The Cafeteria

John sat calmly at his buffet table with his hands folded in front of his face. His splayed fingers moved in and out with slow calculated motion, like interchanging locks in an organic machine. This is not how things were when I left for the bathroom, he spoke aloud. Julie’s had long since quieted to a low hum. His restless fingers made more noise than the cafe's silent patrons: docile creatures who would have been more than willing to protest the silence had they not been so still. They lay sprawled at their dining places, as varied forms collapsed into their soup bowls, motionless figures prostrate on the floor with food scattered before their outstretched arms. They lay still, as tranquil shapes suspended in time--eyes gazing up at the ceiling and mouths hanging open expectantly, waiting for a sound to crawl out of their throats to conquer the stillness. Perhaps they were making a sound that John could not hear. He wondered if they were crying for food.

A dark breeze brushed through John’s hair as night swept through the small Julie’s on the hill. A sign on the broken remains of the street window read, “Don’t be scared! Made fresh and served hot, just like momma does it,” and creaked against the shattered glass. The stars outside glimmered in mournful silence over the surrounding countryside, and reflected starlight into John’s eyes from the rear-view mirror of an old Ford pickup truck that lay, turned on its side, in the middle of the dining hall next to John’s booth. The sign rocked back and forth. John stared.

Three years ago, June 7th 1989, John’s mother cried while washing dishes at breakfast. John looked up from his bacon and hash browns to see Tienanmen Square footage playing on the television and couldn’t finish his meal. 3,000 dead was the estimate. She said it was horrific, atrocious, terrifying. She couldn’t understand, so she asked him to try. There was nothing he could do. “It’s sensationalist news. They’re inflating the numbers,” he had said. Sensationalist news, sensationalist news. She told him that he was heartless. He told her to change the channel. He wanted to finish his breakfast in peace.

He was right. Later, The New York Times concluded that it was probably only 400 to 800 dead, not 3,000. Only 400 or so—-a much more palatable number. As John looked at the scene around him now he wanted to cry, but the tears refused to come.

John put a finger to his lips inquisitively and tapped his sandal on the tile. It slid out a little—the floor was slippery. He drew his feet up beneath him. He did not want to get his sandals wet. This is not how things were when I left for the bathroom, he spoke aloud. He had been repeating this sentence for the past twenty minutes or so. The words had a calming effect. Earlier, when the noise had come to a halt, those words had helped him stumble back to his booth. They had helped him find his seat and finish his meal. They had helped him understand that something was out of place; that, indeed, he had stumbled upon the greatest mystery a man of 23 was likely to encounter. They had helped him avoid the crimson puddles on the floor that were becoming stickier.

It seemed like the set up to a good joke, he thought. “A man walks into a cafeteria bathroom, and when he comes out…everyone is dead!” Silence. “Why?” someone would ask, to which John would seize up, hardly able to contain his feeling, and reply . . . here he drew a blank. Well, what exactly is the punch-line, he thought. There certainly wasn’t much to laugh about. Then why is it so damn funny? he thought as a smirk crept across his face. He bit his hand to think of something else. I guess you just had to be there, he concluded morbidly. He felt like a stranger who laughs at jokes he does not understand. He wanted to leave. But, leaving meant stepping out onto the floor, and he did not want to get his sandals wet.

A trail of scattered chickpeas caught John’s attention, and he followed it with his eyes past upside-down faces, turned over chairs, and pools of red to its origin—a salad plate lying next to another sprawled outline in the aisle several tables across the room. It was lying all wrong. It was positioned face down on the tile, its arms splayed awkwardly at its sides, like a doll dropped by a child. Its belongings were strewn from a satchel in a line along the floor, as if propelled toward an enemy obscured by a booth in the corner of the room. In the debris along the floor lay make-up, glasses, papers, ordinary things. Before he looked away, John noticed a small handful of brochures hidden among the papers. As he looked closer, he thought he could see pictures of smiling faces grinning through the brochures up into the ceiling.

The pools of red grew wider. The level was rising. John pictured his mother crying as she watched the television, and he wished that he could cry as well. Of all the things he wanted at that moment, he wanted to see those happy faces. Maybe then… he thought. He took a deep breath, and stepped into the aisle.

John stood in a river of blood and cafeteria food: the room where the pickup had driven through the windows, where the crumpled bodies had been crushed upon its entry; the broken glass, the lunch trays, the holes in the tables where stray bullets lost their momentum, the coconut meringue pie in the crevice of a chair, the red splotches on the wall, the long bloody smears across the room leading to silent clumps in the distance. Human beings had been murdered here. The murderer, a dirty pair of upturned boots, peeked benignly behind a booth in the corner of the room.

John felt nothing.

Mechanically, he constricted his focus on his goal, the sprawled outline he had seen earlier—No, the dead woman, he thought—who lay across the aisle. Maybe then..., he thought and waded through the sticky red floor to get closer to the smiling people near her satchel. When he arrived he could not see her face. Her hair was in the way. He reached down toward her satchel and peeled a brochure away from the wet pile with difficulty. He had been misled.

“Feed the children,” it read in bold-faced letters above grotesque images. They were smiling. Their chests hung out in front of their bodies and their eyes bulged from their faces, but they smiled for the cameraman—their mouths closed tightly, grinning with their teeth. They were smiling at something they could not comprehend. They were laughing at the same punch-line.

A torrent of air swept into the cafeteria through the broken windows. The sign above the window creaked and read “Don’t be scared! Made fresh and served hot, just like momma does it,” as it rocked against the shattered glass. John shivered. He methodically positioned the young woman’s arms neatly by her sides and brushed the hair away from her face. As the stars flickered weakly over the countryside, John blankly wiped the blood onto his pants, placed the brochure into his pocket, and stumbled outside into the darkness, bloody and confused, like a child trying to crawl back into the womb.