Branching, Like A Spilled Daiquiri
Now stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
There’s a woman, and she walks into a bar. It’s this little place called the Far Street Pub, and since it’s a Tuesday around 9 PM, there’s almost no one there, discounting a couple stray men & women with no care of getting up early tomorrow. The place is practically empty–utter ghost town.
The lady’s name? Helen, probably. I say “walk”, but honestly she more stumbles in, face pale, shirt smudged with dirt, and dark pants marked with darker, fresh stains (though no one would be able to see, if they were looking at her–a few weeks ago the lights in the bar got changed, dimmed, for whatever reason). She’s not injured, despite her rough state. Well, aside from her broken pinky, an injury which she doesn’t quite know about yet given the massive dose of adrenaline surging through her system. Honestly, she shouldn’t be here right now. But she’s had one hell of a day and really wants a drink.
Now if we take a little step to the side, we can see there’s this guy named Hugo working the other side of this bar, the slow joint. He’s been a bartender for thirteen years, but only here for four–his previous place got shuttered when the owner was caught smuggling drugs, but that’s a whole different story. Right here, right now, it’s a slow Tuesday night, and from his point of view he sees someone familiar stumble in.
It takes him a second to place her–Helen, Helen is her name for sure, and though it might be the dimmed lighting (the owner changed them three weeks ago–to help with atmosphere, apparently), she seems a little out of sorts.
Last time he saw her would’ve been two, three weeks ago, after her coworker got a promotion, but before now she always came with friends. The next time he’ll see her will be in
three months, then never again, but he doesn’t know that. All he knows is that today she’s here and alone and her eyes were wide enough to make his skin itch.
So let’s go back to Helen. She takes a barstool and Hugo, because of her eyes alone, asks her if she knew what that loud noise outside was. Of course, she goes ahead and orders a strawberry daiquiri, because it was her go-to and she didn’t really wanna think about what to get. He asks if everything’s alright, but that’s not important.
You could really get a daiquiri anywhere–in fact, in the cocktail “bible”, The Fine Art Of Mixing Drinks by David A. Embury, it was one of the six basic drinks listed, one of the few adopted by most bars around the world. That book defined cocktail culture for decades. Helen read it five months ago, and for a time that got her interested in cocktail mixing. Fantastic party trick, that.
Where was I?
Oh, right: it’s at this point that Helen tells Hugo she saw someone die, ten minutes ago.
Let’s take a real big step back.
There’s this woman, and she’s clocking out for the day. Her name? Definitely Helen, and she works administration at the Atlantic dockyard past the north edge of town. Her work starts late and ends late, so by the time she leaves today she’s terribly tired and the sky’s painting an orange sunset on the horizon. But for now at least, her boring, tedious work is done and she hardly wants to even consider thinking of it until tomorrow.
So as one does, she gets in her car, slides in a Jimi Hendrix CD–Electric Ladyland–feels pretty groovy as she cruises home, and then right as Voodoo Chile is coming to a close sixteen
minutes and fifty-three seconds into her ride, a car slams into her passenger side like a hammer hitting a Aluminium can.
In that car? This guy, Jeff, gliding down the road like he owns it in a fixed up 1967 Ford Mustang. Two years ago he found its corpse, a broken-down gem among junkyard scrap, and–because he was a big fan of old cars and it was the same car his dad used to drive when he was young–he just had to have it.
(That car was actually a 1969 Ford Mustang, but when the only person that’s alive to remember it remembers it as a ‘67, it might as well be a ‘67).
Like you do when you’re a bored, middle-aged engineer, you take the chassis home and work on it on your weekends, fixing every issue with sweat, grit, and a heaping teaspoon of frustration. Then, finally, three weeks before now, your efforts pay off: you’ve got a beautiful roadworthy car that you take out for a spin whenever you get a chance to, like when you need to go pick up some last-minute groceries for dinner tonight. A week from now Helen will end up in an uncomfortable conversation with his grieving wife, but Jeff doesn’t know anyone named Helen and today–for at least another minute–he’s alive and blasting Queen and smiling with the whites of his teeth as he drives down the road, sun setting in his rearview mirror. And if we ended things here nothing about that image would change.
But you’d still have enough clues to know the future set in stone.
The seconds tick down. Jeff reaches a T-intersection, and presses his brake to slow down. But that brake shoots down, no resistance, and nothing slows. Again, a week from now, Helen will find out (in that previously mentioned uncomfortable conversation) his brake failed right as he reached the intersection, one fault in a masterpiece repair, but Jeff still doesn’t know anyone
named Helen and right now the only thing he’s finding out is that there’s a car right in front of him before
Out on the street, a girl, Lyra, walks home from a friend’s house after spending a few hours studying for a precalculus class, something of a weekly constant for her and this friend. She’s tired, and still hazy on exponential functions, but she was feeling upbeat. Tonight, at one of the least busy intersections in town, it was a calm and clear evening, not a soul around. For a time, she could enjoy the sound of nothing besides the wind’s breath and the chirping birds.
