The bar is called Obsidian. With its narrow black on black storefront, one could mistake it for a mirage. Inside it’s long and dark with three doors in the back: one a storage room marked no admittance, another a women’s room with a leaky toilet, and finally a men’s room where it all ends.
***
The night was chilly and Jasper’s mind spun like it always did when he thought of her, which was more often than he’d care to admit. Diana was pretty in that former high school cheerleader way, even though she’d never been one, cold in that coolest girl in middle school way, though she claimed to have been a nerd. Sometimes she’d take hours to return his text. Sometimes, seconds. This time, two days, so he called her but all he got was a curt “I’ve got this deadline” and “You’re not my only priority.”
Her tone. That tone.
I never should’ve bothered.
He passed the black on black storefront. The flicker of a shine hooked onto the edge of his vision. Yes, he could use a drink.
Inside the smell of stale beer and vape pens gave him a strange comfort. Monotonous rock from the zeroes played at a tolerable level. Black floors and black bar and black stools and dim lights left everything shaded except the bartender, a burly hipster who called out for his order, and then there was his beer waiting, Diana’s tone like aftershocks from a quake. Back when they’d been dating for just two months his sister told him flat-voiced “are you sure about her,” and he defended Diana’s aloofness as shyness.
Two months turned into two years.
Time time time too much not enough.
The bartender asked Jasper’s name and Jasper hesitated. The only other Jaspers he’d ever met were dogs. Silly name. His gut constricted and he told him Joe. He finished his beer and got another, and then a third, all the while parsing her socials like a pagan picking through entrails.
You know it’s not going anywhere.
Beneath his hands he felt something scratched into the wood. He peered close but it was too dark to make anything out. He thought of her and sighed. “Where’s the bathroom?”
The bartender pointed toward the rear. Jasper squinted and caught what looked like three doors. He bobbled on one foot. Just three beers but they seemed like six or nine.
You can’t ever be what she needs.
Toward the back the black linoleum turned a scuffed dishwater gray. The gold MEN’S placard had been screwed onto the black door. Inside the toilet almost touched the urinal, which almost touched the sink. He caught his reflection in the scratched mirror. Stupid face. Good looking, sure, but years of partying were creeping up on him. Circles under his eyes. Bags forming. Tired mouth.
He unzipped and pissed. His mouth slacked. It’s all falling away from you. Time time time never enough too much.
He stared ahead as the last of it came out. Someone had written on the wall with a blue sharpie:
Don’t Look UP
What’s the point of it all? I can’t get anywhere. No matter how much I try I never get myself anywhere. All I want is for her to love me, to want me, to want to be with me, but I can’t get anywhere with her.
His eyes lingered on that sharpie ink.
What’s up there? Some monster waiting to devour me. Some giant black widow spider that’s going to grab me and rip me to shreds and eat every last piece of me and leave no trace like I never existed.
Don’t Look UP
Jasper scoffed. Don’t be an idiot. Nothing’s there. He tilted his head back. A collection of yellow eyes fixed on his. Eight giant hairy legs danced through the air. One stroked Jasper’s hair. As he opened his mouth to scream, it snapped its jaws around his throat.
237 seconds later nothing remained of Jasper. Not even a drop of blood.
***
Ollie’s feet were killing him. Absolute murder. His wife picked out these brown leather lace-ups that were only meant to be worn from the house to the train station to the office and back, not for stalking the streets unemployed, pretending the part, looking the part, but knowing full well that a sixty-one year old laid-off man has zero chance at anything approaching a real job.
Resignation tasted like week-old gas station coffee but denial was for fools and children, and Ollie considered himself neither. Fake it until you make it, his buddies always said, so Ollie spent his days clomping the streets in his suit and those damn shoes. Not faking it. Just fake.
Maybe he could coast to sixty-two, start withdrawing social security early, get a gig at Home Depot, pretend he knows how to install drywall. “Time’s almost up, buddy,” he muttered.
Dusk came. Wind swept past him like a vulture. He turned down a side street where a black on black glint caught his vision. He shrugged. “What’s a beer or two?”
Inside, blackness challenged his eyes to adjust. Damp air. An Eagles song played that everyone claimed to love but secretly hated. The bartender, a barrel-chested kid in a flannel, barely glanced from his phone as Ollie squatted on his stool. “Time passes and you become invisible,” he muttered under his breath. He tapped the bar. “Coors.” Without tearing his eyes from his phone the bartender set a bottle before him.
