“Memory believes before knowing remembers.”
William Faulkner, Light in August
I.
The guitar strings are not at all smooth (not like he ever really thought they would be), but coiled, sharp, ridged; they are files for grinding down fingertips. And so rigid, less strings than cables—strong and unmovable, resistant to depression and repellant of the most pleading coax. They buzz and snap and belch, voices megaphoned by the cheap guitar amp that is missing the logo that should be on its front grill, and whose internal corners and tight spaces are filled with 20 years’ worth of dust and grime. The screws holding the whole thing together are rust-free only because of the constant invigorating vibration of steady use. His fingers hurt; he is a student, and there is no sensei save the cold emptiness of the house, the number (few) of his days, and the guitar itself. The guitar is a Fender Strat, sunburst-finished in black-faded-to-tobacco (he will not smoke a cigarette for four years), and is his junior by six years. It is perfect and he loves it, but he is already restless, lustful, late at night flipping through catalogues out of its sight, fantasizing about stroking the neck of a Gibson. His mother told war stories of bleeding fingers, blisters, peeling dermis like whorled cornhusks, anti-ability, shame. Her index finger is broken on her fret hand now—she calls it a boxer’s fracture—and he wonders if it hurts with the cold. He lets a note ring out, echo off the nearest wall, die, before unclenching his hand and stretching it, feeling the joints pop and the tendons complain. His thumb and middle finger on his right hand hold pressed desperately between them a plectrum (he learned the word a week before)—incorrect position, he knows, but comfortable, and he picks the low E string slowly, gains speed in a wrong-key imitation of the rhythm of one of his favorite songs. There is no one to cover their ears, or to gripe, or to give a thumbs up, or to roll their eyes with much love and support. He wrote a song in Chemistry that afternoon. It is long and he is proud; he used the word “fuck” for the first time, which felt great, powerful, incendiary, rebellious even—he is a little too old and definitely too young to admit that the thrill is mostly born out of “fuck” being naughty. He wonders if he will feel embarrassed to sing it (assuming there’s ever any finished product to be sung) in front of his mom. The song is something like his thirtieth, and this time, this one goddammit is going to have a guitar part to found the words and melody (the melody came to him first, a sloping baritone chant—he imagines himself growling it). The band he started, is in, leads, has existed for scant weeks, and even he knows it is a joke. He is not the only one of the four who can’t play note/beat one. But it has potential, the kind of potential that wells in his throat when he thinks, when he daydreams, listens. He has had the Fender for almost a year, and today he is teaching himself, chart on the floor at his feet, diagrams like spells visible even through the gloom and short distance, his first chord, an A. Fingers are a knot, a clump, a tumor on the neck, three of them pink sausages stacked on, glued to each other. Checking his position, angling the fretboard up toward his face—a baby’s face at a man’s altitude—he is satisfied and lets the instrument hang slack again, low-hung, body over his groin. He strums. Something approaching a pleasing sound chimes deafeningly from the amp (the guitar is in fact out of tune, as his year-hence self would have immediately heard, irked), and he does not smile. Second strum, no such luck, only a rude and deadened semimelodic crash. Nothing has changed, no movement in his fingers, no shift in his stance or strumming. He is puzzled. In his pocket his cell phone screams. Well, not his phone—his dad’s, but… His right hand gropes it out, grasps it, presses the call button and the keys light up and illuminate the tunnel wall of his ear canal before blinking out seconds later. His mom’s voice, sounding thin and annoyingly (annoyance being now a near-constant) apologetic. It’s okay, he’ll find something. No, really, there’s a microwave pizza left in the freezer he thinks. And the leftovers, yes. The usual. Fine. Fine means fine. No. It was fine. Nothing exciting. Nothing. It’s okay. He understands (and he thinks he does, really). Okay. Okay. Alright. Loves her too. Bye. It is not late but a crack in the curtains of the sliding glass door reveals an indigo sky, quickly, watchably, concentrating into ink. The phone slides back into his pocket. The guitar strings squeak as his left hand glides down their length. He looks at his watch. Fifteen more minutes then dinner in front of the TV, which is already on, volume low, across the room, then who knows. Left-hand fingers scrape against strings and hurt—tips bearing the sharp stab and straight indentations of a set of .10 nickel wounds, and joints and tendons the low-voltage ache of stress, pressure, repetition, repetition, repeat. The pinky of his right hand hooks around the pickup selector switch, and guides it clicking from one end of its slot to the other and back, while his thumb-and-middle-finger-held pick strums experimentally. The sound from the amp stutters from razor-thin and reedy to treacle-thick. Somewhere in the middle there is a tone that is full of air, inflated, aerated, hollow and round and warm. He settles on this one. Fist still rigor-mortised around an A, his pick lunges predatorily; he strums as hard as he can, over and over, just down stokes, pickup up velocity, his right bicep starting to burn as the seconds expire, searching for breakup, for buzzsaw distortion, for fire, and not knowing where to find it (in two months he will receive for Christmas his first distortion pedal, after discovering the true function