The Listeners (6 page)

“The first is coming up,” I said, “and I'm a tiny bit short.”

“I can lend you some,” he said sadly.

“That'd be great. I'll pay you back in a week.”

“All right.”

“No seriously I will!”

“I believe you,” he lied.

CAM ONCE EXPLAINED
to my brother that Stradivarius had sprinkled volcanic ash between the wood and the varnish on his violins, lushening their sound. “Well, that's the theory.” A smile, a push of black hair back. “Next time I build a guitar,” he added, “I might try it.”

Unlike most of us, Cam actually knew how to do things.

“But where would you get the volcanic ash?” asked Riley.

“I know a few ash dealers,” Cam said.

“Now get out,” I told Riley, who was knifing slivers he didn't plan to eat from a hunk of cheese.

“It's not your kitchen,” he whimpered. “It's Mert and Fod's kitchen.”

“Get the fuck
out
of here!”

“Don't be an asshole,” Cam told me.

FROM THE SUBWAY
I climbed to a street ateem with suited normals and walking-homers and, here and there, an aimless spark lighting the first smoke of nightfall. I passed a crone hauling a one-eyed dog under her arm. Where the second eye should have been was a pucker of fur and skin. This stupid city, why did I love it? Its buildings were mostly not beautiful; its couture was often terrible; and many parts of town were as segregated as they had been in the fifties. But I'd been a baby here; my childish lungfuls had been of this air; and here I had become some mock version of adult. I creaked like one, had the scuffed look of one; but indoors, I was not much better than fifteen.

Uphill past the park, toward the churches, I winced at the streak on my lungs. Creak, creak. I used to make this walk no problem, sucking cigarettes.

I tripped and slammed my head into a lamppost. Forehead wet, fingers red. How much beer was at home? There'd better be enough, and the game-machine had
better not stall again tonight or I would kill it. “Kill,” I said aloud, wiping my hand on my britches. In case I was out at home, it might be safer to go directly to the bar.

DON'T BE SCARED,
said my sister. Don't. Because it's not scary, it's
good
! Some famous people have it. Like the Russian writer—and the French composer—it's a
talent
. Don't you want to be talented? Yes you do. You can't be scared. Fod's not, is he? and
I'm
not, so you don't have to be. You know how sometimes you wish you could rip everything out of your head? Like there is too much noise in it? Well, this is what I do: lie on your back like this—
watch
, Quinn—and close your eyes and say, Here I am. Here I am. Here I am.

PINE ANNOUNCED, “WE
are going Moroccan tonight!”

Riley unlaced his rain-drippy shoes and left them by the door. I did the same. The girl must have been particular about floors.

I sniffed: “Chicken?”

“North African recipe,” Pine nodded.

“Um, okay.”

Riley widened his eyes at me.

I mouthed,
What
?

He asked Pine chipperly, “So when are you going to tell me your real first name?”

She snorted. “You wouldn't want to know, I
assure
you. It's a very hideous name.”

“Then how come your parents—”

But she ran into the kitchen. Riley and I sat dumbly until she returned with steaming plates and cried, “Chicken
magnifique
! Just let me get the bread…”

I inspected the meat. What were those dots? Wrinkled brown—
fuck
. The sky went thick rust-purple with the
smoke of scalded grape: fizzling, flattening, blackening dots on their pyre. All gone. All gone.

“What's wrong?” Pine called from the kitchen.

“Nothing,” said Riley.

“But somebody made a weird sound.” She came back in, wiping fingers on a dishtowel. “Is it undercooked?”

“No,” I said, “I just can't—”

“You don't like the sauce?”

“No—no—it's the—” The sky was so heavy, so fuckedly purple, I almost gagged. Every atom of killed raisin hit my lung hairs. My mother shook me by the shoulders.

Riley held a glass to my mouth. I sipped. “Sorry.”

“No, no,” said Pine, “you're
ill
, don't apologize.”

“I'm allergic to raisins.”

Pine smiled. “Violently, it would seem.”

Red boxes in single file on the sill, lined up along the baseboard, stacked in a pyramid on my desk. The guidance counselor in his bolero tie had repeated, “Bonfire?”

“It wasn't a bonfire,” I insisted.

“All right,” said Mert, “
blaze
. Conflagration. Inferno.”

I'd hoped the counselor was noticing my mother's tendency to exaggerate.
I refuse to cook food night after night for people who do not appreciate it.
I hoped he would write it down in a file.

“And there was nothing else being burned except—?”

“That's right,” said Mert, “which is what concerns me most. It feels like a ritual, some kind of cult thing.”

“Why raisins?” the counselor asked. I shrugged. The counselor waited, asked again.

“There were some lying around,” I said.

“Fifty-five boxes!” screamed Mert. “Those little snack size! I counted—”

“You went into my
room
?”

My mother had been wrong: there were not fifty-five boxes—that was not a good number at all—there were fifty-seven. But I did not correct her. The guidance counselor asked again, “Why raisins?” and I smelled the sky, swollen rust-purple with the smoke of their dying.

“Do you need to go home?” said Pine now.

“No!” Riley said.

“Maybe,” I said, holding a hand over my lips so the worm couldn't get out.

