Lycopene

      The way in is a door, encased in excessive coats of green paint, with eight panels of dusty, beveled glass set in its wood from top to bottom. Once past this rich Blarney portal, you must mount a set of wooden steps - there are only three, but they are obnoxiously steep. After you've climbed them, your heart starts fiddling around in your chest. The building is already fuming with radiator heat, even though the temperature outside has only just ebbed below sixty degrees. This, together with your rapid heart rate and the perpetually sodden look of the lacquered black walnut wall paneling, makes you feel as though you've been placed alive inside your future coffin. You pause at the end of the polished bar, gripping an inexplicable brass rail that is screwed down along its length. There, you catch your breath, gazing at the cold light of an elongated bulb, distorted behind a fluted shade of deliberately imperfect glass.

     In a few moments, you feel cooler - cool enough to live, at least. The flush has withdrawn from your face. The sweat has left your temples. Your pinpoint of vision expands and, suddenly, you see that the bartender is standing before you, hands pressed flat against his stomach in expectant freeze-frame. He has been there for a time. Now that you are emotionally available, his eyes hook onto yours.

     "Get you started with a drink?"

     The words take you by surprise. A drink. You hadn't expected that option. Your eye falls on the legion of bottles behind the bartender, arrayed on their mirrored terraces. What shall it be? Undoubtedly, a cocktail of some kind. But this is a world about which you know exceedingly little. You don't even drink.

     "I'm thinking I'd like a cocktail... Anything you'd recommend?"

     The bartender is already nodding before your sentence can conclude. He searches on high with his eyes, looking around the stamped tin ceiling for a justifiable house choice; the design there, repeated in an unending grid, is a bouquet of wild fruits and tufts of dandelion, hemmed in at all four corners by full moons, whose graphic craters catch the low light of the bar, casting shadows into their own depths.

     "Ah! We do our own take on an old-fashioned. It's a favorite here. How does that sound?"

     An 'old-fashioned.' Sounds safe... institutional. The name alone makes it seem like something standard and warm-blooded on which one could sip incrementally for the rest of the night. The bartender has already fetched an artisan-blown tumbler from somewhere in the soaked hells beneath the bar, giving it a burst of sterilizing steam from some unseen nozzle embedded in his work surface.

     You agree to the suggestion out of inertia.

     Yielding to the turbulent process of your drink's preparation, you shrug your shoulders out of your jacket and let its tan leather pool in the gap between your spine and the tufted padding of the stool's back. Just a minute longer, and the barman is placing a molasses-colored potion between your stark, venous hands, with a piece of petrified wood for a coaster. You see an orange rind floating at the top, stained in the delicious bath. There appear to be cherries, too. For a moment, you wonder why you've never tried to be an alcoholic.

     "Cheers!" says the bartender when you raise the glass to your lips.

    The liquid sluices into your mouth - a bitter arrival, but not unpleasant. The orange rind, a sooty barge on an inner-city river, looms near your lips as you permit a couple of ice chips and one withered cherry to enter the lock of your buccal canal. With your eyes closed, you position the sweet deflated orb between your molars and bite through its brittle crust.

     Then the flavors seize. You can taste something that reminds you of a nightmare in a yellow room; it is the taste of a magnified moon suddenly glaring at you through parting clouds.

     The sweat is back at your temples, bracing your skull in a chilly band that no amount of radiator heat will assuage. You search for the bartender, who is somehow very remote now. He seems occupied with another customer, but a circular boundary - velveteen black - has begun to encroach upon the periphery of your vision so that you are unable to say for certain (there is no other customer, anyway). Eventually, you manage to mutter a question at him when he draws near.

     "What kind of cherries were those...?"

    "Huh? Oh... No, that's our twist! We don't use cherries. We actually do a hickory-smoked, candied cherry tomato. Everyone loves it."

     Having duly provided the requested information, the bartender goes abruptly cold and is unconcerned with anything else you may wish to say. He shows you his back and moves swiftly to the opposite end of the bar.

     All that remains for you is to look into the mirror which hangs behind the palisade of glistening liquor bottles, from whose necks protrude tapered beaks of Plutonian lead. Hypertension and palpitations draw the pitch curtain farther down on your sight. Through this funereal porthole that seems a mocking allusion to the ending of every cartoon you consumed in childhood, you can just make out a reflection of your face. But something there is red and wrong. An inflammation, and what looks like areas of novel growth on your cheeks and forehead. Something coarse and black is blooming there, thickening...

     Finally, the pinhole between you and the outside world closes its aperture completely. The last thing you feel is your own searing saliva falling in long, viscous threads onto the backs of your hands.

     "I can't have lycopene... L'I copen't heve the pene... Lycan'thropene..."