If you want to talk about an out of body experience, how’s this: I was sitting at a bar in the late hours of someday when, putting my drink down, I noticed I had no flesh, just bones; bones wrapped around the empty glass, leading me naturally to scream—except I had no vocal chords, or throat, or tongue—so I click-click-clicked, and “heard” the bartender “say”, “Hey, Lou. I think we got another one.”
“What is this?” I asked, realizing I had no body or muscles of any kind, that I was just a skeleton sitting in a bar filled with other skeletons, including the bartender and Lou, who was a rather squat skeleton wearing a black hat and holding a lit cigar.
Before anyone could answer, I click-click-clicked again, figuring that if I couldn’t scream I also couldn’t ask or say anything, that I was just sitting and clicking to myself like a chump, a worthless old bag of bones.
“Nah, we hear ya,” said Lou.
“Loud and clear,” said the bartender, who was refilling my glass.
How could I even drink? I had no stomach. Where was the alcohol going? The bartender motioned for me to look down. I did; a puddle drained into a gutter, like in some old German beer hall.
“Drink up, kid.”
“Where the hell am I?”
“In a bar,” said the bartender.
“One of countless many,” said Lou.
I downed the drink, and for reasons beyond me tasted actual double malt whisky. “Am I dead?”
Lou took a puff of his cigar. (The smoke filled the spaces between his bones, then slowly drifted outward.) “That’s what you might call an existential question.”
“Aren’t they almost all existential by now, Lou?” said the bartender.
“Sure are,” said Lou.
“You see, kid,” said the bartender, “the thing is we don’t know. Maybe you’re dead. Maybe I’m dead. Maybe we’re all dead. Maybe only some of us are dead—”
“Maybe none of us is dead,” said Lou.
“Not likely,” said the bartender.
“Not impossible,” said Lou.
“You ever seen a talking skeleton?” asked the bartender. It took a few seconds to realize he was talking to me. “No.”
“So make your own conclusions,” said the bartender.
“It takes only one.”
‘What’s that, Lou?” asked the bartender.
“I said it takes only one,” said Lou. “You can see all the dead skeletons you want, but it doesn’t prove there ain’t a live one.”
“How long have you been here?” I asked, glancing around the bar. There were around two dozen skeletons inside, drinking, talking, sleeping (or dead) with their skulls on the tables. A barroom full of skeletons.
“Look at the brains in this one, Lou,” said the bartender.
“Another existential question,” said Lou.
“Thing is, we don’t know,” said the bartender.
“Time,” said Lou, from inside another dissipating cloud of smoke, “is a concept that feels a bit knotted up these days. Ain’t that right?”
“Distended,” said the bartender.
“Like a balloon that’s been getting filled up with air so long you don’t remember when you started,” said Lou.
“And it just won’t pop,” said the bartender.
“And it just won’t pop,” repeated Lou.
“You get what we’re saying?” asked the bartender.
“I’m afraid I don’t,” I said.
Lou pulled his stool closer to mine. “Answer me this, kid. Do you remember where you were yesterday?”
“I—”
Couldn’t.
“Weird concept. Yesterday. Ain’t it?”
“Like something you heard once but don’t remember where, when or what it means,” said the bartender, pouring me another whisky.
It was like trying to touch a cloud. It was like knowing the outline of a shape but being unable to fill it with details, and being perpetually at the moment just before knowing what the outline signifies.
I didn’t know yesterday, much less where I’d been then. I didn’t know anything about the past—except that I’d always just been: here.
“Best not to think about it too much,” said the bartender.
“Might drive you mad,” said Lou.
“Not that we’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting a mad skeleton,” said the bartender.
“Which don’t prove there ain’t one,” said Lou.
Just then there was a crackle and a voice came over an old speaker: “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage, with a roaring round of applause, tonight’s band!” followed by shuffling, the opening of a curtain, the revealing of a stage, and the orderly appearance of five skeletons, one each for the five instruments already waiting: piano, bass, drums, saxophone and trumpet.
Few in the bar clapped.
Lou drowned his cigar stub in a glass.
The band began to play. Some kind of jazz song. A standard, I thought. One of those songs every band covered at one time or another…
But how does a skeleton play the saxophone? I could understand the piano, if you forgot about the fact there was nothing holding the bones—our bones—together, nothing to make them move or rotate, bones hitting ivory, bones hitting ebony, it wasn’t such a far-out idea, but watching a skeleton with no lungs blowing air, pretending to blow air, now that was ridiculous; yet I heard it, the trumpet, the saxophone. All those beautiful notes.
“What’s the name of that song?” I asked.
