Over the doorway hung a carved wooden sign of an elephantine pint glass, black nearly to the rim. Flanked on either side, two huge green clovers stretched outward, as if to burst into the four corners of the earth.
THE PUBLIC HOUSE
He’d passed this pub for years and was always taken with the carefully carved still life above the door.
–How about this place, Thom?
–The Pubic Louse?
They both smiled.
–Right.
Thom brushed the hair from his eyes. He’d worn it short in high school, but other guys on campus wore theirs long, let it go wild. Deliberately bad rat nest heads of long hair made them cool, and more importantly, made them appear older, so he’d given it a go. Raymond cut the ignition. As he tucked the keys into his pocket, Thom swore he saw a butterfly vault out.
*
–Can I start you out with some drinks?
–That’s a good place to start.
–How about you milk us two Guinness from the tap over there?
–Very well.
–Sure thing.
The waiter turned back toward the bar, and Thom followed Raymond’s arms, followed the stretches of his skin to his eyes, searching for a signal of some kind. When he panned across his face, Raymond was already grinning.
–I don’t think…
–C’mon, it’s just a pint. It doesn’t even count.
He chuckled as Thom’s brow compressed into fleshy panels. The waiter returned a few minutes later and positioned dark, shiny pints in front of each of them like two huge rooks. He couldn’t see the palm of his hand through the glass. In a cosmos of bubbles, the atoms of the drink fizzed ebulliently as he brought the glass to his lips.
–Wait.
Raymond motioned for him to return the glass to the table.
–It’s not done! Watch!
Indeed, the glass was alive. Pinhole bubbles rained from an emerging layer of cream floating on the top of the glass. It grew darker, and soon a completely black glass sat before him, defiant in its fullness. He couldn’t see the bottom. In the air, in the night, in this room, Thom slipped easily into a little dream, like slipping a few pennies into your pocket, where he was the size of a matchstick supinely descending the glass, staring at the white film overfilling his eyes from above. If the glass were the night, that wet, black velvet canvas, then all of the light in the sky had been embroidered into a perfect white circle above. If there was a heaven in the universe of the glass, it was surely among that fat, creamy cloud.
–Wow.
Carried in the cosmography of the foam, he noticed the swoop of a full-bodied shamrock crowning the glass. His father nodded; Thom lifted the glass to his mouth, parted his lips and sipped courageously on the sweet-bitter.
–Do you like it?
–Yeah. It’s heavy.
–It’s rich.
–I’m not exactly comfortable… I thought you weren’t really…anymore?
–Do your old man a favor and enjoy it. Enjoy talking. How are classes?
–Sure…um…I’m taking this literature class. These poems we’re reading are…heavy.
–Do you write your own? Poems, that is?
Thom looked around the room, sipped a little sip.
–Yeah, maybe. Mostly, I’ve been thinking about old people and what they think about the young, the forever…foreverness of youth. I want to write a story or something about that.
–Wow, a writer in our midst!
–Do you know what midst means? The real meaning?
–What’s it mean, Thom?
–It means middle, it means in the middle of.
Raymond shook his head approvingly up and down. They sipped beer, dropping kidney‐shaped puddles onto the table.
–You’re in the midst of a good education, sounds like. We should have you down writing copy at the station. Ad guys make some mon-ey.
–I’m not a—I’m not a shill. I just thought…
Raymond waved his hand. Thom’s mouth closed.
–Listen though, Thom, I want to share something with you…sort of.
–What’s that?
He reached into his pocket. His closed palm stretched across the table with a new ease and loomed over the glass. It opened and a plop was followed shortly by a ping.
–What did you just do? What was that?
–Finish your drink and you’ll see.
–I’m not sure I really want it now.
Raymond’s lips receded across his face and formed a small fuzzy smile just as the waitress arrived.
Her face appeared to be separated from her body, floating above it like a flesh balloon, a bit too full for the carriage below. Red ringlets, the color of the filaments that push teakettles to a boil, curled back and reunited at her nape. The topography of her small features eased over her face like a coating of milk. She looked thin enough to spin.