and range of the gain knob on his amp and finding it wanting). His attack is occasionally arrhythmic, especially now that his fingers venture elsewhere on the neck, imitating the moves but not the results of true guitar playing. It’s okay, the rhythm, so much like his own heartbeat now, is enough. His haphazardness throws the pickup switch into its farthest position, and the tone of the guitar is emaciated, atrophied. His hand returns, clumsily, to an A. One of the dogs is improbably asleep through the sonic onslaught, and her legs twitch, running through a dream, her back attached to the side of the couch nearest to him. He can feel the strings move under his fretting fingers, up and down, imitating the waves of their output frequencies, the scale of their representational amplitude defined by the intensity of his strumming. It is increasingly painful, this movement—even the thinnest, unwound strings are like cheese cutters. And then something, the division between strings (pain-givers) and fingertips (pain-takers) blurred now, snaps, pops, shifts, breaks, and what was dull hot tense hurt is suddenly hyperawareness-of-biology-and-the-weakness-thus-implied pain, and he shoots his hand away from the neck in reflex, his strumming/picking hand lagging on the open strings so that there is only jangling atonality bellowing from the amp. He inspects his left fingers. The skin is broken on the tip of his middle digit, less cut than shredded, pulled off the flesh underneath. There is blood. The rest of the fingers are red and angry, and seem to throb visibly like bullfrog throats, but are otherwise unhurt. Crimson pools under the pinched and separated and wrinkled flap of skin, and peeks out from the edge, and a little is smeared down the finger, and he is surprised at the immediacy of its flow (he checks the strings hovering above the block of the second fret, and there it is: a half-inch of rust film on the G string, and nowhere else). He has never been one to push the blood out, preferring to let it dry and flake off… Ah, now a trickle, a slithering line of rouge tickling hotly down the front and then the inside of his finger. Cleanup is required. Carefully, mindful of the danger posed by sanguine meteorites to the carpet, his clothes, etc., he takes the guitar off his shoulder and puts it down, and there is a sound like a half-speed bell when its body makes contact with the floor, when the neck is set against the upper lip of the amp. He turns the amp off and a humming he was not even aware of leaves the air. There is acute pain in his finger, the air on the blood in thin space where there should be no space stinging like acid. At his movements, the dog awakes and gets up, stretches, looks at him. As he goes to ball up toilet paper to clot his leak, he notices he is smiling. He will not baby the cut. Tomorrow, he will play more, and it will likely open and weep again, and all the while scar tissue industriously meshing, weaving together just below the surface, so that when the calluses finally (finally) armor his fingertips, this one will be just that much thicker, that much stronger. Blood blots the toilet paper. His ears are ringing. Not from the volume of his practice. But with the sound that came tolling through the ancient cone of his amp’s speaker at the moment of bloodletting, a sound he is not, and will never be, able to describe, but one that he knows is crystalline and sublime and true honest beautiful scary perfect tiny like the sound made at the beginning of the universe and time with no one to hear it. One that he knows he will hunt fruitlessly for as long as he has fingers to play.
II.
The air is cold. It has been cold, is seems, since before the turning of the seasons, stimulating arm hair, browning leaves, bringing rain. Inside buildings heat has been pumping for weeks, dry and eye-burning like oven air. The wound on his left middle finger is still red, scabbed, a work of dried blood under a single layer, translucent like onion paper, of regenerated skin. It does not hurt anymore, but he has slowed in his practice. Which is not to say that the songs have stopped coming (the one written before, so proudly inclusive of “fuck” and Chemistry-class-birthed, never did get clothed with guitar chords)—his notebooks are filling up, his pens running dry with lines of verse accumulating in towers of black against white paper sky. He has failed, is aware and ashamed of the failure—a feeling that will become, justified or not, objectively true or not, familiar—to finish the song that honors tonight. He started with the title, “Samhain,” and struggled on from there through images that felt inadequate, words that felt bullied, prodded, corralled into rhyme and architecture. After furious scratching-out, bold rewriting, days of stepping back, reattacking, he gave up. He concedes that he might never succeed in wrangling the feeling, the, for lack of any better word, magic of tonight. That day in school, some people were dressed up. A full-body cow suit, a homemade Superman cape, a few rubber masks worn briefly and never in class, innumerable fairy (correction: faerie) wings all aglitter and gauzy, among the anime fans unrecognized character accoutrement, many Renaissance Festival dresses, facepaint, etc.; no weapons allowed, or anything offensive, no blood, a maybe unspoken (he can’t remember) rule forbidding anything too gory/disturbing/inappropriate (the latter never defined really) which is probed but never broken. Most people wore what they wear every day. His girlfriend wore a fuzzy cat-ears headband, the type you can get at a drugstore for low-denomination bills. He made a point to notice them, to call them, her, cute. He thought that the winks and feline pantomimes that accompanied the ears were anything but. Cute, that is. He wore ballooning black paints of heavy fabric, a black