Jim Eigo | Far from Home

“Man! Woman!” declaims my drinking partner for the evening, breaking the almost-quiet that had settled over our dim, out-of-the-way corner. 

Till now all the chattering going on around us had felt peripheral. When the stranger first sat down at my table, he’d joked he was the token local in the hotel bar –  Did that render the rest of us displaced persons? He then said nothing for some minutes as we both just drank. Was it the volume or the vehemence of this fresh, unexpected utterance that snapped me back from the dark, swirl of unformed private thoughts contending inside my head? Or was it his obscure intent in saying what he’d said? 

“When I say those words, you don’t see those words, you instead see beings of your own making that those words, for you, stand in for – am I right?”  

In the dim light, in the state I’m in, how accurately could the word “see” apply here? I want to say: I can see you, sir, less palpably than I smell the drink on your breath, but can’t manage to. And isn’t the breath I’m smelling my breath anyway? What the natives call this cold, sweaty concoction that I’ve got in my hot, sweaty grip eludes me now, if I ever knew, not that what anyone calls it could conceivably alter its (regrettably diminishing) kick. Perhaps I should order a double.

“Birth! Death! When the words I say do not stand in for simple, tangible entities, do you see the word instead, or something else, or nothing at all?”  

Haven’t I, in college maybe, played this game before? So why should I be playing it again with a strange man in a dark, increasingly noisy bar so far from home? 

“And when I say I, do you see me or do you instead see you?”  

If this were a film, this man and I (I only now notice) might each be hired as the other’s stunt double. And why is this place so airless? If I got up now, could I stand, could I walk away—and who would pay my tab?  

“And as I get up and walk away,” my erstwhile drinking partner says, without a hint of slur, “at what point do I pass from this slowly diminishing conversation and into memory, home free?”  My interlocutor goes quiet, rises from our table, and from a rack high above it pulls two bottles down from the line of them that I had assumed were there for display. He turns to go.

Would I ever have been sharp enough to discern the stranger’s passage into no more? I don’t remember. Will I ever again be? I can’t now say. And how in hell am I ever going to pay the bill? As I reach into my pocket for my keys, I can only feel myself.

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