From the size of the two nickel-plated urns, the place must serve a lot of coffee. And yet it looks almost deserted now — only a couple, stretching out the night, at one end of the counter, and Ray, the blond counterman, bending to rinse out a cup, and a guy in a hat sitting alone with his back to the window. It never gets crowded. They file in and out — the night shift, cabbies, drunks, sometimes a cop, loners mostly — there’s never telling who might step through the door.
Earlier this evening, when most of the stools were taken, a woman in heels and a summer dress stopped outside and stood peering in as if looking for someone. At least it seemed that way at first, before it became clear that she’d only stopped to fix her makeup in the reflection of the plate glass. There were mostly men at the counter, and they pretended not to watch as she stroked a comb through her hair. She seemed so unconscious of their presence that watching her would have been like spying on a woman before her own bedroom mirror. Yet, though they didn’t stare, the men on the other side of the glass wondered about her; they wondered who it was she had stopped to make herself still prettier for, or if she’d just been with someone and was on her way back to someone else. When she stepped away from the window, the reflection of the lipstick she’d applied seemed to remain hovering on the glass like the impression of a kiss. The men in the diner pretended to ignore this too, although in its way the reflected kiss was no less miraculous than the tears rolling down the cheeks of a parish church’s plaster Virgin, that crowds will line up for blocks to see. The woman stepped beyond the light of the diner and disappeared down a street of shadowy windows. After a while, the reflected kiss disappeared too — who knows where — simply dissolving into darkness, or perhaps reappearing blocks away on the glass door of a corner phone booth, where an AWOL soldier named Choco, disoriented by grief as if it were a drug, has wedged inside with his conga drum because he has nowhere else to go. He sits dazed, as if waiting for an oracle to call, and doesn’t notice the kiss on the glass door among the graffitied lipsticked initials and eyebrow-penciled numbers. And when he begins to beat the booth, his open palm becoming a bloody handprint on cracked glass, the kiss vanishes again. Perhaps the kiss crosses the city, riding the blurred window of a subway, or of a cab running red lights down a boulevard of black glass….
That couple, stretching out the night at the end of the counter, has been in here before. They sit side by side like lovers, and yet there’s something detached enough about them so that they could pass for strangers. It might be the way they sit staring ahead rather than looking at each other, or that their hands on the countertop don’t quite touch, but it’s passion, not indifference, that is responsible for that. Tonight, at this late hour, they’ve wandered in feeling empty, a little drained by the mutual obsession that keeps them awake. The insomnia they share is the insomnia of desire. Walking here along deserted streets, they noticed this neighborhood of shadowy windows was missing a moon, and so they began to make up a moon between them: solid as a cue ball; translucent and webbed with fine cracks, like bone china; cloudy, the bleached white of a bra tumbling in a dryer. Now, under a fluorescence that makes her arms appear too bare and her dress shimmer from rose to salmon to shades of red for which there’s no approximation, they’ve fallen silent. He’s smoking. She dreamily studies a match-book from some other place where they sat like this together killing time.
And Ray, he’s been working here long enough to seem like part of the decor. The white of his uniform intensifies the lighting. He keeps the coffee urns gleaming and the counter swabbed. The cocky angle of the white paper cap perched on his blond head makes him look like a kid, but he’s older than people take him for; friendly, but as much a loner as anyone he serves. Working nights might seem to grant him an immunity from insomnia, but job or not, he’s here like the rest of them, awake. What he does during the day is anybody’s guess. He disappears behind one of those shadowed, black, upper-story windows, draws the shade, and the rising sun beats it gold. The restless sound of traffic carries up to him from the street. Perhaps it’s something other than insomnia, to lie listening to children yelling as if they’ve re-created light; to try to dream, but succeed only in remembering; to toss and sweat in a dirty paste of sheets, while the drone of a ball game is gradually replaced by the buzz of a fly — a fly buzzing like the empty frequencies between stations as its shadow grows enormous between the shade and windowpane. Is it insomnia for a man to wad his ears with the cotton from a pill bottle, to mask his eyes with blinders, and press a stale pillow over his head, praying for another day to burn down, so he can wake into another night?
