the palimpsest trap

He liked to piss sitting down.

This was not a new development, so it wasn't like it could be chalked up to middle—or, let's be honest, old—age. He had long considered it a sign of respect, to produce no splash or splatter. He wouldn't bother at a gas station restroom, tried to avoid them altogether frankly, and he'd always use a urinal if one was available. But at a place like this, this gleaming bullet of chrome set a little ways off the road somewhere deep in the Catskills, where they just had all-gender restrooms and an ever-more-mixed clientele, well, he thought he'd do his best to pay it forward.

Also, this diner had been his regular haunt for decades now so it was more or less like home, and he treated his home with care. 

He knew the joint well, right down to the text on the Fleishmann's Yeast ad over the sink, and he was reflecting on this when the door rattled, someone turning the knob.

"Occupied!" he called out, his voice a rough baritone with its edges worn down, a stained piece of rough-cut pine.

The door shook again as he did. "Just a minute now," he said, standing up, and in response the door began to vibrate like it was about to come apart. He reached out and touched the wall next to him, found it steady; not an earthquake, then.

Which left two options.

He washed his hands, dried them on a kerchief from his pocket, and went to see which it was.

The door ceased its jumping and jiving as he reached for the knob. The hallway was empty when he swung it open. Not an unsupervised child in sight.

Option two then. 

He stepped cautiously out into the diner, which was empty and silent. This was notable as approximately three minutes earlier, it had been the definition of bustling, full of an average morning's detente between the locals and the tourists.

The hum of the people, the sizzle of the grill: gone. Every place was clear and pristine, as though the diner had yet to open -- except, he saw his own booth still had a steaming cup of coffee and the not-quite-finished remnants of his farmers-skillet-with-a-side-of-bacon, just as he'd left it.

He looked outside. The lot was empty and the mist that had been hovering all morning had dropped in so close that the highway was gone altogether.

Or at least, that's what a person might reasonably assume. If this was their first rodeo, say.

It was not his first rodeo.

He swung his gaze back to his booth where now sat a sharply dressed figure, hands folded patiently. "Hello Harry," it said.

Harry walked steadily to the booth and sat down, never taking his eye off the figure. For all that attention, he wouldn't have been able to tell you what he saw beyond the suit (black, three-piece, white shirt and black tie) and the bowler cap and the general air of masculinity. The superficial stuff.

He broke his gaze to inspect his breakfast. 

"It's the same," the figure offered. "I waited until she topped up your coffee. Gesture of good will, I thought."

"That's nice of you." The steam off the coffee was so picture-perfect it could've been in a Folgers ad. He wanted that coffee but left it by. If he were being honest, it made him a little angry to be interrupted like this. Thought he might've commanded a bit more respect, at this age. 

"In that case, mind if I...?" The suit didn't wait, just reached out and picked up some of the bacon. Harry watched as the hand came up and then... well, it was hard to say. Something happened and the hand came back down without the bacon. 

"I'm afraid you have me at a bit of a disadvantage," Harry said cautiously.

The suit's laughter was piped in, from somewhere off-screen. "Oh, I doubt that. Not that it matters, if you've forgotten. I'm here about a bill that's come due, Mr. Neimand. And my collection rate is perfect."

Memory fluttered at the corner of Harry's mind like newspaper coming loose from a broken windowpane. His face softened. "Ah," he allowed.

"Yes, I thought you might."

"Is this immediate?"

The suit took a sip of what had been Harry's coffee. "You'll find that the time for trickery has passed. But you were canny enough when we made this deal: you have twenty-four hours."

"From?"

It wasn't that the suit smiled, because again it had no discernible features. Nevertheless, Harry felt as thought it smiled at him. 

"Let's not get precious with the details." A billfold came out of its breast pocket and a few bills fell to the table. It looked at a non-existent watch on its wrist, smoothed its lapels, and then stared at Harry. Harry stared back. “So, then, Harry Neimand… What have you got?”

*

The dog understood Harry’s silence to mean that the story was over. He thought about it for a bit, and then asked: “Why did you have to tell me about the peeing thing?”

They were sitting together on the porch in the slow-fading evening. Harry had not come home right away; the dog, whose name was Porter, had noticed and while he would not say he was agitated, he was not best pleased. 

“I suppose I thought it added some interesting texture,” replied Harry, eventually.

Porter considered this. “Do you really always pee sitting down?”

“Do you really always lift your leg to pee?”

Porter walked in circles until he sat down in a tight donut. “Fair enough,” he sighed. “So what are you going to do?” 

