by Dara Horn
Most of the visitors to the paradise bar drink cheap pints of newspapers and magazines, microbrewed advertising copy, and, lately, Internet screeds on tap. Some like fancy anthology cocktails, readers’ digests of different works that make them seem more sophisticated than they are. Others prefer the hard stuff that needs no particular vintage, tossing back murder mystery shots and swilling down romances and thrillers that leave them plastered on the floor for days. Of course, many of the not-yets take one look into the bars of paradise, at the frightening effects of stories on the soul, and vow to stay sober until the day they are born. They hold themselves back for twenty-one days, and then they are born contented, living their entire lives on earth without ever thirsting to read. But others—the thirsty ones, the ones who aren’t satisfied with the meals at the museum and long to wash them down with something bigger, bolder—are drawn to the bar, believing that behind the crowds swallowing cheap words, there might be something worthy of their not-yet lips. And those are the ones who meet the librarian-sommeliers.
It wasn’t long after his twenty-first prebirthday that Daniel met Rosalie, an already-was who worked as a sommelier at his local paradise bar. Turned off by the crowd of natals at the counter—one of whom had just vomited the plot of an entire soap opera onto his celestial barstool—Daniel had wandered off into a corner, a shady nook of the kind many paradise bars make available to the most antisocial bibliophiles, though he didn’t know that he was one yet. Rosalie found him there, sulking, his head in his wings.
“Would you like to see the wine list?” she asked.
“Wine list?” he repeated, confused. He was, after all, new.
“Let me show you,” she said, and landed softly at his side. He watched her fluttering beside him. The presence of this mortal felt different from the other bartenders, he noticed. It reminded him of the attendant at the bathhouse: stern, stirring, somehow slightly too close. His wings tingled beside hers as she unfurled a long scroll before him.
“You’re one lucky guy,” she said. “We’ve got the best wine list this side of paradise.”
Daniel looked over her shoulder, squinting to see the long list of names in the bar’s low light. “Don’t tell me you’ve never had a drink before,” she scolded. Daniel shook his head shyly, but something told him that she already knew the answer. For a moment, she held his wing and looked him in the eye. “You’re going to want something sophisticated, I can tell,” she said. “I would recommend this one, for starters.” He followed her fingertips along the scroll until she pointed at a name that he couldn’t read in the dark. “Sound good to you?”
“Sure,” he shrugged, feigning nonchalance. But a fire had entered him. A thirst.
“I’ll bring it right up,” she said, and flew away.
A few moments later—moments that felt to Daniel like eons, and perhaps they were—she returned from the cellar, landing in his nook with a bottle in one hand. “Here it is,” she said, and brandished the bottle’s glowing label in his face: Genesis.
Clueless, Daniel nodded as she poured a few drops into his glass. “You have to drink it slowly to appreciate it,” she said. “A lot of people just chug it down and miss the whole point.”
He raised the glass to his lips and sipped the liquid carefully, holding it under his tongue, unsure of what to expect. At first it was sickly sweet, reminding him of some of the more cloying paintings at the museum—darkness, water, light, earth, sun, moon, stars. Typical. But then it heated up, then burned with spices, then turned creamy, then grassy, then suddenly flattened into a bitter tannin. Just before he swallowed, it reared itself up into a final burst of flavor, fruit from the tree of knowledge, which fruitfully multiplied before flowing down his throat.
“This is very good,” he muttered a moment later, and poured himself a full glass.
“This whole vintage is exceptional,” Rosalie told him as he slurped it down, swallowing a vast flood of pure rainwater and the chalky remnants of a collapsing tower before bracing his stomach against the flinty tannin of a man holding a knife to his son’s throat. “You’d be surprised, though. There are people who take one sip and spit the whole thing out.” Daniel kept drinking, relishing the spicy hints of jealous siblings on his tongue. “Would you like to try some of the other varietals? Same vintage, different mouth-feel?”
“Mm,” Daniel murmured. He had begun drinking directly from the bottle, curling up with it like the baby he was about to become, dreaming sweet drunken dreams of eleven stars and sheaves of grain bowing down before him. A hint of flint again as jealous siblings attacked on his tongue; then a soft note, later, of sour grapes.
“Great, I’ll go bring up some more.” Rosalie flew down to the cellar and then back up, carrying several bottles with her that she put down on the table in front of him—Exodus, Isaiah, Ezekiel. “Watch out for this one,” she said, holding up a bottle of Ecclesiastes. “It’s kind of a downer. But still worth a taste. Eat, drink, and be merry.”
Daniel popped the cork and poured himself a glass, spilling sour vanities into his mouth, one vain sip after another until all was vanity. As his eyes grew dim, he agreed with Rosalie. A downer. What really made him dizzy, though, was the peculiarly balanced sweet-and-sour flavor, the time to be born and the time to die, the time to weep and the time to laugh, the time to mourn and the time to dance. And the residue at the bottom of the bottle was particularly hard to swallow, when he tasted the hint that of the making of many books there is no end, and that much study is wearying of the flesh. It was a little too heavy, and made him thirsty for something simpler. He reached for the bottle of Psalms.
