The Present Moment
David was on the third night of what was technically his fourth relapse, although no single person besides himself knew about all four. The bar was claustrophobic with low wood ceilings and a semi-carpeted floor whose true color was impossible to discern, populated by about fifteen people in a space not much larger than shipping container. It was raining outside in violent sheets and thundering madly every fifteen seconds or so, each flash of lightning providing for split-second the appearance of daylight in the street. Death can take any of us at any moment and might very well take all of us today. David didn’t say this out loud, but he thought it with morbid anticipation almost every time he got bored.
The music in the bar was loud enough that he could barely hear Angela, who was telling a story about some of her friends getting into a complicated political disagreement with other friends. But by the time the story culminated in anything remotely noteworthy (one person shoved someone else and then the person they shoved burst into tears in front of several other people), David had entirely lost track of which names corresponded to which characters. It was unclear if this was due to his own alcohol-impaired listening, or Angela’s alcohol-impaired storytelling, which was full of irrelevant tangents and personal observations. He was smiling and nodding his head in the manner of someone who would rather give the false impression of paying attention than simply state his lack of interest out loud and change the topic. Angela, mid-sentence, refilled each of their shot glasses from the near empty bottle of Grey Goose, accidentally letting it slip from her hands and shatter gloriously across the part of the floor which wasn’t carpeted. The event welcomely interrupted the seemingly never-ending story and sent an eerie shudder of excitement through David’s amphetaminic nervous system, causing him to laugh a sort of low pitch giddy laugh that one might endearingly describe with the word stupid. Angela laughed too, but hers was more indicative of embarrassment than amusement. A short bald man of about 50 approached the scene with a dustpan and David felt embarrassed as he watched someone else clean up the mess his party had made.
“Oh shit, I’m sorry” Angela said.
The bald man, whose apron indicated that he worked there, cleaned silently without even looking up to acknowledge her apology. David and Angela exchanged a brief look of mutually experienced awkwardness, which passed with a giggle back into the drunken comfortability they had previously been enjoying. She continued her story:
“Like I was saying, Lucas is seriously crying right there, which makes Jacey smirk which Bella glares at her for, and starts accusing Jacob of being a bully, but he doesn’t say bully she’s like ‘you’re such a fucking asshole, Jack’, and Bella, who like, she looked awful by the way like she had these huge bags under her eyes, she’s trying to take him out of the room because she knew as well as anyone did that he was more than drunk enough to get violent with…” David continued nodding his head and smiling and occasionally raising his eyebrows but he stopped listening. Someone walked towards the table.
An ugly-looking man in an expensive-looking outfit who seemed to be roughly as drunk as David approached the bald man and began speaking to him rudely, which the bald man made no response to or acknowledgement of.
“Hey why the fuck are you cleaning up that mess when those kids are the ones who broke the bottle, huh? You’re the bartender not a fucking cleaning lady. You hear me asshole? You really gunna make me sit here and wait for you to come back and refill my glass? Fucking pathetic fuck, you know those kids were laughing at you.”
David felt insulted at the implication that his laughter was in any way sadistic or even directed at the bald man, but then reflected on the possibility that if he felt insulted by it, it might be on some level not inaccurate. Certainly at least, the ugly man was being more sadistic with his insults than David could have been through laughter. A group of patrons tried unsuccessfully to get the ugly man to leave the bald man alone, but he shoved them away and doubled down on his verbal aggression. David leaned back in his chair and let the hypnotic music drown out the ugly man’s tirade. The interaction went seemingly unnoticed by Angela.
Being in the same room as someone who was being so mean to someone else made David uncomfortable. Part of him wanted to get up and shoe the ugly man away but this might put him in harm’s way, and the bald man might resent him for speaking on his behalf. David would rather remain an uninvolved, yet subtly guilty, bystander. He found his disposition depressing. Depressing in the sense that it reminded him of his own cognitive dissonance: the tension between the person his conscience wanted him to be and the person his actions revealed him to be. This thought sent David’s mind to another thought, which was why the fuck was he so depressed if he’s supposed to be drinking and having fun? Angela’s story was a thousand miles away. He realized both that he resented her for dropping the bottle and also that the resentment stemmed from his desire to continue drinking. A physical discomfort crept up David’s spine as he reflected on the question of whether or not he was truly depressed, both in that moment and as a person. David became scared of the way he felt. He began to think more deeply and somehow urgently about the question.
A wave of truly intense depression always brought David back to a sense of being grounded in something indelible, and his mind held closely onto that sense long after each wave had fallen and given way to a comfortable yet tacitly transient enjoyment of life. This depressive function was, along with death and time, a concept that David had been steadily developing his understanding of for just about his entire life, which oceans of thought had been devoted to, analyzing constantly each and every little thing that made him feel better or worse and trying to understand the greater patterns behind them. David’s mind fell into this analysis mode unconsciously, as memories and fantasies invaded his headspace and crowded out the things he could see and hear. If he had been paying attention, he would have heard the ugly man call the bald man a “white trash fucking stupid hillbilly” under the boom of the speakers. But David was too deep in thought to notice. David’s mind sometimes took him far away from the content of people and things around him. Amphetamine and alcohol aided his brain in the endeavor of detaching from his physical body and sailing into the reaches of deepest mental space, unaffected by and unaware of the present moment.
Involuntarily and without warning, the present moment reasserted itself and lurched David out of his daydream via the unmistakable sound of a gun being fired several times in rapid succession, the noise amplified by the small space they were in and ringing painfully through his ears. His nervous system signaled danger and he reflexively stood up and looked around the room. The music was still playing but everyone in the bar was silent. The ugly man fell onto his back in a growing pool of crimson blood and the bald man stood silently over him, pistol in hand, for a moment which was about one second long, but felt more like ten seconds. The bald man’s blank expression was reminiscent of a deer in headlights, seemingly unaware of the gravity of the present moment, and it matched with uncanny precision the dead stare of the ugly man. The room quickly erupted into a cacophony of terrified screams and everybody in the bar, except for the ugly man and the bald man (both of whom might as well have been statues), ran into the night, crowding through the narrow doorway onto the sidewalk and across the street, causing cars to honk and slam on their breaks.
The scene took less than thirty seconds to unfold but by the time it had, David was already a few hundred yards away from the bar. Angela was nowhere to be found. The rain soaked through David’s clothing and made him shiver. He heard sirens in the distance; someone else had called the police. The street, lined with commercial and industrial buildings taller than you can see without tilting your head to at least a 70-degree angle, struck David in that moment as being a place he would never again be able to return to without remembering and reliving the events of the past minute. The stunned amazement which he felt right there would be paired with that concrete stretch of city street forever. David had never seen person die before. Once he realized he was no longer in the vicinity of any immediate danger, his adrenaline gave way to a powerful tiredness. He was grateful for his lack of sobriety, because he felt much less frightened than one ought to feel after witnessing a murder.
David stumbled to the nearest subway stop. Rainwater cascaded down the steps into the underground like a series of tiny waterfalls. He wondered where all of it went and if any subway rats were drowning. He pressed his wallet against the activator and moved effortlessly through the turnstile.
