by Jay Smith
"Like a what?"
"Like Doctor Who."
"Like a doctor who… what?"
"No, the television show...Doctor Who."
"Oh. Yeah. Never watched. No idea what you're talking about."
He was not of the body. "Well, I was dying. So, the doctors pumped a lot of radiation into me because, why not? I was gonna die anyway if they didn't, right? The radiation killed the bad parts of me, but also killed a lot of the good, but not enough of the good that I died. When it was all over, the bad parts grew back good and the good parts grew back good and everything was just slightly different."
"What does that have to do with Doctor Who?"
"You said you didn't know anything about it so I tried to explain it a different way."
"Oh. So, everything grew back, but you no longer like alcohol...so isn't that growing back bad, sorta?"
"Well, I'm not dead. I think that's good."
"I see your point. Dead men don't tip. Would you like something to eat? Fillet Mignon? Chicken Marsala? I like to pair our house root beer with the Ukrainian caviar served on Siberian wheat crackers."
"You're just suggesting items by price point, aren't you?"
"Hey, it's all inclusive and you have access to the real chef and the best parts of the menu. Just think of it as the finest dining by the sea at an 80 percent discount and no tipping required…well, there is tipping, but it's based on the..."
"Yeah, I get where you were headed."
"The salt air means you don't have to season the food as much. You get the taste of adding salt, but the head chef tells me it's just the sensation of the palate and the oily-factory sensation...the nose sense stuff. So, it's like low-sodium eating."
"Full of advice tonight, Murray."
"I am, sir. Here's some more: the tiny black eggs are amazing."
"Cheeseburger. Medium. Steak fries. Let’s keep it simple."
"That’s easy. I’ll call over to the kitchen. But. I’m still…"
"What?"
"This whole ‘not drinking’ thing bothers me."
"We’ve established it won’t have an impact on your tip."
"It is my job to promote hedonism and self-abuse. I see this as a challenge."
"Well carry on, then."
He stared at me with the concentration of a guy working out the actual retail price of the second showcase on The Price is Right. "What wine or spirit couldn’t you stand before you stopped standing everything else?"
I thought about it for a moment. "Rice wine. Hate the stuff."
Murray nodded, held up a finger to give him a moment and disappeared under the bar. A moment later, he produced a small, round bottle with a label covered in Japanese script. He poured a cloudy white liquid into a square tumbler and slid it across the bar to me. "Try this," he said.
"I just said I hate this stuff," I reminded him.
Murray had a tall brown bottle with the word "SEIMEI" written in Sharpie over top of a worn and yellowed label full of Japanese characters. "Got this for one of our older customers who liked aged saké from a particular toji…or brew master. He won’t miss it. He’s dead. I’ll miss Mr. Yukahama, but I think I’ll miss his gratuities most of all. Anyway, if your body regenerated and you hated all the other boozles, maybe it means you like what you hated?"
The liquid had a murky, golden color like storm clouds obscuring a sunrise. It smelled of island fruit, not chemicals but freshly cut oranges with a hint of cinnamon, I think.
Murray explained how Mr. Yukahama was a crazy old man who liked rare steak almost as much as he enjoyed tiny, plump island girls with small feet and big eyes. He slid the square, wooden cup across the bar at me. "One sip of this will bathe the drooping spirits in delight, beyond the bliss of dreams."
"John Milton."
"Who?"
"That quote. John Milton."
"Huh. I thought I stole it from the old man who used to work here."
"Maybe John Milton worked here."
"Really?"
"No, not really."
By all estimates I should have hated the drink. But it was wonderful. Within moments of drinking in a small shot, I felt majestic and expansive, relaxed in my own skin yet prepared to unleash hell upon the world. It was a good and hearty beverage I could picture warriors imbibing before...
Someone caught my eye at the other end of the bar. I sat up in my chair quickly to get a better look, but there was no one there. I took another look around and I’m sure Murray thought my actions a bit odd, but he didn’t let on. Eventually, a nice, warm wave of sorely-missed intoxication fell back over me, and I settled back into my chair. Murray seemed pleased with himself.
