American Goth

by J. D. Glass

  From the tone of her voice, I’d known it was important, and I missed her on the return call. “Hey, Fran!” I recorded. “How’re you doing? I’m coming back in about two weeks—don’t tell Nina, I want to surprise her. What say you we all get together and do something?”

  We finally connected on her next call. “…and Mr. Boyd asked that we respect the family’s grief and privacy—don’t call, send nothing.”

  The words sent a blankness running through me. They made no sense, they were unreal, and I responded with what I thought was logic.

  “I’m gonna call.”

  “Samantha, don’t do it,” Fran insisted across the miles. “I told you what her father said.”

  I was silent as I considered. That couldn’t be true, it simply made no sense, even though a prickling numbness, hot and heavy, crawled up my legs. I said the one thing that did make sense to me, that made the crawling numbness flash over into anger, the words I was now very sorry for. “I don’t believe you,” I told her flatly. “You’re just jealous because we used to date. You want her.”

  “Sammy, Sammer, I’m just trying to save you some heartache,” she protested and I could hear the tears as she spoke. “C’mon Sam, you know me—I wouldn’t ever try to hurt you or her like that. You guys are my friends. I love you.” I heard her breathe, could feel the effort she made to not cry. “God, I wish I was lying.”

  I breathed it in, her words, the emotions so clear to me across an ocean, and knew that whether I wanted to believe or not…

  “I’m sorry, Fran, just, don’t”—I took another breath—“I didn’t mean to make you cry. I can’t believe you right now—I have to hear this for myself.”

  I hung up and dialed another number, and a few rings later I got the confirmation I’d been seeking, though it wasn’t what I wanted.

  “How many times do I have to tell you fuckin’ stupid kids? She’s dead—don’t ever fuckin’ call my house again.” He hung up before I even had the chance to ask how or when.

  Fran and I hadn’t spoken since that call, not since the weight of loss had overwhelmed me, dared me to try to cross the gate, and as my memory once more replayed our last discussion, my body, raw from the shower and hyper from…everything else…remembered her, Fran and the sweet and shy experiments that led to further, more intimate contact until it was done, that first orgasm a revelation of her, of me, the next a response to hunger that had ripped through my stomach and chest the same way the energy did, and the third to ensure we knew what we were doing.

  Despite the growth and the changes between us, and perhaps even because of them, I knew we were united. First as friends and teammates, then, for a short while, as girlfriends. But now, any rivalry we’d had left was set aside: we both mourned the one girl neither of us would ever have. I’d loved, still loved, Nina, but so had Fran, and more than that, I owed her, owed Frankie for the friendship we’d shared. It was time I called her.

  After having paced enough to calm my blood, I pulled out my sadly neglected acoustic guitar, carefully tuned it, and ran through a few scales, then a few finger exercises. It felt good, but it wasn’t what I needed; it made me think of things, of people, I didn’t want to think about, and the sharp lance of memory, only a few months old, bore hot and heavy through my ribs. For the first time, the strings didn’t calm the tangled mess that filled my mind, rode restless and hot under my skin. I put my guitar down and jumped to my feet, only to start prowling the floor again. Okay. I flipped the light, then faced myself in the mirror. Let it never be said, I thought, that I never faced the issues head-on.

  My face had thinned, there were smudges above my cheeks just under my eyes, faint purple from exhaustion. Cobalt blue, I thought as I looked into my own eyes under hair that had gotten darker since I’d not really been out in the sun. “Moon on the ocean blue,” Nina had told me once when we’d sat by the pier on a faraway bay. I closed my eyes for a moment against the remembered glare of the water that burned into my sight and the memory-sting of the wind that blew the hair back off my face as I’d felt her fingers do the same the last time we’d really seen each other, the last real words we’d ever exchanged. I would graduate the next day and leave that continent the day after.

