TENFOLD
Death surrounded Graham Stiller. Not in the way an elderly person lives while family and friends pass on. No, this case called for a much more literal interpretation.
The first time he noticed, it was shocking, almost debilitating. It carved a valley into Graham’s world so deep, he thought it might strike oil.
That was three weeks ago. It didn’t catch his attention right away, but when Graham walked into that diner a few days later, strange happened.
He hadn’t eaten since the wreck.
When he sat in the booth, Graham was dazed. The transition from the excruciating outside heat to arctic air conditioning was shocking. He stared off into space for what felt an inordinate amount of time, maybe even dozing momentarily.
After he’d acclimated, he unconsciously thumbed through a menu, although he still wasn’t hungry. All he wanted was some black coffee. He was distracted by a fly that landed in a spot of dried up miscellaneous liquid, something with sugar in it, perhaps. Graham blew at it, sending it skyward. It buzzed about for a few seconds before returning to the sticky stain.
He continued to flip the laminated pages of the menu, breakfast, lunch, dinner. Breakfast, lunch, dinner.
There was nothing appetizing, nothing with any color. Nothing with any flavor. He couldn’t even smell the food. There was none of that greasy, yet appealing smell he remembered from only a few days prior. It was just blank. His life was without contrast since the accident, blurring from one shade of gray to another. The only thing he could smell, taste or feel was the burn of booze or the buzz of the pain pills he’d gotten from the hospital. In the mornings he guzzled coffee until his heart played a drum solo. It was as close to living as he was capable.
Graham dropped the menu out of lack of interest and it made a snapping sound when it landed on the linoleum tabletop. The ketchup bottle didn’t faze him, nor did the salt and pepper shakers, sugar packets or that little cardboard stand-up that advertised the daily specials. His eyes focused somewhere in the distance, not on any object, but on a point in space where nothing existed. That point was familiar to him and seemed the only place he was comfortable.
Something in between that safe point and his own eyeballs disturbed him. Something was there. Someone was staring back.
Graham blinked once or twice to take back control of his vision. What he saw was a person sitting three tables away. A large man who sported a beard, and shaggy brown hair. His tattoos and black t-shirt suggested biker and a quick glance outside at the Harley parked by the entrance confirmed that fact. He wasn’t doing anything. He wasn’t eating, he wasn’t drinking, he wasn’t speaking. Just staring. The expression on his face was blank, much the way Graham felt. Nothing, focused on nothing.
For a moment, Graham wondered if maybe this biker was hurting in the same way. He might have suffered a horrible loss and by some cosmic strangeness, ended up in the same diner for lousy, black coffee. That made him angry. Selfish or not, it was Graham’s moment and it was his story and no one was going to take it away and he wasn’t going to fucking share. He’d lost enough that week. He shifted in his seat and scowled to let Harley-man know he’d been caught staring and hoped he would look down at whatever was on his table. Harley-man stared and didn’t flinch. Graham looked out the window to cool his fury.
Give it a moment. Take a breath. Count to five.
The dust on the blinds was thick. Grease lay on the sill along with several distant relatives of the fly from his table. Their lives were spent. No cars passed by in the early morning and other than a hot breeze through the blistering August day, the world was still. In his mind he saw flashes of the party, heard blurbs of conversation, drink after drink after glorious drink. Then he saw her. His beautiful Cassie. She’d asked him not to drive, even tried to call a cab. But Graham had assured her there was no need. It was only eight or ten blocks to their apartment.
His joy at seeing her again stopped as suddenly as the car when it struck the telephone pole. They decelerated from forty miles per hour to zero in an instant, sending internal organs slamming into rib cages at forty miles per hour. Cassie lurched in such a way that rendered the damn seatbelt almost useless and bounced her head off the passenger window. Glass had exploded onto the shoulder of the road as the rear of the vehicle raised into the air and then bounced on its tires. Graham passed out and all the world went silent. When he woke, moments later, he tasted metal in his mouth and smelled the odd scent of adrenaline laced sweat, alcohol, blood and gasoline. Those were the last tastes or smells he recalled with any clarity.
