Dicey Riley’s was, at some point, the bar of an operating hotel. Over time the regulars that frequented the pool tables and booze began to frequent the rooms above as well. Eventually most of them came to like the place so much that they favored it over the rest of their lives outside of Dicey's aromatic walls. So they lost their jobs and their wives. Their daughters sometimes came by but the sons never did. Yet they weren’t sad, and they were served large beef burgers to soak up the booze, so they weren’t too drunk either. Most of them paid for their rooms by helping out around the bar, keeping it clean enough that a pedestrian might stop in for a rack of balls and beer. Then there were the regulars who paid for their lifestyle by the lifestyle itself, a couple of pool sharks. So they had a good thing going, the regulars and Dicey Riley’s. It was its own ecosystem down there and smelled like it too.
Harley met Henry ‘The Ace’ Moody the first time she stopped into Dicey’s. It was the only place open on her middle of the night death walks which required a watering hole with flexible hours. All of the other Good she found there was considered a welcomed coincidence. Behind the heavy swing door no one knew much about each other besides what they chose to share, Harley being no exception. And if there was anyone that offered less it was Ace. So naturally, like two sides of the same steel door, they converged.
He spent time teaching her different tricks with his cue and called her his Snooker Hooker. Conversations revolved around things that happened within the walls of Dicey’s as if it was the only timeline that existed. Ace became the closest thing to family Harley had, besides Moha and her actual family that is. And in his 68 years he had never spent so much time around a woman that he didn’t want to put his stick in, in his own words. Perhaps his stick didn’t stick anymore.
For his previous birthday (which was only a few months ago but Ace made it very clear he wasn’t lying this time), Harley had gotten him a blue baseball cap that he wore everyday since. It pushed his hair down straight so it was long enough to come out the sides and his large nose poked out almost even with the bill. Harley often thought about if it was true that noses and ears keep growing throughout your life, and Ace offered her proof. Someday his nose would break the cap’s perimeter and get burnt by the sun and wet in the rain. So this birthday she had gotten him sunblock and a new flask for when he snuck in cheap clear for them both.
‘You really don’t have any kids? After all these years, after all those women! No children snuck through?’
‘Do you see any kids?’
‘No.’
‘Then you have your answer.’
‘What if they’re out there?’ Harley nudged at the door that kept them contained in their own reality.
‘If they are, I hope they’re carrying on my legacy with clear eyes.’
‘And what legacy is that?’
Ace knocked in the four and lined up the seven.
‘Winnin’ bets and gettin’ wet.’
He knocked in the seven.
‘What’s got you so interested now? Snooker Hooker’s got daddy problems?’
‘I’m looking for buttons. To press.’
Ace missed purposefully and Harley grabbed her cue.
‘I ain’t got no buttons baby, I’m vintage. I’m pre-automation. What I’m trying to say is I’m—’
‘One of a kind.’
Harley sank the eleven.
‘Unexploitable, irreplaceable.’
‘Simple?’ Harley added.
‘Mm. Simply the son of all things holy perhaps.’
‘What a crack!’
Mr. Jones behind the bar slapped a towel to the wood and looked up at Ace as he wiped away nothing.
‘You both need to tone it down. You’ve been acting like it’s Wednesday but it’s the weekend. There are people coming in here, from outside not upstairs, and I want them to stay for more than one drink. And your wrinkling ass,’ Jones pointed the towel at Ace, ‘being drunk and horned up on memories from the AIDS ridden eighties ain’t gonna be no help. And don’t you be encouraging him young lady!’ He raised an eyebrow at Harley.
Harley prepared her rebuttal while Ace groaned loudly and finished his glass, slamming it down in front of Jones.
‘If you break a glass in here I will break your face.’
‘Promise?’
Ace put his pinky in the air between them just as the swinging door flung open and the sound of the street flooded inside.
Two women and a somewhat stout man walked up to the bar and took the three seats furthest from the pool table. The taller of the two women sat in the middle and placed a ringed left hand on the stout man lovingly. The other woman sat facing the pool table, her long blonde hair was ocean waved, unbrushed and fell all the way to her waist. She ordered a Negroni and Jones laughed, then made her a gin and tonic. She sipped it without objecting and watched Harley and Ace take turns with their cues. Her gray eyes were opened wide as an owl, actively engaged in play, yet somehow her lids hung heavy and low. She was sultry in her disheveledness and it didn’t go unnoticed.
‘Weren’t you supposed to be getting back out there?’
Ace lined up his shot and took a few deep breaths. Harley was standing across from him, staring over his shoulder at the slit in the blonde’s skirt that ran all the way up to the crease of her hip. Her left leg was so exposed Harley didn’t notice Ace’s miss. He stood up to block her view. Harley could only see her heels.
‘You’re very unpracticed. Who in their right mind stares straight on like that, like she can’t see you.’
