And I Feel Fine
A great growing, whining, whooshing rhythm permeates the window glass like the underwater sound of a wave, a-thump-thump-thump-thump-thumping rapidly, heavily, so rapidly that it blends into a single pitch and when I focus on it, booming unbearably, vibrating the barstools and glasses, it shakes my brain inside my head and vibrates my eyeballs.
I take a swig and fall off of the worn shaking stool in that late afternoon sunlight.
•
What’s a bar for? Go pretend to feel death at your own place, it’s cheaper. I’m here, though, too, on the corner of Main and 2nd. Idiot. I shouldn’t forgive myself. The bartender knows my drink is empty, and she saw me see her see it that way ten minutes ago.
The news is on above her head and I don’t think they’ve shown a single commercial in the last half hour. For that only do I forgive the earthquake that thirty-five minutes ago soaked my lap with beer and made such a ruckus of smashing glasses and tumbling patrons. Ah, memories. Twenty-nine is too old to be making new ones.
•
Arthur is a tall man on the stool next to me, in a green henley, jeans, faux leather boots, sunglasses resting on his short hair, white wristband on left wrist and stainless steel watch on right, face facing inside of hairy arm, sweat under armpit, top of head frizzy from hat. He's angled toward me, trying hard. Only twenty-five percent of the eight red wobbly stools are filled after that little quake emptied the place and he decides that I want company. I think I actually heard his breath quicken, when he came through the door a little while ago, at the thought of talking to me about the quake and himself and issues, as he is currently still doing.
He started by telling me about the power being out at his house, so he’d come here to watch the news, and why is it that the bar has better electrical infrastructure than the residential areas of the city? and how can our governor ignore the seismologists and pass a budget that doesn’t include funds for earthquake reinforcement measures? and isn’t it a shame that the new president doesn’t even believe in earthquakes and stuff like that because he says the science is being falsified by foreign governments trying to sabotage the national economy? and many more of the wrong questions.
What’s the right question?
What exactly is happening now, right now, and is it survivable?
•
The sun is halfway set and the streetlights flash on around the intersection. Arthur’s telling me now that he’s a Rather-Right-Wing Registered Democrat—and for a half-second I think he’s telling me what position he plays on a soccer team—though, yes, a Millennial, (and also a Virgo and single), but one who voted for so-and-so last November because don’t you think such-and-such-other was just a dishonest liar even though he had the most experience, and leaned the most left, but obviously leaning one way and tilting your head and squinting your eyes still doesn’t change a liar? plus I’m Rather-Right-Wing, so not really my type, and who did you vote for?
He’s asking me who I voted for. If I want strange people to know that information, I’ll post it online.
Mickey Mouse is my answer.
He’s only a few years younger than me, I think, but he has such energy. His eyes almost roll at my answer, but he catches himself and breathes a single laugh into his glass as he quickly sips. My glass is still empty. I think about pushing it off of the counter but the bartender would only sweep it into the small pile she’s been slowly forming against the wall and leave me thirsty.
•
Time for a refill, he says to me, and therefore to no one, as the windows rattle softly and the television flickers.
Before the gentle rumbling even stops, the bright banner under the lead anchor changes from WYOMING EARTHQUAKE! to AFTERSHOCKS INCREASING. The bar should've been closed for the holiday but Kate opened it up at four. No sin in a little extra income. Not everyone wants to spend a day alone at home. Customers had trickled in and out until the shaking when everyone left. Then it lulled and the curious came to talk to each other. When it picked up even worse than before they scattered. And I landed on the floor.
—I’m a Democrat, Arthur says, but I’m actually more conservative than my friends (hence his elaborate title, I deduce through extremely complex logical processes), so, you know, I don’t really mind guns. I mean, I guess they’re bad sometimes, yeah, but I’m not going to vote to ban them. Cops should have them. Some people should have, I mean… I kind of want one, even though I don’t have anything to—
—Wait—I stop him—don't you mean the other way around?
—Other way around what?
—You're pro-guns so you fall into the conservative category.
—Well it's not exactly pro-guns, I mean they exist whether you like them or not.
—No, I— yeah— yes, they exist, but owning one, ownership, you're pro-ownership.
—Right, some people should have them, I don't need one but it'd be fun to try a firing range.
—So—
—So do you have one?
—What, no I don't have one.
—What do you think about people having them?
—I think it's stupid.
—So we need to change that?
—Somebody does, not me.
