Grigio’s prohibition is over, so the noise levels are now appropriately high, the atmosphere adequately raucous, and the amber nectar in the shot glasses is finally not apple juice. The pub is once again what it was built to be: a place for people to lower their drawbridges, to let others in and themselves out, to remember that life is more than the dimly lit tragedy of the daily grind. A warm, woozy light at the end of the day’s tunnel.
This will, of course, not be my experience here. I slip through the crowd and find a stool at the far end of the bar, and I can feel a dozen eyes on my back. For a variety of reasons, some good, most bad, I am famous. I am the first of the Dead to challenge the plague, the one who triggered a change that’s still spreading. I am the disease that cured itself. And I am the monster that kidnapped General Grigio’s daughter and brainwashed her into falling in love with it. I am the demon that lured legions of skeletons to the stadium and caused the deaths of hundreds of soldiers, and that may have personally infected General Grigio and thrown his converting corpse off the stadium roof. I am the reason there are zombies roaming their streets and eyeing their children. I am the reason nothing makes sense.
I avoid eye contact with everyone but the bartender. When he finally nods to me, I pull a bill from the small stack that Rosso gave me to help me “find my footing” and I set it on the bar.
He looks at me uneasily. “Uh … what can I get you?”
Another choice. Another opportunity to tell the world what kind of man I am. What do I wear? What kind of music do I listen to? What is my favourite drink?
I shrug and mumble, “Alcohol.”
He takes the hundred-dollar bill, which amounts to little more than a drink ticket in the stadium’s sad little private economy, and pours me a shot of whiskey. I dump it down my numb throat and stare at the bar top. The thick pine slab is completely covered in initials, doodles, and crass little dialogues. I peruse them like book spines, trying to imagine the stories behind the titles.
It goes on and on, all down the bar. Love, hate, jokes, and the simple urge to be noticed, scrawled onto the wood year after year. The bulk of the inscriptions are on the top of the slab, bumping and overlapping like chatter at a party, but leaning down, I notice a few on the underside, as if never meant to be seen. Most are standard crush confessions: Jerry loves Jenny, Jenny loves Joey, Joey loves Jerry. But one entry catches my eye. It appears to have been carved and then promptly scratched out. I can just barely piece the letters together.
I wince. Cold needles in my chest. I don’t know why this word stings; I pull my eyes away from it. They fall immediately on another line deep in the corner, scratched so faintly I almost miss it in the dim light.
I close my eyes, hoping for saltwater to ease their sudden burn. When I open them again, the bartender is looking at me. I slide him another hundred.
• • •
“R?”
My name hits me like a splash of cold water and I peel my face off the bar. The room spins for a moment before I can anchor it down and bring Julie into focus.
“What are you doing here?” she says. Her eyes are bright blue beacons in the blur of the bar, wide and worried.
“Drinking.” I don’t know how many times I’ve emptied the glass in front of me; it could’ve been just twice, but my body is still defining its limits and I do believe I’m drunk.
“What the hell, R, what happened with the meeting? I still haven’t heard from Rosy, why didn’t you come find me?”
I can see that she’s upset. I can see that it’s strange, me coming here to drink alone in the middle of a crisis. I can see that she is beautiful, her strawberry lips and blueberry eyes, the peach fuzz on her cheeks. I can see the television behind her. The disorienting montage of unrelated images. A few plays of football, a few airbrushed models, a juicy tenderloin, a cute baby, a syrupy quote from a pop philosopher with a stock-footage sunrise behind it.
“R!”
The basement door that insists it’s not there. The coat of white plaster and all the cracks creeping through it. When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar! When it’s aflame! When it’s asunder! A polite laugh track from a classic sitcom whose cast died decades ago; fat, stupid men with gorgeous wives.
Julie sits down next to me. Which trope are we? The gun-toting teenage orphan and her hapless amnesiac boyfriend? Where is the box we can climb into? It’s cold out here.
She touches my arm. “R. Are you okay? What happened?”
“I left him with them,” I hear myself saying. “They’re not what they say. They want to eat us and I left him with them.”
“They want to eat us? What are you talking about?”
“I know them,” I mumble. “I know them, I know them.”
No one in the Orchard is watching me anymore. At some point after the initial shock of my entrance, they all drifted back to their conversations, or to their blank study of the televisions flashing that nerve-shredding culture collage from every spare nook in the room. A quote over a shot of hand-shaking businessmen, read aloud for any illiterates in the room: Don’t ask what’s in it for you. Ask what you’re in it for.
A shirtless rock climber. Some fluffy clouds. A Corvette.
I reach for my glass and try to coax a final drop onto my tongue.
Julie snatches it out of my hand and slides it down the bar. “R, stop it! I need you to focus. Slow down and tell me what’s happening. Should I alert Security?”