VII.

The restaurant scene around campus was abysmal.

The food options consisted mainly of several joint pizza and burger establishments that stretched down a boulevard disconnected from the main road. At the end of the boulevard was a late night diner. One could recognize it by the groaning purple neon lights reading “DINER.” In spite of its presentation, it was in fact the only respectable place on the block.

It also received the fewest customers, making it the perfect refuge for me and the girl with the faded magenta eye.

A bell above the front door rang when we entered. The bartender, a stoic man who never spoke, waved us to a nearby booth. The waitress, who was busy sweeping the floor, set her broom aside and fetched a pair of menus. As far as I could tell, there was no one else here, save for two silhouettes further down in the back.

“Are you hungry?” I realized I hadn’t asked the girl with the faded magenta eye this courtesy question before we came here.

“Actually, yeah, just a little,” she said. “I’ve got to go home soon though.”

“But the film club…”

“Can we talk about them later?” she said. “Maybe after we eat something.”

“Okay. Sure.”

I liked the diner for two reasons.

The first was because they were the only place nearby that didn’t serve just burgers, fries, pizza, and wings. Yes, these were the essential nutrients of any fledgling university student, along with instant cup noodles, frozen dumplings from that one local Chinese grocer, and buy one get one free spicy tuna sushi rolls.

Did it make me crazy to yearn for some chicken and waffles or even a well seasoned Full English Breakfast every once in a while?

The second reason was that the diner was clean. Very clean.

The waitress, the one with the frilly dress and uniform, who set aside her broom to fetch us water and our menus. Because the restaurant received so little business, she spent much of her day cleaning anything that looked less than spotless, which made the diner my goto study hall when the librarian was near capacity.

After I chugged two glasses of water to rinse my mouth, the girl with the faded magenta eye and I put in our orders. She settled on pan fried salmon with cauliflower salad and mashed celeriac root. I ordered country fried steak and roasted potatoes.

We both sat in silence while we waited and dug in immediately when our food arrived.

As I chewed on the first thin strip of chicken fried steak, I looked up, as I usually did when I ate alone, to savor the clean view of the restaurant. Except instead, this time, I saw the girl with the faded magenta eye curl strands of long hair behind her pointed ears.

And that was the moment I remembered that there was a lot more to the human face.

The girl possessed a second dark blue eye. This one was not saturated by an outer circle of black or faded magenta colors. I thought it looked better this way.

Her lips and cheeks were the next to reveal themselves. Her lips carried spring colors. Her cheeks were ripe like peaches. Her diminutive nose twitched every time she forked bits of salmon into her mouth.

I also spotted playful, shallow depressions sitting just to the right and left of her mouth. They seemed slightly hidden and swelled like whitecaps in the ocean, disappearing and reappearing between waves of chewing.

The girl looked up at me.

“Could you stop staring at me?” she said.

Something warm filled up the flanks of my oral cavity.

It was the steak.

“Rosalyne?”

A familiar voice drew towards me from the back of the diner. A silhouette I didn’t recognize wearing an officer’s uniform beneath their corduroy trenchcoat passed me by. Behind them, I identified the build and dress of Mr. Caraway.

“Mr. Caraway?” I said. “I didn’t know you ran sessions outside your office, especially this late.”

“Oh, that guy? No. Just catching up with a friend. Speaking of which,” Mr. Caraway turned to the girl across from me. “Hi. You’re Miss Natasha Yu, right?”

“How do you know me?” the girl shifted backwards.

“There’s no need to be cautious. I’ve just heard your name a few times from people at my practice,” Mr. Caraway reached into his jacket and fetched a plain white business card. “I was hoping you’d have time for a chat sometime.”

“Is business that bad, Mr. Caraway?” I joked.

“Have a think about it, Miss Yu,” Mr. Caraway ignored me. “Anyway, I’m not here to pressure you. I’ll see you both again maybe. Good night.”

