The Listeners (4 page)

“This is stupid.”

“No Cadmus, it's not stupid, you are sad.”

“Can I take a prisoner?” I said. Riley was somewhere downstairs; I could rope his wrists together, pull off his underwear.

“No Cadmus, you are gentle and good.”

“Well what am I supposed to
do
then?” I stood in her room wishing we had video games like regular families, or a TV at least. Lack of TV stuck you in rooms with lame sisters who wrapped themselves in sheets, pirouetting, singing “Where am I? Where am I? Where am I?”

When we played Nakedies, my sister would hold a lit lighter to the inside of Riley's fat pink thigh. I'd blindfold him with his superhero undies, the knot so screwy he couldn't undo it himself and so tight he couldn't rip it off, and we'd leave him like that. The weird thing was he never told. I undid the blindfold and whispered, “I bet you will
this
time!” but Riley stared back and said he wouldn't. Why not? “Because I won't,” he said. The tears made his eyes so green.

I WOKE IN
the night to cramps, the first swelling roll. The pain was veiny brown—a side of killed meat. When I stood, the collecting blood squirted out and I would have to throw these panties away. A girl's stomach was raining. “Why does it look like rain?” my sister had asked, and I crumpled the paper I was using to explain periods to her: “That's just how I drew it.” “How do you make the stomachache stop?” “Aspirin,” I said.

I thumbed off the cap, shook five into my palm.

In the morning, still bleeding hard, I hobbled to the convenience store, where a boy no older than twelve was buying cigarettes. Two Thumbs was staring at the ceiling. The short aisles contained nothing but plasticked pies. I consulted the soda case.
Will you get me some ginger ale?
Reached for a green bottle.
I have a
—My sister hadn't known yet to call them cramps; she said stomachache. Puddle on the bedsheet: a perfect red sun. Two Thumbs watched the sun through the ceiling; he was refusing to actually be here. I smiled at him and he smiled back but only with the front of his mouth. “Dollar fifteen,” he said.

AMONG US THREE,
I was boyest. My sister with her painted nails and whimsies was very girl, and Riley, dazed and scuttling, seemed despite his penis not boy at all. I was only half girl, so lanky and teatless, never scenic from across a room.

My sister did her sanding on the sunporch so the flakes of skin wouldn't fall on anything Mert could yell at her for. The porch floor was already a mess. Riley sat at her feet, watching her scrub.

“
Pourquoi
are you doing that?” I asked, swinging past.

“I am making my touch receptors closer to the surface,” my sister said. “To sense the teeny grooves of locks, safecrackers' fingers have to be incredibly alert, so they sandpaper off the top layer of skin, which is dead and blocks feeling.”

And she held up her hands, dribletting red, ten little pads torn open.

We played on our parents' bed, leaping and twirling in bare skin. Fod came in to tell us time for dinner, and in the middle of the word
dinner
he stopped, muttered “Goddammit,” hauled me by the arm away from the little ones and into the bathroom.

He pointed to my downstairs.

Three hairs.

“No more Nakedies for you, hear me?”

THOUGH I HAD
been eating again for years and years, the extra hair on my lip and chin had never quite gone away. Your mustache, Riley used to cackle, your beard! I uncapped the jar of cream, the plastic powder vial, scooped portions onto a plastic square and stirred with a tiny paddle. Daubed mixture above mouth and along jawline. Fifteen minutes. I proned myself on the couch so the drying bleach wouldn't fall off. Ten minutes. The bearded lady. The good doctor had explained it was my body's way of staying warm when it couldn't be sure there would be enough flesh to do the job. Five minutes. My arms were still hairy too: I kept them in sleeves. One minute. Hot water and washcloth.

I remembered of course where the notebook was—in my blue cardboard suitcase, stuffed up on the top closet shelf, where I stowed things I couldn't stand to throw away. The notebook was rubber-banded to a cigar box of fan mail. I sat straight down on the floor and opened to an early page.

Teased up the page corner to see what might be next—saw the word
fumes
—then threw it down. But picked it up again.

Smoke rolled off my thin black letters, the colors churned up. Cam had liked to criticize my manners, much like a persnickety aunt. A very tall aunt.

I knelt on the floor and stretched out.
Here I am. Here I am
. The kitchen clock clicked. The rain pelted. The cathedral sat on its hill.
Here I am
. I could hear the colors still, all those terrible bright shapes, but they were knotting together—slowing. I was in my apartment on a street in a city in a country on the floating scab of a globe.

“IF FOD KILLED
Riley from punching him in the stomach, what should be his punishment?”

The youngest looked at the oldest, and the oldest looked surprised.

“Come on, what?”

“I don't know,” said the oldest.

“There would have to be punishment,” said the middle matter-of-factly. “Which do you think: water torture on a schedule, or life imprison?”

ACROSS THE BUS
aisle, a calamity-haired baby spark had been sneaking glances. It was a half recognition—he couldn't quite place me. Hope crackled.
Hey I fucking loved your last record
was what they usually said. Then hope dashed on the rocks of shame: had I fallen so low I needed a high-school student to remember my name? I put my cheek to the window glass and snapped the band, wanting pain so bright it was all I felt.

