Some people think that being a bartender is easy. Well I’ve done just about every job in the universe, legal and illegal, and I can tell you it’s true: bartending really is easy. You pour drinks, you pretend to listen, you collect tips. You lean over to expose green flesh, you really collect tips—especially if, like me, you’ve got three boobs (four when I’m excited).
But bartending stops being easy when you start to care. That’s the mistake I made with Q-ru.
He came in alone one night and I asked a question that I never would have asked anyone but a Polerian. “How’s that pretty girl of yours?” I said.
The first rule of dealing successfully with clients is never be the first to bring up a relationship that might have gone south. But in my experience, Polerian relationships never went south.
Q-ru didn’t say anything, but his ears started bleeding green.
“Oh, don’t cry,” I said, sitting down beside him. “Please don’t cry.”
“She’s gone, far gone.” He wouldn’t even look at me. Twenty seven eyes, tentacle-tethered around his head, and not a single one would meet mine.
“These things happen,” I said.
Q-ru’s eyes wobbled. “In the history of Polerians, never happened before, not once.”
“You’ll meet someone else,” I said. By then, I should’ve known to check my assumptions and my cliches.
“No someone else,” Q-ru said. “Q-ra is the one for Q-ru, Q-ru is the one for Q-ra. No someone else.”
Finally I said something intelligent. “What happened?”
“Q-ra doesn’t want to make simbta any more, so no more simbta for us.”
I nodded as if I followed. “Is that like making love?” I whispered.
“Physical act of reproduction?” Q-ru said, which was how his translator rendered my words. “No, of course not physical act of reproduction. Not talking about biological functions here but about simbta, about making simbta!”
“I’m sorry,” I said, placing my hand on his shoulder. “I don’t know what it means to make simbta.”
“Making simbta is why we live,” Q-ru said, calming down. “How we live is biological functions, why we live is to make simbta.”
“Why doesn’t she want to make simbta anymore?”
“Don’t know. Why? Don’t know. But Q-ra wants to be alone, all alone, and never make simbta again.”
“Are you worried maybe she’s making simbta with someone else?”
There are a few universal stares that don’t require the use of a translator to understand. Q-ru looked at me like I was missing both brains.
“Not possible,” he said. “Together, can make simbta. Apart, cannot make simbta. This is what Q-ra wants, apart, not making simbta.”
“Wow, no more simbta,” I said with genuine wonder, since I still had no idea what simbta was.
“No more simbta,” Q-ru repeated. “Not for Q-ru.”
I didn’t know what else to say. Q-ru didn’t want anything to drink, even at no charge. He left.
It wasn’t hard to figure out why Q-ru had beamed into my bar.He’d been looking for some company away from other Polerians, who are a kind people unless you’re a Polerian who can’t make simbta, either because you haven’t yet found your other (a few oddballs) or because your other left you (in the history of the Polerians, Q-ru). He’d beamed into my bar for companionship and comfort, and I’d sent him on his way more depressed than he’d arrived. That thought depressed me in turn, so much so that for the next few weeks I couldn’t get my fourth breast to come out, no matter what I tried.
That’s what happens when you stop pretending to listen and you start to actually care.
Time drags when you’re waiting for something. I was waiting for Q-ru to come back. I tried to fill the hours sitting in front of my computer, digging through the omnipedia, learning as much as I could about the Polerians. But there just wasn’t that much information out there. I found a few references to simbta, but no descriptions of what it might be. Later, I’d learn from Q-ru that as sacred as simbta is to the Polerians, they don’t talk about it to outsiders. If not for his depression that one day, he might not have mentioned it to me at all.
Just the way it always happens, Q-ru beamed into my bar as I was about to give up on ever seeing him again. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but he looked even more depressed than before.
“Q-ru,” I said. As much as I had wanted to see him again, now that he was there in front of me I wasn’t sure what to say.
“Saying goodbye, that’s all,” Q-ru said. He looked at me with all his eyes; I blushed under that kind of attention.
“Goodbye?” I said, trying to make my voice sound light and playful. “You’re-never-coming-into-this-bar-again goodbye or you’re-taking-your-own-life goodbye?”
“Second goodbye. Taking-own-life goodbye.”
