All the Women in the World

I knew when I first met her that she was the one. I had no doubt. This radiant prepossessing Venus, this sultry yet humble Junoesque vixen. Every Goddess all in one. Every pulchritudinous actress and model there has ever been on all the billboards and silver screens, stirred up in a batter and baked perfectly into one perfect and delectable person. There was never a moment when I thought that I merely was in lust, for it was not, nor that she was new, thus, alluring in the ecstatic nimbus of her novelty. It could have been written on her forehead like a scarlet letter, the numeral one, and every other woman in the world would have a numerically greater, but in turn, lesser figure. Somewhere, there would be a two, and a three, until they all had a number which corresponded to their predestined rank of how good a pairing they were for me. I have met several people who may have been tens, or twelves, or twenties, but never had I met a one. 

She was a tourist in Vegas, and I was a gondola boat pilot at the Venetian. I moved to Vegas to work as a case manager at some private prison nearby years before, but it hadn't worked out. All that deprivation of liberty, justified or unjust, turned me into a despondent raging alcoholic. And needing work to live until I found something else, or until I decided to return home and concede defeat, I got a job at the Venetian in what I thought would be dealing blackjack, or as a valet. You might be surprised how little it takes to pilot a boat. I told them I earned a canoe badge in Boy Scouts and coupled with the fact that I spoke English, that was good enough.

She was with a boyfriend who wore those asinine vanity glasses and who had messy hair. If ever they make a TV movie about Jeffrey Dahmer turned surfer, he deserves a screentest. I don't know his name. I never got it, nor do I want it, but hers was Ember. I immediately thought of all the words her name rhymed with: November, December, timber, remember, member, dismember. I told her she was the only person I ever met who had that name and he sneered and rolled his earth-like marble eyes and carped that "she hears that shit all the time, bro," and she smiled as though politely to agree. 

I stood on the bow of the boat and turned the oar and looked at her. I did my best to look past him, but he was a wretched cud. He gave me a weird televangelist vibe. A fraudulent, narcissistic, swindling kvetch with a definite personality disorder that I could not yet diagnose in such that I didn't care and was no longer getting paid to do so as I had in the prison. He abused her in some way, I was convinced. Perhaps not with fists or physicality, but with psychological domineering and under the false pretense that he was more sophisticated and intelligent than she, which was an obvious misnomer and purely a product of his own insecurity. 

God knows I am no Dear Abbie, but it didn't appear as though they were right for each other at all, and I knew that she didn't love him because there was such desire and desolation in her eyes that I could not ignore. Everyone loves differently, but he was flipping through his phone on the boat like he was bored or better than such touristy things, and though I don't usually talk to guests, in the absence of his affection, I talked to her. I asked her about what they have done, how long and where they were staying, and what was her favorite part of Vegas. And this Jeffrey Dahmer surfer dude piped in and said it was the pot dispensary and legalization and he rambled briefly about some obscure fact and she cringed but tried to cheer herself up about something in his visage. She examined him like someone looking at abstract art they bought until she found his old familiar value which outweighed that air of pomposity and phony wit she somehow found tolerable. He was home to her. He was comfort and peace in what I already knew was a very disheveled life. Then her eyes left him, and she looked around in awe of the glittery surroundings as he lit a joint. 

"Really?" I asked.

"We're on vacation, dude," he quipped. "It's a rite of passage."

"You're not allowed smoking on the boat, asshole."

He glared at me and smiled the way Dahmer probably smiled at black kids or the surfer a wave to rip and snuffed the joint out on the bottom of his sandal. "Aye, aye, captain." 

Ember was embarrassed and I turned my attention to the canal and decided to leave it alone. But even looking the other way I could see her. I could feel her. She permeated me and I wanted to pull the oar from the water and smack him with it. I wanted to throw him overboard and drown him. To rid him from her consideration even if it was not me that she wanted in lieu. To throw open the door of her cage and to let her go for she was obviously a caged bird. Maybe there was something adequate about him that I didn't see or know and maybe my criticism of him was relative only to my adoration of her. But in five minutes, he and her would be out of my life forever, exchanging themselves for tourists from Antwerp or Atlanta who would invariably ask me to take their picture.

After a brief seven minutes we moored and they parted. Jeffrey Dahmer glaring at me and Ember saying thank you, sweetly, because she had been accustomed to being their emissary, apologist-in-chief for his rudeness. But just when I thought she had gone as quickly as she came, she turned and ran back and asked if she could take her picture with me. 

"Memory’s sake," she added with an intrepid grin.

