Wild Awake

by Hilary T. Smith

  “I don’t know what you’re going to find up there,” he says with a rueful glance at his crutches. “Maybe nothing. But Sukey-girl was always sneaking up to that rooftop, so you may as well have a look around.”

  I glance at the spindly staircase climbing up the brick wall, and my stomach twists up like a wet shirt. I hate heights, hate-hate-hate them, and the fire escape looks like it would collapse if you blew on it too hard.

  “Go on,” says Doug.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You want to see what your sister saw, this is as close as you’re gonna get.” He pats me on the arm, gazing up the fire escape with an expression of such naked yearning I feel ashamed.

  “You stop by when you come down,” he says, “and tell me what it’s like up there.”

  The fire escape clangs each time I take a step. I grip the rusty handrails, silently uttering threats to the Imperial Hotel: If I die climbing this stupid fire escape, I will come back and burn you to the ground before they even get a chance to demolish you. Cars rumble past on the street below, and the smell of their exhaust pricks my nose. I can hear the bass thump of someone’s sound system and see the white splatters of pigeon droppings on the tops of faded awnings. Look at you, sneaking up fire escapes, laughs the Sukey in my head, but I’m so mad at her I don’t even answer. Each rattling step sends my heart racing. Every time I glance down, my guts contort. I can smell the cloying stink of the Dumpster in the alley below. That’s where I’ll land if the fire escape gives out.

  The higher I climb, the more I start to worry about the most random and trivial things, as if my brain has given up on trying to distinguish the important stuff and is just firing at everything that moves. I wonder if Math Boy found the solution to his equation. I wonder if Stanley Otter Fish would have been a famous composer if he hadn’t gotten run over by a truck. I wonder what would happen if I died, and the last fruit I had ever eaten was a pomegranate.

  I tell myself there are worse things than having a pomegranate be your last fruit.

  After a dozen more rattling steps, the fire escape ends and this weird iron swimming-pool ladder goes up the rest of the way. I clench my teeth and scramble up it, scraping my knees against the top rung in my hurry. Once I’m safely on the roof, I’m so dizzy with pent-up dread and relief I don’t even look around, I just crouch down and squeeze my eyes shut and breathe. While I’m crouching there, so close to the roof’s heat and dusty smell, the height and the climb and the whole situation overwhelm me all at once and I almost start to cry again. My knees hurt and I haven’t slept, and when I tried to fix my synth this morning, the power light flared and flickered and then winked out and I couldn’t make it come on again.

  I’m not supposed to be here, I think. I’m not supposed to be here and my brain is not supposed to be doing whatever it’s doing and I’m not supposed to know about Sukey and everything is wrong.

  Maybe if I wave my hands, someone will see me and call 911 and the fire department will come and get me down, not just from the roof but from everything, from Sukey being murdered and my thoughts going loud and then normal again and from this whole entire wreckage of a summer.

  I pinch myself again, viciously this time. Do you ever shut up? There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just looking for excuses not to be brave.

  I huddle there by the ladder, the strong side of me bullying the weak one, until the feeling evaporates and just like that I’m fine again. I lift my head and look around.

  In the middle of the roof, there’s a sagging plastic lawn chair. Beside it there’s a pile of cigarette butts, an old Discman, and a faded Coke bottle filled with rainwater. A chipped clay flowerpot has rolled under the lawn chair, spilling out a heap of black soil spotted with white pearls of fertilizer.

  I’m psyching myself up to investigate more closely when something catches my eye: a splatter of dirty yellow paint beside my right foot. I reach out to touch it and immediately spot another one a few inches away. I freeze, my pulse quickening, as my eyes pick out more and more of them, scattered all around me in a cloud. The colors have gone dull and filthy from years of dust and rain, but they’re still there, still visible, layers and layers of drips and splatters and spots.

  Sukey.

