In short, there's really not an explanation for this story that I can think of. See what you think of it. :)
Enjoy!
Last summer, the summer I discovered the possibility of being someone else, was one of those summers almost nobody in their right mind would like. Some days were so hot and so humid that if you even attempted to move, you’d probably die of heat stroke. You could practically swim through the air if you knew how. Only people without air conditioners in their homes dared to leave them and even then it was only to go somewhere there was air conditioning and pray that they had a late closing hour.
That day was probably not the hottest one on record, but it felt like it. Of course, everyday where the temperature goes above the mid-sixties feels like that when one works in a restaurant where half the air conditioner is only avoiding falling onto the pavement of the parking lot by a thin thread. The rusty thing hadn’t been fixed in years and was, at this point, probably too hazardous to the environment to even think about turning on. Working in a restaurant like this was like trying to sell a jar of sweat to regulars at a gym. Needless to say, everyone flocked to the nice, cool restaurants like they were an oasis in the desert. Myself, I was one of the ones trying sell the sweat.
The diner in which I worked was empty of customers. Completely, utterly empty. Not one soul was sitting in the booths with the ripped red leather and all the lights, most of which hadn’t worked since the seventies, were off in order to fend off as much heat as possible. The waitresses were sitting at the counter along with the cooks and dishwashers, having given up on whatever busy work there was to do that day. Every one of us were either sipping from a glass of ice water or holding one to our foreheads as we exchanged some rather creative stories of what we were going to do to the owner of the diner for forcing us to come in on a day like this.
He was sitting in the back room, which always managed to keep much cooler than the rest of the restaurant but was never open to the customers. To us, it sounded as good as lounging in someone’s inground pool for the day as the sounds of him and his cronies laughing loudly and drunkenly wafted into the restaurant. None of us would have dared gone in there with them, if only for the sake of our families, but it did sound vaguely tempting. How did they get the energy to laugh so loudly when we couldn’t even find enough energy to lift ourselves from our seats?
Around two in the afternoon, we all mustered up the strength to turn our heads and blatantly stare as a man entered the restaurant and to raise our eyebrows when he didn’t end up turning right back around as soon as he noticed the absence of that refreshing gust of cool air like you felt in the nice restaurants. It was almost like an omen in a way. Was this what the world was coming to? People walking into hot restaurants on hot days and actually staying?
“Should we tell him we’re closed?” one of the cooks mumbled to the group.
Instead of answering his question, we all cautiously watched the man as he examined through his thin-rimmed glasses the words on the whiteboard up front advertising the breakfast specials despite the fact that breakfast hours were long over. None of us could bring ourselves to change what was written, but he didn’t seem to notice that as he stood slightly hunched over, his arms crossed over his chest nonchalantly.
One of the dishwashers sighed that type of frustrated sigh that people only sigh on hot days.
“Hey buddy!” he called to the man, causing him to glance up briefly. A glare on his glasses prevented all of us from actually seeing his eyes. “The sign says to please seat yourself!”
But before the sentence was all the way out, the man was looking back at the whiteboard. It seemed like he was waiting for something. There was something not quite right.
“Is he crazy?” one of the younger waitresses whispered to no one in particular.
And no one answered that either, though we were all undoubtedly thinking the same thing.
With the same sigh the dishwasher had sighed before, I slid off the stool I was sitting on and walked over to the man . Standing right in front of him, he seemed completely different somehow than he had from farther away. For one thing, he looked unexpectedly younger. While his hair wasn’t gray and there were no lines on his face, something had made him seem older from a distance. I still couldn’t see his eyes, though. The glare on his glasses always seemed to be in the perfect place. It must have been that time of day.
“Are you lost?” I asked him quietly, almost condescending in my inquiry, no doubt the result of an attitude brought on by the heat and a lack of business. I had no intention of making him mad, just remind him that he didn’t have to be here when there were so many much better places to be.
He heaved a sigh, but this one was different from my own. This was more one of giving up. Like I had caught him doing something that I wasn’t supposed to see him doing.
“Unfortunately no,” he replied, turning his eyes on me. Suddenly the glare was gone and I was surprised to see that his eyes were almost indigo. Not only that, they seemed to me at the time to be almost completely devoid of emotion. There wasn’t even a hint of the person who might have lived behind those unusual eyes.
I raised my eyebrow at his answer.
“Are you sure about that?” I asked.
He nodded, moving his eyes away from mine, back to the specials board as if he thought it might have changed when he wasn’t looking. I looked at it too, reading over the various omelettes and pancakes we were trying to force down people’s throats. I cringed when I saw that the person who had written it had spelled the word “chocolate” wrong on chocolate chip pancakes.
