Straight and Level (4)

John was prone to something Sarah called ‘disappearances’, periods where he crawled so deeply into his own thoughts that he became unreachable via the body he left behind. Sometimes this happened in rooms full of people. Sometimes it happened in rooms full of people who had gathered specifically to celebrate his birthday.

In their least problematic form these departures had a procedural rigor. Just as one might set the alarm when leaving the house, John would dedicate a small portion of his brain to listening for telltale signs that his absence had been noticed. Under these conditions, something as small as someone saying his name might be enough to bring him back.

Other times he simply abandoned himself, leaving the lights on, water running, doors unlocked, and whole dinners could pass during which he was both present and absent, a Schrodinger’s cat version of himself. Under these circumstances, nothing reached him. Not his name, or someone pointing out that his fork was suspended in midair, frozen between his plate and his mouth with a portion of medium rare ribeye hanging in the balance, not even his daughter saying he was acting weird, or his son asking, seriously, was he okay. He could be told that these things had occurred, and he wouldn’t argue, but as far as John was concerned sometimes he was just standing in a hallway hearing that he was going to be fired and the next thing he was conscious of was sitting in front of a pile of presents, the air pregnant with expectation that he should do something with them. Whatever had happened in between, it had happened while he was away.

For John these journeys were like being underwater at a pool party. If he looked up, he could see the colors, the wavy forms of other humans, the motion of the surface world. But beneath it he was alone in near silence, afloat in the liquid volume of his own thoughts. He understood that in these moments his job, the thing that being a member of society, that being part of a family, that being half of a couple required, was for him to look toward the light. To swim, reach and kick for it. To return to the surface.

But in the silence he could think. He could question. He could seek answers without distractions and he was realizing that the answers were all below him. There was a truth he’d been hovering above, one he’d been avoiding for too long. So even as the people on the surface called to him, even as he realized that in this particular pool there didn’t seem to be a bottom, his instinct was to descend, to swim towards that void, that darkness, and once and for all, deal with what was really there.

There was a certain peace in this, a comfort in returning to himself, of letting go of the pretensions and performance required on the surface, and sinking to a depth where the pressure crushed everything into a sort of order. Things that might be fuzzy or diffuse up there got squeezed into a diamond like clarity down here. They collapsed into units. They could be arranged into formulas. They could be computed, crunched, and calculated into answers. The surface was a world of words and sentences. This was the world of numbers and equations, and an equation wasn’t anything like a sentence. There was no room for subjectivity or confusion in an equation. It wasn’t good or bad, it merely produced a result. And you could know with certainty, whether you liked it or not, that the result represented a reality that simply was.

Words on the other hand were abstractions. Concepts. They were squishy and debatable, and arranging them in sentences only compounded their ability to represent something and nothing, a definition and its opposite, all at the exact same time. A tangle of trickery, a poetry of postmodern meaninglessness, words were sirens singing in the shipwreck. Numbers were a way of lashing yourself to the mast.

So perhaps it was fitting that when John was finally yanked from the water by the sound of his wife literally clapping in his face while saying “Helloooooooo, Earth to John,” the only word he could produce was a number.

“Fifty” he managed to say as he stared at the shapes hidden under wrapping and bows. And by sticking to this one word he somehow accomplished everything required. The word spawned smiles and chuckles from those who heard it as a joke, a sort of ‘don’t mind me, I’m just getting old and prone to mild dementia, ha, ha.’ For Marcus, who was wearing an expression of deep concern, it played as reassurance that John hadn’t somehow sussed out and been destroyed by the truth, but was instead merely contemplating the passage of time. For Sarah, it similarly explained his simultaneous here and nowhereness as the product of marking a milestone that could be depressing for someone given to rumination, and doubly so for someone taking life extension pills from a brain damaged UFC fighter that rendered his emotional controls as unpredictable as his digestive ones.

John understood that somehow he had done his job, that they were all now reassured. But the fact that they each took different meanings from his single word just proved his point. Up here even a number could mean anything, and it made him eager to return to the depths where fifty could only be fifty and nothing more. Trying to live up here, untethered from the cold hard and singular reality of numbers was how he’d gotten himself in trouble. For five years he’d let himself be seduced and confused by the world of words, and now that the consequences were coming due, he wanted nothing more than to retreat to the place where, although the decisions could no longer be taken back, at the very least the costs could finally, fully be calculated.

Sarah seemed to sense that without action his presence could prove a brief layover rather than a true arrival, a mere changing of planes followed by another rapid departure. She gave him a look that said ‘stay with me’ while gesturing to the presents and saying, “where would you like to start?”

