by John O'Brien
So in the face of the power outage, Miles proceeded directly to scotch. Osmond watched him from Osmond’s booth where Osmond had only now opened his eyes and was pretty sure something was up but, having missed the news as spoken, had no idea what it was.
“Miles,” said Osmond with some new uncertainty rearing a nose over the old uncertainty.
“Power’s out,” said Miles, weary enough to not give a shit about parroting Fenton and weary enough of Osmond to not give a shit period.
Scary stuff, and what’s more: Osmond knew he was right about Miles, the backing away. Sense it that quick, one thing he was good at. Power’s out.
Osmond wanted out of this knowledge, all of it, just as Miles wanted out of Osmond at the moment. He, Osmond, good at the game or at least not without practice in the tenuous affairs of men-friends and surrogate big brothers, tacked eyes down to the bar, tried hard not to quiver frightfully as he took his liquor. A medicinal excuse, always. For him the best. The fat of his belly and his revolvers and the booze, all warming, cooling each other. Warming, for now.
Disgusted, Carey was beyond the point at which reasonable men hold their tongues. Up for hours, watching them all salivate in their sleep, hangovers percolating. Yet all that careful observation and winning the I Found the Power’s Out award still goes to a drunk. He wanted so much to. … As much as Carey wanted to embrace the apocalypse this little stuff kept getting in the way. So much happening with even more about to happen, a world in flames, and all he could think about was how unfair it was for bachelor number 3 to have made this discovery before he did. So dearly did he deserve to fuck that waitress Jill, and all he could think about was the obfuscation that went with such an act. Find a light switch and you’re a hero; fuck a girl and you’re a creep. Go figure. Bang bang.
Rang another shot from outside brought a smile to Jill’s face—her new habit, did it for some time, she guessed, before realizing it in the mirror one morning, smiling involuntarily (and only lightly) every time the sounds of violence crept in from the outside. Tick tick. Bodies like a countdown, must be outpacing births at this point. Sort of nice in a way, if you think about all that new birthing opportunity being made.
Extra room, she always thought even though everyone told her it was silly, the room problem. Now her bathroom was dark, had been for the longest time. But if she stood still long enough in here she could begin to see a shadow of a reflection (now that’s silly) in her mirror. Power’s out, she’d heard Fenton announce. Yesss, well, it’s about time one of them found out. Likely she would have told them eventually, say if some catastrophe had arisen (no, that’s silly!), but best let them discover this kind of thing by themselves. Sure, she could have told them hours ago. But kill the messenger and all that-if Jill had popped forth with this news they would never have forgiven her for it. Like getting pregnant and taking up the room, in a way it really is all her fault, the bad stuff. Makes sense, and not so bad in the mirror now. Okay: the lighter it gets, the more you can see.
Langston, getting wiser by the second and well convinced by the wetness of the ice hours ago, could nonetheless feel a pang of distress to hear his private power’s-out hypothesis confirmed so directly and finally. It would have been better to be wrong about this, but then it would be better not to be blind, too. He wondered if the fires still burned outside after all these days, if the power was really out. Lights out. Lights out, a phrase he may have lived or merely gleaned from fiction, prison movies, tight discipline, boarding schools, military schools, or just his dad. His dad was the type to say lights out, yet Langston can’t remember him ever actually saying it. That phrase, almost like life, so tightly woven into his memory it felt, yet he had no recollection of ever hearing it spoken by any live person. A play maybe, still it wouldn’t matter. Just like TV, also out. Ironic, this lights-out thing, an augury of sorts, if it had ever been uttered, that is. Well it must have been uttered, so it would count, dark man.
Busboy shoulders up to the bar with a thirty-five percent attitude, slips onto the stool to the right of Rudd, who is, to put it mildly, somewhat surprised, is, to put it tipsily, somewhat drunk, to put it surprisingly, somewhat pleased, drunkenly, mildly surprised, ready for a go-around, an unpredictable inventory. Do I talk first or let him? Supposed to know. Something about the advantage. Seize the Day or Tip Your Hand. Impossible contradictions, fit every situation, like astrology or the Bible, cover your ass well with all these republican aphorisms, he had to admit. Useless when the power’s out.
