His arms glowed like alabaster. From a height, he watched the faint limns of orange light come off his hot skin, the sleep of alcohol nestling deep into the rivulets of his brain.
He felt, a little foolishly, like a child, as he maneuvered his bear's hands to grip the iridescent glass, once golden, now filmy with sud. It took a particular effort to track his eyes across the room, now lighting on the candle, the bright hot centre of it, now the slanted dark faces of strangers, now the waitress's receding ass. His point of focus like the pointer on an oversensitive mouse, he thought, careening across the screen of his vision, no no pull back pull back. There.
The candle's flame burned deep through his retinas, as if burning past vision into some other sense. Touch, perhaps - though he could not say what he was touching with. He reached for it, swatting helplessly with ham-sized palms, flickering the light. No, not touch - but the centre of the light, not the light itself but the dark hole within it, it communicated itself to him in a way that superseded vision, bypassed it entirely. There was no distance to travel, no conversion of sensory data into clarifying flashes of neurons. It was more like truth, a thing simply known, a thing that exists without reason or whyfore and resistant, above all, to worry. The opposite of truth is worry, he thought, as he sat in the certain worry-free glow of the dark heart of the candle.
He briefly considered ordering another drink, and then forgot the idea almost immediately. There is something reassuring about the space between the fourth drink and the fifth, a perfect equilibrium of the mind and the body. It was like being returned to childhood, really, to a time before peripheral vision and the ugliness that such a vision affords. He remembered arriving at the pub, which looked more or less like the two that preceded it, being escorted up narrow stairs by the sleek waitress who crinkled her eyes when she smiled, just one eye, so that he saw it as a covert wink, an invitation. He fantasized about her thoroughly between the first drink and the third, imagining her warm skin in the rubber of his hands, her bitter tartness in a wedge of lime.
The sounds in the pub were now less sharp, yet clearer. He finished his beer, but it did not do what he had hoped for. Instead, leaning forward, he stared deep into the flame in front of him, closer, until it filled his vision and burnished everything in the same orange glow that rose from his skin.