In the ensuing conversational silence, the diverse sounds of nature could be heard from all around: crickets, frogs, owls, ravens, squirrels, chipmunks, cicadas… and those were just the things that Porter knew Harry could hear. There was an entire other world of things moving around out there, like deer and rabbits and ants and spiders and the trees themselves. 

It was a good sign, Porter reasoned, that the world went on uninterrupted. It would not be fun once silence fell. But Harry didn’t seem particularly hard-pressed about it, yet. He smelled calm, if also faintly sulfurous. 

“Not sure,” said Harry finally. He dropped a hand down and scratched along the dog’s head. 

Porter had come into Harry’s life about five years prior. Harry had woken up one morning to find him sitting at the back door. It was a good sit, squared off, tail gently wagging, head cocked to one side. Porter knew how to make a good first impression. 

Harry had not let him in right away but had instead spoken to him through the screen door. "Hey there, fella, you lost?"

“Nope,” replied Porter, as easy as anything. He’d been pleased to see that his intel was correct: Harry wasn’t the sort to flinch at the sight—or sound, rather—of a talking dog. 

But he was also the sort who took his time. Porter was okay with that.

“Can I help you?"

"You're Harry Niemand, right? 

“Yup.”

“I'm your dog."

"Don't have a dog."

"Didn't have a dog. Now you have me."

Harry squinted, sizing up the logic. "Suppose I can't argue with that. Give me a minute."

Porter waited as the man went back inside. He itched his ear, sniffed his crotch, but otherwise was patient.

"I'm going to come out now. Would you mind backing up?" Harry asked the dog when he came back, and gently opened up the door. "And if you'd stand, ah, right over there?"

The dog followed the path of Harry's pointing finger, then looked back at Harry. "In the suspiciously empty circle of dirt?"

"Not suspicious. Just a circle of dirt."

"Smells weird."

"I'm sure it does."

Porter had already given the whole place a solid sniff well before Harry had even known he was there, but he put on a show of double-checking everything now.

He let the man do his thing—pouring a line of salt around the dog, then lighting a bird’s feather on fire and tossing it at the circle. He seemed satisfied by the way the smoke spiraled tightly upward. He did a few more tests with the things he'd brought from the basement before, apparently satisfied, scuffing the salt line with the toe of his moccasin. 

Porter took a moment before padding over to Harry, putting on a little bit of puppy-eye. "All good?"

Harry nodded. "You hungry?"

The dog's ears perked up.

"You like jerky?"

"Probably."

Harry cupped a piece of jerky in his hand, which he lowered to the dog's nose. Porter sniffed, butting the cold wetness against Harry's leathery hand, before daintily taking the jerky and gnashing it with gusto. 

Harry asked, "You got a name?"

"Some have called me Porter," the dog said, tail wagging, expectant. 

Harry considered this, and then nodded his acceptance of it. He proffered another bit of jerky, then gently scratched the dog between its ears. "Nice to meet you, Porter.”

*

“I think the talking dog might be too much,” Reagan said to herself as she pulled up out of her writing trance. 

There was no one around, but she liked talking to herself about her writing. It kept her level, she thought; better than keeping it inside. Although, she could understand why someone might see it as more troubling. 

But also, maybe they just saw her as an artist with all the weirdness that entailed! That would be nice. It would be nice if other people were to call her an artist, sort of like how they made children clap to keep Tinkerbell alive.

It was nearly 7pm, which meant that the evening’s film was soon to begin and people were milling about. Reagan watched them for a few long moments, hidden in plain sight—how quickly people got used to her—in the defunct ticket-booth of the Majestic Theater on Mill Street in downtown Allantide. She waved when she saw a few friends, although only a couple of them saw her.

It had been a point of contention when she arrived in town for the… well, what did one call an artist-in-residence… gig? Posting? Deployment? It was not (in her limited understanding anyway) a residency because as she understood it, residencies did things like make you food and stick you with a bunch of other artists in beautiful old houses or the like. She was here, living in the belfry like a cut-rate Phantom, writing in the little glass-walled ticket booth, subsisting on the kindness of an anonymous donor’s stipend and the general quality of the people in town.

Before she left her booth for the night—she might come back, she often did come back; the light from the green-domed library lamp (which she’d appropriated from the belfry that had become her bedroom) was now such a part of local lore that she heard it mentioned on the radio—she did a quick tally of her working time and pages-filled, adding the data to the wipe-off calendar she’d blu-tacked to the wall. She also made a note to consider, again, the pros and cons of the dog as narrator.

