13- The Copernican Revolution

“The thing of it is,” said Nick Knack, a little emo punk kid with spiky blue hair and little blue knob jutting out from underneath his lip, as he leaned over the front rail, pool cue in hand, “the guy could be anywhere.”

            Knack took his shot, and he banked in the twelve ball off the rail.  “I mean, at this point, he could be in Mexico, Argentina, fucking Poland, dude.”

            Tim Tim, who was the other half of the eight ball game, was standing at the bar with a beer in one hand and a pool stick in the other.  “Why would he go to Poland?” he asked.  “Nobody goes to Poland.”

            “Fucking Nazis did,” Nick said.

            Laird was sitting at the bar, looking at the TV, trying not to look at the girl down at the end of the bar.  She had long, black hair and sat five stools down on his left, with one index finger curled around a cigarette, and the other twisting along the edge of her drink.  She was looking right at him.

            “Dude,” Tim Tim said.  “Are you comparing Kevin to the Nazis?”
            Knack was still shooting.  “Two ball into the eleven,” he said.  “Corner.”  He calmly stroked the cue into the two, which edged the eleven into the corner pocket, just as he’d said.  “I don’t know, Tim.  Figure the Nazis swept through Europe, taking whatever they wanted, pissing off just about the whole world in the process, and before you knew it, they were off to fucking Argentina or whatever.  Sounds at least a little like Kevin, if you ask me.”

            Knack sized up another shot and he leaned over the table.  Tim Tim was using a house stick, wooden, ever so slightly bowed.  Knack, on the other hand, was using this big maple and ivory baseball bat of a cue stick that nearly shook the table every time he struck a ball.  The place was Kay’s, a shit hole of a place in Jamaica with a juke box full of blues and country songs, and a single pool-table which was last re-felted sometime during the Reagan administration.  It was two o’clock and there was nobody there that wasn’t laying face down in front of a half-full beer and smelling of seven days without a shower and a month without a paycheck.  Aside from the seemingly indigenous peoples of Jamaica, black, white, drunk and watching re-runs of Judge Judy on a thirteen-incher with a fucked up vertical hold above the bar, there was the girl behind the bar- Debbie, a dyed blonde, black roots showing chick so skinny that her neck muscles stood out and the bones just above her tits jutted out like a little, jagged mountain range leading to her neck.  On the other hand, she had absolutely perfect teeth.

There was Debbie, and then there was this girl down the bar.

            Laird’s eyes met with her green eyes, and she smiled at him.  He sipped his beer and turned around to Tim Tim.  “What does it matter where he is anyway?”  The girl was still looking at him.  Debbie was cleaning glasses and tapping her feet to “What’d I Say” by Ray Charles.  “Gone is gone.”

            Knack had run the table down to nothing but low balls, which were hanging around the pockets as evidence of Tim Tim’s misses.  Knack and his maple and ivory baseball bat smoothly sunk the eight ball in the side pocket on a two rail bank.  He let out a big, whooping laugh, stomped the end of his tusk of a pool cue to the floor and said to Tim Tim, “Pay up, motherfucker.  Gimme my fucking money.”

            “Fuck,” said Tim Tim, tossing a ten on the table, which Nick Knack added to a messy fistful that he pulled from his breast pocket.  The lip-ringed, emo punk counted his money and formed it into a loose stack, hooting and howling.  “I’d say that’s…a healthy eighty bucks you just gave me, pip-squeak.”

            Tim Tim lit up a cigarette and wiped snot from his nose with the sleeve of a dirty T-shirt that said “You Aren’t Here.”  He let out a smoke-filled sigh and collapsed onto a stool in the corner with a cue in one hand and a smoke stuck between his lips.  He was fifteen years old, and he looked younger than that.  “I thought it was seventy.”

            “Whatever, kid,” said the Knack, “I flunked math.  Every fuckin’ time.”  He spat out a cackling laugh and danced to the bar between Laird and the pretty brunette, who was licking her lips after a sip of whatever whisky-looking beverage that was in front of her.

