Homecoming

I had always observed the man from a distance. He was sad like a ship alone on a voyage to New Zealand. His eyes matched the dim light of the lantern that hung over his head. The bar we both visited too often had a charm of its own. Sometimes I mistook it for the back office of a closed radio station. If you stayed there for long, melancholy dripped on your head in the form of Morse codes.

One day I went to him for a light. My matchbox was empty and the barman was nowhere in sight. I tried to remember whether I had ever seen him smoke. At his age, people do not trust the government, so my guess was he must be unmoved by the propaganda against tobacco consumption. To my surprise, he was not. He made a negative grunt, without even trying to hide his disgust. I felt like a fool and went out to buy a fresh box of matches.

When I came back, the bar was darker and gloomier. The barman had come back and was wiping the counter with a towel that resembled my mother’s wrinkled face. The old man finished his drink and asked for another one.

“It’s your fourth. Are you sure about the next?” The barman asked him, his hands still moving.

“You don’t worry. Give me my drink,” the old man knocked on the counter with his glass.

“And who’s going to pay for it? Do you have money?”

The old man looked a little restless, “You give me my drink now. I’ll pay you later.”

The barman didn’t reply. He wore an expression that could mean “Fuck off!” in Chinese. I got curious. I waved at him. When he came close, I asked him about the man. The man was a regular customer like me, but his tab was cleared by his son. He gave them strict instruction: in no situation he should be allowed to have more than four drinks a night.

I felt bad for the man. From his appearance it was clear that once he bought many people, known and unknown, their favorite drinks. Perhaps some of them were close to me. Perhaps I made love to them, or had a brawl with, in another life. Now was the time to pay my debt. I asked the barman to pour him another drink. He stared at me for a second but acted all professional at the end of the stare.

We finished our drinks without saying a word. Finally I got up and paid my bill. I felt that the old man had also gotten up. I came out. The man was behind me. I could almost feel his breath on my neck. I got alarmed. I didn’t want to be hugged by an unknown person for a simple act of generosity. Anyone in my situation would have done the same.

I was wrong. The man didn’t want to thank me. He was just standing behind me, motionless, still, fixed like a nail on the wall. I don’t know what got into me, but I also could not move my legs. Few seconds passed. I was expecting something to happen any moment. Nothing happened. The breath on my neck stopped at one point. I turned back and there was nobody.

I did not visit the bar for a couple of months. I was busy with my work. I went out on a tour and came back with a fever. I often dreamt about that man in my feverish frenzy, trapped in the twilight of medicated drowse, hanging from the strings of depleted consciousness. I saw him washing his hands in blood and whiskey, arguing with a street vendor on the price of cabbages, riding on a merry-go-round with a toothless prostitute – the usual Freudian imageries. When I started to feel better, an irrational desire took control of my mind. I wanted to meet the man once again, possibly for a chat, more possibly for the silence that he always wore like a cloak.        

I entered the bar on a late winter evening. I ordered my usual and the barman complied without a word. I noticed that the bar had changed a little in my absence. The sitting arrangements seemed different; the lights were brighter; and more importantly, the old man was not there.

“What happened to the old man?” I asked the barman. He was still wiping the counter. He looked up and said coldly, “Don’t you know?”

“No. What?”

“His son doesn’t let him come here anymore.”

“Really? Why?”

“Because you bought him that extra drink, that’s why.”

“So what? I thought it was a nice gesture.”

“Well,” the barman shrugged like a monk on vacation, “his son didn’t.”

I took the address of the man from the barman. At first he was reluctant. Then I offered him some cash and a sob story. My own father, I told him, had died of cirrhosis of liver and he used to look exactly like that man. Perhaps the story was unnecessary. He would have given me the address simply for the money.

It took me some time to find the address. The man lived in an alley behind a deserted shoe factory. As I marched to his house – an old, peculiar, damp building – I stumbled on few half-finished shoes lying around like dead soldiers. I could see from a distance that the door was open, slightly. A slim ray of light was beckoning me from inside. I shuddered and contemplated turning back. It was too late. I walked up to the door and pushed it open. I thought the door would make a screeching sound. It didn’t.

The door opened to a corridor that did not seem to end. I stepped in and gave a holler, “Is anybody home?” Obviously, there was no reply. Suddenly, I realized, the floor of the building was softening. As I was falling on the ground, I tried to count the doors on both sides of the corridor. There was none.    

When my senses came back, I discovered that I was lying on a bed. A familiar face was leaning on me, but I couldn’t recognize where I had seen it before. Then it occurred to me. I had seen an older version of the same face. This must be the son, I thought.

“Are you feeling well now?” The voice sounded disgruntled, but it could have been a bout of cold as well. I got up and extended my hand, “You may not know me. I am a friend of your father.”

“A friend of my father! What are you talking about?” He sounded genuinely surprised.

“Yes. We met at the bar. I once bought him a drink,” I folded back my hand and tried to explain. My head was throbbing with a headache.

“But…but,” the son stared at me with as much disbelief as possible for a college-educated TV repairman, “you are my father. Don’t you remember?”

My headache reached a point of no return. The clock was ticking. My head would explode any moment now. I went to a mirror at the corner of the room and looked at myself. The old man was there alright. I smiled at him and he nodded. I turned to my son and asked, “Where is my glass?”