"Of the asshole who told your boyfriend to put out his joint?"

She laughed. "No. You're not the asshole. Of the gondola boat driver."

"Pilot," I corrected her. 

"Pilot," she nodded with a grin. I could tell she was a little drunk. I imagined she had downed a few hurricanes earlier in the day. "I've taken pictures with a few people – to help remember the trip, you know?" Then she became distracted looking at the water. "How many pennies do you think are down there?"

"A million and one," I replied. "I'm sure if it." 

Her boyfriend walked on, probably to light up his joint on the street or to drop acid. I put my arm around her and could feel her within me, a seed that had been eternally planted by fate and that would grow like an oak. I was cognizant enough to ask her to take a picture with my phone as well, and she pleasantly agreed, perhaps sensing the first inkling of my obvious adoration. I wanted to say something eloquent to her. Something momentous that would stick permanently because I suppose that it is human nature to want to be meaningful and to matter in certain people's lives more so than in others. But my mouth was dry, and the words were trapped somewhere beneath my tongue like bodies in a basement. 

Then she was gone. As fast as she came, she had left me. Pilfered from me, I could pine, though I watched her walk away of her own freewill. I saw her fade into the night, swallowed up by thousands of lights. I neglected my boat which obediently bobbled in the shallow water waiting for me. I was stuck in a moment of time that had let me go, that didn't want me like I wanted it. When I returned to my boat and back to the port where the tourists waited to board, there was a couple smiling at me like they all smile. They were from Montreal. How inadequate they looked in comparison to her. How pasty and drab. How lifeless and inert. 

People always like to tell you where they are from. They say so with an air of pride and they often add what their country or state of origin is best known for, or the state bird, flower, or motto. Sic Semper Tyrannis, that sort of thing. In God We Trust. Liberty or Death. I’ve heard it all. Useless knowledge. How many presidents hail from there, or the population of their capital city. The state gem. The river. Things I never cared to know, especially now. If I was able to index it, I would be a hell of a contestant on Jeopardy! someday. But I realized then that I hadn't asked Ember where she was from. Nor had I made any bad jokes about flames or fire at the expense of her distinctive name. Jokes that briefly frolicked on my tongue before they were overcome by others or silenced by second thoughts. I hadn't said much at all.

Later that night after my shift, I walked from my hotel apartment to Caesar's Palace, and I gambled until I lost about 19 dollars and that was enough for me. I  was in a good mood because I met her, though I was too optimistic about someone who was now a ghost and who I wouldn't likely see again. Yet, just the thought that she existed meant the world to me. Knowing that she was out there, somewhere in this very city, gave me gooseflesh and turned me back into the boy who loved Valentine's Day. Who loved stuffing those generic cards into the glittery boxes of pretty girls, hoping for a return on investment, so to speak. A smile or a chance. A kiss or a hand to hold on the playground. 

Then I ordered an old fashioned and I drank and lost ten months of sobriety in one fell swoop. I thought of calling my sponsor, but she was a caffeine-addicted prostitute named Kyla Snow, and I didn't know if she had it any better than me. Sponsors make you think that they got it all figured out. They act like Jeidi. They make it seem like you are going to die if ever you drink after a long drought. Fall off the wagon, they call it. Going to the darkside. Like you will not be able to stop, and your liver will go into a sudden cataclysmic shock, and you will die there with the pall of cirrhosis upon you. Your skin that awful shade of yellow your mother once painted the kitchen as though a gallon of piss has dispersed itself through all your blood vessels. But I wasn't going to die, not when I was in love. God wouldn't do something like that to me. He wouldn't introduce us, just to end us before anything ever was. This was fate. It was predestined, which is why I searched for her. 

I walked over to the MGM where she had said she was staying, looking at every face in the crowd the whole way over and while at the bar, trying to discern her from a million people from all over the world. What were the chances I would ever see her again? And what would I say if I did? Hello? Can I buy you a drink? May I have a moment to love you, one evening, one date, one hour, a half? May I be but a splinter in your life? May I hold your hand for a moment? Or I needn't even to touch you. Only to absorb you. To hear you speak. To laugh. Giving me what you choose. Leaving your face so readily in mind so that all I ever need to do is close my eyes and there it shall forever be. On the backs of my eyelids. Tattooed there by the adequate impression of a single platonic encounter because love is not sex and the greediness of corporeal pleasure. Love is pure and beautiful. Love is looking into someone's eyes across from you and being content and blissful in the shadow of their company, and not wanting more than that, or more than they wish to allow. Simply, giving more than taking.

