The Underground Bar

I was always in the corner. Life had put me in an unwanted place and in some people’s eyes perhaps I’d given up the fight. But the corner was a good place for observing things, so I tried to make the best of it. You can learn a lot about the world simply from watching, yet so many people are loudmouths, taking up space in the middle of a room, sprawling as much as possible, and they never notice that everyone around finds them intolerable. Some mistake that for confidence, or power, but I’d say it’s mostly stupidity.

Stupidity is what got me here – although not my own. I suppose it could be said I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and now I’m in the corner of this bar – observing. Nothing ever starts until 5 p.m., when the bartenders start polishing glasses and stacking up glistening bottles of spirits, all a kaleidoscope of colours and shapes. Perpetually dark, the bar is underground, with walls of deep blue velvet, and no windows to admit gasps of dying evening sunlight. Light hangs from the ceiling in the form of reflective cut stone, tear drops dangling from sculpted iron. The iron stretches like spiders’ legs from webs of spindly chandeliers, and on each table flickers a fat, waxy candle.

Then there are the customers. Some are random, like vapid bumbling tourists, or grey businessmen looking for a quick drink before returning home to yawning domesticity, but there are also regulars. There’s the fat man who slams his palm on the bar for a double smoked whiskey, or the very young fellow with the gaunt, hopeless face who never says a word. I relate to hopeless-face quite a lot; perhaps at some point life just kicked him so many times he forgot how to smile, or the feelings that could lead to such a phenomenon. No one ever asks him his story.

No one notices me either, or at least not very often. So what else can I do except wait for her to arrive?

She usually arrives around 8 o’clock, with the slow confidence of a prowling alley cat that knows its streets. Tonight she’s wearing a little black cap that sits askew atop her glossy raven waves, and a fitted black jacket with a velvet trim. She paints her eyebrows with punctuated glamour and her lips are deep blood pricked burgundy. I can’t help feeling a tiny swell of excitement when I see her; it’s all I look forward to every day.

As despairing as my situation is, at least I see her. And she does notice me. Sometimes she will blow me a kiss or send me a little wink. She is the only one who seems to care. Maybe she grasps the knowledge that my life drags on an endless prison? It used to be very different. I miss the things I used to see, the places I once knew. My body aches to its core, and I feel old, and as soon as she turns around to order her drink, the spark dwindles and I’m left yet again with nothing except my thoughts. I clench and unclench my stiff hand wrapped in tape, like an injured prize fighter. I’ve lost this match; I can merely hope for next time... but what if “next time” never comes? Maybe the vague promise of next time is the sole grain that keeps a lot of us going.

Tonight, a man in a long charcoal coat comes into the bar to talk with her. He kisses her on both cheeks, and carries a spiral bound notebook under his arm. One thing I know, is that she’s a struggling actress, so he could be a director, or a playwright, or perhaps neither; they could be lovers. I feel suffocated, cramped up, trapped. Oh, to be this handsome man, coming and going as he pleases, the breeze flapping his coat around his legs, a seemingly endless world at his feet, even smelling the light perfume of the dark woman’s hair. I miss freedom, even things so simple as the texture of stones under my limbs. Everything is flat, stagnant.

Before he leaves, he says, “People only see fragments of you, yet in their minds they build a holistic concept. Naturally, it’s almost always very wrong.” Her eyes dazzle as he presses the notebook into her hands, and disappears around the corner stairwell.

Then, I feel a slippery nudge. I’m shocked back into my own reality, as another prisoner climbs on top of me, out of the way of that massive fleshy hand that sometimes reaches into the ceiling of water above us. I brace myself, immobilized by fear and tape, pressing my face against a wall of glass. But it is not me they take away this time, and I return to watching the people at the bar.

This short story is dedicated to a lobster I saw in a bar in Prague... I remember watching him through the tank and feeling such a deep sense of unfairness about his life... so I wanted to immortalize him in a little story.