The bartender chuckled.
“I don’t know,” said Lou. “Just like you don’t know.”
“It’s on the tip of my tongue,” I said—before realizing I no longer had one.
“Mine too,” sighed the bartender.
“Sure sounds mighty sweet, though. Don’t it?” said Lou.
And it did. It sounded so sweet I wanted to lay my head down on the bar and start sobbing myself to sleep. Wait, “Do skeletons sleep?” I asked.
“Hey, Lou!” said the bartender. “Finally one that isn’t so existential.” Then he turned to me and said: “No, skeletons don’t sleep. Once we’re awake we’re always awake.”
“But always is an existential question,” said Lou.
We listened in silence to a few bars of the song. “Are they actually playing?” I asked after a while. “Or is this some kind of recording?”
“Ain’t no recording,” said Lou.
“The sign says ‘Live Music’,” said the bartender. I must have looked puzzled because, “On the outside,” he added, “where you haven’t been yet.”
“But how’d I get inside if I’ve never been—”
“Think of it as a chicken and egg-type of deal,” said Lou. “For there to be an outside, there has to be an inside, and for there to be an inside, there has to be an outside, but what there don’t have to be is an order to it.”
“Doesn’t the outside contain the inside?” I asked.
“Would you look at that!” said Lou.
The bartender reached under the bar and pulled out a large book, which he placed on the bar, opened and started to write in. “What are you writing?” I asked.
“‘Doesn’t… the outside… contain… the inside?’” he said scribbling.
“That’s what I said,” I said.
“You ain’t as dumb as you look, kid,” said Lou. “What you’re gawking at right there is The Big Book of Existential Questions.”
“It has all the questions we don’t know the answers to,” said the bartender, leafing through the book’s innumerable pages. “Yours now included.”
“Can I see?” I asked.
The bartender spun the book around so I could see it. “Just don’t think too hard about too many or you might go mad,” said Lou.
I glanced at the open page: Where does all the rain go? If I can’t kill myself does it mean I’m not alive? Have I ever been loved? If there is night without day why do we call it night? Who makes the whisky?
My head began to spin. “Take it away,” Lou told the bartender.
The bartender put the book under the bar.
“I—I’ve got another,” I said.
“What is it, kid?”
The music was truly very beautiful. “Are we sure we’re hearing the same song?”
“Afraid that one’s already in there,” said the bartender.
Lou patted me on the back of my spine as I discovered that tears were running from my eyes—from my eye sockets? I pressed my finger bones into the empty orbits. “How do I even see!” I yelled.
“There, there,” said Lou.
The bartender offered me a stronger drink. I screamed, “How does alcohol help? A skeleton can’t get drunk!”
Several other skeletons looked our way.
The band kept playing.
“It helps,” said Lou. “The why of it don’t make a difference.”
I gulped the drink down and found that he was right. Somehow it did help, even as I saw the booze fall through me and drain away into the gutter.
“How…” I said.
“There’s theories,” said Lou.
“Quite a few theories,” said the bartender.
“Some say it’s memory—like from some kinda before. Maybe you liked to drink before you came here. As a fleshling, I mean.”
“That presupposes there was a before and that I ever was a ‘fleshling’.”
“But you have a vague feeling, don’t ya?” asked Lou.
“I do.”
“Some take that as evidence,” said the bartender. “For some that’s enough. For me it’s all a bit Romantic to understand the world based on my own feelings, but I won’t deny I have them sometimes too.”
“I only remember vaguely,” I said.
“Vaguely’s as good as it ever gets,” said Lou.
“Some don’t even have that. Total blanks. Don’t even know how to speak,” said the bartender, motioning at one of the skeletons with its head laid flat on a table. “Others get to vague eventually.”
“Might say you got a head start. Nice to start with something,” said Lou.
“No one’s ever gotten to clearly?” I asked.
“No one I ever knew,” said the bartender, and Lou nodded.
I noticed that four of the skeletons had at some point gotten up from their chairs and started dancing. Two pairs of two. Hip bones swaying. Twice: one skull resting on the shoulder bone of another.
“I vaguely remember… her,” I said.
“One on the dance floor?” asked Lou, surprised.
The bartender looked.
“No,” I said. “Not that her but a her. There was a her. In the before—I think.”
“If there was a before,” said the bartender.
I vaguely remembered:
Heartbreak.
“Lots of hers around here,” said Lou. “But you gotta be careful. There’s a difference between vaguely remembering her and thinking there was a her. You can think a lot of things. Like a whole before, with you and her in it.”
“Imagination,” said the bartender pointing below the bar. “The Book’s filled with questions about that.”
