Today I went to a restaurant, a newer place in town. It filled a building that had stood empty for three years, and before that, it was a Denny’s. The tables were clean and the accents were blue, and the waitress’ eyes were wide and edged with white.
I told my dad, sitting at the new table, that the aura of the Denny’s lingered. He asked when I had been to the Denny’s in town—never, I said, but all Dennys’ are the same place, you know? There are many doors, but they all open to the same strange otherworld, a place where another plane of existence opens at the right hours of the night.
The Denny’s was gone and has been for years, but it stuck to the walls and whispered from the speakers when the music paused. The bar was untended in the middle of Happy Hour. When we walked in, the hostess stand was empty. Our waitress had a sharp note in her voice, strained, and her lips moved strangely around her words, and her eyes were ringed white, like a startled animal. She was a pretty girl, just a few years older than me—I might have gone to school with her, but I didn’t recognize her, and she didn’t seem to know me. When she walked away, the faint shadow of a red-shirted figure seemed to cling to her back like mist. Hi, I’ll be your server tonight, she said with a perfect toothy smile, and I heard the rapid welcome-to-Denny’s-can-I-take-your-order in my mind before she kept talking, can I get you anything to drink to start.
I wonder what she’ll dream about tonight, our waitress with the white-ringed eyes and the unfamiliar face. If she dreams about her job, but decked out in another primary color and filled with the transient souls who end up there at odd hours. No one goes to Denny’s, someone told me once, you just end up there, usually at late hours and with a mild degree of confusion about what brought you to their door. If she dreams about the red-shirted shadow, and about how that stranger arrived for work one day—another day, another dollar, a waitstaff lackey of the boss but also a keeper of the door to an elsewhere—to find their job simply closed, the sign gone overnight like it had never been. We don’t know what happened to the Denny’s in town. It didn’t even go out of business, it just stopped, like a hand had flicked a light switch and taken the whole building with it.
I wonder if she’ll dream about doorways and dark lots.
The walls were decked with black and white photographs, of serious faces and beautiful landscapes, so neatly tiled that there was never more than a hand’s breadth of clear wall in some places. Their eyes didn’t follow you, and the water didn’t ripple out of the corner of the eye, but there was something…close about them, I told my mom. Like you might pass your hand over the front and then reach through, past the paper and ink to the otherplace just beyond. Not a trap, if you were clever, but a gateway, which is almost the same thing. Cut off from the other Denny’s doors, I told her with a smile, the restaurant had to find new ones.
Ginger ale and a burger. The food wasn’t a binding contract—the terms of the deal are set out at the beginning, at a restaurant, even at a Denny’s. You come and they serve you, you pay and they allow you to leave. Our waitress brought us the check without a fuss, not so much as a wheedling don’t you want dessert to keep us there. Deal observed. I looked out the window as my mom pulled out a credit card, overheard part of a conversation about checks. No, we don’t take checks, cash or credit. Checks aren’t signed in blood, I mused, but then neither is credit. Digital lifeblood, maybe, a new bond for a new age, modern contracts to match a modern elsewhere. Deal kept.
I don’t think I would want to dine and dash, at that restaurant, in those walls.
Two crows spent almost forty minutes on the grass outside, idly strutting through the all-day dew that still clung. They chattered at each other, and eyed the window where I watched them, black eyes like drops of intelligent ink. I looked outside every few minutes, and every time I expected to see another view, something new, something other than the shoe store and the vast expanse of pine trees. It was the feeling of lying on my back on the ground with my eyes closed and feeling the planet spin beneath me, but the stars being the same when I looked again.
When we walked outside, the pearly grey sunlight-behind-clouds had faded to a sulky, dull twilight, and there was fog wrapping thick around the restaurant. The parking lot was empty save for our car and two others, even though there had been several more families inside. We laughed about the old Denny’s in town, about how it had lost its hold on this reality, and didn’t talk about the empty bar or the wide-eyed waitress or the way the kitchen was so quiet, even though every staff member was supposed to be behind the swinging doors.
The Denny’s in town is gone, died quietly in the night without so much as a flatline. But I think it might be haunting its replacement.
