The Listeners (14 page)

“Nothing,” I said. “Just wanted to see how you were doing, you know, with the bookstore sadness and—”

“I'm fine,” he snapped. “Good night.”

He hadn't cared that I didn't have a college degree, or that I didn't read much. He had seen us play a bunch of times and he told me, during our interview, “You guys wrote fantastic songs.”
Geck wrote the fantastic ones,
I did not say. Ajax was fingering some huge dark beads around his neck. “Hard, what happened,” he added, meaning the accident that ended the band, but I thought, at first, he meant my sister—thought
How could you know about that?
—and my eyes prickled hard. Maybe he only hired me because he had brought me to tears.

RILEY HANDED ME
a papier-mâché face. In sixth-grade art they were doing Halloween masks.

“Nice,” I said and handed it back.

“No, it's for you.”

I fingered its glitter crust. “Thanks but I'm not, like, gonna
wear
it.”

Our father's car was out front and when we climbed to the porch we heard Mert screaming inside. Not screaming—choking? We heard: “Oh God oh God oh God.”

“It's okay,” I said and rested my palm on Riley's head. Before I could finish unlocking the door, Fod opened it.

“Kids, your mother's having a rough day. Go on up to the park.”

“For how long?” I asked.

“Just go.”

The choke-squalls were worse with the door open. “Is she okay?”

“She'll be fine—now go.”

We went. I steered us to a picnic table and Riley opened his backpack to see which library books he had and I lit a cigarette. Smoked half, heeled it out, lit another.

“Here,” said Riley, and gave me a snail that he kept in a secret pocket of the backpack.

I made Riley sit at the picnic table as long as possible, afraid of finding, at home, exactly what we found: her still coughing and weeping. It smelled of onions frying; Fod was in the kitchen to escape her. She was balled up in a chair, forehead on elbow, shaking her head.

“Mert are you okay?”

“No, squid, I'm not.”

I wished she would just fake it.

“Should we go back to the park?” asked Riley, looking up at me with such trust that I spat, “Fuck no.” He shouldn't have trusted me. “Fod?” I called through the onion. “Are we eating soon?”

“Yep!” he shouted back. “Want to set the table?”

MY BROTHER AND
I packed what I owned. The weather had turned cold again, but I was drenched—muscles tiny from lack of use, heart stiff from smoking. Riley busied himself with the silverware and cups while I slid armfuls of records into boxes, singing nonsense.

“You still have a good voice,” called my brother.

“Shucks,” I said.

He sized up the kitchen table. In its drawer were my million rubber bands.

“Do you pick out a new one every
day
?”

“Depends,” I said.

“But some days you don't wear one—how do you decide?”

How had such an earnest person managed to land in our family? I told him that I gauged my daily panic level the minute after waking.

“Do you want to keep these takeout menus?”

“Why the fuck would I?”

“Oh. I don't—okay.” They went into the trash bag; his cheeks flared.

“Sorry, Coyote, you're totally helping out and I'm being a . . . ”

“It's all right.”

I came to squat over the pile of newspapers in the corner. Underneath were the posters and pages, the yellow photographs—

“What is all that?”

“Documentation of fecal matter,” I explained. “Which I wanted to torch but couldn't figure out where.” Into the trash bag they went.

He was staring at my calf, which had a sea-green vein he'd never noticed before. Well on its way to being the leg of an elderly.

“I think my familiar has left the building,” I offered.

“The rat, you mean?”

I nodded. “No more thumpings in the night. Haven't heard him in two days. He must have smelled the packing and known cleaning fluids would follow in its wake.” I added a laugh, for Riley's sake, but actually I was a little bothered that I had not gotten to say goodbye to the creature. Or kill it.

The radio told how bad the traffic was getting on the bridges. It did not talk about the female soldiers or their periody underwear. The blood was food coloring stirred into water, but the prisoners didn't know this. They believed the red was real.