The girl was quiet even after Mr. Caraway had left. She prodded at what was left of the salmon. Her eyes averted, once, then twice to the blank white card Mr. Caraway had given her before she slipped it into her shirt pocket.

It amazed me how much more you could read from a person when they possessed a face. There were so many mixed emotions, a whole range of idiosyncratic signals that hand gestures and body language could never feasibly simulate. I imagined what a full fledged conversation with such an animated face might feel like.

“Mr. Caraway’s nice,” I tried to break the silence. “He’s a bit insensitive at times but…”

“Don’t ever go to the film club again,” the girl scowled all of a sudden.

“Don’t worry. I won’t,” I nodded. “And you shouldn’t either.”

The girl shook her head.

“I shouldn't have relied on you to get away this morning. I had second thoughts when I shouldn't have. It's my fault things ended up the way they did. I shouldn't have involved you. I'm sorry.”

“I don’t understand,” I replied. “You sound as if you're going back there.”

“I am.”

“But… why would you do that?” I asked.

“Because I don’t belong here. The film club understands that. They’ve found a way of sending me back.”

“Back where?” I asked.

“Back to where I came from.”

“But where is that?” I asked.

“Doesn't matter. You couldn't imagine it, because you're not me.”

“What? Is it like a different town? A different country?”

“See?” the girl giggled. “You can't imagine things outside your own cognitive purview. The best I can say to get through to you is to say that I'm an alien, and I'm returning to deskny.”

“But the film club. Those people. Can they imagine it?”

“No. They can't. But our arrangement is still favorable to me. I help them with Apocalypse Anew, and I get to go home. We have mutually aligned interests.”

“Was that Apocalypse Anew? All I saw was a microscope looking down at black mold.”

The girl frowned.

“Oh, Rosalyne,” she pouted. “Is that what you really believe, Rosalyne?”

My thoughts buffered at the sound of my name. How should the conversation proceed?

“... how do you know my name?”

“What do you mean?” she smiled. “That man who came by called you Rosalyne.”

“Yes he did,” I said, “but I never told you that was my name. You just believed him?”

“Ah, so that’s why you never called me Natasha,” she widened her eyes, “why you’ve never referred to me by that name, why until now I’ve only ever been referred to as the girl, the girl with the black eye, and so on and so forth.”

That was exactly right.

Only I held the creative authority to affirm that I was in fact Rosalyne. Only the girl, who still refused to acknowledge her name (and so my dear readers, because of her, you remain subjected to this continued limbo regarding her true identity, however the reading experience suffers thus) could confirm or deny what her name actually was.

The girl sighed as if she had read my mind.

“Let me tell you something, Rosalyne,” she leaned her chin on her palm. “This world doesn’t begin or end with you. There can only be deskny, the wonderful abode of simultaneously complete and incomplete understanding. You know this. Intuitively you do. People don’t stop existing because you stop thinking about them. They haven’t evolved into posthuman lifeforms because you’ve scalped their faces from their bodies. You’ve done all this for a specific reason and for a specific purpose, but this construction is doomed to fail.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I murmured.

“I was someone like you once, you know,” the girl bit her bottom lip, “I know what it’s like not to accept the world inside of you. I mean, how could we? How could we come to accept such terrible… things? But I promise you, Rosalyne…”

“I don’t want to hear anymore of this!” I snapped.

“Then you won’t,” the girl closed her eyes. “We won’t ever speak like this again.”

The girl blinked and rose up.

“I’ll pick up the bill,” she said. “I have to get home. It’s getting late.”

“But what about…”

“Thanks for standing up for me today,” she bowed. “It made me really happy.”

The girl with the faded magenta eye took off. I watched her shuffle through her purse for several bills along with a generous tip. She waved at me again as she pushed hard on the door to exit the diner.

It was hard to see if she was smiling.

Her hair was, after all, always in the way.

I hadn’t really broken the silence at all.