“Right. Do you want me to fuck it up a little?”
“Would you? That’d be so nice. Just fuck up the place, Gil.”
“After this take, dear,” he says. “Rolling.” As the song begins, I hear him say, “This is the one, Kris.”
Of course it isn’t the one, ’cause it’s never the one. Afterwards, Gil actually leaves the control room to come and talk to me. I’m in trouble again. He stands in front of me with an empty Coke can and smushes it in his fist, drops it on the floor. “Better?” he asks.
I laugh. “Better.”
“Right. I’m going back up to the control room and you’re gonna blow the roof off this filthy place.”
“Okay.” When I see his Little Orphan Annie face back at the desk, I thank him. “I know fucking up the place isn’t in your job description.”
“You write my job description,” he answers. “I’ll do whatever you tell me to.”
“Right back at ya, sister.”
“Okay, then,” he says. “Blow the roof off this filthy place.”
“Yes, sir.”
Gil rolls tape. “This is the one, Kris.”
I don’t blow the roof off. Tattoos don’t glow. No heat, no electricity, no roller coaster, no beautiful coughed-up livers. I feel fine.
And guilty. What’re the odds a witch’d be driving by right now? I could run out into the street . . .
“Do I have to take you for another walk?” Gil scolds gently, sounding tired. “How did you used to get the songs’ voice to kick in?”
“It just did whenever I picked up my guitar,” I say quietly. It’s sorta hard to root for Gil when he’s rooting for evil.
“AH-HA!” he screams into my brain. Quickly, I grab my headphones and rip them off.
“Ow.” I wince at him through the glass and he motions for me to put the phones back on.
“Sorry, Kris, I forgot how loud your cans were,” he whispers. “I’m bringing you your guitar and you’re gonna play it while you do this vocal, got it?”
“Isn’t it gonna bleed onto the track?”
He laughs. “Not if I can get you screaming again.” He’s excited again. That’s nice. It won’t last long, but it’s still nice.
Gil appears in the room, holding my guitar. I take off the headphones and reach for it, but I’m moving too slowly for him; he’s really excited about this new idea. Deftly, he places the strap over my shoulder and swings the guitar away from my big belly. He even moves my hair out of the way and shoves the headphones back on my head. Then he races to the control room, saying something I can’t hear to the assistant engineer, motioning and gesturing. Gil can’t wait to try this new experiment. Poor Gil. It’ll be a relief when he finally gives up.
Maybe I should start planning my life. All art therapy aside, education is important. I can’t be fucking around, not with the baby coming. I wonder if McGill University would still let me in. After the baby’s born, we could both go be Canadian.
“One minute, Kris,” Gil whispers in my head. He’s still pointing and talking in the control room; the assistant engineer’s listening and nodding. They’re probably tearing apart my goddamn lyrics again. Glad I can’t hear it.
I’ll fulfill this commitment, then move to Montreal. I could teach the baby French instead of English. That’d be funny. None of my friends would understand it when it talked.
Gil hits the talkback, whispering, “You ready?”
I stick a thumb up at him. What are we trying now? I look down. Oh yeah, my guitar.
“Rolling!” he whispers as the track begins.
Bass and drums start this song. I listen and then begin playing along with the guitar that’s already there ’cause Gil is watching so intently. I feel silly.
“This is the one, Kris,” whispers Gil. And I smile up at him, thinking, No, it’s not.
I sing on cue. Can’t hear it, of course, but I feel it in my rib cage, not my throat. Weird. Like the baby, it’s in my middle, alive and swelling and needing to come out.
Then the roller coaster races by and grabs me by the hair. Heat builds, my skin fizzes with electricity, colors appear, blotting out the studio around me, “now” becomes memories, vital sounds fill my chest—all this in an instant. The last thing I think is, this is one beautiful coughed-up liver.
♋ long painting
static played through my middle
seared my gut
When the song ends, I look down at my guitar, impressed. Quickly, before its spell fades, I try to understand. Evil Kristin makes me care, I think, about everyone and everything.
Or maybe she’s just what it sounds like when you care so much that you flip the fuck out.
I hear nothing from Gil in my headphones. Then I look up at the control room window and see him jumping around, waving his fists in the air and dancing in silence. Gil dances in as I’m taking off the headphones and guitar. “You done it, Kris, you done it!” he cheers and pulls me into the control room to listen back.
My bandmates are sitting on the floor, smiling. Were they there the whole time? Gil laughs delightedly. As the song plays back, I put my hands on my stomach. The baby isn’t moving.
♋ white trash moon
out of the chaos
my us
and your little fontanel
I’m lying in bed, listening to a tape, and the baby’s dancing, thank god. Little fists and feet going a mile a minute. Babies just don’t dance to Throwing Muses, I guess—nobody does. I remind myself that babies sleep a lot in utero, that all mothers freak out when their bellies are still, that evil isn’t necessarily evil . . .
Gil and I decided that our only rule for recording vocals is: no singing. Works for me. Singing’s stupid, at least when I do it, but evil . . . maybe I shouldn’t call it “evil” anymore because there’s something okay about the mess, the chaos, the noise. It does seem to be an intelligence. I ask myself Dr. Syllables’ question, “Are you peaceful?” and think, Well, yeah, I am peaceful. Peace just isn’t necessarily quiet.
