The Song is You (2009)

by Arthur Phillips

  Julian saw the same ten-second spot, surprised his brother hadn’t mentioned being on the show, and assumed Aidan had suffered an early defeat and so kept a minor embarrassment to himself. He was therefore puzzled to watch Aidan’s easy victory on Monday evening and yet be unable to contact his brother, leaving a congratulatory voice mail that Aidan listened to in tears. Tuesday’s still more impressive victory, Wednesday’s thoroughgoing destruction of his opponents, reminiscent of a Viking pillage of an undefended Kentish town, and Thursday’s Incident were watched by Aidan’s brother, his editors at various magazines and websites, the patrons at a dozen bars of his trivia-night circuit, the Jewish woman he had taken out twice in the interval, none of whom he had told, none of whom could reach him as he sat on the floor of his apartment, rocking, as the unmistakable theme music began.

  Aidan’s Thursday afternoon had passed in rising hopes and ebbing confidence, flash sweats sweeping the pencil from his fingers as he tried to compose a crossword. It was coming, tonight, in an hour, in minutes—maybe they just skipped this episode and blamed a spoiled tape—no, there he was, “Space Travel,” “The Underworld,” any moment now, and now: “Who are the Jews?,” and then all of time screeched to a halt, and Aidan’s flesh burst into flame, and then the universe, having shrunken to a single dimensionless dot, exploded outward in poisonous ripples and scalding dust. The empirical fact (“no longer a matter of scholared disgreement”) of Jewish responsibility for the bubonic plague seeped onto Islamo-fascist and Holocaust-denial websites with intellectual pretensions, footnoting the scientifically unimpeachable work of biohistorian Dr. Aden Donald Hughes, Ph.D. Aidan’s income dried up for months, requiring a careful budgeting of the Jeopardy! winnings. He was blackballed from trivia bars and denied writing assignments, even those related to pubic grooming. He watched (as did millions of others) the late-night sketch-comedy routine in which an actor with a motorized, knee-length black beard and magnifying-lens spectacles plays Jeopardy! against a hooded Klansman and Elie Wiesel with the categories “Slurs,” “Jew Evil,” “Those Troublesome Darkies,” “Subhuman Races,” and “Justifiable Child Murder.” (Wiesel pulls off a stunning upset.) He duly and hourly Googled himself (an exercise that had previously returned very few and very accurate hits) and read the dozens of editorials from publications around the nation that shredded him to make a potpourri of points: “The Un-derwiring of the Freudian Slip” (Psychology Today), “Burned in the Melting Pot” (The New York Times), “Jews in Jeopardy” (Commentary), “Good Question, That: Who, Indeed, Are the Jews?” (American Jewish World), “Mistakes in Knowledge vs. Mistakes in Taste: Editing the High-Speed Trivia Show” (Gameshows.com), “Saul Fish: Our Prince” (Temple Beth Israel Newsletter), and “The Year’s 10 Most Grotesque TV Moments” (Entertainment Weekly— Aidan’s grainy face, with his eyes malignantly shifted all the way to the right, filling the magazine’s cover). He received a single job offer during this time, a superficially plausible request to submit work for a projected Golden Treasury of Improving Children’s Verse, a helpful sample of which was enclosed for guidance with the offer:

  A mathematician of Jewish descent

  For Christ our Lords murder refused to repent.

  With wily logic algebraic

  He remained staunchly Hebraic,

  And so to eternal impalement was sent.

  He noticed with pained shock and then weepy horror and then muttered grumbling the sudden apparition of stickers and stenciled graffiti all over New York bearing the image of his own mournful, disoriented face at the very instant after his infamous reply. Dozens and then hundreds of him gazed, befuddled and shameful, from subway-car doors and stop signs and traffic-light control vaults and newspaper boxes and car bumpers and the sides of delivery trucks and, huge, on bedsheets suspended from the overpasses of expressways. He received scolding and congratulatory letters, even wedding proposals, though he was by then fully committed to his stumbling steps toward a deep breakdown, at the bottom of which the only voice that caught him and slowly and unsteadily hoisted him back to the surface was that of his nearly-ex sister-in-law, Rachel.