            Laird was staring at her hard enough to knock her over, and he took a sip of his beer and he licked his lips, and he wondered if she’d make him use a rubber.

He smiled at the girl and she smiled meekly back, and then Nick Knack started talking.  “Nicely done, Junior,” he said to Tim Tim, “Nicely fucking done.  You don’t fucking gamble unless you’re capable of winning, fuck-wad.”  He pulled a ten from his bundle of cash and set it hard on the table, and said to Debbie, “Two shots of Jameson, Love, and your fucking phone number.”

The Brunette took another sip of whisky, something dark, scotch maybe, and she smiled and she looked down at the bar.  There was a girl sitting next to her, blonde, a little bit chubby, with a bright red leather coat that looked like an ugly couch.  She was whispering in the brunette’s ear, and the two of them were laughing.  Laird felt his cock stir a bit and he took another sip of beer.  Maybe I can lay both of them, he thought.  Fat girls give great head.

Debbie the waitress poured two shots of Jameson in front of Knack and Laird.  “I don’t have a phone,” she said, giving Knack a look over.  There wasn’t much to look at, but she took in his 125-pound frame and shook her head.  “Are you even old enough to drink?”

Knack smiled at her…crooked teeth…and pushed forward the ten and without answering, he did his shot in a long swallow and then picked up the shot in front of Laird.  This, he took down in similar fashion, with a single swallow and then slammed the glass down on the bar for effect.  “Kneel before Zod!” he yelled and pumped his fists into the air, one after the other.

Knack unscrewed the two halves of his cue and he put them into a long, thin case, which he snapped shut, smiling.  “It’s a good day,” said the Knack.  “It’s a good day.”  He turned to Laird and gave him a long look over, and Laird apprehensively looked up at the mirror that served as the back of the bar and he saw that his face was white all over.  He hadn’t shaved in about five days.  He looked over at the girls and realized that he kind of looked like shit. Knack cracked an uneasy smile and said, “You alive, partner?  You don’t look so good.”

“Bad shit the other day,” he said.  “Wasn’t a big deal, but I’m still, you know, recovering.”

Knack took a sip of Laird’s beer without asking and he cringed a bit with the swallow.  “Nice medication,” he said.  “If I see your boy Kevin, I’ll give him a holler.”

“In Argentina?” Laird asked, smiling.

“Fucking Poland, baby.  I hate spics.”  He nodded to Debbie and said, “Keep the change on that ten, but only after you get this fucked-up junky another beer.  It’ll balance him out.”  He smiled and slapped Laird on the back a little too hard and he barked, “I’m gonna go find an ugly girl and get my dick sucked.  Nice working with you,” Knack said to Tim Tim, who flipped him off.

            Then, Knack was gone and Tim Tim went over to the juke box.  Laird was looking at his beer and he was thinking about Kevin and about Pink.  He was thinking about Vermin’s apartment, and the few wadded-up bills he had in his jeans and what they could buy him.

Suddenly had a headache and his stomach felt like it was tied into a large, single knot.  When he closed his eyes, he saw a bright blue canvas with stark, white lines that looked like…something.

            It looked like a secret.

            “You want to buy us a drink?” someone asked him, and when he looked up at the mirror, there were two girls standing on either side of him, the cute brunette with the pale skin on one side, and her chubby red couch of a friend on the other.

            Laird blinked his eyes, and he faked a smile and he said he would.  When Debbie came over, the couch, whose name was Emma, ordered a whisky sour, and the brunette, whose name was Mia, ordered a Sex on the Beach, and Laird made an obligatory Coney Island joke and they all pretended to think it was funny, and Laird felt the knot in his stomach being pulled tighter.

            “Do you come here a lot?” he asked and Mia said they didn’t.

            “We go to St. John’s,” she said and he acted impressed.  “Emma’s a Communications major and I’m undeclared, but I like Philosophy.”

            “Who doesn’t?” Laird asked, sipping his beer.

            “Ooooh,” she said, smiling wide, “Do you like Kant?”

            “Oh yeah,” he said, wishing he hadn’t even made eye contact.  “Who….doesn’t?”

