Fast Food Ad Infinitum

This short story was written in 1990. Only the implications are true. And some of the names. 

            Some friends and I were sitting in a fast food restaurant one foggy night in Fresno, California. It was the Karl’s Jr. near the airport. Albert’s flight to Seattle had been canceled. He sat with his head resting up against the window. Steve, Bill and I had been doing our best to avoid being infected by the gloom Albert seemed determined to draw in through the glass from the cold, wet, darkness outside. The cheery pumpkin-orange vinyl seats with complementary harvest-rust Formica tables here inside where it was warm and dry almost weren't enough.

            We had finished eating. If Albert was going to stare all night at the fog outside that was his business. He had eaten the food we’d ordered for him but as far as conversation, his only contribution had been several announcements of how far away from Fresno he would be if only the night had been clear. Some time ago he had reported passing over Portland.

            The fog was terrible. And it had gotten worse. In the time we had eaten our burgers, the fog had swirled up the light poles along McKinley Avenue and had swallowed several of the more distant streetlamps. Only four or five dim, orangish halos remained.

It had been five or ten minutes since we’d seen the pale headlights of a car materialize out the mists and slip slowly and silently by. This was the Father of all fogs all right.

            Steve, Bill and I had been playing with the ice in our cups and nibbling away at the greasy crumbs scattered among the paper debris. Except for us, the place was empty. The Assistant Manager sat alone near the cash register.

Bill cracked that the rest of the counter kids and burger flippers were in the back eating take-out pizza. .

And then Albert turned from the window to look at us.

            “You know,” he said. “I think I am in Seattle.”

            The rest of us laughed. It looked like Albert was finally beginning to accept his fate. Maybe we’d get another order of fried zucchini and sit around a little longer joking about yet one more victim of the dreaded Fresno fog.

            But as I looked into Albert’s face, there was not even the slightest hint of a smile. His forehead was furrowed as he continued.

            “Look around you. It’s all the same. The hanging plants you were arguing about – whether alive or plastic. The fake-wood trash cabinets with ‘Thank You’ on the swinging doors. It’s all the same.” Albert swallowed hard. “The zucchini we just ate…”

            He sifted briefly through the pile of paper in the middle of the table, mumbled something to himself, then looked back up at us and spoke, his voice low, his words measured out slowly.

            “We could be in the Karl’s Jr. in Seattle. We could be in any Karl’s Jr. in the world.”

            Steve tried to pull Albert off the bench, grabbing him by the arm.

            “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “You can sleep off this food and catch the first flight home in the morning when the fog lifts.”

Bill and I slid out from our side and stood up, a grin still lingering on our faces, but Albert hung onto the table, gripping tightly with both hands.

            “How do you know?” he said, his wide, now gleaming eyes fixed on mine. “How do you know this is not the Karl’s Jr. in Seattle?”

            For the tiniest part of a second I believed him and looked around suspiciously. With the fog swirling around outside, obscuring any landmarks, we could have been anywhere.  Here inside it looked just like the downtown Fresno Karl’s Jr. where we had gone last week for sodas and deep-fried zucchini. Or Seattle’s Karl’s Jr., for all I knew.

            Then Steve laughed again. “Come on. All we’ve got to do is walk out the door, step across the parking lot, and we’ll be back in Fresno, standing next to the car we parked outside this Karl’s Jr. an hour ago … Sorry Albert.

            Albert stood up. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m getting off in Seattle. See you later.”

            Albert shoved past us as we looked at each other, shrugging our shoulders and grinning again. Albert went through the door. We were nearly right behind him. The door had just swung shut before I pushed back out, Steve and Bill behind me.

            Albert wasn't there. We looked at each other. “Yeah, right,” Steve said. “Albert’s in Seattle.”

            Steve ran over to the car. Bill and I headed in opposite directions around the building. We met at the door.

            “I’m going to check back inside,” I said.

            The guy with a Karl’s Jr. a name plate that said ‘Assistant Manager’ sat on a stool at the cash register near the drive-thru window. “Did you see my friend come back in here?” I asked quickly, before he could ask for my order again. “He has short, blond hair, sticks straight up all over?”