"Listen. You mind watching the bar for a minute? I gotta duck into the back and refill the cheap tequila bottles, if you get my meaning."
I picked up the bottle of seimei in a toast to indicate I was quite content. I settled into my high back chair and watched the golden liquid fill the tumbler as my mind drifted toward the roar of the ocean.
"So." The word felt like it found breath just behind my ear. "Rough night, huh, Winston?"
He was behind me, behind the chair and out of view and I had no desire to meet his gaze. I should have known he’d catch up to me. I let my defenses down. I didn’t hear him approach, but a man doesn’t survive five years in the Afghan mountains by drawing attention.
I didn’t turn to greet him. I just kept staring into the square glass. Reflected in it was his shape, standing still under swaying palms. "Park. I didn't expect to see you outside the hospital."
"You don’t even seem happy to hear from me."
"Why are you here, Park?"
"Because you haven’t opened the package I sent you."
"Why don't you just tell me what's in it?"
"I can’t do that, Winston."
"Why not? We can talk about it over a drink."
His reply contained a low growl. "Because I can't. You know that."
He moved off to my right toward the center of the bar. I looked up from the glass and into the distressed metal backsplash behind the bar. While not the best mirrored surface, I could see the warped reflection of myself and the chair with Parker’s shape outlined behind me.
"I don't want to know what's in the package."
Again, silence. I could feel him just behind me. I resisted the urge to turn around and just have it out. Parker was committed to his enterprise. He was always about following the rules, keeping the pact and seeing things through to their bloody end. It pissed me off that I knew what he was thinking even after all these years and I had no way of convincing him to just… let it rest. "Right. It’s the fucking game again. I have to play it through, even though you’re…" I swallowed the last word in a mouthful of saké.
He moved a step closer to me and then another. I felt a cold chill under the skin around my neck, like Parker was reaching out to me, his fingers just millimeters from my flesh. "I've been planning this for months. For us. You owe me your attention if nothing else."
He stood directly behind me now and the chill of it rolled over me, causing my body to shiver and my teeth to chatter. It didn’t scare me. It made me angry.
"How helpful was your dungeon master bullshit over there in the sandbox?" I turned in my chair, prepared to face my old friend. "Parker?" There was nothing there to yell at.
"Mr. Casey?" It was Murray, back up front to scare the piss out of me. "I thought I had another guest. You okay?"
"Cell phone coverage sucks down here," I replied without a hint of a cellular device in view. As lies go, it was a poor one, but as transgressions go, a man talking to himself in a bar and then lying about it was probably not the weirdest thing in Murray’s experience.
Murray decided it was easiest to just agree with that statement.
"So. Are you gonna open the package or not?"
I looked up at Murray who waited expectantly for an answer. He was eavesdropping on my conversation with Parker. Did he see him? Did he see Pa
rker’s face?
No. No one ever saw Parker on his visits.
"What did you say?" It came out stronger and darker than I expected and hit him unprepared.
"I asked, ‘you wanna open another bottle or not?’ Though, the way you’re draining that one, you might wanna slow your roll there, gaijin."
I realized that in my conversation with Parker, I put down at least two inches of the four in the bottle of seimei. It was starting to swim across my frontal lobe again in a loving, warm kind of way that I quite missed. I said. "Got any more of this gold stuff?"
"I’ll check in the back," Murray said as he turned toward his little store room behind the backsplash. I took a breath and turned to where I knew he would be standing.
There was my old friend Parker again.
I remember Grant Parker back when he was just a lanky kid. I remember him long before he went to college to become an officer in the Army, before he won his silver bar and took his first platoon to Kuwait in 1990s, before he took a bullet in the hip for one of his soldiers in Basra, and long before he earned his second silver bar and command of a company of military police in Afghanistan. He was the kid who turned the monkey bars on the school playground into a medieval keep under siege. He and I were part of a group of misfit geeks huddled together in my basement playing Dungeons & Dragons or Twilight:2000 over an entire weekend.