That pause brought him again to reality and he shifted on the uncomfortable bench.
“Where is a freaking waitress when you need one?” he said under his breath and looked at the counter. It was lined by stools made of red vinyl and chrome.
As his eyes came back around the diner to his table, he saw Harley-man still gazing at him. It had gone on too long.
“What is it? You need something?” he asked.
Harley-man didn’t budge. Graham wadded up the paper from a used packet of sugar and flicked it off the table in his direction. The biker still didn’t move and he didn’t speak. He just stared.
“Hey, what is your problem, asshole!” Graham shouted and stood up.
A week ago, he would never have confronted another human being in such a way, especially not one that was double his size. A lot had happened that week. Harley-man’s gaze unnerved him further as he stood. It didn’t follow. Graham took a couple steps toward the giant who was wedged in the booth three tables away.
No reaction.
He waved his hands frantically in the air to gain attention.
Nothing.
He held his breath and stepped right next to the man. He thought maybe he was sleeping with his eyes open and poked him in the shoulder. Harley-man slumped over to the window, dead as dry twigs.
Graham exhaled his shock.
The adrenaline he’d been building left him in an instant. There would be no altercation, but a new feeling rocked him in the other direction. This man was dead and someone had to be notified.
“Hello?” he said. Then, a little louder, “HELLO?” Afterward, he stopped to listen.
There should have been sounds of sizzling bacon and pancakes. There should have been conversation. There should have been music. He leaned past the counter and saw a waitress in a skimpy blue uniform lying on the floor and staring up at the ceiling. Her nametag said Brenda in punched plastic letters. He thought it suited her occupation. Dread clawed its way up his spine and he pushed through the swinging door into the kitchen. Two cooks and one busboy lay dead at their stations as if everyone’s clock had stopped at the same moment.
Graham flashed back to the blackness. He stood motionless in the kitchen while the world blurred and then focused again. He was staring at the steering wheel of his car, the dark night sky, a deflated airbag, and a telephone pole in front of him. He looked to his right at Cassie who was gurgling, blood trickling from a wound on her forehead, from her ear and from her mouth.
“Dear God, Cass. I’m so sorry.” he said.
Tears streamed from his face in the memory. She turned her head slowly and tried to speak through the pain, through the blood that drained down her throat.
“Tenfold,” she said, choking out the words.
Graham knew what she meant. “Tenfold” was her word when exaggeration was needed. Whenever something hideous came on the news, she would say “tenfold” meaning she hoped the evil would come back on that murderer or thief or child molester tenfold. Whenever Graham would say, “I love you” she would reply with, “Tenfold”.
It was her final word. She loved him tenfold and then she died. The night after the accident, the police had read him the riot act, taken his license and told him he would be charged with drunken driving and vehicular manslaughter. They tossed him in jail until his lawyer arrived and posted bail. Then he went home and swallowed a bottle of pills with some liquor. Th
e next morning, he woke up anyway.
The first day of grieving for his beautiful Cassie tasted bitter and wrong. Her loss was his doing and he no longer deserved the memories they’d built. He couldn’t wash it away with soap or liquor, so he tried a razor to the wrist. Graham lost enough blood to lose consciousness, but woke up the following morning again. Two days turned into four and he went numb. The urge to die was replaced by no urge at all, save for his need for a cup of coffee.
Graham looked around the kitchen again and spotted a telephone. It hung on the wall by the manager’s office door as it had probably done for decades. He picked up the handset and listened for a dial tone. Then he pushed 9-1-1 for emergency and waited. After a few rings, someone spoke, but the voice on the line was lost in a bad connection and he couldn’t make any words out.
“Hello? I need help,” he said.
Static.
