“Has anyone seen the wine?”
He is slumped in the seat as only he can slump. Jack drapes himself over a van seat as elegantly as the highest-fashion scarf over the shoulders of the highest fashion they, she, or he. It is a sight to behold, a boot splayed to one side over the edge of the bench and another planted squarely on the floor before him.
Quoth the Moist: “’twas left at home.”
We began with questions, which is only right, the alpha of many a worthy endeavor. It’s always worth asking—a man who was not wise, per se, but rather adept at paraphrasing the wisdom of others suggested to me on multiple occasions: if you never ask, you never get. And so it must be asked:
“Didn’t we bring wine?”
He has righted himself in mock exasperation, mock looking under and between seats for a very real bottle which is very much not in the still-pristine vehicle. This question actually represents a step backwards of sort. One would, we’d think, need to know the answer to this second question before rendering the first relevant. We need the “was” before the “where,” you’d think. But this is not about logic, we can rule that out immediately.
Quoth the Moist: “that we did not, it remains at home.”
Well this turn of events seems unfair, but it isn’t about fairness, either. Jack is expert in repose as well, a posture that suits him as well as the others in the game of van calisthenics. His eyes are closed, threatening to slip away into oenophilic dreams, until the next variation on the theme drifts to the surface:
“Where is that wine?”
The mood between the asker and the asked is decidedly, definitively, assuredly genteel. There is no taste of the absurd, we are nearer to a meditative call-and-response reminiscent of a lost East Asian religion. Moist looks out the window, as if to drive home the quotidian nature of the set of questions.
Quoth the Moist: “’tis at home, darling.”
Jack lolls to the side in his horizontal state, listing one arm off the side of the bench, looking entirely the part of Marat in David’s portrayal of the former’s demise. Not all questions end with upward inflection demanded by the correspondent punctuation mark. They can take other forms, forms with full stops. This seems to be a theme, at least if you say so.
“I know that we had wine.”
Moist is prepared, the script has not yet run out, and, in fairness, the angle is slightly different besides. The twenty asks, as we begin to see, are about contouring rather than information-gathering—not triangulation, but icosagonation. Jack expertly circumscribes the issue at hand, whether he knows or even hears the answers is so far beside or even outside the point that it does not bear further consideration. Moist prefaces her rejoinder with a look at me, a meaningful but not pleading look, because what is there to plead for? The release is foreordained, it is question twenty only.
Quoth the Moist: “Indeed we do, it waits at home.”
Jack crosses his arms over his chest, mimicking a death pose to match his death mask, he awaits the plaster artist to coat his body and cast his visage for posterity. His eyes twitch beneath the lids, slightly, almost imperceptibly to the untrained eye, but that eye is not mine and it certainly is not Moist’s, and we both read the Morse code it pulses out: questions five through nineteen. The eyes say to me: do not bother with those questions, “Master,” move your narrative to the end, where your loyal, perseverant reader desperately wants to be. And so I accede:
“Has anyone seen the wine?”
I saw him manifest a bottle once, I swear it. It didn’t require all the 20 questions, either, it was somewhere in the teens, and it didn’t take completely. I wouldn’t call myself desensitized to the procedure, more like hypnotized by the calm regularity of the questions, but in either case, I was shocked to see the green glass seem to flicker on the back bench, like an old television signal that required some rabbit-ears adjustment. I think Jack, serene as he remained, sensed it wasn’t going to stick around, his powers of materialization if not unanticipated than at least underdeveloped, and so he reached for it nonchalantly, bit with bared teeth, withdrew, and spat out the cork, took a deep pull and released the bottle, which tuned out before it could spill on the carpeted van floor. But Moist didn’t buy it, and she said so:
“I don’t buy it.”