“Pretty dead in here,” Ollie said. The bartender grunted. “You know, me and my wife, we had this dream of getting an RV and spending our days cruising around America, you know, going to Montana in the summertime and down into Texas in the winter, but that sort of thing isn’t as cheap as you think, plus there’s the health thing to think about. Seemed like a good idea, but now, it’s like time gets you, you know?”
The bartender grunted again.
“Sure you do. Another one, chief?”
Ollie ran his hands along the bar and felt something scratched into the wood. He shuddered and remembered how in high school he craved to be something, only he could never figure out what. He never shook that craving. It gnawed at him, every day. And now he’d ended up here in this shithole on a dead Wednesday evening.
“Another one, buddy.”
Melancholy settled on Ollie like seasickness. He finished his beer and told himself time to go. He didn’t want to, but no point in staying. He almost made it to the exit when his bladder cried out. He pivoted in his spiteful shoes and looked for the bathroom. In the back, he assumed. With each step the light receded until all he could make out was the fake gold of the Men’s sign. He stepped inside, avoided his tired face in the scratched mirror, and sighed before the urinal.
“Time gets you, no matter what you do.”
The patter of the stream filled his ears. He blinked at the wall. Someone had scrawled in blue sharpie Don’t Look UP, like it was a dare or something.
What’s up there? Some witch who’ll turn me into a ball of ice and then shatter me into a million molecules? Ha! I should be so lucky.
Ollie looked up. Orange eyes blinked back. A woman. Her mouth stretched like a scythe. Her slender hand crept down toward him. The tip of her finger touched his forehead. A winter chill crawled down his skin all the way to his toes. It infiltrated his muscles and his bones. His organs ground to a halt. His brain turned to ice, and then his body shattered into a trillion atoms.
***
Darius’s phone rang. His hand trembled like a tree in a windstorm. He pulled it out. Unknown number. He answered it. “Darius Wilkinson,” a woman said. He knew by her tone who she was. He hung up.
His mother chose Darius because it was a name of one of the greatest kings who ever lived. But what good is it being named for a king when you’re stuck in the mailroom, six car payments behind, hiding your BMW the best you can from repo?
Rodrigues threw that fight. Bastard. I would’ve cleaned up. Now the hole’s just got deeper. Can’t get a raise can’t get a promotion can’t get shit. King. Ha! Look at the other kings. Herod. Henry the eighth. Richard the third. MLK. From where I sit, kings are more cursed than blessed.
He silenced his phone and shoved it in his pocket beside a couple of pens he swiped from work.
I didn’t mean to.
He stalked through the summer dusk and turned down a side street. He could feel the day leaving him behind. He could feel himself getting old, an old man at thirty with nothing to show for his years but a mountain of debt. He wished for some divine intervention but he was too superstitious to even form the prayer on his lips.
Some evil thing from some other dimension will give you all that cash, but what’s the price?
He stopped midway down the block. Fine, I’ll do it. He faced the sky. “If anyone’s listening, I could use ten, twenty grand. Like now.” A hot wind carried the reek of trash. He felt nothing but the ticking of his heart. He surrendered a defeated sigh and trudged on.
Seven steps ahead he spied a virgin scratch-off on the ground.
Don’t.
He picked it up and stripped the silver with his thumbnail to reveal three treasure chests. Fifty grand!
He looked left and right and shoved the scratch-off into his pocket beside his phone and the stolen pens. Car payments, bookie, credit cards. All clear plus a few grand leftover. For the first time in a long time hope galloped through his system. He walked quicker now, and when he spied the black glint against the setting sun he figured he’d earned the reward of a drink.
Inside was dark and cold with a trace of pot. Old-school rap crackled through speakers. A bearded hipster bartender slouched at the far end. He gave Darius a friendly nod. “What can I get you?”
Dread crawled along his neck. He brushed it away. “Whiskey soda.”
Darius tried not to think about the scratch-off in his pocket. Why wasn’t he happier? He checked the fights this weekend, trying to figure out which one to bet on. He could bet on however many he wanted to now. No. That’s how you got yourself in this hole. It never ends good for the king. But it’s fifty grand! Problems solved. Stop tripping all over yourself. Still, something kept telling him he never should’ve picked it up. This is how it ends. His blood turned cold, only warming when he reminded himself how that repo lady wouldn’t be nagging him anymore.
He sipped his drink while flicking through stats. He ran his fingers along the bar and felt scratchings in the wood.
“Can I get you another?”
“Yessir.” Darius forgot about the scratchings and sunk into a satisfied slouch. Time fell away. The world fell away. All that remained was him here in this bar, a string of frustrating days behind him.
“Where’s the bathroom?”
