The Brooklyn Rail

This story from Marie-Helene Bertino’s newest collection, Exit Zero, confirms her status as a master of slippery twilight, a true believer that if one sidles up to a threshold just right, she can pass through whatever veil keeps our logic in this universe separate from neighboring realities. The bar from Cheers, which aired right at the edge of twilight when I was growing up, seems like a reasonable enough place for our protagonist to end up after a long, epiphanic night. Here, in the titular bar, the sitcom’s beloved characters replay one episode in an endless loop. The stories in Exit Zero, like all of Marie-Helene Bertino’s fiction, climb to the rarest heights by combining intuition with emotional wisdom.

*

The year I gave college a try, one of the only professors I liked talked for what felt like forever about the false self. The part of one’s personality ruled by insecurity, scarcity, and vice. The false self loves a party, he said. The false self loves to talk. I remember these lectures—some of the only I attended—as if I were still in that sunken brown classroom, listening to laughter on the quad and longing for escape. This was before I started doing things on purpose, a time that professor would probably refer to as when the false self drove. I was still a barfly and did not connect my malfeasance to anyone else’s pain. I’m not proud of anything that happened the night it changed, which began, innocuously enough, when I drove to my mother’s house to steal.

It is the feast of Saint Mary Magdalene de’Pazzi and there are figurines of the bewildered-looking nun tucked behind gateposts, mailboxes, stoops. When my friends and I reach my mother’s house, her mussed hair and the pressed map of fabric on her face makes it clear she’d fallen asleep. Yet she ushers us in, asking do we want coffee? Piece of pie? Tea? She has decaf? My friends ply her with compliments on her robe, the house. They feign interest in the show she’s watching on the same television from when I was a kid, its gunked knobs only managing two channels.

“Is this the show with the retired baseball pitcher?”

“Cheers.” She pulls an envelope of cash from her pocket and hands it to me, face filled with hope.

I’d told her the money is for a school dance, invented of course. I knew she’d like the idea of me floating in crinoline layers grinding up on some law department dull-skin. I’d like to say I don’t count the money while everyone waits, as if she’d shortchange me.

These nameless friends wait on the lawn while I say goodbye. “Tomorrow,” my mother says. “Church?”

“Don’t I come every Sunday?” I grimace toward the audience of sympathizers I imagine follow me.

“You do.” She nods as if this is a reminder to herself that I’m not that bad.

“That’s right I do.”

As I leave, I catch her expression unfolding, energy surrendering, as if dealing with me requires a mask that slips farther the longer I stay. The punch of the recliner in the other room as she returns to her show is a dismissive sound signifying a crime that at nineteen I’m unable to articulate. Maybe it’s indignation over the persona she dons to deal with me, her only daughter, that stops me on the lawn. I reenter the darkened family room to the sound of canned laughter.

“Thanks, I guess.” For not saying a proper goodbye? For allowing me to leave angry.

Her baffled expression is lit by television. “What did I do?”

I let the screen door slam, join my friends, who are smoking cigarettes on the lawn, two easy hearts in the night.

 

We pile into my borrowed car and drive farther south in the city where the streets narrow. Dropping out had been surprisingly simple. I skipped a few classes, a few more, until college unhooked from me.

We arrive at the stadium bar where I’ve never once had a bad night and I’m thinking, I want to find a girl who looks correct in jeans, with a particular sag below her Donnas, our name for the bones above the pelvis.

A miracle happens and I find her within minutes. Over the next few hours my friends recede into the crowd smiling against the wood-paneled walls. Each time the door opens I glimpse the strands of lights that garland the street, left over from the commemoration of Mary, known for falling into an hours-long ecstatic state, the girl says . . . Sounds great, I say, and she tells me it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. A high like that can only be followed by desolation. She’s proud of the saint and her neighborhood, unable to hide her smile in the glances she offers me, at her beer. This loosens me, and I confess to lying about the money, my mother. I slap hands, buy drinks. I talk to everyone.

 

I wake on the floor of a dark room, phone and wallet gone, unsacred pulsing in my cheek. A switch plunges the room into a disagreeable light. A door and a shelf of books. A carpet of brown-and-red floral. What I slept against turns out to be a pool table.

