Sorrow

by Tiffanie DeBartolo

  “You want a year to gallivant around New York like a bum, playing guitar and letting that kid mooch off you? On my dime? Not a chance. And why would you want to live like that? Don’t you know how lucky you are? You get to go to school and study whatever the hell you want. And you’ll have a career waiting for you when you’re done. That’s the deal. Otherwise, come June, you’re on your own. And in a million years you couldn’t make it on your own in New York City.”

  I heard Cal’s voice in my head: You don’t need his stupid support. You’re going to be a rock star. But it wasn’t as simple for me as it was for Cal.

  First of all, Bob’s words got stuck in my brain. I believed him when he said I didn’t have what it took to make it in Brooklyn, and that gutted me. Second, and probably more significantly, for reasons I did not understand, Bob and I couldn’t seem to get along, and I desperately wanted to change that. I wanted his love and approval, and I thought that if I stayed behind and did what he told me to do, I would get it.

  I stared at the red horse again and noticed that the jockey on the back of it resembled my favorite guitar player at the time, Johnny Greenwood. I was sure that was a message from Sam, a message I didn’t have the strength to heed.

  “Joseph,” Bob said, “are we clear?”

  It’s not that I knew all along I wasn’t going to go with Cal. It was more like the idea of moving to Brooklyn and chasing some crazy dream didn’t seem real to me. It’s easy to fantasize about doing something and to talk about doing something and even to make plans to do something. It’s a whole other thing to actually go and do it. It’s idea versus action. And the difference between the two is guts, I suppose.

  When I look back on that time now, it’s clear that not going to Brooklyn was as much of a choice as going would have been. But it didn’t seem like it then. At the time I saw the fact that I stayed behind as not making any choice at all.

  And when August rolled around, Cal moved to New York just like he said he was going to do, and I went off to Berkeley, numb and full of regret.

  To Cal’s credit, he kept at me for a couple of years after he left, constantly begging me to drop out of school, move across the country, and be in his band.

  “Nobody here plays like you, Harp. Blood Brothers, remember?”

  I continually turned him down, and by my junior year at Berkeley, Cal and I had completely lost touch.

  Though in the essence of truth telling, it’s more accurate to say I stopped returning Cal’s calls and e-mails. I purposely dropped off the face of his earth because whenever we talked, he would tell me stories about his life in New York—playing in dive bars, working as a dishwasher in a restaurant, sleeping in the restaurant’s pantry when he couldn’t afford rent—and I would hang up the phone feeling even worse about myself than I already did.

  I followed Cal’s career from afar for a while. But the night Callahan appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman for the first time, I kicked the wall of my bedroom so hard I broke two toes.

  After that I stopped paying attention to what Cal was doing. I stopped surfing the web for news of his life. I stopped listening to any radio station that might play his music. I never spoke of him again to anyone. In general, I tried to pretend Cal Callahan didn’t exist.

  It wasn’t that I was jealous of Cal. I loved him, and I missed him. And I was prouder of him than I had ever been of anyone or anything. But it was impossible to feel that proud of everything Cal had accomplished without being reminded in the most painful way of all the things I would never do.

  You know where I was the night Cal was making his national television debut on The Late Show? Before I went to the emergency room to have my toes X-rayed, that is? I was sitting in my shitty apartment in Berkeley, eating a shitty burrito from the shitty Mexican restaurant I lived above, wondering why I wasn’t standing on that stage, playing guitar beside my best friend.

  EIGHT.

  I didn’t know any nice places to eat in Mill Valley, so the night October and I went out to dinner for the first time, I let her pick the restaurant. She chose a tiny, farm-to-table spot off the main street in town and asked if we could go right when they opened, before it filled up, and for the first twenty minutes we had the place to ourselves.

  The restaurant had an open kitchen, a wood-fired oven where they cooked everything in cast iron pans, and furry seat cushions that made the room feel cozy and romantic. There was a record player behind the bar, along with stacks of vinyl, and a playlist on the back of the menu, the albums selected by the chef to complement the food being served that night.

  Rumors was playing when we walked in, and as October mouthed the words to “Go Your Own Way,” my instinct was to tell her that the first songs I learned to play on guitar were Fleetwood Mac songs, but then I remembered she didn’t know I could play guitar. As a matter of fact, she barely knew any veritable information about me at all.

  October was wearing a loose-fitting, knee-length dress the color of Japanese maple leaves in the spring, a long, silky scarf tossed around her neck, and brown suede boots. She looked pretty and cool, and I contemplated telling her so, but that seemed like something you’d say on a date—and specifically not something you’d say to your boss over dinner—and since I wasn’t sure which one of those scenarios we were in, I held back.

  As soon as we sat down, the restaurant’s young chef came out and greeted October by name. She introduced me as her friend Joe, and the chef shook my hand and asked me if I had any dietary restrictions. I told him I did not, and he took away our menus.

  The waiter, whom October called Brad but whose shirt had the name “Al” stitched above the left pocket, asked if he should bring us some wine. October looked to me for the answer and I nodded without hesitation. I was nervous, and the restaurant didn’t have a full bar, so tequila wasn’t an option.

