CHAPTER FOUR

          It was snowing again. Dawn Becker, fresh off of the downtown #12 bus, stumbled down Broadway, her steps awkward and exaggerated from the three inches of snow on the ground. The snowflakes were unusually large; she saw them land on her travel bag as she swayed her arm back and forth. They sat still on her clothes like hollow cottonballs, maintaining their shape and mass. She would blow them off of her nose. They piled on the ground. She felt every one of the hundreds she compressed with every step, warming them, bringing them a little closer to water. She felt no resistance as she walked, as she looked up at the sky. In New York City there was always something going on in Port Authority, or right outside as she was finishing her last cigarette, that would attempt to hold her interest, make her take notice, make sure she would either not forget the place, not want to leave, or at least feel sad (or pissed or envious or sexy), most likely on purpose. Dawn knew New York’s Broadway as an urban boardwalk, a conduit and a museum in one. She felt that this Broadway should have felt like that, but was worn with coming and going. It was merely either the entrance or the exit to the turnstile of raised off-ramps above the buildings around her, just next to the river. The concrete was the color of the snow clouds behind it. They stretched like tarp across the entire sky and continued dropping snow.  

            She turned down Division Street, saw the bar, remembered it, and decided to go in. She had a good forty-five minutes before she had to be on her bus back to Harrisburg, and craved a beer or a shot or two, something to help her sleep through the overwhelmingly tedious Greyhound trip. Something to distract her, give her mind a little bit of a pillow to lay on, a little comfort, since she knew she would not be able to rest her head on that bus. And besides she had never gotten to a bookstore and was tired of the tapes she’d brought. She was counting on being able to sleep through a large portion of the trip home and make the most of the next three Reading Days before end-terms. And a dive bar next to a bus terminal below a giant twist of highways seemed almost too good to be true and a better place than most. And a perfectly bookended feeling of closure, proper for a small celebration. Because though she had been glad to see her sister, Dawn Becker was extremely happy to be leaving Albany.

She nodded her head up once when she saw the street signs on the corner, Liberty and Division, criss-crossed, splitting the sky, directing snowflakes, intolerant and cold steel, reflecting fluorescent, cradling the distant skyline of a brooding, frustrated mess of a city. She wished on a thousand, million snowflakes that her sister would be able to get out after graduation. She pressed her flat palm to a spotless glass door and entered the empty bar, the words LAST CALL blazing above her vanishing silouhette, reflecting blue haze on the snow below.

                                                                        ~ 

            Dawn became alert when she realized she was on the floor, and she sat up when she realized her sister was next to her. She swung her head around in the mild, early morning light, disoriented, and saw that the three of them had fallen asleep in Caitlyn’s room.

            Her easel, holding a blank canvas, was in the corner of the room by the window. The shades were pulled down all the way, but a gap between the side of the shade and the wall let in a stream of light that fell on one half of one of Caitlyn’s smaller prints, making it gleam dull, white light. On the other half was what appeared to be a caricature of a face Dawn didn’t recognize. The room was a bit overheated and smelled of stale pot smoke. Dawn rocked her neck from side to side and stretched her back.. Gina was so deep in sleep she looked anesthetized. Caitlyn was curled facing the wall and looked naked under a thin sheet.

As Dawn looked around the room for her bag and her cigarettes, she noticed for the first time that the rest of the room was strangely unremarkable. There was a sturdy but low-profile desk that had almost nothing on it except for some paint cups. Next to the desk was a five-foot high CD tower, probably with a capacity of 200, about three quarters full. There was a bookshelf (Dawn noticed Ayn Rand, Virginia Woolf, and Kurt Vonnegut immediately) with an empty vase and a beautiful, all glass, double-bubbler bong on top of it. These were flanked by a handful of framed pictures of groups of people, probably family photos. However, near the door, on the other side of the room, stacked in a pile and leaned against the wall next to her dresser (and presently inches away from Dawn’s toes), were a group of maybe fifteen thin canvas boards.

            Dawn could only see the one in front really well. It was of a woman from behind, with her face turned in profile. It appeared to be a self-portrait, only the woman in the painting had long, red hair. She was leaning on a balcony that overlooked downtown New York City. Dawn saw that although the painting appeared to show the balcony as being right next to the river, the skyline in the background looked awkwardly small, as if it had been painted from a vantage point a few miles inland. Dawn, who was not that familiar with New York, couldn’t say for sure, but she reckoned she was right and wondered if Caitlyn had done it intentionally.

