by James Greer
A group of people she didn’t know came out of the bar on the opposite corner as Amanda stood waiting for the traffic light to change. Two of the boys in the group linked arms around one of the girls, who protested with sharp little shrieks of laughter. Amanda kept pressing the Walk button on the traffic signal post with her thumb. Then she rubbed her thumb in the palm of her other hand. He has nice shoulders, nice the way they slope sharply from his skinny neck to the bony points where the arms begin. But there’s a twisty ridge of muscle so you know he’s a little strong. I bet I’m stronger. I bet I could have cracked him in half like a lobster claw with my legs. Three months ago and the memory of that night still lingers.
Crossing the street, she hesitated in front of the door to the bar. A little early to go in. No one will be there yet and I don’t have any money. I have three dollars which is one drink or maybe two beers. If Trip is there he’ll buy me drinks. Amanda turned and headed south down Brown Street, aimlessly, gazing without intent at the darkened windows of the row of closed storefronts and old row houses lining the street. No one was on the streets, at least down here, and she hoped that she wouldn’t run into anyone she knew. She walked as far up as the record store where Joe worked, looked in the window to see if he was still there. The store was closed, and she could discern nothing moving in the dimly lit interior. Wish I could see like bees, with the blue parts of things shimmering. The sky in daytime would vibrate, you could tell the time just from the intensity of blue, bending the sun. Fragments of light contain the whole truth of light, still. What is revealed? If you can see you can see.
She turned down a side street, even emptier and more desolate than Brown. Voices carried from a porch nearby, but she couldn’t see anyone. Wonder if I really am nuts. Manic-depressive, the doctor said, after half a lousy hour of talking. How can you tell anything in half an hour?
Her feet carried her automatically back to Wyoming, opposite the bright façade of the hospital, alongside the bar. When she came around front, a car full of kids she didn’t recognize sped through the intersection and one of the kids yelled something rude through the backseat window. Amanda looked up, unsure whether the rude comment had been directed at her.
Through bee’s eyes, would even stuff that’s invisible to us appear visible? Emotions have auras. Heartbreak has an aura. If you could see that, what would it look like say in ultraviolet? Sometimes I think I can see things but as fractured designs. Are there patterns or is it all incomprehensible jumble. Chaos that doesn’t resolve in wider perspective, only wider chaos. Maybe move closer, like with those 3D gimmicks. No matter how I blur my vision, focus, squint, unhook my head, or grimace: I can never get those things to work. I can never find the angle that springs the gimmick’s secret.
Amanda Early tugged at the brass knob, her slightly crossed brown eyes with ochre flecks squinching in the late winter cold. Stepping into the bar, she smelled the beer smell and the smell from the stale pretzels lying in a stainless steel pan under a heat lamp at the edge of the bar. Ice crystals sat clumped on top of the salt chunks on top of the pretzels, thawing. She quickly scanned the front room for signs of anyone she knew, then saw Joe and Trip sitting opposite each other in a booth in the back room, and headed past the bar, waving at Billy the bartender as she went.
“Hey, Billy. Quiet night,” said Amanda.
“So far,” responded Billy gloomily. Although Billy’s living was dependent on the largesse of the largely college crowd that patronized the Hive, he regarded customers as an unwelcome intrusion into his routine of gathering empties and loading them into racks to be carted to the dishwasher downstairs, through a narrow trapdoor and down wobbly wooden stairs to the basement.
Amanda greeted her friends and sat down. Trip was occupied with a sheaf of typewritten pages, as usual—his book proposal, he took great pains to tell anyone who asked—leafing slowly through the pages from back to front, stopping to make a pencil mark. Joe bent low over his empty drink, sucking the last few drops of yellowish liquid through a red plastic straw, noisily, by way of returning Amanda’s greeting.
Trip looked up and his face contorted into a version of a faint smile.
