The bar is the goal of Malorie’s blindfolded journey to recover sound equipment, and its arrival marks both a hard-won practical success and an abrupt encounter with danger. Reached after nine afternoons of searching, it offers the smell of sour fruit, stale smoke, and beer as a sign that she has finally found the right place; inside, however, a rotting odor and an unseen attacker make that success inseparable from fear and loss.

Destination and Route

The search for the bar requires Malorie to travel alone. She plans to drive a quarter of a mile in the direction opposite to the one from which she arrived, turn left and continue four miles, then turn right and go another two and a half miles before searching on foot. She intends to bring food for Victor, who can guide her back to the car and to the supplies when she needs him.

The route is made more perilous by the limitations of blind driving. Malorie considers five or six miles an hour a reasonable, safer speed, but her first attempt shows how little control that precaution gives her: the Wagoneer bounces over unidentified obstacles, hits the curb twenty times, strikes poles twice, and collides with a parked car. She returns home without supplies, shaken and unsure she can repeat the effort. The bar is therefore not simply a nearby errand; reaching it means accepting repeated risks in a landscape she cannot see.

A Repeated Search

Malorie persists after the first failure. She finds the Laundromat on her seventh attempt, and recognizing the place from her original drive to the house gives her enough confidence to continue. The bar itself remains elusive: while blindfolded, she enters a boot store, a coffee shop, an ice-cream parlor, and a theater, hears her shoes echo in a marble-floored office lobby, and knocks a shelf of greeting cards onto the floor.

On the ninth afternoon, an unlocked wooden door leads her into the bar. The recognition is immediate, before she can identify the room by sight: its smell of sour fruit, stale smoke, and beer confirms that she has reached the destination. She kneels and hugs Victor around the neck, telling him, “We found it,” a brief expression of relief after a search measured in attempts, wrong doors, and accumulating physical strain.

The Search for Equipment

The bar is valuable because Malorie has come to retrieve a microphone and related equipment. At the stage, her fingers find a short, oblong object capped with something like steel netting. She realizes that she is holding a microphone—the object she set out to find. The discovery makes the bar more than a destination: it contains the means to assemble the sound equipment her mission requires.

Following a wire, Malorie locates a small square object at the far end of the stage and then finds three more cords leading to three additional microphones. She gathers the amplifiers, small enough to carry, along with the microphones, cords, and a stand. Her success depends on touch and sound rather than sight; she identifies and collects each item by feeling her way through the room.

Danger Beneath the Floor

The bar’s welcome is reversed when Malorie opens a floor-level compartment. Calling out receives no answer. As she kneels and pulls the opening up, Victor’s nails dig into the wood, and the smell rising from below makes her vomit. The rotten odor turns the room from a successful stopping place into a source of immediate alarm. Malorie recognizes that the danger is not only the difficulty of moving blindfolded: she believes someone else is present in the room.

The threat becomes physical while Malorie is at the stage. As she finds the microphone, she hears Victor’s bone pop and his fur and flesh rip. His cries sound almost human in their despair. Malorie gathers the equipment while apologizing to him, then feels her way down from the stage with her back against the wall as Victor continues to struggle. The bar thus yields what she came for, but the discovery is bound to the injury of the companion who helped her reach it.

Significance

The bar brings together the central tensions of Malorie’s journey: the need to act without sight, the painstaking use of hearing and touch, and the danger that remains even when a plan succeeds. The route makes ordinary landmarks—shops, a lobby, a door—difficult to distinguish, while smell becomes decisive evidence that she has arrived. Inside, the microphone and its associated equipment are concrete gains, but the rotting space and Victor’s attack deny any simple triumph.

The sequence also shifts the meaning of arrival. Malorie’s embrace of Victor and her words of relief follow a search that has already exhausted her body and confidence; the equipment then requires her to remain in the bar as danger unfolds. The place is at once the answer to her search and a trap-like setting in which successful retrieval carries an immediate personal cost.