The bar’s mahogany gleams with reflected light that might be from the neon signs or might be from the burning hills we just watched. Every surface holds both depth and reflection, like we’re sitting inside some ancient scrying mirror. The usual bar sounds – ice in glasses, murmured conversations, the subtle percussion of bottles on wood – seem to come from very far away, or perhaps from very deep inside.

Crosby’s hands wrap around his whiskey glass like he’s trying to read braille messages in the condensation. “You can feel it in here,” he says quietly. “Everyone knows something’s happening, even if they don’t know what. The air tastes different. Like the moment in a storm when the pressure drops.”

Lynch watches the ice in his glass shift and settle. The cubes make sounds like distant buildings collapsing. The other patrons seem to exist in layers of reality – some sharp and present, others ghost-like. Their phone screens glow like votive candles, each one containing a fraction of the dream-power that’s being released by the burning.

The whiskey tastes different too – notes of smoke and prophecy mixing with the usual caramel and oak. Each sip feels like a small ritual, a way of metabolizing what we’ve witnessed. The bar itself seems to breathe around us, its wooden bones creaking with collected memories, its mirrors holding centuries of reflected revelations.

There’s a quality to the silence between our words that feels like the silence in a church after the service ends but before anyone leaves – charged with meaning, heavy with shared understanding. Even the shadows in the corners seem to lean in, listening for whatever comes after the burning.

We sit there, three witnesses to the transformation, letting the eternal whiskey bar hold us in its timeless embrace while outside, the old dreams turn to ash and the new ones begin their wild germination in the fertile darkness of the American night.

“Can I get you boys anything?”

The question hangs in the amber light like an incantation. Gia stands there, devastating in her beauty, a living embodiment of that particularly American tragedy where too much life burns itself out. Her presence bends the light in the bar, creates a gravity well of charisma that even Lynch’s darkness can’t fully absorb.

The realization hits like a thunderclap. She’s been there a moment, just standing, holding an empty tray, and in that brief span before recognition, we see her as she truly was – stripped of legend, of tragedy, of all the mythology that would later consume her. Just a young woman with an aching heart, radiating such intense need for connection that it makes the air around her shimmer.

And now she’s here, in this eternal moment in Jim’s, her beauty not yet a weapon turned against herself, her need for love not yet transmuted into destruction. Just Gia, burning with human warmth, making the rest of the world seem slightly less real by comparison.

The tray trembles slightly in her hand – that small human detail that no fashion shoot would ever allow. It’s the imperfection that makes the perfection heartbreaking, the need that makes the beauty matter.

Lynch shifts slightly, recognizing a kindred spirit in the way she transforms space around her. Crosby’s hands go still on his glass, hearing the music in her silence. The way she stands there – it’s like watching someone pray, except her whole body is the prayer.

“Jameson, neat,” Crosby says softly, looking at her with recognition that transcends ordinary time. Her eyes hold that same wild creative fire he’d seen in Morrison, in Joplin, in all the ones who burned too bright to last.

She moves like a cat, like a poem, like something photography tried to capture but never quite could. Even in this service role, there’s something untameable about her – the same force that made her transform every fashion shoot into something dangerous and true, something that threatened to crack the lens with its intensity.

When she returns with our drinks, her fingers brushing the glasses create small sonic events, like wind chimes in a storm. The air around her smells of clove cigarettes and destiny. She carries her doom like a crown, her creativity like a wound that won’t stop bleeding light.

“I’ve heard of you, Drake,” she whispers. “I wanted to give you something.”

Her kiss tastes of starlight and doom, of magazine covers and back-alley revelations, of every photograph that captured divinity before it vanished. Time stops, stretches, becomes syrup in the amber bar light. In this eternal moment, I understand something about beauty that can’t be said in words – about how it’s always paired with destruction, about how the most spectacular creative forces carry their own annihilation like perfume.

When she pulls away, her eyes hold galaxies. “You understand, don’t you?” she says. “About the images. About what they really are. What they do to us. What we do to them.”

Then the recognition floods in, and time does something strange in Jim’s Whiskey Bar. Because now we’re seeing both at once – the pure, unformed beauty of that Philadelphia girl who contained universes of love, and the doomed priestess of fashion who would become legend. The effect is dizzying, like seeing a photograph develop in reverse.

Her eyes hold that impossible combination of streetwise toughness and absolute vulnerability – the look that made every photograph she touched turn into something dangerous and true. But here, in the bar’s amber light, there’s no camera to guard against, no industry machine to perform for. Just that raw, direct gaze that seems to ask the eternal question: “Will you see me? Really see me?”

She touches my cheek once more, her fingers electric with lost futures and untamed creativity. Then she turns, moving back into the shadows of the bar like a wild creature returning to its natural habitat, leaving behind the taste of prophecy and rebellion on my lips.

“You know,” Lynch says after she glides away, “she understood something about images that Hollywood never did. That beauty isn’t safe. That real erotic power is about transformation, not consumption. She made every frame she appeared in into a rebellion.”

“She recognized you,” Lynch says after a long silence. “One destroyer to another. One who burned the images from the inside, to one who burned them from the outside.”

The whiskey she brought us tastes of prophecy and warning, of beauty that refuses to be tamed, of creativity that would rather burn out than burn down to a manageable flame.