What Can I Get You?

So you walk into a bar and the person behind the counter says, “What can I get you?”

You don’t know. In fact, you can’t even say you don’t know, because to say that implies some kind of knowing you might have apart from this question, i.e., ‘I don’t know what I’d like to drink, but I know what a drink is, and ordinarily I could quite easily tell you what I’d like to drink. I’ll get back to you in a minute.’

In fact, you don’t know. In the most profound, extreme sense of the word. You don’t know who the person behind the bar refers to when he says, “What would you like to drink?” Is that even what he asked you? You’re not sure. You don’t know what it means to like or to get, all you know is this vague, dry sort of feeling, a prickly sensation inside you, coming from an area about a finger’s length down and back from where words come out when you open your mouth.

Wait – do words come out? You open your mouth and a sound issues from your lips, a noise is emitted that seems to travel from where you are to the person behind the bar, who responds, nodding his head. Good, you think – but – does he understand you? Is he just humoring you? After all, he hasn’t moved to get you that drink.

He stares at you with frank curiosity, perhaps wonder, hostility mixed with concern, passion mixed with disgust, pity mixed with accusation.

Who are you?

No, really?

Why have you walked into all this? It was a nice, pleasant place till you came along. The bartender was about to tell a story about his mother’s hands. The way they seemed to act quite independently of her at times, each finger on each hand, he says, had a personality of its own.

“Hello!” one finger (the left index) would say to another (the right pinky), as it curled across the breakfast table, index tapping pinky on the tip. “Wake up! It’s time to lift spoon, pour coffee, raise cup and drink! Come on – I need your help!” Index finger a bit more sprightly and nimble than pinky – pinky flabby and a little stiff.

“Tell you what,” index said, “I’ll tell you a story to help wake you up and get the blood pumping.”

Oh, this is absurd, you think. More because the keen sense of identity of the bartender’s mother’s individual fingers is so much more developed than your own. And you have a whole body to work with, a mind and memories, likes and dislikes, a sense of morality and so on. You sigh, lean forward, and listen:

Once there was a good, beautiful hand at the end of a long, evil arm. Every time the good and beautiful hand, whose name was Gwendolyn, wanted to do something good and beautiful – like fold a sheet of paper into the shape of a snowflake, or toss a dart at a dart board, or spread raspberry jam on a piece of warm, fresh bread – the long, evil arm, whose name was Fred, would ruin it. He would suddenly jerk so that the paper snowflake crumpled into a ball, or pull back so that the dart sailed wide of the board, or go numb so that the jam wound up on Gwendolyn rather than the slice of bread she held.

(to be continued..?)