Wonderland (26 page)

In the tiny kitchen area I find a paper cup, cereal, milk, a plastic spoon. Also, blessedly, coffee in the large plug-in coffeepot. I pour coffee into a second paper cup and open the bus door with my foot. Outside, Terry and Zach stand smoking, both in hooded sweatshirts across the backs of which are written, in silver letters,
Suck It Twice.
It’s the
Suck It Twice
tour of Little Wars.

“Morning,” I say. I sit down on an upended cinder block, put my coffee cup on the wet ground, spoon cereal out of the other cup. It is cool, windy, gray. The festival now looks like a refugee encampment: people trudge by wrapped in mud-tipped blankets; a security guard walks around the backstage area with a mammoth plastic bag, spearing up the night’s trash. The cereal is made out of marshmallows and chocolate chips and a few tasteless flakes that might be some kind of grain. Terry and Zach nod, Zach’s gaze makes me blush. I poke around in the cereal with the plastic spoon. “Fucking Latvia,” I say.

“They saw a tornado near Riga,” offers Terry. “Since when does Eastern Europe have tornadoes?”

“How do we know they didn’t before?” says Zach.

“Yeah, I guess,” agrees Terry. “But still. That was intense.”

“It was,” Zach says, smiling. “Took me by surprise.”

A tasteless flake gets stuck in my throat and I cough. “How does the gear look?” I ask.

“It’s all there,” says Zach. “But being in that tent overnight—we’re going to hear that night all the way through Rome. I’m sorry, Anna.” He taps his ear. “Hopefully we’ll be the only ones who can really tell.” He drags on his cigarette.

In the daylight, Zach is older, but also more handsome. In the night, he was tender, seeking, surprisingly joyous; at one point he murmured, “I feel like I’m seventeen and you’re fifteen,” a comment I could have asked many questions about, but didn’t. This morning, with the hood pulled up over his head, the long lines in his face, the bump in his nose, and the circles under his eyes suggest an inward, questioning man. He isn’t brilliant. Maybe I can’t read music, but I can hear what isn’t there and never will be. And yet. He catches me looking at him and smiles, the smile of his fifty-two-year-old self, waiting for me one day at the back of the tour bus. It is a knowing smile. I smile back.

“This festival is busted,” Terry says, stubbing out his cigarette in the mud. “We’re in Stockholm tomorrow.”

“Other way for us,” I say. “I hope the flight still goes. How’s the van?”

Zach shrugs. “Still has its wheels.”

We all laugh. Zach shakes his head.

“Listen, Anna,” says Terry, “do you guys want to open for us through Japan and Australia? Some shit went down last night, on top of everything else.” He makes wavy hands, a horror face, then snaps back into beauty. “Mid-August to Thanksgiving.”

I bite my knuckle. The hundred little girls holding hammers pause at their tables, look at me goggle-eyed. I can’t read their expressions. “Right. Can I—”

“It’s cool. Just text me by, like, the end of the week? There are all these promoters and stuff.” With his index fingers, Terry shoots himself in both temples. “Sometimes I just want to go back to the trailer park.”

“The fuck you do,” says Zach, and I feel that tug, the place where it tilts, wanting to be in his dreams. As if, once requested, it is a thing that could be willed.

“Let’s go play Halo,” says Terry, and Zach nods, stubs out his cigarette in the mud as well. The silvery
Suck It Twice
backs disappear up into the bus, Zach sneaking a tug on my hair as he goes by.

I remain on the upended cinder block, finishing the coffee as slowly as possible. The bus door whooshes open and Kiki comes out with Zelda, rosy and plump. “What was I thinking with this shit?” says Kiki, putting one of Zelda’s hands in her mouth and opening her eyes wide. Zelda laughs. Kiki removes Zelda’s hand, kissing it loudly. “What happens when she has to start school? There’s no school on the road.”

“The school of life.”

“
Fffff.
” Kiki snorts. “The
alphabet.
Arithmetic. Social studies. Pilgrims.”

“Here,” I say, getting up from the cinder block.

Kiki sits down gratefully, stands Zelda between her knees, holding her under the arms. Zelda looks blue-eyed at the world. She sways and reaches wildly at the air, feet just grazing the mud.

