100 Proof

“I like your stories,” he said. “There’s a lot that happens between the words.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Sometimes they are only four sentences,” he said. “Sometimes I want just two sentences more.”

The whole experience left no physical marks, but I felt like a boxer after a fight, swollen-eyed and raw-fisted. The rounds, all of which seemed to last so much longer than three minutes, were nothing but deflected body blows, gloves held in front of my face, side-to-side glances in search of an unseen exit.

I knew I’d return to the ring time and again, chasing the title that has always eluded me. But at that moment, I most needed water, bandages, liniment, and the locker room’s cool floor.

Somewhere within that first kiss, she tasted it: the memory of a cigarette smoked hours earlier. Though she tried to explain away her desire, she knew her weaknesses: Peaty scotch, a red wine flavored by wildfires the year the grapes were harvested, char-grilled meat. Her favorites always involved the taste of fire, and that was why, when given the opportunity, she went back to him for more.

He became an unsolvable riddle, a math problem missing one key variable. I puzzled over each small action as clues to the obscured whole, but circled back to the inevitable conclusion: There is mystery that creates romance, and then there is mystery that clouds it. Some conundrums are, simply, irresolvable.

“He disrespected your intelligence when he lied to you,” said one friend. “That’s all the answer you need.”

“Another glass of the Coturri?” asked the waitress.

“Of course,” I said. “If it ever goes off the menu I’m going to be so sad.”

“And it will,” said the waitress. “And the next year’s vintage is going to be totally different.”

“I know, I know,” I said, already mourning the loss of this fire-seared wine. “Nothing is permanent.”

“I can see your mind processing,” she said. “I can tell you’re not entirely here.”

It was true, indeed, that I had a song playing in one corner of my mind, a to-do list forming in another, a scan of the room happening in a third, and in the fourth, an escape plan developing.

“Perhaps you need to learn to be here, now,” she said. “Perhaps you need an Om moment before we begin.”

Sadness, which once pooled like mercury around my feet and poisoned me slowly, rolls back when starved for attention. Watching the thermometer only slows its progress toward normal. One year, then two, then three, and I burn cooler by degrees with each turn of a calendar page. Eventually, it will be as if fever never overtook me, as if delusion twins dream, twins memory.