–Hi there. My name is Samantha, and I’ll be taking care of you this evening.
*
Soft light unraveled from the ceiling as Thom, freshly deputized by hormones, gobbled down a herculean, sappy gulp of Guinness as fast as it would move.
–And for you, sir.
Samantha’s huge black eyelashes flittered as she leaned closer to Thom, and held him in a kind of webbing, pinning him to his seat. Every bone in the catalogue of his skeleton shivered.
–I’ll a have…
Menu spun. Eyes squinted. A foam mustache claimed his upper lip.
–I’ll have…
He could see her without clothes. Her nipples were pink dimes, and his mouth was a parking meter. Her shallow bellybutton punctuated her tidy abdomen, but Thom had visions of run-on sentences, run on and on and on and on, on her hands and knees, her stomach seemed almost as inviting as the veiled opening beneath it. For a second, wavy lines of steam appeared to be rising from her skin, groggily, all of it, all rising and fluttering, anesthetizing, all opening…
–I’ll have this burger cooked in Guinness.
–How would you like that done?
–I like things done well.
She nodded and suppressed a smile.
–Very well, gentlemen.
The menu she collected was like a belt pulled slowly through the loops of his fingers.
Time slowed way down as Samantha walked from their table to the kitchen. Eventually, Thom’s attention returned to the glass.
–So, what exactly am I going to find in the bottom of this glass?
–A useful trick.
–What kind?
–The kind you can really only pull off once.
–How does it work?
He sat upright in his chair, shifted his weight in his seat.
–First, you meet a woman who enjoys a Guinness. They’re a rare breed, but keepers, every one…practically every one.
–Okay.
–Immediately, fall madly, madly in love with her.
–Rrrrright.
–Then take her out some night, after all the stewed guys have been thrown out or carried home. Walk up to the bar. Buy her a drink.
When nobody’s looking, especially her, carefully drop what’s in the bottom of your glass, into hers.
Thom pulled the pint away from his lips.
–You want me to be a date rapist?
–A what?
Food plates touched down. Samantha crowned the table with a bottle of ketchup.
–Would you like another?
She reached for his glass, backsplash shreds coiling a smidge above the base, but he pulled it against his chest.
–Actually, I’m still working on this one.
She nodded, her pink lips momentarily drew closer to his as she leaned in and out from the table. Sliding away, knee-high black boots sheathed her striding pins. Rosewater ghosts of skin, so sweet, her wet metallic redolence hung in the air before collapsing onto the floor in her wake. Thom pulled the blushing ghost of her body into his lungs, away from everyone else and swiveled back to his father’s awaiting stare. His eyes were trained on the nearly empty pint glass. Slightly buzzed, he grabbed the base of the glass and held it momentarily under his chin.
–Buttercup.
Raymond’s lips fuzzed out at the edges.
–If you’re lucky, it won’t clank around the bottom of the glass until there’s just one swallow left.
He tilted the glass as fingers parted the blackness, swished in cool spiritualmud, and struck something solid.
–And if you’re really lucky, after she picks it up…
Between his forefinger and thumb, he produced a diamond ring covered in beer. He wiped the ring with his napkin. Raymond’s fingers unlocked, trembled forward slightly, and restored the ring to Thom’s control.
–Are you proposing to me?
Raymond’s smile was reproduced on Thom’s face.
–I want you to keep this, for the future.
–I’ll lose it.
–No you won’t.
–I’ll sell it.
–If your mother didn’t, I’m sure you won’t have any retention problems. Besides, she only returned it to me because I promised I’d give it to you.
–I still don’t want it.
–Well, you may down the line.
Eelskin sliding on eelskin, the wild game of her flesh and boots, her flash and blood, continued as Samantha returned to the table.
–Can I get you gentlemen anything else? More—another Guinness?
Thom dropped his eyes, inventoried the greasechoked ruins on the table.
–I think we’re all set for now.
She handed over the check.
*
The flimsy, brass-colored hinges rattled along the doorframe, but it didn’t give way to the impatient patron outside.
