Rock N Soul (15 page)

“And if you’re
really super nice
,” I paused dramatically, “I’ll even let you watch me eat a slice of Grandma’s special-recipe strawberry-rhubarb pie. You can sit real close and watch me chew and everything.”

He laughed again. “You’d do that for little old me?”

“Only if you’re nice.”

“Then I will
definitely
be nice,” he promised.

Crazy Cousin Chad was out on the porch pacing when Chris and I arrived in the taxi. He looked up at me and then immediately turned around and went in the house.

Chris watched as the door slammed shut behind him. “Well, that was certainly a warm welcome.”

I headed up the walkway to the house. “He probably just hasn’t taken his meds today. Sometimes he doesn’t take them because he says they make him feel fuzzy, and Aunt Greta tries to crush the pills up and hide them in his food, despite the fact that that’s never worked, not even once, because he can taste them. And also because he’s a human and not a Golden Retriever.”

“So that wasn’t a reflection on your relationship with Crazy Cousin Chad?”

I shook my head. “Nope. Chad is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”

“That was lame. But I forgive you.”

“How very magnanimous,” I said. “Now stop talking to me before Aunt Greta spikes my cranberry sauce with clozapine.”

He scoffed. “Technically I can talk all I want. It’s just up to you not to answer me.”

“Well, then just don’t be an ass. I’m going inside now.” I paused in front of the door, took a deep breath, and went into the house.

“Tyler!” Grandma’s voice announced from the kitchen. “You’re here! Wait just a second, I need to dry off my hands.”

Chris raised an eyebrow. “Did Chad tell her you were here?”

“Fuck if I know,” I murmured back. “But Grandma always seems to know the instant I walk in, so probably not.”

Chris nodded and immediately started snooping through my grandmother’s stuff, examining every knickknack on the shelves in the front room. After a few seconds, Grandma came bustling out of the back of the house, beaming and holding her arms out.

“Come give me a hug, you bad grandson you.”

I hugged her tightly. “Why am I a bad grandson?”

“Because you have a girlfriend and you’re trying to keep her a secret,” she chided, pulling back and wagging her finger at me.

“Who?” I asked, genuinely surprised. “Carmen?”

“No, not Carmen,” she said. “I know about
that
hussy and good riddance, is what I say to that. No, I mean this Gemma girl who keeps posting on your Facebook.”

“Oh, Gemma,” I said. “She’s just a friend.”

“That’s not what it sounds like on the Facebook,” Grandma insisted.

Chris looked up from Grandma’s collection of porcelain thimbles. “She
does
post a lot on your wall. And we do have lunch with her sometimes while you try to pretend you’re not staring at her tits.”

I almost argued with him since I definitely had not been staring at Gemma’s chest during our lunches, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me break my personal “no talking to invisible people in front of family” goal this soon into the day. So instead I just smiled at Grandma. “I wouldn’t lie to you, Grandma. If I start dating someone, I’ll tell you.”

“Promise?” she asked, wagging her finger again.

“I promise.”

“All right, then,” she said. “Now go wash your hands and come help mash the potatoes.”

“Okay, Grandma.” I kissed her on the cheek and headed for the bathroom, where I didn’t even have the door closed behind myself before Chris started chattering away.

“You’re going to help her mash potatoes? Isn’t that a woman’s job?”

I faced him and crossed my arms. “Okay, first off, that’s incredibly sexist of you. A man can mash potatoes just as well as a woman can and women are not objects who exist to fuck you and make you dinner. And second off, no, I’m not going to help her mash potatoes. Every single year she tells me to go wash my hands and come help her mash potatoes, and every year I tell her I’ll do it and then I escape.”

Chris smiled. “Family traditions, man. They’re weird.”

“I guess so,” I said. “Now get out.”

“Why?”

“Because this is a bathroom and you need to get out.” I made a grand “go ahead” gesture at the door.

“I had no idea that washing your hands was such a personal matter.”

