I work at the Lone Star Diner, off the road from Carson City to Reno. Diner name has of course been changed for obvious reasons–more on that later.

Why do I work at the Lone Star Diner, off the road from Carson City to Reno? Well because, kind stranger, my life plans didn’t work out. Generally, if you’re caught working at a diner past college–specifically, one in the middle of nowhere, it might mean that things aren’t going so hot.

But still, why this diner? Why Lone Star specifically?

I’m aware you probably aren’t actually asking these questions, but I nonetheless believe they deserve a response.

Of all of the diners in the world, what makes Lone Star so special is…

The pay.

The pay is fucking great.

There are maybe ten other diners within a 30 minute drive from where I live. Most of them average out to a little over minimum wage. **

Meanwhile, Lone Star is whipping up a mean $50/hr.

And that hourly rate is due to one, single, solitary reason, no matter what anyone tells you.

Because of him.

My first day on the job was fine, more or less? I’d worked customer service before, so I felt like I could run with the strange surprises that came unique to diners. I was able to adapt to the inconsistency of the rules pretty quickly. Unwritten rules like–some areas in the restaurant need to be spotless at all times; others, boss lady couldn’t give less of a shit about. Serve customers quickly! But not too quickly, asshole. Customers here don’t actually like it when you show up too fast. Give them some time to feel the floor under their boots, to miserably stare ahead, and mourn what could’ve been. Y’know, diner stuff. They’re here because they want to be alone. Pardon the contradiction.

Of course, vaguely defined, ‘whispered only by ghosts’ rules extended to the cooks as well. If you were, somehow, secretly, celebrity chef Marco Pierre White in the flesh, your mandate was to keep your damn prowess to yourself. Your job is to make the classics as decently as possible. Not bad, but not amazing. Just poor enough to be really good–that’s what the customers are here for.

As the weeks unfolded, I rose, or I suppose–crouched–to the occasion quite well. You want intentional, pinpoint precision mediocrity? You’ve come to the right person. Most of the patrons just wanted coffee and brunch, brought to them at medium speed, with a semi-predictable cadence of waiter or waitress check-ins afterwards. Done, done, and done.

Not one for subtlety, one day I finally decided to ask my boss the question in the middle of a shift. I didn’t want to ruin a good thing by doubting it, but fuck me if I wasn’t a little curious. Not a full ‘look’ at the gift horse’s mouth, more of a skeptical side-eye…

“Why $50/hr?”

She didn’t even look up from her task at the register, methodically counting out bills. “Said it on your first day, ya gotta be good at following the rules. And when it’s an important rule? You’d better be damn well perfect. High expectations here.”

I made a face. “Right. High expectations.”

“You think I’m joking?”

“No ma’am, I guess, I just,”–Why did I even speak up?–“I just think you’re running a really cool operation here. Cooler than you might realize. It’s still work, but the whole thing seems… fair?”

Christ, my waffling skills were abysmal. Add that to the list of intentional mediocrity! Booyah.

She looked up from her duties and shot me a stern look. “I don’t run this ship. And following the rules here means that you take care of yourself.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I am your employer, sure, and I’ll pay you well to be here, sure, but you should be aware–there is plenty more going on here than just you and this diner.”

She glanced down at her watch, then sighed. “I usually save this speech for the end of the month, but you already caught me halfway through it. So, the Cole's notes: if you don’t think you have it in you to follow instructions clearly, without protest, and without asking too many questions, then you should leave. Quit. No harm, no foul. A week’s worth of pay on the house.”

The conversation sputtered shortly after that. I tried to find an opening to ask more about what she meant, but she was closed off to the topic moving forward.

And you know what? That was fine–if she wanted me to put my head down and just do the work, I could do that.

And work I did. And things were good. Mundane small talk with the customers was fun, my coworkers were friendly, and I was getting paid well. I’d found a place to park the failures of my life. A place to build from.

