Old Reviver

There’s a bar at the corner of Stanton and Clinton called the Old Reviver where you can wait and see which spirit bottoms first.  There’s a booth in the back, little cul-de-sac seating put up against this dark, grainy wood so shined you can see a muddled reflection in it.  That’s where she left me her letter, which I left burning in the ash tray.  I make it a habit to go back there, kind of like it’s a bar servicing Limbo where I try to baptize myself with a bottle.  I should’ve been there a half hour ago to ordain happy hour, but instead I’m here at my brother’s place scrambling about for my keys.

They’re not really my keys – the chain, I own, yes, scarce proof that I do indeed possess things nowadays – they’re a couple key copies my brother Richie made at the CVS to spot me for my stay.  I’ve been crashing in the corner of his kitchen these last couple of weeks on a weathered, orange inflatable I bought for a trip a year back when I went to see Sandusky Bay with Norah.  We ended up crashing a cheap motel making fools of ourselves by blasting that Uncle Tupelo track.  I never even took the air mat out of its bag, but I’ve been seeing that blow-up nightly now; maybe it’s fate.  I bought that thing with Richie at an REI, planning some other trip in our endless string of adventures, and here I am at the end of the road, on my knees, searching through the littering of last night’s New Belgium beer cans.  I wonder whether the orange looks better in the morning light or the lamplight.  Shoot, should I bivouac before or after the bar?  After.  There are more pressing things in life than the immediate moment, surely.  Where are my keys? 

I’ll retrace my steps.  Richie left in the morning, that I know, but did not witness.  He left a note and some cash.  A nice note, a worrying note there on the counter by his records.  Of course there was the usual sympathy point written in it, a brotherly thing, some things you say to the stranger you’ve been adjoined to your whole life.  Adlai, I can’t lie, I can’t tell you I didn’t cry when you first told me about Norah leaving.  

They’d met, of course, at Mom’s funeral.  Norah stood by my side the whole night, with me as we watched Richie embrace those relatives, those folks who only lived up to that name whenever someone in the pack dropped or cuffed.  Mom loved them all anyways, writing postcards and sending gifts to them whenever she could, and they treated her in life like she was a no one, a nothing.  After the reception Richie came to me embattled by tears.  I couldn’t look at him, turned and looked away I did.  But Norah hugged him, did what I couldn’t, and came back to me in my world right then.  I kept looking away, saw a blue jay in that winter outside, and the world felt black. 

Richie never really knew Norah then.  Why’d he have to go and write how sad he was in his letter?  She and I’d been seeing each other on the sly for a year by the time it happened, and of course the first big thing I could take her to was to see my own damn mother be carried away by some people who spent her life leaching away her kindness, dressed in violet when she hated all things purple.  I stopped reading his letter then and there.  I need a drink.

Kitchen cabinet, above my bed for the night, top shelf.  I open the clasp and peek in.  All the bottles taped blue at the waterline.  Richie never touched alcohol himself, my teetotaling kid brother who’d shout at me when I swiped a shooter or two from the mini bars at those motels Dad would drag us, but he kept some around in case he needed to host drunks like me, all measured and accounted for with that line marker.  I’ve always felt like he came across Frost’s woodland crossroads and instead of taking one of two paths, he bushwhacked his own way forward.  I’ve got a Croat Zinfandel I like and there’s plenty still in it.  Maybe the answer’s at the bottom.  Or maybe my keys.

Retrace one step and the mind will find my keys for me.  Powers of the subconscious, proved without having to write a proof.  I bring the Zin with me to the bookshelf.  This morning when I was brewing some coffee black to Zen out the anvil resting over my brow, I checked out one of those guidebooks Richie collects each time a flaring fad of wanting to see the country hits him.  He and I were going to see this old lighthouse in Maine last spring, something to do with it being the easternmost point on the contiguous continent brought out a reverse Manifest Destiny feeling to him that likely coincided with a lingering worry for the future and his nostalgia for our childhood travels.  Old road trips we used to take with Dad to faded furniture towns in Appalachia, railroad junctions and brick wall joints riddled with plastic geckoes.  Hushpuppies and bluegrass ran in our blood, Richie and I’d joke whenever Dad cranked the window of his 2000s Tacoma down to flip a tailgater off and leave the road.  No wonder Dad left.  There’s gotta be more tailgaters out there to flip off.

Of course, I ended up driving cross country to Sandusky with Norah and couldn’t go with him.  Richie said nothing of it and went along on his journey.  He left me a voicemail from the top of the lighthouse, something about sunlight through a prism, that he was hopeful for me.  I felt pretty alone on my drive even though Norah was there at my side, or maybe she was asleep. 

