short story for workshop. i kind of like this one. sorry for the odd formatting and crummy dialogue. i can't help it.
At the same time she’s wiping a stranger’s sweat from her arm, tensing and relaxing tendons on the back of her knees to ward off the cramp, losing in the background noise that brisket and homemade bar-b-que sauce that bleeds out from inside the walls and in her veins, slipping in a couple different kinds of smoke like a coat against the cold, break-beats on the towers, neurons firing off and everything linear and concurrent at once, this folded over on that onto that onto that. Break. Spin. Breathe. And repeat that line over and over again like a mantra creased over on itself, ‘cause the black’s laid on thick tonight and you’ll need more than light to make sense of your senses. She’s taking it all in at once, every sight and sound and feeling coming in unfiltered like the Marlboros she smokes strictly when she’s drunk and sometimes when she’s not. She’s out for a little self-destruction. She dives into the earth.
Through the dark she spots a scrawny scene kid but older than you’d think, with his Levi five-elevens and Buddy Holly frames, tinkering with a sampler with one hand and a dos equis in the other and spitting drivel on the mic. Mic check one two, he says. One and two, puff and puff and pass the time. Minutes wrapped and sparked. These days will fuck you up. In a past life she spent her Friday nights stirring Chamomile, watching ordinary and miserable Americans have their face or house made over and their existence at last endowed meaning (oh! praise network-television-God, I was once lost but now I’m thin) and cutting eight-by-eleven sheets of computer paper into squares, saving the excess rectangles because there’s always something to jot down (if not, you just aren’t thinking hard enough) and you never know when you might run out of sticky notes, practicing her origami with the original squares, folding things over like she does, fashioning another paper crane for the paper crane shelf where nothing is perfect, every last crane with its own little imperfection. She remembers the cranes and then tosses them into a small fire in the rear of her subconscious, feeling redeemed, her mind returning to Hard Times where live music and thick cuts of meat and drunken revelry come together in pure Texas fashion. She returns to the smoke and the Levi’s and the collective anticipation building up in everyone’s feet. Goddamn this part is the hardest. It’s the waiting, oh Lord, the waiting. Like Jeffrey Caine the jock at prom, out for some pussy or at the very minimum a little Stacy Cranberry hand action by the end of the night, praying as if it were his death wish. Start the show already. Club music drags on through the towers like a chain smoker ditching that cold turkey bullshit. She’s gotta stop kidding herself. These lips got dependency issues. Speaking of dependency issues, there’s almost-boyfriend-but-not-really-we’re-just-talking, who attends some haughty music school and goes by the name of Michael, standing beside her, acting aloof. Everyone is packed together shoulder to shoulder and ass to crotch, the lid popped off this sardine can venue, the night sky hovering above and fighting off the smell of us fish and stifling that need to gag. Tobacco and weed and burnt wood chips make most constellations queasy, warring for our consideration while the corpses and contraband float up and up and the refuse amasses somewhere along the rings of Saturn. Dig your graves in the stars. For now, it’s about the music. No one will find them beyond the spinning lights cast on the awning, the yellow and funky-lookin’ blue that’s sometimes purple, hell if I know. I already told you I’m colorblind. Shows how well you listen.
Some track off Low End Theory fades to shitty goth-industrial fades to “Boys Don’t Cry” which also fades and this is it! The quiet says it all. Time to break and spin and breathe. Scene-kid-but-older gives the signal to the soundboard guy in the back and then shuffles off stage, his stride reaching only as far as his five-elevens will allow. Break and spin and step three, breathe, in and out. And the speakers blare again, the Cool Kids this time. Shit. Not yet. It drones out of the mains and subs, the chorus dictating dance moves to a mass of whirling dervishes. Do the whop, do the smurf, start the fuckin’ show already. Our heroine is getting antsy, staring over at Michael who’s texting some other chick like he does in class or in the car or wherever he’s comfortable being himself. That is, lost. By God if he doesn’t quit the cell soon, I swear. Mike check, one two. Almost-boyfriend-but-not-really-we’re-just-talking check, one two. This cord’s no good, she can’t hear herself through him, let’s trim the bass. She thinks it’s gone to his head possibly, knocked something loose. Toss away the thought, put it in that fire with the all the cranes. Show’s on its way. We are almost there.