  We held each other, close, safe, and silent in the warmth of the sun and the breeze that blew off the water, content for the moment to have this, just this, because I knew, we both knew, we had the rest of our lives to work this out, we had the assurance of tomorrow. If I’d only known then what that tomorrow had held, if I’d had a clue…that would have changed everything. If…if…if.

  There is no “if,” I told myself sternly and shut the too-vivid recollection down and away where it wouldn’t hurt. I had other things to think about, things to learn, to focus on. I would.

  I already knew there wasn’t enough motion I could do to make me feel better. Playing guitar was out of the question, and the wave that once more threatened to descend…those little razors were so close, I just had to reach for them. I dressed again in sweats and sneakers and went down to the first floor, to the back room where Uncle Cort had said he’d be. The light shone from under the door, and as I opened it I saw him, face screwed in concentration as he sat in front of his workbench, his gloved hands carefully tapping at whatever shone before him.

  “Need something, dear heart?” he asked over his shoulder as I entered.

  “Do you trust me?” I tried not to shift as I waited for his answer.

  “I do,” he said solemnly, his gaze steady on me as he gently laid down his tools. “Do you need something?”

  “Can I…can I have the sword?”

  He got up slowly and crossed the room to the large oven in the corner and opened its door, then pulled the sword and its scabbard from within. He handed it to me and I felt just that much calmer as the hilt fit into my palm.

  “Thank you,” I told him.

  “You’re welcome,” he answered, his voice quiet, deep, and grave, as if we were trying not to wake the house itself.

  “I just want…I want to do an exercise,” I said as I turned away and reached for the door.

  He nodded. “See you in the morning.”

  “Yes.”

  My heart felt heavy in my chest, a burn that climbed into my throat even as I climbed the steps to the study and, once there, kindled a fire in the grate.

  I took a centering breath, then drew the blade from its home and let the firelight wink off it before I drew the circle around me, on the Material, in the Aethyr, then took my accustomed position with it—head high, arms straight, posture perfect. It felt so light without the weights on my wrists…

  Closing my eyes, I forced my mind to empty and focused on the Light within and without, the swirl of matrices from the sword in my hand, a loop that fed back and forth. I felt it clearly, the current that entered me from the surrounds: it flowed from my hands to the metal and through it, then back to me, the endless circle, the endless Light that sang and pulsed and thrummed and danced. I let it take me away from the ache in my muscles, the burning weight that suffused my shoulders and back. There was no rug beneath my knees, no fire that warmed my face, no air that cooled my back, no breath, no mind, no body, nothing but the Light and my reflection of it…

  And that was how Cort found me in the morning just as the sun rose—position perfect and finally, finally, ready to go to sleep.

  Freshmen

  The mind is for seeing, the heart is for hearing

  —Arabic Proverb

  “Hi, Fran,” I said simply when she answered the phone, “it’s me—and I owe you a huge apology—I am so very sorry.”

  She gracefully forgave me, and we caught each other up on everything.

  Fran had deferred her freshman start at Columbia until the spring semester, “just putting the last four years into perspective. Adjusting, you know?” she said.

  I suspected there was quite a bit more to it, but I let it go—if she wanted to talk about it, she would, and if our reasons
were at all similar, I wasn’t ready to talk about it yet, either. “Yeah, I get that. Me, too. Kinda why I’m staying in England for now. Oh, I, uh…” I took a deep breath. “I changed my name, by the way—Ann, you know, the middle of Samantha.”

  She was silent a moment, and I knew her well enough to know she was thinking of all the reasons that might be behind it. “I can understand, I mean, it kinda suits you. Ann,” she said finally before falling quiet again. “When do you think you’ll come back?”

  “I don’t think I’ll…I’m not certain.” I didn’t tell her that I was seriously considering “never.” I also didn’t tell her about anything else I’d been up to.

  We changed the subject and as we continued to chat, we realized how much we did miss one another. And since her parents had decided to spend part of the winter in Italy because Fran’s older brother and sister (much older, almost ten years older, and twins besides—Gemma and Gianni) ran some sort of art studio in Milan and wouldn’t be home for the holidays and Fran was no longer in school…

  “Hey,” I asked her, suddenly inspired, “why not stay with me for a bit then? Maybe even spend the holidays?”

