A Grain Of Salt

The bartender with the frayed flannel shirt pauses from drying a glass. “How’s come you ain’t eatin’ your beer nuts, Frankie?”

Frankie looks up from his half-filled glass and pushes away the plastic cup holding the snacks.“ I can’t eat peanuts no more. It’s the salt.”

The bartender lifts his eyebrows. “You turnin’ into a health freak?”

Frankie grimaces and wipes his mouth on the paper napkin. “I went for a checkup this morning. I’ve been having them chest pains again. The doc said I’d better lay off the salt.” He takes a sip. “Or else.”

“What bullshit!” says the bartender. “My mother lived to be ninety and she ate nothin’ but salt her whole life. Listen, my friend, you can’t believe everything you hear. Especially from a doctor. They’ve all got their money tied up in them pharmaceuticals. I’ll bet you didn’t get outta that office without a prescription. Am I right or am I right?”

Frankie notices for the first time, and he’d been going to that bar for years, how the neon Coors sign over the bar and its reflection in the mirror broadcast two pink “Coors” into his beer. “No, not really,” he says, mostly to himself.

“Frankie, Frankie, Frankie. You’re a smart guy. When somebody like a doctor tells you something, you gotta take it with…I mean, he doesn’t really expect you to never eat salt again. Hey, I read in an article once that people who eat health food cut their chances by fifty percent of ever enjoying themselves.” He chuckles then shakes the drying towel. “Listen to me. You ain’t gonna drop dead over beer nuts. I promise you that.”

• • •

Frankie opens his eyes to see a man in a luminescent white robe standing at the foot of his bed. “Jesus Christ!” he screams.

The man laughs and the robe shimmers with the slight movement of his chest. “No, but that’s a good guess,” he says.

Frankie reaches to pull his blanket up but it’s not there. “Who are you and how’d you get in here?”

The man doesn’t answer for a moment. It looks to Frankie as if he’s trying to decide how to answer. “You’re dead, Frankie. There’s just no nice way to say it.”

As his eyes adjust to the brightness of the man’s robe, Frankie starts to see the details of the man’s face. He looks a little like Sister Sharon, his sixth-grade teacher—like he could be her male cousin. “Are you an angel?”

“I wish,” the man says.

“A ghost?”

“Nah, thank God. I guess you could say I’m kind of a guide. I’m here to help you make a decision.”

Frankie wasn’t sure if it was because his eyes were getting used to the dark, but it looks like colored smoke is starting to turn to foam behind the spirit. “Am I really dead? he asks.

“What do you think, pal?”

“But…I mean, what happened? Last thing I can remember was…well, I remember Graduation Day at Blessed Mother Academy. No, wait. Now I remember gettin’ married to Gloria. Then there was that fuckin’ kidney stone. Hey, what are those beams coming out of your head?”

The spirit turns his head to look over his shoulders. His long, white hair sends tiny lights into the darkness as it moves. “Must be just something you’re seeing. Do they look like scenes from old home movies?”

They kind of do, Frankie thinks. He squints his eyes and stares into the light. “Hey, that’s the night Gloria kicked me outta the house. Is that what killed me?”

The spirit smiles and colored lights begin to appear behind his head. It isn’t Sister Sharon who he really looks like, Frankie thinks. He actually looks a little more like Gloria, or like her brother—except she didn’t have one.

“No, my friend,” the spirit says. “ It’ll all catch up to you. You’re fifty-eight. Well, you used to be fifty-eight. You were working at the GRM machine shop making drill bits. You had chest pains, remember that?”

The home movies seem to be getting bigger and brighter. And blurrier. Frankie starts to feel dizzy.

“You had a massive heart attack just a few hours ago. Your brain’s blocked out all that trauma. Lucky you.”

Frankie touches his chest. It’s ice cold. “Was it the salt that killed me?”

The spirit takes a step toward him and, as it looks to Frankie, sits on the bottom of his bed. Only there doesn’t seem to be a bed.

“Salt?” the spirit asks, his eyes looking up for a long moment. “Hmmm. ‘If salt loses its flavor, then how can it be seasoned?’ Ever hear that one?”

The swirling lights around them seem to be swirling faster and Frankie has the feeling the two of them are moving together through a brilliant fog. He wants to grab on to something, but there isn’t anything to hold. No, he changes his mind. It wasn’t Gloria’s brother, who she never had anyway. It’s the bartender at Martelli’s, except he’s wearing a glowing robe instead of an old flannel shirt. Frankie scrunches his eyes and feels something familiar in what the spirit said. It takes a few moments to come to him. “Parochial school,” he says. “Father Schulte’s class, I think. I mean, that’s from the Bible. Right?”

The spirit nods. “Matthew 5, verse 13. Do you know what it means?”

Frankie feels a weird sensation in his fingers, like his hands were mechanical cog wheels, turning with anything he touches, meshing into everything around him. Only there’s nothing around him. He looks down but can’t see his hands. He can’t see anything but the shining fog swirling around the two of them.

“Yeah, I think it means that we’re supposed to be good Catholics. Or maybe just good Christians,” he adds, thinking the spirit might be a Protestant.

“Wrong!” says the spirit. “You’ve been taught a bunch of nonsense, pal. Not your fault, of course. Still, there you are. It’s supposed to make you think. Salt can’t lose its flavor. It doesn’t have any flavor. It’s sodium chloride. Sodium chloride doesn’t have any taste. You’re the one

with the taste. It’s all going on in there.” He points and Frankie feels a sharp touch on his forehead. “Jesus wanted us to understand that what we take for reality is a subjective experience, so we might realize who we really are. Get it?”

Frankie remembers that he barely graduated from Blessed Mother. He shakes his head. “Is this a test. I’m no good at tests. Am I going to hell?”

The spirit laughs and a shower of lights from his hair flow into the luminescence around the two of them. “No,” he says. “You’ve just come from hell, Frankie. Only you’re not Frankie any more.”

“If I ain’t Frankie, then who am I?”

“Sorry, pal. You’re going to have to figure that one out on your own. You could’ve been working on it while you were alive. Well, no biggie.”

The lights and the fog dim. The spirit shrugs, gets up from the bed that isn’t there and begins to walk away.

“Wait! Where’re you going? What’s happening?”

The spirit’s voice begins to echo. “Stuff to do,” he says. “Anyway, good luck.” He vanishes.

“Don’t go away. Sorry I don’t know nothin’ about salt. Hey, you said you was going to help me make a decision.”

A distant voice comes from the darkness. “Oh, yeah. Well, now you have an opportunity to work on developing your consciousness. Only most folks don’t want to do that. They’re just glad to sort of evaporate. Or you can hang around incorporeally in some place you’re attached to. I wouldn’t recommend that. But that’s up to you. Adios, amigo.”

“What does incorporeally mean?” Frankie pleads.

There is no reply.

• • •

The young man sitting on a stool calls the bartender. “Hey,” he says. “There’s somethin’ wrong with your Coors sign. It keeps flickering.”

“I asked the Coors guy about it,” the bartender says. “He can’t figger it out. Nothin’ wrong with it. He thinks the sign must be haunted.”

“It’s fuckin’ annoying. It’s driving me crazy.”

The bartender has an edge in his voice. “It ain’t gonna kill you. I can promise you that. Hey, how about some beer nuts?”