M
Y TINY, TINY
apartment at 19th Street and First Avenue is composed of two small rooms, an elbow of a kitchen, and an armpit of a bathroom. The smaller of the two rooms is my bedroom, which is painted sky blue. The unframed double mattress and box spring fill the width of the room from wall to wall. About two feet above the bed hangs a built-in storage cabinet; on the underside of the cabinet is a clever, subtle disk of light that I bought years ago in Paris. The light looks as if it flew there, spread its wings, and stuck. There are perhaps three feet of space from the foot of the bed to the wall opposite. In the corner of the blue bedroom is a rattan chair with a high, extravagant, rectangular back. The window in this room looks over a modest courtyard in which there is a table with an umbrella, which no one ever uses, and the building’s trash cans, neatly enclosed in a wooden pen. The larger of the two rooms, which is painted burnt orange, is my living area. In this room there is a graceful wooden desk, a desk chair, a daybed/sofa, and a floor-to-ceiling wall of shelves filled with books, found objects, precious keepsakes, family photos, a punctured gourd shell in which reside several dusty vials of cocaine (does coke go bad?) and a few hits of ecstasy, violin strings, the cat’s old collar, and, truth be told, in a white cardboard box, her ashes, which I somehow have never been able to scatter. In this room there is also an ingeniously partitioned closet, which holds, among many other things, my two pairs of Prada boots and the Lanvin dress, zipped into a Lanvin cover, that Simon bought me in Rome. It still fits.

I have lived in this apartment for fifteen years. Jim and I lived there together for six of those years, like two origami birds set beak to beak. All we could do there was eat, sleep, and fuck, which to Jim, in the early days of his sobriety, felt like sanity. When he left, it did not seem any bigger. If anything, it seemed smaller. The apartment is a good deal, and in recent years the landlord has painted the hallways, redone the entryway, installed new mailboxes, and put in a heavy, solid front door, the key to which cannot be duplicated. When I left to go on tour, I discreetly sublet my tiny, tiny apartment to a young Chinese woman, an NYU grad student in film who signed all her emails to me “with respect” and paid everything in cash, up front.

I imagine writing the Chinese woman:
Stay put. We are in wonderland.
Which is where, exactly? The same place, but it changes.
Suck It Twice.

My tiny, tiny apartment, however, does not change. The blue does not change. The burnt orange does not change. The view out the window of the small courtyard does not change. It may seem as if that isn’t much, not much to show for a life, but it’s a lot, actually. A point of leverage. In New York, rent is everything. If I hadn’t been able to trade my tiny, tiny apartment for Jonah’s studio time all those years ago, that one week of sand, none of the rest would ever have happened. No
Whale,
no Simon, no chateau, no
Bang Bang,
no swifts, no electric blue, no Jim and his angelic fiddle, no circle with Billy Q, no Berlin, none of the large and small, generally unknown glories and betrayals that have composed my life. All that from two tiny rooms, a pop-up world. And a hundred little girls with hammers in there, waiting for me to come back.

Waiting on a bench in the crowded airport in Riga for our flight to be called, the three Spanish guys with full beards from last night playing cards and eating potato chips on the floor nearby, I miss my tiny, tiny apartment. I miss it like missing an animal, or maybe like I am the animal. On the television monitor above, sweat-soaked men in navy blue uniforms leap ecstatically around a soccer field. They have won the World Cup. I’m pretty sure the men in blue are Norway. Zach squats down by the three Spanish guys and they deal him in, crisp slap of the cards. Zach’s life at the moment is in boxes in his parents’ basement in Rockland County. Over his shoulder, I can see that he holds quite a few face cards, but since I don’t know what game they’re playing, I don’t know if this means he is winning or losing.

T
HE WALLS WERE
impossible. Texas, unsurprisingly, isn’t kidding when it comes to prisons. In the years since it had been abandoned, this prison, as my father told it, seemed to have become even denser, harder, more unyielding, a dark star. The electricity had been off for so long that the darkness within had grown in on itself, thickened, acquired a centripetal force. Worse still was the absence of scent: no sweat, no cooking smells, no cigarettes, no coffee, no rot of garbage. And, of course, no sound. No talk, no yelling, no rattle and bang of weights in the yard, no steel gates opening and closing, no footsteps, no cries of pain or pleasure or surprise, no television or radio. It was a fortress without a purpose: nothing to guard within, nothing to fend off without. Birds nested in the guard towers. The front door stood wide open to the black silence of the interior, but the walls refused to seam. Pockmarks dotted the walls from the morning’s work, as if small fists had battered futilely at them from improbable heights. Titanic, expensive equipment lay shining in the weed-filled prison yard, motionless. The joke, for years after: that he couldn’t break into that prison for love or money. It was a story he told us, because none of us were there when it was happening. I lived in New York by then.
Never
ever,
bro.
Whale
had just begun whispering.