“There are at least five bodies at the 82nd Street Diner. Can someone help me?”
Fuzz.
“Hello?” Graham shouted.
The tension in his voice would have jarred even the most jaded of operators, but static was all he heard. He dropped the phone and wandered back out into the dining room. Harley-man was still slumped in the booth, and Brenda was still sprawled on the floor. Cassie was still dead. It was time to leave.
Quickly he stumbled outside into the heat. A wave of nausea greeted him in the temperature change and his knees buckled. Graham lay on the shaded concrete until the awful feeling passed. Once his stomach settled and the cold sweat broke, he stood, using a parking meter for balance. On the opposite side of the street in the barber shop, he could see a body in the chair. He stumbled across the normally busy road for a closer look. Hot breeze and screaming cicadas were the only things he could hear.
He stopped on the double yellow line and closed his eyes. He was thankful for the sound of the wind.
And the flies.
The droning sound of flies followed him. It followed all the way to the barbershop window. Graham pressed his face to the tinted glass for a better look. The chair inside was turned away from him with its patron shielded from view, but the dead man on the floor told him the score. The scissors lay in his hand as if he’d dropped dead mid-cut. Locks of hair lay haphazardly on the commercial tiles.
He turned to the next storefront—death. The next and the next—same.
Graham broke into a full sprint toward his empty apartment. He turned his head to avoid seeing any more of his former neighbors in their strange resting places. The lock tumbled easily and within seconds he was through the door and sobbing on the floor. Dehydration caused those tears to sting, but pain was a feeling—a sensation—and those were becoming precious.
Behind his eyelids there alternated flashes of Cassie the beautiful and Cassie the battered and bleeding, turning her lifeless eyes to choke out that final word.
“Tenfold.”
He shook as he rocked, sobbing and saying it over and over again.
-~‑--~@
Three weeks later, that odd day had become a distant, hazy memory. Graham sat in his living room and considered it. Everywhere he went, folks were deceased. He had no idea if they were dead before he arrived, or if they remained that way after he left. He was only certain that in his presence, everyone was gone. In his head, he pictured a cloud following him that killed everything within his field of view.
He hoped it was a temporary state. He hoped everything snapped back to glorious reality once he passed through and that it was some strange warp reserved only for him. That was better than the thought that death happened in his wake, or he was the last living being on earth. He hoped if he stayed inside those apartment walls and never even glanced out the window, life would continue on around him.
He hoped this time that death would take him as it had his wife, as it had taken all the others.
Graham laughed at the handgun in his lap and thought about all he had witnessed since that night. He heard more flies, the only visible creatures that moved when he was around. There was always one or two within reach. They were like his disciples, but he had nothing to preach to them.
His laugh grew nervous and then crazed as he picked up the gun and pushed the barrel between his teeth. A roll of skin scraped loose from the roof of his mouth. It should’ve tasted like metal. He should’ve smelled the CLP oil that was slathered all over the machine but it just wasn’t there. There was nothing but misery and the maddening song of the houseflies. Graham took his finger off the trigger guard and wrapped it around the tiny lever.
“Tenfold,” he said as he applied the six pounds, ten ounces required to discharge the round.
-~‑--~@
Hours later, he woke with the gun in his lap. A glance at the ceiling told him two things. The bullet had made a large hole in his ceiling that the upstairs neighbor wouldn’t be happy about, if he were alive. And, there was no God in heaven.
“Tenfold,” he said again and for the first time he understood its true meaning.
So many times she had used it as a term of endearment.
I love you, babe.
Tenfold, she’d say.
In the passenger seat of his demolished sports sedan, her eyes were different. They were blind—dead—staring off into space just beyond Graham’s face. Staring at that place in the distance where nothing existed. She was speaking to him. There was no doubt. But she wasn’t looking at him, into him, as she always had. She was cursing him for being reckless with her life, with his own life and their life together.
Graham was in his hell. Alone with the flies.
Tenfold.