The Seaweed Bar and Grill

The sun, round and pulsing and full of promise, bore down with no apparent rancor and touched everything with light, normal in all respects but causing a rarified effect because of the recent blue-sky rain.
J. Beluga Worthington listened to his shoes impact the sidewalk, trying to think of a word which might describe such a sound, sitting on so fine a balanced edge between wet and dry, but he could not. Words eluded him primarily. So he turned into a place between two buildings, not an alley and not a street, too narrow for either, where the drying sky seemed distant and the water would sit all day, waiting for that brief moment of sunlight when it could properly reflect, shimmering in errant breezes, and he walked to the end of it and found a door. The building on his right was made of stone and brick, erected years ago at the turn of the century according to a plaque on its façade which Jay had not seen. It held offices mostly and two store-front businesses, a travel agency and one of those ubiquitous neighborhood shops which carried one of everything and had evolved, over the years, into a specialty shop catering to its regulars so that one could purchase a bottle of single-malt scotch no one had ever heard of and a particular brand of Scandinavian chocolate to which several old ladies down the block were happily addicted. The building on the left was new, comparatively speaking, and was made of concrete and glass and steel, not entirely soulless but of another species than most of its neighboring structures. It too housed offices and a bank and had its own parking garage which made it popular with the commuters who worked downtown. Some people, when seeing the building on the left for the first time, saw fleeting visions of heroic dioramas, frozen in time like ants in amber or of strangely romantic scenes Mediterranean in nature and for which no cause had ever been found. Jay could not know it but the phenomenon was frequent enough and intense enough that doctors had been consulted and physicists employed but any explanation was not, as yet, forthcoming. A few alarmists had suggested consulting a Priest but in downtown Salt Lake City only two blocks from Temple Square the idea had been quickly vetoed. The structural interstitial slot in which Jay found himself stopped abruptly at the brick rear of yet another building, but both of those encasing him laterally held a door as if he were in a Lovecraftian gameshow forcing him to choose. In an actual Lovecraft novel J. Beluga would have scaled the rearward wall, clinging precariously to the rough mortar squeezed so long ago from the bricks by half-crazed masons, tearing his fingers and hands to shreds until, having reached the top, he would be stark raving mad and find himself staring, bereft of reason, at the widening maw of a soulless universe. Sensing the third alternative Jay turned to the left, perhaps because of his genetic heritage since he made no conscious choice and tried the knob on the old, weathered and constantly vandalized metal door. It was not locked. H.P., a veteran of such things, would have advised turning around at that point but he was long dead and J. Beluga Worthington had never heard of that writer, or very many authors of fiction for that matter.
Jay stopped for a moment thinking of the time, years ago, when his brother the worlds-youngest-drunk had dared him to go through a similar door and that had turned out well so he felt as if a positive precedent had been set. He opened it and stepped through, stopping on a narrow landing where stairs went both up and down. A bare bulb lit the stairwell with light of such a malignant quality that Jay momentarily lost faith in his decision but then he heard music and felt better. The door, attached to security hinges, closed behind him with a gurgling sigh. He stood for a moment, determining the source of the sound echoing off of walls so in need of paint that they actually wept at night between the watchman’s rounds.
Down. Or so it seemed. He took three steps and waited with his head cocked to his favorite ear. Yes, it was coming from down there somewhere. He continued on, picking up the hint of an odor as well, the music becoming stronger with each creaking step until he found the bottom after an unusual twenty-three steps. Another bulb. The music sounded like World, that nascent genre adopted in recent years by the dispossessed and those with yearning souls, taking influences from around the globe and fusing them in another futile attempt to hide from God. Another door confronted him, this one mostly textured glass with the words “Seaweed Bar and Grill” professionally painted on the glass.
