The Listeners (2 page)

“Shot,” said the oldest.

“Drown,” said the youngest, “because then you might not drown but have a dolphin save you.”

The middle shook her head. “This is in a part of the ocean,” she said, “where dolphins went extinct. Now do you guys know about the different ides?” She gleamed her I've-done-my-research smile, which according to their mother was not very becoming. “March is famous,” the middle explained, “as the month when ides should be wared of, but many perilous things have taken place on the fifteenth of February as well. For instance: on this day in 1961, flight 548 crashed in Belgium, killing seventy-three people, including every figure skater on the U.S. Olympic team. On the ides of February of
this very year
”—she paused for effect—“the drilling rig
Ocean Ranger
sank during a vicious storm off the Newfoundland coast, and eighty-four rig workers died.

“But good things happened too,” she went on, “like Susan B. Anthony from the coin was born on this day in 1820. And Sir Ernest Shackleton popped from the womb on this day in 1874. He saved every last sailor from an icy death, although the sled dogs had to be killed. And on February 15, 1564, Galileo Galilei came into the world. He was the first to see craters on the moon.”

TEN YEARS AGO,
a man called Ajax who wore wooden jewelry gave me a job out of sheer kindness, and I'd worked at his bookstore ever since. I had never been the biggest reader, which worried me at first, but I learned to pony up convincing answers to customers on the shortest of notices. I could refer to writers so quickly and slur-rily that the customer would nod along no matter what I was saying. If an aficionado wanted to have an actual literary conversation, my eyelids would droop and I'd fiddle with the calculator until Ajax swooped in, with his genuine knowledge, to rescue.

At lunch hour we had strawberry soda and cocoa patties from the Jamaican grill. Ajax bent over his newspaper while I paced the linoleum aisles. Our little graveyard lay in the shade, its shelves aburst with stories, bins packed with remains, bunting slung limp from the ceiling, and for hours at a time, for days on end, nary a customer. It was an improbable location for a bookstore, out here among the office blocks and furniture outlets
and restaurants full at lunchtime of trembling chrome-haired ladies. Each stack of pages in its cardboard sleeve was a house, and in each house things happened without anyone knowing. The houses were dead because no one would read them again. We had our regulars and the mail orders, but both were measly.

A spider clung to the net of flesh between my thumb and finger; my other hand flicked it off and pounded it flat on the scarred counter.

Two boys strutted in, cold-faced sparks, their garb a tattered skin on spitefully thin limbs. It was a good thing their assflesh had been hacked away, or had never grown in the first place, because the britches didn't have room for it. They were not so much pants as denim harnesses, sliced low, grazing the pubic bone. I had once relied on my own skinniness to pull off that kind of look.

The taller spark asked, “You got any books by the guy who went to jail for building a half-pipe on Indian burial grounds?”

I stared at him.

“Do you?”

“He only wrote one, and it's garbage.” (In fact it probably was.)

“Well do you have it?”

“You might consider looking on the memoir wall.”

“Whatever, lady.”

Lady
? Neither stripling had removed his fly-eye glasses.
Lady
? And now a girl, even younger than the boys, attractive in a cake-mix sort of way, strolled in.
School must've just gotten out. Both waxy heads turned; they appraised her clinically as she leaned into the new arrivals table, shrugging off her pink wool coat.

She left without buying anything. So did the sparks. The silence in the store was so huge I could hear every twist and shimmer of ring in my ears. I flicked on the radio, which stayed at talk stations—Ajax honored my no-music policy. Thought it was stupid, but honored it.

Those kids should've known who I was. Even after all this time.

Narcissus was a flower but was also a boy. The boy loved the sight of himself and so he loved water. The problem with Narcissus: oneself was only of limited interest. Sometimes, to ward off the tedium of Quinn, I went into the heads of people I knew. I was Geck; I was Riley; I was my smarter sister. I listened to their conversations. Watched them watch TV or make toast. I liked borrowing their heads.