“Some say it makes no difference,” said Lou.
I suddenly became aware of windows. I’d seen them before, but I hadn’t registered them as windows. Now I realized they allowed me a view of the outside; where, through the blurriness of rain-streaked glass I saw the filtered lights of a city. I heard, through the pattering rain drops, just below the rhythm plucked by the band’s bassist, the hum of electricity, the churning of some kind of life…
“Are you thinking of Miles, Lou?” the bartender asked.
“Among others,” said Lou.
“Miles is an interesting case,” said the bartender. “He started as a blank, then got to vaguely and decided he could think himself to clearly.”
“Thought up a whole load of details,” said Lou.
“Put them all in order and arranged them into a before for himself,” said the bartender.
“I told him, ‘Miles, you’re crazy. You can’t just decide there was a before.’ He said, ‘Why the hell not? What goddamn else is there?’ I said there was waiting. (We’re all waiting, one way or another.) I said, ‘But, Miles, it ain’t gonna be real.’ He said, ‘It don’t matter if it’s real because it’s real when I believe it.’ ‘Just like that?’ I asked. ‘Just like that,’ he said.”
“Did he go mad?” I asked.
“You haven’t been listening,” said the bartender. “I already said I’d never known a mad skeleton.”
“Worse than mad. Miles went and got sad,” said Lou.
“Now, a sad skeleton—those I’ve seen too many of,” said the bartender.
“See ‘em outside all the time,” said Lou.
“Why’d he go sad?”
“Because Miles, in his dupe’s quest for certainty, thought himself up a before so bleak he couldn’t make sense of it,” said Lou. “And do you know why he couldn’t make sense of it?”
The bartender grinned wide.
“No, why?” I said.
“Because it didn’t make no damn sense,” said Lou.
“It didn’t hold together,” said the bartender. “There were loose ends, and those loose ends had loose ends, and so forth.”
“Because he made it all up,” said Lou.
“Maybe he made a mistake. Maybe he just wasn’t systematic enough,” I said.
“Systematic?” said Lou. The bartender poured him a drink. “His entire conception was a mistake. Miles erred, kid. He believed he could cobble together a before from a bunch of vaguely remembereds and filling in the blanks.”
“He thought he could understand his situation based on a story of his own authoring. He failed,” said the bartender.
“He had to fail,” said Lou.
“What happened to him—is he dead?” I asked.
“Oh, kid,” said Lou. “Don’t make him pull out The Book.”
“Dead is one of the existential questions,” said the bartender.
“Already asked,” said Lou.
“Never to be answered,” said the bartender.
“So where is he?” I asked.
“Wandering hopelessly,” said Lou.
The band finished one song and started another, a slower one. More skeletons got off their seats and started to dance. “Then there was Abaroa,” said the bartender, and, “Now there was an oddball,” said Lou, and I didn’t hear any more because I, too, stood on shaking knee caps and walked drunkenly toward the dance floor, joined in the dancing, caught up in the familiar music I would forever be on the cusp of identifying, cracking to its rhythm, creaking to its beat, wondering and stepping until the song ended and I came back to the bar, behind which the bartender stood as before, polishing a glass, but from in front of which Lou had gone. “Where’s Lou?” I asked.
“Went out,” said the bartender.
I felt I should go out, too. The rain was battering the windows.
City lights swam.
Exiting through the bar doors I noticed the world lacked colour. Everything was black and white. A sign above the bar did indeed say ‘Live Music,’ and as I passed from interior to exterior, rain drops splashed against the top of my bare skull.
The bar was located on a busy urban street, car-less but populated by buses and trams and pedestrian skeletons, some carrying umbrellas, others without, moving briskly along the sidewalk in both directions, where in the distance traffic lights bloomed through the hanging mist. Beside the bar were a pharmacy and a hotel, both bearing neon signs mirrored by the puddled asphalt, making it hard to tell the dark sky from the dark ground. I could have been floating. I could have been upside down. The air was still. The rain fell in perfectly vertical lines. I chose a direction at random and walked.
Wet streets intersected wet streets, each with its own bars, pharmacies and hotels, and diners, kiosks and coffee shops.
I walked and the rain never stopped, and the night never ended.
Later I got on a bus. Skeleton passengers looked at me as I went down the aisle, sat down. None spoke and I thought about my conversations with the bartender and Lou and had terrible doubts because if we could never be sure whether we had heard the same song, how could we be sure we had heard the words said, asked the questions answered, spoken the sentences contemplated. What if everybody was just click-click-clicking, saying what they wanted to say, asking what they wanted to ask, hearing the answers they wanted to hear. The world passed monochrome beyond the dirty bus window; was it too but a monologue punctuated by the falling rain?
