THUNDERBOLT

Stan is drinking alone in an empty bar after work. Unwinding, he rationalizes, although he has been drinking daily for weeks. Just eating some smelt with grated turnip, and sashimi he narrates internally. He dips a piece of sashimi in soy sauce, one side, then the next, and savors it. He closes his eyes to amplify it’s flavor. Savory. Buttery. Rich and delicate. And when he opens his eyes a man in gold and yellow tiger mask is sitting opposite him at his table.

“Excuse me?” says Stan. The man’s tiger mask is made of some gold and yellow polyester mesh. He looks like the old Japanese wrestler Sataru Sayama. “Ahem” says Stan, “There are a lot of empty tables here. See? The entire bar is empty.”

The man in the yellow mask waves his hand and the young asian woman behind the bar quickly and diligently sets a glass down onto a square napkin and pours out a sliver of sake. Her hair is short and straight, with bleached tips. “Thank you,” says the man, staring intently at Stan and his plate of sashimi and smelt and daikon.

"Mm hmm," she musters, The two stare at each other for a minute as the bartender returns to her station and resumes quietly watching the both of them.

"Just passing through for a drink. Some idle conversation. And I will be on me way," says the man in the mask. “Happy Halloween,” he says, raising his glass.

“Yeah,” says Stan, deciding to be polite. After all, it would have been more awkward to turn him away. How would it look if two people sat in an empty bar in complete silence? “Kampai,” he says and raises his own drink. They engage in small talk, making comments about the food and decor of the dive bar. The atmosphere is dim and hollow. They talk abstractly about work. Stan is an accountant, and the man in the Tiger mask — although he does not offer his name — says that he is a social media expert. They talk about business and the economy. They discuss the recent APEC Conference. They talk about technology, and about culture. The man who is from Hokkaido speaks with a mild accent and has a tendency to pry in personal matters, but becomes secretive when asked about his own affairs. Stan realizes this and stops divulging facts about his own life, leaving the two of them sitting in silence.

“Did you know,” the man starts up again. “I once knew a woman who had no sense of herself?”

“Now how would I knew something like that? This is the first conversation between us—” Stan laughs, affably now. The booze is beginning to take hold.

“Ha. Yes. Chicago, I think. I don’t mean she had no sense of identity,” continued the tiger. “Simply, she could not sense her own body. It was... a curious condition,” he said, then continued drinking from his glass right through the slit in his mask where his mouth was revealed. At this point, Stan is regarding the mask as he would any other face. The man continued, “She couldn’t tell her legs from her arms. And most of the time, she crawled and flopped about. Most times, she used a level, the kind that carpenters use, to move about so that she could tell if she was properly balanced. But overall, she had no sense of her body. Didn’t know where her foot ended and her shoe began.”

“That’s a strange story,” said Stan. “Kind of an odd thing to—”

“There was this other friend, back in Japan,” The man continued. “Who began to have this other condition, funny, how I’m remembering these people,” said the tiger. There was a lining of glitter around his ears, sparkling as he titled his head in recollection. “He could only see one thing at a time. His entire world was stitched together with little parts. He would never see a face, he could only recognize an eye, or an ear, one thing at a time, but never the entire face. Once, he mistook his wife’s head for a hat, and tried to put it on. Funny, isn’t it? Ha ha!” The tiger erupts into laughter.

Stan notes that the conversation has turned a corner into darker territory and decides to call for the check. When he raises his hand to the bartender, she averts her eyes and ignores him. She turns around and starts cleaning glasses.

“You see, beneath all of this is a illusion,” says the man. “There’s nothing. Just a void,” he trails off. “Our bodies mean nothing.”

“Check please” he calls out to the bartender again.

The bartender remains inert and ignores him.

“Check please!” shouts Stan.

The tiger leans in and whispers. “Hey, you like her? Yes?”

“No.” Stan leans back in his chair. “Just want my check. I have to work early tomorrow,” he slurs.

“Ah, come one. One more!” chides the man. He lifts his hand and the woman quickly and efficiently delivers over another round of sake.

Stan shakes his head in frustration. “Fine. Last one. I swear she likes you more than me. She won’t even look in my direction, even in this empty bar,” He laughs in resignation. “My luck with women has been lousy,” he confides.

Donna Summers sings through a portal from the 80's, and spreads out softy along the bar counter.

The man nods. “Ah. I see. You want to see something?” the man asks, briefly scratching the white fringe of faux fur along his cheeks. He reaches into his pocket and extracts a phone. “Look at this,” he says and holds the face of the phone up for Stan to see.

Stan squints and looks closer. The man’s hands are shaky and uncoordinated, so Stan steadies the phone with his hand. When the blurred square comes into focus, he sees that it is a picture of the bartender without any clothes on. She is smiling at the camera. Stan pulls back, blushing.

“Yeow!” The tiger erupts in triumphant laughter and raises his fist into the air. “You see! Not so difficult is it! Very easy!”

Stan smiles and nods. “Good job” he says.

“I have hundred of pictures on this phone!” says the tiger.

“Nice work,” Stan says, not knowing how to proceed. He is too embarrassed to ask for the check again. He is wondering if his facial expression is betraying every thought he is having about the woman behind the bar, that if she were to look at him, she would know that he had just seen her naked because of his lingering I-just-saw-you-naked-on-someone's-iphone face if ever there were such a thing. He is suddenly too shy to look at her and he begins folding his chopstick wrapper into a small crane.

“What if I told you that entire back room behind the kitchen is filled with girl just waiting for action?” The tiger asks.