–Occupied.
Thom turned back from the door to the mirror. He’d been in there too long. He’d walked his father to his car then back, ran back really, to the bar and tried to conjure some useful excuse for doing so. Class was going to start soon. He’d even done the reading on Festinger’s Congestive Disconnects, was it? What’s a Wednesday night class, really? In college you’re expected to dissolve once-a-week classes now and then. He unlocked the door and walked toward the bar.
Samantha lifted the tapkissed Guinness from the bar and Statue-of-Libertyed through the crowd. He followed her movements from across the room and struggled to push his gaze toward his shoes as she approached. It was like holding someone’s head under water. Cutting the crowd open with each stride, she snipped and sliced through the bar, stretching pint after pint from the stalwart taps, upstretched golden levers, rigid spitting spindles behind the bar; each step was a narrow, triangular sin, coiled and obscured only by the long glossy boots sheathing each leg.
He could move, it felt possible. But to be ensnared in the rippling wave that surged from her with each step then sucked into the riptide between strides and smothered by her bloomsy perfume as it spread, mouth to floor, to just sit there and take it, be hauled in for once, necksnapped from the tug, taken in and consumed, plucked from the earth, sucked down to the marrow…
Thom ordered another and watched her move through the rest of her shift. The line of her lipstick was still sharp, reapplied perhaps, and that attention to detail was irresistible. She disappeared behind the swinging door to the kitchen. In her albescence, Thom’s body slackened, and he sunk into his stool.
When she returned moments later without an apron, Thom was shifting in his seat, head spun to apprise the crowd, and he didn’t see her approach. She took the open seat next to his; she was hard angles mostly, that could carve into the wooden stool like a carefully arranged collection of planes. She had practice, of course, but when she sliced her legs into a cross and snapped her lighter ablaze in unison, he almost exploded. Before her fingers tapped the charred traces of tobacco from her cigarette, a glass of Guinness appeared under her chin as if it had sprung from the well-lacquered wooden bar she leaned on.
–Don’t worry…
She leaned in and patted his arm. Thom froze.
–I don’t think it’s that terribly creepy that you’re still here.
She inhaled. She exhaled. She turned back to Thom, who remained silent and could have stayed suspended in a block of ice for the rest of human history.
–You look familiar. You’re in my psych class, no?
He nodded. She talked. She lit another. They skipped class. Her tongue was an icepick that opened up the evening.
Evening out his coaster, he lowered the glass from his lips, and it fit underneath exactly. Lingering froth, the vestiges of fallen stars, was unacceptable, needed to be taken care of at once. Shot glasses, fallen shell casings, guarded his pint like chessboard rooks. Thom stared across the room at the booth he’d sat in the first time he’d been in this bar. An old Rudolph ate a burger alone, dripped mustard on his shirt, ordered another round. The giant black pint and clover caboodle had been replaced by blue neon lettering:
CURLY’S PLACE
Unaware, his fingers tapped at the roses behind his coat.
–Samantha?
He raised his glass, but she swung her eyes away, slippery through the room, and pulled a pen from her apron to recite the specials for another table. The lugubriousness of lubricity. Glass in hand, he shuffled toward the bartender.
–Another?
–Yeah, yeah.
The lever bowed toward Thom, toward the cornermuttering late afternoon bar, and released its allotment of cold black relish into the glass.
Samantha approached and continued to avoid his stare. She leaned over the edge of the bar and rolled along her stomach like a rocking horse, feeding the order to the bartender
–Sloe Comfortable Screw. Gin and Tonic, Bombay. Melon Balls. Two.
–Hey, Sammy.
She stood still, her back to Thom, now whispering to the bartender.
–Sammy, hey; hey Sam. Gotta second?
Disengaged, the bartender threw over a glance, forcing a crumpled smile out of the side of his mouth. He slid a new pint under Thom’s nose as Samantha’s head swept around the room, scanning nothing really at all, only to avoid eye contact. Her brown bangs obscured her eyes. Finally, Samantha locked on Thom.
