David looked up from his thoughts casting his eyes once more to the old man that had triggered his demented stroll down memory lane. The man lifted his head back up towards the window, gazing out at the windswept streets. Cast for a moment in profile, David caught a glimpse of a ghostly smile cut across the man's face tearing through his morose visage. The resemblance to his father immediately ceased.

As it did, the man turned from his reverie out the window and locked eyes with David. He shivered, the man's gaze penetrating, peeling back layer after layer and boring down deep until David felt naked before him. He wanted to look away, but instead found himself held in that probing stare as if by a vise. There was a story there, waiting to be told. For a moment, David visualized himself slipping off his stool and joining the man at his window booth. They had much to talk about.

With that in mind, David slid his legs around the stool, prepping to dismount, only as he did his stomach lurched, and the room spun. A dizziness overtook him and he grasped the underpinning of the counter for support, clutching it tight. His knuckles whitened and the room blurred and the drums beat, pounding in his ears.

He shut his eyes against the intrusion, the sounds vacating with a pop and a silence stealing in, yanked forcefully into that absence as if by a vacuum. The world had gone black, but slowly a dull gray faded in, taking on silhouetted shapes, until those contours themselves evolved more and more variations of gray, carving out shape and dimension, until finally Glazer laughed out from the darkness.

David saw himself then in that black void ripping out a metal brace from beneath the counter overhang and stabbing it into Glazer's temple. The brace slid into that multi-grayed laughing form as if through jelly until it pierced out the far side with a light pop and a splish sound followed by a gentle gray spray of blood and brain. The brace eased to a stop, then rested there in the laughing Glazer's head, a twisted shadow play.

David gagged, and the world snapped back, the warm reds of the bar replacing the grayed contours of his vision.

"Seven dollars," the bartender said, handing David his drink.

"Umm... yeah, thanks."

David slipped out seven dollars in cash and handed them over, then counted out a two-dollar tip (largely in change), which he left on the bar. His fingers shook as he counted it out, but he didn't think the bartender noticed. It had been a small tremor, a restrained one. The Li men knew how to hold a calm veneer over a tortured soul.

David slid his legs out again, still vaguely compelled to meet the old man. The dizziness had abated, and David gathered up his beer, dropped from his stool, and turned to lock eyes once more with the man in the window booth.

When he looked, however, the old man was gone, the booth empty save for a crisply folded five and the watered remnants of the man's bourbon. A tiny bell sounded as the bar's door drifted shut.

David stood there holding his beer with nowhere to go, and no answers to be found. At a loss he slid back onto his stool and settled in for the night. As he did, somehow he felt comforted. He couldn't shake the image of the metal brace piercing Glazer's skull, and yet even as that image tore at him, he felt at ease at the bar – at peace in the dark, balled up on the stool, tight and tense and alone. It reminded him of home.