t-shirt with fender guitars warped into the shape of a grinning skull, letters stretched and bent into shapes reminiscent of tribal tattoos defining cheekbones teeth sockets etc., and modeling clay devil horns, bound to his head with nylon cord running through both horns’ bases, purchased at the very same Ren Fest where the girls bought their dresses. The hours of school passed glacially, painful in a very real and physical way. The day he escaped to with Last Bell practically still tolling was flatly overcast and blustery, raw, perfect he thought. No Drama rehearsal that afternoon, so right home. He kissed her wetly goodbye at the corner where her house is, noted: her hesitation to release him from embrace, her microexpressed pout and big eyes, her hand in his sliding down his fingers as he pulled away, pressure light but communicative, willed—he resisted them all and walked the rest of the way home. His mom got home from the hospital shortly after, gave him an update that he did not hear. It is now dusk. The sky is cleared and holds the last residue of sunset. The doorbell rings and he is not surprised; he saw them come up the driveway seconds before, peripherally, from the table where he and his mom are eating an appropriately autumnal meal. Butternut squash soup, cider, bread, grain salad. His mom gets up and hefts the rustic basket heaped with candy to thorax level. He remains seated and chewing, slurping, and hears the door squeal on its hinges. Elfin voices from where, if he had been out on the porch, his thighs would be. Trickortreat. Warm (but tired, he hears, can’t help but hear, very tired) chatter from his mom. What great costumes. You’re welcome. Thank you. My son does it every year. I’ll tell him. Happy Halloween. She shuts the door, returns to the table, on top of which she drops the veritable sucrose product cornucopia. There was an adorable little girl in a Princess Leia costume. Cool. The mom was complimenting— I heard. They finish the meal with a few subsequent many-voiced interruptions, the intervals between which shrink and shrink. He brings his plate to the sink, tells her it was good, and goes to take a piss. As he exits the bathroom with moist hands he shakes lightly, the bathroom door being within close proximity to the entrance of the house, he catches his mom opening up to a new group of revelers. Trickortreat. He goes, stands beside his mom as she doles out sweets, looks at the costumes, smiles in what he hopes is a kind and not at all ironic or—God forbid—somehow pedophilic way at the children or maybe they’re preteens under all the paint and latex and polyester, looks at the costumes. One of them, a boy, has a gory headdress, a kind of half-head mask/hat, molded into an open cranium, rubber skin curled down like a banana peel, the furrowed mound of domed brain pink and wet with fake blood the boy must have added himself (it runs down the boy’s uncovered face which is smiling with eyes greedy and comically fixed, following the candy dropping into his bag, runs down onto his clothes, which are nondescript and will certainly be disposed of, ruined now, at the end of the night), nestled in shards of rubber bone, convincingly, horrifically, impressively. His eyes scan the children and their costumes and happy maybe uncertain or a little overstimulated or something faces, but he is watching his mom, watching for her gaze to hesitate on the boy in question, watching for some mineralization of her features or hiccup in her breath, listening for her “Happy Halloween!s” to becomes strained or pained or cold or disingenuous forced somehow telling or. None of it happens. This may be worse. His building annoyance loses bloodflow, deflates. The door closes and he can hear their voices, shrieking, getting quieter. His mom puts the candy basket down on the stairs. Getting low on Twix. She goes to the kitchen. There is a party tonight, a few minutes outside of town at a house in the country. A friend’s house, where most of everyone he knows will me. There will not be booze (he will never attend one of those parties all throughout high school, something he will later come close to regretting), only loud bassy music in the basement, the pop side of heavy metal, a cooler full of soda cans and upstairs plates of pizza rolls or maybe real pizza and certainly bowls of supermarket brand nacho cheese corn chips, and a blacklight—blacklights being something that have started to be a fixture for some reason at parties he goes to—so that every vein of lint, every flake of dead skin and daylight-invisible flaw is suddenly not just visible, but glowing, unmissable, unable to be ignored or remain uninspected. He does not want to go. He does not want to not go. The previous weekend he hosted a party of his own. He has had a Halloween party every year since he was two. They are now in some way legendary (sadly so, he thinks—only legendary in that their absence would be noted, not necessarily legendary in that they are expected or looked-forward-to or anything, although he likes to imagine that they are). No one would have blamed him if there was no party this year. He hand-made a Mad Hatter costume minutes before his first guests arrived. Sharpie checkers on an orange shirt (only one photo of him in this costume will ever surface, and he will hate it, his face scrunched and fatty and boylike, twisted into such happiness or at least what looks like happiness…he will hate this past self, will be jealous of him and hate him). He does not remember much past that. Tonight. Magical tonight. It’s not to be wasted, can’t be anything but wasted. I’m going for a walk to look at the neighborhood. Okay. Why don’t you take the dogs? … You don’t have to. Okay. Isn’t there a party tonight? He is out the door and the night is cold. There are families of shadows creeping on and off sidewalks, under