Segment 7

         I don’t have eyes. I don’t have eyelids. But it’s dark and so I open them anyway. The world tilts like a madperson’s top and a sheer wooden cliff rises above me. Circular lights loom far overhead like descending saucers. There’s a cloud drifting across them, obscuring even their meager brilliance. I turn the head that I don’t have and find wooden roots plunged into the floor near me. Someone’s foot kicks out, goes through my face. My expression isn’t there. I can’t be surprised, because I have no heart. But if I didn’t have a heart, would I feel the way that I do.
         Sound lags behind sight. I claw my way to my feet, scrambling for invisible purchase with intangible fingers. I regain balance just as the air opens up and the sound assaults me, a rigorous clamor, hitting me in a dense mix. There’s voices and shouting and what might be music and the clink of glasses and maybe someone is coughing far away but I can’t tell and behind it all is a heavy pounding, the sound of riders approaching, even though there’s no horses in sight.
         I throw my arms up on the counter even as the colors of the world stop bleeding together and fall into sharp focus. Beyond me, a girl is mixing something in a glass in front of what seems to be a wall of liquor. There’s an ashtray poking out through the back of my hand. Someone puts out a cigarette through it, bits of flaming ash spray from the impact, fleeing villagers desperately trying to escape. But the island consumes, it’ll take everything you have. Someone slams a shot glass on the counter right next to me, but I’ve already realized where I am.
         A bar. Oh God. How did I get here? Have I become completely adrift now, merely floating from zone to zone, heedless of any kind of purpose. Maybe. But I’m just fooling myself, I never had any purpose to begin with. The mad thought occurs to him that if I start shifting randomly I’ll never be found but I don’t think I really want to be. I don’t think it’s possible. You have to be somewhere in order to be discovered. And I’m in between, the place where the cracks go when life is too much, making people trip, breaking your mother’s back. I remember the way my mother arched her back, when she moaned for us to take her out of the place, the way she lifted herself off the hospital bed, like she might break her body in two and let whatever was festering inside escape and let her be. Or that she might be able to escape, crawl out the chasm of her sundered stomach and fly free, upwards and toward whatever fate awaited her. I don’t think about my mother much, except when I can. I can’t get her out of my head now. Why am I in this place? What am I doing here?
         “Because this is how we do it,” the guy next to me says. I don’t recognize him. But I recognize the person he’s talking to. “You know, this is it? It’s not, I can’t get all dressed up in some goddamn suit and sit in a dead room and stare at her goddamn body and pretend that this is how I’m supposed to mourn.” A shotglass has appeared in his hand somehow and he drains it almost without pausing. He turns it upside down and plants it on the bar in a slow gesture that could almost be a ritual. “Everyone’s got to do it their own way, right? And people can look and say I’m not being respectful and all that garbage but I’m doing it the only way I know how.” He stares straight ahead, not even talking to anyone in particular anymore. “It’s like instinct, you don’t have to be taught. It’s written in us from birth, it’s this reflex we have, so we know what to do. Right from birth we know how to handle it.” His face has sunk lower to the bar. Someone hands him a glass of beer, the liquid the color of dead autumn leaves in sunset, too heavy with moisture to blow away. He sips at it, curses, turns back to the person he was speaking to, but they’re gone. A stranger is in the seat now, with his back to him. “We just tell ourselves that we have to be all fancy, make it all regimented, like there’s an instruction booklet on how to put someone in the ground.” He’s talking to me, but I’m not here. Some part of his brain is listening to himself and he shudders, taking another swig of beer. “All, all I need, any of us, all we need is company and a memory.” He lifts the glass an inch off the counter, pointing it toward the place where he’s thinks you’re hiding, safely placed until the day of judgement. I can’t tell him. That’s not the way it is.
