“Rolling Rock. Bottle. And a shot of Jagermeister.”

Ethan pulled a five dollar bill from his wallet and and set it on the bartop. One of the benefits of living out in the middle of corn country was the fact that liquor prices were low. In the city, he’d have pulled out a ten, and not expected much change. When the bartender returned with the bottle and filled the glass, Ethan handed her the five with a salute. He downed the Jager in one quick toss, then sipped the beer before heading deeper into the club.

He looked down the narrow row of tables opposite the bar. Most were filled already with clusters of young men, talking to one another mostly. Some were craning to see the stage at the far end of the bar. There, on a catwalk complete with shiny silver pole, women danced and gyrated in time to music, dropping pieces of clothing every so often, and kneeling near the edges long enough to collect tips. Ethan shook his head, and looked closer to the bar. He’d come in a little later than normal. Usually, he got the table furthest from the stage, but tonight even that was full. He didn’t come for the T & A; the beer was cheap, the crowd was townie, and air was clear. It was rare to find a bar around the area that didn’t allow smoking. He wanted to avoid second-hand mind control and chemical testing.

One of the dancers led a middle-aged man away by the hand, and Ethan took his stool. He settled at the bar and looked down at the bottle. The green of the glass reminded him of dreams, and the alcohol within reminded him of Buck. Where the hell had he gotten off to? And why were the dreams so regular now? They were vivid, almost like surreal television. And the Salvador Dali factor had gone through the roof. Everything normal wasn’t, and everything unusual was commonplace. The had to be some reason. Maybe the library had some information on dream analysis. But that smacked of New Age or mysticism, and he was definitely against that sort of thing. Psychology was one thing, even if Freud was a quack and the whole discipline was filled with yes men and wafflers looking for easy answers to hard human situations. But it was at least a pseudo science. This other stuff was not even related to science.

He looked over. At the door, the ID checker was smiling up at a very tall, thick, imposing man in a black suit and tie. The man wore dark sunglasses and a fedora. Ethan blinked. Could it be…? He took another drink of his beer and waved the bartender over. He’d have another shot of Jager, if you don’t mind. He dropped three one dollar bills on the bar and looked again toward the front of the bar. The man in black was gone. Ethan whipped his head around, searching the crowd and the entire bar for the man, but could not find him. He once again tossed back the shot, and set the glass down with a hollow “thunk.” Maybe this was a dream too. Wouldn’t that just be a bitch…

A dancer walked past him, dawdling near his chair a few moments before trying tomake eye contact. He raised his eyebrows at her and tilted his head back slightly for a moment, as an acknowledgement of her presence, then went back to sipping the beer. She waited a moment longer, but seeing that he wasn’t talkative, and wasn’t reaching for his wallet, she moved on through the bar. He watched her walk away. He did appreciate her figure and everything he coud see of it, especially the tilting rise and fall of her behind as she walked. As he sipped the last of the beer, he wondered what it would be like to actually carry on a conversation with one of the women who worked here, and why he never did so.

Ethan ordered and drank two more beers. A couple more dancers stopped by his stool, but again he turned them down. He talked to a man in his late thirties who happened to be in town on business, and was waiting for one particular dancer. The man was in sales, working up new markets in the Midwest. His client showed up, and they moved to a reserved table closer to the stage. Another man sat down, ordered a sea breeze, and slipped a ring off the third finger of his left hand. Ethan gave him halfhearted answers about sports scores and weather reports. When the dancer from before came by, the man left with her. The night was moving slowly. Ethan felt a pressure at his gut, and stood to head for the john.

Bar bathrooms were always a test. At the pub, your bowels had to be ironclad, because there was never the kind of privacy (or any paper) necessary to finish. If you were drunk enough to sit in a bar bathroom, you needed a cab (and a towel). In some places, especially in Europe, there was just a metal trough and everyone lined up and whipped it out, pissed, and moved on. Sinks in bar bathrooms were vestigial. If you used the sink, you had to wonder why you’d come in in the first place, and not driven home or walked down the street to some nice restaurant or gas station. At least in gas stations, there might be paper towels, and usually there was a lock on the door. A door, even. Ethan broke the seal and sighed as the last pitcher made its way back into the never-ending cycle of liquid. It was like some amber-colored evaporation-condensation-precipitation cycle from an alcoholic science book. He zipped, rolled out a two-foot length of paper towel, turned on the water and washed his hands, left the water running, ripped the towel (careful not to touch the roller or the case again), wiped his hands thoroughly, used the towel to turn off the tap, used the towel to open the door, held the door open with his shoulder, and tossed the towel into the trashcan as he left.