  She reached him not through overt pity—when Aidan was no longer returning Julian’s calls or opening up for the Chinese-food guy, only slipping money under the door—but simply by leaving a message saying she had done some research and learned that Aidan’s ubiquitous face was the work of an art student who had created the black-and-white schematic image to fulfill an assignment for a class on Viral Marketing. And Aidan, at last, returned someone’s call.

  He came to her apartment, and she welcomed him with an expression of such open love and kindness that he felt tricked and was about to turn back and scurry home. At the last moment she corrected her face and said, as coldly as she could, “I’ve learned something that may interest you, a strange fact or two.” That brought him into the apartment, bare-walled and oddly furnished, as she’d only recently left Julian’s. She spoke carefully of the facts: the art student had begun selling the stickers and stencils from a website to map how quickly an image could disseminate through a community’s consciousness, but now he was making real money thanks to the dazzling speed of Aidan’s face’s proliferation. With Rachel’s pro bono legal assistance, Aidan negotiated a percentage of the site’s revenues, and a fair restoration of his income resulted. After that he found himself at her door every evening and sometimes more often, waiting on her step when she was out, finally accepting a key and a dedicated couch.

  And so today the premature revelation leapt out: “Rachel sends her love.”

  “You see her much, do you?” Julian asked, tightening his towel.

  “Did you hear about the surgical procedure they approved?” Aidan recovered. “It was in the paper today. A new technique reduces the number of open-heart surgeries, turns them into just lasery, scopy things, out of the hospital in a day.” He sucked his teeth. “And then all the incivility to follow.”

  The Aidan non sequitur challenge. After their regular Wednesday dinners with him, Rachel and Julian used to debate whether Aidan truly thought his listeners made such conversational leaps with him or whether he intentionally gutted all the connective tissue so that the listener would beg Aidan for enlightenment. You were certainly not allowed to blithely agree, not just inattentively say, “Absolutely right, Aid.” He would see at once you were humoring him.

  Rachel always insisted that either possibility was the behavior of a sweetly childlike mind, a prodigal boy’s brain, enjoying its own strength or showing it off, and that if Aidan had a weakness, it was only his inability to see that most people simply did not care. “Which is really a most enviable strength,” she’d once said. Julian, who would normally have defended Aidan against anyone (reserving for himself the right to mock him), would take the role of attacker after these Wednesday dinners, simply to enjoy watching how easily and gladly Rachel would leap to the barricade. “He’s his own species,” Julian complained, and she corrected him: “He’s his own man.” Rachel’s easy love for Aidan reminded Julian of their mother, Pamela, the last woman who had been Aidan’s defender, thirty years before.

  “You don’t know what I mean, do you?” Aidan asked, shaking his head at Julian. “Why don’t you just say so if you’re lost?”

  “All right, I’ll bite. What incivility follows from less open-heart surgery?”

  “Don’t patronize me,” Aidan fired back. “It’s beneath you. Where are you taking me for lunch?”

  8

  A PIECE OF MUSIC’S CONQUEST of you is not likely to occur the first time you hear it, though it is possible that the aptly named “hook” might barb your ear on its first pass. More commonly, the assailant is slightly familiar and has leveraged that familiarity to gain access to the crisscrossed wiring of your interior life. And then there is a possession, a mutual possession, for just as you take the song as part of you and your history, it is claiming dominion for itself, planting fluttering eighth notes in your heart.

