Nuala

I was a regular here, when I was well. It may be a good thing that I'm not well anymore. It's a dive that knows it and doesn't apologize. The view is actually quite charming when I walk in. It looks as patient and understanding as a good shrink.

Wait, something's off. I've never seen anyone like her in this place before.

Courage. Don't be a creep, and don't fall or something. Just politely take the closest spot and see what happens.

"What's wrong?"

That seems a rather presumptuous way to begin a conversation, but I don't care. She could be the sort of person that I was eager to have a conversation with. In fact, I'd basically given up hope that I would ever have a casual, promising chat with a stranger like her ever again.

"How much time do you have?"

She laughs in spite of herself. That's a favorite of mine, you know? After all, when you are a weird, ill, middle aged nerd like myself, you get a lot of patronizing, insincere laughs and more than your share of "greetings where no kindness is," if you'll allow me to be the kind of pretentious twit who echoes Wordsworth while telling a story about being implausibly hit on in a dive late at night. When someone tries to keep a laugh in check and fails, it's reassuring. The fact that I need ample reassurance of that kind of late is something I resent quite a lot.

"Well, I'm getting younger," she says. I feel something when she says that. You've probably felt something similar: a sense that what you are experiencing is better than you dared hope, which is so seldom true in this, our life.

"How?" I ask, knowing that I can't afford to mess this up.

You won't get many chances to taste accidental joy. Trust me. Youth is saturated with this kind of thing, but that's because young people (their gloomy protestations to the contrary notwithstanding) speak the language of hope with innocent fluency. When you haven't looked at life too closely for too long, you keep the faith in it that time will kill.

Once you've been around for a few decades, you learn that things mostly turn out to be rather disappointing. No one washes dishes or does laundry for many years and thinks anything stays nice and clean for long.

"I'm careful about what I eat," she says. "I try to treat the farm like a table."

I'm not sure what to make of that, so I laugh as if I've understood her.

"So, why are you so sad?" She seems sincere, which is a little unnerving.

"I used to love teaching with stupid, idealistic enthusiasm," I say, "and now it seems absurd. When a group of people with whom you are eager to discuss a poem or a story or a novel haven't read it, and enlist AI assistance to generate their opinions of it and their essays about it, it's hard to keep despair at bay."

She moves closer to me. I am as clumsy as a moose on skates, so I admire smooth locomotion. She seems like she's had a lot of practice closing distances.

"It must be frustrating," she says, "how much writing is really original, though? Isn't it all more borrowed than new?"

I have that sensation again: you've done nothing to deserve this. Make it work! I want her to go on talking, just like that, for as long as she possibly can. I mean, so much of communication is just habit and custom. We get used to saying particular things under particular conditions and repeat the ritual. So many cliches and verbal false limbs and predictable, formulaic utterances. As long as the tone sounds "authentic," we sell and buy it contentedly, but how much thought goes into any of it?

She feigned empathy and then went for the vein. Smashing. I can't lie: I'm also impressed by the combination of curves and angles that the dim light in the dive touches as it acknowledges her. I'm old, but I'm alive.

I try to conceal my enthusiasm, but it probably isn't convincing. "What exactly do you mean? I'm sure you know that all sorts of original writing goes on all the time, most of it awful, some of it mediocre, with the real virtuosos making up a small, mostly ignored clutch of people who can't wait for their efforts to match their aspirations. Don't disparage that little group, please." I understand that this is a bit of a gamble, but she seems averse to standard nonsense. In this dive. Remarkable.

Her smile is a bit hungry.

"Calm down," she says, "I meant, it's all bricolage, isn't it? Borrowing old bricks to build your new walls. Even your anointed, lonesome elite doesn't include anyone who could invent a whole language, let alone a genre, or a mode. It's mostly a matter of arranging the corpses of other people's dead ideas, after all. You fool around with what's already there and call it 'bold' and 'innovative.'

I'm sorry, but I've seen the same story play out a thousand times. The characters might change in some respects. Costumes and make-up, at the very least. Your popular culture is very excited about race and gender and sexual preference at the moment. The setting shifts. But the plot and the dialogue and the themes? So shocking. Predictable as nervousness before a first kiss. Most should just give up, you know?"

What is masochism? She's trying to hurt me, and I know what she's up to, and she knows that I know, and we both like it. We have skipped the terms and conditions and the instructions, and we are playing like heroes.

Or so I tell myself, because I like it.

"Are you talking about literature or life?" I ask. I resist imagining what she might say, and concentrate on looking forward to whatever she comes up with. I'm trying to remain grateful for my good fortune. I walked in here against my better judgment and the advice of my rather aloof, efficient physician, hoping. I mustn't spoil it, I tell myself.

"For us, is there a difference?" she asks. She got the waiter's attention with obvious ease. I'm convinced that he would give her his car keys or his kidney if she asked. Young. A pup with oversized paws. He's back with two pints in a blink. I try to pay, but he's comped the round. A real operator.