porchlights, silhouetted in doorways. Clouds like milk in ink roil around a three-quarter moon. A car passes. A puddle of flashlight oozes up vinyl siding. He is down on the street, footsteps making no noise; there are no other cars in view. From somewhere comes the rasp of a creepy sound effects loop, so muffled and distant that it seems more a part of the wind and air than something carried on them. Shrubs bound in false webs, trees studded with twinkling strings of stars. The moon dims, cumulously shrouded. Triangles of bright gold staring, following his movements like the eyes of funhouse portraits, from every garden walk and concrete step. The overall decorative effect of the neighborhood is relatively disappointing. Half-assed. Although most made some effort. A few houses are coldly dark and apparently hibernating, stony and serious and no fun at all, just begging for Tricks that will not be dealt them. Kids today, too good for their own good. He is walking fast. He is half a mile from his home now, has hit a particularly thick flock—a seemingly full set of Power Rangers, a vampire, two Harry Potters, a unimaginative bloody psychopath, more—herded by a few parents wielding pumpkinheaded flashlights who look at him warily, openly considering him Up To No Good. He nods and smiles as he passes, can smell one father’s brown leather jacket, turns away. He hears the flock’s frenzied chittering recede behind him, veer off towards a house he has passed already (he is traveling the opposite direction as they are), a house whose lawn is bathed in fog machine haze. Trickortreat. He walks on, saluted by dying trees standing at ease on either side of the street. A shiver radiates through his body, from core outward. He should have grabbed a heavier coat on his way out the door, now has to hunch his shoulders up around his ears to combat the chill; the temperature is dropping. As in at this moment, and noticeably. He can feel it descending, falling, crumbling away and down and leaving his flesh vulnerable. His pace slows, gradually, so that at first he doesn’t know that he is stopping until he is no longer moving. Time slows too. His watch stops ticking. He only notices because it stops. There are no sounds. The wind has ceased. The air is dead. The moon is framed by smoky seas. Somewhere, nearby, he knows, children are thrilled, hissing between them, shouting laughter and mock-screams up into the dark, trying to freak each other out and probably succeeding but he cannot hear them. Tonight is when the veil is supposed to be thinnest. The two sides closer than any other annual point. Samhain. The Feast of the Dead. All Hallows Eve. The veil is thinnest, the membrane that lies between what’s living and what’s not (he knows now there are many kinds of dead) fragile, easily whispered through, parted for the passage of small folded messages, touched, pushed through, breached. Walking a razorblade. He is alone now. There is no sound. A streetlight blinks off. He leans forward to resume movement. Does not move. No sound.
III.
The rain frosts the windowpane evenly, like spray paint—but whether the rain itself is a mist, or instead just heavy enough to splash watery particles on the window after striking some unseen surface below, he does not know. The light coming through the window is gray and spectral. Steals warmth and comfort instead of lending it, blurs shadows into stains, reflects cruelly off everything, turning moted air to smoke, hot flesh to stone. The room is small and close, despite the coldness of the light is warm for the most part, but not on the bed, which dominates nearly half the space and is under, pushed up against the drafty window. On the bed is a leopardprint bedspread which has ridden up and pulled, crumpled, limp, itself to the top of the mattress, a faded violet sheet, a mountain of kicked-down comforter, a few pillows, one of them sans case. There is music from a radio under the computer desk and he wishes the music was louder—at its present volume it is nothing but unsettling, the level and timbre of remembered conversation—but he knows that she set its (the radio’s) knob as such for him, to make him relaxed, to make him relax. He bows to her experience. The air has a smell, had a smell even without them in the room: inscrutable, somehow both musty and fresh like new hamster bedding, thinly perfumed with the remnants of something feminine and artificial. A gust moans through the centimetric crack at the bottom of the window. His backpack, its top darkened and soaked, is a carcass near the closed-and-locked door. The door is lightweight—he hopes it’s not too thin—and its handle rattles Parkinsonally with footsteps in the townhouse, the passing boom of car stereos, the wind. The song on the radio ends, switches to a commercial, as she unbuttons his fly. He is clothed and horizontal on the bed. His shoes, sopping, sit impatiently on the floor. The fabric of his pants nearest his ankles clings, chills. Her fingers on his zipper. He may or may not have stopped breathing. Downstairs her German shepherd barks, deep bellows with whining peaks, traveling through, inhabiting the walls, no doubt reprimanding some passing pedestrian out in the gloom. She stops; he must have made some sound or made some movement. Are you okay? Yeah, I’m fine. I’m good. Would you be more comfortable with your clothes on this time? I guess. Whispers. Baby. The light makes the curls of her hair sharp. The light, he realizes, is the natural version of fluorescence. The bed is canopied crudely, not really canopied, hung with sheer material impaled on tacks to the walls of the alcove that holds the bed. The ceiling is blue, he knows from memory, but today is gray, like everything else. There is the ghostly flutter of cobwebs in the corner above his head, wisps nearly invisible like ripples in the very