WHEN I GREW
stars on my shoulder, nobody saw them at first. I started growing them spring of tenth grade, about the time I picked up smoking and discovered a band I loved more than any I had yet heard. The sounds this band made were torn wings, crusts of glitter hills, valleys of black flame, clouds cut in three by red lightning, bluish brain rising from cankered feet. Every hair on me pointed at the ceiling. The thick poles of sadness that stood in me were yanked out by the singer's screeching and howling, and my shoulders fluttered. The drums were heaving and keeling and thwacking, each hit pulling the veins in my chest closer to the surface. The people onstage didn't look any older than we were, white boys on whose fatless bodies hung cotton and denim, nothing especially special—but they
knew
something. They were pilots of the new land, beckoning
Over here, over here!
and I felt superior to every other kid in the room because I alone (I believed) was having my veins brought to the surface.

The magicians played again the following week after a protest at the university. I didn't care about South Africa but Cam made me go; it was important, he said, horrible things were happening and we had to do something. Horrible things, I thought, have already happened. But I queued up with the rest of them, a line of kids in black britches and gray glimmies, scarred boots and leathers, hair chopped up. They yelled, Divest! and End apart-hate now!—pale cheeks tomato-ing with righteous anger and June heat. I did not yell; I was merely waiting for that night's show.

Apartheid No, Freedom Yes! they screamed in the bar. Practically every kid in there had also been at the protest. Cam screamed too. A guy from our English class bought us whiskeys with his brother's license. With each sip, I brightened. I could not wait for my new loves to take the stage. Cam kept brushing against me. I brushed back. “I bet your hand is smaller than mine,” he babbled, holding his palm up. I pressed mine to it. “Shit, a whole knuckle smaller.” We kept our hands like that for a long time, and when he looked at me, I did not look away.

In his parents' car, after, he stared at the wheel, a true smile on his mouth. Then he turned. “Um, hey.”

“Yeah?”

“Come here,” he said.

Our mouths bumped; I smelled whiskey; his lips were dry, at first.

BECAUSE RILEY'S BUILDING
didn't have mailboxes, the postman threw everything onto the hall radiator, and you had to sort. I saw flickers of the lives going on in other apartments. Man on the ground: antiwar pamphlets, amateur magician newsletter. Woman on the fourth: handstitched brocade envelopes from an unpronounceable town in Wales—faraway lover, or devoted aunt?

Nothing from Cam, of course. Maybe he never even got my letter. What if the secretary had misspelled the address? Or what if he'd called my apartment after I moved out?
You left a forwarding notice.
But what if the phone company had mixed up two digits of Riley's number?

My brother's mail was a postcard inviting him to attend a furniture sale. His name on the label was a blue cube, and salty. No flavor if someone spoke it, only when I saw it written down. My own name written was chewed aluminum foil: sore, bright, silver-black.

If the Russian writer whose numbers had colors and feelings had been a genius, then maybe we sisters were
too. I said doubtfully, “Genius?” and my sister said, “We
could
be. Mert and Fod should've put us in a
special school
.” She made me bring my library books to the basement, where we would read for an hour before dinner to sharpen our brains; and she reminded me not to tell Riley. He would feel bad, she explained, for not being a genius too.

But the fact was, I was just as normal-brained as Riley, except I heard colors. Only our sister had any genius in her.

From the windows upstairs I couldn't see the door to Mrs. Jones's parlor, only the people using it. Here, a big-bubbed college student; there, a crew-cutted soldier. 8:52 PM: handholding couple with matching white veins in their ears—the girl's idea to go, I was guessing, and the boy humoring her. Mrs. Jones stayed open until midnight on weekends because people were more likely to buy fortunes when drunk.

The bathroom had no windows and was big enough for a little table where Riley had laid out pans and strung up a wire. In his pans floated smoky prints, harsh and cold. He would have stayed in here forever, safe from people, if he hadn't worried that the chemicals would eat tunnels in his skin. He played no music here. All was flat: the sheets of silver paper, the taut wire clipped with drenched images, water dripping neatly into the pans.

