No Last Call

At the table beside me, a large anthropomorphic cauliflower sipped thoughtfully at what looked to be two fingers of middle-shelf scotch, staring blankly across the tavern with oddly human eyes. His hands looked like the late-night rough sketches of an art school student drawn through an absinth haze. Crude fingers tapped impatiently on the dark oak table. Waiting, worrying maybe.

Some crustaceans wearing Stetson hats played mildly passable country song covers on a small stage in the corner. The cauliflower continued to stare into the middle distance, letting out a sigh and checking his watch. Fingers tapping. Any time now…

He sipped his scotch uncomfortably in the cigarette mist as a three-eyed orangutan attempted to explain the healing properties of amethyst to a disinterested Abraham Lincoln at the next table. The cauliflower checked his watch again, fingers tapping. Finally, it happened.

He disappeared. No flash, no fanfare. Just gone. A jump cut to some other reality. The table he had occupied sat vacant for short time before a couple of bipedal mollusks came and cleared it for other patrons.

What exactly are we? It’s a question I ask myself every cycle. Every night is a different stage, a new backdrop, another costume. Everyone at this tavern is an indentured performer, trapped in an endless cycle of appearances in your dreams, your friend’s dreams, your mother’s, father’s, cousin’s, seemingly whoever’s. I’m not really sure. All I know is we wait here until our name gets picked by the hostess and then we’re spirited away, trying to adapt to whoever’s subconscious we are thrust into. And then, bam! We’re back here. In another form, waiting for another dream. This bar is our green room, our backstage, a place to drink and wait for the next dream we’re in. Or nightmare.

“Good for him”, the velociraptor next to me nodded his head in reference to the recently departed patron. “He’d been waiting quite a long time. Far too long for produce”.

I had known the dinosaur for some time. It was hard to tell who was who in here with everyone constantly shapeshifting after every dream, but I could always recognize Linux by his posh Southern English accent. I called him that because the first time I could remember meeting him he was in the form of an old CRT computer monitor. He was particularly upset at that time as he had no orifices in which to consume alcohol.

I motioned over to where the cauliflower had been. “I hope he gets it good this time. I had heard he always really wanted something of a prominent role.”

The velociraptor nodded respectfully, spinning the Jameson in his rocks glass. “That seems doubtful. How many people have dreams centered around cauliflower?”

“Vegans?” I thought aloud. “I don’t know. More likely he ends up being an extra somewhere in the background, I guess. Too bad. Maybe next time.”

“Well, no small roles and all that,” Linux sighed. “When it’s your time it’s your time. At least he got to be somewhat anatomically correct.”

“Well, he was a six-foot-tall cauliflower with human hands and face.” The raptor ignored me.

“I mean look at me”. Linux gestured towards his reptilian form. “Look at this inaccurate affront to science!” He appeared pretty average as far as predatory therapods go. Small dangling arms, huge head with yellow lizard eyes, and rows of razor teeth, with a long tail that snuck out through the back of the bar stool that he sat more than a little awkwardly on. Apparently, there was one glaring error to his appearance of which he proceeded to complain to me at length, and not for the first time tonight.

“Where are the feathers?!” The raptor made a show of searching his body fruitlessly. “Nothing. None at all. Look, it’s commonly understood that therapods, such as myself, were at least partially covered with filamentous protofeathers!”

All damn night with the feathers. The more drunk he got, the more he babbled on about them.

“What kind of backwater illiterate can’t be bothered to pick up a book and attempt to at least have some semblance of realism in their dreams. I’m the one who has to parade around in this insult to paleontology. It’s bad enough trying to have a drink with these stupid chicken arms.” He craned his neck and lapped up the last of the Jameson. “Have you ever licked whiskey? It’s possibly the worst way to enjoy a glass.”

I shouted over to the lobster manning the bar. “Another round for me and my friend, Jurassic Park, here.” The crustacean clawed a bottle of Jameson off the shelf and poured us two glasses. Linux shot me a glare, but accepted the drink.

My form tonight was similar to what it was most nights. A dark and shifting shadow, not fully discernable. Tonight, I maintained something of a human shape, but in some dreams, I would be a bird, or a wolf, or a monster. Always, I was dark as night with glowing eyes.

I took a sip from the glass as the lobster scuttled over to another customer. “How do you know you’re inaccurately formed?” I asked Linux. “That would imply you believe in an actual shared, chronological reality outside of this place. One that had actual dinosaurs. One that you might have been a part of, or are still a part of. I’m telling you; we are more than just dreams.”

Linux rolled his reptilian eyes as well as he could. “Look, I’m not getting into this tonight with you. I’m too drunk for your optimism. But you do bring up a point, maybe there’s no such thing as velociraptors. Probably there’s no such thing as me. I mean I don’t feel real, do you? I’m a different thing every time I come back here. If anything, we are simply the product of someone else’s subconscious.”

