The Catch

[THIS STORY CONTAINS IMPLIED VIOLENCE]

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"So, what's the catch?" he whispers to himself.

"I'm sorry, sir. I didn't catch quite that." He can't see the waitress across the counter through the greasy thicket of black hair that envelops his face.

"Just a coffee, please." No sooner does he finish speaking, he feels the warmth of her body move away from him. She’s uneasy, he can feel it in the way her breath hits the air. He picks at the brown crust of dried blood under his fingernails. The coffee is set before him with a polite "There you go, sir. You enjoy now." He responds with something between a grunt and moan. He sits and stares into his drink. Gaunt features and hollow eyes stare back at him from its black reflection.

“Yes… But what’s the catch? I always wish I… You should have… what’s the catch, what’s the catch…I always wished I’d said to… What’s the…” he mumbles to himself. 

A blonde woman sits in the booth behind him. She checks her watch. The bell rings as the glass door opens. Her heart rate rises ever so slightly as she cranes her neck, as it has every time she’s heard that little bell. The man smiles to himself. She must be waiting for someone, too. He spins slightly on the stool. 

“Have you considered that maybe they aren’t coming?” he says to her. She gives him a wary look up and down. To her eyes he is a disheveled, rake-thin man, sickly pale, garbed in dark, oversized streetwear, with a straggly mess of unwashed hair, thick as tar and just as filthy. To his eyes, she is food – a vessel through which pumps the stuff– the delicious, delicious stuff. The stuff he needs. Just looking at her sends shivers through him. She shivers too, nervousness getting the better of her and stutters for a moment before collecting herself. 

“You’ve been sitting there just as long as I have been. Is whoever you’re waiting for coming?”

“Who says I’m waiting for anyone?” he growls, pouncing off of his stool. Standing at his full height, he looms over her. Looking up at him, she keeps her gaze even, but her little heart betrays her. Buh-beat… buh-beat, buh-beat, buhbeatbuhbeat beat beat… pumping away, sending that thick, creamy red goo oozing through. He sits back down. The more scared she gets, the faster the stuff runs through her, and the harder it is for him to back off. Best quit while he’s ahead. He excuses his outburst with. “I’m sorry . . . real long day.” He watches as she nods and looks back at the door as another meat sack walks through, the bell ringing. 

Though her features are calm, her heart beat does not slow. It makes his fingers twitch. Standing again, and being certain to hunch this time, he calls over the counter, “I’m gonna get a smoke. Be back.” She sits, quietly scrolling on her phone, but to him, her little heart fucking reverberates through the diner… he feels it vibrate the glass as he throws open the door, the bell ringing violently.

Out in the cold he can breathe. It’s getting to be proper night time. His hands tremble as he retrieves a lighter and cigarette from the pockets of his brown hoodie. His hands . . . they still feel so sticky . . . and he washed them so well… Click the flame on, the cigarette sizzles. He can hear the stuff running through her veins through the window. More distance… he needs more distance. Murmuring to himself he wanders through the near empty parking lot.

“Fuck you… Fuck you… What’s the catch… What's the cost… no that makes you sound juvenile… don’t be… can’t be melodramatic… not for him… Distance… Distance… What’s the catch, goddamn you…” He leans against the lone lampost to keep his body from shaking. He looks into the starless black sky and smokes, letting time slip by him. 

He inhales and the tip of the cigarette crackles to brilliant life… the sky… it’s so dark… where did all the stars go…? Moths buzzing around the head of the lampost. Exhale and smoke fills the air, and the tip goes dark and time goes dull and his head is submerged underwater… all sounds muted… all things heavy and slow… hours and seconds pass as one, intermingling and overlapping…. Inhale, burning fizzle… seconds and hours separate and stack like oil and water in a glass… exhale the tar build up… all the concrete swirls into a gray mass into which he falls forever and ever. 

After a time he returns to his stool. The blonde woman’s heart rate is normal enough now that he can barely hear it… barely. She is laughing now, a mirthful little giggle. A man’s voice says, “I’m so sorry again for being late. Supe was talking and talking and would not let me go. Literally followed me to the door and stood in the doorway. I had to walk and talk her back to her desk before I could get outta there. I’m really sorry… I really don’t want to be one of ‘those guys’ you meet on the dating apps.”

“You could have texted.”

“I know… I’m sorry… I guess I figured I could text an explanation, or I could get in my car and drive and get here all the faster.” His heart is absolutely pounding. 

