Ghosts of Futures Past

Thomas strolled through the multitude of Parisians and whatever-elsers teaming Gare Du Nord on that particular Tuesday afternoon in July, brown leather travel-bag in hand containing all the possessions he’d brought with him to Paris.

He passed a Starbucks (a classic Parisian establishment), making his way to the exit and the city beyond. TV screens trumpeted that the Hemingway Bar at the Ritz had been ransacked by a mysterious assailant. He paused, stock still outside the large glass windows of the café, taking in the marching chyron at the bottom of the screen. No injuries, thank god, just a lot of property damage and a fire. It also appeared the vandal was still at large.

He shook his head in disbelief and continued on, picking up his bag. Not quite Notre Dame burning, more like the Louvre being robbed, but nonetheless it seemed it was an auspicious day to be in the city of lights. On a street a block from the bustling station he deposited his bag at a baggage drop run by the ubiquitous middle eastern personage who always owned these things. Then he wandered into the metropolis hoping to get lost.

Finally, he merged into the city without any belongings or place to be. It felt like diving into the ocean after you’d spent the afternoon grilling yourself on the beach. He could feel the two major traumas of the past few months, really the destruction of the only two pillars of his life so far, beginning to weigh less on him and receding mercifully into the background. The sounds, sights and smells of Paris began to filter a kind of catharsis into his present experience.

Part of him felt like he was fucking up by being there. His dad’s injunction that he’d lived with his whole life told him a man faces things head on when things got tough. And he was doing the opposite, purposefully, running away as fast as he could. Flying half-way across the world away from his wife (wait, ex-wife) and leaving the team behind in the wake of that fucking shit show in Afghanistan felt like cowardice. Worse, it felt like betraying everything he’d ever believed in and thought he knew about himself.

But damn it, he didn’t know what else to do. He’d tried to face everything head on already, by every tack he knew. And everything kept blowing up in his face. So what else was there? How many more attempted reconciliations with Julia would end in the same stalemate? How many more phone calls with teammates bawling their eyes out or stifling things over too many drinks could he take? He wasn’t a damn psychologist and after trying so many times he knew he wasn’t helping anyone. And it just made him more exhausted and angry every time he failed.

He’d had to get away, to make a clean break. And the only place that felt like there was a sliver of a possibility for a clean start to him was Paris. All the Hemingway, Orwell, histories and biographies he’d devoured since he was young, and especially during his PhD, when he wasn’t slogging his way through archaeology papers, had nursed a deep love and affinity for a city he’d never really know outside words on a page creating an indelible place in his soul.

These books had pointed to and pushed him towards a version of himself he longed to be, showing him that there was more to him than the ordinary and often depressing surroundings he’d grown up in when no one around him would. It’d given him the will to forge on in the grinding, ego-driven pyramid scheme known as academia. They’d propelled him to use his passion and discipline to make a real impact in the world in ways he’d only dreamed of when he was young.

And it didn’t hurt it was a city of the night as much as lights. The luring sense he could get lost and burrow into that warm, bleary, expansive city with people who didn’t know him, whom he had no responsibility to, no mission to fulfill or live up to and break his back over, was as enticing as the spiritual attachment he’d cultivated in his heart.

He just needed a break from it all, needed to get away. It had to be something radically different from how he’d been operating before, from the way of life that had brought him what he thought was gold but had turned out to be shit.

…

His face was haggard when he caught it from the corner of his eye in a mirror outside a restaurant amidst the raucous stream of drunk tourists on Boulevard du Sebastopol. They meandered to and fro, in and out of bars and nightclubs catered solely for their hedonistic sojourns. He couldn’t blame them, he was drunk too, looking to escape.

The initial freedom and excitement from his arrival was steadily wearing off, perhaps in tandem with the now several beers he’d had as he canvassed the city and its innumerable cafes. He frowned inwardly in silent resignation. Sadness and anger had been steadily imposing their insistent weight on him again despite his attempt to out distance them and the levity of his current surroundings.

But still, with help from the alcohol swirling in his bloodstream, he felt the poet in him coming on and the glory of the ancient city around him beginning to sing to him in coaxing whispers. Damn all this heaviness and moping, this crying over spilt milk and bitter regrets.

Paris and her stories, the people he’d admired and those she’d once nursed in her bosom, were the only thing that mattered. Their names and faces stretched out before him now, in angelic miles, as the tourists and Hausman buildings receded into the background of his perception. The titular figures from all his books, parading their great and heinous deeds, their triumphs and foils, each man and woman of portent and destiny gazing back at him from some heavenly beyond. They peered into his soul to see if his was one of a caliber such as theirs.