Outside is an abbreviated hallway, the same sad sepia as the room. A bright bar shines at the end. I hear the din of talking. Two doors, marked LADIES and GENTS. A pay phone and framed newspaper clippings. A woman brushes past me, wearing a leopard sweater and a sequined barrette in the shape of a bow. I follow her to the bar, where the patrons welcome her with pleasant faces.

“Carla,” the bartender says. “You look spiffy. You going out tonight?”

“Yep,” she says. “Eddie and I are catching a movie. It’s his last night in town. He’s going out on the road again with the ice show.”

“Uh-oh,” says a man sitting at the bar.

She turns to him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh nothing. Well, you know. I got this image of chorus girls in skimpy costumes. Skating around. Lonely husband on the road far away from his connubial connubials. You’re not worried?” They speak in bright tones and the man looks familiar; I may have borrowed a quarter from him the previous night for the jukebox.

“Not at all,” the woman says. “I know my Eddie and I trust him completely.” Anxious for her date, she walks to the front door, stops, calls over her shoulder. “He’s the sweetest, most faithful loving husband in the whole world and I thank god every day he married me. If ever there was a one-woman man, it’s Eddie LeBec.”

A couple next to me converse in low tones. They ignore me when I ask for the time. I ask a suited man at the bar. Instead of answering, he yells to the woman, who pauses in the doorway. “Hey Carla, what movie you going to see?”

“Fatal Attraction.” She leaves and climbs a flight of stairs that leads to the street, visible through a low window. The door closes. The first man nods to the second man. The lights in the bar dim. The chatting people around me lean against the brick wall and close their eyes. The bartender sits and seems to nap. Those seated around the bar place their heads on it as if powering down.

“My friends left and I just woke up in the back,” I say to the first man. “Do you know what time it is?” Sliding his beer out of the way, he lays his cheek against the bar and closes his eyes.

In the darkness, a song plays above us on speakers I can’t see. A man sings. It is the theme song from Cheers, my mother’s favorite show. I recognize the actors though they look the same age as in the 1980s and ’90s when the show was broadcast. I wasn’t a fan but remember the bartender’s name, Woody, and that the actor who played him went on to achieve box office success.

“When is it?” I ask an attractive yuppie woman, but she is sleeping against her partner’s shoulder. “Where is this? I have to take my mother to church.” I realize I’m dreaming. I will wake up, probably on the floor of the previous night’s bar, get home, figure out the money later.

“Wake up,” I instruct myself. The song ends. The lights return.

Sam Malone, former famous baseball pitcher who ruined his career with drink, stands behind the bar with Woody. They study Sam’s wristwatch. A brunette woman enters and announces that she has just returned from a seminar in which she has learned how to speak effectively on her own behalf. When she is finished asserting herself, they count down from five. On one, the bar explodes into cheering. No one has been listening to the woman. They’ve been waiting for a specific moment to arrive. The people around me pump their fists and cheer.

“What’s going on?” I say, the same time the woman says, “What’s going on?” We are both ignored.

Wake up, I order myself.

Sam explains that today is the second anniversary of their only recorded win against a rival bar, Gary’s Old Town Tavern.

Gary’s staff had humiliated them in a variety of sports until two years before, when the Cheers bar bested them in bowling. Carla, the waitress who not five minutes before left to see Fatal Attraction, emerges from the back holding a trophy that she parades around the bar.

I take a seat while Sam calls Gary to remind him of the auspicious anniversary. “This moment of victory is frozen in time.” Hanging up, he realizes that the trophy is missing. Sam and Woody leave for Gary’s to retrieve the stolen trophy and moments later reenter carrying the trophy, broken in half. Cheers vows revenge. A series of pranks ensues. The gang becomes suspicious of everyone coming into the bar.

Wake up, I beg.

The scene ends. The lights dim and the people power down.

Interlude music plays.

My vision narrows and my breath comes out serrated. I fill a glass with water and press myself into a booth in the corner. I’ve had panic attacks but never a fully wrought sensory delusion. Yet this anxiety theater has no seam I can find. The walls reach the ceiling, the floors are finished, even the details, the pretzels in the bowl. The framed sports articles from Boston newspapers. My riddled brain has unspooled a perfect replica.

Dr. Frasier Crane and his wife, Lilith, enter arguing. Dr. Crane warns the crew against retaliation.

The pranks continue. Extras shift and move around the set, whispering nothing. I am able to touch and move things, but no one sees or hears me. Panicking, I lose track of the storyline and am only barely aware of Gary entering, feigning a truce with the brunette, then filling her office with sheep. Carla appears from the back room, dressed in black and holding a toolbox.