Then, she slipped out into the crowd.

She spotted Andy, the owner of the theater, and waved. He was an enormous bear of a man who bore a sizable resemblance to Animal, the Muppet drummer and it had been rather disconcerting for Reagan to realize that, if Animal were real, he might look something like a chainsaw murderer. But Andy was a totally nice guy, cursed only with a physical appearance that belied his sweet temperament. 

He was behind the concession counter and gestured for Reagan to come over. She did so and he handed her some popcorn and a box of Milk Duds. “You’re in B-13,” he told her.

“I don’t get the ticket?”

He rolled his eyes. “Get it later, you know how to print it yourself.” 

She grinned and thanked him, and then slipped into the theater just as the previews started. The theater was an old church and there was still a sacred energy to the space, or so she liked to think. A temple to art! How fitting that she’d end up here, that she’d be the first artist-in-residence—the things she was going to write! The writer she was going to be! It was all so thrilling.

When the screams started, she wondered if she should have been more specific about that last bit.

*

The woman stepped away from the microphone suddenly, apparently done with her reading. It took the host by surprise, and he shouted from the bar, “Another round of applause for Mira Wei, everybody!” 

This bought him a few seconds to get to the mic, but by the time he rolled into his stock closing speech, nobody was listening. They were all bellying back up to the bar, either to close their tabs or order another drink. Mostly the latter: it was a beautiful evening, too warm for this time of year but who could complain?

Annalee, the bar’s owner, watched the crowd with some satisfaction. It had been her son, Darren, who suggested they partner with the bookstore for a monthly reading series and it was a lovely surprise to discover that this had been a good idea. Or, at least, it wasn’t one that lost her money.

“Bit of a bleak one there at the end,” groused the older man at the corner of the bar, a kerchief hanging out of his back pocket. Annalee recognized him—a regular, unperturbed by the literary disruption to his routine. He lived somewhere on the edge of the county, had a dog? She couldn’t remember his name in the moment.

“Didn’t know you were paying attention,” she chided him.

He kept musing, as though he hadn’t heard her. “Might be neat if we had an artist-in-residence in town. Sounds so flash.” 

She was about to say something else when she heard a faint train whistle, off on the breeze. Not a real one, although it sounded real enough; it was one of those wooden whistles you could get at the toy store in town. Or you could, anyway, before it closed. 

Annalee excused herself and stepped out the back door, onto what was once the station platform. Now, it was just a long patio that gave way to an overgrown flat stretch where once ran iron rails. She looked up and down the rails as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, waiting to see what was coming.

In a few moments, she spotted a cherry ember in the middle distance. “Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania,” she said to the figure who’d fired up the ember.

The figure exhaled a cloud of noxious smoke, then stepped forward, the moonlight glinting off their grin. “Now, now, Annalee. I thought we were friends.” The figure wore a three-piece suit, a bowler hat, a general air of masculinity but not enough to pull off ‘human.’ 

“You only come around when you’re looking for trouble,” she replied, not letting it get too close.

The figure shivered. “What the hell are you trying to do, Harry?” it asked, in suddenly sharp tones. 

Annalee paid the change in demeanor no mind, could even be said not to have noticed, but kept talking. “And I’ve had enough trouble of late. Been a hell of a month, I tell you what. So you can turn around and walk yourself right out of here.”

The suit's laughter was piped in, from somewhere off-screen. “But Annalee, I think we both know that I can be a solution to your problems if—don’t you fucking dare, Harry, you old fuck, this won’t work—you’d only take up my offer.”

Annalee had, it turned out, been considering the suit’s offer. She was tired, and she didn’t want to be. She was fighting a uphill battle against age, against time, against a changing town. She knew she had her boy, her bar, her friends, but…

“So I was thinking,” she said, as the figure shouted and swore at a man she couldn’t see or hear or even know about—because that man had deemed that she couldn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t. “How about a wager, instead?”

And the suit, because it had to, because of the rules of the game, said the only thing it could say: “You’re on.”

*

Harry Neimand put his hands down on the Formica top of the booth, fingers splayed. “The end,” he said, although it wasn’t. It never was. 

The diner roared back to life in the span of a blink. Harry tensed at the sudden influx of sound, then slowly exhaled.

The seat across from him was empty now, and would remain so for… well, for a while, anyway. He’d knotted that devil several layers deep—let it find its own way out, if it could.

Well, he knew it could, but it’d take time. And that was all that you could ask for in this life: a little more time.