“To the bar I betake myself,” he announced, noticing Joe’s empty drink and Amanda’s arrival in the same moment. “Who would like what to drink, specifically?”
Amanda made a vague gesture of demurral.
“I insist,” insisted Trip. “I will buy a round of drinks with the money I am due upon completion of this beastly book proposal.”
“Greyhound,” said Joe, without looking up from his glass.
“Greyhound for Joe,” said Trip. “And for Amanda?”
“Well, if you’re going, I guess a whiskey and soda.” She reached into her pockets, pulled out a couple of crumpled dollars and some change.
“No, no,” said Trip, seeing Amanda separating her change into little piles. “I’ll pay. That’s the point of buying a round of drinks.”
Amanda shrugged, and Trip walked toward the front room. She heard the front door swing open, the low whoosh of air as it swung back on its heels, and involuntarily turned around. A girl with blond hair and a small nose, wearing a robin’s-egg-blue scarf, walked smiling into the bar.
Mary Valentine breathed a sigh of decision. She knew it was too early, there was no way he would be there, and so no rational fear of an uncomfortable encounter. But the ghosts of awkward moments past conspired to produce in her stomach a churning fear that only alcohol could soothe, and she walked through the warm air straight to Billy at the bar and ordered a whiskey and water. She saw in the back a group of friends, Amanda Early and some others, but didn’t feel ready to socialize, and instead pulled up a stool at the bar. She sat next to Fred, a gentle-featured guy with a heavy West Dayton accent whose attendance at the Hive bordered on the devotional—to the point where he was eventually hired to work the door, checking IDs of the University of Dayton kids, which was what he was supposed to be doing now, but you can’t be everywhere at once, he explained to Mary. There was a baseball game almost over on the TV and it was more or less dead in the bar: Fred bet Mary he could name every person in the Hive right at that moment, but Mary never bet unless she was sure to win, she told Fred, which Fred explained you’re gonna have to wait an awful long time between bets if that’s the case.
“You’re telling me,” said Mary, sipping her drink and giggling. She’d decided after all to wear the green skirt because of the colors of the tile in her bathroom, even though her knee was scraped and now cut shaving. My legs, she thought, still look good and sometimes if I wear pants with this top I look like a tater-tot.
Mary giggled, again, at the thought of herself as a tater-tot, which would have been a better costume than the pumpkin-lady one with the big orange boa she’d tried last Halloween, where no one had come to her party because everything was still too awkward.
No use trying to make anyone understand, thought Mary. Everything important needs to be left unspoken or it gets ruined. Let them think I’m a flirt or boy-crazy or whatever, it’s partially true, but a partial truth is hopeless and frustrating, like a partial orgasm. It’s fine if everyone hates me, I can’t wait to get out of this town. If I had even a little money, or a car … I’m twenty-three. I’m twenty-three with a degree in English and I work at a novelty store and if I could grow wings right now I would never look back at this tired, dingy place.
She swallowed angrily the dregs of her drink and ordered another. Mary had hoped, possibly even expected, that love might give her the sense of freedom she craved, the lightness of limb and strength of purpose to make a life anywhere, even here. Instead, what she got was a more complete sense of futility, and the worst parts of passion: The ground had fallen away beneath her, replaced by a vortex of quickly shifting currents of feeling, from jealousy to rage to bliss to despair to emptiness, the void of detachment that can feel like peace but nobody’s fooled, even for a second. She was inflicted with an ache of unremitting need, and Ma
ry, who had always prized her self-sufficiency, found this unwonted neediness galling in the extreme. Above all, the twisty feeling in the stomach that never leaves, the hard knot of incomprehension that makes even the thought of food ridiculous and nauseating. She’d lost ten pounds and taken to drinking heavily and alone. At one point she’d torn the phone cord from its wall jack and not gone out of her single-room apartment for five days, calling in sick for three shifts of work at The Magic Hat.