I have to remember what I learned playing guitar on the edge of the bathtub all those cold mornings in Boston: fully engaged efforts toward life pummel the universe into a shape that suits them—they are the universe, after all. So it’s in a song’s nature to leave an impression. I shouldn’t expect anything less.
Now I have to be as bad-ass as a song or a baby. If I’m gonna leave inertia behind, that is. I silently promise this baby that I’ll be ready for forward movement when the time comes.
And I will be. Because vital means you can do both dirty and clean. Science measures art: this studio helped us harness our chaos. The ability to navigate a pristine or polluted terrain is inherent in our changeable natures: strong people can breathe anything and they can live anywhere, like snakes. Light and dark are two different moods a mind shines on the subject matter at hand. All humans embody this dichotomy and music’s just what that sounds like.
None of this is special; it’s merely extraordinary. It’s falling in love—with this moment, with all moments.
♋ status quo
peace isn’t quiet
So I don’t write songs to describe what it’s like in here; it’s just like this in here so that I can write songs. And I absolutely did not invent them.
Sitting in a tree, I look out over my swing set, over other trees and into the fields behind our house.
A cloud of birds erupts from one of the trees: a hundred dark birds, scattering up into the sky.
We’ve reached a détente with the chef: we’re allowed to boil water. This way, Gil can have his buckets of tea and Leslie can have her ramen noodles. Anything else, the chef gets to put on a plate. She’s calmed down a little, seems to have figured out that we aren’t assholes, though we all still avoid eating when she’s around.
This morning I told her I just wanted an apple, so she put one on a plate, then insisted on “making the baby breakfast.” It was very sweet of her, especially since she’s not a very sweet person
. I’m just not hungry and she makes me so nervous, I don’t think I could eat the baby breakfast even if I was hungry. Maybe I can smuggle it out in a napkin to the little animals in the barn. I’ve been looking for a way to get them to like me.
The record is really flying along now, though we’re still amazed that we can play a transcendent take and then a crap one. We “identified our curve,” alright: it’s a disintegration that is both instantaneous and remarkable. Crap takes vary in their crappiness, but there’s rarely anything actually wrong with them except “feel”—they simply don’t have it.
After five years of playing shows, we thought we were in love with music and music loved us back. But music’s been waltzing into the room, sparks flying, giving us big, fat kisses and then waltzing right back out again, leaving us very much alone. None of us can put our finger on the mechanism behind the spark. It’s either there or it isn’t and everyone can hear the difference; a dead body may have all its parts intact, but no soul animates it and we all know what that looks like. Luckily, we only need each song to waltz into the room once.
And every time we get a keeper take, Gil lets us take a break so we can wander out to the barn to see the animals. None of us would ever go, say, read a book or make a phone call because the petting zoo babies are so painfully wonderful. Their facial expressions alone are enchanting—like the fish in the aquarium plus goofiness. I can’t believe anybody ever finishes a record with all this dangerous cuteness around. Baby animals’ll keep you from getting anything done.
In the barn, Leslie always climbs a ladder into the hayloft. An actual freakin’ hayloft. She loves it up there. And Tea and Dave position themselves on the fence at the calves’ pen. Perfect, tiny cows, the calves have mouths full of hay and big old purple tongues that stick out when they chew. They’re really beautiful.
But the lambs are my favorites; they run around like they don’t have knees. The lambs’re so much like the toddlers in my midwife’s waiting room, it’s uncanny. This is how vegetarians are born, I guess. I sit on the floor, holding a lamb on what’s left of my lap because they like to be held. The lamb snuggles up against my big belly and bleats at the other lamb as it runs by, kneeless. “We’re never gonna finish this record,” I say. “It’s too cute here.”
“Murder,” says Dave vaguely, his chin on his arms.
“Just ‘murder,’ that’s it?” asks Tea.
Leslie calls down from the hayloft, “Don’t you wanna kill anybody specific?”
“When I kill them, it’ll be specific,” says Dave. “For now, I just wanna book a murder.”
I squint at the back of Dave’s head. “What’re you guys talking about?”
He turns around. “Future crimes,” he says, bending down to scratch my lamb under the chin.
“I’m gonna free lab animals,” says Tea.
“Well, god, Tea, you could do that now. It can’t be that hard . . .” The lamb looks over at me and bleats, sticking out his little, pink, potato chip tongue. I laugh. “He likes me ’cause I gave him bacon.”
“Oh no!” says Tea, looking stricken. “You gave him bacon? Sheep don’t eat bacon.”
“Well, neither do I. He didn’t eat it, though; he just sorta played with it. Then Tripod ate it.” Tripod is a three-legged cat here who has run of the place. He hangs out in the control room and listens while we work. “Now Tripod likes the lamb.”
Leslie looks at me from her hay bale. “That’s not cool. Bacon’s bad news.”
“Tripod thought it was pretty good news.” The lamb hops off my lap to play with the other lamb in the straw.