            Probably, she thought.

                                                                        ~

            “What’ll it be?” the bartender asked. He had not been standing there when she had come in. He emerged from what Dawn imagined were the back offices as soon as she sat down at the bar. He lingered in front of her for a moment before taking a white cloth from his belt and wiping the area of the bar in front of her and laying down a napkin.

            “Long Island Iced Tea,” said Dawn, slowly, with effort.

            “Coming right up,” he said, taking a tall, thin glass from under the bar.

            “Strong, please.”

                                                                        ~

            Another reason she had for going in was the dream. She had only seen the bartender that once, but for some reason he stuck to her and appeared in her dreams early the next morning, in her second-to-last dream. Dawn knew that she had a tendency to remember really random meetings with people, and would normally not be phased by one of them turning up in a dream. But the fact that he had shown up in her recurring dream and completely altered it made her want to swing by the bar again. Just to talk to him for a few minutes. To see if there was anything she was missing, to see if he had anything to say.

            The dream was loosely based on an actual incident when she and Gina had gone to Woodstock ‘94 in Saugerties, New York, with Gina’s boyfriend-at-the-time Matthew and his sister, Dawn and Gina’s good friend Meredith. Gina and Dawn had been visiting Meredith in Buffalo, where Meredith was going to boarding school, and the three of them had taken the bus down together. When they got to the concert site, Matthew was waiting at the pre-arranged meeting spot. Just as they were about to enter, Gina realized her ticket was gone. It was in a small red bag that was now missing. She figured it must have fallen on the floor of the bus somewhere when she was fishing through her backpack for something or other.

            Minor hysterics followed. Gina called Port Authority, in New York City (where the bus had been heading) and talked to someone at the lost and found who was assuring her that he was indeed looking at the ticket in his hands right then, that when the driver checked in after his shift he found the bag and handed it in. The person with whom she talked also assured her, fitting his sentences in  between heavy breaths, that the bag would be held for her as long as she needed it to be held. After some discussion, it was decided that she and Matthew (who had driven in) would go down to Port Authority and get her bag and her ticket. They simply did not have enough money to buy another ticket and would only be gone “six or seven hours”, according to Matthew. “Worst case scenario,” he had said, “Is we get back after dark. And as long as we meet here-” he gestured to the big 2A sign hovering over their heads, “That won’t be a problem.” They set four p.m., exactly seven hours away, as the meeting time. If Matthew and Gina had not gotten back by then, Dawn and Meredith would go back onto the festival grounds and check back at nine. They all felt pretty good about this, so did not make any emergency plans.

            In reality, Matthew and Gina never made it out of the parking lot. They sat in congestion for about two hours before stumbling on some guy who was trying to sell an extra ticket he had. Apparently he had just gotten dumped by his girlfriend the day before and was more than happy to sell them the ticket for fifty bucks. They went right back inside but could not find Dawn and Meredith, so they waited until the meeting time and place, hooked up with them then, told them the story, and went back on site, laughing, drinking, smoking, and had a memorable Woodstock.

            However:

            In Dawn’s recurring dream, they never make it back to the site. Dawn, who eventually ends up losing track of Meredith in the Green Day mosh pit, gets lost, and stays lost for the entire concert. Among the various issues that keep popping up are frustration at Gina for losing the ticket in the first place and anger at herself for splitting up with her friends in the first place.

            -Always feels tremendous guilt-

            -Left them behind.-

            My own Fun.

            However:

            This morning, there is also a difference. It is the Monday morning, after the concert. Dawn is wandering around, watching hundreds of people pick up tons of trash from a quarter million people. She sees an old guy, kneeling by a tree, in blue-jean cutoffs and a short sleeved, white shirt, like the one he wears when he’s at work. It is the bartender (much older, skin looser), playing the role of wasted hippie in her dream, and he does not notice her directly; she’s right next to him and he’s looking as if she’s across the field. His motions are finely tuned with the ground and the air blowing around him. Dawn looks at him and sees what he is: he’s one of those leftover hippies that came to Woodstock to relive it all. She looks at her dirty, muddy self and  the concept of this man in front of her and her initial reaction of the man in his surroundings is that she feels that that it is all completely natural and good and proper and whatever: he looks as if he has been here forever. Even when he’s gone, he’s really not. He’s living in here and for here. His face, tied to the earth, performs all the conversation he needs. But he speaks anyway, she knows.