I popped open a red can of chips, closed my eyes at the factory taste dear to me since childhood. The radio was listing war-death statistics, so I turned it back off. Silence, buzzing. For three seconds, the most I could stand, I made myself pretend I was deaf. This was how it felt: the flat hush unbroken by a single noise other than the hum in my canals. Riley would have to learn sign language.

“THE TORPEDO IS
a fish that if you touch while it's alive, even with a long stick, your hand will go numb, perhaps forever. But if it's dead you can eat it.” The middle looked up from her notebook. “So what would you do if the king commanded you to kill one?”

“Shoot it with a rifle,” said the oldest.

“Ask the king,” said the youngest, “if he could please command someone else.”

THE BAR WAS
its usual self, smudged mirror and crack-vinyled banquettes, idleness warming the air. Sparklers dressed to the teeth were chattering at every table. My spot on the end stool had been commandeered by some fellows who had the look of a band about them: their outfits were variations on a pinstriped theme, and their droopy haircuts matched, and their number was four. The one most likely to be the singer (shiniest hair, bonniest face) was telling the others: “I'm just gonna book it to South America, if so. No way I stick around to get slaughtered on a camel track.” He swung his polished locks, tipped beer into his mouth.

“Me neither,” said the one who, fattest, would have been the drummer.

“Yeah, fuck
that
they can't institute a
draft
it's the twenty-first century!” added the bass player, dumbest.

Their eye-corners were unwrinkled, thighs spindly, they were killable. I watched them in the hot sand, these dapper four, a row of pinstriped puppies jerking and flopping in the bullet spray.

Mink wiped the zinc and chewed a lime, worrying its pulp for last juices. She was sweating hard. She was letting the other girl fetch my drinks. When did she ever do that? Normally she was a good lieutenant, always had the new drink ready before being asked.

“They try to draft me, I'll shoot my toe off,” declared the drummer. “How you like me
now
?”

When Mink drew near I said: “Bad day or something?”

She turned. “I bounced three checks.”

“Oops.”

“Ninety dollars in fees.”

“Re-up
ici
, madam!” shouted the singer.

“One second.” Mink hunched and unhunched her shoulders, slow; then bent to serve.

The singer looked over at me. Kept looking. I decided to be flattered.

“Hey,” he said. “You're that—I mean you were in—I mean you used to play around here, right?”

“I did,” I said.

“I
thought
so.” He took a pull from the glass Mink had set down. “There's an old poster of y'all up at WMUC. I have a show.”

“Congratulations.”

“So this is totally weird, because I just saw another guy from your outfit. Today. A few fucking hours ago. And now I see you.”

“How come you didn't see
her
?” I said, pointing at Mink. “She was in it, too.”

The singer looked. Shrugged. “Time is a hammer.
Anyway, for some reason I thought that guy died. Didn't one of you, like, die?”

“No,” I said.

“Oh. Sorry, I don't know why I thought that.” He swallowed more beer. “I kept thinking when I saw him—this was on the subway, right—isn't that guy dead? And really tall, by the way. What is he, six four?”

Geck was not tall.

“I think you saw someone else,” I said.

“No, he had the exact same face as on the poster. And the hair. Old-fashioned, you know? Like, a black flop.”

Geck was blond.

I fretted my wristband. Pluck, snap, pluck, snap. Stretched the rubber far enough to break. When the bracelet had first been assigned to me by the good doctor, I didn't intend to use it, until I discovered that it worked. It brought my brain back to itself. If terror, crack band brutally hard. If dread, flick elastic and focus on pinch: dread gone.

CAM DIDN'T COUNT
as a ghost; he was perfectly alive. I had never doubted that he was, though in ten years I hadn't heard hide nor hair.

He had been good at every school subject.

He had loved American cola.

He had opposed the shaving or waxing of pubic hair, believing nether-whisker removal to be decorative where no decoration belonged. “The cock is an
organ
,” he once said. “It's not like you're going to dress your liver up in a bonnet.”