‘Maybe I want her to see me.’
‘No, you don’t. And you don’t have to stare like that to get your look. I saw those legs when they came prancing in and I know how tight they must look right now draped over each other because I let my mind do the work for me. It’s all better, up here.’
He tapped his temple.
‘That’s because your mind is the only thing that still works in that skin sac.’
‘Oh go to hell! You might as well have a body like mine since you don’t use it. Tiny little number like you, what a waste.’
‘Will you keep it down at least?’
‘Harley, all I do is keep it down.’
‘Look, now she’s coming over here.’
The woman stopped at a seat in front of Jones, closer to the pool tables.
‘Get her a drink.’ Ace mumbled from the side of his mouth.
‘You get it.’
‘Fine!’
Ace stood up straight, all six feet of him, and handed his cue to Harley before spinning around on a heel and heading directly towards the blonde. She smiled and her skin warmed and softened like a freshly lit candle. Ace said something to Jones and he grabbed three tumblers and filled them heavily with whiskey. Jones whistled at Harley as he set them on the bar.
‘One’s for you, Snooker.’
Harley felt a wave of nerves make its way to her face and she thought she might puke. She glanced towards the bathroom, the door was propped open with a plastic foldable sign that read cleaning in progress. She groaned and took the glass, leaning her back against the bar. Ace did the same.
‘Blondie here says she doesn’t play pool and she doesn’t drink brown.’
‘So, naturally you’ve ordered the whiskey.’
‘I’ve also offered her my cue.’
Ace winked.
Harley leaned forward and peered passed him at the blonde. She was facing the table, swiveled on her cracked leather stool. Once she felt Harley’s eyes she turned and met them with her own. A smile grew on her lips and Harley, having come this close to getting back out there, knew it was close enough. She didn’t even want to know the blonde’s name.
‘Is this your daughter?’ Her voice was a soft hum like a mythological siren coaxing Harley towards her.
‘This here is my Snooker Hooker.’
‘Are we playing or drinking?’
The blonde hopped off the stool and took the cue. Her hair made a sort of wind as she passed. A warm amber flooded the air but was just as quickly replaced by liquor.
Harley broke and went on a run. Ace ordered more drinks. And the blonde twirled her hair around her finger. After two quick games, Ace grabbed his cue for one more and then they sat at a rounded bistro table and made Jones bring their drinks to them. The blonde’s sister and her husband, the stout man, became bored and left. Eventually Harley went back to wine and slowed herself down. She felt her stomach trying to extract nutrients from the alcohol to no avail. She thought about her paintings as she often did at Dicey’s when the end of the night neared. She knew as soon as she left she would be back outside with the beetles and the cyborgs trying to race home to her studio and hide safely between the walls of her own curated headspace.
That itch to get home was the reason Harley had become a regular at Dicey’s. It isn’t what brought her in, but it kept her coming back. A mindless break like an Einstein-ly walk along the pond. Calculating angles and spin, dissecting the table like an eagle from above, lubricating her cue with 100 proof, and then slumping on a stool until her legs have just enough life left to guide her home. Every so often, on nights similar to this one, she’d have too much and stay too long and her legs didn’t bring her home. Usually she crashed upstairs, sometimes in the park, rarely somewhere unknown. Such as a stranger's apartment across town that she had to take the last surviving taxi to and undoubtedly back home. But, all things rare for the rare.
The blonde’s name was Ash. Not as in Ashley, she had said to Ace, but as in Hash, but you drop the H. The H was silent. Her parents had been traveling in Morocco when she was conceived during a lucid Hashish trip that lasted three days and two nights. Then she came out with large gray eyes that never turned and so became Ash.
Ash’s apartment was expensive and uninhabited. Everything was shiny and black, no dust or half empty glasses of port. She had a maid and chef, she said. Harley thought she might even have someone that came to clip her toenails biweekly, because when she slipped the first of Ash’s heels off that night it became clear she didn’t spend a day unpolished. Soft tanned skin, slippery in the cold silk sheets. Just when Harley thought she’d lost her, a long limb would reach out and pull her back in, engulfed by the wild waves of blonde that seemed endless in the faint light from the hallway. Harley’s mind kept revolving back to a humming siren: Ash in her ear helping her up onto a ledge, then backing away, then coming back again and pushing her further. Her fingers warm and relaxed. It wasn’t until Ash kissed her way down Harley’s side that she gave up, or in. She hadn’t intended to stay the night but sunlight filled the room when she finally came up for air.
Harley left the bedroom, found her sweater on the bed frame and tip-toed down the hallway. In the kitchen, light poured in from a large window onto a small circle table with a single chair. Harley filled a glass with water and sat so the sun beat directly at her back. She rummaged through the health magazines and Architectural Digests on the table, the only evidence that someone lived in the apartment often enough to pick up the mail. A bent page in a small political magazine made its way into Harley’s sweater as she finished her water and placed the glass in the empty sink. She peeked into the bedroom one last time, saw the motionless ocean of hair camouflaged on champagne colored sheets, and slipped out the front door.
