The Brooklyn Rail

Four Shot Glasses from “Getting to One”

After conceptualizing, then creating, “One”—a bar where each patron must drink
alone—he became its most frequent patron.
—from “Ghost” by Eileen R. Tabios

One Eye Open

He sometimes wondered if he should wear an eye-patch to mask how his left eye hid under
its constantly lowered eyelid. But he couldn’t release dolphins from his memory and chose
to be transparent about his shuttered eye. Before retirement, he’d worked for a company
that turned dead bodies into ocean reefs—the company named itself “Eternal Reefs.”
Trawling oceanic depths, he stumbled across a pod of dolphins. He smiled at them,
manifesting the long ties between their species. The ancient Greeks and their gods
welcomed dolphins—emblazoned on their coins, they were sacred to both Aphrodite and
Apollo. In Hindu mythology, the Ganges river dolphin is associated with Ganga, the deity of
the Ganges river. The Boto, a species of river dolphin that resides in the Amazon River, are
believed to be shapeshifters, or encantados, capable of bearing children with humans. On
land, studying them, he stumbled across research revealing how dolphins are sufficiently
intelligent to be capable of self-awareness, the precursor to advanced thought processes
like meta-cognitive reasoning (thinking about thinking) attributed to humans. Events that
blackened sky before nighttime then transpired to interrupt his meditations on dolphins.
Those events explained the logic to how dolphins sleep—with one eye open. Those events
continued so that he, too, began sleeping with one eye open. Eventually, the only source of
succor left to him was “One,” a bar where patrons must drink alone. He felt relief at being in
a place where no one was allowed to bother him. But he’d seen how the affable dolphin
sleeps, and so drank his bourbon with one eye open. Paradoxically, one open eye made him
more watchful than two open eyes. Blindness, even in one eye, emphasizes one’s fragility
through exposure to events that randomly create collateral damage, whether from humans
who are the planet’s most dangerous species or panda cubs smaller than mice and each
weighing no more than four ounces. To look at a panda cub is to feel one’s heart constrict
from the ineffable so that, helplessly, tears begin to leak.

Polmost Spirytus Rektyfikowany Vodka

He woke from a dream of Chichen Itza where he’d followed the serpent descending the step
pyramid of the Kukulcan temple. When he left its last step, he stumbled out of the dream to
feel his cheek hardening against a wood counter. He raised his head to see the bartender
looking at him quizzically as she raised a bottle of Polmost Spirytus Rektyfikowany Vodka.
“You sure?” the bartender asked, flinging back wavy red hair over gleaming white shoulders
bared by a strapless top. The vodka was the world’s strongest alcoholic drink, courtesy of
Poland. At 192 proof, it was banned from even checked baggage traveling into the United
States. He’d excavated it in New Zealand from a wine cellar owned by a Silicon Valley
financier who built an escapist utopia on the island country. He’d filed one of the cases in
the bar for his private stash. “Not sure. But pour it anyway,” he replied. As she filled the
glass before him, he asked, “Do you know the word ‘seasteading’?” “Nope.” “It means
creating artificial islands.” He’d learned the term after punishing the financier for hiring
mercenaries to assassinate a Māori activist concerned about the safety of sea creatures. The
bartender snorted. “If folks want to live on islands, they should just come here.” He nodded
and tried to recall his dream—he was searching Chichen Itza for a mural depicting the
Mayan rain god Cháak. The mural featured Maya Blue, a color he needed to see to verify
he’d successfully recreated the technique for making it. He’d found the dye’s source in the
Ch’oj plant growing in Quintana Roo. But he’d had to persevere through tests that initially
disputed its existence. A cloth soaked in its dye first turned white; only prolonged
immersion turned it blue. “I was unnerved by that white smoke until the vibrant turquoise
broke through,” he explained to the bartender. “No one ever talks about how much fortitude
hope requires.” The redhead looked at him closely. “But you didn’t lose hope,” she said. “So
what are you doing here?” He looked around. He laughed. He was in “One,” a bar where each
patron must enter alone, drink alone, and leave alone. He laughed again as he waved at her
to refill his glass. “A toast to Polmost,” he said with a grin. “It made me forget I both lack
hope and am hopeless.”

The Road to Juliana

He wasn’t sleepy but yawned to regulate his body temperature—that was his token health
activity. Nor did he use the yawn for briefly closing his eyes—he was cognizant the eye’s
cornea is the only body part without a blood supply, getting its oxygen directly from air.
Logically, his glass contained tequila which, according to mice studies, may be best for
blood sugar balance than other alcoholic beverages due to the naturally occurring sugar in
its base of the agave plant. Other studies conclude tequila may not be as severe a
depressant as other types of alcohol. He wondered whether he’d drink as much tequila as
the amount of saliva he’d produce in his lifetime, a volume sufficient to fill two swimming
pools. These are the concerns of a former dietitian before becoming a regular at “One,” a bar
where each patron must drink alone. He looked forward to forgetting his past—at least his
thoughts will come to lessen their concern over health which was no longer relevant for his
life. His past reveals him as a victim of how the field of eating disorders presents a high
burn out rate for dietitians who constantly take in their clients’ anxiety and trauma.
Fuhgetaboutit! he thought. Learn about dogs, he ordered himself. Dogs benefit humans! This
was how he discovered that a Great Dane named Juliana once peed on an incendiary bomb
during World War II, thereby earning a Blue Cross Medal.

Non-Fungible Armadillo Shells

Soon, the waiters noticed how the man’s lips only stopped moving when he sipped from his
glass of Reyka vodka. Nearby, the television’s Talking Heads debated whether NFTs could
work as Pokemon cards, a discussion that involved the bored apes owned by Jimmy Fallon
and Paris Hilton as well as how Beeple’s NFT collage, Everydays: The first 5000 Days, sold at
Christie’s for $69 million, about $15 million more than what Monet’s Nymphéas sold for in
2014. One waiter approached the muttering man. But the man’s muttering was too low for
the waiter to hear clearly. So he moved closer to the experienced drunk and observed,
“Reyka is a uniquely Icelandic splash in the vodka world. The distiller makes its spirit from
a glacier’s pure spring water after the water passes through a 4,000-year-old lava field.” The
man turned his face towards the waiter who took a step back at seeing eyes not just
blood-red but with blood leaking from its sides. “TV people are idiots,” the man whispered.
“I turned a boy into a paraplegic because it’s impossible to turn an armadillo into an NFT.”
Such was how the waiters at “One,” a bar where each patron must drink alone, came to pity
the man with red eyes whose mutterings were simply a repetition of the one word, “idiot.”
Unlike many on the planet, armadillo shells are bulletproof. Outside the bar, the crumpled
receipt for an NFT that failed to shield a boy manifests flotsam and jetsam as it keeps being
picked up by a harsh wind that blows it down dim and smelly alleys leading nowhere.