“I would have preferred you texted.”

“Next time I will then. I mean… if there is a… oh, god that’s so presumptuous of me. And look, I’m no better than my supervisor. Talking on and on. I’m making a horrible impression,” he stammers out. She does not respond. He says, “Ok… can I… Can we start over? From scratch even?”

“Ok, sure,” she says calmly. 

“Thank you.” Then the date stands, and walks backwards through the door in a cartoonish, if mundane, display. He then re-enters, the bell ringing at his entrance. Sitting back down, he says, “Megan?” 

“Yes… Megan…” she giggles out, her frustration melting. “Tom?”

“Yes, Tom,” he replies. Sitting, Tom says, “I’m so sorry for having made you wait, Megan.” And then they spoke, made jokes, and discussed their little lives. 

They were cute, he couldn’t help but think to himself. They both seemed so relieved to him – each laugh thankful that this evening was not wasted as so many before had been. 

“Would you like anything else, sir?” says the waitress from across the counter. 

“Why would I want anything else?” he says, angling his head. 

“Well… you’ve been sitting here so long.” 

“And…?” He stares intently at her. The color fades from her face, and her heart starts to beat just a little bit faster… tantalizing. His mouth waters.

“W-well at least let me get you a fresh coffee.” He blocks her reach, her hand flinches as it comes into contact with his cold flesh. He dips his skeletal finger into the brown liquid, slips it in-between his lips. 

“The coffee tastes fine.” 

“Oh, well that certainly cannot be true, Julian,” says a man from behind him. The man sits next to Julian. The bell did not ring this one in. 

“Y– you…” 

“Yes, me. Ma’am, ignore my friend’s awful table manners. A fresh coffee for him. And I will take an iced tea.” He was as handsome as Julian remembered. Broad shoulders, slender, firm figure, slicked back hair. Garbed in a dapper velvet suit that seemed both to glisten and eat the light at once. 

“Torvald…”

“Yes, yes. Don't act so surprised. I am responding to your summons, just as I said that I would.” Leaning in, he says, “Though I must say, arriving on such short notice was by no means easy. Fortunately, I was in the states.” Julian finds that he can, at first, only grunt in response. Their drinks are set before them. Torvald pays him no mind until he murmurs out, 

“Heard you were… Heard you were overseas.” 

“What was that? Speak up, boy! My ears are not what they once were. Well… perhaps they are, but you’ll have to indulge me – you’re just so young and adorable. It’s hard not to play up my seniority whenever I’m around you.” Pinching Julian’s cheek he says, “I was overseas. China, in fact. It was a good run. I can’t say that I care for that place anymore, though. At first, sure, so many people. And the underground… don’t get me started. You can go days without ever seeing the sun. Seemed like Nirvana. But, alas, everything there is just too… closely observed. Too many cameras… everyone is accounted for on a computer. So here I am… loathsome as this country is. You know, fascism used to be so good for us. No one cared when a few Jewish shop owners went missing – they’d simply assume it to be the S.S. Ahh, but now I am reminiscing about the glory days. I haven’t even asked you how you’ve been keeping all these years.” 

“Off the grid mostly.”

“I cannot imagine that to have been an easy feat. Not anymore.”

“It’s not.”

“Anyway, we’ve had our niceties. May I now ask why you’ve called me here?”

“Three words…”

“Pardon?”

“When we last met, I thought I’d said everything I had to say. But there were three words…three words I’ve always wished I’d said… ‘What’s the catch?’ Before I said yes to you . . . to your offer.”

“Oh, please. Is that why you have called me here? To say you regret your decision – you wish you had read the warranty a little more closely? You’re not so naive as all that, Julian.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Let’s pretend, ok, let’s pretend you did say those three little magic words… go ahead… say them…”

“What’s the catch?”

“We take life to extend our own. We are thieves. And our hunger is never sated. There, do you still want this?”

“...No.”

“Well of course you don't. But you are not the Julian I spoke with so many decades ago. Do you know how that Julian would have responded just now?”

“No, I do-”

“He wouldn’t have cared. At the time you didn’t even care enough to ask if there was a catch. What makes you think telling you explicitly that which is implicit to our nature and condition would have changed anything? When we made our arrangement, the ‘catch’ as it were, didn’t matter to you a wit, my friend. I could have said anything at all– Yes, anything," he says, speaking over Julian's rebuffs. "I could have said we eat only newborn babies and give birth to live tarantulas through our dicks… Anything… and you still would have agreed. Yes, yes, you would have, Julian. That is how 'the catch' works. At the time, the catch, whatever it may be, doesn’t matter. That’s why it’s a catch."

