Irene’s
Things were noisy at Irene’s. The patrons were all loudly squabbling and bickering among themselves. It didn’t help that it was raining outside and that it had rained continuously for more days than anybody could remember. It might have even been weeks. The dismal, unceasing, gray rain provided a dark and dreary atmosphere, alternating the mood at Irene’s Last Place Saloon between frustration and despair. Tempers were short, the days were long, and there was no place else to go.
The bar was downstairs from the street, in a basement, with windows at the street level where you could look up and see the rain pelt the dirty sidewalk. Crowded together around the great wooden bar, crowded around the tables, sitting, standing, leaning - these were Irene’s customers, pressed together, with either too little in common or too much, and no way to tell which. As the days dragged by people would come in, stay for awhile, leave for a time, and then come back again, pulled in by an inexplicable force. It was a lonely crowd, an assemblage of interchangeable parts, seeking refuge from the rain, seeking refuge from their lives, seeking refuge in each other, trying to make a difference, somehow, by being heard, by somebody. Anybody.
Whether it was the rain or whether it was the group of patrons, it is impossible to know, but the squabbling and the bickering continued seamlessly through the rainy days. Politics, economics, religion, philosophy. The arguments poured forth like the beer out of Irene’s taps. Each argument started the same. Somebody would toss out some declaration or other, only to see the subjectivity of their position laid bare and their presuppositions beaten ragged by a cacophony of protestations from the crowd, each protestation met with its own requisite objections in a new cacophony of opposing declarations. And on and on it would go, day after rainy day, week after rainy week.
What was lost on the patrons of Irene’s Last Place was that, had they been able to go back in time, they would no doubt have been able to witness their grandparents, and their grandparents’ grandparents arguing over the same basic themes. It wasn’t always Irene’s. It wasn’t only these customers. And it wasn’t just the rain. There was something alive that moved through all of it, or maybe something that stayed in place while everything - the bar, the customers, the rain - moved around it. It remained, steadfast and unceasing, without resolution, without satisfaction. Such was the fate that Irene’s patrons found themselves tied to, caught in a circle that began long before them, and would remain long after they had gone, the pointlessness of it all as imperceptible to them as the circularity.
On this particular afternoon, like many before it, a young man was putting forth an argument that had been made a million times before him, on a million other rainy days. The young man, due mainly to his youth, had no way of knowing this and assumed that his subject, as well as his manner of presenting it, were completely novel and new.
“Bullshit!”, came cries from the crowd. “Read a book, moron!”
Other epithets were hurled towards the young man, and the young man responded not by restating differently or restructuring his argument, but instead by simply making it louder. A few took the young man’s side and shouted their support, and soon a few others did the same, yelling out their own versions of the argument the young man was attempting to make. Within moments it seemed everybody in the bar had chosen sides in as deafening a manner as possible. No one remained silent and soon it was fairly impossible to distinguish words from screams and assertions from obscenities in the raucous din of the saloon.
Finally, after a great length of time, like all arguments at Irene’s, the shouting eventually tapered off, with people dropping out of the battle one by one, until one lone and simple “Go to hell,” was countered with, “Yeah, well up yours,” and the argument was rendered complete, the usual course of business at Irene’s Last Place Saloon.
But the crowd at Irene’s was not one to remain silent for long, and soon another shrill declaration was met with yet another shrill response, the crowd taking sides, the voices loud and boisterous, the bar once more becoming a veritable battleground of earsplitting disagreement.
As the merry-go-round of squabbling continued, a man sitting underneath one of the bar’s windows just happened to look up. It was not a seemingly significant move at first. He was simply rolling his eyes at some statement or other by another patron of Irene’s, lifting his head as he did so. But his eyes came to focus for one brief moment on the sidewalk outside.
The rain had stopped.
The man’s rolling eyes halted at the sight and soon he found himself transfixed upon a gleam of light that beamed downward from the sky. He stood up and moved closer to the window. Little by little it dawned upon the man that what he was actually seeing was sunlight.
“The sun…” he uttered, his voice trailing off, his mouth opening, remaining so as his eyes widened as if to catch as much of the beautiful light as possible. He stood that way for some time.
A woman, sitting near this man, and in mid-epithetical sentence, happened to glance over and see the man looking out the window. It dawned on her as well that the window was betraying the light of the long-lost sun. Forgetting instantly what she was saying, her voice faded to silence as she, too, made her way towards the window.
Soon others began to notice the sunshine gleaming upon the outside world. And then others. Within a short time the entire crowd at Irene’s was standing, looking up through the windows of the saloon. A hush had fallen over Irene’s as the crowd had become completely mute, mesmerized by what they saw outside. It would be fair to say that at that moment, if anybody in the crowd had wanted to continue one of the many previous arguments, it would have been impossible to do so, first because the crowd’s entire attention was now transfixed on the scene outside, and second because it would be doubtful that anybody could even remember what any of the squabbling and bickering had been about.
Eventually, the man who first discovered the gleaming sun began to slowly walk away from the window, towards the stairway that led up to the bar’s exit, all the time keeping his gaze upon the window’s sunlight, finally looking down only to secure his footing upon the steps. The crowd slowly followed, everybody in Irene’s filing quietly up the stairs towards the doorway.
The man reached the top of the steps, opened the door, and stepped outside. The sidewalk was dry. The streets were dry and the buildings were dry. Above the man the sky was a deep, clear, cloudless blue. There was, in fact, no sign of rain at all. The man wondered vaguely if it had ever really rained. The air was dry and warm, the sun gleaming down upon the silent, smiling patrons of Irene’s as they made their way outside, out into the world, out into the sunshine of the day.
.
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