Noise

by Peter Wild

  ‘Thirty seconds,’ Doug says.

  Nikki stands from her bed, watching Sean watch her body, the body she’s made available to him these last few weeks, pretending their first time she was a virgin because he was and it was important to him. And they’ve fucked and kissed and held each other every chance they’ve got, which hasn’t been so often, not often enough, Sean believing, she knows, they’re at the beginning of something, Nikki wondering whether they’re at the end, another reason for taking the chance tonight, because Sean lives all the way up in Berlin at the top of the state, hours and hours and worlds from Manchester, and because he still believes in a safe kind of escape, an entrance into the white-shoe world, where he must believe they’re saving a space for him, but that’s what she likes about him, too, how he still believes, and Doug says, ‘Twenty seconds,’ and Nikki shouts, ‘Will you just give me a fucking minute here, Doug! I can’t find my fucking panties, OK?’

  ‘I am giving you a minute,’ Doug says.

  She looks at Sean, who looks away. He just needs to be convinced.

  ‘Now fifteen seconds.’

  She knows there are staff members in the hall with Doug, plus all the students on her floor, getting off on this little drama. There are only two here she’ll miss, three counting Sean: Barbara, the residential supervisor, who took her to her own house in Portsmouth two weekends ago when Nikki’s mom was in jail, and Jasmine, this wicked funny chick from Dover, a junior like Sean who Nikki got baked with a couple times. They laughed and laughed, wandering the campus, the little town, pretending they were part of it. And even though he’s too young, will never be as old as Nikki, and weak, she still feels tenderness for Sean, who just needs to be led.

  ‘Is Barbara out there?’ Nikki calls, and after a second in which Nikki imagines Barbara looking at Doug for silent approval to speak, Barbara says, ‘I’m here, Nikki.’

  ‘Can’t we just have five minutes so I can get dressed?’ she says. ‘Can’t I just have that tiny dignity,’ dignity being their favourite word, along with trust and commitment and community, words thrown around so carelessly they mean less than nothing.

  She hears murmuring on the other side of the door, then Barbara says, ‘Two minutes, Nikki.’

  ‘And not one second more,’ Doug says.

  She looks into Sean’s eyes, which won’t stay fixed on hers. Why not him? Why not now? If he’s so desperate to be saved, why shouldn’t she save him? They can save each other. They’ll hitchhike somewhere, get jobs. ‘Let’s go,’ she says, leading him to the window. They’re only on the third floor, two flights from the ground and a row of bushes against the brick building to break their fall. But down in the grassy courtyard of Harrison Hall, looking up at Nikki’s window, stand three tutor counsellors, including Susan, the chick who busted her for smoking.

  ‘One minute,’ Doug says.

  Nikki waves to the crowd below, pulls Sean back from the window. ‘Wait,’ she says, ‘I know how,’ and Sean says, ‘You gotta get dressed.’

  ‘He’ll take us down to the conference room to talk,’ Nikki says. ‘But no way he’s calling our mothers tonight. Look what happened to Casey. Or Sarah. Not even Jenn got sent home in the middle of the night.’

  Sean pulls away from her, picks up her tank top from the floor, her skirt, and pushes them toward her.

  ‘We’ll wait till three o’clock, when everyone’s asleep,’ she says. ‘Then meet in front of T-Hall and take off.’

  ‘And go where?’

  ‘Anywhere.’

  Barbara told Nikki she was self-destructive, another one of their words here, but taking off seems the opposite of that. Isn’t it more self-destructive to be all alone, stuck in Manchester with her living-dead mother?

  ‘Take these,’ Sean says, the drowning back in his eyes as he pushes her clothes against her. ‘Please.’

  ‘Thirty seconds,’ Doug says.

  Nikki grabs her tank top, pulls it over her head. The worst part will be in the conference room downstairs, watching Sean beg for another chance for next year, shrinking, promising–what, to never fuck again?–the moment Nikki will erase him from her memory for good, and if that means eliminating a piece of herself, it’s only a tiny piece she won’t miss. There’s nobody in this world she can talk to. Her cousin Melanie gone to Texas. Crystal still in Manchester, but already stuck there forever. Maybe Nikki should beg like Sean, hold her breath for two years, as if anyone could, then go to college with the people they’ve been training her to join, the people they’ve been training her not to offend, the fuckers with ruby slippers who were born into it.

