Another Kind of Madness

by Ed Pavlić

  After a few weeks the rule appeared to him. He’d lived it at work, for years, from just surviving labor, but the thought came to him on the piano: the definition of insanity was doing the same thing again and again and expecting the same result.

  ■

  Then, the right hand began, literally, index and middle finger, straight out of the old yellow pages ad. Two fingers, walking. Hurdling black keys or crossing a white stream on upraised stones. A roar of the falls fallen somewhere upstream beyond the range of human hearing. The current pulled away from there down into the range beneath human feeling. The remaining fingers raised up in the air. Two fingers, a visitor, émigré to the left-handed planet. The right hand callused from the mixing paddle, gloved by its own skin. The left hand wore its glove of breath. For Shame it was like watching himself writing his autobiography at the age of two, when words still tangled with their tones in a battle over what they would become. When meaning fought with pure sense for sense, a prehensile mind pulling against the limb of solid body.

  Thumb as a kickstand. Right pinky and ring finger, a stunt double who waited in the trailer. Late night, still playing, the shadow of his right hand sprawled across the wall.

  The right fingers walked and the left hand two-bricked, three-bricked the sound, tilted it upward, downward. It immediately sounded good or bad. Then, after a while, that certainty failed into goodbad, badgood. Everything began to depend upon the traveler to the east, a plot that threatened the story. Shame drank the endless repetitions, his mind spooled in his arms. His foot worked the pedal like a high-hat cymbal, popped it off like a clutch on the steep ramp from Madison Street onto the Dan Ryan headed south, 85 mph all the way to the merge at Ninety-Fifth. Repetitions until the last phrase didn’t recognize itself in the mirror of the first.

  The sham of repetition unmasked became a way to learn from himself, to learn what he knew without knowing, had known, hadn’t learned. Aristotle’s gravity: the heavier an object, the faster it falls. Turned out it was only true for people who fell through space inside other people. It was like taking a spoon in a dream and tasting someone else from a bowl of what you are. It made him think of how, at the job, he’d taught himself that any word repeated ten times, twenty, anyone’s name said over and over, became unrecognizable. Shame’s hands wondered. The ache traveled up his wrists, across his shoulders. He learned that the title of every song is: “Who Owns This?” He’d tacked a white tarp to the ceiling. It dropped behind him when he played: the false curtain, a temporary illusion, privacy. Shame himself became a shadow on the other side: three points made a plane, one sheet made a wall, one wall made a room. Any three consecutive steps vanished the route left behind.

  Rule: there was never a route left behind.

  Repetitions. And, at first, the thirtieth word was always “pain.” The fifty-first repeated word was “fear.” And he’d forced himself to deliver fifty more as if the foreman was pounding the mortar board and demanding the brick be placed where he could swipe them up without taking a step. Then the pain and fear were lost and even Shame wouldn’t believe any of it. None of it. None of it until he found another path across the street and it began all over again, the keys mined with mind, body trapped. Felt-covered hammers touching tensile steel wires, low to high, might spring loose a wheel of anger from inside. His nose brushed over the backs of his hands. Thighs off the cliff of the chair. The whole machine drew him away from the falls downstream. The pull, a momentum gathered beneath him. The push, the way one looked at the edge of the roof and heard, “Come a little closer, I dare you.” The pull, a stranger who walked behind you in the street. That Aristotle thing pulling someone else over the ledge inside your chest and into a space unmapped by any sound. An abandoned wing, an empty shaft.

  And power. Enough, he thought, to make two hand-fuls of red dust out of a still-banded full pallet of ceramic block headed his way on the back of a flatbed truck. Jobim’s sound of a gun in the dead of the night. Enough to make strangers of his family, to make family of strangers. Enough so it seemed that he could watch his roommate crawl along the inside of his arm, pause, and pierce him there to put her poison. Poise in mind drowned in the fluid need that lured hips to touch. Touch tangent to the mirror; the complexity of fingers, an infinite sensuality; a human freedom to search for terror along the rim at the eclipse of control. And then how long one could hold one’s breath in and what lay beyond that, in the mute iron weight of any shadow cast, as if by grotesque incongruity, as if by choice. Choice? Flakes of it. Dead skin on an onion. Try it, he thought. Then try again until you were out of agains, try to follow it around in the dark. There was no route. Nothing was ever empty.

  Enough so he could lose himself in a room of people he’d never met, enough so that he could approach each of them from behind, a felt hammer tap on the shoulder and waited for them to turn around. Then Shame would play. He’d walk them toward the edge of the roof in his chest. Everyone a riff, every phrase meant, “Just a little closer, I dare you.”

  ■

  Take anything into the mind. Let it travel with the hands. A boxcar full of scrap rebar. The tune of a lunch wagon, ice cream truck. A soft swipe of red chalk across the sidewalk. All of it could be taken apart, flipped by a sudden pulse from the sea floor. When the mind be hands on your back, when the bet be fingers under your belt. A whole system of city lights twirled on the point of a pin, dark come feline come around a corner, the torque of stretched skin, almond slope, the cornea-color of love. An engine. Take lust. Something with silent wings contours the air just above an up-twisted belly; a tongue tastes furnace dust from its career across your shoulder.

