A lot of weird things happen in this town.
Especially in this here bar. It's like an epicentre for complete and total
outlandishness. Take, for example, what happened to my buddy Jack a couple
weeks ago. He and I were just sitting at the bar, knocking back a few drinks
that night, as usual. Jack's wife had just divorced him, so he had a little
more reason than usual to fill himself with the rotted grains. I, of course,
joined him in the drinking binge.
After Jack had about five or so shots in him,
he began to get a little ornery. He started yelling at me about his divorce
and how he had trusted that woman who he was married to for a whole of
“five long months.” I, having not yet drunken nearly as much as Jack, told
him to sit down and settle. He did, and he tried in vain to push his tousled
hair, which is normally slicked back and rather sleek looking, back into
place.
After that episode, he started sobbing, as
many bitter drunks do, about how he was married for “so long” and how he
didn’t know if he could ever go out with a woman again. I, wanting to rid
myself of this friend of mine who had become an inebriated idiot, told
him he could start now.
“Just look around in here. There are plenty
of women around. I bet one of them is desperate enough to consider you
as an option,” I told him after finishing off my third Bud of the night.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” is what I thought
he said, his speech being quite slurred and hard to understand. So, the
pathetic drunken thing got up, greatly calmed down now, and looked around,
his eyes (and mine, as well) finally settling upon a woman. She was sitting
alone at a table with a large cup of some black liquid, which I assumed
to be Guinness. He walked over to the table, and I, deciding this could
be an interesting spectacle, tried as best I could to listen in.
“Hi, I’m Jack. How ya doin’?”
“I am well,” said the woman, without even
looking up.
“So, what’s your sign?”
The woman looked up at him with cold, steely
eyes for a moment, and stated clearly and evenly, “Stop.”
Jack staggered away and came back to his stool
at the bar, about ready to give up. I decided I liked this girl’s style,
and wanted to see more. I knew Jack wouldn’t mind me using him as a guinea
pig in a sort of social experiment much, since he’d be too drunk to remember
much of anything anyway.
“You’re not about to give up that easy, are
you? I bet she’s just playin’ hard to get. Get back there and try again.”
Jack, being in a state in which he was very
susceptible to suggestion, complied and walked back to the table.
“Look, maybe we got off on the wrong foot.”
“I was not standing, and you appeared to be
on both feet.”
Jack looked like he thought about this for
a while, and, drunken slob that he was, replied in his usual brilliant
manner, “Uhm, yeah.”
The woman continued to stare at her glass
of thick, dark liquid with those eyes of hers. It was the eyes that really
intrigued me. They were a cold grey, like stone or cement, and the whites
were so incredibly white, so institutionally white, they looked as if they’d
been made in a hospital or a laboratory. Her face looked equally cold,
her pronounced cheekbones jutting out like the edge of some piece of machinery.
Her nose was, like her speech, straight and to the point. Her lips looked
like something from an Andy Warhol painting, unnaturally red on this pale
face of hers. She wasn’t traditionally beautiful, I’ll admit, but there
was something nonetheless very alluring about her.
Jack, not really sensing his unwantedness,
sat down across from her. While he did, she didn’t so much as look up at
him. She just kept staring at that glass of hers, every once in a while,
taking a sip. When she lifted the glass, the light reflected off, creating
tiny swirling rainbows in the glass. He started to talk to her again, but
I couldn’t really hear what was being said, because somebody had the amazing
timing to turn on the juke box at just that very second. Jack would seem
to ask her a question, or make some comment, and she would, without looking
up, pause for a second, as if to process information, and then give him
a cold response which was none to his liking. This continued for at least
ten minutes, at which point Jack’s face seemed to have shifted in colour
to a bright crimson.
I didn’t see what happened next, because I
had passed out (I was, after all, drinking the entire time). When I came
to, I saw Jack on the floor, screaming, with the woman’s hand around his
throat. The hand was not, however, currently attached to her arm. It was
broken off at the wrist, but there was no bleeding. It was shooting off
blue sparks where there should have been blood. The woman was standing
up, and had the same cold expression on her face, or what was left of her
face. The left half of her face was missing, revealing metal underneath.
To this day, I don’t know if this was real
or if it was just the beer, but at that point I decided I should go home
and go to bed. I never asked anyone about any of this, not even my good
buddy Jack; it was one of those things that you just don’t want to know
about. Jack wouldn’t remember anyway.