  The ex
act moment of infection: Julian Donahue is standing on the F-train platform at York Street, in front of a peeling poster decorated with a supine rat with its tongue lolling from under Xed-out eyes, cheerfully advising that rodenticide has recently fumed the area. On the floor, near his foot, as ready proof, there is a tightly wound golden-red coil of rodential innard. On closer inspection, it is a shiny, springy clip-on tornado of exotic hair extension, a follicular concoction molted from a Brooklyn head of arabica-latina-afra-italian curls, and the sight of bunched hair (even fake hair) against the dirt of the floor reminds Julian of Rachel’s incurable phobic refusal to remove the gritty, soapy hair-jellyfish from the shower drain: “Just step up, mister,” she had told her new fiance, “because I never, ever do it.” The Irish girl is on Julian’s iPod, and this time—why this time?—this time, the hi-hat figure at the opening of “Coward, Coward” prophesies the hissing arrival of the F train, and the man next to Julian is drenched through with sweat. Sweat streams off him in rivers onto his workout clothes and his blue gym bag held in a brown hand with knuckles gray and cracked. Carlton used to ride in a pack of the same blue material on Julian’s back, and on trains he would “hoo-hoo-hoo!” a whispered shout of delight into Julian’s neck, and the bass line weaves in and out of the hi-hat—Julian hasn’t noticed it before, this jigsawed interplay of the rhythm, propulsive, urging something up and on, and the sigh of the train’s opening doors encourages the bass and drums in turn.

  Julian steps aside to let off a well-dressed, blond-braided Scandinavian giantess who silently bumps her fist against the sweaty fist of the black man entering, and the Irish girl sings, “‘Will you leave no trace at all?’ she asked him. / ‘Will you leave no trace at all?’” Rachel in a fight once: “Is this all there is of you? You’re barely here. I can put my hand right through you,” her fists thudding against his back in no way disproving her point. The Irish girl sings, over a low guitar and that braided bass and hi-hat, “She wasn’t asking him for a favor.” This time Julian can’t see the singer, doesn’t bring her physical body to mind, so there are no bellows, no heaving breasts or writhing. This is only sound, how the blind hear music. The experience is detached not only from any rational cause—Swedish fist? Curled rodent extension? Hoo-hoo-hoo?—but from the source of the music as well: the Irish girl’s body is nowhere accounted for in this blackboard-blanching equation. The disembodied voice filters all feeling and also causes it. The dense terrine of feeling in Julian—regret, hope, sorrow, faltering ambition, longing—startles him. It could not be produced in such concentration and quantity without the voice, and so, after this moment on the train platform, he comes to crave the voice because it reveals the feelings he could not find in silence.

  And after that first shock of love comes trepidation. A younger Julian would have reset the needle, rewound the tape, replayed the track again and again, sucked the song down to its marrow until it held nothing but thick nostalgia, accessible only years later. But, older now, aware of how rare this experience was, he rationed “Coward, Coward.” If it showed any signs of weakening, of becoming merely catchy, he skipped it, set his iPod back to shuffle and hoped the song would recharge, surprise him.

  And the singer did. She wielded that bodyless, faceless, lipless, lungless, breastless voice, animating a different cluster of meaningless material each time. Two weeks later, in the silence after a Beethoven sonata finishes: the ornate pediment of a high-story window he’d never noticed before on a block he daily walked; a homeless man licking the inside of a jam jar with a thin and pointed tongue; Aidan’s old story about how the sound of an unnecessary MRI reminded him of their late mother, Pamela (the machine’s relentless magnetic-robotic chant of pam!pam!pam!pam!pam!pam!), as he lay in the heavenly white training coffin; the mist from a sidewalk fruit vendor’s hose sprayed through his berries, sprinkling Julian’s face, carrying their scent (triggering in turn the recollected aroma of a strawberry tea Julian had years ago been offered by a potential client in an interview for a Czech beer commercial), mixing with a sourceless breeze of free-range New York City garbage; and the silence after Beethoven ends, and the Irish girl sings, “When its all just flavor, and you’ve got none left to try.” She was telling him that she knew, she actually understood and could explain all of that—window, jam, pam, mother, fear, death, garbage, tea, work—could fit it all together in a pattern he didn’t even know he’d been seeking.

  He was not insane. He did not think it was anything but coincidence and crackling brain function. He did not believe she literally understood or wished to help him, but when the song was working—collecting and filtering and compressing sensation and offering it back to him—there was a wondrous bonus notion that the headphones were a unique two-way connection between his mind and that voice, which must therefore be aware of him.

