The lightning strike is so close it raises the hair on the nape of my neck like porcupine quills. The crash of thunder is nearly simultaneous, rattling the fillings in my few good teeth. I know something bad is about to happen to me, and, unlike earlier today when I collected my $450 life savings from the trustee at the Rescue Mission and crossed the bridge from El Paso to Ciudad Juarez hoping some drug-crazed assassin would quickly put an end to my misery, I want to live now.
I'm curled in the fetal position in a dark alley behind a bar called "Volver a Empezar," my eyes clamped tightly together. But every lightning flash strobes straight into my brain, leaving the impression that I'm seeing things through closed lids. I'm not exactly drunk any longer from all the alcohol I consumed at another establishment earlier in the night, but I feel as if I'm in a drug-induced half-stupor, brought on, I believe, by the strange concoction the bartender here mixed up for me less than an hour ago.
The incredibly tiny bar was totally devoid of customers when I walked in. Even the bartender was absent when I mounted a stool upholstered in dirty red vinyl, a gaping split down its middle sutured with gray duct tape. Never before had I seen such a collection of oddly-shaped liquor bottles sitting on shelves in front of a wall mirror, the liquid inside of each glowing as if illuminated from behind.
The bartender entered through a green and red bead curtain from the back room. He was a slight man whose wide smile revealed two gold-capped eye teeth. “Buena’ noche, senor,” he said.
“Buenas noches. Una cerveza, por favor.”
“Si, si, a beer,” he said, “but you look like un hombre who could use a new start.”
“You can say that again.”
“You look like un hombre who could use a new start.”
In the mirror behind the bar I could see the peculiar look on my face.
“I can make an especial drink just for you,” he said, “one that will bring a finish to a tired, old life. Just fifty dolares.”
“Fifty American dollars?”
“Si.”
“That’s one expensive drink. Muy caro.”
“Yes, but it will do the trick.”
I figured if he was going to poison me for fifty bucks, he’d have the other four hundred soon enough. But what did it matter? I had come here tonight to end things.
“Why not?” I said. “Porque no?”
He took a highball glass from beneath the counter and set it on the bar. Then, two-by-two, he removed four bottles from the shelves behind him, each with a different, gemstone-colored liquid inside. Ruby. Amber. Jade. Onyx. In that order he poured a shot of each into the glass, the entire contents turning jet black when he added the last. With a foot he nudged a small, three-step stool backwards, then climbed to the top so he could reach a bottle that stood at the center of the top shelf, a bottle whose opal-colored liquid could best be described as iridescent white. I watched transfixed as he brought it down, pulled out the cork and began to pour. I was certain that the most the opal beverage could do was to dilute the inky highball liquid to a lighter shade of black. But when he filled the glass to the brim, the entire contents turned suddenly into a mystical ice blue.
Pushing the glass toward me, he said, “You must drink it straight down.”
Raising the glass toward my mouth I paused to smell the potion, surprised that it had the vaguest vanilla bean scent, and I was immediately transported back to the days of my youth when, while my mother baked cookies, I would stand sniffing from the tiny bottle of vanilla extract as if it were some kind of potent drug. This pleasant memory allowed me to place the glass to my lips and down the beverage in several long swallows. Oddly, the liquid was completely flavorless.
When I finished and set the glass down on the bar, the bartender said, “Fifty dolares, por favor.”
I took five tens out of my limp, brown-leather wallet and pushed the bills toward him across the bar.
“Gracias,” he said. “Now you must leave, in order for things to begin again.”
But when I stood up from the barstool and began to turn toward the front door, he said, “No—you must leave by a different exit.”
He gestured for me to circle behind the bar and to follow him through the bead curtain into the back room, which was pitch dark except for the aura of light surrounding a large ivory candle sitting on a triangular table in the center of the space. If he hadn’t gone ahead of me and opened the back door I’d have never suspected one of being there. When he opened it the door nearly blew out of his grasp due to the force of a wind that had sprung up while I was inside. There had been no forecast of a coming storm, and I couldn’t believe how quickly the weather had turned. As soon as I was in the alleyway he closed the door behind me, and I was on my own.
Suddenly I was weaker than ever before, and unable to walk more than a few feet. I found a bed of discarded cardboard boxes and lay down to rest. The tempest raged around me, a hurricane of swirling dust, discarded newspapers and Styrofoam cups. I closed my eyes and prayed for a quick death.
Now I open them in time to see a jagged bolt of lightning strike a telephone pole at the corner of the alley and the street, a liquid waterfall of electricity flowing down the pole and spilling out in my direction. The silver river of doom rushes in slow-motion toward me, and I stare helplessly as a splinter of fire suddenly arcs off of the surface to enter the left toe of my shabby boot, straightening my body from fetal-pose innocence to cadaverous rigidity. What a way to go, I think, just as the last meaningful word spews out of my twisted lips: “Shit!”
