There are Skyscrapers in Our Souls

The ancient Romans had a saying: in vino veritas in aqua sanitas: in wine there is truth, and in water there is health.  Truth or health, but never both; they cannot coexist.
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The bar always blurs to black.  It is the natural state of the bar.  The neon thrum, the sharp, flashing crack of the pool cues, the thwack of the darts into the embrace of their boards; the senses are confused, and I cannot separate taste from smell from sight from sound.  It is a pail of water upon the canvas, the paint running, too much color, too much detail, and it all scumbles out to black.  Nature may abhor a vacuum, but the bar depends upon it.  There is an endless expanse within it, and my mind uncurls into places it can’t remember.
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There are skyscrapers in a soul, I told her, my elbows planted in the mess of spilt drinks atop the bar.

There is no such thing, she confidently disabused me.  The soul is a myth, and she tosses back a pint of truth.
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There are skyscrapers in our souls.  We build them with our bare hands; the source of light is indistinct, and we spend our spare moments perched on steel beams staring into something brilliant and bright.  The tower is finished, and hazy forms stroll about the ethereal streets, sometimes nodding, sometimes smiling, but always with eyes inward.  We build skyscrapers in our souls, forgetting that they cast the longest shadows.  They blot out the light for the smaller buildings beneath them.  Where the shadow begins, places out of the prevarications and ambiguities borne of the union between light and vision, places out of where we see and hear and touch and smell and taste and only feel–well, therein lies the truth; somewhere beyond that is the bar.
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Another shot? I asked, determined to take another regardless.  I was unbearably lucid.  She acquiesced, but insisted, shyly but firmly, that she pay.  I shrugged my indifference, asking, Why?

She smiled.  It’s friendlier.  So we both buy drinks, instead of you buying me.  She smiled wider.  I’d rather be a gift.
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I woke up beside her, still wearing a condom.  The night prior had been reduced to the blotchy ink of a handwritten note soaked in eighty-proof truth.  Her legs were twitching and her face flinching; her face contorted in a silent scream.  She was having a nightmare.  A housefly alighted upon the crest of her cheekbone.  She looked like the victim of a plague, roiling with an unseen, yet terminal, disease.  She looked like she’d had too much truth, and her body was rejecting it, her brain was refusing it, her liver ameliorating it.  Sober, now, she was a collage of lies; mascara streaked, teeth filled, pubic hair waxed.

It contrasted harshly against the night before; her ample breasts bouncing, her hips pressing back, the little sound from the place where the throat meets the roof of the mouth.  It’s a noise that defies explanation.  It was the crackling pop of the last swirling star between spacetime and the honest vacuum; perhaps it was the solemn squeak of the bar door as it seals shut, reducing a tiny crack of muted light into a vacuumous nothing.  Vladimir Nabokov wrote, Common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.  Sometimes I see it in the tavern door closing.
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I had my first beer when I was twenty.  Using a fake ID, I went to Mr. Roberts Bar & Grill in Madison, Wisconsin.  Bored to tears–bars are really very boring for the sober–I ordered a Moose Drool.  A dark beer, hoppy with medium mouthfeel and body, it went down easier than you’d think. 

Now picture a mountain above a city, a city with a skyline that scrapes the sky.  The mountain’s craggy slopes are snow covered.  Picture the author–yours truly–atop the mountain, decapitated, with head in hand.  He places the disembodied head at his feet and pushes.  As the head bounces down the mountain, it gathers snow, even until the face is no longer visible.  But the ball of flesh and snow has only come a quarter way; disaster looms.  The hazy forms turn their hazy faces towards the dull roar of the avalanche.  They blanch in fear at a ball now halfway, and now man-sized.  They flee in fear.  With the hazy forms hiding inside their skyscrapers, the brilliant and bright light blinks out, and on flicker the neon lights.  The snowball crashes through the streets, defying physics, moving with impossible momentum, until it crashes through the barroom wall.  As the snow melts, the bartender asks my head, "What will you have?"  I ask for a pitcher of truth and two shots of honesty.  Oh, and a cocktail–something sour, like sincerity.

When I got home from Mr. Roberts, I wrote inside my arm, I traded in my pheromones for cockeyed teeth and a crooked smile and a scathing sense of self-sacrifice.  I played Plans by Death Cab For Cutie, and watched the sun as it backlit the buildings downtown.  They were building an addition onto a high rise apartment building; on an I-beam hundreds of feet up, I saw the tiny silhouette of a man.
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I sit at the bar and talk to a bronze-haired girl, marveling at her everything.  I won’t remember it–a sure promise that it will be repeated.  When she talks, I impatiently listen, eager to spill out across her feet and rise like a tide until we’re eye level.  It’s not going to happen.  I know it–it’s the truth.  There are facts in every thing she does, but so few of them include me.  Our reflections in the bar mirror are hazy, and we’re wandering around on ethereal streets lit by a brilliant and bright light.  We both pause, side-by-side, and stare up in awe at the façade of a skyscraper.  Looking closer, I realize it isn’t a building at all, but instead a black and hungry vacuum.  The nothingness emitted an odd tumult of noise.  I thought I could hear a neon thrum, the sharp, flashing crack of a pool cue, the thwacking of darts into the embrace of their boards.  Wasn’t there a skyscraper here, once?  The glasses I don’t wear tumble end-over-end into unknowable oblivion, while her locket tugs on her neck to places I cannot see.  We nod to each other, then, and smile.  Our eyes are only directed inwards.  We part ways.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said, First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, and then the drink takes you.  I disagree.  The bar kills, but never with booze.  Alcohol never killed anyone; it is the truth therein that buries you.  Here’s to remembering that treading water is drowning, if you learn to ignore your lungs, I toast into the mirror, a few moments outside of memory.  The vinyl of the barstool’s upholstery still holds the imprint of the girl, but her body has fled: she has become a bright and blindingly brilliant light.  In vino veritas.  Blackness.
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There are skyscrapers in a soul, I told her, my elbows planted in the mess of spilt drinks atop the bar.  I spoiled beneath the hot bar lights, carrion reverting back to something more honest.

There is no such thing, she confidently disabused me, her dark hair like the feathers of a scavenging crow.  The soul is a myth, and she tosses back a pint of truth.  She begins to circle me, and I take refuge in my apathy.

No, no, there is, I persisted, the words a smooth slurry of wet sand.  And there’s a line of hazy forms hundreds of stories long on its roof, all patiently waiting for their turn to leap.  Worst of all, though, is not the thrill of the fall or the fear of the impact.  The worst thing is that, without exception, they will rise unharmed, return to the back of the line, and do it all over again.