“Buy you a drink?” he said smilingly.
For a moment there was a blip, a dysfunction in his drunk. Fact is he felt a loss of control, so normally, familiarly imposed. Something might be lost, panic, bottles, a search for the appropriate republican aphorism. Once saw that mayor in California on CNN, years ago during a brush fire, of all things, places, in Malibu. Guy stands in front of the mansion skeletons and speeches, it’s time to pray. Guy was a drunk too, if Rudd had it right. A businessman, made money, enough to get elected. An answer. An aphorism, time to pray, stretched. Well thanks for the good word, Mayor, but I’ll still be sleeping in cousin Reginald’s guest suite tonight, the bore.
“When you go crazy?” he seemed to want to know, the busboy.
He’s already drunk, Rudd could tell right off, not so much because he knew this kid—he didn’t know him at all of course—but because he was intrinsically alert to any state of intoxication. It would have been an issue, this kid availing himself of community intoxicants, be they wine or window wash, especially at this late date, but for the remarkable fact of his communication. Rudd thought, let it slide, and sliding himself, said, “But I guess you know where it is,” meaning the intoxicants, the more traditional ones.
The busboy responded with a quizzical snarl, like Where what is? meaning the crazy. He looked from Rudd to the bar, the bottles, the tequila, maybe, well. Rudd reached, had to stand but finally grabbed for it, got back with a glass and splashed some in. The kid glanced at it and waited … for what? Rudd to drink it?
Busboy left it untouched, left altogether, Rudd alone at the bar. Fuck him, thought Rudd, downing the tequila. Yecch! That’ll teach me.
People shuffled and trundled about the room, gravitating toward then often away from the bar but preponderantly toward, looking like a time-lapse security video played out on the television monitor so conspicuously absent from their mid-to-late morning, gone the way of the pleasantries and puffy-face, disheveled-hair smiles and greetings that would accompany such a group were they in a more benign setting. Say a college reunion weekend. A convention. Christmas at home.
Rudd, already at the bar, caught the movement of the tequila bottle in his peripheral vision, but when he looked right at it it was still. Then his glass moved-not much, maybe just a millimeter or so—but again: when he looked right at it, nothing. Onward into the still of his moment the bottles just beyond his direct stare began to tease him, jiggle and dance, move out and back. For a while they did it one at a time but it soon degenerated into a group effort, and Rudd was reminded of apes touching the monolith in 2001. They played with him in a friendly enough way and he was drunk enough to not feel the panic that such events might warrant. He found he could control them, look away from a row of bottles deliberately as sort of a tease, getting them to do their thing and look back real quick, catching them. Fooling them. It got to be kinda fun and after all … why not? It got to be so that when the moment waxed not so still and he could feel the motion and We’re-Here-edness of the others his first impulse was intrusion. They want to fuck with my head, he thought, and realized too late to test the limits of his new game that the bottles had, with military precision, stood down.
“Langston said he saw the bottles moving,” a voice from behind, feminine, Jill’s.
“What!” with a start and turning his neck so fast that it moved within his collar slicker than a ball-bearing primed with sweat and grime and ten days’ self-righteousness Rudd yapped.
�
��What what?”
“What about Langston? I mean he’s fucking blind! How could he see anything, much less the bott–” He turned quickly back around. Again that grease. Bathe. Drink more. Do Something!
“No shit, Sherlock,” she said, and it amused her to feel so young, to say something you’d say in high school. She giggled.
That giggle burned the back of his neck. How much had he said? Did he tell her he’d seen bottles dancing around the bar like he was some fucking old wet-brained DTer chained to an iron bed in a 1940s evils-of-alcohol movie? Was that why she was laughing at him?
“I mean he’s fucking blind!” came an echoing roar from down the bar, an outraged Langston, either at the remark or the truth of it, would evidently have a few things to say about what he’d heard.
“Langston,” said Rudd, for lack of a better idea.