–Not now. I’m working.
She disappeared into the adjoining dining room. He pulled his glass along the bar, letting the rish pishh coat down his throat as he gulped back toward his table. An odd man with a pair of sooty hands sat in his recently vacated seat.
–How’s it going today, buddy?
Thom traced his eyes along the man’s blackened fingers, thumb, hitched Northbound along the lattice highway of his protuberant veins. He tried to count the sprouts of stubble poking out of his jaws, hoping the landmarks, the map of his face, the flatness of this grey reality, would alight some kind of glowing recognition inside the bog of his brain. His nametag read: MARK.
–I’m fine. Ah, how are you?
–Not too bad.
Mark leaned in.
–By the way, my name’s Mark. Mark Urie.
He pressed a darkened finger against his nametag and extended his hands. Incognizant, Thom hesitated, fanned out his digits to release his glass and managed a lazy shake.
–My name’s Thom.
–Of course it is.
Mark pulled a pack of smokes from the pocket covered by his MARK. From his pants he produced a lighter, flared, and set it on the table. Beretta Bikini’s return. A real skelly thing, could pass her waist through a needle’s eye.
Off to the side of the bar, Samantha was on a break dragging on a cigarette.
–Mark, have we met before?
–Never formally.
–What about informally?
–Yes. Twice.
–Yesterday?
–Yep.
Looking closer, it wasn’t a gun porn pin-up on the lighter at all. Thom pulled the thing closer to his face and traced his eyes over the curl of a long blade back to the haggard fingers and wrist bones of an Angel of Death floating above the ground.
As appeared to be his practice, Mark’s eyes scanned for something, found it, and then sent the words out for distribution.
–You don’t know how you got home last night, do you?
Thom shook his head and eyed Mark’s cigarettes.
–Man, you gotta take it easy on the tit.
Mark floated a short laugh into the air. Thom finished his pint.
–Those guys wanted to peel your skin back, especially that big one.
–Which guys?
–You know.
–Nah. What guys?
–You know, the four guys I just happened to scarecrow off you.
–Oh…
–Where were you last night? Where did you go?
Thom looked confused. He spun his head around; she was pulling in the last silver wisps of her cigarette.
–Mark, right?
He nodded.
–Can you just hang on one moment here? I just have to…
–Actually, no, I’m on a…lunch.
He swished his glass around.
–But, for what it’s worth, you kept saying: It’s all for you. It’s all for you when I drove you home. But I figured that was a bit of a lie.
–What?
Mark reached into his pocket. Thom watched as a diamond ring fell to its limits, sweeping out along the chain.
–You left this in my car.
The ring swung pendulously as Thom’s heart pumped hell back and forth through all the pinched tubing in his body.
–You should take better care of your shit, man.
–Sure, but…who are you?
–You’re Thomas Evans, of two-thirty-seven High Street, apartment eleven?
–Yes, that’s me.
–Ta da! Turns out I’m your paper boy!
Mark stood up, twisted like a weathervane, and seemed to float along huge quills of smoke toward the door as Thom shook his head side to side. Staring at the sudden familiarity of two olives, Thom spun light off of the ring, round and round, and imagined the stretch until Samantha had another break.
Samantha, a wave or so out in the bar at an empty table, dodged his stares and pried at her teeth with a toothpick. He nimbled through the crowd toward her as she wiped down the table.
–Sam. Can we talk for a second?
Her eyes were screwy, scrolling along, rubbing the ceiling like a tongue tracing and retracing a row of teeth.
–I want, I need to explain something from last night.
Her eyes compressed into two pinheads.
–I can explain the Jurry Wringer thing.
She turned a three-quarters view and then squared up.
–I really don’t care.
–Let me just say something.
He patted her hand oddly, too lightly with his palm, and pulled three roses from his coat.
–I’m sorry.
–You said enough last night. Or…don’t you remember?
Samantha pushed his hand off of hers and lifted a flesh colored bandage that coiled her wrist.