The familiar room of crimson walls, black floor. Geck nursed a tonic water in a booth. If battling to stay off mood alterers, I didn't know why one would want to hang out where they were sold; but this was his pattern. Every time he got clean he persisted in moping around the bar, sighing a lot, twirling a dirty pale forelock on his finger.

“Watch any good moving pictures lately?” he wanly inquired.

“Last night I saw a decent one about life on a planet run by people who look like whippets.”

“What the fuck is a whippet.”

“You know, like a very thin dog.”

He tipped back the glass. Ice cubes kicked against his teeth. “I have a cane,” he announced, “made from the penis of a bull.”

“Is that right.”

“Serious,” he nodded. “Buddy of mine from treatment got it for me, on account of my leg. Minky!” he shouted. “Can I have another of these? With olives this time?” He added to me: “Imperative to give yourself some variety.”

Geck had fifty-two days. Eight more until sixty, then thirty to ninety. When he hit ninety he'd be feeling much better. It was always the way. When he felt better, or better enough, he'd start to itch again. He had, as usual, a fat list of complaints about the recovering life. First of all, everyone was always so bleeding grateful.
My name is Bucky and I'm grateful to be sober one more day; my name is Lucky and I have a hell of a lot of gratitude this evening; my name is Sucky and I'm just honored to be alive!
Earlier this evening Geck had eaten five powdered doughnuts from the church table and had not been grateful. Some nights the meetings were a comfort, offering the solace of being among barely-making-it people who, like himself, survived each day on routines of coffee, cigarettes, and self-deprecation; but tonight no solace, merely a bad mood made worse by doughnut-nausea. And Deep Cleavage flirting with the asshole who lied about his clean date. And that dragons 'n swords nidget in his cape.
And bus riding in suburbia—the fucking worst! Took an hour to go a mile, and the other passengers were these huddly little no-life-having people who reminded you, kind of, of yourself. He missed his hatchback. Hated asking for rides so suffered the bus and the endless walk after.

“Such as, for instance, tonight,” he concluded, “it'll take me a year to get home. Unless maybe I could crash at your…?”

“Nein,” I said. “So is there anyone nice at your meetings?”

“Nice? Um… developmentally
disabled
, maybe. Boring, absolutely. This one guy won't shut up about how his coworker keeps putting his stapler on the guy's side of their workstation…”

And his parents' house was always quiet, I imagined: carpets on every floor, footfalls hidden, a soft agitation snaking down every hall.

“Jonathan? Can I get you a soda?” Geck's mother pronounced
soda
like it was God's greatest temptation. About twenty times a day she offered him one. The icebox was crammed with six-packs of the various colas, the lemon-limes.

“No thanks,” he shouted.

“You sure, hon? I can bring it up.”

He licked and flipped slithery pages. His mother had had magazines waiting when he got out of Canterbury Recovery Center, a neat pile on his desk. Well,
their
desk. Everything was theirs. He had paid for nothing in this
house except his guitar and a practice amp the size of a keychain.

He told me now, “I guess it's a taxi for me, then. An expensive and unnecessary fucking taxi.”

“By the way,” I said, “have you seen anyone around lately? Anyone who isn't usually around?”

“You speak in riddles.” He dug around in his nose with one pinky, almost delicately.

“Just, I don't know, the other day on the train I thought I saw someone who used to live here—from back in the day—”

“Well,
I
haven't, and I'm glad. I don't need any run-ins with former associates until I've improved my circumstances.”

THE AMP HAD
been banished to the hour between five and six and absolutely zero after dinner because the racket made Mert want to cut off her ears. I tried to play along with songs I liked but couldn't and it sounded like a field of circles with tiny black dots.

“Green-legged triangles!” countered my sister. “Not circles.
Listen
.”

I still heard circles, which infuriated her. “You're not listening close enough.
That
”—when I clanged out a chord—“is
triangle
.”

“It's circles. I'm the musical one, I should know.”

“You're actually really bad,” she told me.

“Shut up.”

“I'm just making a scientific appraisal,” she said, “of the facts. Your ability to play is nonexistent.”

“Shut
up
,” I yelled.

Riley, flower on wall, waited in excitement.

She went on: “I hope you learn soon because otherwise Fod will think it was a big goddamn waste of money.”

“I'll do you a mischief,” I warned.

“Oh I'm
so scared!
”

I stood up. “You want to get smashed?”

“Nay,” said my sister, and there it ended, disappointing our brother, who loved to watch us hit.

 

The blindfold made loud blackness, a hiss and reel across the backs of his eyes. He was afraid to touch the walls—their surfaces, when bumped, were damp and moving—and his own whines had a horrible pulse. The blackness lasted so long he had stopped crying and was nearly asleep by the time our father opened the closet door and said, “Goddammit” and yanked off the blindfold.

Riley saw the heat in Fod's face. His sisters were going to get hit. He cried, “No Fod, it was a game!”

“A game?” shrugged our father, thundering downstairs.

Riley rushed behind: “Yes and I knew I would be in the closet so it's not bad and I just fell asleep before it was over. Please don't do anything to them.”

“Quinn!” Fod shouted at the door to the basement. “Get your ass up here!”

“No Fod
don't
, they didn't
do
anything.”