  Brad/Al nodded in return, and then he turned to October and nonchalantly said, “How’s Chris?” as he poured water into our glasses.

  “Fine,” she answered. “Out of town, as usual.”

  “Rough life that guy has.”

  October rolled her eyes and smiled politely, and I questioned what the hell I was doing there with her.

  We were quiet then, the subject of Chris hanging between us like a spider that had just descended from the ceiling, neither one of us wanting to break the web and have to deal with the thing crawling around the table.

  Once the waiter came back with the wine, October tucked a wavy chunk of hair behind her ear, looked around the empty room, and said, “Thanks for humoring me with the early-bird special.”

  I shrugged, not having given it much thought.

  “It’s this weird thing I have.” She paused, picked at a seam on the edge of her scarf. “This condition . . .”

  “You have a condition where you have to eat dinner before the sun goes down?”

  She laughed, and I remember noticing how much I liked the sound. Her laugh was artless—probably the only artless thing about her—and contained absolutely no pretense.

  “Anyway . . .” She took a sip of wine. She seemed nervous too, and I could tell she was really trying to think something through. A moment later, using a lot of medical jargon, she explained her condition to me.

  I shook my head. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  Glancing obliquely at the ceiling, she thought for a few more seconds. Then she said, “In layman’s terms, if I see someone being tickled, I’ll feel as though I’m being tickled. And if I see someone get shot in the head, I’ll feel as though I’ve been shot in the head. But it’s not just physical sensations. I can often sense the emotional experience of another person by touching them.”

  I couldn’t wrap my head around what she was saying, and I tried not to sound offensive when I mumbled, “This is an actual thing?”

  She nodded and went on to explain that during her child
hood, she couldn’t watch much TV or go to movies because it caused her too much pain. Apparently this made her something of an outcast among her peers and, like me, she spent a tremendous amount of time alone. And, much like how I turned to guitar, she turned to drawing and painting to keep her company.

  “I was a ferociously lonely kid,” she said. “Art saved me.”

  Sounds familiar, I thought. But I didn’t say it. “How old were you the first time it happened?”

  “Eleven.” There was a small vase of daisies in the middle of the table. October picked out a flower, spun it around in her fingers, and then, one-by-one, began gently petting the petals as she continued. “I was sitting on the floor in our living room. My mom and dad were on the couch behind me, watching a documentary about the Maasai tribe in Africa—my parents are both anthropology professors, and this was the kind of stuff they watched for fun. There was a scene in the film where a man slaughters a goat. I watched him draw the knife back and slit the animal’s throat, and I started reeling on the floor, gasping for air, feeling like there was blood gushing from my neck.”

  “Jesus.”

  “My parents rushed me to the emergency room, but of course there was nothing wrong with me. Not physically, anyway. It took months for the doctors to figure out what was happening. After that, my parents didn’t seem to know what to do. They were constantly walking on eggshells around me. They still do. Meanwhile, all my classmates mistook the sensory experiences I was having for some kind of clairvoyance, as if I could read minds or something. Obviously, I can’t. I just have . . . how did one doctor put it? A heightened ability to experience empathy.” She stopped, put the daisy back in the vase. It seemed like she was waiting for me to say something, and when I didn’t, she added, in a tone that wasn’t wholly convincing, “At the time, it felt like the end of the world. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve chosen to see it as a gift.”

  “A gift?” It sounded like an unbearable affliction to me, but I can barely handle my own feelings, let alone suffer the feelings of others.

  “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” she sighed. “It’s not something I normally talk about on a first date. One day I’d like to get up the guts to use it in an exhibit.”

  I wanted to say something supportive. It seemed like she needed that. But I was caught up on the word “date.” And besides, I was still skeptical. “So, you’re telling me that if some random stranger walked in here right now and sat next to us, you could look at him and tell me what he’s feeling?”

  “Not necessarily. But maybe. Usually I have to touch the person. I have to open myself up to them. And it doesn’t work with everyone. Rae, for instance. It’s one of the reasons we work so well together. Energetically, she never gets in my way.” Again, she waited for me to say something, and when I didn’t she said, “You must think I’m a freak.”

  I shook my head. The truth was, whether her condition was real or not, it actually made me feel closer to her, not farther away. I had my own idiosyncratic issues to deal with, and limitations were aspects of her character that I could actually relate to.

  “Movies and TV?” I said. “You still can’t watch those?”

  “Not much.”

  “What about live music?”

  “I love live music, but concerts can be tough for me because when there’s music involved, emotions are intensified, and the more intense they are, the easier it is to feel them. In general, I try to avoid crowds. You wouldn’t believe how much sadness people carry around. In a large group that can be overwhelming.”

  “Hence the early-bird special.”

  “Hence.”

  The waiter brought over a dish of roasted vegetables sprinkled with local goat cheese and honey, and as I reached for a carrot, a question dawned on me, one that made me instantly uncomfortable.

  “What about me?” I mumbled. “Can you feel what I feel?”

  October took a bite of cheese, then caught my eyes, paused there for a moment, and nodded slowly. “Pretty sure I could if I tried.”

  I shook my head—I think I’d meant for that gesture to be imperceptible, but October saw it, and took it as a challenge.