It must’ve been a Saturday, I think, when I first noticed him. An occupied seat in the far corner of the diner. No idea how long he’d been sitting there and waiting, though he certainly looked patient. I had the strange inkling that he’d been left hanging for quite some time, though I couldn’t actually remember seeing him enter.

Brown corduroy shirt. Short hair. Mid 50s, it seemed. A reasonably calm smile. Normal looking dude.

I started making my way out from the back and headed towards him.

Immediately, I felt a tight grip on my arm–

It was Melanie, my boss, with a forceful clutch–enough to make me drop my notepad. Her fingers tightened around my forearm, sharply pinching my skin.

“Important rules,” she said.

“What?”

“You ‘member our chat about rules? Well this is the most important one. Okay?”

“Okay…?”

“That man, over there, in the corner.” She motioned to the man who had caught my attention– sitting upright, hands softly clasped together, coy smile across his face. “You don’t go up to him. You don’t say a word to him.”

“But he’s… a customer?”

Her hold intensified–she was hurting me. Almost as if she was taking out some sort of unseen anger on me.

“I’d like to ask you right now to be smart enough to not ask questions and just follow instructions. You don’t go to his table, you don’t talk to him. You can look at him. You can shout across the room at him if you’d like–though I can’t imagine why you’d ever need to do that. But you do not approach him, and you do not take his order.”

“Or…?”

A sharp exhale through the nose, a shake of the head, and a glare from my manager. “It’s different every time. But, it ain’t pretty.”

I watched him from the short distance I’d been afforded. It was hard not to. She did too.

Unlike the other customers here, I didn’t get a sense that he was here to be alone, to reminisce, or to take part in the comfort ritual of a lackluster Eggs Benedict over rye. Instead, I had the sense that he was just… curious. Mild-mannered, content, but curious.

My shift ended not too long after, so I didn’t actually get a chance to watch him leave. Regardless, the experience of seeing him and learning about the rule he was connected to left a bizarre, dampening feeling on my mood.

I liked my job. I liked coming home and unwinding. I didn’t mind being in the middle of nowhere.

It felt nice to look up at the empty sky filled with stars. To see them shimmer and shine, and even occasionally shoot across. I made a wish that things in my life would stay simple.

___________________

I started to get a sense of his cadence. He’d usually show up once a month.

The rare times I got to see him, I’d try to squeak in the odd question to my boss. Questions like, ‘Who is he?’, ‘Where does he come from?’, and ‘Has anyone spoken with him?’–all mechanically met with ‘I don’t know,’ ‘I don’t know,’ and ‘If you’re scared, you’re welcome to quit.’

Then, as fate would have it, one day boss lady fell incredibly ill. My coworkers and I had to convince her to go home midway through her shift, her sickness falling, uncomfortably, within the usual 1-3 day window at the end of the month when our ‘customer’ would typically appear.

And of course, there he was, right after she went home.

To my benefit, the other waiters and waitresses working the rounds were well aware of his presence and knew exactly what to do whenever he arrived. All of them knew to steer clear of him.

Nevertheless, driven by a foundational curiosity that I just couldn’t shake, I used this opportunity to go for it. I shouted a single thing across the floor, knowing Melanie wasn’t there to chide me–

“Hello sir! What brings you here?” I asked him.

He turned his head from his fixed position in his seat and put a hand to his ear. Clever.

“I said, what brings you here?” I called out again, a few notches louder this time, garnering some odd looks from our Thursday patrons.

To my surprise, he spoke back. I’m not sure why I was expecting his voice to carry the tone of some twisted, demented demon–maybe the fear Melanie had instilled in me? The man sounded exactly how he looked.

“I’m sorry dear,” he said, “I’m afraid I’m not sure what you’re saying. Can you come over here and ask me again?”

Nope. I was good.

“And I don’t mean to be rude, about the service,” he continued, “But it feels as if no one has taken my order for quite some time now.”