         He’s still talking but his voice is falling out of solution, it’s precipitating into places that I can’t reach. I’m drifting, moving to my right, sliding around the bar. There’s no wind but I can’t stop. I can see now, the bar is full of us. Of your friends. Of our friends. All of them look older, since I last saw them, photographs aged through time, what a missing person might look like, if you kept looking for them down pathways of time and let them grow old in your mind. Outside the windows there’s nothing but night. The angle is wrong, I can’t even see the stars. The bar is filled with faces that all look like they know each other, that they’ve all come separately and of their own accord, united by some kind of secret grief now writ large and that this place is the last island that remains, that for as long as they stay here this is the only place in the vast emptiness that matters and nothing outside of it is real and it’s just them, locked in celebratory mourning, spinning into whatever blackness surrounds them all. The room doesn’t feel like it’s sliding with me, I’m leaving pieces of it behind. They’re doing this for you. They have to be. I try to linger over each face, read and memorize what I see there, try to fill in the gaps of where you’ve all been, before this brought you here. The last meeting. No. But it feels like it, caught in this confinement, that once it ends, once the sentence is up, all of you will go your separate ways and that will be it, to maybe pass each other on the street every so often, to make phone calls that never get answered, always never home, a bell ringing in the silence and never heard. No. That’s not right either. I make these things up, when I can’t think of anything else. For everything you were, you weren’t the core. There was no center. There’ll be other gatherings, for the same reasons, for different reasons. A wedding, maybe, soon, someone’s child, a party done just for the hell of it. Holidays. Just without you. I pass through a girl, sobbing into a napkin, while another girl rubs her back, trying to comfort her. We’re here, but there’s nothing we can do about it. The magnets are too strong, to drag us in. Even I’m here, lost as a ghost, in my own future. I see a glass half empty, sitting alone at the counter. Someone has propped a picture of you on it, a fairly recent picture by the looks of it. You’re at a party and you appear to be in the middle of laughing, perhaps the person taking the photo made a joke. The glass is sweating and some of the moisture is running down the photograph, it’s falling over your face, partially obscuring your features, making them indistinct and blurry, distant and murky. Someone reaches over and wipes it away with a sure thumb. Your smile doesn’t fade. But it does. Photographs dissolve, bodies decay, memories fade. I don’t want to think about these things. But they’re there, whether I want to think about them or not.
         The guy next to me is building a palace out of empty beer bottles. There’s something in his eyes that suggests he’s seeing right through me, even though I’m no longer here. “I can’t believe she’s gone,” he’s saying to a girl on the other side of him. Her eyes are weary and understanding and trying to focus away from this place. Somewhere across the room people are laughing and it’s that kind of situation. It’s not inappropriate but it hardly seems to belong. “I feel like. . .” he rubs at his face with the hand that isn’t holding a lit cigarette, “. . . half the time I’m trapped in this goddamn dream and the rest of the time . . . I keep forgetting, I do.” He looks at the girl and she has a hand on the back of his head, affectionately, like she’s afraid he might fall down if someone doesn’t grab him. His eyes seem watery in this place, but that could be the light, or the smoke. “My brain just sort of wanders and I stop thinking of her as dead and then, out of nowhere, for some reason, I just remind myself and it, it hits me all over again just like . . .” he stops, takes a long drag on the cigarette, lets it out slowly, with obvious pain. “I don’t want to think of her as gone,” he says, his lips barely moving, “but I have to convince myself, or I’m going to go nuts.”
         The girl mumbles something to him in his ear that I don’t catch. I’m not sure if he hears either, if it’s already lost. But maybe he does. His face changes, contorts. On the other side of him, around the corner of the bar, two people are staring into each other’s eyes, foreheads touching. They might be sitting on the same stool. It hardly seems out of place, in this atmosphere. He grins at the air suddenly, a false thing. “You’re right,” he says, blinking rapidly. I don’t recall her having said anything, just then. Response is lagging. “I never thought that either. I never thought it would come this suddenly.” His face consticts and he runs a hand over the smooth skin of his head, bowing his face down toward the bar. He’s put out the cigarette and grabbed a nearby glass of beer and his knuckles are white against the amber colored liquid. “I thought she’d get sicker and sicker and eventually just pass away, to give us all a chance to get used to it, so we’d get a chance to say goodbye.” He raises the glass to its lip, drinks hungrily. “Maybe this is better.” He frowns. “Maybe.” He finishes the beer, waves a hand to the bartender for another. As it’s handed to him, he shakes his head, trying to wake up from a place he can’t believe he’s at. “It hasn’t hit me yet.” He laughs harshly. “Can you believe that?” The girl makes a noise that might be agreement, or assent. I don’t recognize her, though I know him. A new girl, maybe, or one that he’s found tonight, who can give just the right amount of comfort. I can see how the lines are laid out, and I know how this night will end, when it does end. “I’m afraid of what’s going to happen, when it does,” he says, and his fingers intertwine with hers. “I don’t want to be around, when it does.” Another thirsty gulp of beer goes down into what seems to be some kind of abyss. “But I do want to be very drunk for it.” He sighs, swallows, fumbles for a cigarette again. “But I’m not sure if it’s going to-“
         ”What is this?” a larger man says, his voice projecting like something compressed. I don’t know this one, but he seems to know my friend. He slaps my friend on the shoulder, jostling him, nearly causing him to drop the cigarette. “That’s not how these things are supposed to go. If we all wanted to gather someplace so we could stand around weeping we could have used my lawn.”