If only. In those moments before the concert, the sky can’t take the stench from below any longer and it begins to rain. Alright. We’ll have a show in the rain. That is, unless the tent over the boards isn’t... goddammit, it’s ripped. Rain trickles through tears in the clouds and tears in the sky and tears in the plastic and onto the soundboard, flowing down the hard plastic, creeping into the circuits. Sparks fly and that’s that. Time to file out. Micah closes the phone and asks what happens. She just turns and walks and grabs his hand not out of affection but to keep a tab on someone older in theory than practice, pulling him towards her like a child. It’s ok, I promise. If she can’t absorb this venue she will absorb another, the street. She pulls Michael out of Hard Times with everything oversaturated and overexposed around her, feeling invisible in comparison, comfortable in not being seen. Fortune’s wheel spun and she’s upside down, oh well, it’s a new perspective at least. She dives into the earth again.
---
He thinks, goddammit she’s beautiful when she bosses me around. She tugs him out of Hard Times and he feels her palms, warm despite the rain, hydrogen and oxygen tangled in her hair, matted with precipitation, her bangs clinging to her face and her purple dress clinging to her body like he would hide behind his mother’s leg at the sight of a stranger. That’s it. She makes him feel like that. Vulnerable. He’s typed nonsense on his phone for about half an hour now, words like “ommmmmm” and “Oregon” over and over just to keep his eyes down and off of her. He tends to gawk at beautiful things, can’t help himself, scared she can see him for what he really is, all out in the open and naked. Oh, the terror. That’s what love is. It’s in his hands, and he thinks maybe it’s in hers. There’s rain, there’s flames stuck in between their hands.
Time passes like it does and there he is, driving her home, minutes burnt away like a blunt. The wiper blades are on second to highest, pushing rain off the side of the windshield and onto the highway. He brings it down a few steps for no particular reason, the wipers slowing, allowing the rain to accumulate and distort the world outside, the car lights ahead going from dots to lines then back to dots. And he feels slightly more alone with her behind that thin curtain of rain, fleeting though it is. Like clockwork, his thoughts revert back to school. There’s a symphony he has to transpose and analyze for Monday, from a full orchestra to two violins and a viola and a cello, shit, he probably won’t get any sleep tonight.
“I just can’t do it,” she says, picking up midway through a thought. It looks like she’s staring at the window, not outside of it, concentrating on a spot in the glass as if she just saw herself trapped inside a raindrop clinging on the outside.
“I’m sorry. Do what?” he asks.
“Freeing myself from the bonds of rational thought. I can’t do it.”
“Oh ok,” he says, allowing another moment to burn. “What?”
“You see the big dipper up there?”
“I’m driving.”
“Oh right. Well play along and pretend you see it,” she continues, “Why is it there in the first place? Can you tell me?”
“Why is what where?”
“The big dipper. Up there.”
“Oh. I haven’t a clue,” he says.
“I mean, why would the stars align themselves like a ladle? Did they talk to each other beforehand and organize it like that? It’s nice having a giant ladle in the sky, don’t get me wrong, but why?”
“I give up. Tell me,” he says.
“Come on, show some speculative reasoning” she says, “Or ask your friend on the phone. She seems to have a lot to say.”
“Oh please.”
“Ok ok. I’ll give you a hint. One word. Perspective.”
He said nothing.
“Use that head of yours. You’ll figure it out,” she says, tapping his forehead with her first two fingers. And after that, silence, to a point. There is the drone of rubber tires on the freeway. Talk radio too dull to make out words. And the girl soaking up the seat beside him, eyes shutting slowly then reopening, awake then asleep then awake. She’s swallowed up in the dark, her dim frame and just her frame curled with its feet up on the seat and its legs tucked at the chest and her silhouette sits there and speaks and breathes in her stead. Maybe she is somewhere else altogether, he thinks, maybe she’s hiding in some remote pocket of nighttime and giggling for some odd reason. There’s the stink of cigarette smoke on their clothes, brought out into the open with the old rain sinking into the fibers. His sight shifts from the road to her to the road. It’s hard to keep his eyes still, with the gawking and whatnot. Minutes pass in silence, perpetually burning but never burning up completely, then she tries to snuff it out.
“And I was really looking forward to it too. Looks like you’re doomed to Bach chorales and chamber music forever.”
“Oh I’m sorry.”
“Why? It’s not your fault. It’s just a damn shame, that’s all.” She smiles. It is lost in the dark. “I know you liberal-art-conservatory-types are all about staff lines and such. I just wanted to pull a prodigious music student out of the classroom for once, you know, to see what happens.”
