Only One

Last night I had the strangest dream. I was sitting in a bar, and this guy kept saying, “So no shit, there I was...” but then stopping. Or maybe he was telling a series of very short stories that I couldn’t hear because I was too far away. In the end, I decided that I should go over there, so I could either tell him to knock it off or hear what he had to say.

The guy looked up as I approached. He was sitting in a cluster of people, but none of them were looking at him; they were all facing in different directions, at the bar or at tables, alone and in pairs and in small groups; some of them were reading, some of them were having low, intense-sounding conversations. 

One guy was banging away at a portable manual typewriter, the kind that comes with its own integral carrying-case. He had an actual pipe clenched between his teeth, adding little clouds to the haze permeating the bar; that’s when I realized I wasn’t in San Francisco anymore.

The “No shit, there I was” guy was sitting on a stool, perched on the top of it like a captive parakeet, his feet tucked up on the top rungs. As I turned back to look at him he said, “So, this guy walks in to a bar...” Staring me right in the face.

Everybody around him stopped. They didn’t, like, all look up at me at once or anything, but... one of those pauses happened, where everybody shifted gears at the same time; the typewriter guy shifted his pipe to the other corner of his mouth, the reading people all paused, some to turn the page, some to stare off into space for a bit. Conversations lulled.

“So, this guy walks into the bar,” said the guy on the stool again. Everybody was getting going again: writer writing, readers reading, talkers chatting away. The stool guy is still looking at me.

“You switched stories,” I said. “I came over here to hear the last one.”

“So, this guy walks into a bar,” he said. 

I crossed my arms. “Come on,” I said. “Tell me how the other one ended.”

The parakeet man grinned, crooked teeth and whiskers. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, kid,” he said. “There’s only one story, and it never ends.”

Then they all looked up at me at the same time.