Wild Awake (19 page)

I go through everybody, one by one. I chatter to the streetlight of Petra, the phone booth of Dr. Scaliteri, and the construction pylons of my mom and dad.

Soon I’m at the bridge. Soon I’m at the top of the bridge. Soon I’m over it and down the other side.

I save Sukey for English Bay, and for Sukey, I don’t address a streetlight or a concrete bench. I save her up until I spot the magnolia tree.

Sukey
—

I pedal hard, keeping my eyes fixed on the magnolia tree. It breezes, sighs, as if it’s thinking about what it wants to say.

Come on, Sukey. Come on
.

I push, I pant, I pedal, I strain. The magnolia’s scent pulls me closer, reels me in.

All at once it happens: The magnolia tree erupts into light. I lift off from the ground and cartwheel in slow motion through the rain. My bicycle tries to split away, but I clamp my legs around it and we fly through the air like conjoined twins. The streetlights and street signs all lean in like a crowd of people pointing at a strange object streaking across the sky. My bicycle and I flip once. The Sukey-tree leaks into an ice cream swirl of pink and white. For one sparkling moment we hang halfway between heaven and earth.

Then gravity wins. My bike and I fly apart, briefly careen through the night sky alone and land with a crunch on opposite sides of the road.

My head whips back from the impact and my ribs twang like a dropped guitar. The sky spins above me like a penny. My bike has dematerialized, and my iPod is strewn across the intersection in a million glittering pieces. When I try to move, ten different parts of my body light up at once, like someone’s pressing all the buttons at an anatomy exhibit. The magnolia tree blows me a kiss of perfumed air, and I can’t decide if what I’m feeling is incredible bliss or excruciating pain. This might just be the greatest moment of my life. It’s possible. If it is, I don’t want to waste it lying around in the middle of the road. For a single, golden second I breathe galaxies.

A car door slams and someone wearing noisy heels gets out.

“Are you okay? I couldn’t even
see
you in that black dress. You’re bleeding. Okay. Oh my God.”

The stopped car’s headlights are shining in my eyes, blinding me with their yellow glare. I can’t see the woman standing over me dialing 911 on her cell phone.

“Can you talk? What’s your name? Oh God. Is your neck broken? Can you hear me?”

I realize this woman is alarmed because she does not understand the situation. The situation is that I have been transformed into an invincible angel who feels no pain. I realize I must elucidate the situation before she calls an ambulance. I leap up from the ground. The woman’s alarmed look is nothing compared to the way the branches of the magnolia tree begin to riot in the wind. I scuttle across the street and snatch up my bike. Straddling it, I flash her the devil horns.

“Hail Satan.”

I ride away, wobbling, as fast as I can.

I’m fine and my bike’s fine
and the situation is 100 percent under control.

I would be exaggerating if I said that my skin is in shreds or my bike looks like it’s been beaten by thugs or if I claimed there was any kind of problem at all.

In fact, I have made it home safely and stowed my bike safely in the garage and all the doors are locked and the lights are on.

There is only one bloody handprint on the garage door to suggest—incorrectly—that matters have exceeded my ability to deal with them. There is only one wrecked pair of gold tights in the kitchen garbage can to indicate that anything has veered even slightly off course.

My thoughts dart from one bright thing to another. I sit on the kitchen counter smoking a joint and drinking electric lemonade while drops of purple-black blood run down my shins and make fascinating splatter patterns on the kitchen floor. I make seven bowls of oatmeal, one for each day of the upcoming week, stud each one with razors, no, raisins, swaddle them in Saran Wrap, and line them up in the fridge. This is what I will eat this week. These are my monk’s rations. I draw up a new and improved practice schedule and tape it to the wall; it’s as big as a map of the world and contains all my plans.

What I need to do is get Serious. It’s time. I’ve had my fun. It’s okay to be free but not so free you lose track of what’s Serious. If you ever get that free, you need to reel yourself in, because the edges of the world are as sharp as glass, and if you ride over them you’re going to get torn up. I wanted to hear that secret music, so I let it play and now that I’ve played it, it’s time to turn it off and be Serious again.