Greg stepped forward and nudged one of the gifts toward John. “Why don’t you get mine out of the way. I’m afraid there’s not much to it.”

Putting his hands on the gift further tethered him to the same reality as everyone else. Even before John pulled at the paper containing both the words ‘Happy Birthday’ and ‘Over The Hill’ it was obvious from the shape and weight that he was unwrapping a case of beer. He lifted one of the brown bottles up by the neck, revealing that it lacked a label or any other identifying information. Just dark smoky glass topped with a golden cap.

“I know,” Greg said, “beer from the beer guy, right? But, well, believe it or not, it’s really good beer. Award winning actually. I entered it in the World Beer Cup thinking that even if we got a mention it might help put the brewery on the map. Unfortunately, it took so long for them to announce anything that we were already shut down when I got the news - we won. Gold medal.”

“Well shit,” Nick said, “screw the restaurant side of it, we should just be pumping this stuff out at scale.”

“Ha. Yeah. Well, that’s the thing. There actually isn’t a way to make any more.”

“If you’re talking about a capital issue, I mean, I think that’s solvable. People understand that if you put a gold medal on something it’s gonna fuckin sell.”

“No, it’s uh… see there’s a thing called a coolship. It’s kind of like a giant copper pan. I had one brought over from this brewery in Belgium that, well now that I think about it, they had also gone out of business. Maybe that should have been a red flag, right?” John saw the bruise behind the wry smile.

“Anyway you pump the hot wort into it and you open the windows and this wild yeast and bacteria settles in and that starts the fermentation. But the thing is, that microflora is local, you know? Like, the yeast floating around the air in South Norwalk is different than the yeast floating around in Brooklyn or Belgium for that matter. Plus the coolship itself, it’s sort of got its own little ecosystem built into the metal and wood, organisms living in the seams and scratches that interact with each batch. It’s almost like the coolship is this living thing and it’s working with the local living things and it’s all creating something that can only exist in that exact environment as a product of that exact equipment and all the history it brings with it. Even that old brick building we were in with the rent that killed me, it’s a huge part of what brought this beer to life. The proximity to the harbor air, the specific way it circulated through the room, it’s all in here,” he said, picking up one of the brown bottles. “So when I say I hoped it would put us on the map, I mean that in the sense that what I was making, it couldn’t exist anywhere else. It was a product of everything I was trying to do, right down to where I was doing it and what I was doing it with.”

He fell into a moment as he started at the bottle in his hand, a conversation he was having with himself. Unlike John, he was able to break it off. “Anyway, when they were pulling the coolship out it got damaged and I think I heard the insurance company sold it for scrap. So, there’s literally no way to bring all the elements back together and make another batch.” He gestured to the case in front of John. “What I have is all there is and all there ever will be. And the thing about beer is you can’t just hoard it. It’s not like wine that gets better and better. It’s got a window. A fairly short one. This one’s a blend of the wild ale and a younger, more hop forward - well, the point is it’s the best it’s going to get. Right now. In six months it’ll be good but it won’t be this. What you taste at this moment, that’s a perfection that’s just passing through. It’s everything I hoped it would be. I just always hoped there would be more. Anyway I figured, you know, the brewery was really just an excuse to share something that made me happy with the people I cared about. And now the building is gone, and the equipment is gone, and, well, ha, the money’s gone too. But I’ve still got the beer,” he said, holding the bottle up so it caught the light, “and I’ve still got the people I care about, and I honestly couldn’t imagine a better reason to open it up.” His voice cracked ever so slightly with the final words and everyone could see the tears welling in the corner of his eyes. Not that he was alone. Sarah and Marcus were dabbing at their cheeks, and even Priya, who John was quite certain could preserve state secrets under torture, was blinking away some dust.

The room was oddly silent for a moment and then Nick did his Nick thing and saved them all. “Jesus Christ, Greg. You thought you should go FIRST?” Laughter, fuller and louder because it cracked the tension, rolled around the room and Nick pulled Greg into a hug.

John knew that should have been his job, that he should be on his feet with his arms around his friend, telling him how much it all meant to him. But he was rocked by the bottle in his hand, and the notion that it contained something that was both perfect and expiring. The notion you could simultaneously win and lose. That the things you wanted most could be the very ones that destroyed you. That these words, these fucking words, they could spin you around until you were stuck in your chair swearing that you could see your life in a blank bottle of beer.

These were exactly the sort of thoughts that could plunge him back underwater, but he could tell as he caught Sarah’s expression that he would not survive another disappearance, so he forced himself to his feet, embraced his friend, and announced that he was going to get an opener. As he left the room, Sarah touched his arm and whispered a warning.

“Come. Right. Back.”