air they inhabit. She takes off her shirt with one X-arm motion, tosses it across the room so that it lands, joins the bra she removed under-shirt when they first settled in, brings his hand to rest between her breasts, and he assumes he is supposed to feel her heartbeat. Which he can’t through the hammerfall of his own pulse stampeding through his hand. I love you baby. Her skin is clammy, but underneath, flowing near the surface, he can feel heat in her fleshes. They kiss for a while. Shhhrelax. Relax. I am relaxed. His neck is bent cruelly, head pushed up against the wall, pressure. The commercials end, a new song vamps up. He hates this song. She unstraddles him and the humid warmth she leaves behind down the length of his entire body evaporates and he shivers. She stands beside the bed, in profile, opens a drawer in her dresser, parts mounds of unfolded clothes, takes what he sees is a condom in dull foil into her hand. She puts it lightly between her teeth, and her hands go to her waistband. She tugs down, steps out of sweatpants and underwear and is now naked. She is voluptuous. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen her completely unclothed before. She shifts her weight and looks positively classical. The pout she wears is one he has come to understand as her attempt at sexiness; her mouth pursed and the corners slightly downturned (the condom has moved back to her hand), big puppy eyes, one eyebrow raised slightly, pleadingly. She says something but he is not listening, and hopes the affirmative noise he makes will satisfy whatever question she may have posed, approve any sentiment. She blinks exaggeratedly, prolonged. A draft seeps through the window and crawls across him, burrows under his clothes. She kneels on the bed, swings a leg over his legs, restraddles him, his knees. She holds the condom out to him, does not say anything. The books, Health Class said practice. He has not. He takes it, in an instant feels the contour of its ring (it is harder than he had imagined) in the foil. With the ends of fingertips rips the very top of the wrapper, does not breach the pouch. He must be blushing by now. He can’t bring himself to look at her, her face. He tries again, farther down, ripping in a curve as not to damage the packet’s cargo. He can feel her smile from four feet away. The condom’s out; he wants to examine it but doesn’t. Rolls it on. Wasn’t that big of a deal. She rubs his legs like she’s praising a dog, and scoots up and over him. Gives him a look. Are you ready. So special. A second frozen. He supposes this is it the big moment what every guy dreams about fantasizes about wears like a badge like a brand a shining ribbon. He says something, which may or may not be words. She lowers herself. Jesus. Her hands on his abdomen. His in fists by his side and then on her hips. Open your eyes. He moves, tries to move, moves. Baby. Desperate. Up and up. Let me see your eyes. Hands from his chest into his hands fingers interweaving. …love… I… Downstairs the front door opens, slams in the way only wind or weather’s reverse pressure can slam a door. Intake of breath, his, sharp. Punctuation. The earth does not shatter, does not stop turning. He does not die, not even a little. He stops moving. Did someone? Maybe we… But she knows, he can see it on her face, which isn’t unkind, but which he hates anyway, angry, still inside her, hates that she knows and thinks him all the cuter for it. She lifts herself off him, lies beside, against him. Cuddling is the word, her leg pinning him, her fingertips on his neck. He indulges her, wants to indulge her. But he has to, needs to go. No, please. The song on the radio that he despises crossfades to another one he despises only slightly less. A pillow falls to the floor, on his shoes; he fears it soaking up some of their moisture. His heart rate slows. He removes the condom, throws it in the wastebasket under her desk at her prompting, closes his fly. He gives her a few more minutes. He tries hard to reflect while she murmurs and pretends to somehow be sated beside him. When his mom drives them (herself and him) to Thanksgiving two days later, he will have a secret inside. Not exactly burning but residing comfortably, metastasizing, tickling somewhere near his diaphragm. Eventually shrinking as time renders it assumed, as he tells (brags) to select few (many), every time he does so a piece of it flying crudely out of his mouth and dissolving, evaporating. He is out of the bed, leaving the fading ghost of a kiss, pulling on his shoes and putting on his jacket and backpack as she tries to get him to stay just a few more minutes in a pidgin English/babytalk. He can’t. Believe him, he wants to. Really. Loves her. She pulls the comforter up and over herself and the last he sees of her as he exits the bedroom is her hair twitching in the window’s frigid exhalation. Down the stairs, quietly. He can hear across his skin the presence of a human being—brother, what’s his name—in the living room of the townhouse, but does not turn to see. The German shepherd nips at his thigh as he goes out the front door, something he (the dog) has never done before, and catches a little skin between his (the dog’s) dulled-with-age teeth, doesn’t break the skin. He is out onto the sidewalk and already his face is damp with cold mist. Walking home. I must remember. I must remember. I must remember this. I must remember. The leaves on the concrete are slugs. Despite his future boasts, he knows something. Despite the spring in his step that he has put there, designed, thinking that it must be there, thinking that the world will see somehow, must see, he is a new man after all (but he allows that he’s not really a man at all, doesn’t feel like one, won’t feel like one for years), he knows something. He knows that nothing has been lost. Gone already.
IV.
