Bottle in a Message

Dear Immortal Drunkard,

Your addiction to the land of the living has upset the cosmic balance. For every bottle you leave standing, another town goes down in flames.

The stain of your continued waking existence will draw God's sober ire.

Drink up or face the consequences.

The typewritten note ended with a crude sketch of a bottle approximately one third full, and the message itself was taped to a full bottle of Old Rip Van Winkle 10-year bourbon.

So, it wasn't a message in a bottle, but a bottle in a message on a bottle.

The note showed up in the driveway before the house burned down, and I knew it was a sign from you.

You're the reason I stayed after all of Hayworth left—well, that and I thought I'd finally rediscover rock bottom. I didn't find it right away, but the letter in the driveway was easy enough to see because I'd passed out in the garage with the door still open.

All the smoke hanging in the air was making me cough, so I took a drink to catch my breath. The bourbon didn't go down smooth. I knew it needed ice. I also knew you'd say ice was for cowards who liked their drinks watered down, but we can agree to disagree there.

Anyway, Ben's gas station on the corner hadn't blown up yet, probably because his fuel was too watered down to catch fire. Watered down… ice—I wanted some so I walked to the station and brought the Old Rip Van Winkle with the message still taped to it.

The outside ice storage bin was filled with nothing but bags of water, and the gas station doors were chained shut. Ben's yellow Hummer was nowhere in sight. Big Ben Hayworth, who acted like the town was named after him instead of his great such-and-such. He'd said no government on the face of this Earth could tell him to leave Hayworth, burning or otherwise, but he'd evacuated just like everyone else.

Breaking the lock on Ben's doors wasn't hard because it was a cheap lock, but there was no ice inside either. Waste of my time, so I rinsed my mouth out with tepid Olde English, grabbed every last bag of rye chips, and dropped $40 on the counter.

I probably overpaid, but that didn't matter because I had the bottle in a message on a bottle, and the message reminded me of your raging drunk God theory.

You said God only allowed mankind to exist because He was blacked out… but God's blackout couldn't be contained within a single mind, so it was scattered across the minds of millions of drinkers throughout the ages.

And if enough people swore off alcohol, God would wake up and swear we never existed.

That's where we came in, Sandy: Every time we drank beyond remembering, we were doing our part to save the world.

And that's what I was doing. I was wearing that old Hawaiian shirt you always hated, walking the streets, and drinking to keep God at bay.

I could see his mind taking shape, black smoke rolling over the mountains, flames searching for consciousness. But I had my Old Rip Van Winkle and vowed to finish it before He could wake.

The bottle was gone when I woke up in a bathtub that was overflowing, brown rye chips swirling along its porcelain edge.

Metal clinked and clanked beneath my butt. I discovered 17 sets of car keys were in the tub with me. Yeah, I counted. For a crazy instant, I thought about flushing the keys down the toilet to hide the evidence that I'd gotten behind the wheel after all these years. No, 17 wheels. I started retching.

I left the keys that didn't belong to me in the bathtub that wasn't my own.

The next room was all wood, leather, and shag carpet. There was nothing there to stop the retching. I needed white rectangles: refrigerator, stove, kitchen. I found it downstairs, but there was nothing in the cabinets, only rings of dust where bottles once stood.

I had to get out of that barren house. And it was a good thing I did because the second bottle in a message on a bottle was right outside.

The Old Rip Van Winkle tasted like hot rusty nails, tetanus on my tongue, but it worked. After the retching subsided to hiccups, I read the second message.

To whom it may concern (the IMMORTAL DRUNKARD):

If you can read and remember this, your efforts so far have been in vain.

You cannot save what is already lost.

You cannot save this town.

You cannot save yourself.

Oblivion is the answer.

That sounded about right.

This letter was signed with another sketch of a bottle, two-thirds full this time. I wondered what would happen when the bottle became full. Would it be all over, or would there always be another bottle?

I stepped back from the house and saw I had spent the night in Ben Hayworth's McMansion. No, it was still the middle of the night. The sky was black and filled with drunken fireflies who had flown too high and were now spiraling back down to Earth.

A firefly buzzed against my sleeve. I still had on my Hawaiian shirt, but I was also wearing an oversized robe, dripping wet of course. Another firefly extinguished itself on my shoulder.

Embers. More rained down on Ben's lawn and roof.

I thought about getting back in the bathtub until I remembered the car keys in there.

Had I run over someone tonight? Was there even anyone left to hit?

You of all people should know I had to check the main avenue. There was a wheelbarrow in Ben's yard that I could use in case I found anyone in the road.

The wheelbarrow was filled with four fire extinguishers—no idea why, but I kept them there and added the bottle of Old Rip Van Winkle, then rolled the wheelbarrow off Big Ben Hayworth's property.