There’re a few photos framed atop this bookshelf, but no keys.  The shelf’s no more than a few planks nailed together with a chipping varnish thrown on, possibly a left over from Mom’s estate.  There’s the one picture of his graduation, him with his widow-like gown and a truthful grin, wrapping his arm around me, unpleasantly smiling like a mix between serial killer and amateur-hour Vogue because I’d never known how to act in front of camera, even though Norah was behind the lens.  Funny, even though we have the same color eyes, a shadow’s depressed Richie’s green while mine are blanched and blinded by the sun. 

I’m slumped in a rattan chair by the shelf and remember I still have the photograph of Norah from that Sandusky trip packed away somewhere, probably as a bookmark in that Charles Jackson book I was reading before she left.  Does she have my copy still?  Maybe I should message her and ask.  Is it worth breaking no contact to reclaim a treasured good?  Best not to, there’s no point in opening that book again.  I don’t remember the photo all too well, but I took it while walking in the rain with my Nikon as she looked at me from the driver’s seat of our Highlander.  Her eyes in it, I do remember.  They held a firm gaze whose resolution burned the peanut butter color away, and her hand, rested outwards at me, adorned with the ring we both wore that she fashioned from swiped copper wire. 

There are my keys.  I don’t remember leaving them on the coffee table, but I guess I also don’t remember last night very well, other than vague, strobing images of a ceramic dream pig telling me to get going and pay the toll.  My keys turned out to be in a dish tray with that same pig face at its mast.  Richie always kept funny things like that.  Tiny porcine trays and assorted goods.  Wooden masks, shaped and painted with the form and pattern of varying animals decorated whatever space he had in his walkup.  I always assumed that if he didn’t pursue publishing like he did, he would’ve been a zookeeper in another life, a giver of refuge to the stray curiosities of the Earth. 

Richie told me when I was first moving in with him, after I got the boot from Norah, that he’d come across all these figures while wandering through northern Mexico the summer after he graduated.  He’d wanted me to come on that trip too, but I was a year out of college setting myself to move out of a dingy place in Roxbury to a dingy one bed, one bath in Two Bridges.  Norah and I were both looking for jobs, she graphic design, me photo editorial.  I couldn’t risk the resource for some endless excursion when she and I were stepping out from the bubble for the first time.  Plus, I was already burning through the money Mom left and had already asked Norah to pull from her trust to her side eyed sighs. But I did enjoy him talking about the sculptures and his journeys, hearing his passion for the people and places he’d met, how vivid they stood in his telling, like a model in relief. 

Sure, I was a little tipsy when he told his yarn.  I’d started returning to the Old Reviver that week, testing if the wound had healed, and he happened to be home when I got back.  He didn’t know about why I was out and about.  I brought some groceries with me to make it look purposeful, to give myself an alibi, so it felt like a spy story where I played the active listener, the wounded but mending brother.  Richie never mentioned anything about my drinking, not even the steady depletion of his collected stock, but I’d sometimes catch him looking at me from that bookshelf seat with a prying eye and a prim lip whenever I bumbled in late.  Him and those indecipherable masks, ever watching.

An array of monkey faces and elder masks, wooden and clay faces crowned with hair unmistakably taken from tree fiber, came and went on my way to the door as I began to leave.  If I were in a worse mood, I’d say I was haunted or cursed.  Maybe it’s better to blame the masks for that feeling.  The hallway to the door seems to stretch until eternity, like some sort of elementary perspective drawing where long lines feel their way to a central vanishing point, except that the vanishing point is a slide-bolted door with a little peep hole beaming the only light into space.  And like a moth to the flame, or a shrunken man in a pinhole camera looking for the exit, I reach out towards the door, checking my momentum after opening it so that I don’t swing out falling onto the short runway of a platform before the spiral steps of doom begin. 

The season outside isn’t too bitter for December, save the groutfit feel of the snow losing its life force as it degrades into a slush that certifiably will seep into a sock, and the wind chill.  That’s what gets you, after all.  The walk towards Stanton isn’t too much of a trek, but these streets feel like wind tunnels firing turbine breezes right at me, hollowing me out further than I already feel.  Sure, college in Boston felt colder, and all those walks along the Charles that I used to take with Norah when we were first trying on the word dating must have fortified me from feeling pierced like I do now.  I lost a genuine river, meandering and all, and found this river of steel and goddamn wind chill down 2nd Street with no coat worth its snuff nor any heartwarming company to compensate.  She took me one time after a dinner in Cambridge to the Harvard boathouse because she loved the movie The Social Network so much.  We spent those after-midnight hours huddled on the rocks by the shore right outside the locked gates, skipping rocks while plotting ways to sneak in and snatch a photo of us together.  Her tawny hair draped over my shoulder like a waterfall in curls, and she told me about some constellations I’ve since forgotten.