         “Please, I’m not in the mood for this-“ he says, trying to wave the other man away. But it’s like trying to shift an oak, it’s going to grow wherever it wants to. Even if it’s in your space. The girl gave the other fellow a sharp look when he first appeared but now has a small smile on her face, watching the proceedings.
         “In the mood?” he asks, incredulous. He turns his body, addressing the smiling photograph, still propped in its place. “Did you hear that?” he asks it, adjusting it slightly, then readjusting it, so that it never really goes anywhere. Turning back to my friend, he rests one elbow on the bar and says, “What are you thinking about there?”
         “You know what I’m thinking about,” he shoots back. I’m between the two of them and trying to follow both their faces at once. It’s a game where the balls are whizzing by too fast, there’s too much distortion. This is what will happen, a few days after now, after it’s all over. I’ve been to the future, but never my own. I don’t know what to expect, other than what I see.
         “I do,” the other man says, with a laugh. “You’re sad and you’re pissed off that she’s gone but you know what . . . so is every single person in this goddamn place.” He laughs again. “I know, I can’t take it, it’s tearing me up inside, I want to go find God just so I can punch him in the face for doing this, for letting it happen.” The grin has never left his face. He might be insane, in a way I can’t explain. “And whatever I’ve got, you have it ten times worse. I know it. That’s why we’re here, to try to make it all go away.”
         My friend takes a long drink from his glass, never taking his eyes off the other man, waiting to see what he has to say.
         “I’ll tell you what I’m doing,” the other fellow says, drumming his fingers on the bar to the beat of some obscure rhythm. “I’m raising a glass,” he says, cupping his hands around something invisible, “and I’m trying to drown myself in her memory.” His face is almost luminous through the smoke tainted atmosphere, but there’s anguish hiding just under the surface, poking out through the icelake exterior of his eyes, a begging for it to be a month later, a year later, so that the hard part is over and he can consider himself healed from the giant psychic rent that has been torn in his brain, in his heart. “But it’s not enough,” he says, putting the imaginary chalice down, “and I keep inhaling the air, I keep breathing in the wrong parts of this place.” He points at my friend suddenly with a finger that is just barely shaking. “But you, you my friend . . .” and my friend stares back at him with a cockeyed gaze, warily and warning, “you’re drenched in her, you could drown us all and still have enough left to fill an ocean.” His voice drops, he slides forward. “And here you are, keeping it all to yourself.”
         “I don’t feel like talking about it, about her,” my friend says, looking away but only briefly. He hardly sounds convincing, but I think he believes it, somehow. The bar is a patchwork of faces and sounds, underscored by a thudding beat that emanates from some dark corner. Bartenders are running around behind the counter, trying to fill a need that can’t be sated. They’ve got the only medicine that they know, but it’s not what you need. People are closed off in groups and I hear your name floating around like a banner in the sky, hovering above everything without actually touching down. They’ve got you, but they don’t want you too close. “It’s too soon, everything is just-“
         ”I don’t want to talk about that,” the other man says, grabbing my friend by the shoulder again. “Goddamn, man, I know that she’s gone . . . I know all of it and I don’t want to hear anymore about it, I know all I need to know. There’s nothing more to say about her death.” My friend has been flinching with each word, tiny bullet holes shot straight into his brain, spasming with each reminder. “You’re the same way, I know it. You wouldn’t be here otherwise . . .”
         “I don’t want to be alone,” he might mutter, and the girl draws her arm around him tighter. He’s finished the beer again but hasn’t called out for another yet.
