Jay Fox - THE WALLS

There's a pale-faced man at the bar. Fish-faced, too. He's bloated, discernibly agitated, sporting a leather jacket scarred by a life of payday loans and drug addiction. He looks to Tomas. “You look like you've had enough, champ.” He looks to me. The word “aquiline” pops into my head, but I'm fairly certain that it doesn't apply. “You can take down whatever he's got left, right? You look like you know how to handle the sauce.” He's local, but it's not so pronounced as to make you think him the type who remains in the area because he's incapable of leaving. He's intelligent, but, unfortunately, misguided.

“He's not fucking touching shit, man,” Tomas explodes. “I paid for that shit, and I'm fucking drinking it.” He grabs the pint off the bar, almost falls over, and then takes off towards Aberdeen. James' can of beer remains unordered. My shot glass remains on the table, perhaps thinking whatever it is inanimate objects think about before they remain inanimate.

“You know'm or is he just some drunk asshole talking your ear off?”

“He's a friend.”

“He do this type of shit often?”

“Usually he's not this bad. I guess he's had a bit too much tonight.”

He shrugs. “He seems like a horsefucker to me. Probably from a long line of horsefuckers. Equestrian,” he adds casually.

“I couldn't comment.”

He laughs glacially, takes down the last of his beer, and then retakes his anonymity among the people in the bar. As he disappears from sight, my attention turns to the girl next to me. She is alone and eagerly awaiting the bartender. “Do you want to buy a shot off me?”

“What did you put in it?”

“What? Nothing. I just don't want it.” She squints. “My friend bought it for me.”

“I'll pass.” She turns away.

I'm left to ponder at this altar of Dionysus. It's a familiar situation, which I suppose is kind of pathetic. I am a connoisseur of lonely moments. It has given me ample time to reflect upon and appreciate the distinctions of each bar I've visited. This is the first place I've been to in a while where most of the bottles behind the bar have been placed in front of neon lights, making the liquor inside appear phosphorescent. It's not an antiquated look by any means, but the apex of the trend subsided some time ago. True to any trendy place in Brooklyn, however, the bar has been lined with a number of small, white candles that have been placed in dram glasses. The majority of the wicks stand at cold attention, barren like dead trees. The bartender is clearly too busy to bother relighting them, and the hectic environment seems to bring out an earnest disposition that would still be pretty prominent even if the place was dead. Her candor strikes me as somewhat abnormal for an individual partial to the hipster genre of fashion. She sports a Mod-Rock haircut, a mangled shirt featuring the name of a band from the late-seventies, pink dance pants, and a ragged pair of Converse All-Stars. She has no time for small-talk, she says, even if it is referred to as “chit-chat.” She accentuates the “ch-” to such a degree that it makes her look like a rabbit nibbling on a carrot. When a twenty-something man asks her what she recommends, she lets him know, in a less than implicit manner, that it's incredibly selfish to try to flirt with someone who has several customers to appease in a very limited amount of time. She adds that his act is pathetic, that his spurious androgyny is offensive to people who are actually gay, and that he should spend more time reading books as opposed to websites dedicated to Andy Warhol — who she refers to as “That fucking snake-oil salesmen, who ruined art.” When she brings him a PBR, she tells him it's the “House special.” She adds, “Drink up and shut up.” She does not receive a tip from him, but the next two patronesses dig deep.

I have no idea how old she is, but I would guess that she is either young and from the city or a bit older and from somewhere else. Obvious, I know. There is a certain lack of patience in her voice that is, again, earnest. She is a bartender; bartender is an occupation; an occupation is an activity that one does for money, not for fun; hence, “Shit or get off the pot, bud; I don't have time to dillydally here.” True, customer service requires a certain amount of obsequence — even if it is more often than not feigned, if not hostilely sardonic—, but this is not a venue for punctilios and grace; this is just a place to get drunk. The music begins to fade. The Sheeps are to begin soon.

“Do you want this?” I ask her.

“What?”

“This shot. Do you want it?”

She takes it down without much in terms of restraint, and then relays that the next drink is on the house. I ask for Aberdeen's can of beer. “Oh,” she adds as she cracks the top, “Don't let me see your friend trying to buy anything, otherwise I'm getting security to throw his ass out.”

“There's security here?”

“Why you gotta be such a wise ass, huh?”

I exhaust slowly. “Has he been a problem all night?”

“No, but I don't want to lose business on account of his shit. Just keep an eye on him, 'kay.”

Before I can assent, I learn that Barazov uses a double bass pedal.

It's autumn. The leaves have yet to take on the warm, moribund hues of the season, yet the scent in the air is one of stoic anticipation for the rites of the coming chill. The breeze off the East River is serene, no longer suffuse with the stench of putrefied waste. These are the halcyon moments, the transitional days that carry us from era to era, the threads that keep so many patches of memory from falling into famished disuse. The cement exhales the last of the sun's warmth as the western sky grows velveteen with plush clouds and the fading light of sunset — irrational contours and miasmal layers of color. In the summer, the distinctions seem more vivid, even if the rest of the day seems to bleed together.

“If nothing is true, everything is permissible.” It's a man's voice. His words are addressed to me. It's difficult to place his age, though I am certain that he is significantly older than me. His intonation is strenuous, as though each syllable is given a special gravity before it is articulated. To call it calculated would perhaps be more accurate, as his presence radiates a certain erudition that would hold misplaced pauses and other gratuities of speech in contempt. Then again, I have always had a compulsion to refrain from calling people calculated, as I feel the word implies something nefarious.

I am walking with this person, but I do not know who he is. He clearly knows who I am, knows the pace at which I walk, the manner in which I conduct myself. I would like to compare conversing with him to playing a game of chess with God, but this is certainly impossible, as one cannot play a game against a being with knowledge of all the moves that can be made. Perhaps He does not know what you will do, but He knows all that you can do; and He knows all of the potential consequents of any of those actions, and all of the potential consequents of all of the originally potential consequents, which are now antecedents, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum . So maybe we have free will; it's just that He knows all, both truth and falsity, and that these two concepts lack definition until future becomes present, present recedes into the past. But then God ceases to be outside of time, no? How then can He be omnipresent?

I cannot remember from where the two of us departed, nor can I recall just how many steps we have taken. I only know that we have traversed a great deal of space and time, that his steady gait has yet to diminish in its sense of urgency.

“I thought it was: If nothing is true, then everything is possible.”