I let the exchange end there, diverting my attention back to the other guests. As always, he’d eventually disappear without fanfare, without the clatter of the entrance bell or any sight or sound of his steps across the diner floor, our backroom conversations about him remaining dreadfully short while he was there–just: ‘He’s here,’ and ‘He’s gone,’ and the odd, when we really needed to say it, ‘I feel really weird about this.’

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

It took me a while to understand where my brazenness to address this strange middle-aged man came from. In truth, I was just afraid. His presence and all of the questions tied to his being at our diner were disrupting this otherwise great arrangement that I felt I had. It seemed right, in the moment, to stand at the very edge of my bravery and say something to him. Of course, now that he was gone, I just felt worse.

The next week, I was invited to something pretty interesting at work.

I generally have a good amount of visibility into what Melanie, ‘boss lady,’ does on a daily basis. The only element that remained elusive was her bi-weekly check-in with a particularly sharp-dressed agent-looking-fella. There was a pretty consistent presence of state troopers, agents, and similarly uniformed men and women dropping into the diner, though I seldom paid it mind beyond simply noticing it.

Midway through wiping down the tables, only an hour or so into my shift, Mel swung by and said:

“Hey, want you in the meeting with the big boss, if you have a few.”

The big boss? “Uh, sure. Yeah. Coming. Just uh, if you don’t mind me asking, who is–”

She let her eyes speak her unwritten rules to me: ‘questions’ equals ‘generally bad’. Thank you for the reminder, ma’am.

We maneuvered to a backroom and sat at a table. Across from us, already seated, was a man in a sharply tailored suit with a subtle earpiece in–the aforementioned agent. The table was littered with a small, messy stack of notes, papers, and documents.

He made it a point to size me up, staring me down uninterrupted, like a deer to headlights, no concern at all about how awkward he was making it for me.

Then, he turned to Melanie.

“How long she been here?” he asked her in his gruff Western drawl.

“Six months,” she said.

“Y’trust her?”

“I trust her. Yes.”

He let his eyebrows say ‘If you say so’ then went on with it.

“Alright, so, apparently y’had a visit from the wandering man last week. You,” he said, motioning to Melanie, “were out. But you,” attention now shifted to me, “weren’t. Give me the lowdown.”

The wandering man?

The agent caught the confusion in my eyes.

“Jesus, you’ve told this girl nothing, haven’t you?” he said to Melanie.

“Sir, I know it sounds weird,” she said, “But I personally feel as if the man is almost, I don’t know, drawn to curiosity. Like, maybe the less I say to those not already in the know, the bett–”

“Wandering man,” the agent cut her off, “Is our nickname for the fella that sits in the corner of your fine little establishment. Or should I say, the state’s fine little establishment.”

“I’m sorry?” I asked.

“That’s correct. The state’s. Congratulations, ma’am, you’re part of a government operation. The wandering man, not just a cutesy little nickname but our legal definition of this tricky little problem, is a phenomenon we discovered many years ago. At the time, he’d just walk the desert landscape, chatting up unsuspecting strangers with bizarre questions. Everything fine, all hunky-dory. A little weird, sure, but nothing illegal. However…”

However…?

“Sometimes… things would happen because of him. Bizarre things. Grizzly things.”

I could see Melanie groaning, concerned at the picture being painted. Would this pique my curiosity?

“Have you guys, y’know, taken him in for…” I almost wanted to cut off my own stupid question, but he ran with it–

“Nope. Not because we don’t want to, but rather, because it… might not be safe.”

The cozy mental image I’d held of this diner was starting to fracture.

“We have reason to believe that he’s a visitor,” he said.

“From…?”

___________________

I didn’t attend another debrief after that.

Not because I was barred, mind you.

Rather, I just didn’t want to know anymore. My gut no longer held curiosity. There was just a low, aching dread there now.

The agents and troopers–spaced out and seated amongst the eatery–were now just a glaring reminder of what my dingy diner job really was.