         “Nobody does,” the other man insists. “Not tonight. Death makes everyone alone and we’ve had enough of that. I want to talk about her, about who she was. That’s what I care about. That’s what I want to hear, and maybe I won’t feel like someone who has a hole punched inside of him.” He sits back, eyes dancing. “I know you have it, I know it’s there. Don’t leave us like this, when you’ve got it all in you.”
         Something twitches in my friend’s face and he says flatly, “She really did think you were a prick sometimes, you know.”
         The other man stares at my friend for a moment, then bursts out laughing, slapping his leg. The sound tries to permeate the room but the air is too dense, there’s too much chaff floating around in the air, absorbing it all, smothering it down. “Well that’s no surprise there, then. I probably was a prick, when we were together. It just came with the territory.” He glances over at the picture. “Though you could be a little snooty yourself there, missy.” He looks back over at my friend. “Sometimes I think she figured that I broke up with her in retailation for breaking up with you.”
         He smiles at that. “Now that was a long time ago.”
         “That was the first time I ever saw you cry, you know.”
         He recieves an obscure gesture for his statement. “Screw you,” my friend says. “You never saw anything. My mom told you, and she told her too . . . she felt terrible about it, when she heard. Bought me a teddy bear, so that I would feel better. She might have wrote I’m sorry fifty times on the card.”
         “Why she’d break up with you again?” he asks, probingly.
         My friend shrugs. “Wanted to see other people, I think. I don’t think she wanted to stay in a relationship.”
         The other guy laughs again. “No wonder she thought it was a setup when we fell apart . . . that’s basically the reason I gave her. She even said to me, did I ever tell you this . . . she said . . .” and he scrunches his face up and comes up with an affectation of your voice that’s surprisingly close in spirit. They knew you well, these people, in the latter days. To them, I’m the ghost, less than even a spirit. “. . . if you’re doing this because I hurt him, I didn’t mean it that way. That was just how it happened.”
         “Way to let her down easy there, tiger,” my friend jibes.
         “I told her, if I hurt you just a tenth of what you did to my friend, you’d cry until you had nothing left in you.” As an aside, he adds, “I was laying it on a bit thick, but I figured it was a worthy cause.”
         “Thanks,” my friend says, primly. “But you didn’t really need to-“
         “And that of course started a whole other spiel,” he breaks in, sinking into the story, “about how she hates getting close to people because this is how it always turns out and what a terrible person she is . . .”
         “You really touched a nerve there, huh?”
         “Oh believe me, I was trying to. When you look up crash and burn in the dictionary, there’s the two of us, at each other’s throats. As a couple we got on each other’s nerves way too quickly . . .”
         “This would go back to you being the aforementioned prick.”
         “Yeah, whatever. Shove it. Anyway . . .” he signals for a beer but fails to get the bartender’s attention. Shrugging, he continues, “it’s one thing fighting with your girlfriend, it’s another when you’re fighting and she’s turning it into just another example of how she’s a terrible person. It feels just cruel after a while.”
         “We never fought,” he says. “Not outloud. I hated to do it, I just didn’t have the energy for an argument, I’d shut up and she’d keep trying to pry, keep trying to see what was wrong. I was like talking to a goddamn wall after a while.” He laughs without sound. “I’d’ve broken up with me too, if I ever got the nerve.”
         “So after a few minutes of this, I, I really can’t take it anymore, she can’t even hear me arguing with her . . . I take her, I grab her by the shoulders . . .” he mimes the action, his hands passing right through me, touching me even when I’m not here. “I say to her, I say . . . listen, I’m the one breaking up with you . . . you’re supposed to acting like I’m the jackass, not the other way around.” He leans back and grins. “That’s the version the grandchildren will hear, at any rate. In actuality, it was a little more . . . colorful.”
         “I can imagine,” my friend says, raising an eyebrow. “So what did she do? Agree with you? I can definitely get behind that sentiment.”
         His grin never wavers. “Nope. She slapped me.”
         “Nice,” my friend answers, clapping his hands together briefly. “I guess that ended the conversation then.”
         “More or less,” he says, with a slight sigh. A beer finally appears, he drinks of it gladly, wetting his parched throat. “We didn’t see too much of each other for a while, the last year or so we’d finally been getting along again.” He turns back slightly toward the bar, then to my friend, glancing sidelong at him. “Did she really say I was a prick?”
