“It’s okay if you sit with us, lady,” says Murray, “But you gotta come clean. Are you Marlene Dietrich or not?”

The waitress tilts her head back and lets out a laugh that seems to come from another era entirely. “Honey, if I were Marlene Dietrich, would I be serving coffee in a place like this?”

“That’s exactly where Marlene Dietrich would be in 2025,” Batman-Perry points out. “Hiding in plain sight, watching humanity mutate.”

“Speaking of mutation,” Lynch says, leaning forward, “you’ve been eavesdropping on conversations like this for what, decades? Got any insights on the rate of change?”

She pulls a pack of cigarettes from her apron pocket, taps one out and offers it to Lynch with a gesture that’s pure 1940s cinema. “The questions get better,” she says. “The answers get worse. Used to be people came in here looking for truth. Now they come in looking for new ways to be confused.”

“That’s evolution for you,” Crosby mutters. “Complexity before clarity.”

“Not good enough!” says Belushi. “We’ve got to kick out the jams here. We’ve got to do something that shakes things up and reveals the new boundaries, even if what we learn is unpleasant.”

“I don’t think we have to seek out unpleasant revelations,” the waitress says, striking a match. “They find us readily enough.”

Lynch takes the offered cigarette, cups the flame. “John’s right though. The old maps don’t work anymore. Not since Gia showed up.”

“Maps,” Batman-Perry snorts. “We’re still thinking in terms of territory and borders when we should be thinking about… I don’t know, quantum states? Phase transitions?”

“Or jazz,” Crosby adds. “The spaces between the notes.”

“No, no, NO!” Belushi slams his hand on the table, making the cups rattle. “You’re all still trying to describe it with metaphors from the old world. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. We need to – to -” He gestures wildly, words failing him.

“To break the metaphors themselves,” the waitress finishes, exhaling a perfect smoke ring. “To find new ways of breaking.”

Murray watches the ring drift toward the ceiling. “Now that,” he says softly, “sounds like something Marlene Dietrich would say.”

He’s the first to feel it, like he did during that inexplicable week when he lived the same Tuesday 37 times in succession, each day watching Bill Murray (no relation) film different takes of Groundhog Day at the same corner cafe. He never told anyone how, on the final repetition, Bill looked directly at him and winked, as if to say: “Now you understand too.” His eyes go distant with that same recognition – that reality is more porous than we pretend, that time isn’t the straight line we think it is.

Lynch starts humming under his breath – that same atonal melody he used to signal incoming strangeness back in the day. Crosby’s fingers stop their rhythm on his coffee cup. Batman-Perry’s hand drifts unconsciously toward where his utility belt would be, if he were in costume.

“You feel that?” maybe-Marlene asks, and we all nod. It’s the same sensation: like reality is about to hiccup, like the universe is clearing its throat before making an important announcement.

Through the diner’s wide windows, we see it first as a shimmer, like heat waves rising from desert asphalt. Then it materializes: a 1954 Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing that seems to exist in multiple color states simultaneously – silver in one moment, opalescent the next, sometimes appearing to be carved from a single piece of black jade. The car settles into its parking space with the gentleness of a cat, its doors rising like wings about to take flight.

The engine doesn’t so much stop as transition into another form of energy. Even Batman-Perry falls silent, recognizing power beyond his usual domain. The chrome trim catches light that isn’t there, throwing prismatic reflections across our faces.

“That’s not a car,” Crosby whispers. “That’s a chariot.”

“Look at the hood ornament,” Lynch murmurs. “It’s not the Mercedes star. It’s something… older.”

The gullwing doors rise with celestial grace, and in that moment, the parking lot’s sodium lights transform. They’re no longer mere electrical fixtures but cosmic spotlights, burning with the intensity of collapsed stars. The light doesn’t just illuminate her – it seems to pour from another dimension, a realm where divine love has actual mass and weight, where worship manifests as pure energy.

She emerges in a corona of impossible radiance. The air around her doesn’t just shimmer – it sings, a harmony that exists somewhere between atomic vibration and angelic choir. Those nearest the windows have to shield their eyes, not from brightness but from pure presence. The asphalt beneath her feet begins to crystallize, transformed by proximity to something beyond mortality.