“It’s not,” I snapped. “But I need to take a leak and I don’t want you ogling my privates while I do it.”

“I am
not
going to ‘ogle your privates.’ I mean, come on.” He rolled his eyes.

“Then it shouldn’t be a problem for you to kindly fuck off for forty-five seconds.”

He pouted. “I’m bored.”

“Yeah, well, I have to pee. Now get out.” I gestured at the hallway again.

There was a quick tapping on the door, and I jumped.

“Tyler?” It was Chad’s voice. “Are you all right?”

I cleared my throat. “Yeah, Chad, I’ll be out in a minute.”

There was a beat of silence, then Chad spoke again. “I heard you talking to somebody in there.”

I glanced over at Chris. “Yeah, I’m on my phone. I’ll be out in a second.”

Another long pause, long enough that I was sure Chad had left. Then: “Do you have it on speakerphone?”

“What? No,” I said. “Go away, man. You’re giving me a shy bladder.” I looked at Chris with an eyebrow raised, and he just shrugged.

After another pause, Chad said, “Okay,” and I heard him shuffling down the hall.

“That was weird,” Chris said. He sat down on the closed toilet lid.

“I will straight-up pee through your torso if you don’t move,” I warned him. “I swear I’ll do it.”

“Fine, fine,” he grumbled. “Spoilsport.”

“I fail to see what sport I’m spoiling for you, exactly,” I said, “unless it’s privates-ogling.”

“Geez,” he said, rolling his eyes again. “Okay, okay, I’ll go out in the hall.”

“Thank you,” I said, then crossed my arms and pursed my lips while I waited on him to leave. Chris stood up and gave me a cheeky salute before walking through the door and out into the hallway.

I finished up in the bathroom, then poked my head into the kitchen to tell Grandma and Aunt Greta that I was going to check on something in the backyard, which was my very unsubtle way of saying that if the potatoes were going to be mashed, they weren’t going to be mashed by me. Grandma just sighed and waved me off instead of waggling her finger and telling me to stop stalling and lend a hand. I headed out into the backyard and sat in the tire swing hanging from a big oak tree.

Surprisingly enough, there was no snow on the ground and it was fairly warm for December. Chris sat down on the grass and put his hands on the ground behind him, then leaned back and tilted his head up toward the sun, his eyes closed. I watched him for a few seconds, wondering how the sunlight could hit his dark-brown hair like that and turn it almost red in places when he didn’t actually have corporeal hair for the sun to touch.

“Can you feel the sun?” I asked him after a bit.

“No,” he said. “But I can remember feeling the sun and I can pretend.” He left his eyes closed and tilted his face up farther. A soft breeze started, and it ruffled his hair even though that didn’t make any sense either.

When I didn’t say anything, he opened one eye and peered at me. “What?”

I shrugged. “I was just thinking about why, since you don’t have a physical body, the sun and the wind and things affect you.”

He opened his other eye. “Do they? How?”

“Well, your hair moves in the breeze,” I told him. “And the sun kind of glints off it. Did you know that it’s sort of bronzy red in the sun?”

He shook his head. “Nobody looks at me in the sun.”

“I do,” I said, then realized that my answer could be interpreted as more than five percent homo and so I continued. “Well, I mean, I’m looking at you right now. And I’d guess that stage lighting makes it reddish too.”

“Probably,” he said, sounding a little distant.

“Did you like it?” I asked after a moment. “Being a rock star?”

He pushed himself into a more upright sitting position. “It’s like any job. There are things you like and things you hate. All in all it’s a better job than most, though. And like I said, the music is important to me.” He paused. “Well, the music
was
important to me. I guess now I can’t make any more of it.”

“You could compose,” I suggested.

He just shook his head and didn’t respond for a long time. “My birthday’s coming up,” he said finally.

A bell rang deep in the back of my mind. “January 7?”

“Yeah,” he said, looking genuinely surprised. “How did you know that?”