At the end of the episode, the cast pumps and whistles around the bar cheering “We’re number one.”

“Pretty weenie,” says Al, a callback to an earlier joke. Everyone looks knowingly at him and at one another.

The lights dim. The ensemble closes their eyes. The theme song plays again, a lone, plaintive oboe replacing the singer. When it finishes, the lights go out. Bright sax erupts from the speakers. The lights return, and Carla emerges from the back room, wearing the leopard sweater and sequin bow.

Woody says, “Carla, you look spiffy. You going out tonight?” The episode begins again.

 

When Dr. Crane and Lilith enter arguing, I run through the front door but at the top of the stairs am halted by a brick wall. I try escaping through the back window, hurl a pilsner, climb the steps to Melville’s, the seafood restaurant whose entrance is inside the bar. I see a reservations desk but, reaching the last step, find myself on a wooden platform, a staircase on the other side leading back down to the set.

“Pretty weenie.” The episode ends. Lights down. Lights up. The episode begins.

 

As I’ve done with every hard thing in my life—father, friendships—I become a student, analyzing my situation with the acute care of self-pity. I memorize and inspect every set piece for exit, the phony Tiffany lamps like jeweled mushrooms, ashtrays, bouquets of red straws arranged along the bar, two ferns, antlers. I’m in a later episode, after the popular character of Coach has died and been replaced by Woody, the mild-mannered Indiana boy, and after the fussy blond woman is replaced by the brunette who is fussy in a different way.

this is a square house, a sign reads. please report any unfairness to the proprietor.

An hour of implied time passes when Sam and Carla go to Gary’s to dole out dribble glasses then return to the bar. Between Carla leaving on her mission and Gary visiting the bar to admit defeat, an entire evening, morning, and afternoon “pass.” Who is running lights and sound? Who is replenishing the bowls of olives and pretzels? I develop and nourish theories on my captors. I rule out the girl who looked good in jeans, my friends, even my mother, as time passes in half-hour increments. The actors show no signs of being complicit. Their makeup remains fresh. Their hair poised in the gravity-defying styles of the 1980s.

The loop is predictable and after several hours fades into background static. Certain phrases refuse to dematerialize, buoys in a monotonous sea. this moment of victory is frozen in time, Sam tells Gary during the anniversary phone call. it’s really rather machiavellian, Dr. Crane says about the final prank. When Carla asks why Norm and Cliff are seated at the bar like a bunch of wimps, Norm says, that’s what wimps do. Each replay is launched by carla, you look spiffy and finishes with pretty weenie. These phrases continue as I sleep under the pool table, marking literal and implied time in my dreams, only to awake in agony to find myself again in rerun.

 

A stranger from Framingham enters the bar. He wears a gentleman’s suit, thinning hair swept to the side in worry. He has stopped in for a beer because, he explains, his wife is getting surgery at a nearby hospital. The gang circles him, assuming he’s been sent by Gary to Vaseline the benches or unscrew the salt shakers. “Sick wife, yeah right,” they keen, they arrow. The stranger from Framingham does not understand why he is being viewed with suspicion. With the hope of finding relief from the devastation of loss, he has accidentally wandered into a bar whose denizens are engaged in a prank war with a rival bar. He speaks with the exhaustion of grief. He leaves the bar as the regulars snarl.

 

During this time, the sheep are the closest thing to friends I have, though they are only present for ten minutes at a time. I pet and confide in them. I miss Philadelphia, I tell them. They are on a shorter loop. One nuzzles another, prompting a third to take a step back. Every few moments the same nuzzle, the same retraction. I don’t fault them for their predictability. They are more reliable than my human friends. The fussy brunette enters and, seeing them, throws the papers she’d been holding into the air. The sheep disappear when the door slams. One moment I am surrounded by the softly lowing, dung-smelling bodies of animals, the next I am alone.

I pick up the bar phone. No dial tone.

The episode contains twelve entrances and eleven exits through the front door. During each one, I attempt escape only to encounter the same brick walls. I vary timing, speed, approach. Over and over, the set returns me to itself. I feel every inch of the brick walls for hinges to reveal hidden rooms, but the moorings hold.

“I’m lonely,” I tell the sheep, but they are caught in their own loop and cannot help.

