Decision Paralysis

In a side street, on a busy corner, lit softly yellow by a street light, a motorbike parked. It was a hefty machine, powerful and sleek at once, chrome black and far too expensive for the dinky gay dive bar underneath the sign of the 'Tap Dancing Bear'. The hands that parked it there, leather-gloved, shook with nerves and excitement. Johannes Brandt was a tall young man, in their very early thirties, old enough to cut an imposing figure, young enough to not have really earned it. They shook out their shaggy blond hair, pressed flat by the helmet in their hands, and stowed the thing away in their machine, leather jacket already shrugged half off their shoulders. Ice blue eyes surveyed bar-goers through rectangular glasses, pooling in, coming out, laughing with one another, before their owner themself finally took heart and shouldered their way in through the door, back straight with a confidence they simply weren't feeling.

It was night number three of this same routine, of prowling into yet another gay bar looking for connection, for something or someone to do. Had they been in prison, Johannes might've said that they were freshly out, but all they'd been had been under the thumb of their family, and for all they liked to complain, they hardly thought that one could be compared to the other. One was a life under constant surveillance, one where a step out of line was just another excuse to dole out punishment, and the other one was prison.

They'd been surprised, in fact, when it turned out that all that Johannes really needed to do in order to lose their parents' constant watchful eye, to shake off the hired stalkers and the baby sitters, was to fuck up so tremendously that they'd be taken entirely out of the will until they showed that they learned their lesson. It was a cutting of strings, a puppet unstrung, and Johannes, of course, had absolutely no intentions of learning any lessons at all. For the very first time in a very long time, hell, for the first time since going off to university and living on campus, partying and drinking and brawling and fucking while they were ostensibly getting a psychology degree, Johannes felt free.

Money was about to be an issue, yes. Outside of what was mandatory for their degree, Johannes had never worked a day in their life. As the quietly disgraced son of an industry mogul and a socialite, whose face had been plastered all over the newspapers for plastering that shit-eating wife beater Johnson's face all over their fist, they were about to have some serious trouble finding work with so much as a joint practice in someone's backyard. But for the moment, they'd found an old friend's couch to crash on and a fridge to mooch out of, and so for the moment, they were free.

They were not, however, experienced in how to talk to people outside of their tight circles. For every cute guy they were eyeing, they somehow found a way to misstep. Each drink offered was turned down, each bit of conversation initiated was evaded. When Johannes stared at somebody too long, trying to see if they'd like to come over, somebody else would approach to tell them off. They'd try to strike a conversation about this or that, about stocks or the newest gossip, and their conversation partner would look at them like they'd grown a second head. Underneath the flicker of the bar's overhead lights, between the smell of whiskey, leather, and motor oil, drowned in the blaring of some colorful interview show about drag queens and the murmur of conversation to all sides, Johannes was well and truly alone.

So finally, on the eleventh hour, they threw their drink back, paid their tab, tucked their tail between their legs and left. It was the third humiliation in three nights, two more perhaps than their ego could really take, and the tenacity they'd always prided themself on was starting to give. Fundamentally, they felt, there was something separating them from all the others in the room, much the same but at the same time different to what they'd always felt at fashion shows and socialite balls, at golf or horse back riding or the opera or whatever other stupid thing their family had always insisted to drag them to, just to scold Johannes later on for not socializing properly. Make connections, Jan, they'd say. Play nice, Jan. Smile, Jan, until they had forgotten how not to smile, how to stop. But whatever it was that they were lacking, that had made most of their family's outer circle turn their nose up at Johannes, and that had made their fellow students only invite them to parties once they were proven to be a lose cannon, it had followed them all the way here.

And so they left, through the back entrance this time, feeling somehow too ashamed to even make their way back out the front, and stepped into what was now darkest night. The sky hung black above them, all stars snuffed out by city lights, a sick grey-yellow glow clinging to the firmament in their stead. And no moon hung in the sky that night, no moon. They let the heavy fire safety door fall into the lock behind them, then turned as the noise never came—propped open by a foot, it turned out, belonging to another bar goer snuffing out his cigarette on the ground and moseying on back inside, where he wouldn't be at risk of having to speak to Johannes. That was a stupid thought, of course, but with the humiliation of the night, it was one that, nevertheless, clung.

A second bar-goer was making his way upstairs, up an iron fire escape clinging to the side of the building like a parasitic vine. Johannes paid him no mind as they scuffed their motorcycle boot against the ground, sullen, wishing for a moment that they'd smoked, just to have an excuse to stick around the back for just a moment longer. But their moment had passed, and so, hands dug into their pockets away from the cold, they ducked their head and took their tail still tucked between their legs and left. With a last irritated look cast over their shoulder, they bid the bar goodbye. Goodbye to the smoke smell, goodbye to the leather and the promise of some company, to the fire door and the brick wall and the man listlessly picking his way up the stairs. As he was almost at the top, Johannes watched for a wistful second as his boots took the last step, waiting for him to sit down perhaps and have a smoke, watching the starless sky over the sleeping city just as alone as them. The heel of it connected, but then, instead of finally arriving at the top, it was as if the world blinked. And in that moment of not-even-darkness, of Johannes' brain filling in the sensory gap as their eyes ostensibly closed, the bar goer had somehow made his way straight to the bottom again.

Their eyes widened, Johannes shook their head, blond bangs whipping against their forehead as they watched him climb, again, in the very same direction with the same speed and movement, unerring as if he hadn't, just a moment ago then, fucking teleported.

They whipped around the corner before they even knew it, hand on the iron hand rail as they watched him, wide eyed and voiceless, as he climbed back up. The fabric of his olive green bomber jacket shifted in time with his shoulders' movements, his worker's boots taking one clunk after the other, and a plea, a question was stuck numb in Johannes' throat as they simply watched and doubted how much they had had to drink. No, no, they were driving. In fact, they hadn't drunken a single drop of alcohol all night. It must've been the humiliation, then, an altered state of mind, or perhaps they hadn't slept as well as they'd thought, or perhaps it was simply the dark night air playing tricks on their mind, and so, afraid of humiliating themself further, of asking out loud with their mouth whether this man had just teleported or if it was just them, they watched him climb again. And, really, it wasn't as if he was paying them any mind at all.

And once again, heel-sole-tip, his boot connected, right at the top of the stairs, before the world simply blinked again and he appeared right in front of Johannes. On instinct, on some sort of fear, a knowledge that something was terribly wrong then, they grasped for the only instinct they'd ever had, for action, for fight, and grabbed hard onto the back of the olive green plastic jacket.

"Hey!" the man suddenly exclaimed, and whirled around to the sight of Johannes' eyes the size of dinner plates. "What are you grabbing me for, man? What's your issue?"

The words were stuck in their throat though, still, and they couldn't quite work out an 'are you alright', or perhaps a 'so where did you learn to teleport', so they simply gaped and said nothing.

"Fucking junkie," the bar-goer angrily shrugged off their grasp, and thundered up the stairs, up to the top and then over. And Johannes watched, thunderstruck, as he lit his cigarette there as if nothing had even happened. It felt, no, it was wrong to the core, to simply leave this uncommented, to not tell him what they had just seen, to not question their own sanity or his or even to accuse the universe of something, of foul play or of malfunctioning or of simply playing a mean trick on them all, but that was exactly what they did. Wordless, speechless, Johannes turned around and went home, feeling as though they had just seen something that they were going to be punished for witnessing.

A feeling that, really, wasn't all that far off.