Songs Only You Know (19 page)

But once the sound took hold, everything was worth it. Never mind the crowds—I still believed in music. That if I learned to play with just the right touch, a new beginning would arise, one from which I’d never turn back.

The girl at my side, that’s how it felt to be near her, at the edge of a life-altering hugeness about which I knew nothing, only the lightness of my being.

“I’ve heard so many bands, my head’s going to explode,” she said.

“Mine already has.”

“I noticed,” she said. “It’s a good look.”

W
E WALKED TOGETHER BETWEEN
the parked cars. She stepped with her hips angled outward, a dancer’s graceful sway, as we moved across the asphalt. It was officially springtime, but gray snow still lined the edges of the parking lot where the winter plows had mounded heaps. Her jeans were baggy, and beneath the cuffs were skateboard shoes, silly things. Boots—you wore boots if you wanted to be taken seriously. I was summoning my sharpest extrasensory capacities, X-ray vision and inner soul surveillance, scanning for evidence that she was a dud or an illusion.

Her face was the kind of thing you wanted to float your hand over before actually touching it. Then, softly as you could, you’d graze your fingers against her cheek, and nerves you didn’t know existed would come alive in your palm, and you’d make the feeling last as long you could. After barely a moment beside her, I felt anchorless, helpless to effect whatever attitude of coolness I might have wished to carry. It was a kind of emotion I couldn’t remember tangling with. When there seemed nothing left to do, I said her name for the first time.

“Well, Angela. Here we are.”

“Where else would we be?”

She was shorter than Lauren, whom I’d forgotten entirely in the moment but who was present like a phantom to which I unconsciously compared Angela, the severe, unnameable differences.

She and drummer Blaine had broken up, or she thought they had.

So I’d heard.

And what else? She was an English major, a ballerina, with a twin sister somewhere. She hosted a radio show; spun good records, heavy ones, sad ones. She lived in a dormitory two hours west, in Kalamazoo.

We were getting toward the back of the parking lot. We were almost alone.

“I have dreams about you,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m doing this, but I feel like I have to know you.”

My minivan had met a timely death outside the band’s rehearsal space one winter evening. “That’s my car,” I said, pointing to my used Escort hatchback parked near the edge of the lot. I opened the passenger door for her, and we sat inside, holding Rolling Rocks I’d stashed beneath the seats; I’d been told it was a hydrating beer. The bottles required an opener, and as I dug through my pockets, Angela took it upon herself to twist off the caps using her teeth.

“Where did you learn that?”

“Oh, you know,” she said. Then she got down to cases. “I just have this feeling about you.”

“What do want to do about it?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

Whatever I felt, I wanted to pull a string and let it come down. “Let’s screw all this and drive to Chicago, right now,” I said, as charming as I knew how to be. My new room in the upper flat didn’t cross my mind. There was little there yet but a mattress, and home, wherever that was, was not where I wanted to take her. I wanted to be as far away as we could go, knowing we might drive for days before it was all straightened out.

“Chicago,” she said. “Why Chicago?”

The band had been playing there every few weeks; it was the first place that had come to mind. “We’ll go,” I said. “You and me. It only costs six bucks to drive there in this thing.”

“I’ve always wanted to do what you do,” she said.

Her hair was chopped short, pinned with barrettes. Her loose clothes—you couldn’t tell what was beneath. All I could see was her face, a look on it like she’d traveled a year carrying a message of great import.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“When you play. Go wild, screaming like that. And then when you touched my back after the show that night, I knew there was more.”

She was there. She was. She might have been the first person I’d ever truly seen. The entirety of her seemed conscious in her welled eyes, a green soul-world of things gorgeous and passionate and totally unknown.

“You look like an alien,” I said.

“I think the same about you.”

Like a bird crashing into a glass pane, a hand slapped the window: Blaine, motioning for me to roll it down.

“What are you guys doing? Making out?”

“We’re discussing literature,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “The book club.”

To impress the festival crowd, he’d shaved his hair into a dismal Mohawk. The brown tuft dangled to his nose. He slapped the window again before vanishing through the parked cars toward the glow of distant cigarettes.

