He looked around the bar, at the dozen or so other patrons. Young, all of them, and loud. The tables covered with empty glasses. Laughter that broke like a bomb, a whole table falling apart at a joke, following it with a toast. When was the last time he’d sat in a group like that, been lost in a conversation, lived only for a drink?
The selfish focus, the certainty that this moment was all there was, it was familiar. When he’d been eighteen and a soldier, drinking with his buddies had been pursued with the same relentless energy, the same showy self-determination. But there were differences. Everyone was thinner, with the tight-fleshed look of people who didn’t drink enough water, spent a lot of time in the sun. The clothes were light and similar, very functional. Earlier, at the border, he’d thought that the place looked more like the past than the future, and he’d half expected to see big hats and cowboy boots, a generation playing at an older role. He’d been half right; there were a lot of hats, but the boots were all function and bore the marks of hard wear. None of it seemed to follow a fashion, or at least not one he recognized.
“No beer signs,” he said.
She cocked her head.
“A bar like this anywhere else, there would be beer signs. You know, the old-school logos, the Clydesdales. And even the new beers, they make signs that consciously reflect the ones that came before. Because that’s the way it’s done. You brew a beer, you make a sign for it. It’s like a pool table in a bar, even though no one really knows how to play pool anymore. Our grandparents shot pool; we get drunk and whack at the balls with warped sticks. No one thinks about it, but it’s nostalgia. It’s a sense of the past, of the way things are done.”
“Like classic rock,” she said. “I could go the rest of my life without hearing ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ again.”
“There you go. I mean, the Rolling Stones are great. But Credence Clearwater, or the Allman Brothers for the ten-thousandth time? Is anybody moved by their music? Does anybody even hear it? It’s nostalgia.”
“Cars,” Shannon said. “Most people live in cities, don’t drive more than a few miles through traffic. So why do car companies keep making big cars that go fast and use a ton of gasoline? What they should be is light and electric and easy to park.”
“I don’t know about that,” Cooper said. “I like big cars that go fast.”
“Old-world thinking,” she said, smiling. “Another round?”
Outside the windows the world turned gold and orange and finally violet.
When they left he was feeling good, not wasted but certainly on the way, the world slippy around the edges. She hailed them an electric cab and gave the driver instructions. Their knees touched in the backseat of the tiny car. Martinis before dinner, and then steaks, an inch-thick rib eye crusted in rock salt and black pepper and grilled a perfect medium-rare. Every bite made him want to melt onto the plate.
He noticed that people around the restaurant noticed them, marked them as tourists, but there didn’t seem to be any threat in it. Newton got its fair share of tourists, and probably thought of it as exporting goodwill.
She ordered a bottle of wine with dinner and matched him glass for glass. Things got hazier, the world shrinking. He knew he was drunk, didn’t care.
Sometime later they were in a basement club. Sleek plastic furniture and low tables, a smoky haze sweet with marijuana. On a small stage a three-piece band—bongo, violin, guitar—played a strange, highly rhythmic melody somewhere between reggae and jazz, the musicians all heading off on complex tangents like mathematical equations, the sounds nearly, but not quite, discordant. Brilliants, he was sure, musicians who could play anything they’d ever heard once and yet never wanted to play the same thing twice, bored with a pattern explored. Shannon was in the bathroom, and he leaned back, listening to the music. The smarter plan for the night would have been to stay in her apartment, study maps and read Epstein’s biography, but he couldn’t make himself care.