“Q-ru, you can’t do that!”
“Must do that,” Q-ru said. “Nothing else to do but that.”
“That’s not true.”
“True, very true. For Polerians, not alive if not making simbta. As good as dead.”
The pad on my apron beeped; someone was ordering a drink the table couldn’t mix. I was working alone—the bartender I hired to help on busy nights hadn’t shown up—but I ignored the beep anyway.
“Q-ru, give yourself time,” I said. “Things will get better.”
“Lots of time already. If continue to live, live only for the memory of the simbta Q-ra and Q-ru used to make, the simbta used to make but will never make, not ever again.”
He reached for his armband. I did something I’d never done before for a customer who hadn’t run up a tab. I hit my own band first and blocked his beam.
“Please,” Q-ru said. “Came to say goodbye, said goodbye. Time to go now.”
“Only if you promise not to kill yourself.”
“Can walk out door.”
Q-ru’s big, but the bear at the back was bigger. “He won’t kill you. But he’ll hurt you. A lot.”
“Please,” Q-ru said again.
I stood up. “Excuse me, I have to go mix exotic drinks for exotic customers.”
Q-ru hung around until closing time, not drinking or eating, not talking to anyone. He sat at his table, looking more lonely than anyone I’d ever seen before. And working a bar, you see a lot of lonely people.
When everyone else was gone, I said to Q-ru, “Are you ready to promise, or will you be spending the night here?”
“Just want to go.” His voice was full of so much sadness and despair, his twenty seven eyes devoid of the merest spark of joy.
“Why you care?” Q-ru said.
Why I care? I asked myself. Life is great just so long as you don’t.
“Does anyone else care?”
Q-ru shook his eyes.
“Maybe that’s why.”
Amazingly, he smiled. “Not very good reason.”
“I guess,” I said, returning his playful smile. “But it’s all I got.”
“Lipka?” Q-ru said, turning to face me with his entire body for the first time that night.
With a nod, I typed the order into the table and removed the glasses when they filled up. I handed one to Q-ru, who emptied it in one gulp.
“Last drink,” he said.
“But tradition insists on a last meal.”
We hit the kitchen, cooking and eating through the night. Q-ru taught me a few Polerian recipes. I introduced him to celery. Although I’m a great cook, and I tried to show him a couple of fancy dishes, Q-ru was done when he came across the “green sticks.” He spent the rest of the night crunching through stalk after stalk.
Q-ru didn’t kill himself. I’d like to imagine that my friendship or some words of wisdom I imparted pulled him out of his suicidal depression, but I think the truth is that he really liked celery.
Q-ru couldn’t return to his old job, surrounded by simbta-making Polerians, so I gave him work in my bar, with the rest of us simbta-less folk. It turned out Q-ru was a great cook, except for a bad habit he had of crossing off celery from my recipes.
He seemed happy enough. My customers liked his cooking, I liked his company (for years, my only permanent employee was the bear, who could only say three words-none of which I was interested in, no matter how many times he asked). Q-ru was happy. I was happy.
Then Q-ra beamed into my bar and turned everything upside down.
As much as l liked having Q-ru around, I wouldn’t have begrudged him life with his one true love, making simbta and being happy. But I got the wrong hit off Q-ra the second she materialized on my floor.
“Hello, Q-ra.”
“Hello,” she said. She employed all her eyes in a search for Q-ru, sparing none for me.
“Looking for someone?”
“Q-ru.”
“What makes you think he’s here?”
Q-ra’s eyes-all of them-focused on me like a fleet of spaceships locking onto a target. “Know he’s here.”
I didn’t remember Q-ra being that unpleasant. It made me wonder if the lack of simbta had changed her, or whether my perception was influenced by how much she had hurt Q-ru.
“Maybe you should just leave,” I said, but I saw her eyes focus on something behind me and knew that Q-ru had come out of the kitchen.
Eavesdropping is horribly impolite, but I did it anyway and didn’t try to hide that I was doing it. As a surprise for Q-ru, I’d been teaching myself a little Polerian. I didn’t catch every nuance of the conversation, but I got the gist. She’d made the biggest mistake of her life, she wanted him back, she wanted them to make simbta again, forgive her, forgive her, forgive her.