            All Dawn wants to know is the way home. She doesn’t want to ask him, though. It’s strange to her. It is not fear, in the slightest. In a very real way, she is calm and relaxed. She cannot describe the emotion to herself. This is more her discomfort than anything.   

                                                                        ~

            “Pretty slow, here, don’t you think?” Dawn asked. She sipped her Long Island Iced Tea with stern lips and inquisitive eyes, intentionally through the little red straw/stirrer thing that came in it. She would lift the glass off the table and the napkin it was on would come up with it and she would not care. She’d wait to see how long it could hold out.

            “Well, you know, it’s still early. What is it, six-thirty?”

            “Six-fifteen.”

            “Six-fifteen. Anyway, I never get more than ten people in here on Sunday anyway. Sundays are real-ass slow.”

            Dawn smiled. “Closed on Sunday.”

            “What’s that?”

            “Closed on Sunday. It’s something Caitlyn said today. We were walking around the Plaza there, trying to think of something to do besides minor sight-seeing.”

            “All sight-seeing in Albany is minor,” the bartender said, taking his pack of cigarettes out of the breast pocket of his white, food-service shirt. He took one out, placed it in his mouth, and laid the pack down on the counter in front of Dawn. Marlboros.

            “Thanks, I’ve got my own.”

            The bartender nodded, lit his cigarette, and motioned for Dawn to continue.

            “Anyway, this girl Caitlyn says that we shouldn’t bother looking for anything to do because of all the state workers staying in at their homes in North Colonie and the hungover college students, this city is dead on Sundays. She said there should be a sign off the Thruway saying, ‘WELCOME TO ALBANY. CLOSED ON SUNDAY.’”

            “She’s right. Caitlyn. Is that the girl you were with the other night?”

            “You wish,” Dawn said instinctively, before his comment had occurred to her as odd. Dawn looked for any kind of laugh in his eye but found nothing. It was as if he had just asked her how she had been doing lately.

            “I didn’t think you’d remember me. At all,” she said, letting out a small laugh.

            “I called you a cab, didn’t I? Sorry, I just never forget faces.”

            “Quite all right,” Dawn said. “Any anyway, no. That was someone else. Someone else entirely.”

                                                                        ~

            “What are you doing here?” Dawn asks incredulously.

            The bartender looks as if he had just been aroused from a month’s sleep. “Me?” His eyes are glassy and unfocused. He is asking the question to the air right now, chin above his shoulders, tilting backwards but somehow in no danger of toppling over. “Me? Me?”

            “Yes, you,” Dawn says.

            “Where am I?”

            “You don’t know?”

            “It’s Monday...”

            “Yes, Monday,” Dawn says. She is watching him closer now, the early morning light glossing his cheek. He stretches his back out against the tree he’s sitting against. There is a slight pause in the air. She can see his eyes clearly; they are trying desperately to focus, shifting sideways, making a concerted, conscious effort to construct some kind of workable sight equilibrium. He is looking at her kneecap, trying to right himself to it as a fixed point to keep his world steady.

            “I’m waiting,” he says, his voice dense and ebbing. The last syllable hangs in the air, drawn out against the physical space between them in a belligerent monotone. “...biding my time...”

            “You’re not supposed to be here. There’s this other guy that pops up usually. You could be him. But he looks different. Feels different. But he’s usually a positive force in this dream. Man and you don’t look too good.”

            He still doesn’t really even take note of her. He’s still hanging on to the last syllable of his previous sentence. Either that or the next one never really caught on. He’s trying to think of something, maybe. He’s flawed. He’s drooling. This is a concoction of Dawn’s mind so she takes it personally. Just what am I trying to say here? she thinks. It’s amazing. This is the most into a dream she has ever been. She’s completely aware of it now. But it keeps backing over her. Something is not right. Cause for alarm. She sees her arm and is only aware that she is dreaming about her arm. Even her most lucid of dreams have not been this self-conscious. Not only is she aware, she is analyzing it as it happens.

            So have I done this before and just don’t remember? Or will I not remember this? Is it like this every night and I forget? she thinks.

            “How do I know I know,” the man is saying. Sing-songy, very non-threatening, in subtle major thirds.

                                                                        ~

            “So you’re just visiting. Where are you from?” The bartender leaned forward and propped up his foot on one of the barstools behind the counter.