I had no luck in my search, though I did, by odd coincidence, run into the Montreal couple who came after her. God is a jokester. A walk about the slots and craps tables and through the tides of people was fruitless. Roulette wheels spun wildly and the little ball that worked its way to the slots was the very incarnation of my mind bouncing, racing. Settling for a moment, only to be spun wildly again with another wager. But of all the faces I encountered, hers was nowhere among them. Whatever casino they were in, whatever they were doing, I was not to discover, and I figured that she had forgotten me anyway and it probably only really mattered to me, so it didn't really matter at all. And so, it washed away more like a bloodstain than cherries jubilee, and where it remained imprinted upon my soul, there was a crimson badge, a badge I bore most begrudgingly, but one I knew I'd bear without cessation. What a fool my heart was, and I with it, complicit, because of its foolishness. 

I flew home three days later and moved in with a friend, into the basement of his house. He and his wife had gotten a divorce, which made the accommodations unexpectedly available. I believe he wanted me merely for the company. So not to be alone. I filled some void in her narcissistic absence. He wept over things she left and stewed in the misery of his sudden predicament, a listless and dull shell of his former jovial self. I tried to console him, but it was no good. I will never know why a person becomes so despondent and ever wants to be with someone who doesn't want them. I could hear him crying at night alone in his bed and I wouldn’t have been shocked had he shot himself and I would have been startled awake by the percussion of the occurence, left to call the ambulance. But he was a gracious host, and a fine cook to boot. 

I got a job at a paper company boxing reams of paper for businesses who probably never consider the fact that someone does such for a living somewhere. They don't even know that I exist, but I do. Assuredly I do. I know that I exist only because even after all these hapless months, I am still in love with the girl from the gondola boat. I imagined she was on course to marry that Jeffrey Dahmer surfer dude and have a few kids and to eventually divorce, as we all do. We, as a collective. A failed marriage is almost a rite of passage more so than it is an ignominy. Every excuse in the world has already been proffered by other trailblazers who came before you so that you must only borrow one of theirs. I had two marriages under my belt, irreconcilable differences, but I knew I would never know a third. I knew I wasn't in love before, but at the time I thought that is what love was: a plate of uncertainty and growing accustomed to someone else that you simply must eat like your greens. I thought it was giving up freedoms in exchange for comfort and safety. And when I disappointed in my disappointment, mostly because of my alcoholism and the collateral damage that came with it, they left me for someone safer. Someone they seemed to have kept in their pocket for such a time. Perhaps they've found happiness elsewhere. Or not. But I certainly do hope they have. 

There is not even a title for my occupation it is that banal. It is tedious to the point that I half expect I will become the paper I make. Emulsified in the pulp. Boxed and shipped. My life is one single ream of brilliant-white 25-pound paper to be copied and faxed and tattooed with office drivel and corporate policy no one reads, later shredded, and recycled only to do it all over again. To be a test, or homework, for kids to loathe. Or maybe, I imagined in my indefatigable optimism, I could be a love letter or a Valentine's Day card. I wanted to stop drinking, but life struck me stiff. It is cold in Ohio. It was never cold in Vegas. It is dreary in Ohio. It was never dreary in Vegas. And there was no life, artificial or otherwise, in this valley of gray cold dearth where they say patience is a virtue as they count the days to spring on colloquial Lang calendars tucked in wooden holders on bucolic walls checkered full of PTO meetings and family birthday reminders. 

I hadn't forgotten the snow. It was part of me, in my DNA, and the way it was, and is, is the way that I am. It has its brief and glorious triumph and then it becomes onerous, and the mind breaks sometime in the middle of January, collapsing in a monotonous and wretched state that requires attention and deliberate hope for the Spring that is "just around the corner," yet months away still. That glorious savior Spring. When Christ is crucified and is again risen. Again and again. I am much alike the snow. The cold. 

I hadn't been back long when some fellows at the paper plant, who I might loosely call friends, invited me to a bar nearby that they said was wonderful and full of the loveliest people. They promised no drama and they delivered. It was a pizza restaurant, and the liquors were kept in reserve on a couple of unsure shelves like attentive soldiers and two beer taps reminded me of a lactating brown mother with gold tits. The bar was busy before we bellied up and sooner than I realized it, my friends had absconded to wives and children and other dubious obligations, and several pats on the back later, I was drinking alone, with only the bartender and the few patrons who remained or who straggled in after them.