  “You don’t believe me,” she said, not a question but a declaration.

  “It’s not that I don’t believe you, it’s just that it sounds impossible.”

  “Give me your hand.”

  I wiped my fingers off on my napkin and slid my hand across the table. October reached over and rested her palm flat on my forearm. Then she scooted to the edge of her seat, extended her leg, and pressed her right calf into my left one.

  She closed her eyes, and her breath stretched out like taffy on a long, slow inhale and an even longer, slower exhale. I watched her closely and could see her tiny ribcage and chest moving up and down rhythmically, six seconds in and eight seconds out.

  There was an intense heat in her touch. I felt my heartbeat quicken, and I fought against becoming aroused. I hadn’t had that kind of reaction to a woman in a long time, and as I looked across the table, I had this silly, adolescent vision of making a playlist of my favorite songs and playing it for October on a long drive up the coast.

  After about a minute October lifted her hand, opened her eyes, and sat back in her chair. Then she took out her phone and showed me a short video of her second Living Exhibit, Solitary, in which she had aimed to exist without art. She’d spent two weeks locked in a tiny, gray studio apartment in an art gallery, where a two-way-mirrored wall allowed museum visitors to see what was going on inside the room and gave the viewer the impression of watching a human diorama come to life.

  October lived alone and in silence inside that box for fourteen days. She had no music, no television, no books, no pencils, no paint, no color, no scents, and saw no other humans. She didn’t even cook her own food, because she believes cooking is an art too. By the end of the video her big eyes were dull and her usually vibrant face was pallid and drawn. She looked like half a person.

  “I felt like a ghost,” she said, “like I didn’t exist.”

  I got nauseous thinking about it. That was how I felt almost every day.

  I looked away, drank the rest of the wine in my glass, and poured myself some more.

  “Joe . . .” October said.

  I shook my head. Shut down. Reverted to the lamest possible version of myself as I stabbed a piece of squash with my fork and wished I were somewhere else.

  I could feel October staring at me, and after a while she said, “You know what hit me the hardest once I left that room? The smells. As soon as I walked outside, all these odors struck me—trash, gasoline, food, the Bay, the perfumes and scents of people walking by. I swore I could even smell the eucalyptus trees in the park, and they were over a mile away. It was like I’d developed some kind of superhuman sense of smell. When I got back to Mill Valley, it was even more intense. I’d only lived here for a couple of months at that point, and you know, this town smells like heaven anyway, but it really smells like heaven if you’ve been in limbo for two weeks. I remember getting out of the car and walking to the biggest redwood in the yard. You know the one between the house and the garage?”

  I nodded. I could see that tree from my bed.

  “I threw my arms around it and just inhaled.” Her eyes filled with tears, and she used her napkin to dab at the corners. “Sorry. I haven’t thought about that in a long time.”

  She took a sip of wine as Brad/Al dropped a mini loaf of bread off at our table, along with a ramekin filled with olive oil.

  “I didn’t mean to upset you,” October finally said. “I was only trying to tell you that I understand.”

  I looked at her but didn’t say anything. I felt all tied up inside, certain I was blowing it, certain this would be the first and last dinner we’d have together. But October held my look with soft eyes. Then she ripped off a piece of bread from the loa
f, dipped it in the oil, and said, “It’s OK. You’ll tell me when you’re ready.”

  She didn’t seem at all annoyed with my emotional ineptitude, and that surprised me, mainly because it didn’t jibe with the reaction I was used to getting from women, which was typically disappointment and frustration, not understanding.

  Nevertheless, from my point of view, October might have been able to perceive emotions, but she couldn’t perceive facts, and I believed it was the facts that counted. I believed that the more facts October learned, the easier it would be for her to see what a broken toy I was and discard me.

  There were so many things trapped inside of me then. But they were things I didn’t know how to express—not just to her, but to anyone.

  I wanted to tell her the truth. I wanted to tell her that I’d grown up two miles from where we were sitting. I wanted to tell her about Bob and Ingrid, and Cal. I wanted to tell her how when I was in high school, Phil Lesh saw me play at the Sweetwater and told me I was a better guitar player at sixteen than Jerry Garcia was at fifty. I even wanted to tell her about my brother, and I never told new people about Sam.

  Something happened, I imagined I’d say. I’m not supposed to be like this.

  To be clear, I don’t blame my brother’s death for who I am any more than I blame Bob or Ingrid, but it’s hard not to wonder how differently I would have turned out had Sam lived. Of course the flip side is that Sam’s death is what led me to the guitar, and to Cal, and without those two things, I’m not sure I would have survived my childhood.

  Art saved me too, I wanted to confess.

  I would have told October the story of how, exactly one month after Sam died, Bob came downstairs dressed for work, his eyes like two dead rats, and announced to Ingrid that he was getting rid of all of Sam’s things—clothes, books, baseball and swim trophies, even the furniture in Sam’s bedroom.

  Ingrid had protested with shouts and tears—“I’m not ready, Bob. Please.”—but he told her he’d called the Salvation Army days earlier. “They’re sending a truck over at noon. It’s not up for discussion.”