“Q-ru, can I see you for a second?” I said, pulling him away. He let me lead him around, but most of his eyes were still on Q-ra.
“You have to say no.”
“No,” Q-ru said with a big smile.
“I’m not kidding! You were ready to kill yourself over this girl. And now you’re going to let her back into your life?”
“Yes.”
“But she’s all wrong for you.”
“No,” Q-ru said. “Only one who is right for me.”
“You don’t need her,” I said, hurt at his words but not sure why.
There were lots of things I wanted to say, but I didn’t say any of them. Q-ra’s eyes started waving impatiently, and Q-ru looked like he might explode if he didn’t get back to her.
I finally let him go, out of my grasp, out of my bar, out of my life. From the look Q-ra gave me as they left, pod-in-pod, I knew that she’d never let Q-ru see me again.
I should’ve given him more credit.
One night, just short of a year later, I asked my cook how things were going. Things were going fine, except that we were running out of celery. The customer at table E7, was ordering it by the stalk.
Startling several customers, I burst out of the kitchen. A Polerian sat at table E7, his back to me, but some of his eyes were looking into mine.
He stood. I ran over and threw my arms around him. Sometimes you don’t realize how much you miss someone until you see them again.
“How are you, Q-ru?”
“Never better.”
“And Q-ra?” I said. “Still freezing water with her warmth?”
Q-ru shrugged . “Don’t know,” he said. “Don’t know, don’t care.”
“You’re not together any more?” I said, pulling away so I could look him in the face.
“Not together any more. No.”
“Since when?”
Since a few weeks ago.
I sat Q-ru down, pushed celery sticks toward him. “Start from the beginning.”
Q-ru had wanted nothing more than to get back together with Q-ra. But once it happened, he wasn’t happy. They were making simbta, just like all the other Polerians, but he wasn’t happy. Q-ru couldn’t explain it, but he didn’t need to. I understood. Sometimes you don’t realize how little you miss someone until you see them again.
She lost it when he told her he wanted a little time apart, maybe to travel the galaxy, to see how other people lived their lives, to meet new species and experience different cultures. She became desperate and ridiculed him publicly.
“To Q-ru’s family. To Q-ru’s friends. On the bolos, everywhere. Q-ru no longer wants to make simbta, Q-ru’s crazy. Crazy Q-ru.”
He’d relented under all the pressure. For a while. But he wasn’t happy and he could barely stand Q-ra. And a question weighed on his mind more than any other: Why was simbta so great in the first place?
He mustered up the courage to leave. Q-ra said she never wanted to see him again; his family thought he was nuts; his friends were afraid to talk to him. But Q-ru had one final thing to do. Before leaving, he uploaded The Simbta Spell (And How to Break Free), a book he’d spent most of the last year writing in secret. Within a few days, his book racked up more views than any other in the entire Polerian library.
“Well, aren’t you a little revolution starter?” I said, and Q-ru laughed and nodded with all his eyes.
I was the first stop on Q-ru’s cross galaxy vacation, paid for by the good Polerian readers.
“Once a month, Q-ru. That’s how often I want you to visit.”
“Can come with Q-ru,” he said.
Of course I agreed; I used to be the greatest tour guide in the universe and Q-ru deserved (and could now easily afford) the best. No, really; that’s the reason, and not because I wanted to spend as much time as possible with him.
Which is not to say that sometimes it’s worth it, caring about others. For the last three weeks, no matter what I try, I can’t get my fourth breast to retract. It’s a killer on my back.
And that’s not the worst of it. A long time ago, I learned that the best way to live a happy life is to not care about anyone else, to not have your happiness depend on anyone but yourself. That’s a hard ideal to live by when you’re planet-hopping with a Polerian who’s convinced himself he’s in love with you. Especially when you’re in love with him too.
Karl El-Koura was born in Dubai, United Arab Emirates and now resides in Canada’s capital city with his wife and their adorable tiny human. Over eighty of Karl’s short stories and articles have been published in magazines since 1998, including two that appeared in Storyteller Magazine. Those two and eleven others can be found in his short story collection “Ooter’s Place and Other Stories of Fear, Faith, and Love.” To find out more about Karl, visit his website at www.ootersplace.com.