         He laughs at that. “Did you really expect her not to?” He adds quickly, “It was more like a love-hate thing, to be honest. She enjoyed being around you, but in small doses. You drove her nuts and it was fine, when she was in a mood to be driven nuts. But that wasn’t all the time. I’m sure you can think back on what times those were.”
         “Say no more,” he says, holding up a hand. His face briefly becomes more serious. “She was glad she stayed friends with you, though. I think she was terrified that you’d stop talking to her.”
         “My reasons weren’t entirely altrustic, I’ll admit.”
         “You hoped she’d take you back. She knew that.”
         “Dammit,” my friend swears. “I guess I was pretty obvious back then, huh.”
         “Obvious enough that I saw it, and I walk around with blinders on all day.” The comment seems more self-aware that it might appear at first glance.
         My friend is cradling the drink in his two hands. His face appears in the surface of the beer, pale and wasted, ready to break up at any second. “In the beginning I thought we’d get back together if I hung around, if I was nice to her.”
         “Foolish boy,” the other man said.
         “Hey, we all have our weaknesses,” he shrugs, resting the beer on the stool between his legs. There’s another one on the bar that might belong to either of them. Perhaps the bartender is just saving herself the trouble. “And I told you, this was a long time ago. After a while, it just didn’t seem important anymore.” Looking through the glass on the bar, I see distorted figures. They don’t seem to be all there. But they are. My attention is drifting, my center of focus fading. I’m passing through all of you. “We’d joke about it every so often.” It’s almost instinct to throw up my arms as I slip through your body. But there’s no sensation, you might as well not be there as much I’m not here. I don’t even know if this is all really happening, I don’t know how much of the future is set in stone. They don’t tell us these things, in our line of work. We just do it and hope someone else knows what’s going on. Nothing about this year feels right at all, but then I’m not supposed to be here, it’s like going out into the wrong neighborhood wearing heavy clothing on a summer day. You know, right off the bat, that something just isn’t right. I’m not right.
         “She was afraid of hurting you again,” he says, somewhere behind me. There’s men ahead, beyond the bar, staring into places where I might be. I feel myself pulling apart again, like smoke, like memory, held together only by gravity’s whim. “The few times you ever came up in conversation, I got that much out of her. But I think she felt weird talking about old boyfriends.”
         “And now all her old boyfriends are talking,” my friend says, with more than a little knowing humor. I don’t even know what I’d contribute to the conversation, if I were here, in the flesh, able to talk. There’s a pocket at the edge of the room where people are staring right through me. I’m going to be going away again soon. It’s all so blurred. I can’t remember how to focus.
         “You two always did talk, all the time . . .” There’s eyes, blending in with the wall, with the hazy surroundings. I’m infused with loss, people are staring at the bar with reddened eyes, telling themselves that they’re not feeling anything.
         “We did and that’s . . . that’s the part that’s going to hurt me the most . . .” I’m through him now, on a tracjectory I can’t see. There’s an alcove at the other end of the bar, where all the beats are emanating from, spat out from an angry jukebox. Two people are standing near it, one sitting on a confiscated stool.
         “Because one day soon, something is going to happen . . .”
         One man’s face, masked in shadow. I’ve got a magnet in my head that’s drawing me to him.
         “. . . and my first instinct is going to be to pick up the phone and call her, to tell her about it, because that’s, it’s what I always did . . .”
         He pivots, with a rigid calm, as if he knows I’m there.
         “. . . right then, it’s going to hit me, when I realize that I can’t do it anymore, ever . . . that’s when . . .”
         And I see him.
         I see him.
         Dear God.
         I don’t know what he’s doing here and the sight sends a rigid shock running up my body. For a second I feel almost solid. He looks the same as he always does, a strange detached stare, the impression that he’s turned sideways away from you even when he’s facing you directly. He’s holding a drink but it’s probably soda and his eyes are casually darting around the bar, watching everyone that’s there. Two people are taking pictures of things that I can’t describe. The jukebox is loud but not overwhelming, although I don’t recognize the song. I’m studying his face and I can’t read it. I never could. It’s eerie, how they mimic him, back in the city. I think this is the first time I’ve seen him, since I found out what he is, what he’ll be. But he doesn’t know yet, he can’t, he doesn’t carry any of the trappings and he seems free of the weight. I saw one of the previous ones once, when I slipped out of sequence. She looked sad and unyielding and even then she wasn’t fully aware. I can’t imagine what it’ll do to him when he finds out.