I rearrange the living room furniture, pushing the couch and coffee table against the wall and dragging all the lamps into a circle around the piano. It is time, I decide, to learn some new music. Something daring. Something bold. Something the judges at the Showcase have never heard before. I rifle through my collection of sheet music until I find the tattered folder marked
Sesquipaedia
. It’s a piece I’ve wanted to play for years but never had time for: thirty-five pages long, devilish timing, written by a little-known composer called Stanley Otter Fish, who was run over by a bread truck at the age of twenty-three.

Sensational
, sniffed Dr. Scaliteri when I showed it to her last year.

But if I’m going to make an impression on Tzlatina Tzoriskaya, that’s exactly what I want my performance to be.

I take out the sheet music and lay it out neatly on the floor, pages and pages of notes like tiny black beetle eggs. I walk through the rows of music like a maze. Someone once told me that it’s possible to play any piece of music after hearing it a single time, without ever looking at the notes. Everything we see and hear gets stored in our memory, whether we realize it or not, and it’s only a matter of coaxing it back to the surface. I circle the room in my bare feet, listening to the music in my head and trying not to peek at the pages on the floor. As I circle, I can feel the Prokofiev concerto being ripped up like weeds and tossed into a gnarled heap. If I can learn music, I can unlearn it too. I can unteach my fingers to play the notes I spent so long mastering. I could make the whole keyboard foreign again if I wanted to. I could rewind and rewind and rewind until the whole thing became unintelligible. Or I could circle and circle and circle until I knew everything, everything, and I could hear all the music I had ever heard looping through my head.

I circle and circle, my knees weeping blood, until the pages are stained and torn and I can’t see the notes at all.

When the sun comes up, I stop circling and march up the stairs. Birds are chirping in the backyard trees, industrious feathered machines, reminding me of all the work I have to do. I had better get some sleep so I can wake up, eat the first of the oatmeals, and go back to the piano refreshed. Sleep is important for memorization—that’s another thing I’ve heard. I ought to have been taking naps all this time.

I go into my parents’ bathroom and click open the medicine cabinet. I twist open the Costco-sized bottle of ibuprofen, gravely dispense myself six orange tablets, and swallow them with water from the tap.

I go to my room and lie on my bed with the lights off, but nothing happens.

Something needs to happen.

I need to go to sleep so I can wake up so I can practice piano so I can get Serious.

I lie in bed five more minutes and don’t fall asleep at all. Reality whangs horribly in my ears. I feel like a glow stick that’s still glowing the morning after Halloween.

I need to sleep so I can wake up so I can practice piano so I can snarfle with Skunk so I can wake up so I can get the situation completely under control.

I can’t sleep.

Why can’t I sleep?

A minute later I still can’t sleep. I get up and go downstairs and smoke two medicinal-sized joints, then go upstairs and take ten more ibuprofen and a handful of sleeping pills I find in my parents’ bedroom, then go back downstairs, throw on some smooth jazz, and lie down on the floor under the piano.

In a few minutes or half an hour or maybe the next day a blue haze comes over me and I don’t know if I’m dreaming or tripping or what but whatever it is it’s heavy and strong and it hurts a little less than whatever the fuck was happening before.

Denny is here, and I’m so
confused when I wake up and he’s dragging me out from under the piano that I promptly roll onto my stomach and puke.

“Nice, Kiri,” he says, arching one eyebrow appraisingly. “Real classy.”

When I lift my head to look at him, another squirt of puke shoots up my throat: flecks of pink and orange. Electric lemonade.

I want to be back under the piano. It’s cozy down there. Like curling up under the car you’ve just been hit by and going to sleep. I grab a piano leg with one hand and start pulling myself back under. The piano is a big, kindly whale looming over me in a comforting way. As long as I’m under there, nothing can crush me.

Denny crouches and grabs my ankle to thwart my return to the mother ship. I make a grunt of protest and thrash my aching leg.

“Damn, Kiri, how’d you cut up your legs like that?”