“I’m sure,” he said, and even though he didn’t sound uncertain, he didn’t sound particularly sure about it either.
“I see,” I said. Then, suddenly compelled to ask, “So this is where you’re supposed to be?”
Something about the question intrigued him enough to look back at me. His indigo eyes searched mine for such a long time that I felt compelled to speak again since it didn’t seem like he was going to.
“There’s an air conditioned restaurant just down the road,” I told him.
He shrugged.
“Several, in fact,” I said. “The food’s better.”
“I wouldn’t know,” he replied.
So obviously he wasn’t leaving.
“Where’s your section?” he asked me.
“Last five,” I told him. “By the windows,” I added, pointing.
Abruptly, he began to move. I followed, grabbing a stray menu on the way.
He slid into one of the booths and took the menu I handed to him. He made no comment about the various grease stains under the finger-printed lamination.
“Can I start you off with a nice, cool drink?” I asked, pasting my best sarcastic “friendly waitress” smile on my face, holding my pen to my pad in readiness.
He seemed momentarily disappointed, his shoulders slouching a bit.
“Is there such a thing as a nice, cool drink on a day like this?” he asked.
I snorted. “Well, since there’s no such thing as a warm meal or clean silverware in here, I wouldn’t give you my word on anything.”
He glanced at the menu.
“I take it the iced tea is a mix?” he asked, gesturing.
I hadn’t even been talking to him for ten minutes and yet iced tea seemed like too cliché a drink for him already. He seemed like the type of person to order hot chocolate on a day as hot as it was, not iced tea. Practically everybody got iced tea.
“Yeah,” I said. “Lipton maybe. More than likely some store brand, though.”
“Always is,” he mumbled. “I’ll take one anyway.”
I quickly scribbled it down on my pad and scurried away to get the drink. I could feel the eyes of my friends and their unanswered questions burning holes in my back as I went about my job. I shuddered at the feeling, suddenly knowing how he must have felt when he first came in. I rolled my eyes at them as I passed, on my way back to where he was sitting. One of the cooks gave me a thumbs-up.
When I got back to the table, I found the man staring blankly outside the window at the cars speeding by. His hands were clasped in front of him and his glasses lay on the table next to the salt shaker.
He seemed to look quite different without his glasses. Less...something. Less foreboding maybe.
“Those your friends?” he asked without looking at me as I set the glass down in front of him.
“We get along...mostly,” I said.
“I see,” he said. Then, he gestured to the seat across from him at the booth. “Have a seat.”
I looked over my shoulder at my friends, all of them looking at me like people who watch suspenseful movies must look when they don’t want one of the characters to do something. Wide-eyed and gripping each other in fear.
“Don’t worry about them,” I heard him say.
I looked back at him, but he was still looking out the window. I cleared my throat uncomfortably, but decided to sit down, taking a moment to find a comfortable spot. When I was finally settled, I found my eyes meeting his. Without his glasses, it was like a shield had been removed. I felt like I was staring into the eyes of a Clark Kent who was about to reveal he was Superman.
“What’s your name?” he asked me, but for some reason his voice didn’t make the question sound conversational.
I hesitated.
“Grace,” I told him.
“Grace,” he repeated, nodding almost in approval.
“What’s yours?” I asked.
He let out a low chuckle.
“That would be cheating,” he said.
Suddenly apprehensiveness took over. Wasn’t it a bad sign when people wouldn’t give you their names?
“Oh,” I said, not really sure what else to say. “You’re not going to tell me to beware of some tall, dark stranger who may come into my life sometime in the near future, are you?” I asked without meaning to, not realizing at the time just how ironic the question was.
“No,” he said. “But I do have a few questions for you.”
The dismay I felt probably showed on my face. Was this going to turn out to be some survey?
“What’s that?” I asked.
He gestured to the cars going by outside the window.
“Do you think those people going by in the cars are going where they’re supposed to be going, Grace?” he asked me.
I watched for a minute as blue, white, red, and other various colored blurs passed by. Some cars had their tops down, music blasting from their radios or CD players while others stopped at the light long enough for me to see complete families inside, happy in their silence.
“Where are they going?” he said mostly to himself when I didn’t answer.
“I don’t know,” I said, answering both questions at once.
“Neither do I,” he said. “And you, Grace? Do you think you are where you’re supposed to be?”
I stared at him for a minute. The only other time I could remember being asked a question like that was when the vice principal caught me wandering around in the hall while skipping math class.
“You asked me,” he pointed out.
“You never answered, though,” I said, remembering back to fifteen minutes ago.
“I’m exempt,” he said.
“Apparently you’re exempt from a lot of things, aren’t you?” I said.