There’s Richie’s downstairs neighbor with her Pomeranian strolling by on the other side of the street.  Of course she doesn’t recognize me, and I only know her from that minked-out coat she wears and the fact that Richie calls her dog Sergeant Floofer.  The little man yips all night in a pentatonic scale, I swear it.  I’d never get a dog.  I already wake up with enough of a headache that I’d split if one came stomping at me.  What’s wrong with this picture?  I’d seen the nameless lady on the move before, many times, in that same furry coat that looked like it was plucked from one hundred and one of those Pomeranians, yet I hadn’t seen her before without her escort, an older gentleman who holds her hand and carries her bags.  Once on a grocery run I got caught up behind the two of them and noticed them humming a medley in sync.  Was he her hired help?  Her brother?  Lover?  After all these years they still were tuned to the step.  Where did he go?  Only a couple more blocks till the bar.  

There’s the vertical sign hanging there in its yellow, unwashed glory, glowing like a muffled eclipse haloed by the sun.  There’re the outdoor tables, rounded wicker remnants of COVID and pavement pints.  And there she is, hazed but clearly defined, standing before the door, her hand throwing an errant lock of hair into place, her face turned away but right there for me to see.  Our first visit to New York before we graduated came back to me.  Two strays walking in stride by Central Park, kitsch ambition to one day see this place from the heights, to scratch out our own corner apartment somewhere, to rediscover ourselves inside an ever-going swirl of souls on the march, eventually finding our eddy in a back corner of the Old Reviver.  They should’ve named a drink after her. 

Maybe there isn’t someone standing there.  Maybe it’s a mirage wrenched from memory.  A need to run hit me.  The bar’s open and there and I’ve come all this way, but to step any further now feels arduous, like forcing my way forwards through a metal net.  The sun’s started to set and the light begins to prick at me, horizontal shafts like needles pushing into my skin.  The vision of the street heightens, as if all things are wider yet everything narrower.  I feel the need to shake some image printed on my retina that stays, no matter what damage I inflict upon myself.  I turn and begin to move fast.  There’s someone in front of me walking.  A woman.  Long hair and walking too slow.  I breeze past her like some asshole, I know it, moving through in the space between her and the parking meters.  I need to get back.  Someone is looking at me.  People walk past and their faces sloop and stretch, their eyes seem to wait behind and watch me as they walk past.  Their faces are unreadable, and I see the elder masks all over again.  Oh god, there’s a dog barking somewhere. Could the neighbor still be out?  Maybe she’d seen me after all.  Maybe she’s always seen me, even on that grocery run.  Would she ask me why I’d come back so soon?  No, of course not.  We’ve never spoken before.  She would never breach customs like that.  But what if she told Richie?  ‘Your brother is a degenerate barfly, trapped in the sugar of a bottle, a weight, you should leave him now before he drowns you too.’

I’m back at my brother’s apartment and the closed door feels like an airlock.  Piano notes do sneak in through the walls.  All is as it should be.  The masks arch down at me.  I know they’ll never say anything.  The bottle’s where I left it, bisected by the blue tape boundary.  Half empty, half full, who has time to ask silly things like that when the time comes to finish it.  One sip and I’m back at that table bent over a letter at the corner booth.  Bitter elixir, liquid castigation. 

I hear Norah crying through written words of resolute goodbye, or maybe that’s me crying, speckling tears onto the letter in the empty bar.  Another swig, distilled with tropical undertones, shaming with dark cherry overtones. 

One more and the scene is silent.  The couple next to us watch and I catch their eye and feel inflamed. 

I’m in the apartment again.  Richie’s letter is there where I tossed it to the ground.  So is the emptied bottle.  I slump against the wooden cabinets where Richie keeps the plates mom left to us.

I reach for the letter.  I lift the bottle, the quarter quart inside sloshes and flares deep burgundy against the dying sun.  I close my eyes, discovering the same sanguine shade inside, breathe in through my nose, and finish the bottle.