“Hey that’s not true.”
“What’s not true?”
“It’s not like music is a chore for me. I at least have the courage to study what I love. You... never mind."
“Got it,” she says.
“I mean, yes, I have to study music. And yes, it is tedious at times. But I can still enjoy music. I can still separate grades from pleasure,” he says.
“Exactly. I just think that music is neither of those."
“You don’t listen to music for entertainment?”
“Not at all. And I sure as hell don’t force it into a classroom, that’s for damn sure. I love it too much for that. I’m sorry if that’s offensive. I’m just being honest.”
He thinks that she doesn’t make sense, that she doesn’t have to as long as she sits there, curled up in his seat, the mere sight of her tipping him over so that all his insides spill out and there’s nothing left on the inside except space begging to be filled. For years he has stuffed himself with theory, reviewing and analyzing and transforming songs into a math even at the risk of hating them forever after, and it’s somehow ok that he’s being torn down as long as she’s doing the tearing. He thinks, goddammit she’s beautiful when she calls me into question, strips me of the little reassurances, the mantras I build into armor.
Puff puff pass, one two, time blazes away in a haze of smoke and he pulls up to her duplex with a million plots and a million scenarios playing out before him. Walk her up, hug, kiss, follow her in or don’t, the start of a life together, break and spin and breathe in the humid air, take the rain into his lungs like she’s made of the dew in the air and on the grass. Yeah, if only. She wakes and hugs him awkwardly between the seats and leaves and that’s that.
Sleep won’t come. He starts Rachmaninoff’s Second on his computer and hits the bed tired beyond tired, in either that dreamy wake or lucid catalepsy where hallucination makes its home. Refugees, settle in! Eat and drink but for God’s sake, don’t trust anything you see. It’s four thirty in the hours before daylight and she in the room, seems her doppelganger hugged him and left, the real thing asleep in the backseat the entire way home. She says she won’t climb in unless he puts on some fucking shorts so he’s bent over the edge of the bed, sifting through shirts and wet towels and pairs of boxers but no shorts. Keep looking. There’s sheet music stuck in between the dirty laundry and he pulls out more and more the further he digs. Search, transpose, analyze. Shit. He can’t find anything through all the staff lines and with Sergei still coming through the speakers and manifesting on the ground and she’s waiting, toes tapping in queue. Where the hell are the shorts? Other people are there now but hers is the only face visible in the traces of light strewn about like dirty clothes. He lies. He says he found a pair and shifts to the edge of the mattress in the gap between that and the wall and sinks in. The others file in but she stays and stands, searching for a spot, unsure how to enter.
And then she sees. She grabs a pair of shorts off the ground and twirls them in her finger, flaunting to him his own lie. This is so goddamn embarrassing. She shakes her head and says that human life is a history of violence, tells him to stop fucking kidding himself. He doesn’t understand and she reads it in his face and laughs. She’s playing with him. The others have left, why won’t she just climb in? She tosses the shorts to the floor and turns and passes through the door. Don’t go. He reaches for the cell. He has to call her before she passes forever out of existence, or even worse, before her hair dries. That hair! He flips the phone open and the clock reads four forty-five and the light sparks cognizance, he has a moment of clarity. How silly. She’s gone. Go to sleep already. He breaks and spins and takes a drawn-out breath, grasping for the solace in sleep. Hours turn to smoke and float up and collide with the ceiling above, accumulating there in a mound of fog, clouds around the ceiling fan, his room like a miniature of the earth.
He watches time slinking across his ceiling and the music from his computer builds crescendos, picks up this lonely hitchhiker and takes him twenty miles down this interstate to sleep but not quite there, so he to watches nothing and everything at once and somewhere in between impressions he understands. He understands the girl and the bit about perspective. He swears he can hear her, her voice by his shoulder entrusting him with sensitive material. She says that music does that sometimes. Calls to mind images and ideas and the like even just for a second and who the fuck are you to say they aren’t real? This night has been something or another - he saw a little girl crying, watching her balloon float up and away into the clouds, he saw a stray dog sniffing out the carcass of another along the interstate, he saw yellow sparks and smoke coming off of a soundboard and heard the collective disappointed sigh from something like a mob - it’s all strung out measure by measure and beat by beat. One note laid on another and triads birthing worlds. Entire worlds, Michael. Makes you wonder what sort of note you are, what chord you fit into, major or minor or diminished, and at what pitch does the earth hum. No you don’t understand. This is how I think. I ask myself these question every damn day, and I listen. Always have and always will.
