In my dream last night, I was eating breakfast at the counter of some shitty diner on the Upper West Side. The eggs were flavorless—dreamfood never tastes like anything, have you noticed?—and the coffee smelled like the disinfectant they never used to clean with.

The only other person in the place was a young guy with unkempt red hair and a greasy beard and a ratty fatigue jacket. He could have been a junkie, or even one of those Juilliard music pricks. But he wasn’t.

He was Death.

I don’t know how I knew, but I just did.

I tried not to stare. I stole glances at him as slyly as I could, and whenever I turned his way he was just reading a newspaper and giggling quietly to himself. Amusement? Self-satisfaction? I couldn’t tell, but it gave me the creeps either way.

At length he got up and walked to the door, and I felt not a little relief. But before leaving, he paused and said, “Do you want to know?”

“Excuse me?” was all I could say, and I choked it into my coffee cup as I was too frozen with sudden terror to turn around.

“Do you want to know when I’m coming back for you?”

I heard the word “yes” come out of my mouth, and I turned to look at him.

Death looked at me with his surprisingly green eyes, and smiled, almost kindly.

“It’s right there in front of you,” he said with a nod towards the counter.

I swiveled back towards my cup and saw the check for my breakfast. Coffee, buck ninety-five. The bell on the door rang as Death disappeared onto the snowy Manhattan streets. Eggs and toast, six dollars and twenty cents. Bacon, two seventy-five. Tax.

That bastard. It was there in the numbers somewhere. He was taunting me. To have the date of one’s own demise right in front of you in a handful of digits and still not know the answer for certain is agonizingly worse than not knowing at all.

I paid the bill and left the diner and that’s where the dream ended.

But I’ll now always wonder, every time I leave a tip at a restaurant, if I’m not arbitrarily choosing my own fate.