  I shift onto my hands and knees to get a closer look, ignoring the roughness of the rooftop on my grazed skin. Rubbing away the grime, I make out raspberry, purple, sea-foam green, like droppings from a psychedelic pigeon. Sukey must have stood over this place with her easel while she painted. These drips of paint must have flown off her brush as she lifted it to the canvas, splashing onto the hot roof. Sukey made art here, my brain keeps thinking, sounding it over and over like a bell—my Sukey, the one I remember, not the strung-out stranger that was starting to replace her in my mind. Even if she was screwing up and getting lost and making all the wrong decisions, at least she was still searching. At least she was still trying to get to that place her soul was from. And maybe, in spite of everything, she found it.

  As I climb back down the fire escape, I tell myself there’s no reason to be sad anymore—no reason to crash bicycles or fight with Danny or have stupid, fretful worries about the people on the bus. The world is good and I am good and love is good and if I’d only stop freaking out long enough to realize that, I wouldn’t have any problems at all.

  chapter thirty

  All day long, I carry Sukey’s rooftop around with me like a pocketful of gumballs, an ecstatic secret I can hardly keep contained. I want to be good for the world—pure and true and wise and somehow saintly, somehow illuminated. I want to have experienced something that has changed me, and so I act changed.

  I take my synth to Skunk’s house, and we fix it in the shed using bike tools. The pieces of the exploded synth fit back together perfectly. You can’t even tell it exploded in the first place, and when I plug it into the extension cord, the power light glows bright blue. I play for Skunk for a little while, saying things like, “This is where Lukas goes ba-ka-ka-ta-ba-ka-ta on the drums,” until Skunk picks me up, moves the synth out of the way, sets me down on the workbench, and kisses me with his hands in my hair. “Love-bison,” I say, but he can’t hear because my mouth is smothered in kisses.

  When I leave, Skunk gives me a little black book with yellowing pages. I read it on the bus ride home. It starts, “The Way that can be experienced is not true; the world that can be constructed is not real.” I flip it over. The cover says Tao te Ching. By the time I get home, I’ve read the whole thing twice. I send Skunk a text I THINK MY BRAIN IS ON FIRE, and he texts back IT PROBABLY IS, and I text back THE WAY IS A LIMITLESS VESSEL, and he texts back USED BY THE SELF, IT IS NOT FILLED BY THE WORLD, and I text back IT CANNOT BE CUT, KNOTTED, DIMMED OR STILLED, and he texts back ITS DEPTHS ARE HIDDEN, UBIQUITOUS AND ETERNAL. we keep texting lines back and forth until we’ve texted practically the whole Tao te Ching, then Skunk calls and says, “I miss you already, Crazy Girl,” and I get off the bus, cross the street, catch a bus in the opposite direction, go right back to his house, and kidnap him for an expedition to the Chinese bakery before his aunt and uncle get home from work.

  That night, Lukas finally texts back after I’ve already sent him a million texts asking when we’re going to practice now that I’ve fixed my synth. I go over there for dinner, and Petra’s made potato-and-cheese pierogi. She comments on my outfit, which is somewhat more daring than what I usually wear, and I tell her now that our band is famous, I need to look the part. Lukas still looks the same, but that’s because he’s the drummer and drummers are never fully in the spotlight, it’s kind of a rule of drumming. He doesn’t say much during dinner, just picks at his pierogi. Lukas’s parents and I do most of the talking.

  “Where are your parents now?” says Petra.

  “Paraguay,” I tell her, “taking care of sea tortoises.”

  “I thought Paraguay was landlocked,” says Lukas.

  I lean forward confidentially.

  “Not anymore.”
>
  We go downstairs to jam, and Lukas goes straight to his drum kit and sits. I look at him expectantly. “Don’t you want to smoke first?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Seems like you already did.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Why are you acting so weird?”

  “I’m not.”

  “You haven’t been the same ever since you found out about your sister.”

  “I’m not the same. How could I be the same?”

  He picks up his drumsticks and starts playing, and even though I try again and again to catch his eye, he won’t look up. Something about that scares me. I stand there with my fingers hovering over the keys of my synth.

  “Lukas?” I say.

  He stops drumming. “What?”

  A dozen possible things-to-say swim nervously around the edges of my brain. A few weeks ago, Lukas knew everything about me, and now there are so many things he doesn’t know, and so many things I don’t know about him. It’s scary how a friendship can change like that, so fast, so completely. It’s like walking past your old elementary school the week after graduation: The swings and slides and buildings are the same, but suddenly, incomprehensibly, the place doesn’t belong to you anymore, and you don’t belong to it.