For the same reason that Osmond rose from his stool and lumbered over to the suddenly diminutive-appearing Miles, took the latter in his big bear arms and the man embraced never looked less likely to speak.
Thus the collision of smart-ass and fat-ass, thought Carey, and no matter who knows what first, I’m pretty much the god of this place. I mean really. And seriously. Thus he spake in a whisper of utterance, “I, God,” and he pondered the little universe of colliding particles before him. Of all present the room was best-by far-understood by him. Him. That would be the definition.
Carey looked up to find Fenton staring right at him.
Not much of a man, that guy, thought Fenton, just like me. He was pretty sure that his dad wouldn’t give a guy like Carey the time of day. Even Rudd couldn’t stand the guy. Fenton felt in a way cast by his dad and painted by Rudd, but he felt nothing for the shifty-eyed little creep with whose eyes his were locked. Now said creep looked down, breaking the lock, and they both knew that meant Fenton won; so that was one at least.
Fenton tossed back his share of the waning supply of J&B, not sure if he needed to want it or wanted to need it. A right of passage, like newlyweds smearing wedding cake on each other’s faces, it made him want to back away, to run and wash it off instead of laughing stupidly at himself along with the rest of the badly dressed room. But you gotta go with the bride and Rudd had fairly ordered for him how many days ago: from now on we’ll both be drinking like men, son; no more of this soda pop.
Pop pop pop pop. More guns, real or merely in his head, he couldn’t tell anymore. Fenton licked the sweat from his upper lip and hoped no one had noticed him tremble, drank more scotch and heard more pops. All the time now, they scared him. He felt for his Glock, caressed it like a penis (a scared kid, thunder maybe, he remembered, at some point inevitably he’d discover his hand on his dick, sometimes squeezing-pop-sometimes so hard that it hurt and that would be what tipped him off). How had he come so far? Arrived at this point in time from some … well, if not happier then at least safer point in time. The whole thing was a wrong turn, a mistake he’d made sometime long ago. Probably something small, tiny, infinitesimal, that set off the chain of events that brought him here and deprived him of his real life. Now he found himself growing numb—no, more like suddenly numb. Just yesterday he stepped away from the bar and into a pocket of still, stale air that happened to be whatever temperature is exactly neutral to one’s body; that is this place in the room was of such a temperature so as to feel neither hot nor cold, not the slightest bit. It felt like nothing, at once alluring and repellent, that sensation. Lack of sensation. Pop pop pop. Novocain in the mouth–pop–residually lingering as one limps from a dentist visit–pop pop–is what he was reminded of by that air pocket. Sip a cold soda, unsettling as hell, good to have a brain at a moment like that to tell you everything’s okay; otherwise you’re a cat with tape on its paw. And still, with the soda, you gotta keep it on the feeling side of your mouth. But like with a soda Fenton couldn’t resist stepping into that pocket of air yesterday. Not so much unsettling, it turned out, but it did break his heart. Pop.
Jill, still laughing, albeit more inwardly, standing near Rudd, noticed the momentary eye contact between Fenton and Carey. Convinced it had something to do with her, she knew it was crucial now that she appear very much at ease with the situation. Play it cool and ride the laugh-whatever it was about-was her strategy. She tried desperately to remember whom in this room she had fucked. But answers such as those always hurt too much on arrival, like a baby would, she supposed, so she’d long ago learned to pretend that much of her life hadn’t happened. A defense mechanism of sorts, it left her with only causeless effects, monsters’ shadows against the wall with nothing there to cast them.
Outside before the apocalypse, which is what she’d secretly decided was occurring, Jill had taken to spending most of her time in her apartment. Some new place, she’d try now and then going out with a friend, would be a ticking clock for her, counting down the weeks, days, or hours until she did something to herself in that place, usually with the assistance of some willing and not-so-caring accomplice. Then would begin the slow burn, hotter and deeper each time she went back to that place, until the inevitable time came when it was simply too painful to return. Thus again and again she decreased the size of her universe, eliminated options. And as they waned, those options, and she was left with fewer and fewer painless locations she began to notice that even these latter had taken on a patina of the burn, a fine ash, due to their very exclusion. The ephemeral nature of any place free of past terrified her. She felt as though she were standing on a sinking island, and it was then that the fabric of her master plan for herself was revealed. Jill knew that she could never kill herself; the next best thing was to systematically render the world untenable. It was time to cut deeper, and she began inviting men home with her and soon found herself sleeping on her own sofa.