The sneaking fear and shame of failing these piercing gazes caused him to shrink back from his reverie, back to the street he was on and search for another bar that didn’t look overrun with fat Americans or drunk Brits. Now he wanted to escape from the just-another Any City for the globe-trotting, social-media-tourist part of Paris. The part of city that was papered over with the grand veneer of its past but really conformed to the least common denominator of its best customer’s demands.

Climbing his way back north the tourists were gradually replaced by real Parisians. The urbane, the wretched, the immigrant, the mundane and other varying kinds. He found a brasserie that was half empty, where he could get a whiskey, or several, and nurse it in the back unbothered and not feeling like he was a burden to people who were happy, or at least trying to be. Chateau D’Eau, on the street of the same name, near Gare du L’est, claiming the cheapest pint in Paris. He thought he might try to find some absinthe somewhere, that chimerical liquor, vaunted for blindness and hallucinations. He felt he might want some of that now, need it really.

The old fashioned came quickly enough. He asked for, almost demanded, a double. The bar tender had given him a studied glance, he guessed due to his gruff manner. The man’s eyes had seemed to confirm something internally for him, looking neither surprised nor offput, just a bit more guarded and business like when he then demanded that Thomas pay immediately after the first drink.

He hadn’t meant to be rude that way, but the alcohol was losing the battle to ward off the thunder clouds of his old life. He’d sail around this storm, he was determined to start free and enjoy just himself for once. So, he needed that damn double. Part of him cringed at this dreadful little signpost on the road to hell, but the rest of him didn’t care. He was done listening to that part that had given him the life he was running from, that he had destroyed and that had been destroyed for him.

Cool, clinking class in hand he felt the effervescent vapors of the alcohol billowing off the top microscopically. He found an unoccupied corner to sit in. Here he could begin his reveries again.

He wondered how long ago this place would’ve been a café for collabos or maquis planning a hit or kidnapping on each other. Or maybe it’d been a working man’s café where the poor had spent their backbreaking wages on cheap wine, exterminating their livers and painful memories, as their lives were exterminated by unrelenting bosses. Or maybe it’d been a Jacobin’s club, the air hot with vitriolic condemnations and singing with lightning bolts of revolutionary declarations demanding the future now.

He didn’t sip his drink but took it one gulp at a time. The sweet, bitter burn of the whiskey swirled a devilish warmth in his stomach and stuck his feet to the ground in mud. Paris! He was in Paris! His life was ruined but he was in Paris!

Back towards the city center, Robespierre had blown off his jaw, by accident or not, with a pistol in the Hotel de Ville that was burnt down by the communards much later. Eric Blair labored in the hellish confines of a medieval basement of a cheap hotel for the same blithe American tourists, sleeping in flea infested attics and pawning his clothes to stay alive one more day. Napoleon’s whiff of grapeshot secured his ascendency after wading through pools of his countryman’s blood. Ernst Junger passed the war in gentile and artistic society while the regime he served devoured Europe. These stories called out to him, seeping through the very walls of the brasseries and flagstones of the streets.

A wave of disgust elevated within him like a hot summer wind – why all these names and faces? Who cared?

Dead men lost to memory. Ashes in the wind and dust to dust. Fill a classroom and make them take a test on it, they’ll forget it as soon as they exit the building. Just a ritual to get the adult at the front of the room to finally stop talking. Write a book about it and it’ll only be the nth one, another listing on Amazon, out stripped by AI slop on Tiktok.

He knocked back the last bit of whiskey and lurched towards the bar for another. What was the point of all it? All that reading, all that studying, the excitement of learning the lives of people who’d made history, who’d inspired him at some forgotten point, the feeling only an echo of itself now.

Better to drown it before it can draw another breath to die an even more painful death sometime later. Better to bury the hurt of those days when he thought his happiness was possible, when he trusted that doing the right thing would make everything turn out alright.

He motioned to the bar tender, who nodded in acknowledgement and then turned back to what he was doing. While he waited, he wondered if Danton had felt the icy singe of madame la guillotine as it had severed the nerves and spinal chord in his neck. Then a glass of something yellow-green was placed before him and he saw the shadow of the bar tender turn to go back the way he’d come. Be careful what you wish for, he thought to himself, looking down at the absinthe.