His forehead is the kind of hot that needs no palm’s press or motherly kiss to detect. He can feel heat in waves leaving its plane, radiating out in rippled, invisible auras, dissipating a few feet from his person. The rest of his body is hot too, but this heat is contained, shackled and struggling vigorously within his tissues, simmering. Only escaping from his forehead. Something about vessels…concentrated in the face and scalp. Why head cuts bleed so horrifically. Hot blood tangles. Knots of capillaries pressed thick and flat like paper fibers into pulp between skin and skull. Surging, straining. Broadcasting fever. Furious chakra. He does not sweat. His eyes hurt, burn, and his mouth is acrid and prickly. The hallway shimmers—maybe the flicker of a fluorescent bar overhead or maybe the optical effect of the heat off his forehead, running down honey waves smoke bending refracting distorting the lens warping the melting abyss of pupil and making shimmer. His eyes burn. His feet have transported him miraculously to Algebra; one of the first of soon many ring-eyed scarecrows to wander in and settle into sadistic desk-chair combos, groaning like they’re first getting out of bed even though its afternoon now, a blade of an afternoon, cold and bright and sharp, but for 47-minute chunks it’s been this way all day except for the five minutes in between each chunk and of course lunch, when irises uniformly shrugged off their glaze and faces pulled themselves skyward and remained so until the next dead bell. Not his. He vomited earlier that morning, automatonically, in an empty bathroom kneeling, feeling the tiles print rules into his knees. He has looked in a mirror; he is ashen, except for his cheeks, which are splotchy apple-red continents. Fingers shake. Tongue steams. There is one other place that lets off heat: his right arm, just above the elbow, on his bicep, a place that lets it off differently, lets it seep out and into the fabric of his sleeve, throbbing and wet, cruel, speaking with his movements, tingling, ugly he knows and puckered now and discolored, this place, pulling at the arid ground around it and unyielding— the glass was dirty, certainly, there was no denying that —but giving no pain really now, although there had been pain, and something else too like sweetness at the very moment— there it was glittering, winking wickedly on the floor and he picked it up between thumb and forefinger daintily and knew without thought what he was to do, and went right into a bathroom, the nearest one —a kind of perverse stimulation of nerves of a tiny, specific, and hitherto untested sort, not pleasure really but more like the negative print of pleasure, outlines and features all there but colors reversed— and of course it was unclean not just dirtily but microbially for sure, but he was not thinking in straight paths and maybe not thinking at all and then it was too late and paper towels were needed and someone was coming in the bathroom clearing his throat with a cough and he had to hide it, should have washed it out, shouldn’t have at all, but there was no caring in that focused searing endless line or moment or —something right, something like falling into an assigned slot, but now he suffers its grimacing recompense, that moment’s— and sitting in class afterwards and a dotted line through his sleeve —and can’t decide if he is sorry. That day, the first and not last, the one after a day of bad news, not the worst but a downturn definitely at the hospital, seizures, his mom said, things moving faster than expected. Impossibly, he does not see the dots’ connections. He is outside of worldly touch. He is a perfect and airtight vessel; his maelstrom is only, sublimely, his own. The bell must have tolled; his teacher is speaking, too slow it seems. His hands are flat down on the desk and there is nothing else on the desk but his hands and the sludge of heat under them. His thirty-some classmates laugh briefly at something that his fever believes for a second is him and behind them all the clock thunders on deadly like far-off axfalls in a forest. And he burns up.
V.
Where there was recently noise, volume, echoes, there is now only stillness and peace. The breathing of the heat down through an overhead vent, the gentle tap of the twigs of bushes on the outside of the basement windows, the low sigh of the air in the room recovering from the recent abuse, of the earth settling around the walls. His ears are ringing and he is hot and sweating thinly and the fingers on his left hand hurt from two hours of playing. Half of the band has gone. He is waiting for his mom to come and pick him up and she is late. It has been dark for hours. The drummer still sits behind her drums (it is her basement) but now gets up and interweaves her fingers, flips palms outwards, pushes away from herself, and he can hear the soft pop of her joints. He notices his amp, on the floor and leaned back against the couch, is still on, hissing. He crosses to it and switches it off. His footsteps are slaps on hard wood. It’s hot. No it isn’t. I’m freezing. It’s like a fucking jungle. I’m all sweaty. You’re always hot. He smiles and flops down on a section of the couch, arms flat against its cool leather. She goes to the other section and sits and crosses one leg over the other. The lights are set into the ceiling, dimmer bulbs dimmed so that the basement is orange and warm. He watches her reflected in the bulging glass of a big dark TV. She beats fingers lightly against her thighs—drummer’s tic—and she rocks forward on the offbeat so that her reflection’s face balloons and shrinks. He can also see himself in the glass, legs and knees huge and body far away and head even farther, almost too small to make out, on the very edge of the screen. He hears her breathing but not his own, and wonders what she hears. For what may be minutes they say nothing. He cools down. The sweat on his forehead evaporates, leaving an invisible, prickling patina of salt, and the color starts to leave his cheeks. His fingers ache and throb, but no longer sting. He inspects his right hand and sees that he has worn down the top of his index fingernail striking the strings of the guitar despite the pick. With his middle finger he presses down on the worn nail’s overhang and finds it thin and flexible. It is hard for him to stop repeating this action. I thought we sounded— His voice fails and he notices that his throat is scratchy, hurts. More like