t hurt you. Her disapproval will only last until she learns you are dead – if she ever does – because nobody thinks ill of the dead.
“How was everything? Can I get you your bill or…” she pauses, hoping one of you will say yes, “maybe you’d like something else?”
You swallow. “Yes, please, I’d like another glass of this.” You hold up the glass, the last scarlet drop reflects pink light through crystal stem, “It was exquisite.”
“I’ll have to charge you for this round. It’s a rare vintage, specially imported, from the countryside around Faro. According to myth, a tribe of Giants committed ritual suicide rather than capitulate to the Goat-king who wanted to enslave the giants and their magic. Their blood and bones they left give each grape a little of the magic. Long story short, we charge twice as much as anything else in this place. Sure you want it?” You’re glad you aren’t the only bullshitter in town. You glance at Death: he’s trying to get the lime out of his drinking glass again. The seltzer is long gone and the last of the ice cubes have fallen victim to room temperature.
“Put it on our tab. And why don’t you buy yourself and that gentleman behind the bar a drink too – on us. Then you can bring the check and we’ll be out of your hair.”
Server Winona’s mood has totally reversed itself. She leans over the bar and whispers to Anonymous Male Bartender. He had been twiddling his thumbs and staring at the ceiling for twenty minutes. Now he’s smiling and pulling an artillery shell-sized bottle from the upper shelves behind the bar. He pours a glass of the port, and then mixes himself and his lover something fruity, adorned with paper umbrellas.
All other candles, besides your own, have been extinguished. You are alone in a dim oasis.
You relax in your chair, drinking Death’s wine. For the first time since entering this restaurant, you are satisfied. You won’t escape Death; no degree of wanting to live will keep you alive. Death doesn’t respond to pleading, threats, or flattery – his secrets and your life are seamless eggs: delicate and impossible to understand without irrevocable breakage. All eggs crack, though, eventually. Whether they hatch downy chicks or become part of a western omelet, all eggs break and are released from what defines them. You feel wise while you watch Death struggle with his lime.
Settling Up
Server Winona returns with the wine and a black leather folder. She makes eye contact with both you and Death. Her smile rivals the one she wore while fooling around with Anonymous Male Bartender.
“Have a good night, you two. No rush to finish that drink, you have all the time in the world,” she says.
“You have no idea, Winona.”
Death pulls a wad of bank notes and crude gold coins from his jacket pocket and stuffs them in the leather folder without looking at the bill total. He’s not concerned with counting Server Winona’s windfall: the lime still eludes him.
The second glass is dry. You savor the third. It’s the kind of wine you never taste outside of major life events: births, weddings, the signing of peace treaties after years of conflict, a loved one’s sudden –
Death throws his head back, mouth gaping, tongue protruding past the point of his chin. He up ends his glass with its uncooperative contents over his face. The lime tumbles from the glass, out into space. You see the limes pebbled rind in a slow-mo instant of clarity.
The lime plops into Death’s left eye. You stop breathing. You’re not dead, just surprised.
So is Death.
“Mother of fuck! That stings worse than a wasp’s asshole!” Death’s voice is nasal. The giant noise of his words forced from the tiny tunnels of his nostrils sounds like a colitis-ridden child farting into a saxophone. Shock and alcohol scare a laugh out of you. “It’s not funny, this really hurts! Goddamn!” Death grinds the heel of palm into the affected socket. He rocks back and forth, gargling out strings of nonsense: “aaaagh oooof eeeeeeeeeackackaaaa!”
Melodramatic Death.
“Here,” you say, handing him your napkin.
“Thanks – hey wipe that stupid fucking grin off your face, you don’t know what this is like.” Death takes his hand away from his eye, now spider-webbed with irritated blood vessels.
“Death speaks? Death is a potty mouth who can’t handle a little pain?” Then your grin does fade. You feel a lot less wise than you didn’t a minute ago when you thought life was a mysterious egg. “What does this mean?”
“It means you shouldn’t get citrus in your eye, dipshit.”
“But why did that happen? Why couldn’t you get the lime out? And then why did it get in your eye? What does the lime have to do with tonight?” You lean forward, past the point of politeness.
“What? No. What? The lime doesn’t have anything to do with you, you fucking egomaniac. My poor eye certainly doesn’t have to do with you. Things just happen. It’s meaningless. Fuck that lime.” Death drops the lime on the floor, grimaces like a petulant four-year old and crushes it with his shoe. “Pretend like it’s a sign or some bullshit if you want, I don’t care. Finish that,” Death points to the wine forgotten in your hand, “and let’s get the fuck out of this joint.”
Death takes the napkin away from his face and blinks a few times. He’s calmed down now, silent again.
What do you think? How do you process this outburst in the context of your final moments of your final meal?
Nothing. Death said “meaningless” and he has no reason to lie to you. Maybe it does mean something, but you don’t have time to figure it out. Plus you have a half glass of wine left to enjoy. That’s enough. That’s plenty.
You drink the wine in short order, placing the glass back on the table like the holiest relic of a religion you don’t follow.
Death stands. You stand. Death walks around the table; limejuice squelches on every other step.
He reaches out and rubs the spot between your shoulder blades in a gentle, clockwise motion. The touch comforts you. Death’s hand drops back to his side. You both walk towards the door. Measured steps, in unison.
As you pass the kitchen area you see Server Winona and Anonymous Male Bartender leaning against the walk-in freezer, her mouth flattened against his so closely they may have accidentally knotted their tongues together. The pair are totally alone. They're free to make love (or slake their lust if that is all they’re capable of) as long as they shut the lights off and lock up when they leave. You are glad for them. They take no notice of you, unable to see beyond their private world.
You and Death, still holding hands, stop in front of the door. You glance over your shoulder at the restaurant. Your table is littered with currency, earthenware, and a napkin, wet from Death’s tears. Solitary, the table floats amidst a sea of indistinct shapes. You wonder what, if anything, tonight meant.
Through the glass panes of the door, the street is just a late-night rumor seen through your own reflected face and Death’s next to it. Both are so familiar to you.
Death opens the door for you.
Courteous Death.
You gulp the outside world into your lungs for the last time and step out into the chill of the night.