Music was faint, coming from inside the venue.

“I just wanted to tell you,” she said.

I’d meant it about Chicago, driving all night. I felt I had nowhere else to be, ever again. Angela was stalling; maybe she didn’t believe me. Maybe she was too sane to up and leave at
the turn of the key, or maybe Blaine had injected his wicked intent into our first moment together.

W
E WALKED BACK TOWARD
the music as if we didn’t know each other; but we did, before we’d spoken a word. Things like that happen, though I hadn’t known it until that night. The festival was a thousand punks canned inside a banquet hall. A band from Gainesville was onstage: Hot Water Music, the last act of the night and the only one I wanted to see. The singer was a copper-bearded, sunburned badass who’d once put up my band in his Florida mobile home. He bled triumphantly from a collision with a stage diver’s boot. Their music was the spiritual opposite of ours, the kind of thing to get you out of bed instead of stomping your guts. The crowd surged forward, crawling over one another, hollering the words. Battle hymns, a revival—I felt it, too. I imagined myself in their band, shouting an entirely different song.

Angela and I were parted by the crowd. We did nothing to stop it. I pushed toward the front of the stage, watching her swaying among the bodies. She sank beneath the horizon of limbs and bobbed again at the surface.

At the edge of the stage, a tall, blond, knuckleboned skateboarder I knew locked a sweaty arm around my neck and kissed my temple. With another beat we were wrestling, twisting through the crowd until we stumbled into the parking lot.

All around us, bands loaded equipment into vans and trailers.

The air was damp, but it hadn’t rained—just springtime, the clouds changing form. Having come so close to her, I was wired. I would have done anything, leaped from a building or gnawed cement. I squeezed my friend’s throat in the crook of my elbow, wrenching hard. When I let go, his neck was roped with veins.

“So,” he said. “You wanna get serious?”

We were on that verge, where drunken, friendly sparring could go bloody.

He snatched a canvas bag filled with cymbals and hoisted it like a battering shield as he charged, slamming it into my kidneys.

“Do it,” he said, throwing the sack. It hit the cement with a muffled clatter.

We took turns bludgeoning each other, laughing with each attack. Then we squatted against the fender of a parked car, massaging our ribs, each draping an arm over the other.

She was somewhere inside. Close, yet with a hundred bodies between us. If I sat there long enough, I might catch her leaving. The music would be over, and the cars would vanish; we’d be the only two left, and we’d talk for hours or stare out through the windshield like fugitives clutching this one thing it’d been our right to steal from the incomprehensible world as I drove her to wherever she wanted to be …

But, no, none of it happened like that.

C
aitlin had been more or less right about my life at the upper flat, stupidity being a frequently occasioned thing, bending now and then toward trouble. One morning, not long before the sun rose, Andrew and I found ourselves standing in the beer and wine aisle of Farmer Jack grocery. It must have been the stillness there, Muzak echoing through aisles of cereal boxes and soup cans—suddenly I knew we were shit out of luck.

“Wait,” I said. “It’s gotta be three
A.M
.” Long past Michigan’s cutoff time.

A case of High Life was nestled beneath my arm.

“Four,” Andrew said, holding up his wristwatch as if he’d known all the while.

This was his slow season, no lawns to mow and little electrical work, allowing him full-bore pursual of his self-education in quantum physics and solar energy, studies that were often aided by drink. The coolers rattled. Shelves of wine bottles stretched away from us—fifteen feet or so of gleaming reds and greens.
Andrew was pacing. It was like he was walking in a hall of colored glass. “Imagine that,” he said. “Time disappeared.”

For weeks, we’d been celebrating my new residency in the upper flat with beer and records and a whole lot of nothing much. Earlier that evening, we’d had an impassioned debate over natural selection, nature and nurture, and other mysteries about which we knew only catchphrases, interrupted only by the discovery that we’d run out of spirits.

Will remained at the flat, a mere two hundred yards across Michigan Avenue. A weeknight. Hugging the box of beer forced me to consider the fact I had to be at the rug shop in a matter of hours.

“What now?” I said.