This was my bar. I knew it all along. I had been here many times before I left for Vegas and though I treated it as virgin and foreign soil, that it certainly was not. It was home away from home if ever that clichéd euphemism applies. I rubbed my eyes in my old familiar state and vowed to myself and to God that this would be the last of it. The last time I ever drank alcohol. The doctor, in what proved to be my annus horribilis the year prior in Nevada, had already said that drinking would kill me if I didn't stop, and he appeared on my shoulder like a guardian angel in an old cartoon reiterating that my liver was liquifying with every drink and that I could not sustain. But if I quit now, and didn't drink anymore, I could live a long and healthy life. 

So this was it for me, I decided. I'd give it up and go back to AA for good measure. I'd get a dog with whom to spend my evenings. A dog who would be disappointed if I drank. Maybe I could train him to bite me if he smelled alcohol. Dogs are smart like that. I'd get an apartment or a house and find someone to spend life with, and hopefully it would last and the number on whosever forehead she was would at least be a prime number. I've always been fond of the number nine, after all. I'd go back to church and get strength through the Lord Jesus. I knew I could because this wasn't where I ever wanted to be. I didn’t want to die. I was here by default as I was in Nevada. Killing things with alcohol that were formidable otherwise. And the old familiar hangover and coughing up blood from a badly damaged liver was tiresome and sheer stupidity. I was resolved in my sobriety so much so that I asked to pay my tab long before the promise of the evening dried up, despite a beautiful young woman arriving alone for a drink. It was long before I had that euphoric numbness I so desperately craved. 

The next six months I did everything right. I got a new job as a counselor in a local treatment center and I bought a nice house. I planted flowers and trees and painted walls and bought antiques, slowly transforming it into the home I've always wanted. I went to church every Sunday and didn't drink a drop. I stopped craving it seven months later, and all that I drank of spirits were those monthly shots of communion grape juice, which was the holiest of them all. I hadn't luck with women because they were not her. They were not Ember. And try as a might, I could not stop thinking of her or forget her. And though my optimism was waning that fate had been so kind to introduce us, there was still the faintest flicker of hope that one day we would meet again in some way. I signed up for all the social media apps and searched her name to no avail, surprised at how many Embers there are in the world. 

"At least, you are sober," a friend consoled me when I confessed at his Super Bowl party. He was the same friend I lived with when I moved back from Vegas. He wasn't crying anymore and had replaced his ex-wife with a new woman, who was much lovelier in all respects. She sweetly promised to set me up with a friend, but I declined graciously. 

At least you are sober. 

That phrase hammered my skull and ran through my mind for the next few months, naked and derisively mocking me harshly in its brashness. I began to loathe the word "sober" and "sobriety" and the resulting odium I felt against myself ran contrary to my predilection for my long-avowed Christianity, of compassion and forgiveness. I bored myself, but I blamed it all on the doldrums of winter, and come spring I'd be fine again with the Easter rabbit and the risen Christ. AA was fine and I had coffee with a few attractive women who came to several meetings, but who fell off the wagon, leaving an empty chair where they were once and me to ponder what became of them. And loneliness perched upon the bust of Pallas above my chamber door and Ember became that fatefully lost love, Lenore, who cast her shadow and wrought it's ghost upon the floor. Forevermore. 

I bought an antique writing desk at curio shop and some old books and a feathered quill with an inkwell and a bottle of indigo ink and began, under the radiant glow of a cherub bronze lamp and her soft-amber bulb encased in a stained tulip glass shade, to write the story of my life in a Moleskine journal for someone who might find interest. I have the intent to bury it inside a wall the way my heart is buried within me, so that it might be discovered some time from now, encapsulated. 

Always my pen seemed to find one single word more so than any other. Ember. And how lovely it scrolled the word, making love to each letter time and time again so tirelessly and facilely. And I realized that although I could stop drinking for the sake of my life and liver, my hope of recoupment from this even greater malady, this ghost of a lover, was null. I'd have better luck regrowing a lost limb. With sincere reverence and equal obeisance, I pined longingly for what I never had, nor knew, but that which I loved still in the sorrow of absence that was not to surcease by any method of distraction. 

But fate wasn't through with me. What was to be was so much greater than the health of my liver. It is incomparable in my life; thus, I’m an inept virgin recorder of the strange fact of that which follows. My house sat in close proximity to the pizza restaurant where I used to drink and on occasion I would order carryout pizza. It was near Easter and the hope of Spring when my spirits quelled that I walked there for a pie, as the hipsters called it. And as the humdrum waitress pulled my credit slip from the device and plucked a pen from a glass jar for me to sign it, from the kitchen emerged a new waitress in who's presence I felt my heart sink and plummet like a shot down plane in the jungle bowels of my own impending tragedy. Like the Titanic, had it's sinking been as glorious as it was ghastly by equal and contrary value. Of all the women in the world, it was Ember. Fate, that old wily sorceress, had opened a door that was never to close on me it felt in the giddiness of my welcomed and most blissful sudden delirium. 