            “I love the Copernican Revolution, you know?  The idea that the representation makes the object possible and not the other way around.  I mean, that’s just so…deep.  Isn’t it?”

            “Sure is,” Laird said, looking at the curving line of cleavage that dipped down from her breast.  “Deep.”

            “What do you do?” the couch asked, and she sipped her drink.

            Laird put his hand to his face and laughed into it.  “I’m an upholsterer.”

            “That’s interesting,” said Mia, while the couch rolled her eyes and lit a cigarette.

            “I specialize in red leather,” he said, and the three of them laughed, everything was fake and Laird felt his stomach turning over and over again.

            They talked.  Laird looked at Emma’s leather jacket and figured it was worth a few bills on Dad’s credit card at some designer store- not one in Manhattan, not someplace nice, but some shop in a mall in Passaic.

            “I think that there are so many jobs open to a communications major,” Emma the Couch said, absently, but when Laird asked what kind of jobs, she shrugged and said that she didn’t like Queens very much.

            Mia said, “I don’t know what the big deal about sex is, I never really feel anything.  And if I never feel anything, then what does it matter who I fuck?”  Laird put his hand on her leg and she smiled and said she wanted another drink, and Laird told her that he’d need to be paid back and Emma let out a snort of a laugh, and Mia smiled and laughed, and Laird saw that she had some Chinese symbol tattooed on her wrist and when he asked her what it meant, she said it was the Chinese symbol for “Smoking is bad for you, but I don’t give a fuck.”

            Her hand was on his leg.

            “It says all that in one symbol?”

            “Chinese is very fascinating.  I almost went to college in Seoul, you know?”

            Laird asked Emma for a cigarette, and she obliged, and Debbie brought them another round, and there was a replay of a Mets game on the TV, and the cigarette was some generic brand that tasted like it was packed with dirt.  He smiled at Emma, “I think you should sell that ugly jacket and get a pack of descent cigarettes,” and she didn’t hear him, and he told her to never mind.

            All the while, his head was pounding and he was starting to sweat.  Warm, wet pockets in the small of his back and under his arms and he didn’t want to take off his jacket because he wasn’t cold.  There was something behind the mirror behind the bar, something behind everything he was seeing.  Steve Trachsel was walking off the mound after being hit with a line drive, Debbie chatted with Tim Tim, who had one hand tucked down the front of his jeans, the girls giggled and laughed, and talked about Descartes, and whether or not we can prove that any one thing that is not our own consciousness exists and all Laird could see behind every one of these things was a sea of blue plains and white lines and he got up out of his seat.  He almost fell down.

            “Are you, like, okay?” Mia asked and she put a hand on his shoulder.

            His heart was screaming in his chest.

            “I’m cutting you off, Laird,” Debbie said.

            He was standing in quicksand.

            Tim Tim was looking at the TV.  “I can’t believe I lost all that money, and why the fuck are we watching baseball?”

            His eyes were burning.

            “What kind of fucking name is Laird?” Emma the couch asked, and then he was stumbling across the bar for the men’s room.  He knocked over two chairs and he nearly fell and he locked the door and turned on the faucet and stuck his greasy head into the sink and let the cold water spill all around him like a cold pocket of crisp air on a warm day and he looked in the mirror and he saw Kevin instead of himself.  He saw a wide blue plain and white lines, and little diodes and capacitors and shit he didn’t know anything about and a bright flash of light spread all over everything and he fell onto the ground next to the john with his hands over his eyes, trying to see nothing.

            Everything was loud noises and flashbulbs and brightly burning lights and green, bubbling fluid everywhere.  His lungs filled up, and his stomach enlarged, and his body swelled with it.  He saw his entire life and he knew that one day, maybe even this day, he was going to die and he reached into his jacket and he took out a little bottle of pills and the chalky taste of chewed up Demerol filled his throat and mouth and his nose and he vomited all over the floor and he threw the empty bottle against the wall and he screamed as loud as he could, “The Aurora Project!” and then he fell into the dark.