Can anybody hear me?
I got off the bus at a stop at the side of a wet asphalt street next to a hotel, pharmacy and bar, into which a pair of skeletons disappeared. I followed.
This bar resembled the last. Here too a band played and patrons danced, but the song was sadder, the dancing slower and more soulful. I remembered her again—vaguely: memory flickering like a defective neon light reflected in a puddle on the blackest of asphalt streets—splashed apart by the tire of a rumbling bus filled with silent skeletons—
“What’s your pleasure?” the bartender asked.
“Whisky,” I said.
He filled a glass and slid it to me.
The dancing skeletons looked like pain. “What are they dancing?” I asked.
“The Grey Lumbago.”
Somewhere outside or inside my mind ripples spread outwards upon a surface from a central point unknown.
Watching them dance, tears dropped from my cheekbones.
“Do you know Miles?” I asked the bartender.
“No.”
“How about Abaroa?”
“No, pal.”
Another skeleton walked in from the street and sat beside me, nodding in polite acknowledgement. This one wore a tie and carried a briefcase. I asked what was inside. He said, “Dunno. Forgot the combination.”
“Or never knew it,” said the bartender.
“Hell, might not even be my briefcase,” said the skeleton wearing the tie. “Steamroller, please.” He glanced at the dancers. “Grey Lumbago tonight?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you happen to have a book under the bar?” I asked the bartender.
“Of course,” he said, and produced it.
It was a copy of The Big Book of Existential Questions.
“I’ve got one for you,” I said.
The bartender flipped pages to a blank one. I asked if I could write on it myself. “Run it by me first, pal.”
I said, “Am I the radiating persistence of hurt?”
“Cerebral,” said the skeleton wearing the tie, as the bartender handed me a pen. I wrote the question into the book. “If you ask me, it’s a waste of time collecting all those questions. Questions without answers.”
For some reason he got on my nerves. “Time sure seems like something we have a lot of,” I said.
“Maybe an infinite amount,” said the bartender.
“If we have infinite time, it’s debatable whether we could waste any. There would always be infinitely more left,” I said.
The skeleton wearing the tie snorted. “What a scholar! Even if I had all the time in the world I wouldn’t waste it on crap like that. Thinking? Bah. Meaningless babble. Wouldn’t you rather get out there and dance? Huh, guy?”
“I loved a woman once,” I blurted out. “That must have meaning!”
He’d gotten under my skin—metaphorically.
“Sure you did, buddy. I bet you remember as much. Remember it vaguely. Am I right? Am I fucking right?”
We both rose, and I swung at him. My clenched knuckles smacking his lower jaw, dislocating it, sending it flying across the bar. He cackled: both his upper jaw, still attached somehow to his skull, and the lower part on the barroom floor. “Not bad, slugger. Now get this.” And he connected to the side of my skull. Next thing I knew, two burly skeletons were dragging me to the exit, and the bartender yelled, “And stay out of my bar unless you know how to behave, pal. It was a conversation for chrissakes.”
I got up in the exterior night time rain, straightened my bones and felt the convenience of not having flesh. No bruises, no blood. You could still fracture and crack, but those were serious injuries from serious dust ups, and even if they never fully healed you didn’t stop being. That would have been too easy. In later times I met not a few cracker-jacks and disclocatees, usually former suicidals who were but bits of bone, hopping and slinking along the street like the rest of us. One of them professed he’d seen the truth and we were all just the dead potential of aborted fetuses.
No, not me. I knew love.
I kicked out at nothing and walked down the street.
In another bar another patron told me he believed we were all dead and in Hell—except it was a Hell after the end-time, post-Hell. “I don’t see anyone burning,” I said, to which he replied: “That’s ‘cause the burning time’s over and everything that could burn has burned. Don’t you see? We’re all that’s left in an abandoned Hell, ossified scraps of recall existing without the possibility of becoming dust, escaped phantoms of yesterday’s space-time!”
The buses go without arriving.
The streets are alike.
In every bar there’s a bartender, a book and an assemblage of skeletons, each coping in its own way, listening to a band play traces of a better existence that used to be. “Or a worse existence,” says Miles. “Or one that never was,” says the bartender, as, finally, I get up and too join the dancing barroom skeletons. Dancing notes from before this self-extinction. Dancing the teardrops rippling whisky. Dancing our skeletal bodies passing through the vertically falling pain. Dancing the Grey Lumbago. Dancing the Grey Lumbago…