Timelike Metric

A rabbi, an Irishman and a penguin walk into a pub.

“Do you serve primates?” the penguin asked the barman.

The barman stared in disbelief at the talking penguin. His face drained of all colour and he reeled giddily on his feet as if he had just been punched.

“I…” the barman stammered, “I’m in a joke, aren’t I? This has to be a joke. This changes my entire view of reality. My memories... my dreams... I exist within the construction of a joke.” He lurched forward, grasping the edge of the bar for balance. “Wha… so what happens at the punchline? What happens then? Do we all cease to exist? I… I don’t want to die…” He swayed again then, seemingly snapping to his senses, leapt back and started to wildly ring the time bell. The rabbi, the Irishman, the penguin and everyone in the pub stopped talking and looked at him. From below the bar, the barman pulled out a shotgun and swept an arc across the pub with its barrel as he addressed them all with a feverish hysteria.

“Right, everyone shut up. No one say anything funny. In fact, nobody say a f-cking word. You, you and you,” he gestured to the rabbi, Irishman and penguin with his gun, “get out of my f-cking pub. Now!”

The three spurned patrons slowly backed away from the barmen as bidden and crept back to the door. Reaching for the handle, the rabbi fumbled at something for a moment before turning back to the barman.

“The handle doesn’t work. The door doesn’t look real. It’s just like a prop door with no actual opening.”

“What?” the barman said.

“He said it’s not a real door…” the penguin began.

“You – shut it!” The barman yelled, raising his gun to sight the penguin. “Nobody asked you a f-cking thing, bird. You say nothing!”

“And I can’t see out the windows” the Irishman said. “Even up close to the frosted glass – it still just looks grey and misty outside – I can’t see anything there.”

Time passed in silence. The rabbi, the Irishman and the penguin resumed their places at the bar. Nobody moved, nobody spoke. The barman stood on watch, gun raised, an oily sheen of sweat developing over his tense features in the close, oppressive air. “Alright, alright,” he muttered thoughtfully, “we can get through this if we all stay cool and work this problem. Now ‘primate’ – why did the bird say ‘primate’? There’s no monkey, no vicar – it can’t be that…”

The Irishman stared ahead with a wry smile. “Huh,” he said. “The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.”

In the corner, a bemused dog nervously curled around and started nibbling at its groin.

“Hey, I wish I could do that” a young man said out loud with a snigger, to ease the tension.

His mate grinned. “But wouldn’t you want to get to kno…”

Crack! The room split in two with the blinding flash and strangely trebly timbre of the shotgun discharge. Cut off before he could finish his sentence, the man’s chest flew up and forwards as if he was a puppet on strings. A fine cloud of red gore exploded out of his torso as he tumbled lifelessly face-down on the floor. Behind him stood the barman, the barrels of his raised gun still smoking. He lowered it, broke it open and let the two spent cartridges pop out with gentle plops before hurriedly reloading.

“You… killed him…” the dead man’s friend said, the words slowly dripping out of his open, uncomprehending mouth.

“He would have killed us all – don’t you see?” the barman said in a hysterical voice. “He would have said it – he would have said the punchline.”

The afternoon turned to evening. The indistinct grey mist through the frosted glass turned to an indistinct black soot peppered with vague blobs of what appeared to be yellow street lighting. A man in a suit, his tie loosened, his crumpled jacket taken off and a shadow of stubble on his face pulled himself up with a weary indignation. “Look, you have to feed us. We’ve been sitting here for five hours with no food and no water. What are you going to do – starve us to death?”

The barman lowered his gun. His eyes were shiny like fine china. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll eat.”

The businessman relaxed his shoulders and smiled. “There, you see. Okay, okay now. What have you got to eat?”

“Today’s special is chicken,” the barman said, also visibly starting to relax.

“Sounds good. How do you prepare the chicken?”

“I don’t do nothing,” the barman said. “I just tell it straight that it’s going to die.”