Robert Silverberg - The Regulars

He went all around the room. Ishmael appeared to be working hard at remembering the names. He repeated them until he had them straight, but he still looked a little puzzled. “Bars I’ve been in,” he said, “it isn’t the custom to make introductions like this. Makes it seem more like a private party than a bar.”

“A family gathering, more like,” said Ms. Bewley.

Karl Marx said, “We constitute a society here. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary their social existence determines their consciousness. We look after one another in this place.”

“You’ll like it here,” said the Pope.

“I do. I’m amazed how much I like it.” The sailor grinned. “This may be the bar I’ve been looking for all my life.”

“No doubt but that it is,” said Charley Sullivan. “And a Bushmill’s on me, lad?”

Shyly Ishmael pushed his glass forward, and Charley topped it off.

“So friendly here,” Ishmael said. “Almost like—home.”

“Like one’s club, perhaps,” said the Leading Man.

“A club, a home, yes,” said Mors Longa, signaling Charley for another bourbon. “Karl Marx tells it truly: we care for each other here. We are friends, and we strive constantly to amuse one another and protect one another, which are the two chief duties of friends. We buy each other drinks, we talk, we tell stories to while away the darkness.”

“Do you come here every night?”

“We never miss a one,” Mors Longa said.

“You must know each other very well by this time.”

“Very well. Very, very well.”

“The kind of place I’ve always dreamed of,” Ishmael said wonderingly. “The kind of place I’d never want to leave.” He let his eyes pan in a slow arc around the whole room, past the jukebox, the pool table, the dart board, the television screen, the tattered 1934 calendar that had never been changed, the fireplace, the piano. He was glowing, and not just from the whiskey. “Why would anyone ever want to leave a place like this?”

“It is a very good place,” said Karl Marx.

Mors Longa said, “And when you find a very good place, it’s the place where you want to remain. Of course. It becomes your club, as our friend says. Your home away from home. But that reminds me of a story, young man. Have you ever heard about the bar that nobody actually ever does leave? The bar where everyone stays forever, because they couldn’t leave even if they wanted to? Do you know that one?”

“Never heard it,” said Ishmael.

But the rest of us had. In Charley Sullivan’s place we try never to tell the same story twice, in order to spare each other’s sensibilities, for boredom is the deadliest of afflictions here. Only the Ingenue is exempt from that rule because it is her nature to tell her stories again and again, and we love her all the same. Nevertheless, it sometimes happens that one of us must tell an old and familiar story to a newcomer; but though at other times we give each other full attention, it is not required at a time such as that. So the Leading Man and the Ingenue wandered off for a tête-à-tête by the fireplace, and Karl Marx challenged the Pope to a round of darts, and the others drifted off to this corner or that until only Mors Longa and the sailor and I were still at the bar, I drowsing over my rum and Mors Longa getting that faraway look and Ishmael, leaning intently forward, saying, “A bar where nobody can ever leave? What a strange sort of place!”

“Yes,” said Mors Longa.

“Where is there such a place?”

“In no particular part of the universe. By which I mean it lies somewhere outside of space and time as we understand those concepts, everywhere and nowhere at once, although it looks not at all alien or strange, apart from its timelessness and its spacelessness. In fact, it looks, I’m told, like every bar you’ve even been in in your life, only more so. The proprietor’s a big man with black Irish in him, a lot like Charley Sullivan here, and he doesn’t mind setting one up for the regulars now and then on the house, and he always gives good measure and keeps the heat turned up nicely. And the wood is dark and mellow and well polished, and the railing is the familiar brass, and there are the usual two hanging ferns and the usual aspidistra in the corner next to the spittoon, and there’s a dart board and a pool table and all those other things that you find in bars of the kind that this one is. You understand me? This is a perfectly standard sort of bar, but it doesn’t happen to be in New York City or San Francisco or Hamburg or Rangoon or in any other city you’re likely to have visited, though the moment you walk into this place you feel right at home in it.”

“Just like here.”

“Very much like here,” said Mors Longa.

“But people never leave?” Ishmael’s brows furrowed.

“Never?”

“Well, actually, some of them do,” Mors Longa said. “But let me talk about the other ones first, all right? The regulars, the ones who are there all the time. You know, there are certain people who absolutely never go into bars, the ones who prefer to do their drinking at home or in restaurants before dinner or not at all. But then there are the bar-going sorts. Some of them are folks who just like to drink, you know, and find a bar a convenient place to get their whistles wetted when they’re en route from somewhere to somewhere else. And there are some who think drinking’s a social act, eh? But you also find people in bars, a lot of them, who go to the place because there’s an emptiness in them that needs to be filled, a dark, cold, hollow space, to be filled not just with good warm bourbon, you understand, but a mystic and invisible substance that emanates from others who are in the same way, people who somehow have had a bit of their souls leak away from them by accident and need the comfort of being among their own kind. Say, a priest who’s lost his calling or a writer who’s forgotten the joy of putting stories down on paper or a painter to whom all colors have become shades of gray or a surgeon whose scalpel-hand has picked up a bit of a tremor or a photographer whose eyes don’t quite focus right any more. You know the sort, don’t you? You find a lot of that sort in bars. Something in their eyes tells you what they are. But in this particular bar that I’m talking about, you find only that sort, good people, decent people, but people with that empty zone inside them. Which makes it even more like all the other bars there are, in fact the Platonic ideal of a bar, if you follow me, a kind of three-dimensional stereotype populated by flesh-and-blood clichés, a sort of perpetual stage-set, do you see? Hearing about a place like that where everybody’s a little tragic, everybody’s a bit on the broken side, everyone is a perfect bar-type, you’d laugh; you’d say it’s unreal; it’s too much like everybody’s idea of what such a place ought to be like to be convincing. Eh? But all stereotypes are rooted firmly in reality, you know. That’s what makes them stereotypes, because they’re exactly like reality, only more so. And to the people who do their drinking in the bar I’m talking about, it isn’t any stereotype and they aren’t clichés. It’s the only reality they have, the realest reality there is, for them, and it’s no good sneering at it, because it’s their own little world, the world of the archetypical saloon, the world of the bar regulars.”

“Who never leave the place,” said Ishmael.

“How can they? Where would they go? What would they do on a day off? They have no identity except inside the bar. The bar is their life. The bar is their universe. They have no business going elsewhere. They simply stay where they are. They tell each other stories and they work hard to keep each other happy, and for them there is no world outside. That’s what it means to be a regular, to be a Platonic ideal. Every night the bar and everything in it vanishes into a kind of inchoate gray mist at closing time, and every morning when it’s legal to open the bar comes back, and meanwhile the regulars don’t go anywhere except into the mist, because that’s all there is, mist and then bar, bar and then mist. Platonic ideals don’t have daytime jobs and they don’t go to Atlantic City on the weekend and they don’t decide to go bowling one night instead of to their bar. Do you follow me? They stay there the way the dummies in a store window stay in the store window. Only they can walk and talk and feel and drink and do everything else that window dummies can’t do. And that’s their whole life, night after night, month after month, year after year, century after century—maybe till the end of time.”