“Don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot, Torvald.”

“It only catches you after you’ve thrown yourself over the edge and are already falling.” 

“You… you should have told me.” Wretched tears tried to well in Julian’s eyes.

“Again, I – I just said this– It wouldn’t have made a difference to you, then. You wanted more time. I had time to give. You’d have paid any price. And hasn’t that time been well spent? Haven’t you done all the things you said you wanted to – all that you felt was denied you by the limitations of mortality? Hmm?” says Torvald while admiring his flawless nails. 

“Yeah…” Julian says with a sniffle, hunching into himself. “I’ve seen all the stuff I wanted to see. Traveled to all the places I wanted to visit. The ‘wonders of the world’. Saw the things I wanted to see.” He wipes at his eyes with his sticky, sticky palms. “All the big things. The paintings in the Louvre . . . the song of birds that’ve since died out. All the big things I’ve done. But I lost the… I can’t have the little things anymore…”

“I don’t even know how to respond to something so… Ridiculous. You’ve lost the little things, how tragic.”

“Do NOT patronize me.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it, Julian. Please, please.” Resting his smooth cheek in his palm, Torvald says, “Perhaps I misunderstand. Please, enlighten me. What ‘little things’ have you lost?” 

“I… going on a blind date… laughing at a dumb joke. Sitting in a diner."

"Listen to yourself. Do you hear yourself right now?"

"I can't sit in this diner without hearing each heart beat of every customer. I’m not sitting in a diner, I’m sitting, trying all I can to not jump up and hurt someone… I can’t go on dates, can’t make friends cause I can’t be alone with people cause every time I’m alone with people it ends the same way. I’m not a person anymore.” Then he really did start crying. “Mecca is beautiful. But when I’m there I’m not breathing in the stonework and admiring the architecture or the fucking… spiritual power of the place – because in the corner of my eyes, what I’m doing is I’m looking for isolated stragglers, distracted in prayer so that I can…” He loses his words in ugly sobs and gasps for air. Julian buries his head in his blood encrusted fingers, his black hair sticking to his scalp.

“Oh… oh, please. Don’t cry in front of me. It’s fucking disgusting,” says Torvald, tossing a handkerchief to Julian. “You are bemoaning the loss of menial minor excursions, at best.”

“I miss them, though… That mundane shit . . . I… I don’t want to be like this…”

“How else would you be, dear boy? It’s this or dead, and you can’t enjoy your little mundanities that way either.” 

“How do you do this? How do I do this?” 

“It gets easier… I suppose. You see, dear Julian. That right there, I’ve found, is the real catch. After a while, the pain stops bothering you. And you stop missing the things you can’t have.” Torvald stirs his iced tea. Julian tries his best to wipe his eyes. He snorts to keep the snot from dribbling down his face. 

“I don’t understand.”

“You will.” 

As the waitress returns, her heart is pumping, just ever so slightly faster. She looks the both of them up and down. Predators’ eyes look back at her. She smiles in a poor attempt to hide her fear and discomfort. 

“Here… here’s the check.” Her heart… so delicious. Without thinking, Marcus catches her wrist… it is so warm. The lovely little ridges of her veins pressing against the skin. The stuff… it flows so good through there. Her eyes go wide. Her heart goes so fast. He hates how it does that. It makes it so much harder to stop when they always get so much more scared, which makes the stuff pump through them all the harder… so viscous and delicious. Despite that, he releases her. The effort leaves him exhausted, and he falls back into the stool.

“I think it is time we left. Parted ways as well. It was good to see you, Julian.”

Julian turns to see Megan and Tom. She nervously waves, trying to weave past him to the door along with Tom. “I… I’m glad your friend arrived too. Uhh… good night,” she says.

Torvald’s eyes follow them through the glass. Turning to Julian he says in a whisper, “On second thought, she… is a tasty morsel. The little boy too. You know, this tea really didn’t do it for me. What say you and I grab a real bite to eat?”

Julian hates how even from the parking lot he can still hear her heartbeat. How else would I be? For the first time, he picks up his mug. The coffee within has gone cold.

It gets easier, he says…

“Fuck it. Why not? They’re a good catch.”