I was looking for bodies and thinking about that time we were up in Canada, Novia Scotia or somewhere. We were on a walking tour, and the tour guide was making a big deal about how some guy had saved his house from a fire at the last moment by putting wet bed sheets on his roof.

You couldn't stop giggling, and I couldn't understand why. You kept telling me to think about what the tour guide wasn't saying. You said to think about how the guy was spreading bed sheets across his roof at the very last moment while fire was on the horizon. Would he have had time to soak the sheets beforehand, or go back down and bring up buckets of water? This was back in the 18^th century; there were no hoses, no sprinkler systems. So, what did he do?

I finally saw it. The guy must've peed on his bed sheets and we were praising him for it hundreds of years later. Did he get a medal for peeing on the roof? Was a toilet named after him?

But wet bed sheets wouldn't have saved the house in Hayworth. My legs must've taken me that way on autopilot. I stopped the wheelbarrow when I saw, or didn't see it. The house was gone, hidden behind a wall of heat and smoke, and I was sorry that I hadn't thought to save your books.

There was this roar, thundering angels trying to rouse God, and the black sky parted to reveal a hazy sun. So it wasn't night. Truth be told, maybe it was the same day or two days after that. Didn't matter. It was now.

The now of the sky swallowing itself then rushing forward in red rage across all time, the now of drinking to rejoin minds with the Immortal Drunkard, the now where you are here with me in oblivion.

There's no third message when I rejoin the stain that is my continued waking existence, probably because the typewriter is covered in vomit.

But there's another full bottle of Old Rip Van Winkle waiting for me.

Maybe that's all there is in the end, a bottle three-thirds full.

I reach for it, but something stops me. This place smells like you. It smells like books.

Sandy the bookworm.

Will you marry me?

Yes, but only in a library.

I thought you were kidding, but we got married in a library all the way across the country in Massachusetts. The librarian wasn't happy about it, but you shushed her. After that, it was the world's quietest ceremony.

But you're not in any of these aisles of books because I'm in the Hayworth library and it's a mess.

I clean the typewriter first, then I re-shelve the books.

And I don't know why the third bottle of Old Rip Van Winkle is still unopened, but maybe I'll leave it that way. Maybe I'm just too busy typing this letter to you.

By the way, I took a look outside and saw that the Immortal Drunkard has been busy: Fire extinguishers, stolen cars, and bed sheets galore. I know it won't matter in the end because you're right about God, Sandy. He's waking up and mankind is coming to a close.

But I don't care if He forgets us. I've already done my best to forget and be forgotten—how else could all of Hayworth have passed on by while I was in my garage with the door still open?

That's okay. I wanted to stay.

I wanted to be the last one to stick a thumb in His eye.

And I'm going to be shouting your name while I do it because I want Him to wake up with a raging hangover and think "why did Sandy poke me in the eye?" followed by "who the hell is Sandy?"

Yeah, let God ponder that one for the next million or so years.

I miss you, and I'm sorry.

—Ray

From the archives of the former Hayworth County Library:

The South Fork Fire ripped through the Hayworth downtown area on August 5^th, 2026. Only two structures were left standing: Benjamin Hayworth's fuel station and the Hayworth County Library.

A collection of cars parked in a rough semi-circle in front of the library drew the attention of rescue workers. Past the cars whose tanks had been emptied, spent fire extinguishers littered the library's parking lot. The library's roof was covered in bed sheets, which one worker described as looking "like some crazy quilt dropped from the sky."

Near the entrance of the Hayworth County Library, the workers found a man's body next to a hose and an unopened bottle of Old Rip Van Winkle.

The deceased was later identified as Raymond Swift, a Hayworth resident. Mr. Swift's body was unmarked by the fire, and smoke inhalation was deemed to be the cause of death.

Efforts were made to deliver this letter to Sandy, who many assumed to be Mr. Swift's estranged wife until his marriage license came to light.

Mr. Swift was married to one Alexander "Sandy" Davidson, who died in a car accident in 2017. Mr. Swift was reported to be the one driving at the time.

The Hayworth town council was initially divided on the issue of the library. Some members were not convinced that any actions on Mr. Swift's part had saved the building. They cited the library's location next to a creek and unpredictable wind conditions.

In the end, Benjamin Hayworth cast the tie-breaking vote, reportedly saying he did so "only to prove that damn drunk wrong." Mr. Hayworth also pledged a considerable sum to expand and modernize the library.

The Hayworth County Library was officially renamed The Immortal Drunkard Library on September 2^nd, 2027. Every year on August 5^th, wet bed sheets are spread across the library's roof in remembrance of Mr. Swift.