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.