SNOW IMPROVED MY
ragged neighborhood: the scrawny trees went gentle against the falling white, and each fin-gerwide housefront appeared to be a holder of secrets. A gray cat looked up, flakes collecting on its lashes. Hello, cat. I turned my key, climbed the black stairs, wondered if his eyes would catch too much cold in them. Poured a glass of half cherry juice, half whiskey, and drank it in two swallows. My octopus watched from the couch. It was too warm in here, the first-floor stereo too loud. Pulled off my glimmie and drenched socks. Thermostat had been jacked—it was hard to breathe. I stomped on a loose board. Should open a window. The music tightened to a tunnel, sharpening, grinding, and my eyes had too much water in them: the couch reeled in jelly: I needed to sit. Where was Octy? I would sit with him. First open a window, then sit. First sit, then open—? I couldn't hear anything except wind raking the hairs. The floor came up through the water to meet me.

And I woke up in the bells. They fell straight down from the cathedral. The news of Cam was still there—I prodded my throat, where it had lodged.
He had the exact same face as on the poster.
But it wasn't him. Couldn't be. Pinstriped Jacket had been mistaken.

It was my day off, and I wished it weren't.
You have a brain, why don't you use it?
My brother too sat for way too long at windows, stayed in his apartment for stretches of more than twenty-four hours. I, at least, was mostly able to fake it, but Riley was all bashfulness, a scuttler at life's hem. Had he ever had sex? Of
course
, he was three decades old! But had he? His bedsheets were decorated with ladybugs, and how could that teen-friar body dare tangle up with another? It was mortifying to picture him naked, all bone and hair, no ass, eyes bulby with terror, skin freckled and moled—a chalky hide like my own, inherited from Belfast, Cardiff, Manchester.

I radiated a burrito and spooned on salsa. Stared at the swollen lump under its cheerful sauce, fat-drenched blood slowing and hardening. “It's fine,” I said out loud. But that whitish chicken-yellow smell of raw fat in the gash—I breathed, breathed, waited for new air in my mouth. Burrito into trash.

It had been a long time since I noticed the blood in my food. Years, maybe. But the blood seemed to be back.

Never fear. I flipped on the plastic machine for a round of my newest game, wherein the streets of an island city were strewn with poked corneas, wrung necks, and slit throats. Nighttime always. Knives and guns were
the standard, but once you accumulated enough points you got to use poison-dipped arrows or a laser that from a hundred feet could stop a heart.

 

On my street, I was one of two white residents, the other a hunchback elder who slabbed on clown-blush for her trips to the store—unless there happened to be some white invalids or white serial killers who never showed their faces. Two Thumbs handed me a new pack and nodded, businesslike. I wished he would say something, even a weatherly remark, because I liked his voice, so squeaky for so jumbo a guy.

“Busy today?”

He shrugged.

I stole a look at the stub; its teeny nail was clean.

Crossing into the next neighborhood (whiter, sprucer) I passed a spark whose mouth was half gone under a chunk of hair. Then I saw them: not one poster, not two, but twenty. Their faces marched the whole way down the block. These mooncalves were never supposed to get big; in fact, they'd claimed not to want to. Their creepy little efforts to make art without bowing to the marketplace had annoyed me but had also been a comfort: they would never be famous. Yet now they were everywhere—piped loud into coffee chains, ten feet tall on construction barriers. The singer, Jupiter, had lost major weight since last I saw him. Where have
you
been hiding yourself? he'd said and I muttered something about a new project I was assembling, and he said anytime we
wanted to open for them we were welcome to. You guys helped us so much when we were starting out, he added, palming a supermarket cantaloupe as if he could have learned something from how it felt.

We did not help you intentionally, I'd wanted to say.

Cam had hated them too.

I wondered if there might be an official name for the syndrome where you feel like you have to leave the house or you will die, but then, after ten minutes of being outside, all you want is to go back in.

Back at the ranch I was greeted by two pieces of mail. One was from my landlord, memo-style:
Your final warning
. Once again it was past the fifteenth and I had not paid this month's, and he wanted me to know that he could start eviction proceedings if it happened one more time. But he was all bluster and no organization. I had been here long enough not to fear him.