            “He’s in Seattle,” The Assistant Manager said. His black, bushy eyebrows nearly met in the middle as he frowned.  “I thought that’s where he wanted to go.”

            “Very funny,” I said, starting to laugh again. “Which way did he go?”

            “Seattle,” he said.

            Steve and Bill walked in behind me. “Albert’s nowhere outside,” Steve said.

            The phone started to ring as I pointed my finger at the Assistant Manager. “This guy says he’s in Seattle.”

            “It’s for you,” he said, offering me the phone.

            It was Albert.

            I questioned him, figuring he had gotten to a phone somewhere close by. But he insisted he was calling from a Karl’s Jr. in Seattle. He sounded a little panicky. I finally told him I believed him.

            “So what’s the problem?” I asked.

            “First, my luggage is still in the trunk of Steve’s car “ – he started to answer, but I interrupted him.

            “So just take the Fast Food Ad Infinitum back here and pick up your luggage,” I said. Now I had his little game figured out, or so I thought.

            “That’s the second problem,” he said. “According to the Assistant Manager here, I can only make a jump between the same two Karl’s Jrs. about once a month. Stepping through an Ad Infinitum Link somehow recharges the extra fat in your system. An immediate reverse trip back to the same place could lead to blood clotting, even a stroke.”

            “Your Assistant Manager – he’s wearing a Karl’s Jr. hat and has dark, bushy eyebrows that almost meet in the middle?” I said.

            “Yeah, how’d you know?” Albert replied.

            “Never mind,” I thought. This was getting us nowhere fast. “How about if we get your luggage, bring it inside, and heave it through the door to Seattle?” I asked.

            The Assistant Manager here in Fresno was shaking his head slowly from side to side.

            “It won’t work,” he was explaining to Bill and Steve. “The luggage would have to believe it was going to get there when you did.”

            “What if you come back to the Karl’s Jr. downtown? We could meet you there.” I offered. There had to be some way out of this. I could hear Albert talking to someone on the other end. I believed that the voice coming instantaneously through the wire was Albert’s so why couldn't he have stepped through a door and ended up in Seattle?”

            I quickly shook off the idea.

            “The Assistant Manager says he can’t do it.” Albert was explaining the Link to me again. “There’s still a good crowd in the Karl’s Jr. here in Seattle, and, according to his instruments, the fog isn't very thick in downtown Fresno. Apparently, this whole restaurant and everyone in it has to make the approach to a jump – either knowingly or unknowingly. If half a dozen Seattle customers looked out the window and saw the used car dealerships on Greystone Avenue appear while they were biting into a Western Bacon Cheeseburger, they’d never believe it, and the Ad Infinitum Link would lurch with me half-way out the door. I’d step on through the door and right back out onto the Seattle Karl’s Jr. parking lot with a queasy stomach – and then some.”

            “Hold on just a minute,” I told Albert.  I held the phone and tried to explain to Bill and Steve everything Albert had just told me.

            “What should we do?” I asked them.

            Finally, Steve suggested we take the luggage to the airport in the morning and put it on the plane to Seattle.

            “Unless one of you wants to take it to Albert by way of the Ad Infinitum Link and stay in Seattle for a month until your cholesterol clears up,” he finished.

            “Or another really foggy night,” Bill added.

            I told Albert what we’d decided. He agreed.

            I thanked the Assistant Manager for letting us tie up his phone.

            “Do lots of people come through here like this?” I asked.

            “You’d be surprised,” he said. “Sometimes people walk in here, they've been eating the same kind of food in the same kind of places for so long, they kind of forget where they are. Frankly, I’m not sure where some of them end up when they walk out the door.”

            It was kind of spooky. After all these years, I figured I knew what I was getting when I walked into a fast food place – whether in Fresno or Seattle or Wichita, Kansas, for that matter. That was part of the appeal of fast food.

            We put the luggage on the plane the next morning.

            Albert called a few days later. He said his luggage never showed up.


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