Wild Awake (21 page)

“Whassat?” Doug burps.

“Sukey’s masterpiece. The one you said she was working on when”—my throat constricts—“when it happened.”

My voice sounds high and cartoonish, like I just took a hit off a helium balloon. I wonder if there’s something wrong with me. I’ve felt strange inside myself since the night under the piano, rushed and dizzy. My thoughts feel like a TV with the volume all messed up: one moment, everything sounds normal, then suddenly it’s BLARING LOUD, then normal again before I can be totally sure the loud part even happened. I pinch myself on the leg, annoyed.
Just quit it
.

Doug gazes down at his speckled yellow hands and says nothing. I pick up a chunk of pomegranate and sink my teeth into it, tasting the bitterness and the rush of sweet. When I’ve finished sucking the juice out I look around for a place to spit the seeds. I settle on my hand.

“Don’t worry,” I say between spits. “I won’t be mad if you wanted to keep it for yourself. But you can’t not show it to me at all. I have to see it.”

I pick up another chunk of pomegranate and go to work on it. The pile of seeds in my hand is growing into a warm, chewed-up heap. I tip it out onto the floor.

Doug looks up, sees the pomegranate, and scowls.

“Put that thing down, you’re getting crap everywhere. What the hell kind of fruit is that, anyway?”

“Pomegranate.”

Doug sighs. “I don’t have no painting,” he says.

“What do you mean, you don’t have the painting?” I say, my voice false-cheerful. Even as I hate myself for asking, hate the sound of my own pathetic hopefulness like the tinny jingling of cheap bells, I can’t help but push on. “Did someone steal it? Did you give it to a gallery?”

Doug scowls down at his blanket, avoiding my eyes. I keep at him, pleading. “You said she painted all the time. You said she used to lock herself in there for days. Artistic privacy. Come on, Doug. You at least saw her last painting, didn’t you? Can’t you at least tell me what it looked like?”

In the room below us, someone throws something heavy onto the floor and starts shouting, a long caterwauling invective that makes the floor vibrate. Doug says nothing. The silence hanging between us is thick and awful and spreading in size like a stain.

“Forget it,” I say quietly.

“Oh, honey.”

I get up, brushing pomegranate seeds off my jeans, and pick my way toward the door. The strange feeling in my head is getting stranger. The utter bizarreness of my presence here, in this dingy hotel talking to this dingy old man, presses on me with an urgency akin to panic.

What the hell am I even doing here?

I fumble for my phone so I can text Skunk on my way down the stairs.

“Aw, hell,” says Doug. “Honey, wait.”

I trip over something and almost bail, but catch myself and keep heading for the door. Denny was right. I guess I know what Sukey was really doing when she locked herself in her room for days at a time, and it didn’t involve a paintbrush.

“
Wait
,” says Doug, and there’s something so raw and urgent in his voice I turn around.

“What?” I demand. He motions for me to sit down, but I remain standing, hands on my hips. Whatever he has to say had better be quick.

“Your sister—,” he begins. He stops and looks at the floor. I make an exasperated noise and turn to leave, but Doug starts talking again and I freeze, the promise of a story a drug I can’t resist.

“The first time I saw Sukey-girl,” he says, “I’ll never forget it. She was wearing a blue polka-dot dress, and she was sitting on the sidewalk with a stack of paintings she was trying to sell. It looked like she’d been on the streets for three-four days tops. I was guessing she was one of those runaway kids from the suburbs, Surrey or Burnaby. She didn’t look a day over sixteen. ‘Go on home, honey,’ I said. ‘You look like you come from a real nice family.’”

The image catches me off guard, and in my surprise and bewilderment I burst into tears. On Columbia Street, a car drives past pumping rap music. The beat carries through Doug’s window,
boom, boom, boom
, a disorienting reminder that in the world outside this hotel room, the words Doug is passing to me like tarnished silver mean nothing at all. The car recedes, its noise like a fly that alighted on Doug’s shoulder and is buzzing off again. I strain my ears, but I can’t hear its thumping anymore.

“We got to chatting,” Doug says. “Some tourist had just bought a painting off her for fifty bucks. It was the first time she’d ever sold anything, and she was so happy she had this glow. She asked me if I knew about a cheap place to stay. I said, ‘Go home, girl. You’re having fun now, wait until you end up like me.’ You want to know what she said?”