I remember Grant Parker blooming into the handsome jock and student leader who still had time for his buddies on the Island of Misfit Geeks, setting up treasure hunts in the acres of empty woods behind his house, and the fight between him and Nate Hamm over Nate’s underage drinking and the rift that sent Nate out of our loyal group of five. I remember the Grant Parker who, after receiving decorations for heroism and valor, sent me a hand-written letter from a combat zone telling me that I was the bravest man he knew for fighting The Monster in my blood.
And I remember Grant Parker’s blackened corpse standing at the foot of my bed the night after he died in Iraq, one blue eye fixed on me while the remains of his shattered face smoldered and cast embers onto my linens. There he stood once again, as he was in the end, saying what he said to me then: "Winston. It is time to really live. For I cannot really die until you do."
His words took me away from the beach, away from the feeling of victory and freedom I already seemed to be taking for granted. The world went black for a moment and I caught a glimpse of the things hiding in the flickering torch light waiting for me to invite them to take me away.
"You’re dead already. That's the line you're going with? A bit melodramatic, isn't it?"
"You're the writer, Winston. What am I supposed to say?"
I took another drink.
Flakes of ash fell slow to the white sand, bits of Parker's uniform and charred flesh started a ring around his body. "Just open the package I sent you. Get it over with."
He moved to the bar stool next to me. His one good eye -- piercing blue and gentle in contrast to the rest of his shredded remains -- would not look away from me. I could smell gunpowder and grilled beef. Looking left, I could peer into the bone ashtray that once contained Parker's brain. The inside of his skull was peppered by the blackened bearings and screws blown from the pipe bomb that killed him.
"All great adventures start here." His breath reminded me of half-cooked beef left on the cold grill overnight.
"Where?"
"A tavern. All great adventures begin in a tavern. You said it yourself."
"That was a long time ago."
"The Prancing Pony. The Inn of the Last Home. The Horse and Groom. That place Nate wrote into our Twilight:2000 campaign..."
I smiled. "Kozlov’s. Where the strippers were all Soviet asp-throwing assassins."
"Right. Well, here you are: the start of your adventure. Up to you to make it great."
And he vanished.
It was rare to see him fade away and the act strained my eyes. I had to blink away the blur. When I opened my eyes and focused, the space where Park had been opened to a tall mirror on the wall at the end of the bar. I realized I had affected the hunch of the power drinker, curled over the bar and over my drink as if afraid someone might try to snatch my bottle. I turned away from the image and looked through the torchlight at an empty beach. Moving presented something more of a challenge than usual. I was moving as though on the water, carried on fluid motion.
I moved, but I felt little resistance in my muscles, just the sensation of movement. It felt like my head remained motionless and the world moved to put Murray in front of me. Everything left a trail of light and sparkles as it moved. I had to steady myself in the chair a few times until the world stopped.
The smell of meat returned and I turned back expecting to see Parker again, but it was Murray. He smiled and pointed to something on the bar that rose to the center of my blurry view: a plate containing a huge hunk of meat on a seeded roll. Lettuce and tomato. A big pickle. A healthy pile of seasoned steak fries. The world moved just slightly to put each item in the center of my view.
My sudden hunger made everything around me more vivid. I only stopped when the plate was empty of everything but sesame seeds and ketchup smears.
Murray stopped back. "Good?"
I made some kind of noise that answered in the affirmative and he took away the remains.
"The Big ‘C’ didn’t take your appetite, looks like. Did it do anything else? Give you super-powers?"
Waves crashed behind the sound of a gentle acoustic guitar. The flicker of torchlight made Murray's eyes twinkle. My catheter scar itched. Philosophical and a swelling with drunk-pity, I confided in my bartender. "I don’t feel anything, Murray."