  “That sounds awesome—you’re saving my life here,” she said and I could hear both laughter and relief in her voice. “Think we can pull it off?”

  It was easy enough to set up.

  Uncle Cort seemed more than appropriately happy to give his okay, and it was decided that when we moved to the London apartment next month, Fran would stay with us there through the holidays, spend two weeks in Italy, then fly back to New York to start school.

  “Wouldn’t your friend prefer to spend the holidays with her parents?” Elizabeth asked when we discussed the impending visit over dinner.

  I chewed thoughtfully over my answer. “Fran…well, her parents, you know, they’re nice people—lovely, warm, polite, very, very appropriate, in all ways, at all times,” I said, “but it’s weird for her too.”

  “Weird how?” Elizabeth asked. “You should finish that.” She pointed to the green things I was trying to avoid on my plate and gave me a quick smile.

  My avoidance of vegetables had already become a running joke, and I grinned back at her as I took the smallest possible bite. But she’d asked me a question, and it deserved an answer.

  “See, Fran’s dad is a politician back on Staten Island, wants to go from county representative to city or, even better, state office, and Fran,” I explained as I pushed the green around on my plate to make it look like I was doing something with it, “well, she’s…her dad’s a conservative and Fran’s gay,” I said simply. “It doesn’t really, uh, work well for him.”

  I felt Uncle Cort’s eyes on me, and the warm sense of concern that flowed from him as Elizabeth watched me with interest.

  “Do they mistreat her?” she asked, her voice gentle.

  “No,” I said, the word hard and hurtful as it rose from my throat while I forced myself not to think about anything or anyone else who might have had a different experience. “They don’t actively mistreat her—they ignore her. They named Fran for her mother, then forgot her.” Ah, fuck it, I thought, and speared some of the leafy stuff onto my fork. “She’ll have a much better time with us,” I assured Elizabeth, then focused on swallowing the bitter taste that filled my mouth.

  With my uncle’s help and guidance, we made arrangements to have the house I’d grown up in appraised by a real-estate company for possible sale, arranged for storage for most of the contents of the house, and the items of importance that had been left behind were shipped to the London address in Soho on Dean Street, a large two-story apartment above a shop, the shop, as he said.

  When we finally arrived there after a four-hour drive on a late-August afternoon, it was to discover a place that was much less industrial than the part of Leeds proper the other shop was in, and completely unlike the suburb the house was surrounded by. Soho itself was a little seedy: a complex mix of music, art, and sex, though to my eyes and senses it was more of a vibe, a feel to the air, than anything open or advertised. Honestly, it reminded me of Greenwich Village in New York, and I liked it a lot.

  The new apartment, even with its two floors, wasn’t nearly as large as the house had been, though it was sizeable. It had its own entrance from the street, and a flight of steps led from the front entryway up to another door that led into the apartment proper. My room, a nice-sized sunny space painted in stark white, was on the floor above.

  “Now that you’re all settled in, you should go out, explore the city,” Cort said over breakfast a few mornings later as he passed milk over to me. “Make some friends.”

  “You need to have a real life, a full one—not everything is about training,” Elizabeth added in response to the questioning glance I gave them.

  “Uh…okay?” I answered. I wondered just exactly how I was supposed to go about doing that a little while later as I sat on the bed in my room with my guitar.

  I hit the tuning fork and let it vibrate against the body, matching the tone to the harmonic as I turned the gear, and in my mind’s eye I saw Nina sitting next to me, her complete focus on the note that rang through the air.

  I played every harmonic to finish tuning and ran my fingers across the fretboard, reviewing scales I could play with my eyes closed, but as I did, I watched her hands pluck through the same beginning chords, the strain along her forearms as they adjusted to the angle, the pressure, the simple playing… I couldn’t, I just couldn’t anymore, and those sharp blades I’d used in Leeds still sat in my drawer, but I didn’t want to use them, and didn’t want to give up music either: it had been such a big part of my life for so long.

