Day 199: On being LOST

Home from another dull, interminable Monday close. Serve customers, sort breaks, post social media events, count the tills, take out the bins. On and on it swirls. The back of the bin store, reaching for bags wedged between the taps of the outdoor bar shoved in there because there’s nowhere else for it to go. The bin bag catching on the tap, tearing, disgorging its soggy viscera slopping onto the floor. The warm, vegetal aroma hitting the back of my nose...

I straighten. Haven’t I been here before? Wasn’t I just doing this?

I always take out the bins, but there are always bins needing to be taken out. I always count the tills, but the tills are never counted.

Why is it always nighttime?

Why are these customers always asking for the same three drinks, wearing the same slack-jawed expressions, making the same one and only joke they seem to know?

How long have I worked in this bar? Now I think about it, I can’t remember a time I didn’t work in this bar.

Has it always been like this?

FLASHBACK!

I’m dressed in an expensive suit, working at a law firm in the city. Everything is smart and well-lit. My partner, whose name is probably Jason, or Brett, wants me to come in on a scheme he has been cooking up to embezzle funds from a charity drive we have been overseeing. I know the scheme is morally wrong, but I’ve got my kid to look after, and he’s going to be kicked out of school if I can’t make payments on his education fees...

END FLASHBACK!

OK, I know this. I know what’s going on.

“I know what’s going on,” I shout. “I’ve figured it out.”

The scene pauses. Customers freeze, glasses halfway to lips. The young bartender, leaning back on a stool in boredom, stops in midair, hovering on two stool legs completely still.

A man dressed all in white, with a neat beard, looking avuncular, wise, steps out from behind a bottle display.

“We’ve been waiting for you to arrive,” he says. “We’ve been waiting a long time.”

“I’m here now.”

“So you’ve figured it out?”

“I think so. It took me a while, but I think I know, now. I’m... “

“Yes?”

“I’m trapped in a long-running glossy American television series, aren’t I? One where the characters find themselves in some sort of non-denominational purgatory after a terrible disaster in the first episode, and in which they now must spend each subsequent episode with their backstories explored in flashback as we learn of the emotional baggage they carry, while they simultaneously deal with parallel plots in the present day that draw out that emotional baggage and allow some minor closure to be found while still providing enough of a resetting of status quo to keep the show running for six to ten seasons. That’s why everything around here is so SYMBOLIC and METAPHORICAL. Why I always see the same recurring faces week after week. Why that smoke monster has been chasing me around the cellar for the past three years.”

“Well,” the man in white says. “No. Actually we’re here to clean the extractor fans in the kitchen.”

His two colleagues, also in white overalls, step out from the corridor. They’re carrying bags of cleaning supplies.

“We’ve been waiting ages for you to let us into the kitchen,” one of them says.

“Oh,” I say. “But… what about the smoke monster?”

“That’ll be the extractor fans, I expect. We’ve not been down to do ‘em in yonks.”

“And everyone freezing?”

“Ahem,” the customer nearest me says. “We were just a bit shocked, is all. You shouting that you knew what was going on like that. It really was rather loud.”

“Oh. Right. I see.

I let the workmen into the kitchen. I show them around. And then, in back of the storeroom, I find a strange hatch, sealed shut, with some sort of bizarre code scratched into the…

“That’ll be the fuse box,” one of the workmen shouts.

Dammit. I just cannot catch a break round here.