  I want to tell him about Sukey’s rooftop, and the fact that I now have a boyfriend, and that I’ve found the perfect person for Goth Girl to date.

  I want to tell Lukas all this, but the way he’s glaring at me over his drum kit—annoyed, impatient, sick of my bullshit—I feel small and queasy and not very illuminated at all.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and he gives me a quick, embarrassed shrug, and for the rest of the jam session we don’t make eye contact again.

  The next day, Skunk and I are exchanging lustful embraces on the floor in the radio temple, and when I shimmy out of my jeans he notices the scabs on my knees. He springs up with a look of alarm and pulls my legs onto his lap to inspect them.

  “What happened?”

  I yawn and try to pull him back down to kiss me. “Oh, nothing.”

  “No, seriously.”

  He runs his fingers over the scabbed parts, touching the bits of gravel I never managed to pick out. Some people have such warm hands. Skunk’s feel like old pillowcases fresh out of the dryer. “I fell off my bike.”

  “When?”

  “Like a week ago.”

  “What were you doing?”

  I give him a mischievous grin. “Ridin’ dirty.”

  Skunk traces his thumb over my kneecap. “What did you do, cut off a bus?”

  “No-o-o. I got hit by a car.”

  Skunk freezes. “You got hit by a car and you didn’t tell me.”

  I swing my legs off his lap and sit up. “Whatever, homey. The Way is an invincible fortress.”

  He looks at me all pop-eyed and distressed. “What color was the car?”

  I reach out and smooth Skunk’s hair. He looks like he’s about to faint.

  “I don’t know. It was just some car.”

  “Are you sure you don’t remember what color it was?”

  I lean forward and lick his ear. “Relax, Bicycle Boy. As you can see, I am alive and well.”

  Skunk’s body has gone all tense, like he hears a strange noise: a mouse in the wall, or a burglar. “Was it following you?”

  I sit there blinking at him. “No. Well, actually she did follow me for a while after it happened, but I think she just wanted to make sure I was okay.”

  “Oh God,” says Skunk.

  “What? What?”

  But Skunk holds his head in his hands and won’t even start to relax until I get up, tiptoe across the room, and quietly turn on a radio.

  Later that day, when Dr. Scaliteri calls me in for an extra lesson, I tell her all about my new practice regimen. I’ve been practicing constantly, I tell her. Now that I’ve realized I can do it in my head, I have basically been practicing piano twenty-four hours a day.

  “How many hours does Nelson Chow practice per day? Probably just four or five, right? I can teach him my technique, if you want. It could really help him out when he’s at Juilliard. He’ll want to practice on the subway.”

  I hear the front door open and Nelson Chow walk in for his lesson. I hear him stop in the hall to take off his shoes.

  “Hey, Nelson,” I shout. “How many hours a day do you practice?”

  No response. Nelson is the kind of person who always pretends he hasn’t heard you. “Hey, Nelson! I said how many hours?”

  Dr. Scaliteri calls out to Nelson that he should wait in the hall. She leans forward so her speckled old cleavage is practically falling out of her silver blouse and hisses, “I will not have this behavior in my studio.”

  “What behavior?” I say. “I’m trying to help him.”

  “Kiri,” she says, “I have never before had this kind of behavior in my studio. You will go home now and practice.”

  “I just told you, Dr. Scaliteri. I already am practicing. I’ve been practicing the whole time we’ve been talking.” I point at my temple. “In my head.”

  On my way out of the room, I realize the stained-glass fruit bowl is glowing a little too hard, like someone installed neon tubes behind the glass.

  Denny and I get sushi most nights because I threw out all the food. Denny always gets an avocado roll and a yam roll. I always get a yam roll and a California roll. I rip open the foil packet of soy sauce and pour it over my sushi like pancake syrup. Denny can hardly contain his disgust.

  “That’s not how you’re supposed to do it,” he says, pouring soy sauce onto his tray and mixing in a dainty green dab of wasabi with the tip of his wooden chopstick. “You’re supposed to dip it in the soy sauce. Like this.”

