Zona: A Book About a Film about a Journey to a Room

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Geoff Dyer’s books include But Beautiful, winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize, Out of Sheer Rage, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, the essay collection Working the Room and the novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. He lives in London and contributes to the Observer, Guardian, New Statesman and New York Times. geoffdyer.com

AN EMPTY BAR, possibly not even open, with a single table, no bigger than a small round table, but higher, the sort you lean against — there are no stools — while you stand and drink. If floorboards could speak these look like they could tell a tale or two, though the tales would turn out to be one and the same, ending with the same old lament (after a few drinks people think they can walk all over me), not just in terms of what happens here but in bars the world over. We are, in other words, already in a realm of universal truth. The barman comes in from the back — he’s wearing a white barman’s jacket — lights a cigarette and turns on the lights, two fluorescent tubes, one of which doesn’t work properly: it flickers. He looks at the flickering light. You can see him thinking, ‘That needs fixing’, which is not the same thing at all as ‘I’ll fix that today’, but which is very nearly the same as ‘It’ll never be fixed.’ Daily life is full of these small repeated astonishments, hopes (that it might somehow have fixed itself overnight) and resignations (it hasn’t and won’t). A tall man — a customer! — enters the bar, puts his knapsack under the table, the small round table you lean against while drinking.

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