"Well, is this a familiar story, playing out predictably?"

"So far, so good. Look. Aren't we mostly acting today in a way that yesterday can certainly explain, if not justify? Isn't it all easily sliced into beginning, middle and end? Try as you might, you can't change that. And as for what you're probably feeling, isn't that just the sum of all the stories like this that you've lived through, from the time when your mother taught you what to do with your love on through the last person you tried to do this dance with, and rather awkwardly at that, I expect?"

My desire is embarrassing.

"And how do you feel about your father?" I ask. I feel as though I've closed my eyes and taken a bite of fugu.

She sips. It is demur, not thirsty. "He was a relatively rare type then, though you've got plenty of him now. He upset me, but I was young. Practically sold me to a wealthy business associate, despite my fondness for a strong, simple farmer who loved me like someone who was used to helping living things to grow."

Audible gasping should be avoided when you are not interested in making a fool of yourself. It is troubling, the number of stories of men acting like perfect assholes you can hear, if you pay attention. It's the form I was born in, but the more I learn about the records, the less enthusiastic I am about my membership. If we can't come up with something better, habit and custom will rule. Look how that's worked out so far!

"Just how long ago were you born, and where?"

"That world's gone."

"How did you escape?" It was clear that I'd recovered from the first question and then some with the second. She straightened my collar. I intended that sentence to be construed literally.

"You will come with me because you want to know."

She's on the trip before I can find my ticket. I drink as much of the pint as I can in a single, mad gulp and follow her out the back as fast as I can be. I've never had grace, but it's clear that something's off when I move about now, I'm afraid. I can bear the odd looks if no one offers to help.

I find her outside. I know I should be disappointed by the cigarette, but frankly, I'm impressed. She does an excellent impression of a dragon.

"Your escape, then? Sorry, by the way. I'm not as lithe as our waiter. The poor kid is trying to remain 'professional,' but I suspect that he would drink your dirty bathwater and pay you for the privilege. Brother is be-sot-ted, no doubt about it."

I think she curtsies. I can't remember the last time I saw anyone do so, but I'm pretty sure.

"I played along for as long as I could. Greed makes people treat everything, and everyone, like part of a collection. I was an alienated belonging. His hygiene was not exemplary.

Eventually, I couldn't think of a reason to go on. I stopped eating and drinking for a good while. No one made a fuss. I persevered. Eventually, I wasn't breathing." She exhales a long, grey ribbon of smoke through the last syllable. I keep my balance.

I'm following her before I am conscious of the fact that she's moving. The drowsy street behind the pub is neatly segregated by the streetlights. I wasn't struggling to keep up. I count that as a win. "Who brought you 'round, and how?" Obvious, but necessary, I think.

She turns like a page. She closes her eyes for a long moment. When she opens them, they've changed in an odd way, or so it seems. I take off my glasses and make a methodical production of cleaning them.

"When I woke up, I was buried. It took some ingenuity to undo that. I think anger gave me more strength than fear. Our home was a long way off, and I was dirty and cold, but I made it. He was not alone in bed." She's started to run her fingers through my hair as she speaks. I do not want her to stop, which surprises me at first. I remember that some cats will make some strange music, if you scratch the right spot. There are reels.

"They didn't seem to notice me at all, at first. I couldn't believe it. The audacity! Even for him, it was indecorously cruel and selfish. Vicious, if you think that's still a meaningful adjective. I started shouting, and that got an answer. He was furious before he realized he was yelling at me. Then he was afraid. He kept trying to pull himself together, even after I'd made that quite impossible. I was shouting, and then I was screaming, and then I was biting him."

She pulls my hair quite firmly. I am looking at a shadowy wire over our heads, between the stars. I feel her strange eyes, and then her cool lips, on my neck. I keep my balance.

"Then, I was drinking. It should have been disgusting, but I admit it: I loved it. I could feel him coming to grips with his defeat. I did not spare his friends."

"Isn't this rather predictable?" I ask. I am a gambler now, I guess.

She releases me. I am trying to find just the right way to describe the strangeness of her eyes. I think that might be the point. I am fixated on the problem, not the danger.

"Nice try. You've never been anywhere like this before. I won't take everything unless you ask," she says. "You're fun to talk with. Can I keep you?" She kisses me before I can start thinking about something other than her eyes. She's an expert.

"I'm not attached to anything, anymore. I don't like it, but that's the truth."

"Is it because you're not well?"

"That doesn't help."

"I can change you, but you might not care for all of the changes." She kisses me again. Sepulchral, silky smoke. I am quite sure she could kill me without breaking a sweat. She seemed positively dainty in the pub. I'm an idiot.

An old, dying idiot. I look up at the wire between the stars again. I start imagining what it would be like.

"I'll keep the change," I say.

She laughs, and then her teeth become the last things.