I walk into the bar of the Beer Cellar. It's a long time since anyone used this place: ten years is more than enough for the bloodstains on the walls to have dried.
A discarded didgeridoo lies behind the bar, and there's a mirrored surface behind a row of bottles of drink, each covered in a thick layer of dust. My hair didn't have grey streaks when I was in here last. Some of the wine is still unopened: there being nothing wrong with a bit of extra vintage, I fumble for a corkscrew. It takes a bit of finding, and the drawer is jammed, but eventually I pull it open and find it, in its old spot again.
A short while later, the heavy, heady scent of a good saperavi floats out of the opened bottle. I don't think I knew what a saperavi was when I was last here, but as this place mutates to its inhabitants, the drink I think of now is here - and always was, a shared imaginary having little relationship to fussy notions like causality.
We held bar fights in here once: indeed, this place exists entirely as the scope for a bar fight. What does that mean, twelve years after the first beer was ordered and nine after the last punch was thrown? What scope does the Bar Fight Arena have when all that remains is a weary-eyed academic sipping wine where the excitement used to be? Is the fight over, or is this duel between philosophy and ennui now the true scope of the bar fight? Was a fight with no winner really a fight to start with?
I sip the wine. And leave a crowbar by the door - just for old times' sake.