Adlai, I can’t lie, I can’t tell you I didn’t cry when you first told me about Norah leaving.  I hope this loss can be your freedom.  She brought out the best in you.  Don’t forget those bits are inherent to you no matter how deep they may sink in time.  Don’t forget that they can always be dredged out again.  Norah was a special soul whose goodbye I know will be difficult to process.  When you first introduced her to me, I was skeptical.  You held her wholeheartedly, denying me the place I held so that there’d be more room in your heart for her.  You were pierced by her.  But the knife was buried in you all along, by her or by someone before, I don’t know, but I did know, and feared, a day would arrive when its exit would ruin you and the world you built for escape.  Don’t forget that at the center of all your construction there is a creator, a mind, heart and body, that you will continue when your world comes down.  When you first introduced her to me, I was skeptical, but as I knit my worries through searching journeys, I recognized the light she brought back to your eyes, the crescent lust for life I only remember seeing from our boyhood, and I knew that you have and you will persevere.  Take care of yourself, Adlai, and stay as long as you need.  Love, Richie.

The sun seems to have set.  I don’t remember the apartment getting this dark.  I’m still holding the letter, but I find myself leaning forward in the chair.  A classical melody of some kind trickles in through the walls, the blues festival posters and maps of rivers like plant cross-sections, the tapestries, coming in from all sides, smooth and smothering.  I bring another bottle of wine out from the cabinet, aiming to finish it, and holster it to my side.  Another shot in the end.  The same result in the end.  Slipping into another sip, I let the letter fall, rocking as it finds the path of least resistance to the floor.  The bottle clings to my fingers. Richie and I always preferred the paler moments after evening’s golden hour, the welcoming of twilight and the incoming tide of nighttime when the vanishing world allows a film of memories to play in peace. 

We did take a trip together, all of us, the three of us, a month before she left me her letter.  We rented a cabin by one of the Finger Lakes for a weekend.  It was all we could make work, what with Richie pulling dark to dark hours at his job and Norah finally finding work at a graphic design agency.  I hadn’t found a job then.  I guess I still haven’t found one.  But we spent the weekend together then and the weather worsened.  I remember falling asleep on the couch on the last day hearing Norah strumming at her guitar on the porch as rain pitter-pattered at the canopy.  I remember how beautiful she looked through the screen door, how much I felt like the future wasn’t just possible but promised when I was around her.  When I woke, she was speaking with Richie at her side.  The rain had let up, but it looked like she had stepped out into the showering before it ceased.  She was choking up as she said something to him, and he, separated by a cold distance to her and wearing a vacant face, looked out past the veranda, the slickened blue greenery, at the distant lakeshore. 

The rain continued to hold off that night, but Richie stayed in, excusing himself for a pressing work call that came up.  Norah and I went walking.  There was a silence settled between us that neither of us broke as we reached a rock outcropping by the far side of the shore.  Even there we sat listening only to the static of the insects and drifting breezes that crashed against what leaves remained in the red maples.  She was looking up to the stars above.  Constellations always mystified me, but she knew their arrangements and their names like they were members of her family.  She never had any siblings to grow up with, to share the world, so she filled her days by exploring the natural world.  Sure, her parents doted on her, but she kept them at a distance, away from the domain of names she’d discovered, the universe that existed between her eyes and those heavenly mysteries that gave life to the space that would chill her.  I’d always envied her for that.  For parents that loved unconditionally and selflessly.  Not someone who abandons the helm while you’re halfway through university.  For the life that she lived, a garden of permanence to turn to in strife and loneliness, an internal world to find comfort and escape.  Instead, I’ve been left with the world as it is, with what I can see but never fully bring in.  Arrested in these memories as life spins on, capturing images and words as my only proof of relation to it, proof of my existence within it.  Instead, I had her by my side, lost to the stars, telling me of a world alive and aflame. 

Thank you, Richie, for the wine and the words.  The welcome, too, but I can’t overstay my due.  I figure I’ll stay here another couple of weeks as I look for work.  Maybe I’ll move back in with Dad.  It’s been since the funeral then when he vanished from us, and a couple of months since he resurfaced.  He never showed up to the funeral or any of the remembrance events at the old Virginia house.  A few of her relatives made it up from Roanoke who told Richie and me that he’d popped up again in Lynchburg, collecting and reselling classic cars, or, junking, as they called it.  Maybe I’d move in with him and find my footing again.  Return to what Norah called the roots I dragged along like a vegetable transplant, all that I have now.  He called Richie a week after the funeral.  We listened to the voicemail together in the empty house that was once under mom’s name but left to the two of us with the condition we sold it and disavowed life here again.  Of course, it was a sugar-coated money ask, some talk about feeling bummed he couldn’t make the funeral, some mention of a bookie, and a call for us both to visit so he could make amends.  

