Good Old 'Everyoneelse'

Truth be Told

I belly up to the bar and order nice gin. "Make it a double, and don't ruin it with bad tonic."
The man next to me three seats away says, "You know your drink order."
I laugh, as required.
"You know your drink order like you know yourself."
I laugh again, this time more reluctantly. I don't want to engage. My brain screams danger, and its why I stand three seats away.
"You wait for someone to acknowledge the sophistication of your choice. I have; well done. You have been seen and approved."
The giggle dies in my throat, and I sidle further away as the bartender hands me my drink, a twinkle in her eye. "He's here most nights, disturbing the guests and myself. He can't seem to get enough."
"I'm sure," I laugh, and explain, "I'm going to go sit at a table, I don't like the bar, enjoy." I take a sip of gin.
The bartender wishes good luck under her breath and under a grin.
The man nodded, and says into the head of his Guinness, "Ah, yes, good old everyoneelse."
He said the word as if it were a single word, an affliction. It held too many Es.
The nonsequitor prompted me to respond, and not move away. "Excuse me?"
"If I repeat the words they still won't come true. It's always go, go, go, as demanded by the masses, and the masses bend over in aquiesence. They set the pace, they keep the pace, they demand the pace out of others. Who can stop the peer pressured race?"
The heat rose up the back of my neck, and my feet felt rooted in place. I didn't like the tone, or the question, or the man. He looked from where he sat, and again began talking, then time looking me in the eye, his voice both crisp and slurred; a gentleman of the cups, an oracle of past hedonism.
I presence filled the room and swept all inhibitions into its path.
My mouth opened of its own accord, and I began to speak: "There's this fast down, turn around hustle and bustle of the modern world, and I cannot seem to clear my mind long enough to write a single line of prose."
"What is prose when we could pose naked in the sun?" He parries.
Bothered and too articulate, I ask, "What poisoned nectar do we drink, to speak thus in tongues?"
"You call this poison, this freedom? It is what I seek and what I return for."
A terror engulfed me. My feet could not move, the water beaded on my drink, and the man was looking at me with a devil in his eyes.
Again I spoke, if not freely, then truefully and uninhibited, with no hint of the earlier laugh to hide my mind, "When I looked into the mirror, the stretch marks of a thousand smiles swore back at me. The masses, as you say, may sweep and turn, and I am left wanting." My hand moved as if to cover my lips, but it could not limit the sound. "I have both said too much and too little, and none of it makes a difference compared to the ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner."
Our eyes broke contact and darted to the corner, where an oaken steadiness now permeated the space. The feeling it had not been there before engulfed me.
The man replied, "Your words create, yet you do not call yourself a poet? Would you call yourself a mother? My hands are scarred by asphalt and rebar, yet I do not spend my last paycheck. I am a good man, and truthful. We are connected in this moment. What is it you fear?"
"I fear a thousand fears. I fear my freedoms and my inhibitions. My hungers are worse than my starvation. I fear you believe you hold appeal to me. I do not fear solitude, but rather the dying of the years." I tried to hold back the truth-dance, before more of my psyche could stain the floor.
"If never another true word passed my lips, it would not be a curse," I mutter.
"You fear me then, the unnamed man?"
"I should not."
"Yet you do."
"I fear your attention. I fear you and I fear my own actions betraying my true wants. My actions hold more consequence than do yours. I fear my wagging tongue, what back alleys it might push me to, and I fear what must have been slipped in my drink."
"No! I would not do the thing you accuse me of. I am as trapped as you in this moment. My drink holds me, and my tongue has a will of its own. I too hunger and desire, but not for what you think. I want to know, to know, to know, the youth that still clings to you. I want to know your mind and its twists. I want to be the cause of a smile."
We fell silent at that, trapped still in lock-eyed contact. He could not lie, and so my fear lessened. I still feared his attention, but not his intentions. I was sickened by his logic, but not afaid of the deep fear of womanhood.
"Another round then?" and a pint appeared in front of him, and a goblet in my hand. I had finished my first drink. The bartender's eyes glintened sharply.
"Is it you, then, who so ensnares us?" I ask the barkeep. Her eyes glistened, and there was no devil behind them, for the devil possessed the whole face. She says, "I see the truth becomes no easier to bear, the more the eons pass. Come now, genie-eyed, and tell me what you see?"
The man stood from his chair, and tipped it. I saw he must be a worker, leather-tanned and hard-lived, and someone I could never trust. Yet, in face of worse he came to my aid and said, "You capture us both, you devil-wench, and in so doing have painted your own demise. You unite where you would soil, and placate where you would embroil. Who are you to question our means? Who are you to stand in our path? You forced metaphore upon us, what could you possibly want with that?"
"You amuse me, man."
She continued after licking her lips, "You have been here before, but only now protest?"
My feet still rooted to the ground, and the second drink on my lips, I said, "She asks for wrath and rage and ruin, she asks for sage and distant vision, she asks for unspoken platitudes, and wants to know the root of ruin."
The devil smiled, and refilled our glasses. "I had hoped to be more subtle. But as it is, I must admit, I had wanted to see you ruined. Who knows to who the antichrist will be born?"
My mind reeled ahead of my loosened tongue. Not a word, not a word, echoed in my mind, pedantic wanderings I did dispise, and I glanced to the man on my left, glanced to him who was held rapt, and directed my next question at him. "You know of the ruin of which she speaks?"
"It is the ruin that never sleeps, which ruins the woman more often than the man, and wakes itself at three am, howling of the moon and crying to be suckled. It is the ruin of families and of nations."
The devil grinned, its plans revealed, "You know this ruin has happened before, it is the fear which drives all your actions. You, woman, do not trust, you stand alone, and you," she glances at the man, "you have no chance, because of others who have taken my mixture, and in the morning woken up sicker."
I felt my heart pounding ever harder, as the trap being sprung had no way out.
"Not this man..." died on my tongue, with all the justifications that had died before. The broken truths, the broken trysts, the seveal minutes of pleasured bliss--it was wrong, wrong, wrong, and there seemed to be no escape from the terrible fact: it can happen to anyone, it happens to everyone.
The devil, she smiled, and filled up our drinks, and walked away to leave us to our devices.
The man and I stared back again, and drank our drinks and tried to pretend that thousands of years of confused injustice didn't drive our genes to seek the things the devil implored them to seek: him to take, and me to hide.
Then the man, some decisions reached, he straightened up, and still looking into my eyes, for he could not look away, he said, "I'm sorry. It's not enough, and will never atone, but I do not wish to stoop so low. She has prompted conversation before, for which I return, but never have the fears and plans been laid so bare. If we can leave, I will leave this bar, and never again will I be tempted at heart to fence with the devil and to tempt my heart, to ask and to lust after what isn't offered. I am sorry"
I broke his gaze then, for with those words he had broken the spell, and I looked down at my half-full gin, and wondered.
Was that all it took? To never or no longer partake? And the truth-sense still on me, I opened my mouth, and a final truth came pouring out:
"The facts have been changed after the fact, to power do the stories lie, and within the victor's eye. I am not Eve; I ordered my cup. But just as then, somone ordered me drink. The world has not slowed down, not since then, and the fire that is burning might never be quenched. You sit at this bar every night, what, did you not expect this? Has this temptation not happened before? You are part of the problem if you are only proving what a good man you are. You may not perpetuate fire, but sir, what did you do? What did you do, when your buddies told you, told you about everyone else?"
The man slumped low, and looked at his drink. He muttered something I could not hear, and I backed away, my feet now unfettered. The glass it dropped and further shattered the spell, and I ran from that bar with the devil's laugh still in my ear.