It was curious how compartmentalized Harley could be. She could shut the door on a space and everything that happened within it. But she hated combining these spaces. She hated soiling the anonymity at Dicey’s by opening herself up to an Ash. She had already begun thinking of the night as fantastical, memories stored in the depths of her mind, and that’s where Harley intended on keeping them, rather than carrying them with her, into her home, contaminating her canvases with a sad orgasmic energy. It was all for the paintings, she told herself.
She walked until she started seeing taxis, which was a few blocks, right on the edge of Ash’s neighborhood. Harley knew it was the edge because there seemed to be a wall surrounding the neighborhood, created by the grime and piss that abruptly stopped after a single block. The change in breathable air to a shit-tea infusion was similar to walking into a brick wall. Unfortunately, the air inside the taxi wasn’t much better. Though after a few minutes the stench subsided, or it had engulfed her, and her mind wandered back to her green eyed friend and the empty canvases in her apartment.
‘Do you mind if I smoke?’
The driver shook his head, rolled down the windows and put on headphones. Harley smiled at the pleasure of being alone in the same car as someone else. She took a drag of her cigarette and leafed through the magazine she stole from that fancy apartment. She scanned the faces for him, something she began doing recently without realizing. Even if she recognized him somewhere he would still be a nameless face. It would only be proof he was real.
The bent corner of the magazine opened to an opinion piece. A powerful man with kind eyes was sitting in a chair taking up the whole page. The words across him read, ‘A Fiskian Evolution: The Limited Language problem.’ The author’s name was modestly placed in the corner: Olivia Beck. Harley turned the page to the opening paragraph.
Can you imagine a world in which truth no longer has significance? A world where the word ‘truth’ has been used and abused to the point where it has no meaning? Truth, used as a label for things it is not, spread thinly across society so that it doesn’t hold any weight, any gravity. For example, what if, in some alternate reality, a society suddenly needed to rely on fact checkers for proof that something, some statement or simple information, is in fact true? And then what if those same fact checkers needed fact checkers because even their truths were at question? What would there be if there is no longer truth? No way to determine right from wrong, therefore no measurement for good and bad, and without these distinctions, a society can no longer hang their hat on crime and punishment. No more morality to stand on. Ideas and actions, no longer categorized by their intention but only by their outcome. Can you imagine? If good and evil didn’t exist?
Harley chuckled, nodding at the author’s lightly salted parody and sank lower in the seat. The smoke of her cigarette hung around her at first, then curled towards the window and was sucked out behind the taxi.
‘Chaos at first, sure.’ says Andrew Fisk of Neurotech. These Nieztschian concepts of morality hang in the background of all his work as an engineer, a peculiar marriage.
‘If communication and understanding remain limited and barbaric, without truth there will be no grounding for civil relations that were originally founded on the premise that there is one right and another wrong.’
But if you could step into someone else’s mind and share headspace with a stranger, expand your mental square footage to encompass their experience as well, without conversation, without abstracts and guesses, it is just suddenly there; would there still be chaos? If you could feel pain and suffering, happiness and pleasure, that was not yours?
‘After generations begin to adapt to a world reliant on a higher model of consciousness, instead of less distinct categorizations of truths in order to maintain moral aptitude, where would chaos be then? If you could at any moment share the space of someone else’s conception, couldn’t any experience suddenly be your experience as well?’
Fisk hypothesizes if you remove the limited capabilities of language, you no longer need abstract concepts and words to govern society, to remain peaceful, to continue an upward trending evolution (the same of which has been stunted for decades). Everything changes when abstractions become as real as holding an apple in your hand.
If holding an apple is even real to begin with, but let’s pretend it is, thought Harley.
Then, can you imagine (in this world where truth has failed and the only chance at evolving and therefore surviving is overcoming the limited language problem and expanding understanding which in turn expands consciousness), that there are two directions the world could take to achieve synchronicity. One through technology and one through ourselves. One simple and quick, one challenging and unknown. Both seemingly result in the same product.
‘According to those that know things which they cannot possibly know,’ Harley said aloud this time. She glanced up at the taxi driver, his head was bobbing away to whatever pop shit he was listening to.
But once the decision is made, momentum ensues, and determinism will take its position at the front of the ship. No stopping that.
Harley turned the page to see a full size photo of Andrew Fisk standing outside his downtown office eating Vietnamese food. Then she shut the magazine and tossed it out the window. The taxi driver made a left and then a quick right and slowed to a stop outside Harley’s apartment. She gathered herself and climbed some stairs until she arrived at a familiar door and stepped in.
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