  She pulls her skirt from Sean’s hand, steps into it, closing the hooks and eyes on her hip.

  She’d rather be dead.

  ‘Fifteen seconds,’ Doug says.

  She takes Sean’s face in her hands, kisses him hard.

  ‘I would,’ Sean whispers. ‘If I could. You know I would. It just doesn’t make sense. I can take the bus down to Manchester whenever we want.’

  ‘I know,’ Nikki says. ‘That’s exactly what we’ll do.’ She leads him to the door.

  They’ll ship her back tomorrow, one day early, if they can get hold of her mom, which they won’t. More likely she’ll wait here with the others, go back to Manchester Friday when she’s supposed to go, Sean gone tomorrow, Sean gone tonight, Sean gone in fifteen minutes, half an hour, fifteen seconds, whenever his begging becomes unbearable.

  She hears the key slide into the lock. Doug says, ‘I’m coming in.’ The doorknob turns, the door cracks open. Nikki throws herself against it as hard as she can, slamming the fuckers back, taking deep breaths as she plants her feet and leans against the wood, planted and pushing, Doug howling in the hall, Sean behind her doing nothing to save them, until he wraps Nikki in his arms and pulls her back, lifting her from the floor, her legs kicking. Doug crashes through the door, his hand pressed over his bleeding nose, his red face furious. ‘I didn’t do it,’ Sean says holding Nikki in the air. And she thrashes and thrashes, clawing and kicking his horrible words, blood running over Doug’s mouth and chin, dripping, as he reaches for her, Sean yelling, ‘She didn’t mean it.’

  ‘I did mean it,’ Nikki snarls, ‘you goddam pathetic fucker,’ and she thrashes and thrashes, clawing and kicking, Doug and Sean grunting as she thrashes and kicks.

  my friend goo

  shelley jackson

  I like goo. You don’t know quite what it is–a pile or a puddle, an oops or anointment, repulsive or seductive. It stretches, like desire. It’s sticky, like memory. It doesn’t make a point, it makes a mess, P-U. So if language has a gooey side, it’s when meaning makes room for the mouth. There’s goo in literature, but there’s even more in tongue-twisters, nursery rhymes, song lyrics. ‘I know a secret or two about goo,’ sings Kim Gordon, who does. Sonic Youth does to songs what I want to do to stories: pulls back the plot, ups the gurgle and squawk. ‘My Friend Goo’ is a song by a girl about a girl. I put the girl on a polder in an ocean of goo and let her talk.

  1

  The goo wheezed and flopped against the dyke. It was no-coloured, marrow-coloured, with the look of something private, something that belonged inside something else.

  It was wrinkled as a scrotum, and yes, Amaranth, I do know what a scrotum looks like. (It wasn’t Dad’s fault, I got worried about leaving him alone so long and walked in on him.) Its swells were dry and tacky, covered with fine hair and insects, but where it broke against the dyke, it was gluey, gooey. It spindled up, then collapsed back on itself till the tip touched, forming arches that thinned to threads and snapped. It slung a cord up at a gull and yanked it back, burped up feathers like foam. During storms, it coughed hunks the size of hogs over the dyke to splat violently on the street. The puddles they made didn’t stay flat–the edges crept in, the centre humped. In the dark, they looked like crouching figures. If one of them ever stood up and walked to the door of a house backed against the dyke, knocked and was admitted, nobody had ever told me ab
out it. But I had always wondered who my mother was.

  There are no pictures of my mother and my father has never spoken about her, except in a few strange and incomplete phrases, long ago: ‘A book in Braille’ (as you know, my father is not blind), ‘A doorknob turning’, ‘What dogs hear’ and, even more inscrutable, ‘Holes in’, ‘When floorboards’, ‘You twist it’ and ‘Once’.

  Mother may be the wrong word for what she was. I do not know that I was ever born. Maybe I came about another way. Many different objects are delivered to this shore. But I know that by the time I was aware that, instead of not existing, I existed, my ‘Holes in’, my ‘Once’, was gone.