swollen, or stretched around the ghost of a golf ball. He clears it, swallows phlegm down. –Sounded good. Yeah, me too. I messed up a lot though. It’s okay. We all did. He has more to say, but doesn’t say it. They both seem to know that their voices are somehow out of place, inappropriate in the reactionary calm, too loud and brash and braying, even if only whispers. They are content for now with silence, the eye of the storm. The band has been together for a few months, and planned for much longer before then. It has gone through as many members as it has names. He and the drummer, founders, are the only constants, will be the only constants. There are four of them at this point. Three of them fifteen years old (he included), one of them fourteen. Some pictures of the band have been taken: children behind their big instruments, smiles (when they are not wearing put-on scowls) earnest except for his, which is exaggerated, ironic. Blue jeans and sneakers, carbuncular faces, feet wide apart. A band with more attitude than skill, and not much attitude really. He is its leader—bringing in song after song to the other three, forging ahead with each one like they even came close to truly mastering the ones before it, calling the shots, calling it his—although he makes some attempt to deny it. Their songs are slow and brooding and long, their melodies and chord progressions simple. He writes about swamps and koi fish, freakshows and ashes, and clouds and stars. He is the hero of them all. His Stratocaster and amp roar amidst the entropic sludge of bass, keyboards and drums. His voice growls somewhere in it all—the cheap furry four-channel PA his mom bought for them inadequate, feeding back off the hard walls of the basement, wailing like an injured animal if turned up too loud. But now the sound of rended air healing itself with silence. Eye of the storm; always passes. It is the first week of December. He realizes that she is looking at him from behind the thick curtain of her hair, but he does not look back at her, instead pretending to scratch at something on his arm. Then he looks at his watch, curses. She’s always late. It’s okay. You can stay as long as you need to. I don’t have any homework. He looks up at her and for once doesn’t see the shibboleth of false antagonism they have insisted on constructing between them, doesn’t see the silly girl he knows from school, but sees for the first time how beautiful she really is, sees the depth in her pupils. He feels something in his chest. Thanks. Shakes it off. Can’t really shake it off. (They will end up together in two years, the first time he will have been anywhere near happy in as much time, the inevitable [but ultimately doomed] product of: wide pendulum swings between intimacy and hostility [both just a way for them to flirt, he later realizes], a strange Fourth of July that ends with her arms around his neck in a friend’s pickup truck, pregnant glances at parties and band practice, an awkward kiss in his car one day after school [initiated by her and retracted the same day], months of subsequent confusion, a note written in Spanish and folded numerous times and handed to him for translation, and a wintry first date at the Natural History Museum, during which his heart thumped at twice its normal power.) They make small talk for a few minutes, having had enough of the silence. Somewhere above, he can hear her mom moving around, maybe in the kitchen. The house creaks when a gust of wind hits one side. He finds that he has been rubbing the leather arm of the couch compulsively, pushing down hard and away from himself, smoothing out the already-smooth dyed skin. There is the shine of headlights through the windows up by the ceiling, scanning laterally. In the driveway outside he hears what he knows is his mom’s van’s engine, burbling like a pot of oil, clicking and snarling. He gets up and looks out the window and is surprised. It is snowing. Big fat flakes fill the tubes of the headlights’ light, stick against the windows and the branches of the bushes just beyond. It’s snowing. What? Really? She gets up and stands by him, brushing his arm as she moves. Wow. Really coming down. Yeah. Maybe we won’t have school tomorrow. God I hope so. His mom honks the van’s horn. He rolls his eyes. Reaches for and puts on his coat. Slings his (already-in-gig-bag) guitar over his shoulder, unplugs his amp and picks it up with a grunt, feeling the tendons in his arm stretch earthward. He stands facing her. She has been standing watching the snow through the window with arms hugging her body. She turns to him. Well I guess I’ll see you tomorrow. Hopefully not. What? Oh, yeah. Good job today. Thanks. See ya. Bye. That feeling in his chest again. He trudges up the blond wooden stairs up to the front door, calls goodbye to her mom, turns the knob, pulls open, pushes through the glass outer door. The snow adorns his nose and eyelashes. It has obviously been snowing harder and longer than he realized. The trees lining the sidewalks are candied. A creamsicle sphere of pointillist halation surrounds each streetlamp. The snow is truly a blanket; the ground hibernates beneath it. He descends the drummer’s front steps, careful not to slip, and heads for the van. He can see his breath, warm life evidenced right before him. The wind is in his hair. He stops halfway to the van and looks once more around him, listens. The world, for the moment, is frozen and still. And silent, through the storm has come.
VI.
There is a point that is more place than moment, the paperthin barrier line between two absolutes, a space neither light nor dark but somehow both, and also static and moving at incredible fluid velocity, and blindingly sublime. Empty and luminous. Something slips up and into this point and then it is more like a moment than a place, hanging twirling and crystalline in time but not in time really just in memory and imagination and fading from the very start, an afterimage before the image itself came to be. Balanced and liminal, perfectly paradoxical in every feature and facet, all inclusive of and negating extremes, the absolutes it seems to separate, a single whole value constructed from infinitely complex quantum refractions. Unlimited and unmappable, despite all worldwide attempts. Navigated twice, the first an embarkation into bright knowledge and the second into unknowable dark. He does not see the launch or the crossing, but far away, he hears a voice in the night.