“No, we have our own consciousness, apart from what happens in those dreams. What I choose to do in this bar is my own choice.” I swiped my whiskey glass off the bar, shattering it against the wall. “That right there was a conscious decision I made.”

The lobster bartender glared at me. “I don’t like your decisions”.

“Sorry,” I apologized. “I’ll clean that up. My point is our decisions have causality. If I can make decisions that have perceivable outcomes here, I have to believe I’m real.”

I dug out from my pocket what I had been waiting to show him. Something that proved there was a real me, that maybe there was some escape from this place. I placed the envelope on the bar. Inside was $20,000.

“Cash?” My lizard friend was confused. “How did you even get that? There’s no money in this place.”

“It’s from the last dream I was in.”

“What?! How is that even possible?” Linux lowered his head. His eyes darted across the room warily. “Is that even allowed?” He asked in whisper. “The hostess has kicked others out for less”.

“Who cares? I won’t stay here any longer. That dream was a memory. I think the dreaming subconscious is a shared space. It’s like the ocean. Most people just take a quick dip, dry off on the beach, and leave. We got carried off by the riptide until we were lost there. It’s like we’re flotsam, drifting through other people’s dreams. This tavern is just an island we found.”

The crustaceans in the corner finished their last song to light applause and shuffled off into a back room. Linux said nothing for a moment, the white noise of clattering glassware more apparent with the absence of mediocre music. “So, you’re saying somewhere out there, there’s a real you. You’re stuck in sleep, like in a coma? What was this dream that has you so convinced?”

I hesitated. “It’s not exactly a good dream. Like all the dreams we’re in, I can’t remember all of it. I know it started in a casino. I remember a man and a woman. They were happy, in love, I think. I was watching them from across the roulette table. They had just won a bunch of money. This money.” I tapped the envelope on the bar top. “All of a sudden we’re outside, moonlight mingling with a solitary street lamp. It’s windy. The man gives the woman his coat. I’m still watching. Like all the dreams we are in, I can’t control what happens next.

“The next moment I’m on them, shouting for the money. The man is fumbling inside the coat the woman is wearing, trying to find the envelope. He’s not fast enough. I remember throwing the woman on the ground, trying to rip the coat from her. I hate this dream, I want to be anywhere but here, but I’m forced into this role. The man tries to stop me, to help his wife. That’s when the gun goes off. Blood everywhere. The money is in my hands. The dream starts to fade, and I hold on to the money with all I have. I have to know what this means, it all feels way too familiar… and then I’m here, with this.” I pointed at the envelope again.

Linux shook his head. “Well, if that’s a memory, it doesn’t exactly sound like a good thing. You don’t really come out smelling like a rose there. I mean, what if you’re that killer. Would you even want to go back to that?”

“I don’t think I’m the killer. I had feelings when I was in that dream, and it wasn’t that of the killer. I didn’t feel greed or malice. I felt love, fear, sorrow. Those are my feelings, I think. That place was real to me. That’s how I ended up bringing the money here.”

Suddenly Linux eyes widened as he shrunk away and quickly left the bar.

“Do you want to leave this place?” I never saw her coming. The hostess hovered over me with her head cocked.

She was the only one who looked human in the tavern, but she was uncommonly tall and had piercing owl eyes. Her presence exuded an oppressive dread. Her stare radiated fire. What kind of being controls a place like this? What kind of power did she hold?

“I’m done with this place. I want out.” It didn’t matter what she did to me. I was done floundering in an existential nightmare. If there was a reality beyond this, my own reality, I would find out now. She looked at the envelope and then back at me.

“Very well. I’ll make you a deal”. She laid down a little black notebook on the bar top, opening it to reveal a list of names in two columns. Hundreds of them, thousands maybe. “Choose one. One of these names belongs to you. If you can give me the right one, then you know who you are and you can return to something other than this. If not, you can return to nothing.” She pointed at the door marked “EXIT”.

I flipped through the pages, my fingers shaking. So many names. “David Crawford, Jack Dawson, Mark Avery” …no nothing looked familiar. I could feel the hostess piercing glare as she waited. I couldn’t remember the first night I came to this bar let alone my original name, if I even had one. Maybe this was all just a cruel joke. Maybe Linux was right and my reality was no more than a side act in someone’s subconscious. Or maybe I was the killer and I deserved this reality. Then I saw it.

“Ellen Flores”, I said calmly.

The hostess cocked her head again at me. “You think this is your name?”

“No, but it belongs to me.”

The heart monitor chimed rhythmically as I looked up at her. The first face I knew to be real in over a year. She was crying happily. The bullet wound had finally healed.

“Hello Ellen,” I said.