  9

  THE IRISH GIRL performed that night. The crowd was larger, challenging the bar’s legal capacity, and Julian thought she had changed in the last weeks, maybe even developed. She was slightly more coherent as a performer, as a projector of an idea and an image. The previous gig, something had distracted and dislocated her, as when color newsprint is misaligned and an unholy yellow aura floats a fractioned inch above the bright red body of a funny-pages dog. It had been perhaps the bass player’s mistakes or, if the hipster snob was to be credited, the seductively whispering approach of success. No matter: she was clearer tonight, even if he could still see her strive, from one song to the next, for an array of effects: the casually ironic urban girl, the junkie on the make, the desperate Irish lass whose love was lost to the Troubles, the degenerate schoolgirl, the lover by the fire with skin as velvet succulent as rose-petal flesh. These shifting roles hung unevenly on her, a matter of youth, nervousness, or, most fatally, inauthenticity (whatever that is, which makes one hundred singers merely entertainers while the next is a transmitter of truth).

  He tried to reconcile what he saw onstage with the effect her music had on him when she was not there. The gap was not unbridgeable, but it was an engineering problem, and he was disappointed with her for not living up to his headphone experiences, and disappointed with himself for having let music again lead him into fantasy when he certainly should have known better by now. Still, his professional reflexes set to work: if he’d been directing her in a music video, for example, he would have told her to let all her old ideas of singers go, all the women she’d wished to become when she was a girl, to forget all the voices she’d imitated and all the praise lavished on her, and simply to think instead about the lyrics, to imagine no one was listening or ever would, to sing despite herself, as if she meant to keep quiet but the songs kept breaking through. “Don’t even think about whether I like it,” he imagined himself having to remind her.

  “Let’s all have a drink then, all right?” she said, willing to cut short her whistles and applause. “And then we’ll play more music. And then have another drink. And so forth.” Even this implication of a churning Celtic thirst for booze seemed a put-on, though the younger men, hunched in troops or paired with briefly outshined dates, found the notion aromatic. He watched her move off the stage.

  The band had not yet risen to the altitude of dressing rooms and backstage demands, so they occupied the end of the bar near the stage, far from Julian’s shadowed post by the door. Some flannel yielded space to her. The rest of the band barricaded her, sliding stools across the floor. The bassist she’d scolded was pale and spotty, his thick, wavy hair gelled toward a central ridge, likely in the second month of filling in the flanks of a misguided mohawk He wore a black velvet blazer built up at the shoulders: Bowie ‘83, Ferry ‘85. On her other side swayed the guitarist: gas-station shirt, truck-company cap, pale hiking boots: pure, uncompromising Seattle ‘92. The drummer: a Goliath with a shiny tan head and a neatly shaped soul patch, a statement that he could also play jazz or batter the fans of an enemy soccer team.

  She dealt some card game Julian didn’t recognize, and soon the four of them we
re slapping the bar and dropping coins and accusing one another of cheating. She had many roles to play, offstage but still swept by the public eye. She had to be one of the guys, albeit the one who was a girl. She had to be their boss and their foil, and she had to listen to their boasting and evasions, and to their thousand deniable kisses blown under their breath, for with a label in the future, the drummer and the bassist especially must have known how fungible they were. Rhythm sections must ingratiate on a steady beat, unless they are brilliant musicians (which these two were not), or her song-writing partner (the guitarist comfortably carried that aura), or her lover, which, Julian would now have bet, watching her offstage, none of them was. “That’s so unfortunate, lads,” she clucked, dragging the pot to her.

  The crowd was almost entirely what Julian’s world called “self-denying consumers,” who vainly believe themselves unaffected by advertising. They weren’t the sort to ask her to sign a napkin or pose for a phone photo, which left the young men milling about with no excuse to approach her. Still they milled. Even those with dates kept an eye on her at the bar, and she tolerated the cacophony of those buzzing male gazes with ivory nerves while Julian watched the calculations and consequences skim over the boys’ faces: her time sitting semi-accessibly, unescorted, at any bar these fellows could afford was now countable in months if not weeks.