         But he’s here and that’s amazing enough. All these people here, everyone that I know was part of our group, our crew and it was never something that he was a part of, nor did he seem to ever want to break into it. Things have changed, in the years that I was gone, circles have grown tighter, closer, with less space between. Perhaps it’s becoming colder out there and we’re trying to conserve what little heat we have.
         I’m moving closer through inertia alone and words are drifting to him, in lazy waves, in slow motion.
         “Good turn out here, tonight, hm?” the man on the stool says. I know him, he was the only person who might have still talked to this other fellow, this person I’m used to seeing from a distance that’s far away, that I see too often now, reflected in the wrong faces. Staring at him is bringing him too many memories, of things that have nothing to do with him. Of blood, too easily and cleanly bought.
         The other man says nothing, just stares out at the crowd and nods in affirmation. I feel so sorry for him, I don’t know why.
         Not receiving an answer, he tries again, “I really was surprised to see you here, though. What made you come?”
         I’ve seen enough of this already. I can’t see anymore.
         The other man raises an eyebrow, looks over at my friend. His words are garbled by ambient static. What I make out what might not what was said. “Well, I made a promise . . .”
         I look away, and everything else is lost.
         I pan across the bar again, trying to find a way out. The air is soaked with drunken sorrow, it’s dragging me back down to the floor. Insubstantial as I am, I can barely sustain myself. People are laughing like there’s nothing wrong with the world but I keep looking back at the picture, with your face watching us all like you’re trapping behind a glass wall, in some kind of one dimensional cage, screaming that the joke is over, it’s time we let you out, time for you to continue in the way you’re supposed to. But you’re gone, you’re gone and we’re all that’s left. I think I see your sister here, somehow standing amidst the pain. I can’t look at her, I can’t see any of this.
         There are booths against the other wall, crammed full of people. The naked air slides me between one, into the walls. Four people, faces wrapped in shadow are sitting in that one, the lights from the parking lot hardly pressing through the window. Gravity can bend mass and it’s keeping it all out, curving what little weight remains. Discarded food sits on the table between them. I’m above them, I’m with them, I’m nowhere at all. Parts of me are being replaced, I’m leaving portions in each zone but pieces are sticking to me, I’m becoming covered with debris, stray memories, sensations, in time I’m going to become a scattered collections of remnants taken out of order and everything that I was will be gone. Maybe. I don’t know anything about this. I’ve said that already. I don’t know how it’s going to end. Part of me can’t care. Maybe the part of me that is supposed to care is already gone.
         Just by shadows alone I can tell the booth contains a girl and three guys. I can’t read faces, their identities are a secret to me. All my focus can’t render their features properly. Perhaps that part of me is gone too.
         Hands shift a fork. Contact with a plate makes a scraping sound. “Does this feel unreal to anyone else? Or is it just me?”
         “That’s the fourth beer talking,” another voice says.
         A middle finger, too quick for me to catch. “No, asshole, I mean, all of this, what’s going on. I can’t believe she’s gone, I guess that’s what I’m trying to say, does anyone else-“
         ”That seems to be the running theme for the night.”
         Someone shifts on the bench. A knee hits the table by accident. “I’ll tell you what it feels like, it’s like a goddamn class reunion coming here, I figured it’d be just a few of us, having some drinks, thinking about old times . . .”
         “This place is pretty packed.” That might be the girl talking. Her voice isn’t too clear to me. Maybe I dated her once, in another time.
         “Goddamn right it is.” That might not be the person she was replying to. “Half the friggin’ town decides to show up, like they were all her best friends, sitting there weeping and carrying on like she died in their arms.”
         “Well, you know it’s hard-“ someone ventures.
         “You don’t have to tell me that, all right?” He’s nearly yelling now, though it’s not clear why. Everyone can hear. The din is spacious, with plenty of separation. “We all saw her, a few weeks ago, we took her out. She told us about her job, about how she wanted to go back to school again, finish what she started. These people don’t know anything about any of that stuff.” He spits the sentence out like a curse, like something dirty. “They don’t know how she cracked a headlight on her car last month and was trying to hide it from her parents, trying to get it fixed before they would notice. Even when we tried to tell her that they probably wouldn’t care. Crap like that . . .”