“I wouldn’t believe you,” answers Stan. Somehow, he feels like he is being tested. “But one can always dream,” he adds plainly.

“Yeow!” the tiger erupts again and drums the table with his hands. He adjusts his mask, and pulls it down tightly around his head. He then motions to the woman behind the bar, and she quickly disappears behind the aluminum impact doors to the kitchen. Minutes later, the doors swing open and two other women emerge from in a nimbus of steam.

Presto.

Earlier, the kitchen had been occupied by a single, middle-aged cook. Japanese. Sweaty and grimy, with a face that looked like flesh hanging off a makeshift meat smoker. Everytime the door had swung open, Stan had gotten a glimpse of that old cook slaving away, chopping green onions and stirring dark foreboding sauces. Where did these well-dressed, made up, pretty, young girls come from? What were they doing back there?

The women smile and set two dishes of kappa maki out, and then slips between the doors and back into the kitchen. Strange that they were back there, thinks Stan. They obviously didn’t belong in some hot greasy, steamy kitchen where an oily mist saturated the air. Not dressed that way. “Look, I think I see what’s happening,” says Stan. “But I’m not interested?” he ends awkwardly, as if phrasing a question. “What you’re selling, I’m not buying,” he confirms.

The man picks up a roll, pops it into his mouth and chews thoughtfully. When he is finished, he says “There was this other person who could never remember anything past 1960. Some sort of accident. All his life after that, he think he is in his 20’s. For a time, it looks so, but as he get older, everytime he sees into a mirror, he would see an old man, and he would be shocked and confused and he would just panic. Can you imagine? And then he would forget, and smile and go back to his life and think that he was a kid again. What blessing. What a curse.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” says Stan. “I don’t get this line of conversation,” he says and calls again for the check. The woman is nowhere to be found, but then the kitchen doors swing open. He sees three naked girls chopping an onion. Their knives appear sharpened and their knife skills appear expert until one of them cuts herself. There is a small slice on her finger. Another girl walks over, takes her hand and starts sucking on her finger. As she locks eyes with Stan, the doors swing shut.

“Hey, what the...?”

“This other man,” continues the tiger, “when he closed his eyes felt like he was swaying wildly, like seaweed swaying in a current. When he closed his eyes he wouldn’t even know where his hands were! If he were sitting at a table, and he could not see his feet, he would not know where his feet were. Rational thought would say to him, under the table of course! But he would feel his feel were extending farther than the floor, to the bowels of the earth. So disembodied, that when he closed his eyes, he would feel that he had no body. And when he opened his eyes, he would be surprised to find himself in seated position. Or lying down. Or just there. Strange!” He held up a finger in emphasis "But I always say, where there is a will, there is a body..."

“I’m leaving. Nice meeting you,” says Stan rising from his seat.

Suddenly, the front doors open and more girls walk into the bar. They all say hello. The tiger motions to them. They surround Stan's table. One of them whispers into another girl’s ear, and that whisper travels around the room, from lips to ear, lips to ear. Suddenly the bar is filled with girls whispering secrets. Then it stops, and most of them begin staring at him.

“I’m not buying,” says Stan. "No money."

“Nothing is for sale. You don’t need to be insulting,” laughs the man.

Stan is looking around for some hidden camera when one of the women lowers herself, nibbles on his earlobe and exhales slowly, sending a shiver down Stan’s spine. He momentarily closes his eyes and when he opens them most of the women have removed their clothing.

The man in the tiger mask asks “This what you wanted? Yes?”

The bar is still. The radio has been turned off.

“I never asked for any of this,” says Stan. “But.... yes. What will it cost me?”

“No charge,” says the man waving him off, but Stan is already kissing one of the girls. He removes his wallet and tosses it onto the table. It spins through the air and lands loudly on a plate, knocking over a bottle of soy sauce. The women converge.

“Another man I knew,” continues the tiger, rising now. “Had undergone such a pleasurable experience, that all of his senses went out of whack days later. It's like being struck by lightning. Too much at once. So... be careful!” the tiger laughs and leaves.

* * *

The next day, Stan wakes up in his own bed but can’t shake the previous night. At first he is elated. What the hell happened? he askes himself in disbelief. He gets up out of bed. Examines all the hickeys and scratches all over his body, and begins to feels strange. When he steps out into the living room, a feeling of dread creeps over him. He surveys the room. Everything looks the same, but nothing is. It is as if a switch had flipped in his mind. His surroundings feel like a stage set that kept revealing itself to be larger and larger, and just as accurate as reality. He repeats the joke, “someone broke into my home and swapped everything with an exact replica.” He showers, gets dressed and has a small breakfast. The food is tasteless. When he opens the front door he realizes that the entire world has been swapped out with this replica, he begins to feel dizzy. Then again, he wonders, was this world anything but how we perceived it to be? he thinks, realizing that there is no way back to the way things were before last night. He remembers a portion of the evening, embroiled in a tangle of limbs, losing the arrow of gravity, and the distintion of his own body. He remembers waking up last night, thinking that someone else was in bed with him, and when he threw this person out of bed, he fell to the floor as well. He chased this person in the darkness, running into the wall and knocking things over. Every time he grabbed ahold of this person, this person would grab ahold of him, and throw him to the ground at precisely the same moment that Stan would attempt to do so. When he finally scrambled to his feet, felt his way through the darkness and flicked on the lights, he realized that he was alone; that it was his own body he had been chasing.

This slow creeping displacement begins to bloom steadily. He was struck by a thunderbolt, he realizes, and the next time it may not be so good. He feels possessed and abandoned at the same time. From his doorway, he takes a step outside, his foot never touching the ground.