The bartender seemed oddly frozen. He motioned toward the rear. As Darius walked the click of his shoes filled his ears. Inside the bathroom reeked of ammonia. He stood before the urinal and sighed. Five grand on Montague. Pays ten to one. Five on Jackson just in case. He should’ve been happy. Why wasn’t he happy?
Kings are born to fall, even the best ones. They fade from time until they’re barely even ghosts.
He finished and zipped and was about to flush when he felt a rustling from above. Something in him screamed not to look. But he couldn’t stop himself. Slowly he tilted his chin up, raising his eyes only at the last second.
The ceiling swirled in a cloudlike funnel. The hair on Darius’s arms pricked up. A face broke through the swirl—demon or angel he couldn’t tell but it fixed its glare on him. In that moment Darius knew: this thing was here for him. It would break him apart bit by bit until there was nothing left of him but a single speck of dust.
The thing opened its mouth and inhaled. Darius felt himself begin to dissolve. Through his panic a voice told him Kings save their people. He thrust his hand into his pocket and pulled out one of the pens, a blue sharpie, and he wrote on the wall with a steady hand Don’t Look UP. Then his hand and the rest of him faded to nothing. Even the sharpie vanished.
***
Saturday stretched out before Corey like an open grave. He checked the time as he plodded along the city streets. He passed women, magazine pretty, sleek and grinning and heading somewhere fun no doubt. He checked the time again. Seven minutes passed. Felt like forever. Sometimes he forgot where he was. Not like a split personality thing, more like a simple losing track of time and place and even self, to the point where he felt undersized in his own body. Sometimes when walking he’d get so lost inside his mind that he couldn’t remember how he got from, say, tenth street to nineteenth.
He turned the corner feeling gangly and deformed. Nothing to do. Nowhere to be. He walked the city playing the same old tunes, clomping the same old blocks, his mind rutting the same old grooves of all his wrong moves. He should’ve finished college. He should’ve married her. Or her. He should’ve moved away. He should’ve taken up skiing. Or tennis. Or mountain biking. He should’ve been born to different parents.
He should’ve been better able to deal with it all. He should’ve been stronger.
He turned a corner, obsessed with this alternate Corey, the one who could do everything right, and he grew to hate himself even more, and then hating himself for hating himself. The spirals never ended. He had to laugh at the absurdity he’d become, and then his laugh wilted into a trickle until it dried up.
Something had to change.
He lifted his chin and looked to the rising moon and nearly stumbled on a raised slab of sidewalk. He righted himself just before disaster, took a breath, and caught a flash of black in the edge of his vision. He wasn’t much of a drinker but something told him to go inside. Plus, he had to piss.
He lumbered into the bar. It smelled oddly of roses. A moody synth track played. The linebacker bartender with well-tended facial hair barely acknowledged him. Corey sat at the bar and ran his hands along the surface. It took him several moments to register the hands as his own. He ordered a beer, the timbre of his own voice alien to him. The bartender set it before him without acknowledgment. Corey didn’t find it rude or odd. Simply normal.
He drank and wondered if he were to vanish, how long would it take for anyone to notice? He scrolled his phone but grew tired of the same news site with the same news and the same socials with the same postings. He sighed and set the phone down and ran his hands along the bar and felt some scratchings. Instinct told him to pull away, and he obeyed, sipping his beer and staring through the blackness at the wall full of liquor bottles and the barely-there bartender.
He tipped his half empty beer and remembered his bladder. He didn’t bother asking the bartender where the toilet was because he knew he’d be ignored. He ambled toward the back, repeating nothing to do a like a mantra.
He stepped inside the men’s room, stood before the urinal, sucked his bottom lip and kept his eyes downcast, wondering if all these dreams and fears and desires in his mind and heart and gut and soul really mattered, and if they all did, then what? Even if he knew how to voice them would anyone even hear him?
His gaze hit the graffiti on the wall.
Don’t Look UP
His blood stilled. Some devil on his shoulder told him to do it, but his gut told him it would be his end. He finished and zipped but he couldn’t move, that urge pushing him to look up, to surrender. A weakness in his knees traveled up his stomach and into his chest before settling in his jaw. He clenched, wanting so bad to just look up and be done with it all.
He stepped one foot back from the urinal, then the other, keeping his eyes level, pivoting and tiptoeing toward the door. He turned back to the blue letters.
Don’t Look UP
He stepped out of the bathroom and into the darkness of the bar.
His knees felt sturdier by the time returned to his stool. Some tiny shift rippled inside him like a pebble tossed into a lake. He ignored the glare of the bartender and finished his beer, but before he left Obsidian forever, he shone his phone’s light on the scratchings in the wood, letters that read:
time turns blood to dust