I groan louder, succeed at twisting my ankle out of his grasp, and clamp my knees to my chest. There. Much better. I am a turtle sleeping with the whale, and Denny is a bothersome crab that keeps trying to drag me away with his pincers.
Go away, crab. Go away, Sir Crabulous
. I have a vague memory that I went to the sea last night. There were ships and clouds and a magnolia tree that picked up and flew like a bird. Also a woman, some sort of witch, who followed me in her car until I dodged her at Granville Island. I remember being wet. Soaked, in fact. I think I was dipped in sacred water like Achilles. I might have taken a swim.

Oh, I remember. I did take a swim. And the witch-woman stood on the pier and screamed, not realizing I was a turtle.

“You smell like dead fish,” says Denny.

Naturally. I am a turtle.

“Why are your piano books wet?”

It doesn’t matter. All that music is memorized. I summoned it in my sleep.

“Would you sit up and answer me?”

Someone spins around my turtle shell, and the rusty blade of Denny’s face appears over mine.

“Kiri? Hey. Kiri?”

Turtle out.

The next time I wake up, there’s loud music playing and male voices talking in the kitchen. I hear Denny.

“Yeah, I think she’s just hungover. But, like, hella hungover, dude.”

I pull my head back into my shell. Whatever.

The time after that, the lights are off and the house is quiet. Whoever was here has gone away. I gurgle and spoon the piano leg. Love.

I close my eyes. Turtle in, turtle out.

The next time I wake up, I hear a basketball game playing on TV.

The next time I wake up, I smell microwave burritos.

The next time I wake up, Denny pulls me out from under the piano again and slams a plastic bottle full of water on the floor next to my face.

“Sit up and drink this.”

I make a strangled murmur of revolt and close my eyes. Bad move. Denny grabs my shoulders, hauls me up off the floor, and tosses me onto the couch. He puts the bottle in my hand.

“Drink it.”

Denny’s wearing his summer uniform, scruffy board shorts and a dark blue T-shirt, and sporting a new angular haircut that makes him look like a backup dancer for a B-list pop star. He plants himself in front of me and watches while I unscrew the plastic cap and take a slow dribbling sip of water. As the water wets my throat, the turtle part of me swims away. I am Kiri, sitting on a couch drinking water. This is my brother, Denny. My tongue feels around for language.

“What are you doing here?” I say.

“Dr. Patel went on vacation. I got two weeks off.”

Two weeks off. The words set off distant alarm bells, and I’m not sure why.
Just when things were going so nicely
, I think, then wince as the first pangs of a headache lance through my skull.

Denny picks up the Ziploc bag on the coffee table and helps himself to a chunk of my weed. He takes a Tic Tac container out of his pocket and tucks the weed in for safekeeping.

“Hey,” I slur woozily. “That’s my stash.”

Denny comes back to the couch and brings his face close to mine. He has a new piercing, I notice—a small silver hoop in the cartilage of his left ear. It looks infected. I’m about to tell him so when he grabs my arm.

“Drink
all
that water, Kiri. You listening? You’re probably really dehydrated.”

I nod and try to retract my arm. He doesn’t let go.

“When you finish drinking that water, clean up all this crap. I don’t know what you got up to last night, but if Mom and Dad saw this place, they’d freak.”

I glance at the sheet music strewn across the living room floor, the half-smoked joint on the coffee table, Sukey’s silver shoes like fallen stars near the piano bench. It looks like an artist lives here—a passionate and tormented soul. Maybe even a genius. Sukey would be proud.

“I’m a real musician now, Denny,” I croak.

“I can see that,” he says, rolling his eyes.

He lets go of my arm, stalks to the kitchen, and picks up his keys and cell phone off the counter. I strain my neck to watch him, holding the water bottle between my knees.

“Where are you going?”

He yanks open the front door without answering.

“Where are you going, Denny?”

“Enjoy your hangover,” he calls, slamming it shut behind him.

I sit on the couch in stunned silence, the water bottle dribbling onto my lap.

Denny is here.

Denny is
here
.

I feel exposed, like an inventor whose secret workshop has just been raided by the CIA. I’m a trapdoor spider whose trapdoor has been pried open. I’m a fetal pig pulled from its bucket of brine, my inner workings sliced open for all to see. Nobody was supposed to be here. Nobody was supposed to walk in and become a witness to the fact that things weren’t proceeding in an utterly Serious manner. Especially not Denny.