“Want a new glass?” Rosalie asked.
“Renew it as in days of old,” he said, and hiccuped.
Before he knew it, his cup had runneth over.
IT WASN’T LONG before Daniel became a regular at Rosalie’s bar. There were some bottles he would request again and again—he was fond, for instance, of certain appellations of Talmudic vintage pertaining to life before birth (they had a comforting, familiar flavor)—but it was mostly Rosalie’s tastes that guided his literary binges. She had a particular fondness for Hebrew and Yiddish vineyards, which was convenient, since few other patrons at the bar chose to sample those languages. Even the true bibliophiles usually stuck to the products of presses from the larger, more standard book-growing regions: English, Russian, French, Spanish, German, Arabic, Chinese. The Yiddish vintages in particular Daniel could count on having all to himself. It wasn’t long before his reading habit became the only thing on his mind, turning into an addiction. He would sit in school waiting for the day to end, then race to the paradise bar. Rosalie was almost always waiting for him, ready with a glass of poetry on the house.
Sometimes they would get together for a few comedies, and he would become so drunk that he would stumble out the door still laughing. Other times, she would pour out tales of lost love and tragedy until he was crying into his glass. More often, sweet laughter and bitter tannins would blend in the same cup, and each alternating sip made him thirsty for more. She never provided a bottle without commentary or at least an opinion—a sommelier’s note on the vintage, or a suggestion on how to enjoy it. One day she stood beside his table as he sipped a fresh, fruit-tinged poem from a bottle by Itsik Manger:
Eve stands before the apple tree
The sunset sky is red.
What do you know, mother Eve,
What do you know of death?
Adam is gone for the day
In the wild wood alone.
Adam says, “The wood is wild,
And beauty is all that’s unknown.”
But Eve is afraid of the wild wood.
She is drawn to the apple tree.
And when she doesn’t go to it,
It comes to her in dreams.
“This is just the kind of thing that everyone gulps down wrong, if they bother tasting it at all,” Rosalie told him as she sampled a sip from the copper cup around her neck. “People t
aste the apple flavor and think they’re drinking juice. They say, ‘Oh, it’s about sex.’ No one ever understands what happened with Adam and Eve. That story isn’t about sex. It’s about death. The forbidden desire isn’t love or lust—you can get that stuff anytime down at the public bath, even on earth. The forbidden desire is immortality.”
“Hm,” Daniel murmured. Intellectual discussions, he had noticed, tended to sound more profound when he was drunk. He took another swig and finished off his glass, then poured himself a refreshing sip of Psalms. “Yet mine is the faith,” he slurred, “that I shall behold the goodness of God in the land of the living.” He belched, then snored.
Rosalie laughed. “Don’t count on it,” she said, and carried him out.
BECOMING A BIBLIOHOLIC changed Daniel’s eating habits. Prior to that, he had loved to eat, but now he lost his appetite. Long periods passed when he wouldn’t even taste a work of art. Every painting, no matter how delicately seasoned, soured in comparison to the drunken rapture of reading. Instead he would drink himself into a stupor and then wander into the bath, where he would try to loosen his hangover by throwing himself into a chilled sulfur tub of loneliness. One morning, after drinking a particularly disturbing bottle whose town full of dead people left him feeling wasted and worthless, he skulked off to the sulfur tub and soaked there for a long time, sunken and shivering. But then Boris discovered him, and slapped him across the face.
“Daniel, what are you doing? Get out of that bath,” he shouted.
Daniel lolled in the cold, smelly water. The slap barely registered; he was still drunk. “Why?” he muttered.
Boris leaned over him, his wings folded at his sides. “Because if you stay in there, your skin will soak up the stench, and then when you’re born, no one will want to go near you.”
Daniel slouched down farther into the pool. “I don’t care,” he said.
Boris watched him for a moment, then snorted. “That’s your problem,” he snapped. “You don’t care. I haven’t seen such a stupid not-yet since your uncle was born. Now get out of that bath.”
Daniel still didn’t budge. Boris stood for a moment, sighed, and then reached down and hauled him out of the water, carrying him over his shoulder to a warm steam room. He sat Daniel down on a bench near the vent that billowed white clouds of trust, leaving a faithful film of dewdrops on Daniel’s wings.
Boris sat down and leaned toward him, then pinched his own nose. “Ugh, that explains it. I can smell Lamentations on your breath.” Daniel’s face began turning red, though perhaps it was only from the steam. “Don’t tell me Rosalie has been getting you drunk.”
Daniel looked up, his surprise dulled by the roar of words between his temples. “You know Rosalie?” he asked.
Boris snorted, then evaded. “It’s not healthy to drink all those books. It’s like all the not-yets who sit in the warm pool and never try the other ones. You’re going to be born addicted to those stories. And then you’re going to go through life thirsty for things that don’t exist.”
Daniel inhaled the clean, pure mist and wailed. “Trust me,” he sighed, “if you knew what those books were like—”
Boris sighed, a deep sigh that sucked in some of Daniel’s trust, making him wonder what Boris really knew, whether he might not have had a few drinks himself, long ago, before he was born and died. “What I know is that you haven’t been eating,” Boris said.