I thought, at first, she wouldn't recognize me, but immediately she did. And her mouth gaped open as mine remained and she hurried around the bar to give me a hug as she sighed and exhaled as laboriously as I in our joint disbelief that we were coupled again by the hand of fortune over a year apart. We were both exuberant like Publisher’s Clearinghouse winners. And it was clear, to my pleasure and gratitude, that she had forgotten me not at all, just as I remembered her well. And so, in the joyous occasion, I forgot the mere matter of my health, and sat back down to eat my pizza at the bar. The other girl said I had to have a drink to sit at the bar and so I decided to drink to celebrate our precipitous fortune, at least mine, without the impediment of her sandy boyfriend lingering about and his dull demeanor ruining my grandest fantasy yet. 

"Well, what will you have?" she beamed instantly taking me over as a customer. I was new to her but she was not to me. I've known her lifetimes ago and she had never left me since first we met. 

"An old fashioned. It is a drink and a way of life," I jibed in my old familiar routine. My liver preparing like a battleship for the incoming torpedoes. 

Her smile never ceased and her amusement with me seemed to rival my own of her. 

"You got it. And for the record, I am old fashioned as well. I often don't feel like I belong in this day and age," she confessed as she mixed the drink. It would be the first of many confessions and the first of many drinks. Night after night. Week after week. Month after month.

She said she lived here all her life, as did I, and we learned we went to the same high school, some decades apart. It wasn't a large town by no means and some of my favorite things were hers as well. And here in this humble hamlet, she had been concealed from me by a dozen streets and time that did not agree with us like a disapproving parent. Though I had never considered the difference in our age, I did then, seeing her youthful beauty radiate in the neon of beer light signs and crystal refracted amber bulbs that were meant to give the bar that vintage patina of yesteryear. All the light in the room seemed to find her in a glorious halo and I sat and listened to her tell me how this was her first day here and that she had a good time in Vegas and about her plans for a future that was as vast as the world itself, all without mentioning the obvious impediment between us. Her commitment someone who I was not. And how absurdly I overlooked the other obvious impediment, that preposterous aforementioned age difference. But I didn't see her through a lense of age. We were timeless, we were ageless things destined to have not that which played like a wild carnival in my libidinous soul imprisoned suddenly not in the least by the doomed reality.  

I left that night in pure intoxicated bliss. Drunk yet truly sober in that she vexed me and intoxicated me so that the alcohol did not. My usual drunken euphoria was augmented by that equally foolish condition of floating on the scarcity of the sacred love cloud. Love as I had never quite had it before, grabbed me firmly in it's hand the way Kong grabbed Faye Wray as it scaled the impossible heights of The Empire State Building. 

And love, that which for decades had robbed me of happiness and successfully eluded me at every turn, reminding me every year on its holiday of my loneliness and with every love song of it's elusiveness, and of every old couple of it's scarcity, delivered at last. Love is an endangered species. A hunted fox. It is a thief that filches one's good sense, one's money, one's rationale and all else it needs to thrive, even one's precarious health. And rarely does it payback its raging debts, so it is a terrible game, truth be told, by any objective spectator. A drug of the worst sort which will entirely break you someday the purer it is. The more you give it. I suppose that is why people settle for those they don't actually love, so there is no fall. No break.

It is a certain truth, yet we all line up and wait our turn, hoping that it chooses us. That we might be so lucky to put our feelings, our sanity, our lives in another's basket the way we once put Valentine's Day cards in boxes as children unwittingly in a charade of the inevitable sorrow. Of a doomed or unrequited love. I coughed up some blood in the sink that made the shape of a heart which I reluctantly rinsed down the drain before settling in bed, sure that it was a sign from God himself who I fashioned to be some infallible Shakespearean Cupid spreading his most gracious gift like Johnny Appleseed once spread apple trees.  

I've never slept so good. Dreamed so well. My breakfast never tasted better and I was never more satisfied with my job. It was as though I had a new significance. A prominence I before did not. A purpose in life and not some evasive maneuvering, some jockeying for nothing at all. I paid off some bills. I fixed up my house. I planted more flowers for her. Trees. I painted walls colors I thought she might like them. All just for if by chance she was ever to come, or if ever there was a time when that door opened just a little wider, wide enough for me to walk though it. And I waited for months. Patient as an old fishermen with faith in his practice, in his rod and reel, and in the fish.

