The Decoy Room is a bar defined by the tension between its abundance of alcohol and Mike Hoolihan’s choice of seltzer. Its brief scenes bring together Paulie No, music, and a crowded drinking room, turning the setting into the backdrop for both a practical exchange about lithium and Mike’s recollection of a small but consequential refusal.

Setting and Interior

At the center of the Decoy Room stands a white baby grand. A pianist plays the jazz standard “Night Train” in an Oscar Peterson style, favoring trills and graces over passion and muscle. Around the piano are Monday-night drinkers, decoys, and a wall of liquor; a bubbling tideline marks Paulie No’s mustache. The room’s instruments and details create a vivid contrast: polished music and an almost playful image of a mustache set against the dense display of booze.

Conversations at the Bar

Mike and Paulie No stand at the bar facing that wall of liquor. Mike had said on the phone that he would be buying, but when Paulie No flattens a twenty and asks what he wants to drink, Mike orders seltzer. The mismatch between the expectation of a bar purchase and the nonalcoholic order makes the choice concrete: he is present among the bottles without taking a drink from them.

The Decoy Room also hosts a conversation about lithium and its bodily consequences. Mike asks what signs might appear if someone had taken it for a period such as a year. Paulie No answers that renal damage would be evident after about a month. The exchange brings medical speculation into the bar’s drinking atmosphere, where the surrounding liquor and Mike’s seltzer make the question of what enters the body especially pointed.

Recollection and Significance

Mike later recalls ordering a second seltzer at the Decoy Room as a sweet moment of deferral, one that tasted sweeter than what he is tasting in the present. The remembered drink matters not as a dramatic reversal but as a small pause: in a room organized around alcohol, he delays or declines it. That recollection gives the Decoy Room a second function, as a place whose earlier moment of restraint becomes more vivid through comparison with the present.

The room’s name and its visible decoys sit beside the wall of liquor without requiring a single explanation. Instead, the scene lets its contrasts do the work: a drinker’s setting and a seltzer order, a richly ornamented piano performance and the blunt medical question of renal damage, a sweet remembered deferral and a less sweet present taste. The Decoy Room is thus both a specific bar and the setting through which Mike measures a change in experience.