Andrew walked to the end of the aisle. He wore a flannel jacket and work boots. Will had buzzed his dark blond hair right down to his thick, hearty skull.

“Now is now,” he said.

With a gentle palm, he dusted the wine bottles, hearing them clack together like loose teeth. He paused, teasing a bottle neck with a finger, smiling, fingering the glass neck a bit harder, until the bottle tipped from the rack, falling end over end toward the floor. As the glass shattered, I knew we were in for something. Andrew moved down the racks with a creeping fascination as one after another the bottles crashed, spilling purple through the aisle.

Moments like that: I guess you could say we lived for them.

I was sure I heard a commotion coming our way.

What happened next wasn’t a decision, exactly. I asked myself if I had the nerve to bust for the exit, and the answer arrived with a jolt to my thighs, igniting a flurry of strides. My arms cradled the chilled box. I heard Andrew chuckling behind me. As we passed the checkout station, an employee cried, “Hit the doors! The doors!”

Andrew dashed past me with a gingerly step. He’d been able to leap backyard fences with barely a running start; I’d seen him scale brick buildings—they wouldn’t catch him. The automated doors had closed tight, unresponsive to our jailbreak approach. Evidently they hadn’t locked, because Andrew wrenched them apart, holding them open long enough for me to get a leg through and squeeze myself into the night.

Andrew ran alongside the building’s facade with the awful idea of taking cover in the woods behind.

“Aye,” I said, but it was every man for himself.

I booked ass across the parking lot, cradling the beer, heading for the upper flat, which sat in plain view beyond the avenue. Halfway across the asphalt expanse, I heard the huff and puff of the vigilante gaining on me, steps away from tackling me to the pavement. A voice behind, motoring, “Mo-fucker, mo-fucker, mo-fucker.”

Sacrificing our booty was my only chance. I whirled, tossing the box of beer. It skidded across the blacktop, wide of a husky, bug-eyed employee coming at me with pumping forearms and a face reddened with a need for cruel justice. I saw all this in the space between heartbeats; then fear carried me into a frantic sprint. Running with a singleness of purpose, I opened each stride a little wider, knowing that you never, ever look back until you’re certain you’ve escaped.

W
ILL WAS SITTING ON
the couch, lost in music, as I barged through the door.

“Andrew,” I said. “He started breaking bottles.”

“Yeah?” Will looked as though I’d spoiled a meal he was in the midst of blessing. There was free jazz playing, or one of his psycho-ambient records. His hair was slicked with royal jelly, the latest sleaze he was working. “You never know with Andy,”
he said, and Will was one of the only people who could shorten Andrew’s name and get away with it. Andy Dandy—fighting words.

“Andy, Andy,” he said, and went to bed.

I was spooked the way people get when they’ve been bedeviled by a horror flick and cannot rest until they’ve checked the locks, bolted the windows. I switched off the lights and lay on the couch, listening for Andrew’s return or a phone call. Jail, I imagined. Bail money. This was life in the upper flat. How it would be from here on, and I was okay with that.

A half hour passed before Andrew’s steps sounded in the stairwell.

I met him at the door.

“What happened?”

In his hand was a cup of coffee, steady as could be.

“I ran out back, down by the river,” he said. “A rent-a-cop was on me, but he wasn’t going into the trees.” He sipped from his Styrofoam cup. “I would have turned his lights out.”

“Where’d you get that?”

“It’s decaf,” he said. “Here, you take it.”

He wasn’t breathing heavily, not a bit. Andrew was deadpan serene, always. Even when he’d snap, come undone, which wasn’t often, he’d move swiftly and methodically. Only his eyes would go feral, as if he’d stared into an eclipse and seen the end of all of us. You’d have to shake him out of it—after the fight or fire or whatever. Sometimes he’d get that way talking about the solar panels he was saving for. The sun’s energy, quantum what have you. It was a good thing the guard hadn’t found him.

“I threw the beer at the other guy,” I said. “He almost got me.”

“No,” Andrew said, scanning the room like there were energies yet to be detected, as though I were an impartial presence.
I never liked it when he did that. “No,” he said. “No, he didn’t. You would have done what you had to.”