Apropos of nothing

In the suffocating dimness of the tavern — an establishment of such undeniable ordinariness that its very existence felt like a grotesque commentary on the futility of human endeavour — there sat William, or perhaps his name was not William at all, but something else, something more representative of his true insignificance. Bill or Billy or Mac or Buddy or some such. This detail, of course, hardly mattered. The name itself was as much an abstraction as the function of the beer before me, the mass of bubbles trapped in the bottle’s neck, their futile rebellion against the surface tension.

The place reeked of resignation, of mediocrity that had long ago been woven into the very fabric of the air — thick and viscous like the moment before an inevitable and meaningless bureaucracy consumes you. There were no windows, or perhaps there were windows, but they were so unremarkable that I could not — nay, dared not — notice them. Light came from overhead fluorescent lamps that sputtered intermittently, as if they, too, were caught in the gears of some unknowable system that had ceased to function years ago.

William, or whatever it was that clung to the edges of his identity, sat beside me at the bar, not speaking, only the faintest tremor of his hand betraying the fact that he existed at all. There was a question in his eyes, but it was not one he would ask aloud. It could not be. For the very asking would destroy it.

And, in short, he was plain ugly to me.

“All I want to do is have a little fun before I die,” he said, a statement that came with such violence, such force, that it rattled the few shards of equanimity I had left. His words hung in the air, fragmented, shifting like a vision of something that had never truly existed in the first place. They seemed to demand something — some acknowledgment, some response, as if his declaration of despair was a key to something greater. But I could only stare at the word “fun,” which, when it escaped his lips, became the very representation of all that was grotesque in the world.

What was fun? Was it the great longing that William clearly failed to articulate? Was it the futile, absurd cycle of our existence, grinding on through every meaningless Tuesday, hollow with the weight of a thousand unlived moments? The air between us grew thicker, heavier, and it became clear to me that nothing would ever emerge from this conversation. There was only the oppressive, crushing certainty that whatever we might call fun would be forever outside our grasp. Whatever its nature, he had clearly never had a day of it in his whole life. All I wanted to do, frankly, was to partake of a little myself. I got a feeling, I’m not the only one.

I glanced toward the window, if it could even be called a window — was it even there? I could not say. But the world outside was an indecipherable mass of uniformed individuals, each engaging in their repetitive tasks, washing their cars in a ritual as devoid of meaning as the act of drinking this beer that had no reason to exist except to fill the void. I imagined them, witnessed them — suits, skirts, shiny Datsuns and Buicks — performing the same motions in an endless loop, caught in the grip of an invisible lunchtime force they could neither escape nor comprehend. Then back to the phone company. The record store, too. And, yet, I found myself drawn to them, compelled to watch the absurdity of it all, as if by doing so I could somehow become untethered from it. But how?

The bartender, whom I am sure I could have identified if only I were able to make any sense of his featureless face, did not look up from the classified ads. His blankness was a mask — no more, no less — just another cog in the machinery of the world, grinding away in his muted, quiet way, pretending that his life, like mine, like everyone’s, had some rational explanation. It did not. None of it did.

William was peeling the label off his bottle, slowly, with methodical precision, as though this act, so trivial in its nature, held the key to unlocking the mysteries of the multiverse. He did not speak; he did not look at me. He merely shredded the label, which fluttered to the floor like a discarded thought. And then, as if guided by some unseen hand, he took a match, struck it, and watched it burn to its end. And then another. And another. His thick, trembling fingers seemed to wrestle with the inevitability of the match’s extinction, cursing it with a passion that could only be described as futile — an impotent rage directed at the uncontrollable, one-directional flow of time itself.

A happy couple entered the bar, dangerously close to each other in a way that suggested familiarity, or perhaps it was something more sinister — a mutual illusion, a momentary escape from the machinery of the world. They leaned toward each other, hands entwined, faces half-formed, lost in their own fragile cocoon of ephemeral meaning. The bartender looked up from his want ads. The world spun. The room followed. I like a good beer buzz early in the morning.

In this spinning room, time did not pass. It merely was. The clock on the wall, or perhaps it was a clock, continued its mocking tick-tock, indifferent to the fact that we, who were trapped within it, could no longer comprehend its purpose. Everything was a waiting, a slow, grinding waiting for something — anything — that might provide even the most fleeting illusion of release. But nothing came. Nothing would come.

Otherwise, the bar was ours. The day and the night and the car wash, too. The matches and the Buds and the clean and dirty cars. The sun and the moon.

And so we waited, watching bottles of Bud spin on the floor of a spinning room on a spinning planet.

I felt the peculiar sense that I had also been here before, many times, and that I would be here again, in this bar, with this Bill or Billy or Mac or Buddy, and the multiverse would stretch out before me in an unbroken line, its meaning lost in the folds of some unanswerable question.

Eternal beercurrence.

The beer before me, the bottle I suddenly could not finish, the label I could not touch, the match I could not light — all of these things circled, spiralled, danced in the viscous, oppressive air until the sun came up over Santa Monica Boulevard.