The three trucks gazed dumbly at the prison, which, with its black windows, gazed blindly back. The work, weightless, in the air between them, blowing away in the sunlight. The crew stood around smoking. With them, the film crew from Channel 4, also smoking. My father paced, peered, squinted, reassessed, studied the plans, felt the walls, tapped them. Where was the error? He might have wished his own father were still alive; his father, the engineer, had had a talent for the ways that matter moved, or didn’t, and known how to make matter work, even against its will, for men. My father squatted in the dirt, looking at the placid field all around the prison, the long grasses on which birds alighted, flew, alighted. Flutter of butterfly wings. A slight darkening ripple as a cloud passed by overhead. Spots of periwinkle blue, of yellow, of magenta. A field cannot be cut, cannot be opened; it is already open. My father spit on the ground.

The prison was oblivious, eternal. The walls, merely scuffed, were cold.

The foreman squatted next to my father. “Roy,” he said, “this is money down the drain every minute we sit here.”

“What about blasting?”

The foreman shook his head. “We don’t have a permit for that. And anyway, then what?”

“Then we’d get a space—”

The foreman shook his head again. “You can walk through that door there.” He nodded toward the dark entryway. “That’s about it.”

“That’s not the project.”

The foreman shrugged. “Tell it to the State of Texas.”

“Let’s go up to the roof.”

“We’ve been up there.”

But they went up. The foreman smoked, leaning against a dead chimney. My father sounded the roof with a long metal bar, striking it in various spots, listening, striking, listening, striking. He heard no answer. The foreman balanced his boot heel on his booted toe, drawing on his cigarette, waiting. Below, the demo guys were playing Frisbee with the Channel 4 guys; the plastic, lemon-yellow disk spun through the air. My father, Roy Brundage, hurled the bar like a javelin into the field, where it dropped without a sound. And then he just stood there, on top of the silent, motionless concrete beast, his hands empty. The smoke from the foreman’s cigarette could barely be seen rising into the light.

I cannot begin to understand what it is to feel the weight of the work drop away and be unable to retrieve it. Consider Norway, leaping streaks of blue: the winner is free, is weightless, has no work to do now and no reason to do it. I cannot understand it, I do not want to understand it. I see now that what I have been writing in my composition book is a catalog, a retrospective, of work that no one will ever see again, of work that existed for less time than it takes to play a song, or listen to one. Not long after my father’s work was done, the photographers would pack up and leave and the bulldozers would arrive—except at the prison, which remains intact in the field to this day. He and I, makers of things that go away; these are the reverberations. I wasn’t there when he cut open those buildings, that train. He didn’t like my music all that much. How strange it is to have disappeared and to come back, years later, only to find that so many of the others have gone. They won’t return. Sitting in the airport in Riga watching the men play cards, I draw a picture of that prison, that front door open into black, neither of which I have ever seen, in
Wonderland.
I write the date beneath it and close the book.

Z
ACH TAKES A
picture on his cell phone of our band’s poster, plastered onto a crumbling stone wall next to a poster of the Pope, his hand upraised to bless a group of dark-skinned children on a beach. “Sweet!” Zach says. The grainy, deliberately blurry image of the four of us standing in dark suits in the rain looks more ancient than the image of the Pope, apple-cheeked, in color, and shiny, beaming in bright tropical sun. Older than the others, I am also closer to the viewer, foreground left, looking ambivalent and existential. It’s a good story, this visual modesty. It’s becoming, but it isn’t true.

“Catholics are shameless,” I remark.

“No fucking kidding,” Zach replies cheerfully. He left my room at six
A.M.
to pretend, I’m not quite sure to whom, that we aren’t sleeping together, but returned at eight with coffee, two
cornetti,
and a hard-on.