A Man Apart (part i)

The man leaned against the bar with his elbows as he sat on the stool. The bartender didn’t remember pouring him a drink, but saw he was sipping spirits out of a scotch glass and figured he must have poured it for him. The bar was empty save for a few townies having an early end to their daily shift. The bartender moseyed over to the man, wiping the rings of condensation off the bar where he had served the townies bottled beer from the chill box while he moved. He stopped at the man, noticing the scotch glass was almost empty.

“This is good scotch. You know, I hadn’t touched the stuff for over a year until last night. Had a terrible fight with the wife, went for a drive. Downed a whole bottle,” the man volunteered without prompting.

“Are you sure you should be here?” the bartender asked. He didn’t want to be a pusher, though his livelihood depended on patrons bordering on alcoholism and reinforcing their choice with a tinge of denial.

“I could finish that bottle on that shelf off in less than five minutes and not have the slightest buzz.”

“I think you’re a little old to think you’re superman. I mean, you’re no frat kid, you should know if you drink all that as quick as you say, you’ll probably need an ambulance.”

“I needed help a long time before this.”

“How’s that?”

“I’ve never been one to think beyond the scope of my own desire. For some reason, someone saw something in me I couldn’t, or thought they saw something. I never could figure it out. I guess that’s why last night happened.”

There was a stiff silence between the two. The clanking of billiards and dull din of quiet conversation could not push the bartender to ask. He stood there drying a glass, noticing after a second that the man’s was filled three fingers. The man took another sip.

“You know, there’s a theory about the universe,” the man started. “It goes that before man invented the telescope, the planets and stars that we couldn’t see with our naked eye didn’t exist as things – as solid, real things. They were possibilities. Like a reflection on a pond that someone had dropped a stone into, they looked like the reflection on the ripples, that they could be this far in one direction or that, or what have you. I wonder if that theory applies to people. Do we all of a sudden find ourselves at a loss of possible outcomes once we look upon a mirror and recognize that we’re limited in our abilities? The child knowing himself only to know really that he cannot be more than the path chosen? Or is it when someone else looks upon you, seeing something they expected, and then you lose the possibility of being anything else? And when they finally find you, you’re exactly where you were thought to be, all those tendencies so inherent in your being leading to the only outcome that made sense when someone paid attention…”

“ Sorta like how you know Buffalo isn’t gonna make it to the playoffs by midseason,” the bartender offered.

He had heard drunken philosophies before, though this was a bit more poetic. He turned around to put away the glass he had been drying, noticing that he had started to wear a hole in the towel. When he turned back around to say something to the man, something profound and relevant as well as consoling, he found that the man had disappeared, the glass was gone, and no tip was on the bar. He left the back of the bar to see where the man went, though the time it took him to turn around wouldn’t have allowed for the travel of distance it took to go from where the man had been sitting to the exit or the bathroom which were on the side farthest from them. The bartender questioned the townies, but they said they had not seen a man either pass their way, nor had one been sitting at the bar since they had arrived. The bartender went back to tend bar as new patrons came in, shaking off the cold winter snow from their shoulders. He looked through a small window that let in the fading November light. There was a break in the clouds where a column of light shone through as if God were pointing down at something significant.