I’m really crying now, tears silently licking my cheeks. I’m not sure why Doug has elected to tell me this story now. Maybe because he’s saved the saddest part of all until the end. Maybe because I’m the only person in the world who can lift it from his shoulders now that he’s carried it for so long.

“What did she say?”

“She said, ‘The soul has a home of its own, and I want to live in that one.’ Some line from a movie. I had her write it down for me, eh, but I lost the paper. It knocked me out—this beautiful girl in a polka-dot dress sitting there on the sidewalk, selling her paintings and pulling out lines like that. Every single day, I told her to go home. Every goddamn day.”

“Why didn’t she?” I say, even though I know the answer.

Another car passes by with its stereo blasting, this time a nattering top forty host whose words I can’t make out. I’d never realized how loud the world was, how filled with cold and impersonal noise. It’s a wonder we ever find each other at all in its clamoring thickets. It’s a wonder we still try.

The mattress groans as Doug leans over to get his crutches “Come on, honey,” he says. “I got something to show ya. It’s maybe not what you wanted, but I bet Sukey-girl would have liked you to see it.”

He maneuvers himself up from the mattress. I watch him warily, my tears drying up but my cheeks still hot. I don’t think I’m ready for more surprises, no matter what they are. I want to be home with my head under a pillow, muffling as much of the world as I can. Doug works his way across the room, lurches past me, and goes into the hall. “Down this way,” he grunts. I follow him at a distance. “I’ve already seen her old room,” I say, remembering the porn magazines and the stench of old cigarettes.

Doug shakes his head in disgust. “Sukey-girl never spent hardly any time in that shithole anyway.”

He crutches down the hall quickly, as if he’s afraid I’ll find some excuse to leave if we don’t get there fast. The floor creaks beneath us like something that’s already breaking, even though the demolition notice taped to the door of the hotel when I came in this morning pins the date a few weeks away. Doug stops when he gets to the fire door at the end of the hall and leans on it with his shoulder.

“Isn’t the alarm going to sound?” I say.

Doug ignores me. “Give that door a push, honey.”

He shuffles out of the way, and I reluctantly take his place. The door scrapes open when I shove it, revealing a rickety fire escape. Doug blinks at the blueness of the sky like he’s seeing an alien landscape. I gaze out apprehensively, my eyes wandering down through the metal slats to the alley four stories below.

“I don’t know what you’re going to find up there,” he says with a rueful glance at his crutches. “Maybe nothing. But Sukey-girl was always sneaking up to that rooftop, so you may as well have a look around.”

I glance at the spindly staircase climbing up the brick wall, and my stomach twists up like a wet shirt. I hate heights, hate-hate-hate them, and the fire escape looks like it would collapse if you blew on it too hard.

“Go on,” says Doug.

“I don’t know.”

“You want to see what your sister saw, this is as close as you’re gonna get.” He pats me on the arm, gazing up the fire escape with an expression of such naked yearning I feel ashamed.

“You stop by when you come down,” he says, “and tell me what it’s like up there.”

The fire escape clangs each time I take a step. I grip the rusty handrails, silently uttering threats to the Imperial Hotel:
If I die climbing this stupid fire escape, I will come back and burn you to the ground before they even get a chance to demolish you
. Cars rumble past on the street below, and the smell of their exhaust pricks my nose. I can hear the bass thump of someone’s sound system and see the white splatters of pigeon droppings on the tops of faded awnings.
Look at you, sneaking up fire escapes
, laughs the Sukey in my head, but I’m so mad at her I don’t even answer. Each rattling step sends my heart racing. Every time I glance down, my guts contort. I can smell the cloying stink of the Dumpster in the alley below. That’s where I’ll land if the fire escape gives out.

The higher I climb, the more I start to worry about the most random and trivial things, as if my brain has given up on trying to distinguish the important stuff and is just firing at everything that moves. I wonder if Math Boy found the solution to his equation. I wonder if Stanley Otter Fish would have been a famous composer if he hadn’t gotten run over by a truck. I wonder what would happen if I died, and the last fruit I had ever eaten was a pomegranate.

I tell myself there are worse things than having a pomegranate be your last fruit.

After a dozen more rattling steps, the fire escape ends and this weird iron swimming-pool ladder goes up the rest of the way. I clench my teeth and scramble up it, scraping my knees against the top rung in my hurry. Once I’m safely on the roof, I’m so dizzy with pent-up dread and relief I don’t even look around, I just crouch down and squeeze my eyes shut and breathe. While I’m crouching there, so close to the roof’s heat and dusty smell, the height and the climb and the whole situation overwhelm me all at once and I almost start to cry again. My knees hurt and I haven’t slept, and when I tried to fix my synth this morning, the power light flared and flickered and then winked out and I couldn’t make it come on again.