That is, until she watches two cars approaching at an intersection. She only has a second to consider their speed–way too fast, no slowing down–before they collide, the silence split by one hell of a bang.
Given what you know already, I shouldn’t have to tell you that Helen’s making it out of this fine. See, she’s in a Volvo, the passenger side is getting hit, and though it was a harsh crash the car’s gonna crumple in just the way it’s supposed to. About as ideal as a crash can be, excluding her poor pinky. The sudden jerk will catch it on the steering wheel and break it, but that’ll be the only physical damage she suffers.
Jeff’s side of the story doesn’t have that luck. Those old cars were solid as a mountain, but that isn’t good for the passengers. All that force has to go somewhere, of course, and he’ll have a split second to realize just how cruel a bastard reality can be.
It’ll rip right through him. A half second after the crash, his anatomy becomes physics.
There’s a moment of nothing. Metal bending metal, light–or at least the illusion of it–and a horrid noise that eats all perspective.
Then–some amount of time later, no one’s counting–Helen pulls her head back up, looking out a shattered windshield. She fumbles for her driver side door and finds it working still, cracking it open to stumble out onto the street. Like I said, it’s obvious she’s fine by some miracle, but she feels a dampness on her clothes, dark stains soaking through. Motor oil? Probably.
(In an hour, when the police find her sitting at the bar, they’ll identify that it’s Jeff–a portion that got ejected through his windshield, at least).
She stands there for a minute, uncomprehending, out on the empty street. There’s another car, and someone in another car, face down, seen vaguely through a bloodsoaked spiderweb windshield. And finally, she realizes through the strange mechanisms of shock a stunning revelation: the Far Street Pub is just down the road, and a drink would be great about now.
So she starts stumbling, and though Lyra sees this, it feels like her mind’s elsewhere. She could go talk to the woman, but what could she do? What could she say? There was blood, a lot of blood, blood and twisted metal, that was clear to see. Did she need medical attention? What about the person in the other car?
No, she doesn’t move–with shaky hands, she pulls out her phone and dials 911. She’ll regret it later, hours as well as months later, wondering about what she could’ve done if she was braver, if she would have approached, but by then it’ll be in the past and she won’t be able to do anything besides dwell on it. She’ll never see Helen again.
So Helen stumbles over to the bar, and soon we’re back to Hugo. And Hugo? Well, he doesn’t have many ideas here, besides getting her that daiquiri. He’s a fast mixer–in most situations he’d be proud to say he was the fastest barman in the pub–but after hearing that story, even a single daiquiri takes him a couple minutes. By the time he serves the drink, both can hear sirens outside, slowly growing louder.
They know exactly where those sirens are going, but neither know what to say. Didn’t know if they wanted to say anything. At least this way, for a few minutes longer, it was just a regular Tuesday night. For just a little longer, there was nothing outside of this slow bar.
But finally, she goes to pick up her drink, and remember? She’s got a broken pinky–so she grips it, picks it up, and realizes a little too late that that pinky is screaming murder. She yelps “ouch!” and drops the glass. Over the next minute Hugo remakes the drink–it’s on the house, both drinks–but memories are funny things.
In a year, Helen will remember the whole crash, and this moment. She won’t be able to speak about it, any of it, and gets real jittery when she’s driving, but in time those shakes will lessen, driving will get easier. Hugo will be able to speak of it just fine as an interesting story, the once or twice it comes up, mentioning how the survivor walked in right after, though he barely knew anything else. Lyra will still wonder, from time to time, what happened to that woman she saw stumble from the wreck. And Jeff? He’s still dead.
Five years later, Helen will remember it, dream of it, now and then, though she can drive fine once more. Hugo will have moved over to the west coast, forgetting the story completely, and Lyra will have only the barest recall of the sight after graduating college, not even remembering the woman stumbling out of her car. Jeff remains dead.
And ten years later, the details will be gone for all of them, except one. Only Helen will remember this moment crystal clear, even though she won’t remember almost anything else: sitting there at the bar, broken glass all over, and a daiquiri pooling on the counter: a big pool of sweet, sticky, scarlet alcohol, spikes of liquid branching across wood.
…This may have gotten out of hand.
Let me simplify it, as much as possible: A woman walks into a bar and says, “Ouch!”