Ironically it was because she’d taken to picking up every available shift that she-for better or worse—was holed up at Tony’s now. She wasn’t scheduled to work at all the day the apocalypse started, but she’d planned on it just the same and sure enough one of the waiters asked her to cover his shift at the last minute. He’d decided to go camping after all. Jill wondered where he was at this minute, if he and his friends had made it out and if so to what? A safe place? There would be trees and maybe a forest, where that waiter was, but no food and other problems that seemed now about as relevant as the problems of the people in the third world. For Jill, at that point, the day the apocalypse started, Tony’s was a safe place. She’d taken care not to spoil it–work made it relatively easy–and she’d come to (at that point) regard it as a haven of sorts. Ironically.
But the apocalypse changed all that and made her ruin this, her last refuge. No longer could she get wrapped up in the petty complaints of some jerk or jerkess fresh out of assertiveness training with nothing better to do with their time than contemplate the subtle variations of shades of pink in the center of their steak or the degree to which a glass should be polished or the oxidation of coffee, the likelihood that all decaf comes in green-topped carafes, that all service personnel are driven by the need to deceive. These things used to cloud her mind and shield her from actual problems and real pain. It was good, her being here, so as long as her luck held she strove to keep it small and pure, to not spend any time outside of Tony’s with the people she knew inside of Tony’s, to resist the occasional invitation to a dark corner of the kitchen from the beckoning finger of the occasional heterosexual waiter. It all worked so well. Then the apocalypse made it impossible for her to go on like that. Even before it was too late she knew it was too late. The moment things started to fall apart outside she searched herself for an appropriate response inside, and when she couldn’t find one she searched for any response. That she found. It didn’t take long to realize that every relationship in this room was about to change drastically and there was no escape. She wasn’t about to wait around for things to sweep her along when she had the means to control it all right from the start. She wasn’t about to wait around for the silence. These gu
ys would take any coffee at any temperature from any carafe and be glad to get it. These guys would be too wrapped up in their developing agendas to think twice about coffee or who brought it to them.
But that was good. But that was bad. She didn’t know. She never had. Jill thought it best now to move gently away from Rudd and to keep laughing but not talk to anybody as she made her way to her bathroom because it would be best now to get a look in the mirror and not talk to Rudd or the other men was what would be best now though it seemed that he was annoyed and seeking an explanation. “He’s blind,” she probably said or at least thought and wondered how long before even her bathroom was a place she couldn’t go. She could take him there now. Or somebody else, somebody who’d not had her yet. If only she could remember who was left. Ask them, they would know, but then they might not go. If it came to that. Or giving head in the bathroom. Her bathroom. Get a grip, give her a handle on the day. They’d always do that. They wouldn’t care at all. She could be a legend. She could be a joke to them. Become something. Then go out for a walk and become something else.
As Jill walked by him, giggling and on her way to the ladies’ room, Rudd almost said, I know he’s blind. But it seemed petty and she was upset about something despite her laughter and it might be best to leave her alone for now. Rudd wanted badly to share with someone the phenomenon of the dancing bottles, and Jill would be the one to share it with. Her laughter notwithstanding, he was pretty sure that he hadn’t mentioned it to her-but then he was pretty sure he’d seen bottles dancing around on the bar. Intellectually he knew it wasn’t a likely occurrence and that it would be a good time to arrest his senses and consider how much of this was about alcohol and how much about the demands and pressures of the situation. Jill, being a woman, would be the choice to confide in. Less of a chance of open ridicule or even concealed contempt, questions and doubts about his leadership, his manhood, and his right to carry a gun. That laughter was a weapon, intellectual and notwithstanding.