But all that was almost a year ago, both a century and an instant in terms of human emotion, and in that time Mary had made an incremental recovery from the disease of love. Only once had she broken down, prompted by some inner spasm of sudden fury to drive by his house and unload a carton of eggs in rapid succession at the unlit windows on the second floor. Maybe half of the eggs, five or six, had come anywhere near their target, the rest splattered on dusty red bricks or lost in the bushes, their broken yolks dripping from the fragrant white blossoms of the row of azaleas lining the front of the house. She still felt a rush of shame recalling the lapse into drama queendom, a thing she hated in other girls but especially in herself, to be so affected by a stupid boy.
So things remained awkward, and their inevitable encounters were fraught but usually uneventful, as neither Michael nor Mary was a fan of confrontation. Worst was the sinking feeling whenever he threatened her sense of no-problem viability by entering her peripheral vision. As if his mere presence punctured the sagging balloon of her personality, and whatever hope she’d managed to salvage from their collapsed romance hissed into the room, joining the smoke on the ceiling, the chatter of her friends, and the low hum of general despair that subtexted every such gathering. This was usually how she ended up making out with someone she didn’t even like.
Mary Valentine finished her second drink and moved toward the back of the bar. The same people, she thought, every night and part of every day, in my eyes and hair and nose and throat. I’m sick of their stink. I’m sick of the sinking in my stomach every time I see them gathered here or in another bar, the fake smiles, the stupid jokes, the general lack of anything resembling an idea. And that’s just me, tee hee.
Useless to complain, though, thought Mary, moving with a parodic wiggle in her hips, deliberately, toward her friends grouped in little clumps, twos and threes, around the booth where Trip and Joe and Amanda sat, the center of the social circle. I complain but I’m here, and I’m here because I’m attracted to the idea of here, which is never the same as the dull tangible thing itself. You’d think I’d have figured that out by now.
“You know that thing where you can’t figure out whether you’re looking at the front of a building or the side?”
Joe was looking expectantly at Trip as Mary slid in next to Joe, wordlessly, smiling.
“I think that’s déjà vu,” replied Trip, his eyes on Mary.
“No, no,” insisted Joe, “I’m pretty sure that’s not correct.”
“Check again,” said Trip, eyes still on Mary, blindly stirring the ice in his drink.
Mary giggled involuntarily. The table was covered in empty glasses opaque with smeared fingerprints, beer bottles with torn labels, a raft of discarded red straws, and waterlogged napkins. An abstract series of canals connected the various objects, and in the map of intersecting rivulets you could see mirrored at crazy angles the speckled ceiling tiles and the hanging plants like leafy spiders and the warmly orange ends of cigarettes.
“How’s the ankle, Joe?” asked Mary, the shadow of a smirk flitting across her face.
“Thank you for asking,” muttered Joe darkly.
“Do you mean in a picture?” asked Trip.
“Yes, of course, in a picture or a painting,” said Joe impatiently. “How’re you gonna get confused if you’re in the true presence of something and all you have to do is walk around and around until you figure it out?”
Trip sat silent for a moment, fingering Mary’s lips with his eyes. “That could either be trompe l’oeil or perspective, I’m not sure where you’re going here.”
“This is an important discussion,” deadpanned Mary. “Important boys are having an important talk about important things. I am so turned on.”
“Isn’t it enough that you’ve crippled me for life?” bleated Joe.
“The only way to placate the goddess of boredom is with alcohol,” said Trip. “Who’s drinking what?”
Strange how he keeps looking at me, thought Mary, as Trip got up from the booth to buy drinks. Not strange, because I cultivate the looks from him and every other, but strange because he seems to get the joke but not care, like there might be some actual feeling behind the kneejerk hormonal response to my flirty façade. A year ago there was some life in me that might have responded.
“Does anybody have a cigarette?” she asked.