A moment or two goes red and then it's quiet and then she adds one last thing. She says to leave the classroom. Hear the earth hum.
Had a dream. I think I know what it means already.
You see everything moves so fast these days. One second I’m in the studio with my hands on the Akai, beats loosed over odd-time signatures and snares syncopated off beat, and then I’m in some other place at some other age. My hands are smaller. I am four years old again and clutching a long twig that’s hooked at the end like four-years-old’s do. No reason. Just there minding my own bee’s wax, as the kids say. The air is dense with rain. I feel the drops suspended in air, like paper stars cut and glued on a grammar school wall. Clouds cover the sky in a quiet shroud, objects and people appearing as silhouettes cast in a collision of gray and blue, slightly beveled. I’m in those holy moments that precede dawn, the washed-out blue light falling before all other light, time stained with the ocean and all things faster than they really are. Looks like a movie theater, reality projected at a higher speed and overexposed only for the moment, until pimply-faced God sets down the popcorn and notices her mistake. She doesn’t see yet, no not yet, and I exist in a part-time theater employee’s gaffe. My right hand covers my eyes and there’s that hooked stick in my left and I’m kicking around pebbles, rocks spilling out of the black plastic boundary and scattering on the cement like blood from a busted artery. Icarus Park is just a monster heart splayed out lengthwise. Even with my eyes covered and all, at the forgettable age of four, I can see this. A couple older kids race my way on bicycles. They scream backwards. We found him! We found him! They did it. They found me. They pedal at me faster yet and I’m the hell outta there, see y’all later, police sirens blaring in the distance. I glance back. The kids, the police, the ex’s faded gold sedan creaking along like an old wine cork tossed to the floor and rolling along a line of pines and street lamps all symmetrical. Turn around. Don’t look back anymore. Just run. This is the sound of one foot in front of the other, spinning the earth below like a top, round and round.
Everything moves fast and so am I, running now, pebbles spilling out from behind my heel and past the boundary again but on the other side this time, dooming the sideways heart to bleed empty, it ain’t got a chance in hell. I climb the playground and slide down the other side and run past the chip up bars. Hah. They’ll never catch me. I look over my shoulder despite swearing not to. There’s the kids on bikes again, the ex running and yelling with a bottle in her hand, the police cars swerving into parking spaces on the other side of Icarus, doors flung open and chubby men in blue displacing all their mass, spilling out in the open. The red and blue spills out too. It creeps up and grabs at my heels. Yeah but I’m long gone by now, moving fast like all things beside me, “catch me if you can, fuckers” like a mantra condensing in my head and throat. Still drops of rain hit my face as I speed onward. This is the sound of leaving them behind, leaving her behind, fuck the bullshit, escape.
I’m long gone. Everything slows for a few moments. My fingers wrap around the twig, shifting and tensing and I don’t know why I’m holding it in the first place but damnit if I let go. I hold it like I’d hold my own heart if I ever had to and I note the bridge ahead and how it stretches and arches its back over that long drop, tall grass and swampy creek water waiting below. Running, still running, not getting there quite yet. God, maybe they will get me after all. At last I reach the bridge, my heels pounding on the damp wood, the noise soft and muddy as I make the gradual ascent and then descent. I register the sound and modify it in my imagination: pull back the mids a bit, let’s bring up the highs. I blast to the other side and by a gazebo to my right, but with time slowed and whatnot I have a moment to make out faces and emotions. A smiling girl with balloon in hand, the yellow sphere stretching up and reaching for the clouds, a jump rope slumping downwards in her other hand. Parents clapping and smiling. A boy with video camera in hand, pointing it not at the girl or the parents but instead up at the gray sky with blue wounds. An adult yells at him to get this on tape by god or he’ll get a beating so hard he won’t sit for a week. He doesn’t hear. Just points and shoots the heavens. This is the sound of creating, creating and that’s it, brush strokes on the Sistine ceiling, fuck the bullshit anew.
