Spontaneous Pool

~Ted Worthington

I don’t get out much with my buddies anymore. Time marches on, they say. It just seems more and more difficult these days to coordinate. In fact, it’s a rare event indeed when my friends Julian and Greg can get their dates to line up. They don’t always agree. It is not that they are antagonistic to each other, but I guess you could say they just see the world from different perspectives. Julian, a tall guy with dark curly hair and a Roman nose, can be at times pompous, even a bit self-righteous; while Greg, much shorter and balding like a monk, is more practical and flexible; he can move dates around if necessary. Julian is older and won’t let Greg forget it. Greg is often solemn and spends a lot of time by himself, but still enjoys verbal sparring and likes to bait Julian whenever he can. I tend to just watch and listen because their conversations are usually pretty lively.

After mechanically circling the Old Town we found ourselves, by accident—but what is an accident anyway?—at our favorite basement bar, the Little Hand, situated under a fancy restaurant in that part of town where the wet, worn cobblestones shine like twinkling lights in the dark of night. A curled steel railing, cool and wet to the touch, led to a dark concrete stairway that descended past faded and damp posters of concerts few people attended. The massive wooden door at the bottom stood open like a maw, a portal to some distant place or time. Somewhere in the back a jukebox hammered out music; the dance floor was tightly packed, the atmosphere dim, though the feeling of energy rippled through the air. We settled into a table, certain of a good evening, a night out to fulfill that deep-seated desire for a chaotic universe.

“Where does the time go?” Julian said, staring fixedly at his freshly delivered beer bottle.

“The better question would be why,” Greg said, after setting down his already half-full bottle.

“Ugh.” Julian frowned and I smiled. Greg was trying to upstage him.

“No,” he said, waving it off. Then he began speaking in a rhetorical tone that demanded no interruption. “Time – what is it?” he mused. “Is it some long slender thread that ties us all together, endlessly looping around us, binding us together forever? Is it linear; is it circular? Can we cut it? Can we untwine it? Separate it into elemental parts?”

He paused for a moment; his words quickly drowned and swept away by the noise. Before Greg could answer, he resumed. “Others say it flows like a river; it rushes in flood, but must it always flow in one direction? Is Time like the slow accumulation of an hourglass, will it end?

“What,” I asked, “are you afraid of dying?”

“No, no, no. That’s not what I’m getting at. I am talking about Time, in general. Will it run out someday? Or can it flow back and forth? Endlessly refilling and emptying the hourglass?”

Greg, who had been fidgeting during Julian’s rant, finally burst in. “How is time supposed to look?” His eyes challenged his adversary. “Honestly, Julian. Are we here to talk or relax? I know you. Your head is filled with all sorts of mathematical equations and theorems. You see fractals all over the place. You spout probabilities and limits; positives and negatives, irrationals and infinities. You want to transform energy and matter into some sort of fate and destiny as if that were some kind of help. Time just is. Let it be.”

“Are you saying it doesn’t matter,” I asked.

“Precisely,” he said turning to me. “Time, whether it runs forward or back, is what you make of it. I’m just here for the fun.”

In the dim light, I could see Julian’s jaw clench. I knew what would come next. Their conversation was not over, not by a long shot. I guess I felt more like Greg at the moment, though I wasn’t really in the mood for a long discussion. My attention was soon drawn by a young woman at the next table. She was there with two of her friends, all three leaning over a large caldron of margarita, containing tiny paper umbrellas and three long straws. She had a pretty way about her, eyeing me with just the lift of an eyebrow. I knew right away she was not ordinary. Now, logic suggests that life is simply an unbroken chain of future occurrences. But, I could see she never played it safe. She knew.

I stood up almost without knowing it and walked over to her table. Nodding politely to her two companions, my focus was nonetheless clear. I spoke to her with a firmness that gave pause to my friends.

“You and I will play some pool,” I said.

Without hesitation, she got up and walked to the tables in the back, twisting through the network of bodies. “But, I get to go first,” she said with a smile over her shoulder as she slowly swept her long, disorderly brown hair from her eyes and strolled up to the table. The green felt looked so vast, so void, as her fingers ran lightly along the bumpers, which in the dim light looked a slightly deeper shade of green than the table. The bare skin of her arm glowed with a mesmerizing affect. Her movements were soft, yet deliberate. Her every action caused a sensation in me that gave me no choice. I knew how this would end.

From the rack on the side wall she carelessly chose a cue and glided along the edge of table, trailing her fingers across the felt, catching the cue ball softly in her hand. At the far end of the now empty table, she placed the shining white cue ball back on the felt with a studied look. I have to say there is nothing like watching an attractive woman play pool.

Choosing her shot carefully, aiming at this pocket or that, she slid the cue back and forth slowly between her fingers; her hair reached nearly to the felt surface, as she leaned over the table, one leg slightly bent.

She gave the ball a sharp jolt to start the game, sending it nearly the length of the table, toward the left side pocket where you knew the ball had no choice but to leap to attention, spring from the pocket and meet the cue ball with a resounding crack. The balls careened away from each other and came to rest at opposite ends of the table. This is how the game is played. Choose a corner or a side pocket, it didn’t really matter, but whichever you picked, you were locked into the game until the end. The chain of events was laid out in advance; all you had to do was anxiously wait for what you knew was your destiny.

“My name is Anthony,” I felt compelled to say.

“I know.”

For her next shot, she tried to pull the four ball out of the side, though she couldn’t get it to pop up. She gave me a playful sneer with her bright eyes and her lips slightly pursed, then it was my turn. I rolled the cue ball slowly down the along the bumper until the eleven ball drew it more quickly to the hole, until that point where the two balls joined just outside the lip, if only for a moment, and the eleven was freed again, returned to the order of the green felt. Its action carried the cue ball across the side of the table where I could use it again to free the ten ball with my next shot. I sent the cue ball to the corner where it pulled up the twelve and caused the ten to roll closer to the point where they were nearly touching.

“Beautiful shot,” she said, genuinely surprised as each striped ball drew so close to the other. She obviously could tell I wasn’t half bad. I felt a bit cocky and tried to bring a third ball into their sphere but missed. The shot down the length of the table only managed to force the ten and the eleven, at the other end, to drift back toward the cue ball. Again, she flashed a cruel little smile, and then took the easy opportunity to quickly return the one and the two balls to the table. You could see it in her stare; she was eyeing that chance to bring order to this chaos, to dispense with the formality of her solids for that all-important chance to make the rack. But I was desperate to be the one not only fill the table, but to return order to it first. That was, after all, the natural way of all things.

 Thankfully, she missed her shot, and I swept in to bring all my balls to the table, at which point I could start thinking about how I could make my final shot. Each move I made seemed to bring the balls closer together. I was even able to draw up one of her balls. I was getting close. I thought I had it planned out perfectly; I thought I knew where to line up my shots, how to get the cue ball to affect the movements of all the other balls, to make them all come together. I was close, though one miscalculation, one stupid mistake on my part and my nucleus was shattered. It was her turn.

She picked up her last ball and, in two more shots, it was clear to everyone at the bar that she would win. With a final flourish, she gave the cue ball that extra energy she needed, and all I could do was watch in feigned anguish as the balls responded to their heightened energy, shooting off the various bumpers simultaneously as if in an apoplectic shudder to make the satisfying clack that brought everything together into perfect order, sending the cue rolling back to the far side of the table.

After two more games, we placed our sticks back on the wall, spit beer into bottles back at the bar, and went to her place. And broke up. Twice.