The writings on all of the buildings had even started to seem like lies. It was to the point where everybody wanted change. You always want change. You just don’t want results from it, like that feeling of euphoria in looking down and seeing that your leg has just got hacked off by a chainsaw.
The floods had dissipated, the polar vortexes receded, and we’d had a fairly pleasant if slightly uneventful summer. Men had sat in bars on the south side as basketball season traipsed through August, armed to the teeth with knowledge on who the best player from every town in Indiana was. Football season started a month later like an underdog thud, like a dog barking from down inside a well, and with glazed eyes we avoided sight of each other and went about our business.
Eventually, the yellow leaves started popping up, and my friend Chloe asked me if I wanted to go to the restaurant that was haunted — like go to the top floor and play it off like we were just getting a beer but actually go into the bathroom where they said were ghosts flying around and sh**. I said sure, kind of reluctantly. It hadn’t exactly been the most eventful year and staring at bartender’s bodies sure gets boring when they’re all wearing masks.
I met Chloe there after work, then, one Friday night, which seemed to be the instinctive night we both sought the supernatural, having grown up on Nickelodeon, which seemed to always unleash its most eccentric, Dionysian viewing material on this particular night of the week. I was in my clothes from work, a Dismemberment Plan t shirt and some chef pants, and Chloe was in this big, ugly, pink and frilly shirt, a leather jacket and a white top hat, with jeans. We certainly looked like a couple of… well… losers. We looked like two people who’d just fallen out of the sky and landed in someone’s attic, to there select all our clothing.
The bartender, male, kept asking if we wanted a food menu. We kept cheerfully declining. I had a tall Sam Adams in front of me so I wasn’t getting too antsy. Some nights I didn’t get hungry until like 1 am and Wendy’s was always still open, so I wasn’t worried about anything, I was just checking some football scores and stuff.
“When do you wanna do this?” Chloe asked.
“What?” I answered. “Get married?”
“Yeah,” she replied sarcastically. “I meant go see the ghosts, dummy.”
“How do you know I’m not already seeing ghosts everywhere?” I retorted, in fine, robust and competitive form. She punched me in the side.
“Ahh,” I said.
“Baby.”
“We should have gone to the haunted house,” I said.
“They’re too busy.”
“Yeah, Hacienda certainly doesn’t have that problem.”
The restaurant we were at was situated in this 100-year-old building, in downtown of the suburban town. It was made of brick and had this giant tower on it that somebody had apparently just built for the sake of erecting something phallic and awe-inspiring in a superficial sort of way. More and more, deluges of corporate restaurants were materializing, everywhere, offering quicker service and lower prices, and stealing any amount of business from the local places, which tended to be situated closer within town. The only identity these new places seemed to have is that everybody was really nice and well dressed and the women’s clothing seemed to be skimpier and skimpier. Men seemed more lonely than ever. More well dressed, too. None of the clothing stores were going out of business. I wiped some nondescript crust off of my seven-year-old Dismemberment Plan shirt and checked my Facebook app on my phone.
“Facebook,” barked Chloe at me. “We’re on a ghoulish vision quest in October and you’re checking your FACEBOOK.”
“You know what?” I snapped back at her. “You go check your ghosts. I’m having a fine time just sitting here being a hopelessly median 2020 male.”
She rolled her eyes at me, especially probably since she didn’t want to go in the men’s bathroom alone.
“You REALLY don’t want to come?” she pled.
“I don’t have an opinion on it one way or another. I mean I know what it’ll be. It’s just spirits. You and I already have spirits, sitting here, though we might not always show it. That bartender in the slender, customary black t shirt, he’s got a spirit. Those ghosts in there have spirits but they’re trapped — they don’t have bodies with which to walk around. You and I have bodies with spirits IN them. And that’s pretty fu**ing cool. We have bodies we can move around with intelligent control but we can FEEL.”
Chloe was just sort of smirking at me so I went on. None of the other patrons could hear me.
“And it’s just like when I ask you to marry me. You’re so obsessed with your FREEDOM. You know, I bet you’ll be the type to haunt this planet long after your life is over, too, but you might find that that very ‘freedom’ you’re after is really a trap you set for yourself. I mean, think about when you get your leg chainsawed off. You know that brief feeling of euphoria you get when you’re looking down at it, blood squirting out like Mount Vesuvius?”
Chloe spit out her Long Island onto the bar and then hastily reached for a napkin to wipe it off.
“That’s what you’re missing,” I proceeded. “That’s what marrying me would be like. It would be like having your leg chainsawed off, but in a good way.”
“I believe that,” she dryly replied.
“Hear me out. All those buildings out there. All those signs that say ‘Got Love?,’ that say, ‘Forgiveness is paramount’… they’re all just lies, aren’t they? But they were conceived with the best intentions. That’s what your ‘freedom’ is like. And you’ll end up like one of those old, weird ghosts, with the pointy hat, flying around in the Hacienda bathroom and turning the lights on and off, over and over. I mean how many times can you turn the lights on and off, anyway? It’s like a stale acid trip.”
I grinned at Chloe. I kinda liked her. I could tell she was thinking. She must have been close to my zodiac sign, or something.