It's All Around You

"Even if this is all there is," he said, "well, at least it's something, right?" He was a short man, old, or at least older than me, sitting on a bar stool three down from mine. I didn't provoke him, one way or the other, I had no context. Forty minutes of silence, the local news, a mediocre sitcom, and then him.

"How's that?" I asked him, regretting it immediately. In my experience I've found it better not to engage in the musings of the random drunk, the random anybody.

"Innkeeper, get my friend another one of whatever it is. I said, even if this is all there is, at least it's something. Right? I mean, it's not nothing. Which is not nothing. Ha ha..." I motioned for the bartender to not serve me another, but he gave me a look and poured anyway. A look that said, But don't you know who this is? I let him pour.

"Thanks." The man tipped his hat at me.

"Don't you think so?" He swayed. "Don't you think that something is better than nothing?"

"I don't know," I answered truthfully. "I guess it depends on what that something is."

"Ha ha..." This seemed to be the only laughter he could make. "It's this, chum. It's all around you, every day, it's there when you get up in the morning until you go to bed in the morning, ha ha..."

I clocked that. Morning, trees, coffee, newspaper, car, cars, people, person, place, thing, bookends of news, bottles of malt, the occasional hat, a lifetime warranty. "And," I added, "I suppose it matters on what comes next." He furrowed his brow in my direction. "If you think there's something after this."

The look he gave, I don't think he'd ever thought of that before. Or, perhaps, he'd thought of it one time too many, and he'd forgotten, and now I was reminding him, and he did not like it one bit. "That doesn't matter," he said, finally. "You have to learn that this right here? This now? This is now. What happens after that, well." He got up and walked, with some ease and elegance, towards the door. "Ha ha..."

Had it only been the three of us? The bartender, the man, and me? Was the room really that dark? I thought about that. What comes next... I understood why he was upset, if upset is what he was. His gratis drink stood before me, somewhere between a gift and a sacrifice, and I did my best to get it down.