“Honestly, I have no idea,” I said. “Carmen must have mentioned it. Or maybe I just remember it from the book.”

Chris raised both eyebrows so far that I was concerned they’d escaped and made a break for his hairline. “The
book
?”

“Yeah. The unauthorized biography of the band,” I said. “Which let me tell you was not overly detailed or helpful or even interesting. I think it got a lot of things wrong.”

“Oh really?” He smiled. “Like what?”

“It strongly implied that Brent and Paul were knocking boots.”

“Totally untrue,” he said. “Although I’m pretty sure they were both sleeping with the same girl without realizing it at one point. And if you believe the safe sex ads, that’s basically the same thing as sleeping with each other.”

I rolled my eyes. “Maybe from an STD standpoint. But I refuse to consider that I’ve essentially slept with Danny Carter from the liquor store, so I reject the idea on the basis of my sanity.”

He laughed. “Such as it is.”

I rolled my eyes again. “Yeah, I don’t have much to prove my sanity these days. When even Crazy Cousin Chad starts asking me if I’m talking to myself, things have gotten pretty bad.”

“Do you think . . .” He paused, looking strangely vulnerable in a way that did something odd to my extremities.

I prompted him. “Do I think what?”

“Do you think you really are hallucinating me?” he asked. “I mean . . . what if I’m not real? Or what if I’m only as real as you’re making me?”

I thought about this for several seconds. “I don’t know,” I finally said. “I strongly doubt I’m just hallucinating you.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I can’t, I guess,” I said. “I mean, how do I know that I’m seeing any of the things I think I’m seeing? How do I know this tire swing is really here and my grandma exists and rain smells like lemons and batteries? I don’t
know
any of that. I could be living in a human farming pod the machines are raising for food like in
The Matrix
. I could be a fetus having a dream before I’m actually born. I could be God and I just don’t realize it. And since I can’t know anything for sure, my personal coping method is just to go with it.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment, then sighed. “I can’t decide whether I should ask you why rain smells like lemon and batteries or if I should just jump right ahead into making fun of you for thinking you might be God. If I went with the first option, I could maybe get some interesting insight into how your weird little brain works. But if I went with the second option, I could call you a hypocrite and point at you and go ‘Aha! Who’s the narcissist now?’ which would be pretty fun for me. So . . .”

I smiled. “Well, you could do both. Don’t let me stop you from doing what you want to do.”

“You can’t cage me,” he said, smiling back. “I am a free spirit.”

We both laughed at that, and then Chris leaned back again and turned his face up to the sun. I watched him for a while before speaking.

“But I don’t think I’m imagining you, man,” I said, making my voice a little gentler than usual. “You know too much about Chris Raiden to just be my own personal idea of what Chris Raiden would be like.”

“I could be lying to you. About everything.” He didn’t look at me. “You don’t know. I could tell you all sorts of random shit and you wouldn’t have any idea if it was really some kind of insight into what I’m really like or if it’s just your inner craziness making shit up.”

I shrugged and kicked the ground to make the tire swing sway. “Well, like I said. I cope with existential uncertainty by going along with what seems real to me.”

“I guess that’s the only way to live life,” he said. “Or death. To live death.”

“Do you believe in God?”

He closed his eyes, still facing toward the sky. “I believe in God,” he said after a minute. “I just don’t know how often I even cross his mind. Probably never. There are a lot of people in the world who deserve divine intervention more than I do.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so I just pushed myself on the swing with the toe of one foot for a while.

“Anyway,” he said. “Let’s talk about other things.”

“Who’s Jerri?” I asked, trying to come across as a little cheeky.

“Nope,” he said, smiling and looking back at me finally. “You’ll just have to wait and see.”

I laughed, then quickly broke off as I saw Chad come out the back door and start shuffling across the yard toward me, doing a weird sort of walk that was fast and nervous while at the same time his feet dragged the ground like it was hard for him to lift them properly.