“Sense. Where I came from there was no sense! Humans can’t hear or see or touch a thing without giving it a name. The place I came from? A place of Nonsense. The implosion of whole galaxies, countless life forms no more remarkable than a yawn or a sigh here on Earth.”

They didn’t make eye contact with the Lip Reader, but they were listening, the regulars of the Swan Song. They too had wondered these same things for so long. Not one of them had ever dared to ask, though.

“That is why I came here. For order. For stability. To use a turn of phrase that I could have never used in that place of Nonsense, I had my eye on Earth for a long time. And not for its arts and culture or genocide and abuse. For its order.”

It was disquieting, the human look of longing on the Lip Reader’s alien face.

“So many beings in this galaxy --and most of the rest of them too -- hunt for power or fame or the feeling of accomplishment that comes with destruction. Do you know what I was hunting for?”

Hillary shook her head. The Lip Reader looked to Sam too but he did the same.

“A place where I could, say, waltz in and get a cup of coffee. Check in with my neighbors to see how they slept. That's the mornings. In the afternoons, somewhere I might drop in for a burger bleeding red with ketchup. Oh, and supper, too. Eons, it must have been eons, I hadn’t a clue what supper was. But once I learned? How could I go without having it for myself? And for my friends here, too.”

“So you built a zoo?”

The Lip Reader rolled its eyes.

“Zoos have piles of shit and donkey rides. I think what I’ve built is more like a Potemkin Village, dolled up like everybody’s favorite neighborhood diner. The Swan Song. You know, it’s the kind of thing you can only appreciate, I mean the predictability, the stability, the sense of community -- when you’ve existed for so long without it. You can’t imagine how long I pined for salt and pepper shakers. The creation and annihilation of a million billion bits of matter: gasses and liquids and plasma. And all I wanted was a root beer with crushed ice.”

The power outage in San Nicolas had started merely as a distraction; the Lip Reader needed to mask its arrival while it found its Earth legs. Take everyone’s eyes off the Earless Monster long enough that it can get a lay of the land and develop a plan. As the town descended into a bereft silence, that plan began to coalesce in the Lip Reader’s mind. And when it stumbled upon the husk of the Swang Song, the Lip Reader knew it had found its sanctuary.

“These people, the very same ones you see around you, didn’t know how good they had it! Gravity! Seasons! Tides! Biscuits! Yet still, they ran off and hid in their little cubby holes when the lights went out. They abandoned each other. They became little more than rats, hiding in the dark. I couldn’t stand it.”

“So he put us here.”

The voice surprised everyone in the diner, including the person who’d spoken.

Troy cleared his throat and spoke again.

“Some of us disappeared in the middle of the night. Others while we were making breakfast or on the can. One minute we were there and the next -- well, the next, we were here. I suppose the Lip Reader’s right, though. When others started disappearing, like Beth Hendershot over there, I didn’t go looking for her. She was my neighbor. I saw her wisp away right before my eyes. I was kissing her at the time. I was upset she was gone, yeah, but I was just as happy, too. Happy to have not gone with her.”

The Lip Reader never once explained the nature of their imprisonment. Yet they did not rebel, they did not question and they did not fight. They act with the demeanor of the defeated. None of it was expected, but none of it felt much like a surprise. They took to their new roles, their new fates, with a sense of culpability. It was the Lip Reader who’d brought them to the Swan Song, but it was their own fault they were there.

“So,” Sam spoke up, maybe feeling emboldened by Troy, “you got what you wanted. Prisoners or actors or playthings. Whatever you want to call them. A simulation of a place that never existed to begin with. Somewhere you could play god and brotherly neighbor all at once.”

The Lip Reader considered Sam’s words.

“More or less. Not necessarily how I would put it. A harsh appraisal coming out of your mouth. But I suppose true all the same.”

“Then what use did you have for us?”

Without so much as a stride or a step, the Lip Reader was by Sam’s side. It happened in an instant, except an instant is still too long a measure. A quarter of an instant, at most.

“It was you, you who almost opened the door. You know, I have a very fragile thing here. It’s taken no small amount of cloaking to hide it from the outside all these years. Cloaking and the indifference of a public that forgot a place so small, so insignificant. San Nicolas was a speck of dust when I arrived here. Today? It’s something even smaller. The forgotten memory of that speck of dust.”

A few of the diners cringed at his words, though none was brave enough or foolish enough to speak up.

“Apathy. That’s what it comes down to. It was that apathy I rely on to this day. To the naked eye, what I have built here must seem more like magic than anything else. But it’s imperfect. Were that apathy to disappear….One tug on the door from the outside -- one breath of fresh air -- and this, all of this, would disappear.”

The Lip Reader finished with a flourish, waving its arms to show the extent of his tenuous empire.

“Now that you know why you’re here, we’ve got to figure out what we’re going to do with you. I don’t suspect you’ll be nearly as accommodating as my other guests have been all these years.”

“I suppose letting them go is out of the question,” Troy half-heartedly suggested, the futility in his voice echoing like a foghorn in a cave.

“Very much out of the question. I have given you, all of you, eternal life. I don’t think these interlopers deserve anything so grand.”

It was a death sentence dressed up to look like immortality. Neither Sam nor Hillary wanted to die right at that moment -- as they suspected the Lip Reader was more than capable of doing -- but nor did they want what those caught trapped in the diner had. They would live forever, damned to a hell on Earth as the indentured rubes of a megalomaniac. Nothing ever changing, caught in a nostalgic fever dream. It was dying by any other name.

“So, what will you do with us then?” Hillary asked, genuinely curious to hear the Lip Reader’s answer. This was no stall tactic. She saw no escape route. She had always had an inscrutable need to get all the details, even if, as in this case, it meant knowing all the ways she might die.

The Lip Reader’s eyes lit like a gaudy firework show.

“There are innumerable ways to inflict pain and suffering on a human soul, not all of them physical. I can, for instance, conjure up all the things that ever made you feel guilty and have you experience them again, one after another, until you wither away from exhaustion. Or we can test your fears: heights or insects or, perhaps, abandonment. See how long you can last alone, adrift in your own mind, before you lose your mind entirely.”

The obvious discomfort on Sam and Hillary’s faces only egged the Lip Reader on further.

“That’s to say nothing of the more traditional, violent means. Broken spines and extracted fingernails. Fire. Ice. Blows to the head. Scrunching up your visceral organs in a vice. Bludgeoning. The only limit, really, is my imagination, and I have a very vivid imagination.”

Whatever the Lip Reader might have done or said next was interrupted by a very slight, almost inaudible sound.

It was brief and muffled, but everyone in the room, terrestrially-born or otherwise, heard it. The Lip Reader shut its mouth as soon as the sound waves hit its non-existent ears. It hadn’t come from inside the diner, that was for certain. In fact, it sounded like it was coming from the other side of the door.

And then again, but a little louder. And again, louder still.

Before the Lip Reader could do a thing to stop it but long after a horrified look of anguish appeared on its face, a man crashed through the door, shoulder first, and collapsed on the floor of the diner.

The Lip Reader wasn't wrong. It only took one soupcon of air leaking in from the outside to tear the whole thing apart. The Lip Reader disappeared. His invited guests disappeared. The booths, the plates, the tuna melts, the kitsch -- everything that the Lip Reader had put in the Swan Song disappeared. The gap in time? Infinitely short. Nothing shorter than it. Not in this world, at least. It went from schlocky charade to cast-off carapace faster than Sam or Hillary could say Deus Ex. The Swan Song was, once again, no more.