  Missing a mother did not strike me as strange. Everyone missed something. The goo had taken away the streets where our older residents had strolled, sold things and slaughtered one another. It had taken their scrapbooks, their loofahs, their names rendered in colourful animals and flowers by street artists. It had taken people too, those who had not retreated behind the dykes fast enough and those who had advanced instead, in fascination or despair.

  The goo gave things, too, but not the right things.

  Perhaps, I was one of the wrong things.

  2

  The pig sings the pig’s song.

  The goo slapped the dyke like the palm of a hand and the tassels danced on the awning above me. The customer jumped, fumbled a piece of flotsam he had been examining, steadied it, tried to catch my eye, steadied it again, this time needlessly. ‘Uh–Hey—’

  ‘She sells seashells by the seashore.’

  Now he stared. ‘How did—’

  Do you know how many times I’ve heard that? Because I do, I run a souvenir stand on the seashore, if you can still call it that–some do. Obviously, I don’t shell many sea cells, she many see, see many she, sell many seashells these days, but people have taken to calling by the same name any object plucked from the goo by ‘anon. beachcomber’ (i.e. me) and these are what I shell–purvey– at my stall here on the dyke, high above the peaked roofs of our town.

  The goo jumped again and the customer, looking aghast, hurried away. ‘P.U,’ I whispered, adjusting the object he had disturbed. ‘P.U.’

  This one looked like a doll’s head, its features rubbed away, merged with something the shape of an egg cup. It was the exact colour of my hand and together they made another object. I held it a moment and pretended we were fused, but when I opened my hand, we came apart easily, so I knew I still had to go home.

  Home was almost invisible–chimney pots and satellite discs adrift in the fog, like a becalmed regatta of boy totes, toe boits, toy boats. Curving around them was the great dyke, visible for only a short stretch, but its coordinates pricked out by those darker objects that stuck up from the roofs below. The dyke was chalk-white concrete cast in vertical slabs. The slabs’ proportions, and the seams between them, made them look like a row of teeth. Sometimes the goo, when it reared up above them, resembled a tongue. Sometimes, when it hissed and mumbled, it sounded like words, though not ones that could be found in any dictionary. This is the first language I imitated, when I began to speak. Even now, if you’ve noticed, I sometimes sound more like a storm than a person. When I’m self-conscious, my tongue seems to thicken or flatten into something like a rudder or an oar, unfit for the fancywork of words. I wuh-wuh-wuh-wu-wuh-wuther, like wind rubbing itself, goo on goo.

  Since I was little, my father had given me tongue-twisters to practise on. I’m your go-to girl if ‘The sixth sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick’ needs saying. But wuthering was never the real problem. Have you ever been so ashamed that you could hardly stand to have a face and when you thought of what you’d done you had to go, ‘Whatever!’ or ‘P.U.’? That’s how I felt every time I said, ‘The capital of the United Netherlands is Kansas City,’ or ‘That’ll be seven hundred thousand dollars,’ or ‘Thank you, come again.’ I was stupefied by the stupidity of my stupid, stupid voice saying such stupid, pointless, normal things. ‘Thank you’? Those aren’t even words to me. They’re–I don’t know–second-hand bowling trophies–faded plastic Santas–adult diapers. Whatever! P.U.!

  Maybe my father is still trying to get me to talk like a normal person when he screams, ‘Good blood, bad blood! Good blood, bad blood!’ Maybe he doesn’t mean that I’m my mother’s daughter and always will be. But I even look like the goo. My hair and eyelashes are the same no-colour as my skin. Boys call me Blondie, but I’m not, just colourless. Beige, if you like, though under this green awning, I’m practically chartreuse.

  If I am my mother’s daughter, and my mother is missing, does that mean I am missing, too?

  If I am my mother’s daughter, and I am not missing, does that mean my mother is not missing either?

  And, as my father would say, if this mother-missing miss’s mother isn’t missing, where’s the mother this miss misses?

  3

  A starling sat on the starling-house and sang to the rooster: ‘You cannot sing like I do, I cannot sing like you do!’

  The goo takes care of me now, chucking up objects for me to sell. I have the best stock for miles and the customers know it. I never have to haggle, which is good, because P.U., I c-c-c-couldn’t, and then how would I take care of Dad?

