Lateral puzzles #2: The complicated drink.
A man walks into a bar and asks for a drink. The bartender pulls out a gun and points it at him. The man says, “Thank you,” and walks out.
In this answer, everybody dies.
Charles rushed into the nearest bar. He looked at the bartender, straight in the eyes, and rattled off a long list of words that constituted a fancy drink served, traditionally, as part of a week-long celebration of sexuality in some Eastern European duchies. He hurriedly drank it and tried to leave.
“Not so fast, Charles,” said the bartender who, while saying this, pulled out a gun, which was dozing peacefully between the bourbon and the vodka.
“That’s a cat, Simone. But thanks anyway.” He walked out.
The bartender cursed, but it was too late. Charles had made his escape. The bartender threw the cat (Dr. Whiskers) away and leapt well over the counter, hitting the floor running.
They ran through the city night, passing by an old woman who unbeknownst to her was about to die of old age peacefully, 20 years from now. The old woman fed the pigeons because her children never called. She glanced at Charles and Simone as they ran by.
They ran through the city night, passing by the statue of Wilhelm, the city founder. Wilhelm, who had imbibed an immortality portion to prevent death only to have his political enemies bronze him to a supposed death, heard the pit-pat-puts of the footsteps on the cobbles. He sighed and re-derived the Grand Unified Theory for the 1.48e18th time.
“How’s it going, Wilhelm?” said the old woman, tottering past the man with the golden body.
“Fine. You, Agnes?” said Wilhelm.
“My back’s acting up real bad.” The old woman grunted and shuffled away.
Wilhelm loved Agnes. She was funny, and he knew she was beautiful because her voice was beautiful and even if she wasn’t he would still never stop looking at her, and if this wasn’t love what was? Wilhelm tried to send all his love to her. His love, honed by not having felt anything else inside the statue for all these years, was so strong it caused Agnes back to chronically ache. Agnes, feeling the pain every time she walked near the statue, eventually stopped frequenting Wilhelm at all in a twist of cruel, Pavlovian fate. Their love—for it was mutual—drove them apart.
Say “I love you,” goddamnit, Wilhelm thought to himself. But the embarrassment would be too much, even for a man trapped behind bronze. And so his love, like him, sat pure, cold, and untouched.
They ran through the city night, entering into a dead-end. Simone cornered Charles into an alley. “Why did you run?” she screamed at him, somewhat incoherently. “You know I need the money. I trusted you. I trusted you!”
Simone waggled the gun at him.
“Careful. Careful. You’ve never shot anybody before.” Charles tried to project a soothing tone of absolute care.
“I shot a man once, just to see what the police would do,” Simone said.
“What did they do?”
“Bleed, mostly.” But that’s not what her heart said. Her heart said this: “I love you.”
“I’M NOT HAPPY,” Charles screamed, incoherently. His heart said the same. And his hypothalamus agreed and added, “Why must I always be defined by whom I am below?”
Charles, a deer in the headlights, stared at Simone—a beautiful shaking woman with auburn hair and a gun in her hand pointed at him, shaking because she wished she had a bronze mask, shaking because it was cold inside and outside her, shaking because she knew why he was unhappy—, Charles being a man who only had the thoughts of Eastern European Carnivale running through his head, but a man, a man who had lived alone ever since his family died in the fire and he had found misshaped love in auburn elsewhere, a broken man with big brown eyes.