18th
The Time Traveler's Dupe
You would never think to look for a wormhole on the Upper East Side but when I walked into The Bar it was hanging there patiently like a welcome sign penned in an expensive whore’s pink cursive. It hangs in front of the bar and the random bookshelves where you bought me the first drink as I came to meet you shaking from across the room. It hangs in the backroom where the calligraphy bleeds into the slow, noncommittal smile of the cocktail waitress and her mummified line of red uniforms waiting like dancing girls primping to break free. It reflects back there in the bathroom mirror too, where at the end of a long night someone else smiles back at me.
After so many years I become a gremlin who tramps from barstool to bookshelf to get cheap thrills, rubbing up against spines. A dorsal shiver from a hard copy of Keats and his earnest reader; a herniated disc from the bureaucrat lipsynching in iambic pentameter while making a study of his watch. Both, you know, were you. Always the ritual of cigars and cognac that belong to other people, the boom! boom! boom! of the disco music, and the swirls of smoke which burn tree rings into outstretched, aging palms. Old men cleave to the perfumed roses of much younger companions, watching them trace circles of I-love-you-nots with long straws into fluted champagne glasses.
When we said goodbye it felt like the crumbling of book-ends. It has happened so many times. It is even happening right now.
But tonight in this place it doesn’t seem to matter. You are sitting on the barstool wondering when I will walk in. And I, I am always halfway there to meet you from across the room.