  The present was a rushing stream of absent water. The past was the shadow of a yellow-pages man who taught himself to walk in Shame’s sleep. The future was listening.

  The temperature had fallen fast throughout the evening. Cass saw Junior, P. W., and Valerie walk into Inflation out of the snowstorm that had become a real blizzard. To Cass, they looked like three years of raised rent. He met them casually at the door, as if they were regulars.

  –Gentlemen. Madame. Please keep all firearms outside.

  –What? You know it’s illegal to carry a firearm in the city of Chicago.

  –Right, I know. But in here we have what I call the in-balance of power. Only gun in here is mine. That keeps everything in balance.

  Cass nodded toward the bar. Angie S., exaggerating a pause while she wiped out a glass, looked the other way. Then, under her voice:

  –Except for mine.

  P. W. nodded—“Fair enough”—and exited back out of the front door. Junior and Valerie went through the room and slid into place perfectly, new pennies in an old slot. They took the open booth, last on the left. Valerie and Junior faced the piano at the back. After returning a few minutes later, and feeling almost weapon-naked, stripped all the way down to the G43 in his boot, P. W. sat facing them and watched the door. The place was a cloud of talk. Valerie handed her coat to P. W., who took it to the bar and ordered a round of drinks. Whiskey, a double with ginger ale and cherry juice, for Valerie; ginger ale, neat, for Junior and for himself. P. W. sat down again, booths full of people and others standing in front of him. The piano sat diagonally behind him, empty stool pushed in.

  ■

  Word moved from place to place like dust around Juniorville. One spot swept clean, the nonsense blew off somewhere nearby to settle in. Cass hadn’t asked. He never did. Had never needed to learn to ask. He knew that whatever he needed to know would show up and become visible all by itself. And he knew that whatever he learned by asking was, at best, beside the point.

  He was in the back room changing the sour line when Shame came in looking like a polar explorer. He shook the snow off his coat and hung it up on a tangle of deer antlers screwed into the wall near the door. Cass made an intricate maneuver of pulling back his sleeve, flicking his wrist down, and checking his watch. Then he went back to twisting the valve in place on the neck of a silver cyli
nder.

  –Don’t know who’s drinking all this. I don’t serve college kids. Feels like I ain’t bent down to the rail all night.

  –Did you ask?

  Shame knew the answer. If you asked Cass anything the truth was in your question. And, in truth, Shame wasn’t even really asking. Cass knew that too; he answered by pausing with the valve for the space of a breath, and then finishing off the remaining twists.

  –Place full?

  –Wouldn’t say that, now.

  Then, in a tone of voice suited to interrogating a prisoner of war or pressing a suspect into a false confession, Cass asked,

  –Do you know what the fuck an apple martini is?

  –You know this wasn’t my idea.

  –You’d know. Should I put a jar up on the piano, piano man?

  Shame paused for a breath of his own, bent down to knock the snow off his boots and out of the cuffs of his jeans. He turned and walked into the hall. Angie S., Cass’s longtime ex-wife, set a drink at the end of the bar. Shame pushed the swing door out and walked into the room. Low in the corner of his eye he saw that a thin, woven rug had been placed under the piano, both still set diagonally to the room. The top of the upright was propped open. But Shame didn’t see that. He plucked the drink from the end of the bar and it felt like he’d stepped on a frayed corner of why Cass and Angie S. had been so long divorced and had stayed together, now, far longer than they’d been married.

  Angie stepped behind him at the end of the bar.

  –That you?

  –You asking?

  –Oh, that you. Ex-cuse me.

  –Man, you both all incessant tonight. Have you looked outside?

  –I ain’t ’cessant-nothing. Why bother looking out? Look to me like it’s all coming in here tonight. What? Don’t tell me you had some trouble with the commute, piano man?

  He didn’t need to turn around. Angie always had an old-time, Southern anvil swinging behind her eyes when she looked at you. Whether she was playing or not, it was the same. He didn’t need to look but he almost ducked. He could feel her eyes sweep over his shoulder into the crowded room when she’d pronounced “all” with her neck like he knew she had. She knew he knew. They’d known each other a few weeks, had been finishing each other’s sentences since the first moment, sentences they both knew didn’t mean what they said they said. So this was trust, or it was close enough.

  –You know, that reporter from the Reader was back here earlier asking questions, “following up” about the “construction-laborer-slash-piano-player.”

  Shame nodded his head to the side toward the piano.

  –And who put that rug under there, Snow White?

  –Oh, I see, you want me to come around the bar and commence to being ’cessant?

  Fighting back a smile and narrowing down his focus to a pinpoint, Shame turned back to the right and walked to the piano without looking any further into the room than the near end of the bar. He didn’t want to know. He told himself he didn’t care who was there and who wasn’t. He sat down with his back diagonal to the room, facing the corner. He took a long, thin sip from his drink. A slice of ice slipped into his mouth and back into the glass. “Exactly like that,” he thought. “That’s how this would go.” He didn’t want to see the room that had Cass and Angie’s snitches in such playful, taunting stitches. He could feel Angie’s smile warm on his back and he knew she wasn’t smiling anymore. He thought, “What a pair, a short chain made of two missing links.” He could almost hear Angie: “Oh, right, now you want to talk about pairs.”