Seaweed Bar and Grill? He thought to himself. Jay would never be mistaken for a genius but even he knew that was an odd name. Still, he was unencumbered, the errand he had been on proving fruitless—and between jobs, which he almost always was, so he opened that door too, stepped inside and was instantly assailed by the most intense and odious smell he had ever encountered. It was not entirely horrible, like rotting garbage or vomit drying in the sun, but it was not pleasant either. It was strong, mostly. At this point it occurred to Jay to wonder why the Seaweed Bar and Grill had no advertising out on the street. At least he hadn’t seen any.
Even from where he stood at the very front of the place he could tell it rambled. Rooms sat haphazard, connected by arches or swinging doors or ramps—he could see no steps up or down.
Tables lined one wall to his left where someone had painted a large window on the blank wall, a tropical scene of palms and ferns and brightly colored birds. Lamps with green glass shades hung from a high ceiling over each table which in turn were covered with white butcher paper. A counter stood high and cluttered beyond the tables and opposite the counter were more tables and a jukebox and an old air-hockey table, neither of which worked—he could tell at a glance from the heavy dust and a certain unevenness of cant. Items of a sea-going nature decorated the place by virtue of having been placed with reckless abandon and never moved again. An anchor too heavy to lift and obviously too large to have been taken through the door was propped in a corner, rusty and crusted with the desiccated remains of aquatic life. Nets and floats were hung like a knot-tied night sky, their frozen billows reminiscent of eternal waves, their carefully tied and woven loops forever bereft of fish.
Jay looked up and found the source of the lingering scent. Dried seaweed, hanging like laundry from nylon fishing line strung across the ceiling in a pattern mimicking the brain-waves of schizophrenic air-traffic controllers, exuded oceanic chemicals, pheromone of cephalopod, fertile odor of roe, which Jay was sure he could actually see as they rippled like heat across the room.
“Its actual seaweed” he said aloud even though he had seen no other human, and reached up to pull a sliver of the stuff from one of the long fronds. He brought it to his nose and sniffed, nodded, then took a bite. It tasted like the ocean but nastier. It was tough and leathery, semi-dried and wrinkling in the way of things meant to be forever moist.
From further back ruffling sounds carried to him and a head poked around the far corner of the counter.
“Oh hey!” It smiled. An upper front tooth was gold and caught the light with a momentary twinkle. “Didn’t hear you come in. What can I get ya?”
J. Beluga did not answer right away. He was staring at the outsized head topping the strangely shaped body. Whoever it was waited patiently, letting him take all the time he needed.
“Something to eat?”
He realized he had been looking too hard. Rude.
“Yeah. What’d’ya have?”
“I’m partial to food but a few of our regulars like to eat Styrofoam and glue.”
“Foods good.” Twittering filtered in, female, plural.
“Tuna sandwich?”
“Is that a joke?”
“It’s a good sandwich, my own recipe.”
“Do you have potato chips?” The gold tooth loomed in a mad smile.
“Oh yeah!” The head disappeared.
Jay looked around again and decided he was the only person in the place other than the head and whatever unembodied creatures were twittering in the back. He decided on a table, one near the mural and the counter both and not too close to the anchor because it looked to him as if it could plummet through the floor at any moment.
“And apple juice!” He shouted. Perhaps the nets wavered.
“Grape juice is better with tuna!” The disembodied voice shouted back from behind the cluttered counter.
“Oh.” Jay was too confused to argue.

“What’s that music?” After a few minutes he had begun to worry that the head had slipped out the back and so he spoke, hoping to generate a conversation. He could think of a lot of questions.
“Phillip Glass.” The voice answered on cue. “He’s old school avant guard.”
“It’s terrible. It actually hurts.”
“Amazing huh?” The voice suddenly sounded close and Jay turned to be startled by the asymmetric man standing behind him with a plate and a paper cup. He set them on the table. A stack of chips covered the plate except where the sandwich lay.
“Mind if I observe your technique?” The head took a chair and turned it around, sitting backwards, letting his noggin rest on an elbow and hand.
Jay looked around worried he was in a Zombie movie. “What technique?”