The government cavalry would mostly show up around the end of month window the wandering man was set to arrive in. When he’d appear, they wouldn’t do much more than examine him from their distant tables, subtly scribbling notes into notebooks. **

He’d always act the same. He would just sit there. He wouldn’t give them, or us–the diner employees–much to go on.

Speaking of employees, I remembered something Melanie told me after my first month of working here–that the worker turnover at this diner was incredibly high. Knowing at the time what everyone got paid, it made absolutely no sense to me.

Now, five months into the gig, alongside a completely new set of cooks, waiters, and waitresses from when I’d first started, I’d seen firsthand just how true her statement was. None of the leavers claimed as much, but I’m sure the underlying premise of who the diner was really for became subconsciously clear to them during their time here. And it probably didn’t sit all too well with them.

I stayed. But not because of the pay. I’m actually not sure why I did.

We had a new cast of rookie employees now. The ones who understood the vague terms of the situation, just as Melanie, I, and all former employees did, stuck around. Those who couldn’t reconcile the situation with their inherent curiosity, naturally filtered out.

And then there was Malcolm.

It was only his first week. He was a keener. Mega-keener. He’d bulldozed through a giant list of tasks and was already asking for the next batch of work to chew through. Anything he could get ahead of, anything he could step in for, anything he could learn, he was on it. He wanted to be as helpful, helpful, helpful as humanly possible. I think the salary of the role, for a guy his young age, was just too alluring for him.

For our part, Melanie and I tried our best to get him to pace himself.

We were both giving the spiel now. By this point, we’d more or less perfected it.

“There are things about this diner that are strange. Rules you will have to follow and not think about. Rules that are concrete, immutable, and non-negotiable, like gravity.”

He nodded. At that moment, I really believed he was internalizing my words.

“And if that doesn’t work for you, and if you don’t think you can take care of yourself, then you shouldn’t work here,” I continued.

There was always a visceral feeling in my stomach whenever I saw the wandering man in the corner during the same week that we were onboarding new staff. I’m sure Melanie felt it too.

On those days, Mel and I would both work the till, and if we saw anyone coming out from the back, we’d stop them. With a simple grab of the arm.

Malcolm stepped out, and I did just that–a rough grasp of his forearm, just like Melanie had done to me when I’d first started. He recoiled in surprise.

”Remember that little chat about rules we just had?” I said.

He nodded meekly, as if he was already in trouble.

I pointed to the man seated at the far table in the brown corduroy shirt, staring straight ahead, with–what I believed at the time–no real reason to be here, and I said, “You will not, under any conditions, serve that man. Don’t go up to him, don’t talk to him. Pretend he doesn’t exist.”

Malcolm lifted the garbage bag he was holding in his left hand. In my nervousness, I hadn’t actually clocked what he was stepping out for.

“Just doing garbage duty, ma’am,” he said. “But, understood.”

And then he left out the front door with his usual swagger. The dumpster wasn’t as close as we would’ve liked so I appreciated his willingness to take on this duty so soon into his employment.

I turned back to observe the wandering man. We had a crowd of agents in attendance that day, scattered about the restaurant.

The man wasn’t one to speak up often. Today was an interesting exception.

“Officers,” he said, “If you have any questions, feel free to join me at the table to ask them.”

The agents around the room reacted mainly with snickers.

“Seriously, if you come sit with me, I’ll be happy to spill it all. Truly.”

Even more laughs. But no one bit.

And yet he continued, pointedly. “I know you’re curious, I know you take notes, I know you talk about me, I know you built this establishment for me, I know you–”

As I reconciled the fact that this was the most words I’d ever heard him string together in succession, I heard the chime of the bell–a door had opened.

Malcolm was dusting his hands as he entered through the diner’s side door. A door which was situated right beside the table the wandering man was seated at.

It all happened so fast. And yet, it played out in front of me excruciatingly slowly, as if there was a moment–a single solitary second–where I could’ve stepped in.

