“So you see, Steve, it was time for him to die,” says The Half Guinea to the Great Kowalski.
In fact, however, Steve is not great or even remarkable by Kyiv standards, but rather an all too ordinary North American English teacher plying his well-worn trade north of Nizhny Val, which separates tourist Podil from the Zhovten Cinema, the Orthodox synagogue and several vile if outwardly humorous nests of local alcoholics largely oblivious to happenings in the rest of the city.
“I see but no further than the horizons of my all too mortal fantasy, oh Guinea half short of a whole.”
“Well, then I’m gonna have to speak to you a little more plainly then, yeah?”
“Please do, kind sir, please do.”
“Step knew that it was time for him to die, but the problem was that the other writers… the guys behind Step, had no intention of writing him out of the plot… do you see?” says The Guinea through the V formation of his incisors, which make his canine teeth look like columns, and his premolars like box seats in a coliseum.
“We all die, though, don’t we? The Steps and Dickersons of this world are as destined to make that forlorn journey to the other side, as I am to pay for your drinks – methinks – yet another time.”
“All right, Shakespeare, take it easy there. I told you that I get paid on Tuesdays, and what day is today?”
“The day is that of Thor, or Thursday as we know it in modern English.”
“That’s right, and you see how that cool chick and her two musical buddies are keeping us entertained here for free while we speak… yeah, Stevie boy?”
“I do, indeed, I do.”
Indeed, the slippery Mediterranean, clad in a three-quarter length black leather jacket and heavy brown corduroy trousers, in the company of his Polish-American companion attired much less noticeably, are being duly amused at no cost by a young punk-like woman with a hardy voice that rings above the subtle beat of a box drum and rhythm guitar. The Guinea is enjoying a gin tonic, at the expense of the Great Kowalski, who sips a double uzvar from a straw.
There’s almost no one else in the place, although it’s early evening, and therefore there should be, unless the owners and managers of the Piano Café are completely oblivious to the financial repercussions of such a situation.
Nevertheless, Steve cannot be more satisfied with the setting for, you see, the lighted backdrop to the stage that the musicians are playing on reminds him of a magician’s trick – that is to say – the curtained box in the shape of an elevator from which the scantily clad lady or really just about anyone appears or disappears on the command of the magician in between the drawing or withdrawing of the curtain that serves as the door to the box.
To Steve, this backdrop, all glittery and quite frankly almost gaudy by modern standards, is like the door between life and death, where a person just appears and performs his bit in life and then somehow exits, totally unnoticed by the majority of people seated in the surrounding dark who in all fairness have their own concerns. The musicians in the Piano Café in Podil just walk onto and off the stage to perform their sets, but the backdrop still reminds Steve of the magician’s box and, thus, death.
“Mr. Guinea,” says the Great One after a long pause.
“Yeah, Stevie boy?”
“I don’t mind paying for your drinks… really.”
“Yeah, I know, I know… but don’t bring it up anymore all the same, ok?”
“Truly some things are best left unsaid… like the dead.”
“Yup, now you’re talking sense, Stevie,” says The Guinea, who’s staring down a young darkly dressed waitress – with no apparent sexual intentions, but rather in an attempt to figure out how she ticks, what she’s thinking, or (more precisely) what she’s worried about, where she will go after work, with whom or to whom and how she will eventually fall asleep on a cheap mattress to an even cheaper fantasy that everything will be all right in her life, that people care about her and that she has a “future” of some kind, somewhere, with some…
“Mr. Guinea?”
“Yeah, Stevie boy.”
“Did I understand you to mean that none of those characters… you know whom I mean… that none of them is ever going to die, oh why, oh why?”
“Can’t say, really. I only answer for The Checkout section, which I have to ultimately share with that guy…” He points to a grotesquely deformed midnight shopper making his way over-laden with plastic grocery bags from the 24-hour Furshet past the summer veranda of the Piano Café.
“Ok… and him, that man of mythical dimensions or monstrous proportions… that thing which I hesitate to call a man, beastly collection of muscular mass minus the form…?”
“Take it easy, Stevie – that’s my partner after all.”
“Very well, do tell. Will he die a death like you or I?”
“Like me – yeah, sort of… Listen, can you cover me for another gin tonic?
“I can and will, oh man of leather and grease.”
The Guinea sharpens his eyes, as if offended… certainly more by Kowalski’s attempts to describe him in rhyme than by being referred to, even if not directly, as a grease ball.”
“So you see Stevie,” The Guinea starts afresh, “don’t read too much into those plots and scenes. Just enjoy it for the form… like this music. Understand?”
“Maybe, Mr. Guinea, maybe, I see.”
“There really is no plot, just thin, almost ad-hoc connections between characters who are as real as anyone you’ll see drinking in here, or for that matter shopping in Furshet after hours. The times and places are also liquid, you see? That means there’s no beginning and thus no end, and thus no death, unless “the guys behind the guys just call it quits…”
The Half Guinea, June 21, 2013