Headlights flickered past the windows, moving west from the Holland Tunnel. We were the only customers in the diner. 
 
Ashton had asked me why I came to New York, but I countered his question with one of my own. “What about you? How did you end up here?” 
 
He laughed. “I’d hardly call this the end. I just got here, to Jersey City. Haven’t even been into the Big Apple yet.”
 
“What I meant was why.”
 
“When John Lennon was asked the same question, he said that if he’d been around in the glory days of the Roman Empire, he’d have lived in Rome, because it was the capital of the world. Today that’s New York. Same for me. It’s the center, and I’ve been walking the outer edges all this time. The outer edges are a necessary place to go, but so is the center, right? Axis Mundi.”
 
“Okay. So…do you have a job or something?”
 
“Oh, I have a job alright. I just never know what it is until I find it. Around here I guess they’d give me the official title of Homeless Man.” And he went on to tell me the story of his arrival here…. As he spoke, I began to be aware that the coffee I’d been drinking didn’t seem to be working. I felt warm and drowsy, my flesh melting into the blue leatherette seat.
 
“Come closer,” Ashton said. “I want to tell you something. There’s a great darkness out there, greater than you know. And it’s full of sound. Look….” 
 
He pulled the hair back from over his right ear. Sleepy as I was, I flinched. It was red and swollen, half again as big as an ear should be. “I can hear very well with this ear, despite its appearance. It’s really nothing. Let me tell you the story.”
 
I shrugged; I was in his hands. He went on, “I was a kid, maybe nine. It was dead winter and a blizzard outside. I had one of those coats with a zip-off hood, and I had left the hood over at my cousin’s, where I’d spent the weekend. My mother told me to wear my sister’s stocking hat, with the pompom on top. Ha. No way I was showing up like that. So I walked a mile to school with nothing covering my ears, wind chill probably 20 below, hitting my right side. By the time I got to class, my ear looked like this. It burned like crazy for the whole day, then went numb. But that night my mom, well, first she cried a little, but then she put her warm hands on it and prayed for like an hour. Really. I fell asleep. Anyway, it’s had this lovely appearance ever since. But guess what? I can hear things you can’t.”
 
Inside, I was still. Inside, I jumped with disbelief. I was skeptical. I was pretending to be skeptical. Which was it? I don’t know. I said, “Uh-huh. Right. Like a dog.” 
 
“Better. For instance, right now, in the kitchen, the cook is telling the waitress that she might as well face it, he’s going to nail her sooner or later and she’s gonna love it. She hates him.”
 
“Bullshit. You can’t hear that.” My blood roused a little from the growing stupor, but I felt my protestation to be only half-hearted. A moment later, Felicity came out of the kitchen looking a little pale and began clearing a table with motions that seemed much too violent. She dropped a cup and it shattered. She bit her lip and held back tears.
 
Ashton beckoned me closer to him, and I obeyed, without a will of my own. He leaned across the table until our noses almost met. His voice was a smooth, perfectly audible whisper. “Now look at this one.”
 
He pulled the hair back from his left ear. This time I groaned and looked away. It wasn’t an ear at all. Just a tangled mass of scar tissue surrounding a hole in his head. 
 
“This one has a more interesting story. I was about twenty, a wild kid. I hung around with two brothers, Paiute Indians. We raised hell. We drank a lot. We ate peyote and datura. We cruised the hills and shot prairie dogs randomly, from the road. Those little gophers would stand up on the rims of their holes and sniff the air, and I would point my .22 rifle out the window of the pickup and blow them away. Thought it was fun, at the time. Anyway, my Paiute buddies, Norbert and Ray, had a pet badger—one of the wildest of wild creatures, the gophers’ tough-guy cousin, the warrior. One day I was totally gone in a peyote trance when the Lord of the Animals appeared, standing above me in the sun. First, he spoke to me of sacrifice—of how you must give up the things you feel are precious, for that is the only way to grow from being a child to being a man. Then he told me about Badger. He said it like this….”
 
Ashton’s voice seemed to take on a different character, distant, faintly foreign.
 
“Long ago, Badger always carried darkness in a sack on his back. One day he was traveling along when he met Coyote. Coyote was certain there was something delicious in the bag, so he said, ‘My cross-cousin, you look tired. Let me carry your heavy load.’ But Badger refused. Coyote asked over and over again, until Badger finally let him carry the sack. Of course, Coyote immediately snuck behind a bush and opened the sack. When everything suddenly began to get dark, he grew scared and called to Badger, ‘Help, help, my cross-cousin! Something terrible was in your pack! I can hardly see!’ Badger immediately spread his arms wide and gathered the darkness back in. ‘You should not have opened my pack,’ Badger growled. He was fierce and angry, but Coyote ran away before Badger could rip him to shreds. Coyote went about telling everyone that Badger carried bad medicine, but the truth was that Coyote simply didn’t understand the darkness. Now, Badger is a powerful totem who can be a protector, keeping the dark energies at bay, but his medicine is difficult to carry. If it is not balanced with Deer, life can be sad and lonely, for Badger out of control is feared and hated. But there are many people for whom a touch of Badger is just the right medicine:  people who need some self-respect, the courage to say No when enough is enough, the strength to act on what is important to them, to seize opportunities and make changes in their lives.”
 