The path back to his barstool was another gauntlet. Beefy men in tight tight t-shirts pushed past him, their shoulders doing most of the work, their necks no longer able to turn. Many of them were so heavily muscled that their shoulders were nearly useless. These stalked the bar like mammalian tyrannosaurs, forelimbs hanging limp and useless, save when prey got close enough to grapple. He maneuvered past waitresses with bare midriffs, low-cut tops, and shorts that seemed to push their ass cheeks out. It was bad news to get too close to the help; the bar had seven bouncers. Smarmy older men goggled behind glasses, tumescent wallets in their hands like fat erections waiting to spill green all over anything that jiggled. He’d had a revulsion for that type since junior high, when the same guys were the pimpled, chubby hoarders of contraband Hustlers and Playmate videos purchased from gleeful high school seniors fleecing seventh graders to finance dimebags. He wove through all of these, heading back to his pitcher and a conversation, he hoped. He glanced left as he passed the center of the bar.

The stage sucked his attention. Ethan stopped and turned to watch.

The music was a deep jungle rhythm.

A woman wrapped in a leopard print cape, head hooded, strode onto the stage, nothing visible but an ambigious shape that ended in supple calves and strappy gold high heels. The music changed to techno, and she burst from the cape, threw it open to reveal her bare midriff, smooth skin stretching from the waistband of a fur bikini to the tawny fur-lined cup encasing each tender breast. Slender, blonde, lithe. She slid around the pole like it was alive, a partner dancing with her instead of inert and bolted to the floor. The curt cut of her hair, a blonde bob, accentuated her shape. Her legs were slim and long, though she wasn’t particularly tall. All of her was narrow, and seemed slight. She and the pole complemented one another well. She wove like ivy up a lattice, pulsed like veins in a limb, shook like leaves on a branch.

Her body reminded him of that oddly blonde Hispanic singer, Christina what’s her name, except her ass wasn’t quite so small, and she wasn’t working overtime to seem cheap. There was something in the dancer’s eyes that was obviously not vapid, and that went beyond the disaffected pose of the dancers who weren’t lucky enough to be born dumb. Her disaffected stare was one of many layers, filters stacked like onion skin, ‘til there was very nearly an opacity that sheltered her from her surroundings and kept you or him or me from seeing inside. She seemed to need this wall. It kept her from lashing out, from running. It was the membrane of her dignity, and perhaps a buffer from insanity.

She backed up against the pole, her motion to the music a subtle grind, a pivot of hips in time with the drop of the bass and the lazy thick chords. He drank in the subtle curve on either side as she slid down the pole, back straight, pressed against the metal. Every man watching wanted to be that pole, wanted to watch and feel the way those hips moved and pressed back against the steel. She reached back with her left hand, grasped the pole below her. Her nails were long enough to be noticed, without the exaggeration of Asian manicure. Her right arm stretched up above her, and she turned her head to the left, looked down and back from the corner of her left eye, as her arm slid up and her hand grasped just above her head. Both thumbs pointed down, and seemed as sharp and bright as slivers of glass. Her hands seemed to pull her back up, and she shimmied up the pole, then pivoted around it, swinging out a leg and letting one arm fly out and open. She performed a sort of swinging pirouette and faced the crowd once more. The dancer dropped into a crouch, feet flat, knees bent, legs spread, pole between her thighs rising up, and again she slid all the way down. Ethan was snared by her stern, severe look, an icefield of blue in her eyes.

He didn’t want to see her naked. Not here, not like this, not so far away and inhumane. The clothing did enough, worked overtime even, to entice him. He preferred, though, to imagine. He didn’t want to watch her cross her arms, cup her breasts, slide the straps down over her shoulders and drop the spotted leopard top to the floor. He didn’t want to know the exact shape and size and color of her nipples. He didn’t want to see her skin glisten with the sweat of dancing and undulation, didn’t want to watch the glitter glisten on her naked skin, with a rail and a stage and a pole in the way. All Ethan wanted was the notion, the promise that the clothing sheltered and delivered. He wanted to keep these desperate details in his mind, wrapped in the blurry gauze of fantasy—never seen. If he were to see her body, the need to touch and trace and taste would be too much. She made his teeth ache, and to see her like that might make his fingers feel the same.