"I told you, that rice wine is potent shit."
"No, it’s not that. I stopped caring. About a lot of things."
"Make sense. A lot of people are like that these days."
"No, that's just selfish and ...another, worse word for selfish... entitled. I spent nine months in a hospital. A lot of that time I had absolutely no control over myself, when I slept, when I ate, when I shit... Meanwhile, life went on and everybody who visited me brought all that polluted, pointless crap in with them from the world. Politics, the weather sucks, the Eagles can't play for shit this year... who cares? My blood was on fire, my body burned from inside out with the kind of pain..." I stopped talking, knowing I was headed for a tangle of words and emotions that never managed to come together clearly to anyone. The silence at the end of an unfinished sentence like that always seems to explain to whatever level people could best understand it.
"Anyway, I came out not caring about gas prices, traffic, the new electronic toy coming out, movies, sports, life... marriage, kids, friends.... work, oh work was a load of fun to re-visit. Nothing is important. Nothing excites me, Murray. It's like that's the part of my brain they took out. Show me a king or a commoner and I'll give equal shits about both which is to say none." I took another swig for punctuation, not realizing - or caring - that the taste had left the drink.
"You're a modern-day Diogenes, then?"
"No. Maybe I'm just a sociopath now. But way to use that degree in philosophy."
"Communications." I took another bite of my burger and chewed.
Murray seemed to come to some decision about me because he put his hand on his hips and he rocked back on his heels as he fixed me with this weird, but knowing look. It reminded me of a stage musical at a moment when someone was about to break into song.
"What if I told you that I could change all that?"
"Change my cynicism?"
"Mr. Gautreaux said you were a guest of Grant Parker's. Have you seen his place?"
"Whose place? Parker’s?"
"Yeah, we put you in his bungalow out in the village."
"How do you know Parker?" My brain floated about like a docked boat in white caps.
"He’s another exception to that club of assholes I mentioned before. Great guy, awesome tipper. I tended bar at a few of his parties down here. And
you, sir, have his pad all to yourself. And if you play things right, you don’t have to stay all to yourself."
"You know…Parker’s dead."
He nodded with sincere remorse. "One of the greats."
"He come here a lot?"
"Twice, three times a year, especially when he was coming off one of his deployments. He used to take a long weekend break between events. And then he stayed two weeks before shipping out to some dirt farm in central Asia. I didn’t think the military was so generous with leave, you know? But when he was here, man, it was one hell of a party, let me tell you. They bought out the whole village."
"The military?"
"I guess so. Lots of people showed up with him. They weren’t all allowed in here. Just him, a couple officers as guests, maybe a writer or two. Oh, man the stories they told."
Murray poured himself a tall glass of whiskey. "I won’t tell if you won’t." He raised the glass. "To one of the good guys."
I raised my wooden cup and we emptied our vessels to his memory. It seemed like a good idea at the time. And still did when I repeated the gesture twice more. Murray joined me again but with only a shot of something red.
~
I can only recall flashes and feelings ten minutes after tapping the second bottle of seimei. Murray and I talked about the new Star Wars movies. Murray redeemed his geek cred by speculating that J.J. Abrams hijacked the Star Trek franchise to make a $150 million audition film for directing The Force Awakens.
Later, we shouted and stumbled through the lyrics to our favorite Schoolhouse Rock songs and I noticed a woman sitting near us at the bar. I think I'd ignored her because I thought Parker was lurking nearby. I didn't even notice Murray serving her the drink she held in her hand.
At some point during the hooking up of words and phrases and clauses I turned to see Halle Berry with Betty Boop eyes, the smile that connected you to her even though she was the kind of beautiful that was usually kept behind a velvet rope or on the other side of a glass teat. She leaned against the bar two stools away from me, turned toward Murray and me, smiling and sipping from a clear glass with a lemon slice on the rim.
She captured my attention like a shooting star and suddenly Murray was the only one listing the major conjunctions in song at the bar.