Ashton’s regular voice came back, close and soft, as he continued, “So that’s what the Lord of the Animals said to me, and then he touched the side of my head. I woke up to find myself lying in the yard, with Norbert and Ray’s badger a few feet away, eating my ear. He had taken it for restitution. Payback for the prairie dogs. There was no malice. He was pure. And now, so was I.”
 
I must have looked sick. He quickly covered the ear again. “And here’s the best part—with my left ear I can hear things that are…well, beyond this plane. Outside this sphere.”
 
I suddenly had an intense desire to get up and walk away, but the desire to wilt, to just stay where I sat, seemed even stronger. I can only guess at what was on my face. He smiled and kept talking.
 
“It’s kind of like music, or maybe a breeze in the aspens. Sometimes it reminds me of the whistle of a bull elk, or deeper, like a foghorn in a storm. Or it crashes like waves, sort of a symphony of waves. Mostly it’s a tiny whisper or tinkle of sound, as if someone touched a silver spoon to a crystal goblet out in the airless darkness of cold space. It’s like radar. I track it, tune it in, and follow my path. Nothing is a surprise. I hear the song of it before it happens. But I don’t always know what the song means until the instant its physical manifestation hits my sight. So I try to keep my doors of perception cleansed, to paraphrase Blake.”
 
On and on his voice went. The alarm I felt was real, but it was faint, and growing fainter. Somehow, I couldn’t wake my critical mind. I wanted to, but I couldn’t make myself believe he was crazy. That’s why I felt I could say, “You’re crazy, man.”
 
“Of course, if you really thought so, you’d be gone by now. So let me tell you something else I know:  this is a very important night for both of us.”
 
I shivered. He laughed. My eyelids wanted desperately to close. I dragged my forearm slowly to the tabletop so I could see my wristwatch. It was midnight. 
 
That’s when the lights went out.
 
Lightning flashed, thunder cracked, and the diner was instantly in utter blackness. There was a palpable sensation of absence in the air, a sort of death as all electrical vibration in the city ceased in one instant. Not a glimmer of light came in the windows; surely, car headlights passed by outside, but I don’t remember being aware of even the faintest hint of luminance. The things I remember best from the midst of that darkness are these: the warm pressure of Ashton’s hand as it came to rest on my forearm, and the sound of his voice, a soft deep whisper in my ear. It’s as if I still feel the imprint of both those touches on my flesh, even all these hours later. I don’t even know what he was saying, but it seems he was telling a story of rolling sage-covered prairies dotted by stands of shivering gold aspens, with blue mountain peaks in the distance, growing ever nearer, slowly, oh so slowly. And his hand was strong, a pressure that held me in my seat even as I heard other sounds, sounds that seemed far away even though they were so close they stopped my breath and made my heart flop crazily.
 
It was as if I dreamed. I heard the sounds of bodies in struggle. I heard the crash of falling objects. I heard Felicity cry out, first in fear, then in pain. I heard Achmed the cook’s guttural laugh, his hoarse breathing. And I heard his breath stop abruptly, with a sickening silence. And all the while Ashton’s hand held my arm; all the while Ashton’s voice whispered, whispered, whispered in my ear.
 
Then, after who knows how long, there was a surge of audible energy in the air, and all the lights came back on. I was alone in the booth. I sat for a while trying to gather my dull wits. Ashton was gone. Everyone was gone. It seemed I was alone in the diner, until I heard sniffling and saw Felicity rise up from behind the counter, hair awry, makeup smeared, clutching her torn shirt around her breasts, and wiping blood from her nose.
 
Around the counter, everything was in a shambles, utensils and broken dishes strewn on the floor, cake smeared across several stools, napkins everywhere. There was no sign of Achmed, nor of Ashton.
 
“Are you hurt bad?" I asked. 
 
“No. I’ll be fine.” Ducking her head, she hurried toward the restroom in the back. I began picking up some of the broken dishes, feeling as if I was waking up from a drugged nightmare.
 
“I guess we better call the cops. And shouldn’t you go to a hospital or something?” I said when she came out again.
 
She refused both. “Thank you for helping,” she said. “But I can finish up now. Just gotta lock the door so nobody can come in.”
 
“I feel stupid asking this, but what just happened?”
 
Her mouth trembled a moment, and a flicker of panic went through her eyes. She seemed unsure of how to answer, at first genuinely confused, then mustering up a streetwise show of cool. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, and turned away from me to clean up a spilled dessert. “But tell your friend thank you, okay?”
 
I couldn’t get her to say more. And still there was no sign of either Achmed or Ashton. I helped out a little more, but gradually everything seemed to be returning to something resembling normal in the Tunnel Diner. I was even feeling awake again, the coffee pumping in my veins, and my watch showed it was after one a.m., so I told Felicity goodbye and drove away into the rain.

 
 
© Brent Robison 2023
 
This story is an excerpt from the novel A Book with no Author by Brent Robison, Recital Publishing 2023.