These are the things. I arrive every time with some amount of money in my pocket and order beers. People mill in from outside and climb from the portal. No one says much. The bartender changes, but it's the same kind, surly. I would fawn over the prettier ones until I realized it gets you nowhere.
What I remember.
I climbed a mountain once, a low one in the Adirondacks. I hated the whole experience, my lungs constricting, my blood pounding in my head at my temples and sinuses, how easy it was for my friends to dash up the switchbacks. But the view: a long valley with a lake, another hump of a mountain on the other side. Once my heart stopped rattling and my sweat started to cool, once I stopped feeling like I was gonna puke, I was able to appreciate it. My friends, too, we got quiet and just sat there and looked out at it and stopped trying to talk.
My family, too, they disappear. I don't remember my grandparents, but I remember my father. His rituals: before work and after, his various styles of facial hair, but nothing he ever said. I remember my mother trying to console me after getting my ass beat at school when I was ten or eleven. When I was older I'd have to sneak past her when I was staying out late. This bar is erasing them, if you can believe that. I have no idea how long it's been since I've seen them.
Why I came in here was a bad week in which someone died and I want to say my wife was not so supportive, but I'm fuzzy on the details. I forgive anyone involved, I will say. And I believe I wasn't so much depressed as curious, because the portal is in this big cubby, near bubble hockey, like I said. You climb up, stoop into it, go around a corner and it's just a circle of green light. It looks fake, but sure enough it resets everything and you get back right in the bar with most things changed.
I was accumulating what I thought to be clues, reading coasters and people's t-shirts, looking for commonalities, sequences, grabbing a newspaper and seeing what had gone on wherever and whenever this was. I didn't see any order. Phone numbers don't work. I started writing basic details down on napkins, once I figured out what was happening. But I could have written anything, as much as it will mean to me. I don't know if I'm aging, I don't know if there's time. I don't know if there's a version of me still in the place I came from.
Yes. It is funny to not know, per se, if you exist. Something I'd never have considered. I took a lot of things for granted.
Now it's the intercession of things that have happened, or happened to a version of me. I won't say they're definitive. I believe I have children, but it doesn't seem real. I just get pissed, get up, walk into the back and go through the portal. It's always this shitty bar with a mumbley jukebox and these regulars who I could know, who could be anyone, who don't talk or stay long. In the event that it's not this bar, I will stay there. I will open my heart to whatever law and sense that applies there. I will stay.
I'll tell you. The first time I had sex, it was awkward, but once I was alone, taking a shower, I felt every drop of water. I saw everything, every surface. Distances, the taste of foods, for a day or two, everything was so intense, it almost hurt. I remember my drive to work, though I have no idea what that was. When I was fifteen and decided I liked cigarettes, it was like bringing a dog home, in a way. There was a new presence to look after and with them, I would climb inside a private cave or something, out in the night, my night. In the country, where I grew up, there was this incredible blanket of stars and the hazy fog of what? They floated in it. Galaxy?
I've been outside the door to the bar, gone a few blocks, but I am so afraid that this world will shift and it will disappear. I will be trapped in the world that isn't real. It throws perspective on the one I've known for sure. But you have no idea, it was real to me.
I hope I was kind to people's children or my own. If I stopped moving, would it matter? Why would it matter where I am. These worlds are labyrinthine and bunched like an onion. If I've reached out to anyone, I don't remember.
Do you have any idea? Do you hear me when I talk to you? Who are you? Are you different every time I arrive? I imagine you like a little recorder, a tiny, hidden shell that everything coils into and proceeds out of at some hidden other end. My voice, my thoughts will just get slowly sucked up into you and you may take notice that I was here. To hold you in my hand. I know there were girlfriends and teachers that I'm combining, tying them up in you. Why do I do that? Do I need someone to talk to? What stays the same. This voice. I just keep talking to my chest, into a glass, to no one, to ears in the sky and I keep asking and asking, asking what?