“How you stuff the sandwich.” Jay stared until he saw the humor buried in the bizarre and smiled, nodding and shaking his head at the same time, setting up a dangerous oscillation. He opened the sandwich by taking off the top slice and began to lay potato chips randomly over the tuna salad until he had a multi-layered stack. The slice went back on, straight down like a junk-yard magnet, and he put a massive hand over it, fingers splayed, and pressed. He liked to hear the chips break and shatter. Then he took the plastic knife and cut it diagonally, like his mother had, picked up one half and took a bite.
“Very nice.” The head decreed. “Reminds me of the music; random, atonal . . . like a criminals mind.”
“You get all that from the way I make a sandwich?” It was muffled by the food but discernable.
“It comes to me. I don’t have a lot of friends—‘cause I’m a freak and all—so I have a lot of time to think.”
Half the sandwich disappeared in silence. The music stopped and it felt to Jay like being let into heaven.
“What is this place?”
“Xanadu. Shangri-la. The hole in the wall. Valhalla.”
“It smells.”
“Part of the charm.”
“How often do you have to change the seaweed?”
“Never. We just add to it.” Jay rolled his eyes. Was it possible to like such a place?
“You like the tuna?” Head asked shyly. It was endearing.
“Best I ever had but I think the smell makes it taste this way.”
“It does. I developed the recipe with that in mind.” Jay rolled that around.
“So it would taste different elsewhere?”
A pinched face answered the question. “Horrible. I’ve tired it.”
“That’s weird.” He finished the lunch, wondering why he was there, how he had found it.
“You forgot ‘Twilight Zone’.”
The head smiled again and tooth came out like the morning. “Right. I knew I forgot one.” He stuck out a hand. “Name’s Head.”
Jay took it as the first effects of shock hit. “Are you serious?”
“Nickname actually but that’s what everybody calls me. It fits.” He took his hand back. “Who’re you?”
It struck him that here was a chance to change, to correct past indignities and remake himself. He’d never be back. Probably couldn’t find the place again if someone he liked bet their life on it. (He never bet his own life.) The correction would be futile, one person wide.
“J.B.” he said, becoming a romantic.
“What’s that stand for—Jules Bern?” Head chuckled the kind of laugh someone used when they knew they were being an idiot and were proud of it.
“J. Beluga . . . Worthington. The J. doesn’t stand for anything.”
“I’m actually Randall Zeno-Parkinson but I like Head better. Never met anyone with an initial for a name, that’s pretty cool.”
“I’d have gone with Zeno. That’s a great name, very pre-Socratic.” Head nodded and JB, freshly minted and feeling a sense of freedom bordering on libertine excess took a leap of faith.
“I like this place. You ever get any actual customers?”
“A few. Accidents like you. I depend on regulars.”
“People come here more than once?” He cocked his head like a bird of prey. “On purpose?”
“The Seaweed Bar and Grill has hidden charms and several mystical powers left here by the previous owner.”
JB finished his grape juice judging the combination to be superior as Head had predicted.
“You gonna come back maybe?” The question had layers. One night three years ago in Tulsa JB had walked through a similar question, his past catching up like pressure waves, his future bleak and all too certain. And here he was, still alive and in a café where no one ever came, facing another pounding.
“Yeah. Maybe . . that okay?”
“Sure, unless you aren’t wearing a shirt or go barefoot. There’s some . . . ground rules. Guidelines. Survival tips.”
“Well that makes it all worthwhile. I usually try to patronize places that need survival tips.” He leaned back. “Why?”
Head ignored the comment and the question, already concentrating on the rules. He held up a finger and bent it back with the other hand. “One.” He said. “Nothing said in here can ever leave this place.”
“Why would it?” JB asked with the innocence of a recently deflowered concubine. Head reacted to the question strangely; he was startled out of hand and stared wide-eyed for a moment.
“Okay, you got me there.” He finally said. “But still, it’s a rule.” JB nodded wisely, sensing it best to agree.