He shrugged. “Are you going to answer the question?”
“I don’t know how,” I said.
“It’s a simple question, really,” he said. “Are you or are you not where you think you’re supposed to be?”
“I guess I am,” I said. “I mean, I’m at work. I kind of have to be here.”
“You don’t have to be,” he said. “I’m not at work.”
“I have a car to pay off,” I said.
“Do you think I came here by foot?”
I opened my mouth to retort, but quickly closed it. When I sat down, I hadn’t expected to be interrogated like this. But hadn’t he only asked me one simple question? Was that really an interrogation?
“Can I ask you something else, Grace?”
He seemed to have a fascination with my name. I’d never heard someone use it so much in one conversation.
“I...guess so,” I said hesitantly, only hoping that his next question would take me away from the one he had asked me before. I was glad to get out of answering that question.
After a pause, he said, “Do you pick your nose?”
The really amazing part is he said it with a straight face. Like he was asking me if I like the color green. Not even one side of his mouth quirked up in a half-smile like any other person asking the question. Then again, how many other people would ask that question?
I guffawed in disbelief at the unexpected absurdity of it.
“No!” I said immediately. “Why?”
“Have you ever wanted to pick your nose?”
Now it was beginning to sound like the survey I had been expecting before. And yet not expecting.
I laughed incredulously.
“I don’t know. Maybe,” I said.
“But you don’t?”
“No!”
“Why not?”
“It’s..gross and impolite....Or something.”
“Or something?”
I shrugged.
“What makes it that way?”
“I don’t know.”
“So there’s a little part of you that wants to pick your nose, but you suppress it and you really don’t know why?” he asked, leaning forward, his indigo eyes watching me in an intense yet nonchalant way.
“What does this have to do with anything?” I asked.
“A lot,” he said. “Tell me something, do you think you’d be a different person if you were someone who picked their nose?”
“No,” I said.
“No?” he repeated, not genuinely surprised. “You don’t think that even setting that small piece of you free would change anything about who you are? Your circle of friends, things like that.”
“Well...I suppose it might change who my friends are,” I admitted, imagining their disgust if I ever decided to stick one of my fingers up my nostril in more than jest.
“Why?”
“Because most people consider things like that gross and I imagine my friends would, too.”
“Don’t think much of your friends, do you?” he said, nodding toward the group that was still watching us intently. I glanced at them, but then remembered his command to not worry about them from before and looked back at him.
“I do,” I said. “I just...I don’t know. How is this relevant?”
“You tell me. You’re the one saying your friends wouldn’t be the same friends you have now if you did a simple thing like pick your nose.”
I opened my mouth again, but words refused to come out. I had no idea what to say.
“If your circle of friends changed because you pick your nose, would your idea of where you’re supposed to be change?” he asked and, though he showed no outward signs of it, I could tell he was slightly amused by my consternation.
“Well...are we talking every once in a while or digging for gold here?”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said.
“It doesn’t?”
He shook his head.
“Why are you asking me this?” I asked again.
“Why have you never asked yourself this?” he countered.
“I should think that would be obvious,” I said.
He sighed and began to fold the corner of his placemat.
“Grace, all I’m telling you is to not leave parts of yourself out of your life just because you know other people think it may be gross or impolite,” he said.
“Oh. I hope you’re not suggesting I make nosepicking a habit,” I said.
“Maybe I am,” he said. “It was nice meeting you, Grace.”
It didn’t take much to hear the dismissal in his voice. He reached for his glasses and put them back on as I slid back out of the booth.
“You too...I think,” I said.
He smiled and then looked back to the cars he had been watching out the window. I began to walk back toward my friends, but something stopped me and I turned around.
“Do you?” I asked.
“Censor myself? I did,” he said. “And someday I’ll die a discontented man because of it.”
“Pretty dramatic,” I observed.
“It has to be,” he replied.
I nodded and turned back around, re-joining my group of friends.
“Is he crazy?” the same girl from before asked.
And again I didn’t answer.
I’d like to say that the next time I looked over my shoulder at the booth, he was mysteriously gone, but he wasn’t. He stayed there for quite some time, calmly and quietly sipping his iced tea, never looking away from the window. When he left, he didn’t leave any cryptic note behind, only a five dollar tip, more out of sympathy for the lack of business than generosity, I think.
My friends later asked me what he said to me, of course, but I didn’t answer them because I really didn’t know what to say. After that, though, there wasn’t really much mention of him. Needless to say, he never came back. I didn’t really expect him to. I don’t think of him much, but I always think about the questions he asked me and how they made me ask myself things that I wouldn’t have thought about before by asking me one simple question:
Do you pick your nose?