         “They were probably her friends, once,” the girl points out. Her hands seem familiar. But I can’t tell by digits. I’m not that good. “Back in the day. How says they can’t feel sad now?”
         “I’m not saying that, you’re not listening . . .”
         “Then what the hell are you saying . . .” another man’s voice.
         “It’s an excuse to get together, to have some drinks one last time in her memory . . .” someone else entirely.
         “That’s it, that’s just what I’m . . . you people,” he swears, sighs, “they’re all just acting, getting together and whooping it up, drinking like it’s some kind of sick Irish wake, sitting around crying and muttering I knew her then, like it matters, like they’re someone important because everyone saw them come here and cry and feel sad and you know what, you know, I don’t need that, I don’t need it at all. I did my best to stay the hell away from those kinds of people after we all graduated, to just talk to the people that I wanted to be around and now something happens and they just come out of the goddamn woodwork.”
         Silence, for a second.
         “Jesus,” the girl breathes.
         “Do you talk about us like that, when we’re not around,” one voice says, with light humor. “Or do you say how you really feel?”
         “Whatever,” the voice gripes. “You’ve obviously all too hammered to get my point.”
         “Or you’re trying to hammer your point into the wrong holes,” another shoots back. “Listen, I understand what you’re saying, but it really doesn’t matter. After tonight, you can go years without seeing any of them again. We’re not even talking to any of them, so I don’t see what you’re complaining about.”
         “They’re here though, aren’t they?” he says sullenly.
         “And what the hell are you going to do? Tell them to leave? Is that it?” The voice is a little heated now, somewhat agitated. “Regardless of what they are to us now, they were her friends and it’s still a goddamn punch in the goddamn gut to find out that she’s dead and you know what, maybe coming here is the only thing they can think of to do, all right? Yeah, maybe I’m not a fan either but I have no right to judge, any more than you do.” An elbow scrapes across the table. “So go ahead, tell me that it matters. Tell me it makes a difference. I want to hear you say it.”
         A long silence follows. People shift uncomfortably.
         Finally, the girl says, her voice soft, “You know who I was most surprised to see, though?”
         “We know,” another voice says quickly. Faces tilt toward each other all around, glances being exchanged. “We saw him, too.”
         “Yeah and where the hell did he come from?”
         “More like what phantom zone did he crawl out of?” The voice is incredulous. I can imagine who they’re discussing. It’s slightly amusing, even in this faded state, to see that their reaction wasn’t that different from mine. “I didn’t think he wasn’t even in the state anymore, it’s been so long.”
         “I didn’t think she talked to him, to be perfectly honest. I don’t know what the hell he’s even doing here. He hasn’t really been talking to anyone.” A shirt rustles as a body shifts, trying to catch a glimpse of a rare sight. “Nobody knows what he does, where he goes. I don’t think he ever goes out with anyone.”
         “She had other friends, you know,” the girl mentions. “Friends that weren’t us. That weren’t part of our group. From other places, people we never met, we never crossed paths with.”
         “And he was one of them?” one says, archly questioning. “I doubt it. I really do.”
         “No, he was never around,” another agrees. “The only person here who might have talked to him was whatshername.”
         “Is she even here?” someone asks. I think I know who they’re speaking of, just from the way something electric jumps in my body. I haven’t seen her here either, but that means nothing. There’s plenty of places to hide in plain sight, in a room like this, all spacious and compressed. You could stand in silhoutte and people might never recognize your shape. If I walked in at just the right angle, if I could somehow be here, I could romance them all and they’d never know who was in their presence. You can always hide if you don’t give people a reason to look. “I haven’t seen her at all.”
         “She might be working,” the girl says. “I heard she could be coming later, when she gets out.” It’s all hearsay, a world built on rumors. If you convince enough people that you’re dead, maybe you really are. How do all these people really know? They don’t, but I do. Because I saw and it scratched its way through my retinas and it’s making its way into my brain and I can’t eject no matter how many times I try to move and dislodge. It’s a spear with a relentless flight path. “If we’re still here,” she adds, and I see a downturned frown caught briefly in the light, the arc of a jaw.