Trust seeped back up into Daniel’s nostrils. “There’s nothing worth eating anymore,” he cried. “Once you’ve had those books, all the landscapes and portraits and photographs in the whole world to come just seem like—nothing. Even the photographs. Even the abstract ones. Even the surreal ones. Especially the postmodern ones. Nothing happens in them. They’re just—” Daniel began, and choked.
“But don’t you see?” Boris demanded over Daniel’s sobs. “That’s the whole point: you are what’s going to happen in them. After you’re born, you’re going to be hungry for those things, those people and places, and then you’re going to look for them, and see them and find them and put yourself into them. The artwork is just the settings, or the other characters. You have to make the plot yourself.”
Daniel sobbed even more. “But how can anyone make a new plot?” he sputtered. His breath reeked of Ecclesiastes. “One generation goes, another comes,” he rattled. “Whatever already was, will always be, and whatever has already been done will be done again. There’s—there’s just nothing new under the sun.”
Boris sighed. “You need to eat,” he said.
Daniel groaned over the rumbling of his own stomach. “But it’s all just—I don’t know, vanity.”
Boris put his wing around Daniel. “How about this,” he suggested. “Why don’t you ask your curator to bring you something to eat that will complement what you’ve been drinking?”
Daniel lifted his head, feeling his hangover subside. “Do you think it would help?”
Boris looked at him, his eyes gleaming under his bald forehead. He embraced Daniel around the neck until Daniel leaned toward him, closer to the steam vent. “You won’t know if you don’t try,” he said.
Under other circumstances, Daniel might have noticed that something was up. But at that moment his nostrils were clouded with deep breaths of trust, and he could see nothing but the brightest corners of paradise.
THAT EVENING, DANIEL entered the museum for the first time since he had started frequenting the bar. The daily specials hanging on the gallery walls nauseated him, but he forced himself to stay. As he sat down at his usual table, the already-was Daniel arrived. The mortal curator grinned, and placed that night’s menu in Daniel’s not-yet hands.
Daniel flipped its pages, searching desperately for something that would whet his appetite. After many long moments of searching, he saw something that at least didn’t disgust him, though he still couldn’t imagine swallowing it. It was a large painting of a bride and groom, black and white except for a large red angel holding them together. A tiny figure, a not-yet figure, was embedded in the bride’s cheek.
“Listen,” Daniel said to the curator, his wings brushing against the menu, “I—I’ve been drinking—”
“I suspected as much,” the curator said with a smile.
Daniel felt himself turning redder than the angel in the picture. “No, I mean, I’ve been drinking the Song of Songs. Do you think this would go well with it?”
The mortal Daniel squinted at the red angel in the painting, then at Daniel’s reddened face. “Maybe,” he conceded, “but I have some better suggestions. May I recommend a few photographs tonight?”
“Photographs!” the natal Daniel shouted, trying not to retch. He pounded a fist on the table. “I’m sick of them!”
“These are different,” the curator vowed. “Chef’s special. They’ll pair well with the drinks.”
“Fine,” the not-yet Daniel growled, putting his head on the table. And the curator hurried off.
When he returned, he presented a platter of two photographs that Daniel had never seen before. The first one was of a bride and groom, though nothing like the ones in the painting. In the painting the groom was short, almost shorter than the bride, a slight man with thin, uncertain hands. But the photograph’s bride was dwarfed by the groom—a giant man with enormous hands, a thick chest, and flaming red hair. The bride seemed a bit stunned by it all, her dark eyes glowing under brown curls. In the other photograph the same bride and groom appeared again, this time held together not by an angel, but by another man—a thin, pale man with dark hair and glasses. The bride and groom looked straight at him, but the man between them was watching someone else behind the cameraman, someone invisible. Daniel took a bite of the photograph and was surprised to find that it was sweet. He chewed thoughtfully for a long while, relishing the taste, feeling nourished for the first time since he turned twenty-one. But as soon as he had swallowed both of them, the old loneliness and hunger returned.
“It isn’t good enough, is it?�
�� the mortal Daniel said. His voice was heavy, almost broken.
The natal Daniel swallowed the very last morsel and sighed. “No.”
The mortal Daniel frowned, but the natal Daniel noticed his eye sparkling, and listened. “Maybe what you need is some real food,” he offered. “Not art. Food.”
Daniel looked up, astonished. What did the man mean? “Real food like what?”
“Real food like fruit,” the mortal Daniel said.
The natal Daniel snorted. He could hardly contain his disgust. “Fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil?” He laughed, a hard jaded laugh. “I’ve had that a million times.”
“No, not fruit from the tree of knowledge,” the mortal Daniel said. He leaned down to Daniel’s ear and whispered: “Fruit from the tree of life.”
The not-yet Daniel’s jaw dropped. He scanned the curator’s face, but couldn’t detect any signs of joking. Trust from the afternoon’s bath still lingered in his own nostrils. He shivered, and shielded his face with one wing. It was a long time before he could speak. “We’re not supposed to go there,” he breathed.
The mortal Daniel laughed. “Says who?”