VII.
He is alone in the room, but can hear others nearby, through and echoing off the walls. Murmurs, voices close to cracking, nasal with recent tears, one or two occasionally rising obscenely above the others—women’s voices. The air is otherwise static and now he understands “deathly still;” it feels solid and is difficult to inhale. He sits in a wing chair in the living room, looking into the blaze of the kitchen, slumped so that his neck is bent at an awkward angle against corduroy upholstery, feet up on a cubic ottoman, legs straight out and crossed, one shin on top of the other. His hands move against an acoustic guitar’s neck and body, sliding up and down the strings and strumming gently with his thumb. He does not feel anything. The chords he forms are disjointed, strung together haphazardly, not ugly but not anything else. Many minutes pass, whispering guitar cutting through white noise quiet. Someone comes up to him and leaks words and he probably says something back. The front door opens and closes. More quiet, more voices, more minutes. The phone in the kitchen rings and it answered by one of the others, and then is handed over to his mom. The call is long and halting, punctuated by his mom’s answers to a stretched thread of unheard questions (if he strains his ears—jutting out his neck ever so slightly forward towards the kitchen—he thinks he can make out the tiny insect voice in the receiver). After a while he understands that the presence on the other end of the line is some sort of representative from an organ donation or similarly medical organization. He listens behind the shield of the guitar and its strumming, and learns details about his father has never heard before, has never thought about asking before, maybe never would have asked about. And suddenly the call cannot last long enough. And then it ends. His mom says Thankyou, and hangs up, looks at him and explains what he surmised minutes ago. She gives him a look of pure heartbreaking apology. He hates how red her eyes are. He says something bristly, wanting her to leave, calculating how much upward inflection, how much warmth to inject so she isn’t hurt. More. She says something else and goes off to finish whatever conversation she was having before. The atmosphere is humid with so many tears shed. Another bout of crying has started in the other room. He strums his guitar and does not feel anything. More people come to him and speak. He smiles a lot and talks with confidence and volume. Some of them leave afterwards, after offering strong, long hugs and kind words to everyone who will take them. He gets up from the chair and gets a soda from the refrigerator, puts some butter on a piece of bread and eats it, retreats back to the chair. He has not turned on the light next to the chair. Will not. Hours pass with every breath he takes. More people leave. It seems to him that more people leave than were there to begin with. Soon the house is as empty as it will be that night. His mom sits down on the couch in the room and he knows she wants him to sit with her. He does. They speak for some time. He does not feel anything. He moves like a machine, makes noise like a machine. Neither will remember what they speak about. Burning eyes and glances at the clock, and the deep-in-bone ache of exhaustion tells them it is time to try and sleep—it is almost morning. They get up and start turning off the lights downstairs. There is a tealight candle burning in the dining room and he goes to blow it out and she stops him and says that he can leave it. At the bottom of the stairs, she pulls him into a tight hug and whispers and whispers and doesn’t let go. He hugs back, careful to not squeeze as tight as her. She is not crying, and does not tremble, but gives off the impression of trembling. Like a gyroscope somewhere deep inside her is spinning off-kilter, consuming its own self-containment and stability as its orbits degrade. He goes up the stairs before her and straight into his room. Says goodnight and that he loves her. Her voice falters when she reciprocates. He closes his door but not all the way, feels a pang of guilt. The room’s light is switched on, as is the stereo. He puts on a CD, turns it down low, and goes to his armchair. He does not feel anything. But where he is at is not peace. A book is opened and reading is attempted for a while. No words are absorbed; he goes over the same page a dozen times before he gives up. And turns off the lamp. He sits staring into the dark for a while until the dark is not so dark. Outside the window he sees that the sky is no longer black but indigo. He does not look at the clock. His eyes burn. His breathing is even and measured. He is more tired than he has ever been. A different and alien kind of weariness. He knows innately that there is peace in rest. Just needs to sleep. Sleep is oblivion and oblivion is the medicine he needs. He climbs into his bed in the dark, not bothering to undress, pulls the covers over himself, and feels the coolness of the pillow on his face. His hot eyes close and soon he breathes sleep and soft lilac light creeps into his room—the sun’s lid opening on the horizon below skeletal trees. The hazy birth of a cold, unfair dawn.
~~~
2009
***{This one took a while to write. Many of those close to me will realize that this story is based on tragically true and incredibly personal events in my life: those surrounding the hospitalization and subsequent death of John Cooper, my father, in 2003 of terminal brain cancer. The specific events in the above piece, however, are fictionalized. Let me explain-- There are definite holes in my memory from that period of time. Instead of trying to reconstruct the FACTS of that time, I decided to write a work of prose that would hopefully reflect the TRUTH of what was going on, who I was, and how I felt. By abandoning factual accuracy, I freed myself up to really delve deep and create something that felt honest and profound. I hope. It took a long time for me to be able to write this. I had (and still have) mixed feelings about writing something so personal and memoirish; it's not really the kind of thing I want to be known for. But I think that it needed to happen, and I'm proud of it. I hope you enjoyed reading.-SC}
