by Benjamin Reed
(04/07/04)
She walks in the bar around midnight. Well, not walking so much as tugging on angel feathers, soaring, just above the ground, at two miles per hour. I'm shaking a martini when I see her, the blood rushing into my hands makes the ice melt into the temperature of tears.
The crowd parts for her, unconsciously, a miasma of formless faces not turning to see who or what causes their feet to shuffle aside. I watch her eyes, the lilt of her hips, the rhythm of her steps, heel-toe, heel-toe, and, I swear, the smoke won't even touch her. Her hair is pulled back into two long ponytails, dyed into streaks of red and gold and black until the original color is irrelevant. She is Theophany. The juke box switches over and the needle, the only other indefatigable element in the room, scratches out Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, The Girl from the North Country.
I give her a bottle of Lone Star and grab one for myself. She talks and I listen. As tired as I am, I'm like the bubbles in my beer: I can't help but rise, to breathe and fall up into the light and air. I've known her for three years, me always on the service side of the bar, her ever the served. The mute varnish of the bar has mirrored dozens of our interlocutions, shamelessly reflecting my doe-eyed stupefaction at her every smile and laugh. We've talked about everything a guy like me and a girl like her can. And never have I known her name.
Well, I must have heard it once, when we first met, but the physical words, the air pushed across those lips, fell like melting snowflakes on my dumb ears, unable to pull my befuddled, slightly panicked mind from her trance long enough to extract the moles of her voice from the shimmering fire that engulfed her. And too fast did our banter accelerate for me to say something so gently awful as "I'm sorry, I forgot. What's you name?" That would be like turning to see the fall of Gomorrah.
Her love, which I have never known and never will, must be a beautiful kind of madness, something that is, yet cannot be, a lovely dream from which one hopes to never wake. Over the years I've asked dozens of people if they know her name, but no one can ever answer for sure. Amazing. How could no one know how this succubus is called, the name of this seraphima, this whisper in the ear of my distraction?
(And, by the way, I know what this all sounds like. But I'm not sick. Nor obsessive. Nor am I a stalker. Although, I have had the fantasy that she is stalking me, and that all these years she's been only been feigning insouciance, desperately bottling her licentious fixation for the excruciatingly intoxicating durations of our conversations, and the almost unbearable physical proximity of our breathing flesh, and that, some day, she'll lure me into a 1979 Econoline van, the cargo area of which has been converted into a kind of Santeria shrine with hundreds of candles and black and white photographs of me, surreptitiously snapped from afar while I'm executing the most meaningless tasks of my day and life, where she'll drug me with her kiss, lay me on a bed of crushed red velvet and cracked gold velour and make love to me for hours before sacrificing me to a nameless god with a Sumerian sacrificial knife purchased on e-Bay for a thousand dollars greater than the next highest bid, which I wouldn't mind at all since life after her touch her would be so pointlessly abject, I dare not imagine it...and if that's sick, I don't know what healthy is.)
So we talk. And still, behind every word, is my complete ignorance of her name. Three years. I have no idea what is said. She says she's going to go look for her friends. She turns away from the bar, and I pause. Before I can help the next customer my eyes are drawn to the small of her back, the muscular ridges of soft tissue visible between her black tank-top and leather miniskirt, the two little dimples of fleshy indentation, the posterior proscenium of her saccharine architecture. Those muscles of her lower back, those are called the erector spinae. I know what they're called because after one summer night as she was leaving the bar, I saw them flex above her skirt as she reached for the door, and I beheld one teardrop of sweat trickle down her lower back, gracing each downy, impossibly fine hair before jaggedly dissecting those heart-shaped muscles.
That night I went home and dug through my closet until I found an old anatomy textbook, where I discovered the name of those muscles. Erector spinae. If I was fated to never learn her name, I would damn sure know what to call those striated and spindled fibers of volute protein, pressing forth to carve her dermis into the soft undulations of a body that moves even when at rest, chilling the follicles of my own skin into shocked attention.
In an hour she comes back, friends unfound. And still my mind is a silent scream -- What is your name? Just then another girl walks up, grabs her and says, "Sarah? Oh my God, it's been years!"
My breath evaporates and my heartbeat is still. I watch. What's-her-name smiles and says hello, agreeing it's been a long time. The new girl turns and shouts across the bar, "Hey Josh! It's Sarah! Remember Sarah?"
Josh walks up and says, "Sarah? I haven't seen you in forever!" Sarah hugs Josh.
Sarah! Her name is Sarah! Hossana! Epiphany! Afflatus! Elohim! Her name rings throughout the bar, waves of sound breaking upon the unwashed masses of people whose names truly don't matter, the siren cry floating from the doors and windows, into the world, making humans out of stones, and angels from the beasts that dwell within.
Later, the new girl says, "Hey, Sarah. We gotta go. It was nice to see you again," and Sarah says, "It was really lucky running into you," and all I can think is, you don't know the half.
Two hours later everyone is gone. Everyone except me and Sarah.
Sarah.
The bar is closed, cleaned, and dark as a tomb except the little space around me and her, sitting at the bar, drinking beer out of coffee mugs. We talk and talk and talk and talk and my heart flutters every time I push her name across my lips.
After awhile Sarah says she has to go. I tell her I'm too drunk to drive right now, and I'm going to wait a little longer.
She gives me a long, tight hug, and even coos when I squeeze tighter. Then she says, "Be careful. Take a cab if you have to. I don't want to tell people I was the last person who saw Joe the night he died."
It was the most beautiful expression of compassion to which I have ever borne witness. Through the window, I watch her disappear into the darkness.
Now, knowing her name and having felt her embrace, the most forward and obvious of her traits, I turn her coffee cup on the bar, to see if, by chance, she left a trace of her lipstick on the white china. Still high on the jasmine of her smell, I see in the dim light that sure enough, ever so slight and barely perceptible, there are two thin smudges of lipstick, darker and more red than the blood in my heart.
I lick my thumb and rub away the last traces of her passing, wishing my name was Joe.