In the crowd of icebox pictures, Cam laughed on the steep cracked steps of Belfry Street, and barrettes had caught the black spilling hair so you could see his
eyes, and his cheeks were dark from not shaving. Riley had taken this one himself—had told Cam not to smile, which was a good way to get a person to smile.

The spider-haired girl from the video channel, throwing out minor questions at the interview's end: “So what about you and the drummer? You have an obvious rapport onstage—and you're the two founding members—ever any romantics between you?”

Me: “We tried that on for size in high school, but…”

What was I, a vacuum-cleaner salesman?
Tried that on for size.
There were things you wished you could suck back into your mouth.

RILEY GROPED ALONG
the rough plaster for the switch. The basement scared him. Our sister's boxes were down there. He couldn't find the light—oh, there. The bulb flickered. He stepped very quietly, waiting at each wooden step. Heard grunts. And me crying. The sobs came in little shots. Someone was hurting me? Faster grunting. It took him a while of listening to figure out the other voice was Cam's, and that I was not being hurt, or not exactly.

We had sex twelve days after the kiss in his parents' car. Neither of us had done it before. Embarrassed to be a virgin still at sixteen, I pretended, at first, to know what I was doing; but it was Cam, hard to lie to. Plus I was afraid I'd bleed. In Nzambi's class we had read the old classic psychology treatise about a girl who left a red mark on the sheet and was frantic to change it so the family maid wouldn't see evidence of her sluttiness. Most manuals warn of first-time blood. What if I leaked enough for the worm to smell it, smile on its eyeless face,
and start crawling at me? Towel, I thought. I could be quick, mop up before the smell traveled.

“What are you doing?” Cam asked when I got onto my knees and stared at the rug.

“Checking something,” I said.

BELLS, CRAZY BELLS,
bumpy under me: what? Oh yes. How'd you get
there
, octopus?

Dots of pain flew at my eyes. I would sew it back on—but I couldn't sew—get my mother to sew it—but she couldn't sew—she was a failure, she always said, as a housewife—and my father didn't sew because men didn't—so Octy was crippled forever, and I hated my sister. It was only a stupid
game
! Why should I keep on playing a game that was so giantly stupid, named after people dead a million years, during which I was obliged to do giantly boring things like hold the end of the sheet while my sister wrap-twirled into a mummy?

She had taken a knife to Octy.

I rubbed my eyes, pressed the pain in deeper. I was too old to cry. I hated being oldest. My sister's crime would not be punished enough. In my wet fingers I held the amputated tentacle, tufted at its broken end, bloodless.

As the oldest, you got in trouble the most and for things you hadn't even done.
Where did all the ice cream
go? Riley. What? Riley ate it. Why the hell did you let him do that?
The little ones were smaller, which made them cuter and less hittable. Fod used to hit us all, but me the hardest. As I grew, I measured my height compulsively, recording each new quarter inch on the door frame, believing that if I got taller than my father, he would be afraid to touch me.

After my sister died, he stopped hitting. It was one of the perks.

I was never up early; but the tidiness of Riley's apartment disturbed sleep. The white walls were so loud. He had a proper toaster, which I loved, no waiting for an oven to heat; and he bought new bread from a real bakery, God bless him. I noticed his crumby morning plate and decided to wash it so he would mind my presence less.

The world looked astoundingly clean at this hour. Everywhere was the strumming of quicker blood, a clicking of the day's gears; across every building (none more than ten stories) the new pink sun laid a stripe; water clung in beads to grass blades and parking meters, soon to die in the heat and therefore brave; and the people were emerging with their game faces on. The gainfully employed marched past: ironed-flat normals, spruce girls with calamity cuts. My hair was an old brown hang. I inhaled fresh shampoo from pedestrian necks, little glows that would be gone by midmorning. Bog-sweat hadn't yet ruined the air, but it would, any day now, I was bracing myself. So humid your shoes went green
inside. The pedestrian current swelled as the bells fell down the hill. Out of the current, the city rested—here, a stone ledge clean of pigeons; there, a red stoop—but inside it, all was rushing.