Joe reached wearily into his shirt pocket and tossed a crumpled pack onto the table. The weariness, Mary considered, was an affectation to deflect his awkwardness at Amanda’s presence. I have some experience in that area, she thought, I know how it feels to have every heartbeat and the slightest gesture magnified a thousand times in your own eyes and ears. Where you wish you would just explode or disappear or instantly become much smarter and better-looking.
She extracted a cigarette from the pack and pulled it smooth between two fingers. Amanda reached across and clumsily tried to light a match for her, the sulfurous head of the match smoking but no flame appearing, probably because the matches had been sitting in a puddle of drink sweat. Joe took a lighter from the same shirt pocket and held it out for Mary’s use without looking at her. Token of his non-playing status, she thought, taking the lighter and applying it to the end of her smoothed-out cigarette. He thinks any gesture of kindness toward women implies interest, so he signals he has none. Which usually to me represents a challenge, except I don’t think so, pal. I’m all challenged out, at the moment, especially where Joe is concerned. Maybe it’s the stupid puppy love aspect of his Amanda crush that makes him pathetically unappealing, or maybe I’m just jealous, which I doubt. Most likely, and most depressing, is that I can see the hopelessness. Either she never responds, and he’s heartsick for a while but recovers and acquires a sheen of bitterness, or worse, she does respond, and they become a couple for a while, until the inertia of this place works on the centrifuge of love and the gravity of ego, or something, I’m not a math brain, and things fall apart and people get hurt, and never heal. These are the two available options, set in feldspar the day Joe decided some combination of physical beauty (and not to be catty, but please) and probably invented-by-Joe or otherwise mythological personality traits was the recipe for his own personal opiate of the masses.
Mary took a deep drag of hot smoke from her cigarette, exhaling noisily through her nostrils so that a focused light gray fume spread quickly across the table to envelop Joe, who pretended not to notice. She listened to the chatter of people around her, thinking she could distinguish simply by the pitch and speed of their voices the emotional content of the mostly superficial conversations. It’s never the things people say that carry the meaning of their words, anyway, she thought. Someone could compile a phrasebook with just the gestures people use in bars to express fear and desire, which are the root feelings of every normal exchange. I want you, say the eyes of one, darting from feature to feature of another’s available topography, while their mouth moves ceaselessly, like an insect eating. I fear death or intimacy or loneliness or the emptiness of existence, say the frantic hands of someone else, picking compulsively at the frayed label of a beer bottle. It’s an easy language to learn, I’m already pretty fluent, but I don’t have the energy to do the necessary catalog work. That might be something Trip could do, it’s not far from what he spends all his time doing anyway. She reached under the table and fingered the scar on her knee, smooth and glassy compared with the rest of her skin. Nothing ever pans out the way you think it will, thought Mary. But then it becomes something else and you forget how much you wante
d it to be the first thing. You get caught up in the nextness, the back flip of expectation over reality’s head, the nearing new day, all that totally insignificant loss. I should have clipped my toenails, for instance. What happens when you get distracted.
“And how are you this dark, cold, and lovelorn evening, Amanda?” asked Mary. Amanda suddenly found a pattern of great interest in the water that had dripped from the glasses onto the dark-brown varnish of the tabletop.
“I don’t know,” replied Amanda. “Good.” She drew a connecting bridge from one small roundlet of water to its neighbor with her straw. Wonder why I’m not scared of death, thought Amanda. I’m afraid of many things, including but not limited to large, creeping insects, severe thunderstorms, being made to look like a fool, being a fool, and rats, but I’m not scared of dying. I know that I will die, because death is the bargain we make with life, but the question that seems to obsess people about whether consciousness continues, or at least individual consciousness, and what form that might take, doesn’t bother me. Not because I don’t care, but because the answer either way is not very interesting. At least the answers I have heard. Most of us, around here, spend a good part of our conscious lives trying to become unconscious. What kind of consciousness is that? If individual consciousness does survive after death, I hope it will be better formatted than the present type. Or I hope you will be able to make better use of it. I hope you will have the chance, at least.