The guy with his back to the window has been sitting there a long time nursing his mug of java. Ray, stooping to rinse out a cup, avoids looking in his direction. There’s something about the way the guy’s hat shadows his face, about his shoulders, hunched as if braced for another blow, about his eyes plumbing the depths of his coffee, that discourages conversation. It would be like trying to make small talk with a hit man. Besides, the guy has been mumbling to himself, his mouth moving as if chewing something too bitter to swallow. If he’s thinking about women, he must be counting up all the times they’ve cheated on him. If he’s thinking about work, he’s adding up the brutal ways of saying they’re taking your job: fired, canned, sacked, axed, terminated. He’s dwelling on the lost in “lost his job”—lost—as if the eight hours of sweat at the heart of each day could be misplaced. Why call it lost if it’s been taken from you? Lost is a lie, and without such lies the streets would be crowded with assassins. But his incessant tallies, his lists of lies and grievances, his roll call of betrayals, have added up to nothing but insomnia. Insomnia is a private score he has, so far, settled only with himself; it’s the time he does each night for his own betrayals, his own petty offenses of failure, hard luck, desperation. And insomnia is also the threat of unnamed crimes still more menacing. After dark, he carries it beside his heart, concealed like a weapon.
And finally, what about the empty water glass set on the counter before an empty stool? No tip beside it. Not that anyone but Ray paid any attention to the person who sat there and ordered merely water. Only Ray recognized immediately that a sleepwalker had entered the diner. They wander in occasionally, and Ray has learned to recognize their habits — how they order nothing but water, and never tip. At first, Ray would serve them only what they asked for, but now sometimes he buys them a coffee on the house. He isn’t sure himself whether he does it out of kindness or cruelty. He’d like to think it’s kindness, that if it were he who was wandering the streets asleep, he’d be grateful to anyone who tried to help. But Ray’s not certain. He’s heard it can be dangerous to tamper with sleepwalkers, that their souls can leave their bodies, and so Ray always braces for that moment when the steaming coffee first touches their lips and they wake.
The sleepwalker’s eyes roll open. He glances around wildly as if he doesn’t realize what’s happened or even that he is awake. Fluorescence scalds his pupils as the coffee did his lips. The diner seems frozen in the blinding pop of a flashbulb that refuses to fade — a glare as stark as the illumination of certain dreams, brighter for being framed by night. In that paralyzing light, the sleepwalker sees the lovers at the other end of the counter, with their bleached-out, hawk-featured faces staring straight ahead as if they’re in a trance; and Ray, glancing away, caught in the act of dunking a cup under the counter as if disposing of evidence; and the hit man in the shadowy hat, mumbling to no one. Stunned as he is, the sleepwalker can feel the paralysis of the diner drawing him in as if he belongs there too. With a half spin, he shoves away from the counter, rises from his stool, and, leaving no tip, staggers for the door. And as he pushes out, something snaps him fully awake — maybe the night air, or the slap of a patty hitting the grill, or his soul returning to him from shadows. He stands outside the diner, within the perimeter of its aura, and stares down a street of dark windows, wondering which way he’s come from, which way to go. In the diner’s almost phosphorescent glow, the deserted street looks like pavement might on the moon. Above the roofs, he can see the moon the lovers at the end of the counter left behind, no longer newly minted, surrounded by the same aura as the diner, waiting faithfully like a dog for them to reemerge. In their absence, it’s gone through phases, diminishing like a stalled traffic light in the rearview mirror of a taxi. Now it’s less than a crescent, less than a smudged thumbprint of mother-of-pearl — only a shimmer like the glint of neon on the surface of a cup of black coffee. The bitter taste of coffee still burns his tongue. He can feel his nerves jumping and his heart starting to race as if that mere sip in the diner has stoked him with the stamina of caffeine, and converted him from sleepwalking to insomnia. From somewhere in the sky above the diner, he hears the screech of a single nighthawk, and suddenly he’s happy. It seems to him enough to simply be awake like that bird soaring in the darkness that sleepers have abandoned, to be walking away from the lighted corner, down the empty, silent streets they’ve left to him, whistling as he passes dark windows, not sure where he’s going, and in no hurry to find out. It’s the middle of the night, and tomorrow seems as if it’s still 93 million miles away$$$$.