—Well I disagree and there's nothing wrong with that, you know? I’m a conservative Democrat, so I don’t vote against guns. It's not like there's some checklist that Democrats have to vote for all of these things and Republicans have to vote for all of these things.
—Yes, I say, but that's exactly what you're saying, you vote for the right to own a gun because you call yourself a conservative.
—Yeah.
The stupidity is frothing thickly from his mouth and the smell is so repulsive that I crinkle my nose against it and when that doesn’t work I put my face over the rim of my glass to smell the leftover bubbles.
Then I laugh once to soften my reaction because maybe my expression has insulted him and some masochistic part of my brain desires to continue this conversation.
—So you vote conservative because that’s what you call yourself.
—It’s my duty as a voter, he says.
•
He is still talking to the side of my face although I’ve finished listening and locked my eyes on the television. The sound is on now because the bartender, Kyla, is watching too (she finally filled my glass with the wrong beer and spent about ten minutes wiping one booth table while just-washed glasses still lay broken where they fell off of the end of the bar) but the incorrect subtitles still scroll over the fiery breaking news banner:
……AWAY FRO MMAJOR METORPOLITAN AREAS. BUT THE AFTERSHOCKS A RE SPREADING MORE POWERFULY AWA YFROM THE EPICENTER THROUG HOUT WYOOMING……………STRANGE ACTIVITY FOR EARTHQUEAKES……
WE GO NOW TO OU RSTUDIO IN CHEYENNE.
[THEME MUSIC]
Screen black. I look outside to escape the sound of Arthur's voice and the nonsense on the television and the stuffy air in the bar and notice that the sky looks strange. The shaking returns but stronger now and with it, screaming loudness. From my seat at the bar, through the windows, between the old Paradise Cinema and the bakery, along the downward slope of the street, over the low hills, far, far in the distance I see light rising as if the sun had swung around and begun to hoist itself back up over the horizon. Then the tall windows shatter and the ground leaps under my seat.
The chill outside leaks through the window spaces, whose glass in shards carpets the tiled floor. Sweat cools on my forehead while I stand where the window once divided out from in, with Arthur on my right and on my left, Kyla, sweeping glass into a bin. I gulp the bottom gulp of my flat beer and watch fire paint the sky in the frame of the door. The dusk blushes around that violent burst, that shoot of flame that in the distance blooms. The atmosphere sinks, heavy, under the heat and seems to gallop outward in a gyre. The streets are peopled, now, and every place becomes a vantage to behold the fire. Black clouds brew deeply round its stem and terror is the face the beast assumes.
It is difficult to stand but we watch from the open wall. I finally ask what the hell is that? My body feels like it’s shaking inside but I realize it’s shaking outside, visibly, my hands around my glass, my knees, my teeth. It’s not fear, I’m too stunned to fear anything; in fact I feel kind of invincible staring this immense death in the face from the edge of the sidewalk in front of a bar and being the single person to have broken the spell. But my body is telling me to run. I definitely should. Go. Escape, my instincts willing my muscles into action, flee, now, away from death.
So I turn from the cold air blowing in, and so does Arthur; we leave the empty windows, return to the bar. The shaking dulls. Kyla ignores the new piles of glass gathered on the floor. She ignores us, our empty glasses, the mess of the room, the rising panic in the street, the two ladies who approach the bar timidly, stop on the sidewalk to consider, to weigh their options amid the glass, then finally walk around the damage and through the door, and lock their eyes on the television without sitting. Kyla is also watching. Arthur is tapping his foot rapidly and it’s rattling the loose bar of metal on which mine rests.
—It’s Yellowstone, he repeats after the anchor.
—What? I say, and it’s a stupid thing to say because I heard him and the anchor and I know what it means and he ignores me anyway or doesn’t hear and so it doesn’t matter.
Erupting. They always said it would. I’m looking back outside. The video on the television shows the details of the gigantic rupture in the Earth spewing fire above the clouds but outside, through the window, it is terrifying, a tiny geyser, a paralyzing horror.
—That’s hundreds of miles away, Kyla says, and I can see it from here.
We should go. Descend, like the Commander in Chief who doesn’t believe, into a closet two hundred feet below the roads and houses and cars. Is there time?
I sip my beer and Kyla pours her own, and the ladies leave, and Arthur complains about the pathetic government and his solutions to the issues of importance. The idiot spills his beer when the shaking reintensifies and he curses the glass and the Earth. And the Earth ignores him and me and spills great rivers of fire out of its heart like a second flood.