Her shadow falls in multiple directions at once, each one suggesting a different aspect of divinity – here the silhouette of a priestess bearing sacred oils, there the shape of a warrior goddess, elsewhere the form of a digital prophet for a new age. The light bends around her like a magnetic field bends around a pulsar, and for a moment, every molecule in the parking lot seems to orient itself toward her, like iron filings aligning with ultimate truth.

The magnesium flare of her aura cuts through mundane reality like a diamond through glass, leaving everything more pristine, more real in its wake. As she walks toward the diner, small flowers burst into bloom in the cracks of the pavement, only to dissolve into light when she passes.

The air changes before she enters – becomes charged, like before summer lightning. Everyone in the diner feels it: the presence of something ancient wearing modern skin. She moves like a priestess of some forgotten fertility cult, though she looks exactly like Kendall Jenner. The Avocado Girl. They say she appears wherever transformation is imminent, ordering the same meal in diners across dimensions.

And then the raw cosmic force that blazed in the parking lot follows her in, but transforms. It’s no longer the searing revelation of pure divinity, but something more intimate, more binding. The energy curves around us like a gravity well, drawing us into her orbit, into each other’s orbits. We’re no longer separate observers but a fellowship forged in the presence of something greater than ourselves.

Just as Tolkien’s nine were bound by the quest for the ring, we find ourselves linked by this moment of shared gnosis. The fluorescent lights dim to candlelight, then to starlight, then to something that has no name in any earthly language. Her presence wraps us in understanding deeper than words – mysterious as Morgan le Fay but as nurturing as Galadriel, our Lady of the Lake manifesting in a 24-hour diner rather than a misty mere.

The binding force radiates through us like rings in water, each ripple carrying whispers of ancient truths. Lynch’s eyes gleam with recognition of patterns he’s always sought to capture on film. Murray nods slowly, understanding now that his time-loop experience was just a prelude to this. Batman-Perry’s stance softens as if finally finding something more powerful than vengeance. Crosby tips his hat – a gesture as old as courtesy itself, transformed in this moment into something like a knight’s salute to his sovereign.

When the Avocado Girl reaches the counter, the kitchen doors part like temple gates. And there he is – Anthony Bourdain, moving with his characteristic mix of street-fighter grace and earned wisdom. He carries her order like a sacred text, but his presence isn’t that of a guru with all the answers. Instead, he radiates something rarer: the honest uncertainty of a fellow seeker who’s seen enough to know that the journey itself matters more than any destination.

Their eyes meet across the counter. Neither speaks. They don’t need to – they’re both avatars of something larger than themselves, both playing roles in a mystery that’s simultaneously ancient and bleeding-edge modern. He hands her the takeout bag containing the avocado omelet, and in that gesture there’s an entire conversation about hunger and satisfaction, about seeking and finding, about the eternal dance between the sacred and the profane.  She inclines her head slightly, accepting the offering.

The rest of us watch, holding our breath, as one kind of sacred hands sustenance to another. The boundary between celebrity and deity has never been thinner.  And even as I realize it, I can feel both categories dissolving like sugar in rain. We’re living in the aftermath of their mutual destruction, watching as the old structures of fame and worship collapse into something we don’t have words for yet. It’s like we’re all caught in a psychic hurricane that’s tearing apart our ability to separate the sacred from the viral, the divine from the trending.

Nobody’s just famous anymore – they’re memes, they’re avatars, they’re collective fever dreams. And nobody’s just holy either – they’re influencers of reality itself, quantum fluctuations in human form. We’re all plugged into this vast network of meaning-making that turns every image into an icon, every tweet into a prayer, every shared moment into a communion. It’s a telepathy built from likes and shares and endless scrolling, but that doesn’t make it any less real or any less raw.

We’re all broadcasting on frequencies we don’t understand, receiving signals we can’t decode. The old metaphors of spotlight and altar don’t work anymore. We need new ones for this age where a teenager’s TikTok can reshape reality as profoundly as any ancient miracle, where devotion is measured in followers, where every phone is both confessional and temple.