As much as I knew I needed to stop drinking, I couldn't. Physically, I could. But if I stopped, I would have no reason to go to the bar. And if I didn't go to the bar, I wouldn't see her. If I sat there and drank water it would be obvious that I was there just to see her, so at the cost of my liver, for the sake of my heart, I had to drink. It was choose one or the other and priority was given to that most central organ who has its own holiday and who I before had never known the depths of and the beauty that lied therein which was so foreign to me that I would have thought of myself as another Tinman who once had rusted in the woods. 

She oiled my rustiest joints, night after night with simple words, looks, and smiles. With vapors of redolent air that fell from her and raptured me in the wake of her passing. She made my heart rage and overachieve in the duty of its simple tolling. It beat like a gong. She was always happy to see me as I was her. But never was there an opportunity for more because I was in love, and despite my wishes, she wasn't in love with me. A cruel fate I desperately ignored. I knew this in the same heart she ravaged. Not in the way that I was, at least. Not to endure organ failure and death just to be near her. Not in so that I livened her life by the mere thought of seeing me again. She was happy to see me, I wouldn't argue, but it was not the way it was for me. It was as though we had been separated by lifetimes and suddenly reunited everytime I saw her. Yet, still I was certain that it was fate and if I hung on just a little while longer, the time would come. The door would open. 

Yet the anomaly of her boyfriend remained, this twitchy Jim Jones wannabe fanatical rube who got way more than he ever deserved in this life, who fortunately was never at the bar. I could tell she tired of him and that she wanted to break free of the life she lived in things she said when she confessed in me and the exasperation on her face when she spoke of him, never referring to him as her boyfriend, but rather as something less and more neutral. However, had I ever to make that observation to her, she would have denied it and entrenched herself deeper in him because loyalty mattered to her. There were subtle words she offered, comments, that left me to believe that she might one day be single and in such a time, I would ask her out if my health sustained me. My funeral wouldn't be a good first date. Not in some unseemly way when he left her vulnerable. I would ask her to a book reading, or to dinner, or to the moon if the means ever presented itself. If there was ever a way, or she had the desire to go, somehow we would. 

Months more passed and I reveled in her the way a man ought to revel in a woman. The way they do in books and movies. In the old ones. In the classics that were written without fear or trepidation. And then I got sick. It wasn't a sickness I could sleep off or that Tylenol would fix. It was one that left me alone in my house, stroked-out on the floor and staring at the dying light of another day, at pictures on the wall of a life passed, beautiful memories of kids that've grown, who I no longer see, of colors that were once the shade of her lips as I recall them, of strands of radiant sunlight the trespassed in through a part in the curtains and dwindled as did I. And there was that mouse I had been reluctantly trying to poison, suddenly out in the fading daylight, up early, standing on his back legs and bobbing his head around as though he knew that something was afoul. He knew I was sick, but there was nothing he could do, or else he would. Then as I struggled to get up, spurting blood from my mouth, he disappeared beneath the pantry and it was as though he no longer existed. 

I had to get up. I had to go see her again. Maybe I wouldn't drink, I thought, but when she asked me if I was having the usual, I knew I wouldn't say no so not to disappoint her. How silly it seemed that I felt she would be let down in such a way, if I didn't drink, if she guessed wrong what I was having, if I changed in any way, but that is the way I felt. I was something she could count on. Even that which I drank, made by her everytime because I once remarked that she made the best old fashioned I ever tasted, which stoked her humble ego. 

I gathered myself and got cleaned up. I fell in the shower twice. I was woozy and my side felt as though I were in the jaws of a pernicious shark. I coughed up more blood and it streamed from my mouth to the tile floor until I cut it with my tongue and spit the rest out defiantly. But it was coming in waves and there was no way to stop it just as there is no way to hold the ocean still. The doctor's prognostication had come to fruition and I was tempted to call him and give him the satisfaction of knowing that for not heading his brilliant advice, I was suffering my comeuppance, and death was just around the corner. I've always thought of doctors as being the schadenfreude types satiated in such vindictive pleasures. 

