In The Eyes

When I enter the Ego Death bar, the bouncer shows me how to connect my personal machine to their local network. “Here ya go!” She waves at a sign next to her as I step through the door. “The party starts after midnight. Till then, grab a drink upstairs and take a look around.” I look back to ask her if I have to, but she’s already waving her metal detector over the person in line behind me.

These European places always have some sort of newfangled apparatus to “enhance the experience.” I connect my machine as asked and an overlay on my contact lenses swings into my visual field. I ignore it for the moment. The gimmicks on the lenses are usually advertising junk, but every so often you can get a discount out of it. I can always take the lenses out if it gets too annoying: these lenses are expensive, but essentially disposable; I have a pack of them waiting to be opened at home.

The ground floor of the Ego Death is a hastily converted restaurant: the retrospectively added pseudo-wood bar with brass-like trim awkwardly sprawls across the space past its original restraints; it cuts the room into weird corners and pockets, each nested in by someone looking to lose themselves in the stale wheat smell of too much spilled beer and the sticky sweet remnants of cola.

I elbow my way to the bar; the crowd is already beginning to press in warm and close. I order a vodka and something. I get a fizzy drink in a plastic cup for 8 euro. God I hope this gets me drunk—I need it. I clear out of the onslaught at the bar, sipping off the top of my drink to keep too much of it from getting on my shoes. I hold the drink above my head as I work my way around the bar to the row of high top tables packed in between the bar and the booths on the far wall.

I sit at the end of a six-top whose other end is occupied by an English pair. As I sit, I make brief eye contact with the girl; she doesn’t quite cringe, but she makes her displeasure at being interupted felt. I none too gracefully swing off the high chair with a creak of platicized leather and step away from their territory. I glance around and make brief eye contact with her; she smiles subtly: SYN — ACK. Message received.

I wander in search of a defendable position, preferably a corner or some other high ground. There is a tiny dance floor squeezed between the bar and a preposterously large DJ booth; a few dancers desultorily bounce to the beat. The back portion of the ground floor, tables and chairs, is even more hostile: I can smell the intolerable intimacy and avoid it. I circle back to an unoccupied corner of the bar next to the bussing station and plant my elbow in something sticky; this is my territory now.

I look around the crowding room, thinking how rediculous and animal we are; I know she agrees with me, her eye contact says so. Shocked, we look away. I wander my eyes around the room, tracing the darkened wood-like plastic trim up to the ceiling and around the plaster-like foam molding and down into her face opened directly at me, seeing me. Who sees me in a place like this? My face softens into a tiny smile that I intend to say “I see you too”. Her gaze shoots away from mine like a magnet turned the wrong way around.

The overlay swings back in to view. Did you like? Nod! I squint, confused. What’s this? If you didn’t, shake your head! Huh. I guess it’s some kind of opinion survey. Goddamn they’ll get anything to run on your machine nowadays. But if it makes the experience better, why not? When in Rome, do as the Romans’ programs want you to do. I nod; the overlay blinks to confirm and drops out of view. I just catch the girl nodding to herself, too.

Elsie and I used to go out together sometimes, but it’d get sloppy. I always wanted to go home early; she always wanted to keep dancing. I never got along with her friends, anyway: bunch of vapid twits. I guess we are the company we keep. But she got sick of me, as well she might get sick of someone who more than once voiced his unwelcome opinions of her friends outloud. At least once, he voiced it in front of her friends. It may have been this that caused them to dislike me, though at the time it seemed worth it to speak my truth. Was it worth the relationship? I suppose it must have been.

The bar is right crowded now; my strategic position on the counter is beginning to be challenged. A crowd of Americans close in on me, speaking loudly:

“And I said that, like, she’d have to, like, try wayyy harder than that to, like, keep up with me.”

“Totally bro!”

“Yeah, I mean, you know, she never, like, got on my level, man.”

“Yeah!”

These boys are each a solid eighty kilograms of meat, built like steer. Their tee shirts are monochrome and tight, their skin rippling and tattooed. The most ostentatios tattoos are animated: the rising sun on this one’s upper arm has rays that gently swirl against his warm skin. They’re clearly delighted to be in far-away Europe having a terrific time; I hope they all get laid tonight. Interested? No.

I abandon my position, my cup empty. In the meantime, the crowd has built up around the bar; people crowd and shove, none giving any ground in the struggle to drink from the frosted glass bottles stacked behind the bar. I swirl the watery ice around the bottom of my cup and drink the dregs of it; the ice rests on my teeth and chills them. I release the cup, sucked dry, from my lips. Invigorated, I try to elbow my way through the crowd; a matched set of girls speaking German growl as I try to push past, so I retreat. I’m not sure how badly I need a drink, anyway.

I drank more with Elsie: that’s how we got together. We met volunteering one summer, but our relationship was always impeccably professional. We were packing medical supplies to be shipped off to Bolivia to save the children dying of blood cancer or some such good deed. I don’t know that it was real—for all I know, the whole thing was a sham to look good on a CV.