            “Pougkipsee. My sister and I both. She’s who I was visiting,” Dawn said. She sipped her drink slowly, enjoying the atmosphere of the deserted bar. She could not recall ever being the only person in a bar-type place before. The jukebox was dark and quiet and looked as if it hadn’t been touched in days. There were two small fans humming in the far corner of the bar that gave the scene the only background chatter it required. A buzzing fluorescent stretched itself out over the pool table. Dawn saw a lone pool stick and the cue ball, and guess the guy had probably been shooting around earlier.

            “I’m taking the Greyhound,” Dawn said.

            “Yep.”

            “See a lot of that?”

“Take a guess,” the bartender said. Dawn could almost see the glow of the sign he was thumbing at. “People come in here all the time, having just come here, or getting one for the road before they leave. Having this place right by the bus terminal makes it ripe for that kind of traffic.”

            “Does it bother you? The lack of regular customers?”

            “There are a few regular customers. There’s this one guy, Greg, that’s in here all the time. He’s working the concert at the Pepsi Arena tonight, but I’m sure he’ll be by after. And his friend Charles, too. Those are the two I know best. But you know, two are enough.”

            Dawn took a hard swallow of her drink and pursed her lips together. The bartender was fidgeting with a ratty cloth, winding and unwinding it around his hands. Even when he addressed her, he felt remote. Like he was pretending to be bored as a disguise.

            “It doesn’t bother me, anyway,” the bartender said, turning his face to Dawn. She noticed that the only time he would look at her was when he was speaking to her. Otherwise his eyes were restless about almost everything else. “I won’t be here long anyway. My stay here is temporary.”

            There was a kind of gravity in his voice as he said it, Dawn thought. And something about the way his jaw jutted just a little bit farther off his face than normal; and something about the texture and intention of what he had said, as if he said it knowing that she would never be able to understand the complexity behind the statement; and something about how she heard him breathe forcefully out of his nostrils; and something about how she stared at him and began to feel an almost absurd tension encroaching around his aura; and something about the tone of his voice that made him sound

                                                                        ~

                            like a wounded soldier on a hospital bed, full of delirium and hope and pregnant with his dreams of what is on the other side of the sterile walls that he stares at.

                                                                        ~

            He leaned back casually, throwing Dawn off for a second. When she recovered, he was holding out his hand.

            “Nick. Nick Kohl. Owner of Last Call, the last true dive in this town.”

            “Dawn,” she said, taking his hand. “Dawn Becker. And I hope you’re right.”

“About what?”
            “About your stay being temporary. This city shouldn’t be permanent for anyone.”

            “True,” he said, smiling. “The odds are in my favor. Nobody stays in Albany long except our naturalized. It’s built for coming and going.”

            “Well, good luck to you anyway.”

                                                                        ~

            “Thank you,” she says, taking the bottle of water from him and taking a huge mouthful. He had taken it out of a bag he had behind the tree. It is somehow ice cold, and she can feel it washing the stringy saliva out of her mouth. This is new. She has never has water in this dream before. And she has no memory of drinking water in any other dream and she is not perceiving as aware, alert, and aroused consciousness at this moment so she is drinking water for the first time. Think about that! And I’m dreaming about water, she thinks. I’m dreaming that I’m tasting water for the first time. So the water is soon gone and she had dreamed it. The sun was high in the sky again. It remained throughout.

            “What are you going to do, then?” the bartender asks. He leans forward and takes the water bottle from her outstretched hand, and rations a small sip for himself. She notices the bartender licking his moist lips, savoring the immediate effect. There is an exaggerated “Ahhh....” thrown in afterwards. He waits for an answer without listening, without acknowledging.

            “I don’t know,” she says. “I guess I’ll try to hitch a ride home. If worse comes to worse, I’m not too far from home to walk, maybe two days worth down the Thruway...”

            “Why don’t you sit down here for awhile?” Dawn notices a small ring of sweat around his chest, matting that part of his shirt to him. He’s tired. The sun has paused halfway up and is ebbing, unsure of what to do. The whole sky feels it and awaits instructions. Dawn looks up, notices this and does not feel encouraged.. 

            “What?”