The wandering man dropped any pretext of an exchange with the agents, stopping his sentence midway and adopting a completely new demeanor. He played the role of a low, miserable, tired man and said, “30 visits, terrible service every time,” in a pathetic tone just as Malcolm walked by.

Malcolm, instinctively, plucked a notepad out from his chest pocket and turned his head to face the man.

“Hey, I got you chief, I can have ‘em ring something up for you, what are you–”

And then Malcolm froze in place.

And the wandering man’s expression turned Cheshire cat wide. His neck alternated between tensing and fluttering, with what seemed to be undeniable excitement.

The man started getting up from the table, and then, immediately–

Both of them were gone.

Malcolm and the wanderer had vanished out of existence entirely.

The insanity of the moment was interrupted by the coded language I heard blared over a megaphone: nonsensical agent-speak that has been seared into my memory forever.

“Alert Level Black. Wandering target has compromised a civilian. I repeat, civilian has been compromised.”

And that was that.

Melanie quit in the days after.

She wasn’t mad at me.

She told me she always knew she’d leave after the tenth disappearance. Why that specific milestone was required, I have no clue.

All I could do from that point was continue to work. On my commutes home, or during lunch breaks, I would look up at the stars, and put out the wish that Malcolm be brought back home. Back from wherever he’d been taken.

The debrief with the agents brought me no solace. The exchange with them was simple and short. ‘Where was he taken to?’, answered with ‘He’s gone now.’

With a perpetual dagger in my soul now, I had only the smallest of silver linings, if you can even call it that.

A lesson.

The lesson that I needed to be even more watchful. Even more diligent. And on days when the wandering man was visiting–the only server at the diner. No exceptions.

I knew the agents weren’t happy about that. None of them said it to me explicitly, but I could tell that they would learn something new about him every time he whisked someone away after a mistake was made. It was a weird, Darwinian set-up they had created. We were a zoo they could use to learn more about a specific animal. A specific entity. A specific visitor.

No dice. They’d just have to watch him sit now. Or wait for him to do something different.

I waited for the three day stretch at the end of the month that he usually appears in. Things were quiet up until that point.

When he finally showed up, it wasn’t what I expected.

For the first time ever, I saw him walk right through the front door.

In the dead of night, at the tail end of my shift.

I was at the till, paralyzed, as he took step after step to close the distance.

And then, he was right there. Standing in front of me.

And I was sure, absolutely sure, that I was going to die.

He smiled.

“Don’t worry. I have my own little set of rules I play by,” he said.

I didn’t say a word. This was no man’s land right now.

“I know you’ve been curious about me. I’ve admired it from the moment you first spoke up to address me. Cautious curiosity is a great thing to see in someone. Especially in such a reckless species.”

Please. Please just go.

“I’d like to answer a question about why I’m visiting. I’m sure you’d like to know why I’m here, right?”

I’m not curious anymore. I swear I’m not.

He laughed. “The answer is really, painfully simple. This little game, this little charade I’m playing. It is just so unbelievably, fun.”

Please don’t kill me. Please.

“You truly have a wonderful planet. I will return again soon. Promise. Give me a month, maybe two this time.” A sincere, kind smile delivered with kind eyes. “I’ll come back with a new game.”

And then he was gone.

It took me a minute to realize that there was a cake box sitting on the counter beside me. Maybe it was there the whole time he was speaking to me. Maybe it materialized right after he left.

I opened the box to find Malcolm’s severed head, a blank expression on his face, sitting on a bed of poorly and confusingly organized flowers. Almost as if there was an intention to create a floral arrangement, but no understanding of what something like that would look like.

On top of the horrific display, written in an almost childlike handwriting, was a note that read “I brought him back, just like you wished.”

The worst thing about being trapped at a diner, in the middle of nowhere, is that you realize that there really is nowhere else to run to.

Every single part of our planet is blanketed by stars, by open sky.

Someone could drop in anytime.