I’m past the gazebo and again everything seems so fast! Stretches of tall grass blurring green past me, the wind cutting into my eardrums, whispering to me my own velocity, demanding I run faster. Faster. Somewhere in the static I hear something else from behind. I just don’t love you anymore! You hear me? Err, I, goddamnit. The ex is drunk again, following me around like she does. Fuck it. I not gonna stop this time. The creek curves around and intercepts my tangent at another point, another bridge coming. Pat pat pat. My feet push the green below, pulling the second all the damp wood of the second bridge closer as if all the world’s tied on a string. Pat pat pat. A part of me goes cold because I know this sound. I’ve heard it before. This is the sound of a heel hitting the ground, rebellion, one man frozen before a Type 59 tank like a fucking mountain.
I reach the bridge and things stop midway across when my bare foot catches on a board uprooted just an inch from the others. The gaps between railing crossbeams allow just enough room for my small body. Left hand still clutching the twig, my free hand grabs hold of a crossbeam, allowing enough time to feel the pain in my foot and arm and my side and realize that, oh God, this is happening. The wood cracks and cracks and I fall down, twig still in hand. Clinging. Like it’s all ok as long as I don’t let go.
Ok so I hit the ground and all in one instant pass through the grass and swampy water and emerge on the other side, in my house kitchen. What? No time. Everything moving too fast for questions. My mother stands there, arms akimbo, scolding me. I cry because I said “hell” or “damn” or some other swear word, at least that’s what mother tells me, I can’t recall. Rest assured it was terrible, awful, only dirty little boys who shoot other boys with bee-bee guns say that word. She asks me if I am a bee-bee gun kid. No mother. To be honest I don’t know what sort of kid I am. She takes me by the ear, pulls me to the bathroom. It smells overwhelming like soap. Stacks upon stacks of soap bars line the walls like drugs neatly wrapped and stashed away in seat cushions. Everything is white. She coats the brush with soap and tells me to have at it. Gotta clean that mouth, lest I become a bee-bee gun kid. No. Brush away. No I won’t. Have it your way you fucking bee-bee gun kid, she says, leaving the room and flicking the light switch behind her. The door slams like a pop, a piccolo snare or a gun, gunpowder going off and bee-bees ricocheting inside my skull and reverberating through the bone. The black is everywhere. I can’t see a thing, reaching out like a blind man for the light switch, meeting nothing but cold air. The room is larger than before. I panic, run, feel for something or anything. A singularity in the black of space, too far from any other star or galaxy for light to survive the trip to this point, some corner God forgot about. I’m in the blind spot of existence. My legs tire and it’s harder to pull them up. They become wet. The cold reaches up to my ass, then my back, and then water and some anyonymous smell like guilt attaches to my skin. I find myself sideways, gasping for air, feeling fluid in my lungs and bruises on the inside. I cough up blood and it runs on my cheeks and neck, dark crimson against the pale white, my voice wheezing and purling. This is the sound of growing up, ties and Eau De Cologne, doing that nine to five, Kafka.
I open my eyes and everything goes fast again and there’s gold and orange breaking around the bridge up above. Morning. I lay in the creek, water and grass clinging to me as if my body heat gives them a temporary consciousness that they just can’t concede. The police and kids are gone yet mother stands overhead, cradling my head, crying. Wait. Not mother. I squint my eyes, trying to make sense of the silhouette hovering overhead like a doctor over a patient. My pupils constrict and I see. It’s her. The one who calls herself “ex”. She’s crying. My leg feels forced in a way it shouldn’t be and I cry too. She tells me she’s sorry, she’s not herself right now. Identity crisis seems to be the theme of the day. Then she says it will be ok, we will start over. She’s so sorry. And I love her, even with the alcohol coming off her breath.
I wake back at the studio and everything still feels fast, time bent past its original form. A dull beat drones quietly from the monitors. Kick snare kick. There’s the beat: finches gliding a little further, clouds parting and colliding and parting an extra time, the world twirling into dusk fifteen minutes early, needle humming break beats over vinyl fault lines. My face splayed across my arms and I’m staring across the length of the soundboard, recovering from a reality syncopated and modulated to an odd-time signature like jazz. I notice the picture of us back home in the park, ex and I, its frame tipped over and face down on a keyboard. This is the sound of two people becoming one, not merging, but one leaving the other,
I still have that beat. Yeah at least I have that beat. Leaking from those bookshelf speakers posted like towers to a glitch-hop God. Pulsing in the copper wires that span from my head to my heart to my ears to my hands. It feels loud, it sounds warm, senses melding into kicks and snares and synth. In digital I see and breathe and dream. She is the one and I am the zero and I am waiting.