I would have done it for no other woman in the world, I wish she knew so that she would know how truly and purely beautiful she is. I gathered myself and dressed and went to the bar and drank the last drinks I would enjoy, joking with Ember as though nothing assailed my liver and complimenting her latest old fashioned as her best concoction yet, holding it all together and coughing only occasionally in a napkin and only when she disappeared into the kitchen, busy in her Wednesday night work. And she smiled a little more than ever before as she stopped between tables, leaning over the bar and telling me that she had something to tell me with such enthusiasm that I expected it to mean that she had found a new job, or that she had bought a new car, or that she got a new cat, all subjects of previous conversations that were prospective happenings in her life. We had become such good friends and I adored her confessions, however trivial they seemed, however slight, and I loved giving her advice when she asked for it and sincere compliments when she didn't. I loved being in her company and I needn't any compensation for it. Not the slightest of physical affections, though certainly I dreamed of them. I hugged her many times and that was suffice, but, still, what must that other world be like? That which is inside her. That Oz in the Emerald City and the yellow brick road that leads to it. Not to profane our friendship, but the matter occured to me. So I waited for her latest confession which would come sometime in the evening between a succession of old fashioneds. Between tables. 

I watched TV while I waited and there were boats in the ocean that were sitting there floating in the black ocean waiting to port. I don't know what it was all about. The volume was turned down. And so my internal amusement began. There has always been a jukebox inside of me and a cast of people who put quarters in the machine and play various songs. And sometimes a television turns on and there is that warm-up red-green glow of the tube before the picture becomes clear as though in it's TV magic, it is creating an entire universe of people for my amusement. This time it is Dean Martin on his late-sixties variety show and he is on stage in his customary black tux and he runs down a short flight of white prop stairs and smiles as he sings to an awestruck audience "On a Slow Boat to China." He is tan and his eyes twinkle and he goofs as though he's drunk and the audience laughs and I wonder if he was, or if it was, all a part of an act. Maybe those highballs were apple juice and no one ever knew any better. Maybe he wasn't as pickled as I. 

And there inside of me, as those boats sat still off some muddy coast, Dean is entertaining me and my live studio audience, because this is how my body wants to conclude it's 44 year-run on this TV planet. And I hum the song and flick my fingers, sorry that I wasn't wearing a snazzy black tux for such the occasion of my death. And I sing a bar of the song, thinking of Ember as she hurriedly carries a tray of drinks by and smiles at me, anxious to tell me what she has to tell me, biting her flush pink lip. A final confession. 

"I want. To get her. On a slowwww boat. To China," Dean croons. But I am Dean. I am that entire studio audience. I am the red flashing light for applause and laughter. 

I'd never given a thought to last things in my life. Last things I would eat. Last things I would drink, do, see, or say. They are morbid considerations, after all. But I'd never imagine that that song would be the last. The one that would close the show. But things began to shut down. Lights. Power. A janitor swept between empty seats. I would need to pay my tab soon so that I could go home and get in bed where death might find me like the tooth fairy finds teeth. Maybe if I made it convenient for him, he would pity me in some way, cut me off before Barbara Streisand took the stage and sang "Feelings." Maybe I would get a good seat or a room with a view wherever it is that I am going. 

I had to say goodbye to Ember, but I wouldn't make it some elongated dramatic affair. I coughed harshly and blood spurted and turned the suffusing napkin into a Jackson Pollack. I stuffed it into my coat pocket and coughed once more into a new napkin and what remained of the first cough made the perfect shape of a bloody heart on the second. God has a wonderful sense of humor, it seemed to me. He's another George Carlin. I couldn't help but to smile looking at it and if wasn't so disgusting, I would have left it for her. Art is in the eye of the beholder. Maybe she would frame it and keep it for posterity sake when she learned what happened to me. When my usual barstool sat empty for some time and she texted me and there was no response, when I always responded. When an obituary was posted or a friend of a friend of a friend mentioned my unexpected passing while eating dinner one night with deliberate brevity, respectfully morose, hoping not to turn the night morbid speaking of death so commonly yet not wanting to pass on that morsel of drama the way that that mouse shall not pass on a delectable chunk of cheese. 

I waited for her to give me my check with a certain sadness and figured I'd tip her all I had to tip in my account being that it was the last I would leave and that she could certainly use it whereas I couldn't. I had one old fashioned too many in this lifetime and being the lush that I am, I was already thinking about what they will taste like in the afterlife. Or if there will be other drinks I've never had which I might prefer. Then I was distracted by some Catholics who had been eating fish at the bar and imbibing the holy spirit the way that they do and whose foreheads were stained with ash in the shape of the cross and I supposed that on my walk home, I'd get right with Jesus. Ember pouted that I was leaving her too early as she ran my card and pulled the slip from the machine. The usual transaction we'd done a hundred times providing me a pen and two copies of the same receipt, merchant and customer, though I always left her both. 

