It was at the edge of town, naturally, but it was also at the edge of the universe, in its own pocket, neither here nor there, so it may as well be called its own dimension: a place where things are either seen or not seen, depending on your mood, your degree of boredom, your distraction level; one moment you might spot its dim, amber, old-fashioned filament lighting, and any second it might flicker away again, out of sight, forgotten like a TV tray slipped under the sofa, gathering dust bunnies.
Dead manuscripts occupied the bar, of course, and anyone who dropped in there for any amount of time knew enough not to pay any attention; you learned to avoid eye contact or sudden movements in there, and particularly you learned not to read titles — a title could suck you right down into the maw; you could get waylaid for hours by a desperate, broken-down manuscript if you scanned a cover page, buttonholed by the thing until it spilled out its whole wretched story — badly told of course, otherwise it wouldn’t be in there — and invariably, somewhere along during the telling, the grubby-fingered manuscript would forget where the hell it was in its story; it would have to double back, retrace the narrative, sometimes to the beginning, and you’d be left gazing at the wall clock behind the manuscript in numbed agony, or slipping a sly finger up to your jacket sleeve, to peek at your watch.
Oh, the horror of abandoned manuscripts! The ones that ran out of gas by page 57 or 123; stuff that was scrawled down at 2:30 a.m., flush with drunken elation, half-believed-in ideas that, given a few pages of actual flesh the next morning, were immediately deemed to be badly in need of strangling. A vast catalogue of files begun — even given a title slug in the flush of new birth — then abandoned; yet somehow never trashed or deleted; often they were printed out, to see if the true light of day on the true page could magically confer substance, bestow actual life force. Hardly ever killed off with finality, though, these manuscripts; just kept around, out of sight like crazy relatives or drunkard uncles.
And those weren’t even the worst. The worst were the finished ones, and these held court at the back of the bar, in dim booths before which no patron dared pass; nobody ever crossed the floor, for fear of getting collared, a sure goner. Finished manuscripts were the worst because they thought they had a home, someone who believed in them, long, long ago. They still had hope. It was pathetic. And yes, the thickness of those manuscripts pointed to the technical truth in their claim: someone had indeed spent hours, months, years, hammering out those thousands of pages. The parting with such manuscripts, once they were finished and the author realized they were complete shit, worthy only of a back drawer, a dark cubbyhole somewhere, was bittersweet: the author buried the thing like it was someone else’s dead body, a back-alley abortion. Thinking about it was painful; and no, it would never be sent out into the world. The shame of it was almost too much to bear. If there was a fireplace in the Dead Manuscripts Bar, that would have been the appropriate sendoff for those fat, deluded tomes: out in a blaze of glory, a pyre of flame rather than sunk in a booth, reminiscing.
What did dead manuscripts have to say to one another? Not much. Most were deep in their cups, alone at their stools, uninterested in companionship; though scraps were reeled off by some, of course: bits of plot thrown out here and there, reenacted for the air. But, lacking the authors’ endorsement, these fragments had the quality of wisps of smoke, curling into blue question marks in the amber lighting, evaporating into nothing.
Behind the bar, a knowing tender with deep eye-bags (let’s call him Joe) plies the knot-whorled surface with a rag; rumpled, snuffling, eyeing his tips (which never amount to much, because dead manuscripts are, by definition, already spent) and contemplating the wisdom of selling off this particular mailing address in non-space and buying a bungalow in Florida instead. Such idle thoughts, like the cul-de-sac ideas buried inside these manuscripts, never get far, usually obliterated by a splash of soda water, a halfhearted bar fight, the tossing of yet another empty Scotch bottle into the trash bin.
Sometimes though, once in a while, a manuscript manages to find its legs, to reel its way toward the bathroom. Inside the privy, it is sometimes possible for one to pry open a window jamb and crawl its way out; there, poised above the vacuum, a rogue manuscript may discover that it is cold and infinitely more empty outside, but at least there is the possibility of freefall, of gut-rushing terror, instead of mere, stupefying dead calm.
You might even be reading one of those now.