ALLOCATION
Those who live out of suitcases learn to spend their evenings in bars. An endless tunnel of concourses, fuselages, trams, and front desks creates a dissociative environment where the realm of dreams provides more sure footing than any permanent address. There is no salvation from this state of mind in spending the per diem on a table for one. The traveler must adapt to endless hypnogogia, lest they begin to yearn for home. Such a way of life maintains the sacred footpaths between any two points in space and time, and occasionally leads beyond both.
“We make our sours with Finnish snow lemons,” the bartender explained. “We’re actually one of the few places in the US that gets an allocation.”
“Snow lemons?”
"Here, let me show you.”
He opened a minifridge and procured a wicker bowl of palmful-sized pale fruits with translucent, oily rinds. “They’re not quite like normal citrus, as they’ve adapted to environments where it would normally be too cold for them to grow. Very soft, so you have to be careful. For instance,” he dug his thumbnail in with a soft squelch, and pulled the waxy skin back without a peeler. Inside was a half inch layer of thick, white grease. With two more fingers, he scraped away this coating, revealing the clear, nacreous membrane around the pulp. It glistened like a soap bubble. “It’s sort of like an avocado, with layers of oil and fat insulating it from freezing and exploding in the arctic air. We cook that part down and use it to wash the whiskey, which gives the drink a little more body, and the kitchen ferments our scraps to make the aioli that comes with the yucca fries.”
“Why have I never heard of these before?”
The fully shucked snow lemon was no bigger than a ping pong ball. “Well, Vitamin C is actually pretty rare outside meat and blubber that far north. It fills an evolutionary niche for herbivores to be able to get their fill. There’s at least one big account up there that buys most of the gross product for reindeer feed. You can imagine the rumors about who it is. Hence, the allocation.”
“Is it him?”
“I mean, probably.” He shrugged. “Not sure who else would have that kind of budget for them.”
“You’d think there’d be more people here with an ingredient that special, though.”
“Yeah, well. This place used to be more popular. We used to get gods in here, the kind that killed giants. The whole damn Wild Hunt would stop in on their way to Sturgis. But a lot of things have changed since then. The airlines banned smoking in the cabin, monks capped production of chartreuse, and the Roman Empire fell at least twice. Most people just blame the pandemic, but I think there's more to it.”
“I mean. I’d love to bring a date here, sometime.”
“And we’d welcome the business. But you and I both know that’s not how this works, and you have other places to be.”