Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Walking out of the World

“It helps if you don’t know where you’re going,” the old man told me.

I’d been in McGinty’s most of the night, commiserating with a friend who’d lost his job and girl earlier that day. Jimmy’d gotten pretty far into his cups during the course of the evening, progressing from dislike of his ex-boss and -girlfriend into outright hatred for the whole stinking world, and this city in particular. Before the whiskey had robbed him of his ability to form consonants, my pal Jimmy had waxed rather poetic about what a soul-sucking hole our fair city is, an ‘envious and vindictive bitch of a metropolis, dedicated to taking the good out of any of her denizens and grinding them into compost to grow the poison flowers that would draw another crop of rubes out of the hills, to be destroyed the same way.” He’d seemed quite sure of himself, and seemed to feel the need to share this and other observations with most of the bar. It had all been downhill from there, and shortly another friend had helped Jimmy, still declaiming to the rafters, out of the bar and into a cab.

I sat back down, finishing my beer and deciding whether to head home or over to another bar to listen to a new band, the Murder Orgy, I’d been told about. My eye fell on a square bar napkin that Jimmy had been using early in his exposition about the evils of the world. The only legible things on the napkin were the words “Walk right out of this goddamn world”. I’d picked it up, and was poring over the words, and the odd squiggles and glyphs that surrounded it, and an old, gnarled finger had appeared and tapped the word once, twice, then a third time, and the old man’s voice had drifted into my ear, sounding like the rough rustle of leave in late fall, quiet but still perfectly audible over the background hubbub of the bar.

“It helps if you don’t know where you’re going,” he’d said.

I looked up and at the man for the first time that evening. He’d been sitting at the end of the bar, on the stool next to mine, all night, but I hadn’t spared him a second look in all that time. He had been there when I came in, and I suppose I’d assumed he’d be there when I left. He had the air about him of a regular, the feeling that he wasn’t so much in the bar as of the bar, a fixture, like the brass rail and the sticky floor. He belonged in the bar, and I’d accepted him in the same way I’d accepted the presence of the neon beer lights. The kind of guy you’d look at and never see.

But when I did take that moment to look at him, to see him, he became subtly wrong. The details of his appearance marked him as a stranger, and quite a strange stranger at that.

The hat he wore had too high a crown and too wide a brim, his coat was of an odd cut and material, the suit under it was of a strange hue. The man wore thick, chunky glasses made of a black substance, coming close to being what a hip young person would wear, but arriving at slightly disturbing through a slight asymmetry. Both his thick mustache and beard stubble were an odd shade of gray.

“I’m sorry?”

“If you want to walk out of the world. It helps if you don’t know where you’re going.”

“What do you mean? How can you walk out of a world?”

“Oh, it’s easy, really,” He’d said with a dry chuckle. “Many a man has gone from this world to that’un simply by being a bit to preoccupied, oh, ayuh.”

“Preoccupied?”

“Yuh. When you know where’s your going, your mind helps keep yuh pinned to the path you want, see? But when you go a wandrin’ willy nilly, or get to distracted as you travel, a body’s apt as not to come on one of the lost ways, and take a turn right out o’ the places they know, and come upon someplace wholly different, oh ay.”

“Lemme see,” I said, slurring a bit as the old man took another drink of his beer, “Lemme see…You think that if I, right, me, I were to walk out of here, and just wander around, I’d ‘walk out of the world’? Really”

“Maybe, maybe you would,” he said, scratching his temple. “Most people, they don’t, whatchacallit, they don’t have the right attitude. They could stomp around with no fixed destination for all their lives, and never come across anything out of the ordinary, least that they’d notice. Not to say they wouldn’t cross a world or two, not at all, but they’d never know it, as where they ended up would be too near what they expected to notice. Y’ever gone to a place, and later found out someone ya knew, knew pretty well, was there the whole time, and yet ya never saw one another?”

“Uh…yeah.”

“It’s the kind of thing most people write off, right? They figure they just floated around such a way they never caught sight o’ one another. And most time is, they’re probably right. But sometimes…” He took another drink. “Sometimes, one or the other o’ them, maybe both, stepped just a little bit sideways on the way in, turned a little bit, right, and ended up in a world a hair’s breadth away from the one they thought they was in.”

“So they were in the same place, but not?”

“Oh, ayuh. Y’see, most people think a place is a single thing, right? But a place is an agglomeration, really…”

“A collage?” I said, getting into the idea.

“Exactly. A collage made up of what different people expect to see when they get to a place. If you was to ask each person here, in this place, to tell you about it, you’d get as many different places described as people you asked. And even when you put all the descriptions together, you still wouldn’t have everything that makes this place what it is.”

“But, how does that make it a different world? Just because people aren’t very observant?”

“Nah, it’s that people assume most of what they see, right? You walk down a street you walked down a hundred times before, how much do you really see? Not much, oh no. Your head builds a picture, and you think it’s the real thing. Sign’s might be wrong, numbers might be different, you might have wandered onto a street you never seen before, and’ll never see again, but your head takes away the things it don’t expect to see, and fills in what it thinks should be there.”

“Like, they don’t have to look, because they know?”

“Seems like.”

“But I still don’t see where the walking out of word, worlds comes in.”

“You from the city, here?”

“No. No, I moved here...”

“Remember when you first come here,” He said, cutting me off. “Did you ever head out and end up a little lost, someplace you didn't know was there?”

“Yeah, a couple of time. Of course.”

“That's all it is. People get set in their way pretty quickly, though, and they stop coming across new things. Part of 'em assumes that the city is only so big, and eventually the set o' memory they have put aside to make a map in their heads gets full, and they get done finding things. But there are 's many cities out there as there are bars in here, see?”

“So,” I slurred, “How do you keep from assuming like ever'body does, hmm?”

“This is a mighty good way to start, no doubt.” He said, lifting his glass.

I lifted mine along with him, and finished the last third of my beer in a few gulps. “So, lemme see here, you're sayin', right, that if I walked out into the night, here, and wandered about, I might walk right out of my everyday world? Do you believe that, really?”

“Don't matter what I believe. Question is, do you?”

I lifted by gaze from my empty pint glass, and looked at the dark eyes behind the black glasses, then looked beyond the stranger to the door behind him, and the unanimous night on the other side of the door's glass.

“Another beer?” I heard the bartender ask.