         “Oh, we’ll be here,” one guy responds sardonically. “This party’s going on until closing.”
         “We don’t have to stay,” another says. “We could leave.”
         “To where?” someone replies. Hands spread why, questioning. “Where else are you going to go?” The sentence falls wide in the halfdark, refusing to latch onto anything. It folds on itself and threatens to echo.
         Silence again. Nobody seems to be looking at anyone else.
         One guy says, eventually, “You know who should be here, who I keep expecting to walk in any moment?”
         “Yeah, I can guess,” one of the other guys answers.
         “We were just talking about him, before,” the girl says. “About whether he was going to come or not.”
         Someone sniffs, scoffs. “Christ, he’s not coming.” Beyond them people are shouting, threatening to break into song. The clink of glasses is becoming a rhythmic undercurrent to the night, to every sentence they pronounce. “I don’t know why you ever thought he would.” And this is me. They’ve got my name, without speaking a word. There’s iron that will bind me here. I could haunt this table like a ghost and never see you. I’m here, but I’ll never arrive. “There was always a better chance that buddyboy would come out of his shell and show up.”
         “That’s not true,” the girl protests.
         “Where is he, then?” the one guy states flatly. “At least we knew where the other guy was, at least he was spotted every once in a while, around town, here and there.”
         “Nobody has since him since we graduated,” another says softly, calmly, as if explaining. “He walked away and went somewhere and nobody knows where he went and nobody has since him since.”
         “He got out,” someone says, with a trace of bitterness. “Did what the rest of us didn’t have the balls to do . . . get the hell out of this town and see what everything else had to offer.” It wasn’t balls, it wasn’t guts. You have to understand, I was only trying to save myself. If I hadn’t gone, I would have died. I would have dissolved into nothing. And look, I’m back and it’s happening again. I shouldn’t have gone, not the way I did, but I had no choice. I didn’t. I tell myself that. “And this, it’s got a long reach, so he went, he left . . . left the goddamn state maybe, hell I think he went so far out he may even be on the planet anymore. He’s just vanished from the face of the world.” And it’s true. And it’s not. Because I’m right here. It’s the strip with one edge. You keep following the road and it will take you back. But I still can’t stay. I have to go, I have to leave again, without ever setting down. An astronaut, constantly scrambling up. Even on the bottom of the world, there’s always a place to go. People are laughing and it hardly seems appropriate, but it’s the world, it’s what I left and it’s no different. Except out there, I have no friends and here my friend is dead.
         “I still think he should come,” the girl says, with quiet conviction. Nobody seems to react to this. “Somebody must have told him, got word to him somehow.”
         “Who?” someone says suddenly, a brisk challenge in the dark. “Who talks to him anymore. Nobody. His family is dead, how is word going to get to him. Face it, he left and he left nothing behind. Wherever he is, he has no idea.” A ragged sigh. “To him, maybe, she’s still alive.”
         “It’s not right,” she says, insisting. “They were always such good friends. He should be here.”
         “Sure,” the guy offers, with a heavy shrug. “But when the hell did that ever make a bit of difference?” And he lets it hang there, daring them to answer.
         I can’t take this, all this twisted pain and regret. It’s not them, not the way I always remembered them, it’s shadow versions of my friends, duplicates ripped out of time, plopped here to go through the motions. It unravels me, as I stand here. I don’t want to see anymore. I’m tired and I can’t watch the fire any longer.
         A shout goes up behind me and everyone I know is gathered in a group. Some are raising glasses high. Near me, someone curses. “Mother of God, not again.”
         “To the best goddamn ex-girlfriend I ever had,” a fellow is saying, his voice slurred, his eyes shining in a way that the light can’t reflect. His gaze seeks a place upwards. “Wherever the hell you are, kid, I want you to know we miss you down here. Stop back when you get a chance, all right.” Then he lifts the glass higher. A mingled murmur rises up with it then and in the midst of the gesture I feel the tear go out and through them, a jagged ripple underneath, the pretense that it’s all a celebration, that if they convert it into a party then all the pain will go away. But it’s still there, leaking out of them, clogging the air and gradually rotting them away from the inside.
         My vision clouds, something sideways to me swells and across the room I see the man I never expected, watching it all with guarded detachment, and I see he realizes the same damn things I do.
         And then I can’t bear to look anymore, and so I go away.