  I fled my guitar, my temptation, and my room to run straight down the hall, past the spare bedroom to the library. I needed to do something, something different, and it hit me as I sat immersed in a text with some tunes I enjoyed playing in the background. The solution was obvious: if, as Uncle Cort and Elizabeth had said, I was learning to bridge, to walk between worlds, then as above, so below: I’d switch from guitar to bass, the bridge that moved between the melody and the beat, something different than what I’d done before, but still taking advantage of the skills I’d spent years building. I told Uncle Cort.

  After picking through some ads in the newspaper and the phone book, then several phone inquiries to discover what various shops carried and what they knew about what they had in stock, one place sounded both reputable and knowledgeable to me. “Electrohill,” I told my uncle, “they know what they’re about.”

  “North London it is, then,” he agreed, and packed me off with money and a map once I’d written the address and number down.

  “Does that watch work?” he asked just as I was about to leave.

  I shoved back my sleeve to check my right wrist almost reflexively. Of course it worked, I knew it worked: I wound it every morning before I buckled the tan leather over my skin. “Yes.”

  “Good, because we’ll meet for dinner later, then,” and he gave me the address where we’d meet. “It’s one of the oldest bars in London, that one on Compton Street,” he told me.

  In spite of my map, I promptly got lost, confused by Tubes and rails, parks and greens, squares and circuses, and more than once got off at the wrong stop. Finally, though, I found my way to Palmers Green, where I tried, one, two, three, four—and the moment I played it, I knew it was mine: I was in love, smitten with an old Fender Precision bass, complete with traditional tricolor flameburst that followed the contour of the body. I’d held it on my lap when I first tried it, then welcomed the weight of it across my shoulder once I selected a strap, an ox-blood leather that spread to three inches wide. I liked the way it contrasted with my black shirt.

  What I loved, really loved, was the way the neck felt in my palm, the thick strings under the pads of my fingertips, the deep, low rumble that echoed through my body when I leaned my ear against the headstock. When I asked the clerk for a patch cord and plugged into an amp, it was even bett
er, and I spent the next hour deciding which amp had the best tone, presented its vibrated voice most accurately.

  Affording it wasn’t an issue, which it would have been just two years ago, I reflected as I pulled out a credit card that I hardly ever used, and that an accountant Stateside made sure was paid out of the trust fund I’d been left: the insurance paid to me by the City of New York’s Fire Department for my father’s untimely death in the line of duty.

  I’d been left moderately wealthy, but I would have gladly traded it to once more hear my father’s voice while we worked on the car he’d bought me in anticipation of my driver’s license, traded it twice over for one of his hugs and the smoky smell when he got home, and yet a third to have Nina eat dinner with us, then sit and play guitar on the porch while my Da lit a cigarette and kicked his feet up on the railing and listened. Such were my thoughts as I hefted the dirty-blond tweed hard case in one hand, after arranging for the small, forty-pound Hartke amp I’d settled on along with a gig bag and various electronic accoutrements to be delivered to the shop. I couldn’t quite think of it as home yet. But no matter; my instrument I’d carry myself. Everything else could be shipped.

  The way back to Soho was quite the adventure as I discovered that New Compton Street was quite far away from Compton, at least on foot. It figured, of course, that neither was near Old Compton Street.

  When I did finally get the proper bearings, I met Uncle Cort right outside the door of the pub with fifteen minutes to spare, and it turned out it was on the corner of Dean, which we actually lived on, only a few blocks away from the place I slept.

  “You found everything all right, then?” he asked me with a big smile, a clap on the shoulder, and a nod to the case in my hand.

  “I take it you expected me to get lost?”

  “Yes.” He laughed. “Come on, dear heart, let’s get some dinner.” He opened the door and ushered me in.