–I know we don’t really make a big deal of the day, but thanks for the…anniverse—
She didn’t finish the word, turned sharply, and drove forward into the kitchen. The door fanned out grandly, sweeping a long cool path, and behind it she vanished.
He reeled in the remainder of his pint and paced back, presenting it to the bartender for more.
–I think we’re all set for now.
–All set, huh?
–Yeah, all set.
He handed Thom the check. He kept shaking his head back and forth.
Thom placed the empty glass on the corner of the bar and thought about threading it with the rosestalk. Daisies in gun barrels. A smile, and his pointer finger extended. The clock was set fifteen minutes fast. Hurry up please, it’s time. Samantha remerged, and Thom dropped the roses on an empty table, but she kept staring up at the ceiling, her faced pinched tight. He put his finger to the glass and pushed it to the lip of the bar until it stopped, balancing on the edge, and walked toward the exit.
Door ajar, Thom yanked all of the air he could pry from the room. There was something familiar that lit up the antsy wicks of memory—maybe the matchbook sulfur spooking through the air, or the aching of the hormones of the drinkers as they weaponized their own guile. It was station after station of hope and grandeur, along the long track of the bar toward the door.
Soon his brain was like a birthday cake glittering with candles of recollection.
Just before he closed the door he heard glass shattering and then silence.
–Pricey Omelet, he thought, too clever for this drunk. But maybe that was the whole trick.
He pulled the crumpled check closer to his face, noticing that the bill seemed a little high.
High school is a nightmare from which we’re all trying to awaken. It locks in or locks out the dangers of the world. He drove with care, on too many drinks, trying not to think back, not let it take center stage. Orderly. He rolled under yellow and red lights, holding the steering wheel. Orderly. Orderly. Nothing like a spot on the x-ray. Nothing like snot in the soup. Nothing like a drop of blood baked into the bread. Nothing like a rip in the fabric, a place where things get through…
Nothing like this one night, this way back one, when the moon was a big glistening hormone bubbling up out of the sky, and Thom came home to a house as empty as a pie plate, looking for the pack of cigarettes he’d hidden in his sock drawer. Up. In the thrusting, electric way you move in a suit of young skin that’s made completely out of fists. Stairs. And through the tube of a long hallway and into the suburban vernal bedroom with all of the self-made trophies and catastrophes. In high school, you can fall down a well and people will stand over the opening just to shade the light. The television screen was a kind of martini glass that stretched open hangmouth, quavering in a fevered green glow. There wasn’t anything to do in the house, and Thom sank back inside himself, the way teenagers do when alone, gleefully slipping into shipwrecks.
But the suburbs are so often engorged and baited—what should be a honeypot is really a wasp nest. The suburbs are populated with taxidermized desire and narcotic blue loneliness. And Thom wasn’t alone in the house. Raymond was there as well, and he wasn’t alone. Suppose: everything probably all comes down to loneliness. When people are supposed to be around, they’re not. When they’re supposed be away on business trips, they’re not.
Thom skulked through inches and grew earward, closer to the bedroom door to listen in a little, just a little, open-eared and swallowing at the door, the way you might eavesdrop in on a whispered conversation searching for your name. Not particularly long, but long enough to know that there were three people in the house, and only two of them were related by blood.
Automatic door opened and closed.
–What—Oh fuck, what? Thom?
After the scream cleared and the scatter and piston-stomp of feet, the room smelled like honey, like oak, like pennies. His father slipped into the bathroom and shielded her from view. Thom couldn’t see her face, but in the mirror he could make out the craggy bumps of her spine ranging down her back and dissolving into soft, round flesh.
Under the big candle moon, inside the clammy hush of a soft October night, Thom walked for miles smoking cigarette after cigarette. He cast out wreaths and reaches, looming out lassos of smoke, so much smoke he could wrap a pale blue chain around the moon bouncing in the sky. He imagined with one hard pull, one big drag, he’d pull down the thing like a big cork and the hole would suck up the whole world, the whole of everything into the drain…
Orderly. Orderly. He rolled under yellow and red lights, holding the steering wheel, his fingers splayed.