THE WILD WEST
game was boring: you rode a bull around a ranch to save a girl. Always a girl. God forbid a
fellow
should ever find himself in need of saving. I chopped down the short list of distractions—more beer, another game, auto-pleasuring. Or walking (hood up, eyes down) whither and nither round the night city, blinked at by cats. I was homesick for teendom, when everything had stretched like a road. I'd decided to be a singer so I could lure Cam's best friend, the hot Pete, from a girlfriend who did not sing. I'd planned to make up for my average physiognomy by being the pivot. The engine. I would make them look. I would do weirdness with my voice that wasn't pleasing or pretty but made them look. My melodies (what passed for them) were blue or silver or bruise. Like runny fabric they bled on my eyes—not my eyeballs but the ones behind them, the louder eyes I'd wished my whole life I could turn off.

Did Pete ever hear
Purgastoria
, or any of the earliers? By the time our first record came out he was gone. When
we played near his college, some meadowy town in New England, he was in the audience. He saw me see him—nodded—but left before our set was over. I did not tell Cam.

In the table drawer I kept a book borrowed years ago from the library:
Enchantments of the Octopus
. I opened to a middle page:

One Christmas in midchildhood I'd gone downstairs with my sister very early and in the dark we stared at the stockings. She tried to guess the gifts from the bulges. Tree smell prickled the walls of my nose. Under the cold was black from dead candles. I'm going to look for just one tiny second, I explained, and was hauling a chair to the mantelpiece when Fod (where had he snuck from?) said “Greedy!” and I stopped, red. But the shame faded fast, replaced by excitement at my presents, the octopus
most. It was soft and gray with a sewn-on mouth and black marble eyes. Fod said each arm had a different power, and it would be up to me to learn what all the powers were.

The other thing in the drawer was the old bike chain. Greenish-blackish links cold on my skin, Cam on my skin, the chain hard between my chest and his pressed ear. When he'd said
I want to hear
, I let him listen. Mineral neck. Sopping panties slicked up tight to the bone. In Milwaukee, I had wanted him again.
My fingers are ten spots of blood who remember you.

THE PONG OF
cheap meat and fry oil hung on the air. Little paper boats rode the counter, too grease-sogged to be ashtrays; I tapped my cigarette into a coffee can. On the wood paneling behind the register was a prehistoric poster from a place downtown that had been converted several years ago into a wine bar: gunpowder silk screen of a witch taking off her spiky hat to reveal a headful of cassettes, and in swooping letters the names of the bands. That had been a good show; I'd gone with Cam, who was acquainting me with the romance of the set list and the hand stamp. The first time I ever bleached my hair, Fod said at the table: So now you're some kind of deviant? I'd expected my mother to be mad too, but she seemed not really to notice. (After my sister died, she noticed everything less.) Riley said, I bet if you put a thing in your nose she won't give a crap either. A
thing
? sneered I. The new hair had made me feel the same way buying records did: like I lived in a secret country. After a trip to the record store, I'd spread out my purchases on the
bedroom floor, each to inspect, to adore. I would play the records in a row then play them again, and again. I did not skip the weaker songs, because Cam had taught me you couldn't always tell at first. There was a three-listen rule. If interrupted by school or dinner, I switched off the player but kept the needle on the vinyl exactly where it had halted.

Another flier, older, tacked higher on the paneling:
Show off or shut up!!! $3, all you can hear.

And now I was someone to whom slender boys felt they could say, Whatever, lady!—unaware that I'd once stood on stages.

Most shameful of all, I cared about this.

Ajax said, “I know we've already been tightening belts, but we have to do something drastic. Last month's revenue was a horror show.” Fingering the wooden arrow in his earlobe, he squinted out the front window. “I mean
horror
.”

“Mmm.”

“I don't really know what else can be done, barring—well, barring.”

Ajax would always be worried about money. He didn't understand that we were a beloved local necessity that would carry on into perpetuity.

He said, “Mind not taking your check again this round?”

“Um, no problem.”
Dear Mother and Father: I regret to inform you that I will be moving back home at your earliest convenience.

“Thanks, man, I really—”

The radio said, “A report released last week describes female interrogators in U.S. prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo smearing menstrual blood on Islamic prisoners and taunting them with the threat that they will not be given water to purify themselves before prayer.”

A clawed brown cheek, three red stripes, a white hand laughing.

My elbow, daubed with my sister's blood. She'd had her period all over herself.

SHE
BECAME A WOMAN
three months before she died. It was a school day, but she hadn't come down yet. Our mother called and called up the stairs. “Go tell that lazy lass to get a move on,” she told me, “it's seven fifteen!”

“I have a stomachache,” my sister said. “Will you get me some ginger ale?”

“We don't have ginger ale,” I said.

She yawned, kicked the covers off, swung her legs down, and creakily stood. A red puddle lay in the bed.

“It's food for a baby,” I explained. “It grows on the walls of this pouch. If you don't have a baby that month, the food falls down and comes out from your downstairs. It looks like blood but isn't exactly.”

My sister stared at the picture I was drawing. A girl's stomach was raining. Black droplets fell to her feet. “Every month it falls out for about five days,” I added.

“But how do you know when?”

“When what?”

“When it's going to come out, so you can put the pad there.”

I shook my head: “No, it's not like that. It's—always.”

She was shocked. “The
whole
time?”

“Yeah, but there's a little break in the middle and not as much comes on the later days.”

“And does your stomach hurt for the whole time?”

“Not the whole time,” I said.