remote cards

We are sitting in a bar when a girl comes in, a friend of a friend, so she comes over and chats to us. How are you liking Austria? She asks me. I’ve only been here a day, it’s rained most of that time, we spent the afternoon in a museum. What can I say? She has come in with two shady looking guys, who don’t come over to join us. They sit at the bar, watching everyone, talking to each other. We leave about then, so she goes back to join them. Later, we are in a packed club, a crush of bodies, and I see her in the crowd, amongst the cloud of smoke and flashing lights, the pounding music. We don’t stay long, having wandered in long enough to get a flavour of the place, before wandering on to the next place. We manage to get a table in Cubus, in the corner, with the lights of the AEC’s façade still going through their colour spectrum beside us. We’ve been there a few minutes when the two shady guys appear at the next table, no sign of the girl this time, just the two of them at a table, looking shifty. A waitress appears almost immediately. I swear I hear her say – so this is the bag? To which they nod. And she grabs a bag from the floor by their feet, where I hadn’t seen it. And she is off with it, returning a minute later with a beer for each of them. Five minutes later a waiter comes along, stands and chats to them, he is grinning, pleased about something. The two guys sit a while, the beers barely touched, instead nursing soft drinks, smoking, looking shiftily around.

Labels: ars electronica, bar, girl, guys, linz