  I pay close attention, marveling at Denny’s mastery of the simple things in this world, thinking if I could only learn to mix my soy sauce correctly, maybe my life would make perfect sense.

  I read the Tao te Ching over and over until I have it memorized.

  I text Lukas over and over about band practice, and when he doesn’t text back I show up at his house with my synth and my own stash of weed. I’m pretty sure he’s dating Kelsey Bartlett; his phone beeps ten minutes after I show up, and he gets all awkward and says he has to go.

  I bring my bike to Skunk’s house, and we snarfle in the shed with pear blossoms knocking on the door.

  I sit in the hall after my lesson, listening to Nelson Chow’s lesson and taking notes.

  I follow Nelson Chow to the bus stop when he comes out and read him my notes.

  I sit next to Nelson Chow on the bus, questioning him about his practice habits until he pulls the yellow cord and gets off.

  I text Lukas about buying a new amp, and when he doesn’t text back, I go on eBay and order one to be delivered to his house.

  I smoke weed and practice piano until Denny says, “When did you turn into a fucking pothead? Don’t you sleep?” and then I practice inside my head, pacing and pacing around the living room very slowly like a Zen monk doing walking meditation in a garden of very tiny bonsai trees.

  Skunk makes me promise to call him at once if I am hit by any more cars, or if I have even the slightest suspicion that I am being followed by secret agents. We fix my brakes and he sniffs my hair like a flower. We listen to radio mysteries and I climb onto him like a branch. We read the Tao te Ching out loud to one another and suck on guavas. We ride bikes to English Bay and build a nest in the sand. We make love ten thousand times and then make omelets. I call him Bicycle Boy. He calls me Crazy Girl.

  Denny says, “Where are you always going on your bike?”

  chapter thirty-one

  Since Lukas doesn’t seem to think we need to practice anymore, I spend the last few days before Battle of the Bands finals keeping a close eye on Skunk. He doesn’t like to talk about his paranoia-thing, but ever since my bicycle crash I’ve been noticing the ways it slips out when he’s not paying attention, like a forei
gn accent or a stutter he’s worked hard to tame.

  Sometimes when Skunk wakes up he’s really groggy and disoriented, and he squints at me suspiciously like I’m a Russian spy whose motives are not to be trusted.

  Sometimes when I show up at his house without calling first, I catch him standing outside smoking with a pile of cigarette butts at his feet, his face blank like an open document with all the text deleted.

  Sometimes when we snarfle he gets embarrassed, and when I ask him why he’s embarrassed, he gets apologetic and says he didn’t always used to be this fat.

  I tell him he’s my love-bison and to stop apologizing.

  I silently take note of all the things that trigger his paranoia and steer clear of them when we’re together. I do this so masterfully that Skunk thinks he’s the one looking out for me.

  “You should really wear a helmet,” he says, and I pat his big warm hand. “Oh, Bicycle Boy,” I say. “Most things in life feel better when you don’t have a chunk of Styrofoam strapped to your head.”

  We ride our bikes to the university and go to the Nitobe Memorial Garden and walk around looking at the little stone pagodas and drinking tea Skunk brought in a silver thermos. I make up stories about everything we see: This is the temple where the Frog King lost his teeth, this is the pond where the Riot Snake wrestled with a lightning bolt, causing daffodils to be invented.

  “Oh, Crazy Girl,” says Skunk. “I love to listen to you talk.”

  On the ride back to Skunk’s house I count all the billboards for new condo developments.

  LUXURY LIVING IN THE HEART OF GRANVILLE ISLAND

  LIVE. WORK. SHOP. PLAY

  AN EXCLUSIVE WATERFRONT LIVING COMMUNITY

  From the looks of the billboards, it appears that people who live in condos spend most of their time shopping, drinking cappuccinos, and doing yoga. As a matter of fact, the new condo developments are basically ashrams: billboard after billboard of slender white women in yoga pants doing the lotus position in front of windows showing blue-white views of the North Shore. Prices starting in the high four hundreds. Om Shanti Om.