  My father is losing a dimension. Every day, he is more like a photograph of himself and he has not said anything in years. Except for the tongue-twisters: those he’s never tired of repeating–training me, I used to think, so I’d be able to speak for him when he beat his final retreat into silence. Later I figured out (imagined, you said, but you came around) that he used them to communicate–that ‘A bit of better butter’ could mean ‘Please prepare my dinner’, that ‘A flea and a fly in a flue’ could mean ‘We are trapped, my dear. Oh, help me find the way out!’ Sometimes I only understood his meaning when I repeated his words quickly several times, since it lay hidden in the slips, where the batter became bitter and the fly flew.

  I got out my notebook from the chest under the table and wrote: ‘boit.’

  The most important discoveries are the ones you make by accident while trying to do something else. ‘Our Friend Goo’: that’s the title of a piece of investigative journalism I didn’t write in seventh grade, since my interviews had yielded nearly nothing. I only got one answer to the question ‘Where did goo come from?’ and that was from my father: ‘The sea ceaseth and it thuffiseff uth, sufficeth us.’ People wouldn’t talk about the goo, though they were nuzzled right up against it. If it made them so uncomfortable, why didn’t they build out in the middle of the polders? Mr Haas (remember his toupee?) said it was convenient, using the steep back side of the dyke as a ready-made wall, but was it convenient how the rain and wind seeped through the cracks all winter? In my room at the back of the house, there were always gaps where the one curved wall met the two squared-off walls and the ceiling, and even if we grouted, the gaps opened again when the weather changed, because the dyke swelled and shrank with the seasons, like breathing. When I went into my closet and leaned against the back wall, behind the coats, I could hear it creak, and behind the creak, a quieter sound that I knew was the goo talking to itself. Or to someone else.

  I did this often.

  To tell the truth, very often.

  Every day.

  Reference books were no more helpful than my neighbours. They hardly mentioned goo at all. ‘A viscous or sticky substance,’ said the OED, which was obvious, and ‘Fig. sickly sentiment’, which was wrong. Sometimes in fiction an author seemed to be trying to describe it, but only under the guise of a person or a landscape. My best source turned out to be children’s books, and one in particular, in which a garrulous fox led a reluctant hairy biped through a series of situations that, described aloud, proved difficult to pronounce. Beside a dark blue pond, its surface ropy and peaked, where a sort of bird chewed on a taffy-like length of goo, the biped was offered some goo to chew. That author, Seuss, had written other books about goo–green goo that dripped from the sky, pink goo that ringed
bathtubs and was difficult to get rid of–but what really impressed me was the association of goo with tongue-twisters.

  Recently I had consulted the OED again and seen that I had missed something. Goo had a secondary meaning. ‘Make an inarticulate cooing or gurgling sound like that made by a baby; converse affectionately.’

  ‘You do look like a verb,’ I told the heaving waves. But the goo wasn’t talking.

  4

  Roukhi we roukhik ya roukhi roukhain be roukh matrakh ma troukh roukhik roukhi bet roukh.

  My soul and your soul are one soul. Wherever your soul goes, my soul also goes.

  The fog was ruining business. I decided to close up shop. I rubber-banded the bills, stuck them and my notebook in my pocket. The change could stay in the cash box, which went in the bottom of the chest with the seashells. I struck the tent and stowed it in the chest, locked the chest to the table and both to a loop of reinforcing rod exposed at the crumbling edge of the dyke. Down the piss-stained concrete steps into the fog.

  On the way I stopped to see you, Amaranth, because you are sometimes the only thing that thuffiseff me. You came out on your low balcony, hiccuping amicably, and hoisted me up.

  ‘Mr Fox, sir, I won’t do it,’ I said. ‘I can’t say it. I won’t chew it.’

  ‘Wha-hic?’

  ‘Say it, chew it–as if they were the same thing. The tongue-twister is, like, stuff.’

  ‘What stu-hic-uff?’

  ‘Goo. You have to chew it.’ You were steering me backwards into your room. ‘Like the Goo-Goose,’ I added, as you pushed me on to your bed.

  ‘So chew it,’ you said, and put your tongue in my mouth. ‘Goo-Goose,’ you said fondly, after a while. ‘What do you know? My hiccups are gone.’