Anyhow, the first day I arrived at the charity’s office, I knocked on the door and she opened it, pushing it out toward me. She was the most beautiful person I had ever seen. She had soft brown hair and soft brown skin and soft maroon lips. She was wearing a too-big sweater that suggested the curve of her waist between her ribs and her hip; the sweater had fallen off her shoulder on one side, and her hair was loosely tied up.

“Here to volunteer?” I could feel my face flush as though bruised.

“Yes…?”

“Good, c’mon in.” She stepped back, holding the door open with her arm extended as I stepped in past her. For a moment, we faced one another, standing close enough that I could have leaned forward and fallen into her wide brown eyes, but my feet carried me past her into the office.

“Terrific,” she closed the door and followed me, “let’s see what you can do for us.”

The music is building in here as it approaches midnight. The popups in the overlay are becoming more insistent: interested? Sure, I guess; I don’t care. How about her? Yeah, why not. I’m not sure what it means, anyway. Certainly some sort of cross-promotion: it must be assessing my opinion of people’s hair styles or clothes or the way they’re standing or something. Do you like this one? Absolutely.

“Alright y’all, time to get the party started!” The door to the basement opens, revealing a narrow stone staircase winding down under the rediculous DJ booth into the bowels of the building. “The dance floor’s open, and there’s no line at the bar!” People begin to filter downstairs. I’m in no rush to dance; that was Elsie’s thing.

At the end of our summer together, the charity had a night out to thank the volunteers for their service. She wore a tight black skirt and a white tee shirt. Her nipples peeked through the taut cotton. Elsie, as always, was the life of the party. She led us in the dancing, a little circle of unsure colleages in a big, generic night club somewhere in the city. I stood obliquely to the rest of them, swaying slightly with the music. She stepped over to me and danced at me; I could feel the music through her body and my body began to swing with it.

Elsie danced completely freely. She knew, unselfconsciously, unarrogantly, that she was beautiful. She moved her body like an instrument; the speakers reacted to her body’s every twist and turn. Her hips bounced and the tweeters wailed; her shoulders rolled and the woofers groaned. My body rolled in with hers, closer and closer. Her hair, her skin, her lips were close enough to smell in the sweet sweat smell of exertion and attraction. Her hips closed on mine and my hands found her back.

The bar up here has pretty much emptied out, so I order another vodka and whatever from the bartender, who’s closing up shop. I taste my drink in the plastic cup—it’s heavy on the whatever. The overlay swings around again: head downstairs! I comply—that’s what I came here for, isn’t it? I duck down the stairs, descending into a dungeon; the pounding noise wells up toward me as I go down.

Delirous lights cut and splice human bodies: a cheek, a wrist, a thigh. Someone coming down the stairs behind me presses me forward, and we are forced ever closer together as our bodies gather in the too-warm cellar of the once-and-future restaurant. Ego death. That’s what it is: the bodies jump and the music pounds to their jumping; the speakers respond to the music of their moving together, echoing electric amplification of exertion and abandon.

The faces are blurred, distorted. I can see none of them clearly, except for the vague sense that there’s someone there. Her face is clear, though—the girl whom I saw earlier. We make eye contact once again; this time it holds. She’s illuminated by a light whose source I can’t see but which follows her, highlighting her cheeks, the tip of her nose; her lower lip casts a soft shadow and quivers. She smiles delicately, and I know that she sees me the way I see her: SYN — ACK.

We begin to dance together, and her queerly highlighted face, bright in the confused haze, approaches mine. Her hips and mine lean on one another, and my hand finds the small of her back. She rests her forearms on my shoulders and lets her head drop forward, swinging back and forth on her limp neck; the top of her head brushes my lips, and I can’t help but begin to kiss, breathing in the warm human-animal smell of her. It’s as though we’re alone in the room; everyone else has faded away to dull oblivion as the red-blue-green lights shatter and spin on her neck and shoulders and wrists.

“HEY!” I scream, “HOW COME YOU’RE SO BEAUTIFUL?”

She giggles. “YOU’RE CUTE TOO!”

“NO, I MEAN, THE LIGHT?” She leans against me and her head is warm on my chest—an intimate moment.

“IT’S THE SERVICE!”

“THE WHAT?”

“THE SERVICE!”

The damn thing in the damn contact lenses in the damn local network in the fucking…

I step back from her and reach for my eyes to pop the lenses out. She scowls and looks around: I get the sense I’m not the only one who looks angelic to her tonight. I finally get the damn things out; they scatter on the floor and are lost underfoot. The people slide into focus around me, green and blue and brown and silver and all the colors of every ranbow broken up and shaken together; and this girl is just one of them, already off looking for another match. And behind where she stood is Elsie, dancing with her own personal angel, his tattooed sunbeams rolling in the dizzy lights of Ego Death. And to me, she looks just like anybody else. Synchronize? — Acknowledge.