“So crawls a toad on his belly into a bed of flowers.”

—Jean Paul, tr. Charles T. Brooks

Under the deepening brume of a once-splendid drunkenness, I sit under fluttering neon. Neon blushes, they say, because it bears witness exclusively to man’s infelicities. I sit pondering needlessly the case of the sot who stood under a streetlight looking for his keys. I consider this pondering work in that I am not ambivalent toward it—to hold a conviction is, after all, no mean feat.

Meanwhile it could be night or day outside, the one invariably busy turning the refuse of the other into commerce.

A thought, then another. A thought. Thoughts. The poorly marked seasons of a life that no more produces new rings than the stool on which I sit. I hover somewhat nearer to life, it’s true, but I know there may come a day with the rot will cease to distinguish between stool and man. I check each pocket individually. Only a pat. Too early.

But it is work, this thinking.

Convictions are held, as I’ve said, not set at one’s feet. For every opinion I’ve had to meekly qualify or do aware with entirely, I have managed to forage another from the dreck, honest work, like breaking pine boughs for kindling. Honest like any work that resists progress, or where progress can go safely unnoticed, an apprenticeship that falters and begins again, where time has no chance of recovery.

I wind down, and back up again. I write my own story when it suits me: A figure stews in a bar. Men are watching him, two, no more than three, seated together on one side of a low table; he is the only other person in the bar, which is being illegally operated in a place of prohibition. He knows this, and he knows that the proprietor has already gone out through the delivery entrance. The bartender is ignorant and oblivious and will deserve what comes to him.  The figure is innocent of everything but what he’s accused of. And even that … if he could convince them that he is only drinking a harmless imitation, temperance beer, that no amount of it could intoxicate him … but he is not. He also knows that he has lost his keys, and if he tries to leave, he will have to find them, and if they see him searching for them under the lamppost, he knows he will be taken in. Meanwhile, he must keep drinking and keep his wits about him.

The beer, though, is intemperate, as much or at least as I am. And there is no one else here to play foil in this harlequinade. No matter. Everything endures. Events pile atop events, with or without their chroniclers, and no one is spared the tortuous litany. As for the beer, the more I try and measure its pulse, the weaker it becomes.

The joke is that the sot is only looking where there is light, not where he suspects he has lost his keys. It isn’t a very good joke, as any real sot would know. Every kind of delirium cultivates its own breed of logic, and the logic of a drunk wouldn’t be so self-limiting. At least two of five fingers would be ready to dive into the darkness, after a manner.

A drunk may ask the same questions night after night, and though he may, once in a while, bend to a charitable interpretation which tilts the room in his favor, the spiral always ends up where it began. But this rhetorical stagnation, however dulling, gives him tact. He speaks in certitudes because he knows nothing is more cowardly than to be proud of an opinion, meanwhile and unbeknownst to him, nothing rids a statement of its veracity like declamation. And while the subject of his speech is inflated to the status of the universal, nothing pleases the drunk more than to solve the problem most immediate to him, which is, most often, the problem of the next drink. The sot’s logic is one of tightening and projection; the logic is constrained to the innermost rings of the spiral, while the speech circumscribes the outermost, and the two are not physically (within the scope of the metaphor, that is) connected, and the two form a kind of hologram, in that depth can be suggested only at certain angles.

So what delirium, if any, would naturally reproduce the conceit of the joke? Deliria of paranoia would produce the opposite effect, the subject only looking in dark places (unless a moral dimension were added, in which case, just why would anyone need to venture into the dark, alone?). Deliria of megalomania would cause the subject to fly into a rage at the mere hint of inconvenience. I can leave these taxa alone, which rules out entire kingdoms of deliria.

One option that might deserve consideration at the tautest resolution is that the subject of the joke is not at all delirious or otherwise impaired, but is in grieving for himself and his predicament, as grief often takes the form of a redrawing of perimeters, and if one is already suggested for him, in the form of the inverse penumbra of the streetlight, then all the better. The subject’s spirit refuses to assert itself across the boundary.

I am in grieving for the world outside of here, for the smells that assault me, for the clamorous, teeming sea of noise that refuses to congeal into ambience. The staggered rows of bollards, erected in place of a nurturing society, are amplified against the gait of a drunk, a minefield. A structure protects itself first and foremost, preceding any notion of private property, more like a living reef than an artful heap of stone and alloy. Every room, the present not excepted, begins as the skeleton of a function calcified into routine. Will is thus tamed to habit. Whether we are free to come and go makes them habitats no less. As such, who could blame me? No role is unimportant. The consumer is every bit the worker, beneficent in stasis.

But to be given grief is a personal matter. Not that a joke has to be universal, or even could be universal, but it stands to reason that a joke, to be repeated as often as this one has, should have a familiar phenotype. A private joke is a first-class absurdity.

What lies in the marginal darkness? Is this even a sensical question? I think so. A subject is necessary to constitute a situation, but very seldom does a subject impose themselves upon the situation. The subject is dissected and recreated in the image of the situation. I am exaggerating, of course, but the contents of the darkness are worth considering with as much of an objectivity as I can muster, so long as what started as a riddle does not threaten to become a fable.

Assume that the drunk remains in the lighted circle because he has reason to fear the dark, or believes he has reason to fear the dark, and that he believes, earnestly if not accurately, that his survival is prolonged by or even contingent on the charade of his looking for his keys where they plainly are not. Ah, but he is, after all, a drunk, and so the ruse is believable. So what end might this ruse serve? It could be that he suspects a thief wielding a knife is stalking him, waiting to be certain that the drunk has something of value. If it was a crime of revenge or insanity, then this would be grim humor indeed, but let us assume for now that the thief is calculating, if not honorable. The drunk, having become aware of the rogue, drops to the ground and begins muttering something about his keys. The thief, growing impatient, may then saunter into the scene—after all, someone must set up the punchline—and ask just why the drunk only seems to be looking under that one streetlight. And upon getting the answer, he walks away, begrudging the drunk for wasting his time. And it may even have been the case that the enshadowed personage was the first to have told the joke, unaware that, by this interpretation, he would look like a fool. But then, how would anyone have known?

Might this make the drunk too clever? Or was he ever one to begin with? That the thief believed him to be one is evident, but I’m somehow uneasy with this version of the story and all that it implies. The mind projected by the drunk onto others is only ever equal to his own, and I cannot step outside of my own besotted mind in order to test the strength of my own cunning, so it is better not to say more. What I’m barking after isn’t even a shadow; it is pure refraction, heat baking off earth.

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Joshua Rothes is a writer, editor and graphic designer. He is the author of An Unspecific Dog, The Ethnographer, William Atlas, The Art of the Great Dictators and We Later Cities. He is the publisher of Sublunary Editions, and, alongside Jacob Siefring, is also responsible for the Empyrean Series, which reissues out of print and hard to find works from the annals of literary history. Twitter: @joshuarothes