                “Excuse me - ”

The man paused and started to come back to him. Thomas’s jaw slackened and eyes bulged as he looked the man in the face for seemingly the first time. He had a plain, handsome visage with a large square head and jaw. His thin mustache was clipped neatly to the corner of his lips. He wore a black beret. The familiarity of his face was uncanny and he searched his memory as to where he’d seen this man before. His voice stammered.

“…I didn’t order this”

The bar tender drew up to him, looked him in the eyes, unblinking, right into his heart. Then Thomas felt his heart explode into tiny pieces and his mind wash down the back of his spine, into his feet and somewhere onto the floor.

                “You look like you could use it.” he said.

Then the bartender took a step backwards and disappeared into the wall, melted into it, and was gone.

He blinked twice hard. His jaw hung open and mouth turned dry. He tried to swallow. He looked around him wildly, gripping tightly inside, trying to remain calm. But no one seemed to have noticed a thing. He focused just on breathing for what seemed like the longest minute of his life.

He looked at the bar. The glass was still there. Not knowing what to do, he reached down in front of him. He could see his hand tremble slightly, and he willed it steady to no avail.

‘La fee verte’ - he could smell the anise a few feet from him as he raised the glass to his mouth. Be careful what you wish for indeed. He didn’t think he could hallucinate before taking a shot of absinthe, but here he was. Maybe these reveries were getting to be a bit too much for him. And despite a part of himself screaming to put the glass down, instead he put it to his lips and knocked his head back.

The thick liquid reminded him of cough syrup. The anise flavor of black jellybeans reminded him of when he was a kid – always the worst kind and last to be eaten in those big multicolored boxes. It raced down his gullet and into his belly in a fiery track. He savored its strange, powerful properties making their way through his body. He breathed in slowly and with abandon, allowing his shoulders to sink back and letting out a deep exhale. A strange zing of what felt like electricity zipped through his body and made him shiver.

He lowered his head again and looked around the bar. The bar tender was still nowhere to be found, if there had ever been one, but everything else was as it had been before. A half full Parisian brasserie filled with people chattering and drinking.

Strange. The absinthe had come from somewhere. Maybe he just hadn’t noticed it on the way over. He was starting to feel the effects of the whiskies seriously now, developing sea-legs on land. And now his bladder pressed on him with the urge to be relieved. He turned towards the bathroom with renewed purpose.

As he approached his way was blocked by a chatting couple of football lads, fully ensconced in a debate about the fidelity of FIFAs refs during the World Cup. Interesting as that might be if he hadn’t had bigger fish to fry and a full bladder, he made to scoot past them with an amicable “Scuse’ me gents”.

However, the uttered words had no effect on the two friends. They were really locked into the topic at hand. He mustered up a bit more wind in his diaphragm and stated a decibel or two louder “Hey guys - sorry, I gotta get through here.”.

To his utter amazement, still nothing.

Were these guys busting his balls? Was this the height of comedy these guys could come up with on a slow Wednesday night? He felt a flame of anger light in his stomach, and mixed with the whiskey, he made up his course. He’d just barrel through the two yahoos, with no malice to minimize it blowing out into something bigger. God damn it, he really had to piss.

He started off straight ahead, like he was walking the streets around Times Square, avoiding eye contact, a man on a mission. Taking a couple strong steps towards the bathroom, aiming for the breadth of space between the two schmucks, stealing himself for the inevitable blow back, his stomach knotted in anticipated tension. But then, nothing, again.

In fact, to his great horror and surprise, this time it was worse than nothing. Actually, he walked right through the two football hooligans, passing through their bodies entirely and found himself face to face with the male styled stick figure on the outside of the bathroom door.

Sickening vertigo; he felt like he was in one of those dreams where he was falling off a cliff. Thomas spun around to face back in towards the bar, his eyes darting left and right looking for anyone to acknowledge his presence, panicked or not. An idea struck him and though only half way crystalized he moved on it. He screamed out to anyone who would listen:

                “Hey! Hey everyone!! Look at me! Look!!” 

His stomach began to sink.

“Free drinks at the bar! I’m buying! Who wants one!?!”

Not a single person turned to look at him. With mounting dread, he tried one last time.

                “Anybody!! Can anybody hear me!?!”

He was panting now, his mind racing with nothing solid to hold on to. Was this a dream? Was he passed out somewhere? What was in that absinthe? Had someone drugged him?

Just then he heard a voice call out to him from behind the bar. It was a familiar voice he knew was attached to a very familiar face.