“Two,” another finger pulled back like a catapult, “The last person out has to remember to lock the door.”
JB turned his head a little, indicating with an accurate chin-point the direction he had come in. “Is that the only door?”
“Yeah. And the lock doesn’t work real good but it’s the discipline that counts y’know?”
“Is there another exit?” Head shook his head, the longish, wiry hair making a kind of mountain bush effect.
“Isn’t that illegal?” A pained expression, as if the first signs of the flux were manifesting.
“Are you one of those?” JB had never heard quite that inflection before. He intuited that nothing good could come from being “one of those.”
“Not on purpose. I just worry about fires and things. I worry, you know?”
“Well there should be another exit any time now. Swordfish is working on a tunnel under the bank.”
“Swordfish?”
Head chuckled again, sounding like small rocks being ground round in the surf. “That’s a funny story really. He’ll tell you all about it. Are you sure you’re likely to come in here again?”
“What’s the third rule?”
“Oh right. He bent back another finger with abandon. “First time you’re a customer. After that you’re a member and expected to follow the rules.”
“Member of what?”
“Hey! We’re in Salt Lake man. Have to be a private club to serve liquor.”
JB experienced some small relief. He had begun to envision an ancient cult of studied indifference or abject confusion meeting down in the Seaweed, performing alchemical experiments of a para-social nature, half biologic, half Newtonian occultism.
“I don’t drink.” He admitted, relieved to be at least in the ball park of sanity.
“Right, but some of my members do.” Head’s eyes wrinkled and one corner of his mouth twisted up in a sobering display of elasticity making a face of some kind. “It is a bar and grill” he said, making quotes in the air.
“Seriously, do other people ever come here?”
“We’re not real busy in the day time. Mostly they come around at night.”
“Are we alone right now?” He remembered the twittering earlier.
The massive head shook again like a sheep dog with a concussion. “The twins are in the back.”
“The twins.” Head had said it as if everyone on the planet but JB knew the twins were in the back.
“They’re getting ready for tonight.” He bent a fourth finger, stalling any effort to extract additional information about the twins, the coming night, or other topics currently on JB’s mind. “Fourth; you always have to tell the truth. You don’t have to say nothin’ about nothin’ if you don’t want to but if you say something it has to be the truth or at least your honest opinion.”
“What about jokes?” Head was nonplussed.
“Damn. You ask hard questions.” He closed his eyes and pinched his face into a cartoon of himself. “I guess jokes are a separate category. We like good jokes.”
“I got a joke for ya.” JB wasn’t sure why he’d said that. He only knew a few and rarely told them but this one was his favorite.
“Right now? In the daytime?”
“Is that against the rules?” Pinched face again.
“No, I guess not but it’s unorthodox.”
“I’m not even Jewish.” JB couldn’t believe he’d said it even before he was finished. He often wished there were a way to catch words as they traveled between mouth and ear and take them back, stuff them into a word pocket where they could be rearranged and recycled. But Head liked it. He smiled and then laughed a little, that watery stone sound.
“What do you get when you cross an insomniac, an agnostic and a dyslexic?” Head really thought about it, tried to think of an answer, which ruined many a joke in JB’s opinion. How were you going to figure out a nonsense riddle? He waited. Head finally shook his head.
“You got me. I don’t know.”
“Someone who lays awake at night wondering if there really is a Dog.” He tried not to smile but he did every time. He loved that joke like some people loved pets or vacation spots. Head looked at him for several seconds—a typical reaction to that particular joke—and then light began to dawn on the infinitely furrowed brow. Eyes went wide (still too small for such an enormous skull) and he laughed, surprising himself, the explosion coming before he was ready which made it even better and he got control of it and took off on a serious binge, nearly falling out of his chair. Later, when it was quieter, Head wiped tears from his eyes, still smiling.
“Oh man,” his chest and shoulders bounced with internal mirth, “that was great. I love that. You’ll do JB, you’ll do.”