  ■

  Shame had played low on the keys all week. And Pearlie’s nine-year-old twins had been at his place. She’d been cleaning two houses, one for a wedding and one for a funeral. Both way north, past Evanston some place. Shame’s playing hadn’t been east of middle C since the twins had been there. La-Tessa and Va-Nessa. The girls said that they wanted to be a tag team of magician-beauticians. They resolutely ignored all of Ndiya’s attempts at communication and spent their time braiding each other’s hair while they rolled pennies and dimes back and forth across the tops of their fingers with their eyes closed.

  To an increasingly eerie effect, they almost always spoke in perfect unison. After almost three full days of the silent treatment, on Wednesday afternoon, the ice broke for an instant. They asked Ndiya if she had any eyeliner and blue mascara. Ndiya gave it to them and then the ice froze back shut. They painted open eyes, bright cobalt-blue eyes, on each other’s eyelids. Then, blue-eyed and unblinking, they’d resumed their no-look training with the coins and the braids. While shut, their eyes beamed precisely the same color as Shame’s stove.

  On Thursday, Ndiya asked what they planned to do with their truly unique and finely honed skills. She thought she saw one eye blink brown as if to check if they were being patronized. Seemed not. Open eyes closed, in blue-eyed unison:

  –We ’bout to get real good at this trick and then we ’bout to get to disappearing all kind of stuff.

  Ndiya thought she heard one of them said “stuff” and the other said “shit” but she wasn’t sure. She figured it was Tessa who said “shit” because one of her eyes blinked brown for an instant before it shut back to wide-open blue.

  Each day, when Shame arrived at home that week, Ndiya had gone out, said she needed some air. But the weather was turning cold and she’d begun to stop into Inflation to warm up. Listening to Cass and Angie talk, with that upright piano in the corner of her eye, and at least less than sure about what she was doing in her life, Ndiya had come up with the idea of Shame playing music on Fridays and Saturdays. Cass and Angie’s response was that they didn’t much care who did what with that piano. It was Angie’s father’s piano. Stone Simpson hadn’t ever made a public name, but everyone with ears—that is, as it was said, everyone who had eyes—around the scene knew him; he had played stride piano all around Chicago at places like the Pershing and El Grotto, just a few blocks from Inflation. As it was said, the man could blow. When he died, they didn’t have room for his piano in their apartment and didn’t quite have the heart to give it away. When Stone Simpson died, Angie learned that her father had had a second career as a Cook County inspector. Cass had known that all along; he played it off.

  Shame had disappeared from the Cat Eye and Earlie’s and people seemed to notice not hearing what they hadn’t been listening to before. As a result, the migrations began setting off a soft subtle breeze on smoldering coals, a soft fix on something that didn’t need to be mixed.

  ■

  Before she went into Inflation, Ndiya stood and listened to the piano from outside the front door. The front windows were blacked out up to seven or eight feet. The glass on the door was fogged over. She could tell the fog was freezing into filigree clinging to the inside of the glass. The storm had all but ceased traffic in the street under the El tracks. The block was nearly silent.

  The sound of the piano came and went. Notes and phrases advanced at an angle and evaporated into mirage. Ndiya remembered a stranger she’d met while at college in Cambridge, an old black man in a blue-and-red beret, who’d asked her in a quiet voice if she knew why it was always less lonely near a mirage. She’d asked him, playfully, if that was also true near the cryptic whisper of a stranger? He was a big man. Maybe sixty? He’d laughed deep, one hand in the pocket of his overcoat:

  –We’re not strangers, little girl.

  And he’d walked away with his briefcase. It might have been the snow, but when Shame’s sound evaporated into the near-silent space behind her, into the snow beneath the tracks, it seemed to leave an exile from sound. It wasn’t like silence at all. The effect so different, she thought, from Shame in person, in private. At home he played distance in a way that, when he left, say, for work, his presence surrounded her like a hot bath. It was like sound in her bloodstream, in the marrow, as if her lungs breathed the sound out of the air like a fish’s gills took oxygen from water. She stood in the street as if in a dim valley between the co
nical chaos of snow lit by two streetlights. The space between each of Shame’s phrases felt like cotton in her ears. She put her hand on the door handle and stopped. She stared down at the snow drifting in the doorway and walked away.

  Whatever was going on in there, she thought, she’d come up on it through the back door. At least brush off the snow, clear her ears, and hang up her coat.

  Over the years, the alley behind Inflation had been widened into a grand boulevard by the absence of two buildings that burned and whose remains were razed. Cars in the alley were disappearing beneath the surf of snow. There were no tracks back there at all. The snow reached the fur-rimmed tops of her boots. When she entered through the back door the air inside felt like warm fluid against her face.