                “They can’t hear you chief. No sense in getting worked up over it.”

He spun back towards the bar. Leaning casually out of a doorway leading to a back room was the bartender with the handsome broad face, clipped mustache and beret. He looked the man over, eyes flitting over every detail, drinking them in as if he’d just discovered an oasis in a desert.

The bartender’s clothes were well cut, but they seemed bizarrely out of date. His hand, the one visible leaned against the door post, was blackened and covered with what seemed like ink or coal on his fingers. He had an “I know something you don’t’” grin on his face and gave a friendly motion to join him before disappearing into the back room. He thought he saw a flash of bright red covering the man’s neck as he turned but he was gone from view too quickly to be sure.

Still trembling, he made his way around the bar and to where the man had just been. He entered an amply lit room with a large, bright lightbulb hanging over a spacious card table. The table was covered in what looked to be maps and manuscripts and open books as well as a few pencils and a compass and protractor. The bartender sat grinning the same grin, propped back in a seat on the opposite side of the card table with a leg ending in a boot leaning on it, the other on the ground, hands folded casually behind his head.

                “Come on in, don’t be shy. Grab you something to drink?” he said with a broadening smile and nodded towards the empty chair across from him.

He could only sit down. Then his mind snapped back into some kind of focus.

                “Not if it’s that absinthe again. I feel like that stuff killed me.”

                A barreling, avalanche of a laugh burst from the man.

                “You’re closer to the truth than you think. But no, this is my stuff, not that Satan’s brew. Here. It’s good, from a plantation near my old place in Cuba.”

He reached down and emerged with a bottle of rum from under the table and plopped it down. Turning around he spun back and deposited two glasses and a small ice bucket, the glasses clinking with a few cubes each and pouring the rum. The bartender slid a glass to him and stretched his arm out in a toast.

                “What should we drink to?”

Thomas took the glass in his hand and held it before him close to his chest, eyeing it carefully but seeing nothing amiss that he could spot. He looked back at the man gazing at him expectantly.

                “Well, Jesus… Why don’t we start with what the hell’s going on?!”

                “Hah! I can drink to that – to what the Hell’s going on!”

Quick as a cat, the man reached over and clinked glasses, and promptly swallowed half his rum. The bartender sighed with relish and smiled back at him. Not knowing what else to do, he took a sip of the ‘rum’.

Thankfully, it was rum. Good rum.

                “Hm, that is good.”

                “Told you so! I know my rum, that’s for damned sure, Hah! …So, what’s your name friend?”

                “Thomas, Thomas Cole. Who the hell are you?”

                “There’s a painter named Thomas Cole, did great work. A real master. Hudson River school I think, you know him?”

                “So I hear. Yeah, I know about him.”

                “You like his stuff?”

                “Sure, it is pretty great. Big landscapes and all that.”

                “That’s one way of putting it, Hah!”

                “What’s your name?”

                ‘Hemingway.”

                “Hemingway… no, cmon… like… Ernest Hemingway?”

                “I’d think so. My name is Ernest.”

                He felt his limbs go numb and the air rush out of his lungs.

                “Holy shit…” he whispered almost to himself and then scrutinized the bartenders large, coarse tucked in button down shirt, mountaineering pants and wool socks. “…You’re fucking Hemingway.” more to himself than his interlocutor.

                “That’s what they call me. That mean something to you? You read some of my work? Hopefully not that god awful poetry like the Austrian in Africa, in Der Querschnitt or whatever fool arthaus magazine it was. A writer has to start somewhere, you understand?”

                “I… understand… Yeah, I understand. No, I never read your poetry.”

                “Well good, that’s a relief. I’ll drink to that too, we can start on the right foot. To starting off on the right foot!” he leaned in, glass extended outwards.

                “To the right foot.”  Thomas said, though his speech was weak and he could barely comprehend what was going on.

                They clinked glasses again and swallowed their rum. A new thought barreled through Thomas’s mind.

                “But… you killed yourself… so, are you dead? …am I dead?!”

                “Hah! What the hell happened to the right foot?” he roared with laughter again, leaning back in his chair. He looked back at Thomas a moment later, the laughing passed, a keen look in his eye. he pointed at Thomas’s chest peremptorily, glass of rum in hand.

                “But I like a man who can get to the point. It’s damned respectable. Too few do it. …Yep, sure did. Had to go. Had to be done.”

                “Jesus…”

                “Well sure, but you knew that part. However, you – are you dead? Well, that is a more interesting question friend.”