            “Just... I could use... some company.” His voice is weighed down, somber. His eyes are turned upwards, angled at hers, parallel to his jaw, jutting again. Dawn doesn’t think he needs companty. He’s a dream! It’s all a dream! Go on to the next one! she tells herself, but she can’t because she has no precedent. But at the same time she knows she can’t stay. Still, she has no memory of how to move from one dream to another. Trees sag gently. The bartender is patting the ground next to him, staring as grass grows up and sticks to his palm. Something is supposed to happen very soon, she thinks.

            “I’m sorry, I can’t,” she says. She senses the wind picking up, and slowly begins to draw herself into a panic. The sky is darkening; the sun, weaker, now accelerates through mid-afternoon, stifling, across the sky, making tracks. Everything above is in motion. The ground holds for a moment, just out of a stretch.

            But it’s just the earth moving faster, she thinks, she knows: The sun is stationary, the sun is...

            “I don’t know what to do now, anymore,” the bartender says, looking to the sky as if he somehow has guessed it...

                                                                        ~

               Dawn, halfway through her drink, began to think about leaving. Not wanting to leave things on an ominous note, she decided to lighten up the conversation a bit. Nick had gone into the back for a minute, but she heard glasses clinking around and called back to him. “So,” she said, breaking several moments worth of silence. “Nick. What are you doing while you’re here?”
            “You mean besides running the bar?” he said, emerging from the back room with a rack of glasses, smelling vaguely of detergent.

            “Yeah.” I’ll be done my drink in one more cigarette, she thought.

            “Writing a novel.”

            “A novel?”

            “Yep.”

            “What’s it about?”

            She noticed a slight pause before he said: “What isn’t it about?”

            “Why a novel?”           

            He put the rack of glasses at the far end of the counter, leaving a rectangle of dishwater across his chest. “It’s just something I’ve always wanted to do,” he said, wiping his hands with the dishtowel that had been tucked in his waist again. “And now that I’m stuck here for a while, I have no reason not to do it.”

            Dawn tucked her lips into her cheeks and conceded a smile. “That’s really admirable, man. I wish you the best of luck.”

            “Thanks.”

            “Why are you stuck here, anyway?”

            Nick shook his head. “Too long of a story.”

            “Understood.”

            “Say, listen. Do you write at all?”

            “Some poetry, not much though.”

            “See, the thing is,” said Nick, leaning towards her, his voice almost a whisper, “I’m having a little writer’s block at the moment and was wondering if you might possibly have any advice to give.”

            “Yeah, don’t write,” she said, laughing at her own joke.

            “Seriously.”

            “Hm. Well, honestly, not really,” Dawn said. “I’m not an artist. I’m going into sports medicine.”

            Nick said nothing, just raised and lowered his shoulders with so little verve it could hardly have been called a shrug.

            “Wait, wait, check this out. I took an American literature class my freshman year and do remember my professor saying something about writing a while ago that stuck in my head. You know Moby Dick?”

            “Well, everyone knows it. But I haven’t read it.”

            “Well, one thing she said about why it was such an effective novel was because he, Melville, wrote about life at sea and the sea itself and the whales and whaling ships. The guy was a seaman. He used his immediate surroundings to relay his point. He interpreted the truth through these things.”

            “So, ‘Write what you know?’”

            “Yes, but not exactly. ‘Use what you have.’ That was her quote.”

                                                                        ~

            “Promise me you won’t stay,” she says, through the growing wind. “Promise me you’ll get home.”

            The bartender says nothing. He simply tosses her the empty water bottle. It bounds across the field, getting caught momentarily in the high grass before the wind pushes it along again.

            “You shouldn’t stay here.”

            The bartender hides in the shade of the darkening clouds.

            She is alone again, by the gate. It is raining. She is naked. Warm. The bartender is gone. Everyone is gone. She can feel herself breathing, she can feel her body against Caitlyn’s floor now, and is sure that she is sweating. But she can’t find the door out just yet. There’s one more thing...

            The pulse of a new day on my face, she thinks. Give me my--

            She can no longer dream. It is time.

                                                                        ~

            Dawn placed a dollar bill on the bar while Nick was in the back and slipped out of the bar, holding the door for four white-hatted college guys who scuttled past her into the bar and, without a word, made a bee-line for the pool table. She hopped down the steps, swung her bag around her shoulder and turned onto Liberty Street, walking towards the bus terminal, the enormous BUS sign glowing a pale blue through the layered snowfall. She knew enough not to look back; the city, she assumed, went on without her.