I hurl bowls of olives against the wall. I spend a full minute screaming during the phone call scene. No matter how I disturb the set, it subsumes my efforts and replaces itself. Beers return within seconds. No matter how I muscle the actors, they return to their intended path.

it’s really rather machiavellian.

that’s what wimps do.

I keep track of the replays by carving hash marks on a back wall with a bar knife. I reach 1,500 episodes, twenty-seven minutes each. Almost a month of human time spent eating bar olives and pretzels, the replenishment of which I no longer wonder about. Instead, I agonize over my real life, proceeding unmanned. Un-me-ed. Is it progressing in real or sitcom time, or in some unknown, third way? In leaps, in gasps. If I ever return, will decades or weeks have passed?

The stranger from Framingham is the only character who is motivated by an unselfish goal. Every episode I wait for him, mouth his lines, and am sad when he leaves unexpectedly, inevitably. I think of his wife in the ICU, his attempt to curb anxiety, thwarted by the suspicion sparked by childish pranks. “Do you have children?” I ask him. “Do you enjoy watching movies?” He never answers. In the manner of unrequited relationships, I project my desire onto the blank screen of him. Oh, stranger from Framingham. Your hours at the hospital are torment. You are a hardworking man who has had one extramarital partner. You worry that this flagging of morals has cancered your wife.

“I’m trapped in a rerun,” I tell him. “Please tell your wife.”

 

*

 

Three-quarters of the way through every replay, responding to an internal mechanism the way daylilies activate in sun, Carla appears in the back room in her soldier outfit, then waits by the pay phone for her cue. She will exit through the front room and travel the implied three blocks to Gary’s, where she will tap into his cable box so he is unable to broadcast the night’s big fight. Instead, his bar patrons will see a taped video of Cliff and Norm, pretending to host an evening of poetry. I’ve given up hissing at her. I can touch but not move her.

 

I am depressed, insecure, and petulant. My theories break and bend. I spend most of my time under the pool table, listening to the beats, marking time by Carla’s entrances and exits. Are people at home watching this episode in some predawn rerun seeing me weep next to the overly rouged group of yuppies whispering nothing? If only I’d been a better daughter. I could sway on the dance floor with someone upstanding and not hang out in a bar with losers.

 

One half hour, Dr. Crane “sees” me.

The gang retreats but he keeps his gaze trained on me. “Who are you?”

I tell him my name and my situation and ask if he can help me escape. “I want to get home to my mother.”

“Many times, we speak a different language from our parents. We address our mothers from a stubborn set of assumptions and never really try to translate into their understanding. This is akin to executing perfect tennis strokes on different courts. Gives a whole new meaning to mother tongue.” He chuckles softly.

“I’ll try any stroke you want if I can get out of here.”

“You are trapped in your circumstances. We must be wary of what we find ourselves repeating. What is it you’re attempting to obfuscate? Finish this sentence: Repeating behavior makes me feel … ”

“Can you get a message to someone when you go back to your apartment?”

“A grace note is harmonically inessential, yet sometimes it’s the only way to hear that a pattern has been broken.”

“Please help,” I say.

“A potentially unending cycle of juvenile retaliation could only lead to a kind of mob mentality which will ultimately result in a regrettable act.” He’s speaking to the group, who have remained frozen while we speak. Lights up.

The episode continues.

 

The episode needs nothing from me, so it becomes as innocuous as a public park I spend my days in. One afternoon during the final scene, as the gang cheers we’re number one, I pick up the bar phone.

A woman’s voice says, “Melville’s? Would you like to make a reservation?”

“Yes,” I say. “God, yes.” “For what time?” “Six?”

The line goes dead. I scream hello.

During the next episode I pace the bar. When the gang celebrates their victory, I pick up the phone. Again, the woman asks if I’d like a reservation. I try for one at noon. The line dies, leaving me devastated, invigorated.

I spend the next few episodes trying different reservation times. Each one elicits a hang up. I puzzle out my options in the pool room. When would I realistically be able to eat dinner at Melville’s in the real time of the show?

Carla enters and, like she has thousands of times, checks the toolbox, left to right, clamps the lid, moves into the hallway to wait by the pay phone for her cue, holding the videocassette of Norm and Cliff’s phony evening of poetry.

Evening of poetry! There is only one implied evening in the real time of the show when the patrons of Gary’s Old Town Tavern expect to watch the fight but are duped.