I’m not supposed to be here
, I think.
I’m not supposed to be here and my brain is not supposed to be doing whatever it’s doing and I’m not supposed to know about Sukey and everything is wrong
.

Maybe if I wave my hands, someone will see me and call 911 and the fire department will come and get me down, not just from the roof but from everything, from Sukey being murdered and my thoughts going loud and then normal again and from this whole entire wreckage of a summer.

I pinch myself again, viciously this time.
Do you
ever
shut up? There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just looking for excuses not to be brave
.

I huddle there by the ladder, the strong side of me bullying the weak one, until the feeling evaporates and just like that I’m fine again. I lift my head and look around.

In the middle of the roof, there’s a sagging plastic lawn chair. Beside it there’s a pile of cigarette butts, an old Discman, and a faded Coke bottle filled with rainwater. A chipped clay flowerpot has rolled under the lawn chair, spilling out a heap of black soil spotted with white pearls of fertilizer.

I’m psyching myself up to investigate more closely when something catches my eye: a splatter of dirty yellow paint beside my right foot. I reach out to touch it and immediately spot another one a few inches away. I freeze, my pulse quickening, as my eyes pick out more and more of them, scattered all around me in a cloud. The colors have gone dull and filthy from years of dust and rain, but they’re still there, still visible, layers and layers of drips and splatters and spots.

Sukey
.

I shift onto my hands and knees to get a closer look, ignoring the roughness of the rooftop on my grazed skin. Rubbing away the grime, I make out raspberry, purple, sea-foam green, like droppings from a psychedelic pigeon. Sukey must have stood over this place with her easel while she painted. These drips of paint must have flown off her brush as she lifted it to the canvas, splashing onto the hot roof.
Sukey made art here
, my brain keeps thinking, sounding it over and over like a bell—my Sukey, the one I remember, not the strung-out stranger that was starting to replace her in my mind. Even if she was screwing up and getting lost and making all the wrong decisions, at least she was still searching. At least she was still trying to get to that place her soul was from. And maybe, in spite of everything, she found it.

As I climb back down the fire escape, I tell myself there’s no reason to be sad anymore—no reason to crash bicycles or fight with Danny or have stupid, fretful worries about the people on the bus. The world is good and I am good and love is good and if I’d only stop freaking out long enough to realize that, I wouldn’t have any problems at all.

All day long, I carry Sukey’s
rooftop around with me like a pocketful of gumballs, an ecstatic secret I can hardly keep contained. I want to be good for the world—pure and true and wise and somehow saintly, somehow illuminated. I want to have experienced something that has changed me, and so I act changed.

I take my synth to Skunk’s house, and we fix it in the shed using bike tools. The pieces of the exploded synth fit back together perfectly. You can’t even tell it exploded in the first place, and when I plug it into the extension cord, the power light glows bright blue. I play for Skunk for a little while, saying things like, “This is where Lukas goes ba-ka-ka-ta-ba-ka-ta on the drums,” until Skunk picks me up, moves the synth out of the way, sets me down on the workbench, and kisses me with his hands in my hair. “Love-bison,” I say, but he can’t hear because my mouth is smothered in kisses.

When I leave, Skunk gives me a little black book with yellowing pages. I read it on the bus ride home. It starts, “The Way that can be experienced is not true; the world that can be constructed is not real.” I flip it over. The cover says
Tao te Ching
. By the time I get home, I’ve read the whole thing twice. I send Skunk a text
I THINK MY BRAIN IS ON FIRE,
and he texts back
IT PROBABLY IS,
and I text back
THE WAY IS A LIMITLESS VESSEL,
and he texts back
USED BY THE SELF, IT IS NOT FILLED BY THE WORLD,
and I text back
IT CANNOT BE CUT, KNOTTED, DIMMED OR STILLED,
and he texts back
ITS DEPTHS ARE HIDDEN, UBIQUITOUS AND ETERNAL
. we keep texting lines back and forth until we’ve texted practically the whole
Tao te Ching
, then Skunk calls and says, “I miss you already, Crazy Girl,” and I get off the bus, cross the street, catch a bus in the opposite direction, go right back to his house, and kidnap him for an expedition to the Chinese bakery before his aunt and uncle get home from work.