"Well," she gleamed, "do you want to know what I was going to tell you before you leave?" Her smile was a radiant thousand-watt smile and there was such life in her eyes that I envied her and loved her more than ever. I had a new hunch just then. She was going to tell me that she was pregnant, though she had told me she didn't want to have kids. A more beautiful woman simply has never existed and I pitied the world for never seeing her though my eyes. Just then, one of those drunk Catholics with the cross on his forehead had interrupted us and handed me a portion cup of ash before he stumbled out of the bar. I wondered what the ashes were as I held them in the palm of my hand. Ember smiled at him saying he meant no harm. Catholics never do. 

"Yes," I replied a little weary. Sad in the sudden finality of it all. "Of course I want to know What - um - what is the news, Ember?"

She lit up even more. Like a kid on Christmas morning. "I broke up with him. I moved out this morning. I am single now and - um - well, you know. Right? At least I hope you know. I hope someone who likes old fashioneds and looks at me a certain way and says things I know are sincere will find it in him to ask me to go out with him sometime. I would be a very lucky lady, if that was to be. Do you think that he will? I prepared this whole thing. It was supposed to sound so much better than that."

Oh, God, I sighed to myself suppressing a cough that would erupt like Vesuvius and paint another thousand Pollacks. The absolute irony of it all overwhelmed me and I stood there having written on the receipt a 663 dollar and 28 cent tip, unbeknownst to her at the time, staring at her in disbelief and wonder as the live studio audience inside me were beckoned to laugh and applause by a flashing red sign inside me as Dean Martin sang, "You're nobody til somebody loves you" smiling with that Palm Beach tan. 

I couldn't just leave. As her eyes plead with me to say something, anything, I swallowed my erupting bloody liver, my rapidly breaking heart, and I told her, quite plainly, and with no regret, "I love you, Ember. He will be a lucky man, indeed."

She grinned in relief and tears welled in her eyes as I dipped my finger in the portion cup of ash imparted upon me by that unwitting Catholic missionary. I reached across the bar that had been such a formidable barrier between us until just then and plotted it on her forehead and dragged it down to just above the bridge of her nose making the perfect numeral for her place in my world. One. She'd never know why I did so, what was meant by it, she simply thought I was playing and laughed as I pushed her the pen and the receipt before putting on my coat and scarf hoping only to make it home. 

"I - love you," she replied delayed and innocently awkward. I smiled at her and she seemed to shake a little with uncertainty, not in her feeling for me or mine for her, but in the precariousness of life itself. This is a very uncertain world no matter how many Tony Robbins and religions you have inside of you. 

"I'll see you soon. I'll message you later," she promised. "If that's, okay?"

"If I don't reply, I'm dead," I replied playfully. She laughed, not realizing at all the seriousness of my remark. That it was my time. And I said a silent goodbye to the bar, with both hands reverently on it as though it were a casket of a very dear friend I will sorely miss, goodbye to the last empty glass I'd ever leave, and to her, the most beautiful woman I've ever known in my life who fate allowed me to love. I surely do hope I am so lucky to know her in the next world, when we are mice, smarter than the poison and luckily not at the mercy of an old shoe. 

I made it home to shuffle off this mortal coil, but not to bed. I made it to the kitchen. I scribbled a last few things in my journal and titled it, "For Ember," rather than burying it in the wall. Maybe it would mean something to her, as would the house she would be willed. The wildflowers, the roses and the apple trees. There on the cold tile floor I collapsed after a fit of coughing and bleeding. The mouse came back, and I caught a sideways glance of him, concerned again of my well-being, perhaps ready to doctor me back to health. Or maybe I had it wrong, all the while, and he was death who came to ferry me to the netherworld. We often think so little of little things, but all of life is made of little things, like the beach is countless grains of sand, and they do and will always matter most. She texted me just then, a reiteration of words, three little words that matter most, all in capital letters. 

I LOVE YOU!!!

I replied, "I will always love you. Of all the women in the world, you are and will always be second to none." I liked to think that she forgot about the ash on her forehead as she finished her shift and went home and caught a glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror and somehow realized what it truly meant. I like to think she smiled, looking at herself more assuredly than ever before, because of me, and loved herself a little more because of it. I like to think so. I like to think as I close my eyes that my liver might heal itself. That my heart, that I had given so much to, might somehow find some way to repair it. My last appeal to Heaven. Regardless, I love her, without cessation.