In the bar, the cast is powered down before the last scene. I wait at the edge, a girl poised to jump into double Dutch. Finally, inevitably, again, the conflict resolves and the gang reaches their sad-sack conclusion.

They cheer, “We’re number one!” I pick up the phone.

“Melville’s?” the woman says. “I’d like to make a reservation.” “For what time?”

“Last night at 7:00 p.m.”

“Very good, ma’am. We’ll see you then.”

I hang up, stunned by success. I parade around the bar with the gang, high-stepping and wagging my hips, until the oboe signals the end of a full arc of human experience, and we return to our places of rest.

 

Since I am convinced this is my last replay, every joke seems well-timed and hilarious. I guffaw at the punch lines. When the stranger from Framingham enters, he is a memory of a former self who once loved him. Goodbye to that self. Goodbye, Woody. Goodbye, pretty weenie. These people never knew me but by sheer time accrued, they are my colleagues.

Carla waits in the hallway for her third-act cue. I whisper, “Goodbye, Carla. I hope Eddie returns from his business trip soon.”

Her eyes remain on the bar. Her smell, Halloween candy and mahogany. Her heart thrums in a vein that lines her throat. This is as satisfactory a goodbye as any other. Hearing Sam’s whistle, she answers into the bar. I follow. “Toolbox, check. Tape, check.” The brunette’s familiar protests of illegality. Carla exits. The remaining cast powers down and I climb the interior steps to Melville’s. The reservation desk shines at the top. The wink of glass on tables. Fear slows me. Will I again find only a platform and a staircase forcing me back to set? But as I advance the desk grows sharper, the way it would in a set that was unending—the real world, I mean.

“Welcome to Melville’s,” the woman says. “Do you have a reservation?”

My legs fail, I clutch the podium for support. Yes, I cry. The door to the street is mere yards away. I run, flinching, anticipating a brick wall or canopy of hands dragging me back. I wrench it open, leap through, and find myself on a city street in a perfect, ordinary afternoon. Around me, nothing but Boston. Cars pass. Two identical men in contemporary clothing jog by, startling me. A child dashes his leg against a pole. Satin air and the honking of horns and the kid, once the shock wears off, crying. Trees in a park a few blocks away. Random, spontaneous life! A cab squeals to a halt because I have stepped in front of it. The driver smiles into the rearview mirror when I slide into the back seat.

“Can you see me?” I say.

Her brow furrows. “I can see you just fine.”

The relief at hearing unscripted words. I want to talk and talk. “When is it?” I ask and she tells me it’s June.

“June!” I say. “Thank god.” I sink farther into the seat, watching the city stream by. Unchoreographed people jogging. My mother will make me grilled cheese with avocado and sprouts. I will tell her what happened and everything will return to normal.

“Must have been some day,” the cabdriver says. “Where to?”

There’s a narrow cobblestone street, I tell her. In the city of Philadelphia. Can she take me there? “That’s where my mother lives.”

But as we drive, worry grows. Will I find her, still sixty-five, or will she have aged and died, wondering why I abandoned her? If she is alive, can I be certain that where I am finding her is the genuine article, or will I be in some other Philadelphia that has spun off the world that’s kept me captive? Is my mother asleep on the couch dreaming me while in real life I am ambling up to her house with my detrimental friends? Will this cab exit the turnpike to find a pile of cardboard boxes and a sign reading city here with an arrow, a brick wall, the edge of some television writer’s line of thinking?

Philadelphia, incredibly, exists. When we see its gray hulking mass spread along the horizon my eyes fill with tears. We wind through its cobblestone streets, hushed in twilight. Nearing my mother’s house, I am filled with sudden, leaden woe. I can’t fathom why I directed the driver to this place. “On second thought,” I say, “there’s a bar a few blocks away. I’ll have a drink then make my visit.”

As if to pacify her, I add, “I promise.”

Why can’t I look straight at it? Mother: A trembling, dark spot. Swatting at flies with a rolled TV Guide. She’ll find me filthy and manic. She who has never entered a bar, let alone longed for one. Yet I don’t want redemption. I want a cool place where people speak with the gentle tone of colleagues. We don’t know much about each other but are kinder than family; offering a quarter for the jukebox, a light remark, a joke that doesn’t cut too deep, a glass of whiskey to settle my relentless, shattered nerves.