Remix: Grisfleur – The Push

This was novel: sat there with someone that he didn’t want to abandon after the first ten minutes. Her nervousness was endearing. The thing was he had brought them to a bar — he always brought everyone to a bar; drinking was the only way that he knew how to facilitate social interaction. All the fears that she had voiced were ones that chimed with the tune his own mind was playing. Whereas she possessed a nervous energy he emitted a slow steady drone like the sound a shadow might make if it had a voice. He was not good for anyone because he was not good for himself. He understood the behaviour she exhibited — when you expected failure of yourself some part of your mind effected a sabotage before somebody else could. He had already played out every scenario and none of them ended with him and her leaving together. There were methods to effect the escape and he was flipping through his list of excuses or lies that would hurt her least and work quickest. One more reason to hate himself — it was as if he invested in them. Still, he hadn’t known her long so it wasn’t going to be that bad.
When he had told her that the conversation had potential he hadn’t been lying, but the shift in his perspective in the short time it took him to travel into the future and back in his mind made a lie of it. If he had managed to maintain the way of thinking about what they were talking about, the way that he was thinking about her, then it would have been different, but he began to deal with both the conversation and her in a perfunctory way. She was a smart girl and she immediately picked up on the change — it was subtle yet noticeable. Once the difference was detected she, as well as he, was sat there waiting for the proscribed series of routines to roll out like clockwork. It was sad — it was as if what was happening was what they had both expected — they had birthed a negative conclusion from their doubts.
When it came to the point where the lie should be dropped into the conversation he hesitated: he couldn’t do it. Her face forced itself to smile. It was odd how intense everything felt to both of them after such a short period of time. How they both manoeuvred out of embarrassment like experts, shedding disappointment like another skin. A connection made and broken before it had had time to set.
She was sat by herself in the bar and he was out on the street wondering where he could go next. He wanted to get tanked; he had engaged in his dose of social drinking for the month and now he just wanted to blot the whole thing out. Move away from polite company to a place where serious drinkers went to be left alone to stew in the stink of their own juices.
He moved down the street, cutting a straight line through the crowd, allowing for not a single person to get in his way. People could see that he walked with determination — that if you got in his way he would knock you down. What made him a writer? His place on the outside looking in — a choice made. A choice never regretted because it fitted with his picture of himself: it provided him with the requisite set of excuses. There were templates out there; archetypes that he could so easily slip into — there were ways to forsake the self and become nothing but a scripted facsimile of some other loser with big ideas of making it big as a writer.
He had decided to give up on being Grisfleur anymore — he was going to be stereotypical drunk writer. He was heading for burn out — something he had not so much accepted a long time ago as willed into being. The romantic notion of the suffering artist, the bullshit that accompanied it — he happily leapt into that fire. Individuality is a hard burden to bear and he wanted to be just like everyone else. He wanted to live his life in the already written lines of fuck-up shorthand.
The dive bar was called The Haunt Of Sisyphus. It made him smile that it had such a high falutin’ name when it looked like it borrowed all ideas of décor from some period in the seventies where fashion was regularly found mutilated at some crime scene. He was determined to empty as many of the bottles behind the bar as possible — he knew that it was an ambition that more than one of the denizens of this place shared with him.
Midway through the fourth drink of bad whiskey he suddenly felt sick, he clutched his stomach, lurched forward and began to vomit over the bar. He was never sick — at least drink never made him ill. His body was having some kind of allergic reaction to his lack of psychic well-being. He wasn’t being sick because he was drunk — he was sick with himself; he was existentially nauseous. Ill at the thought of what he was. His disgust for himself came bubbling up in great stinking retches of puke. Steaming pools of his own vile essence on display for everyone to see. Everyone heard him and they stood there watching, entranced by the grotesquery of the act. Part of him was annoyed at the fact that not a single one of them had any sympathy for him — they were all just stood there enjoying the spectacle.
When the bouncers came to kick the living crap out of him it was just more entertainment for the gathering crowd. No one stepped forward to stand up for him because no one cared as long as they had something to watch while they were on their lunch hour. For big men they moved very fast — he supposed that they might have been rugby players when they weren’t working as bouncers. They picked him up and he was flying through the air, weightless for a moment, and then he hit the pavement outside. Steel toe-capped boots connected with his ribs, pain shooting through him in jagged stabs of information. Blunt shoes thumped into his kidneys, his testicles. They stamped on his hands and busted his fingers; instant bruises blooming — inky clouds on skin. They kicked him in the jaw, teeth popping and splintering in a red/white spray. The cartilage of his nose split and tore. The orbit around the eye swelling, bone splintering, flesh tearing, blood running, and then it all just stopped.
He heard people shouting, the word ambulance. It all started to go dark. It all went dark.