Maybe I should write.  Not to him, he didn’t even bother to drop an address in his call, expecting us to phone him and grovel, forgive him before he even begins to budge a sorry.  Maybe I should write Norah.  It’s only been a couple of weeks and maybe she hasn’t moved back home yet.  I’ll write her a letter, something permanent and present, an envelope addressed to her in a name only she and I know, words of apology and petition written in ink for her to touch, an appeal to preserving our past together so that there might be a future, a growth, an oak tree standing firm through stormy weather. I’ll do to her what Richie did to me.  It's a little past six, the sun’s through with us, and I know the Old Reviver’s still open and nearing turning time. 

Richie kept his stationery buried in the bowels of the living room desk.  And there it is beneath a mess of scribbles, a pile of scratched typeface drafts run through with writethroughs, a shallow lacquered box with rusted hinges that crick like a spring as I open it.  The family initial F. plants itself in a branchlike Copperplate script growing from the bottom left of the envelope face.  I stash it and some writing cardstock in my coat pocket and turn to go.  Almost at the door again, the masks seem to be winking onwards at me and my plan, the noise from the neighbor lady’s place has gotten quiet, and the specter standing outside the Old Reviver flashes again, this time fingering ‘come here’ at me. 

Shit. 

I race to the cabinets and pull down a Barbancourt that I haven’t yet killed.  Nothing had come to me yet of the words I’d write, and the thought of the wind tunnel waiting for me sends me a chill I knew only good speed and a good swallow could prevent.  I take a steady pull from the Haitian’s brew and feel powered to set out.  But there’s the letter that Richie wrote me, his plea for care and health, and memory of his exasperated face flashes, looking at me last weekend when I came back blacked as a man might look at someone drowning before him beneath icy waters.  I take another swallow before returning the bottle.

My feet slur into step, following the route like an electrified slot car, and as I walk the pavement, I lose the feeling that passersby are looking at me, their silent barbs dimming with the wind.  A young couple pressed together passes me, one red scarf wedded between them like a garland whose lights their cheer brings.  I read nothing from them, no expression afforded to the rest of the world, as if all else stops at the water’s edge when you’re in love.  And I know then that I’m left on an island left with a lockbox of memories that refuse to fade. 

The Old Reviver shows itself anew to me, like the door to home after a long journey, and I know that here lies the beginning to my letter.  I order a rocks glass of rye and set my things onto the bar top.  I start on the immediate moment, about this place we first discovered together. 

We never needed to scratch our names into the dark wood panels beneath the bar of the Reviver.  How could I look at this place and not be reminded of you?  Each breath of its mildew smell and the flickering warmth from the hearth brings you back to me.

I notice an older man a couple of seats apart from me and I sit and watch him, searching in his being the words to my sentiment.  He wears low the sort of Gatsby cap you now only see sported by men of his time and certain Irish television shows.  He sips at a Pilsner while peeling at a tray of almonds.  A palimpsest of a story I once read in college from a Colombian author came over me, a mixture of the smell of cyanide and bitter almonds and an unrequited love that tormented a man for a lifetime.  Would I wait out the rest of my days like he did?  Would I find myself at a bar like this for all weekends till eternity, conjuring back my memories of her, peeling at them like bitter almonds, swallowing them one by one as I pray for the next to be my last? 

I look at myself and see nothing but pastiches and patches, the imprints you left when fate incorporated us.  I feel left in this eddy, surrounded by your influence, but unable to follow you into this freedom. 

The bartender, a man a little older than I am, comes by and refills my drink.  I thank him even though he was the one to hand me the letter when she never showed.  I’m in no rush for another drink, but it feels nice to have sure plans for the future.  He’s returned to his corner to resume polishing glasses.  I wonder what sacrifices he’s made on his path to this moment.

I hope that the new world is doing right by you, and though I know the path you blaze is now closed to me, I hope to see my own new world, sites of my own with words special to me that reassure me to continue, to change.  I thought I had no way to respond to your letter, to reach you, but I think I do now. 

The night had settled outside and fewer folks walk by.  Richie would be getting back soon.  I realize I forgot to write him that I was stepping out.

I’ll be working at myself till the end, fashioning my character without any model as guide. Yet as I move forwards, I’ll remember how I felt with you, how I forgot my facelessness when I was there in your eyes.  These words might reach you, but I know they will not really reach you, the private you behind the Norah I loved.  In the darkness I’m now in, I’m grateful to have at least the spark of hope you restored in me.  Goodbye, Norah.  It’s time I check in on my own garden to see if those vegetable transplant roots have begun to bud. 

I pat my pockets for my keys and find them where I left them.  I pay my bill and check my phone to tell Richie I’m okay.  I leave the letter at the empty booth.  I stumble out the door back into the cold.