“Freeing lab animals is harder than you’d think,” says Tea. “I’ve looked into it.”
“We could free some farm animals,” I suggest. Tea looks thoughtfully at the calves. “Can I book a crime?” She nods. “I wanna pull off something . . . complicated . . . that would hurt mean people and help nice ones. Or Robin Hood money from somewhere bad to somewhere good.” I think. “And it’d take place in the Everglades.”
Dave looks at me. “I want in.”
“No dice, you already got your murder.” The lamb comes ambling back, so I pick it up and put it on my lap.
“I think my murder could play a role in your grander scheme,” he says.
“Oh, you wanna be under my auspices? Okay. What’re your qualifications? You were an owl keeper, right? That could come in handy.”
One summer, Dave and I worked at the bird sanctuary on the island. My job was great: I took little kid campers on hikes and taught them how to make herbal mosquito repellant, I fed orphaned baby foxes, raccoons and sparrow hawks. Dave’s job was killing mice and feeding them to the owl. The mice were cute and frightened and the owl was huge and very scary: blind in one eye and really pissed-off. It lived in a smelly pen far away from all the other animals. Dave hated his job, though he can now do excellent impressions of a sweet mouse about to die and an angry owl about to eat it. “Tea, Dave could help you free owls before he killed his person—”
“Is freeing owls all you can do, Dave?” interrupts Leslie.
“He can kill mice, too,” I say. “I’ve seen him.”
“Don’t make me kill mice,” Dave says quietly.
“You can borrow my hair spray,” says Leslie.
“Well, no, he wouldn’t wanna use up his murder . . .” I reply. “Free the mice!”
“Yes!” yells Tea. Dave looks relieved.
Leslie’s voice echoes from the top of the barn, “Counterfeiting! The perfect, victimless crime!”
“I think we could work that in,” says Dave. “If you’re talking Robin Hooding in the Everglades—”
“I’m confused,” I interrupt. “Who’re you murdering?” Dave starts to answer when Gil comes in to get me for the next vocal. “Gil, if you could commit any crime—” I begin, then notice that he looks upset. “What’s wrong?”
“Deep Purple’s kicking us out!” he yells.
“Deep what’s what?”
“Deep fucking Purple is kicking us out of the bloody studio right in the middle of the fucking session!”
Leslie sits up and swings her legs over the loft. We look at each other. “What’s ‘deep purple’?” I ask.
She looks grim. “It’s an old-fart band.”
“An old-fart band with wads of cash,” says Gil bitterly. “Collect your bags and move into the control room. They don’t want to have to see you lot, so you have to vacate any room they might feel like walking into.”
My stomach drops. Dave’s eyes are huge. “What?” he says.
“We can’t finish the record?” I ask.
“I’m fighting to keep those fuckers out of the studio itself as long as they’ll stay out, but you have to leave your rooms and you aren’t allowed anywhere else in the building. No food, no telephone.” He shakes his head. “I don’t believe this.”
We don’t move, just sit in silence. “Look,” continues Gil. “We’ll do everything we can today, but we’ll never be able to finish. We’ll just have to save the rest of the recording for the mix in London next month.”
Dave and I look at each other. We both know I can’t go to London next month; that’s when the baby’s due. I push the lamb off my lap and stand up.
Gil looks defeated. “When you leave your rooms, spit on the floor.”
We file out of the barn. Dave and I walk together. “I’ll go to London,” he says. “I’ll make sure it’s good. Just do whatever you can today.”
I look at him. “What’re we, cursed?”
He smiles. “Let’s plan our crime.”
My mother tells me that she was “sad” before I was born. I ask her what she was sad about, but she won’t say.
“It doesn’t matter, because after I had you, I was happy again. Because you were perfect. Because all babies are perfect. Do you know what I mean?”
I don’t. I think of the ugly baby with the monkey friend.
“I could hold you and say, ‘This is my baby,’ and the
n everything was okay.”
In the hospital, they put me in the shower room, alone. It looks like a shower room in a correctional facility: gray on gray. Just shower heads on the walls and a big drain in the middle of the floor.
This pain is sending me out of myself, is not limited to my systemic reality. It’s more like a shift in the room. I pass out between contractions and then wake up as the next one begins, the sound of the shower spray getting louder and louder as I come to.
Like slow flashing lights: one bright minute is silvery water pouring into the drain, then darkness. The next bright minute opens to a world of cold metal. Not the way cold metal looks, but the way it’d feel to be made of it. Then it’s dark again.
Water pours over me. I’m curled up in the fetal position.
♋ hysterical bending
a girl body’s solid
how do I melt
without dying?
A little universe. With eyelids, shoulders and tiny lungs, yeah, but also with fingers, toenails and knees. Babies are perfect.
Another hell to another heaven—and this has been going on for millennia. Crazy.
Now I know I’ll never be numb again. A mother is condemned to feel everything forever. And I’m finally afraid, condemned to fear everything forever. But that makes sense: feel someone else’s pain, feel someone else’s everything.
And he’s my baby, so everything’s okay.
Rat Girl: A Memoir Page 31