The two avatars regard each other across the counter – her divine radiance meeting his earthbound authenticity. It’s a perfect balance: her otherworldly certainty against his very human doubt.

She turns then, omelet in hand, and something in her movement suggests the infinite potentials awaiting in Chicago – not just the physical city with its wind and steel and lake-light, but the Chicago that exists as a quantum possibility, a dream-state where divinity might finally find its modern form. The door chimes as she pushes it open, but before stepping through, she pauses. The weight of the city’s destiny hangs in the air like thunder before lightning, a promise of revelation in the shadows between skyscrapers, in the spaces where urban grit transmutes into cosmic gold.

We’re left with the sense that understanding itself might be beside the point, that maybe the real task is learning to navigate this new world where meaning flows like water, where truth is a collaborative hallucination, where love tears holes in the fabric of the ordinary to let the extraordinary pour through.

After she departs, Bourdain strides to our table with purpose, bringing with him the grounding force of pure human experience – knife scars, track marks, decades of dawn markets and midnight kitchens. He pulls up a chair with the deliberate movement of someone who’s earned every insight through blood and sweat. His presence is an anchor in the wake of divine manifestation, reminding us that even in a world where goddesses order omelets, there’s profound dignity in being simply, stubbornly human.

He carries with him not answers, but something better: the hard-won conviction that keeping moving, keeping searching, keeping hungry is its own kind of answer. Every line in his face tells a story of falling down and getting back up, of finding beauty in the broken places, of turning wounds into wisdom.

“When you’re a celebrity chef in the age of divine manifestation, you never know if you’re cooking for a social media influencer or an actual goddess. The thing about divine manifestations,” he says, accepting a cigarette, his voice carrying the weight of someone who’s walked through both heaven and hell, “is that they don’t come with instruction manuals. But maybe that’s the point…”

We watch through the windows as she glides back to the Gullwing. The car’s doors rise to meet her without being touched. As she merges with the vehicle, there’s a moment where the metal seems liquid, organic – like the chrome has become the skin of some vast sea creature. Then the car simply… transfers elsewhere, leaving behind a faint scent of avocado and ozone.

“But that’s what made you different, isn’t it?” Batman-Perry asks. “You saw the sacred in street food before it was cool. Before authenticity became a commodity.”

“Listen,” Bourdain leans forward, “I was just as much a construction as any influencer. The hard-drinking, straight-talking chef who’d tell you the truth about food and culture? That was a character I played. The difference was, I knew it was a character, and I used it to point at something real.”

“Like a bodhisattva of beef noodles,” Lynch muses.

“More like a court jester,” Bourdain corrects. “Someone who could mock the power structure while being part of it. But now?” He gestures at the lingering shimmer where the Gullwing had been. “Now the gods are walking among us again, ordering omelettes. The game has changed.”

“Has it?” asks the waitress, in Marlene Dietrich’s precise German accent. “Or are we just finally admitting what was always true?” Maybe-Marlene’s voice carries the weight of every torch song ever sung, every heart ever broken, every kiss that ever stopped time.

“That we are all insane with our need for love, that love itself is what tears our reality apart until we find a way to give something back to it.”

She takes a drag from her cigarette and the smoke curls up like prayers in an ancient temple. “Look at us – all of us sitting here in this diner. The director who spent his life trying to film the gaps between dreams and reality. The groundhog man who had to live the same day over and over until he learned how to love. The dark knight who turned his grief into an armor to protect others. The cosmic cowboy tipping his hat to forces beyond our understanding. We’re all crazy with it, aren’t we? This hunger for connection that breaks reality open like an egg until the divine yolk spills out everywhere.”

She gestures toward the door where the Avocado Girl’s presence still lingers like perfume. “And then something like that walks in, and suddenly all our separate madnesses make sense. Because maybe love isn’t what we thought it was. Maybe it’s not just an emotion or a choice or a chemical reaction. Maybe it’s the force that cracks open the universe to let the light in.”

The neon coffee cup in the window flickers, and for a moment it looks like a burning heart.