by Brian Short
Joe Reading… at the Market downtown. I remembered. A shape eclipsing the sun. Gave me his card. But I didn’t remember giving him my phone number. I didn’t even have a phone at the time. So how…?
“Joe,” I said, “Reading. Of course. Right.”
“Yes look,” the fast voice said, “I’m with [something again unintelligible] we need some photos taken Joe told me that you’re a photographer he’d worked with you before.”
“I… huh.”
“We’re constructing a website for the state tourism board and need photographs of particular sites these are all sites outside of the city the city has its own tourism board that’s something totally different we have to in fact be very careful not to even mention Seattle let alone photograph it since these locations are all outside the city encompassing the rest of Washington State they would involve you driving to the sites and taking photos of them our next deadline is the section featuring Tacoma in and around and downtown there may be some locations that seem a little confusing also Hood Canal etcetera suchlike etcetera you understand we need to have them by Monday they’re nothing terrifically complicated they just need to look attractive is this something that you can do?”
I’d gone to the blinds drawn over window, pried two plastic slats apart with my fingers and looked outside. The bright sun scattered off the brickwork of the unused courtyard three floors below and the dry concrete fountain at its center. A collapsed plastic wrapper for a package of hotdog buns rested loosely against the base of the fountain. It would have blown away, had there been any wind. “Yes. Of course. I can do that. Sure. Monday?”
“Monday,” the voice said, “I’ll email you a complete list of the locations.” He then told me how much the job would pay.
•
“You’re not working tomorrow night, are you?” Vivianne asked, gathering knitting needles and colored yarn together to pour into her bag; also pens, pencils, and what appeared to be dice with several extra sides.
Proteus watched this whole collection disappear with a careful sweep of her arm across the desk blotter. Like so many lemmings, each object followed the next over the edge. “No,” he said, “I’ve got it off.”
“Good! Then you can come to my show.”
“You have a show.” He set his backpack onto the floor beside the desk, straightened up and looked into her face. She smiled.
“My band. Vinny and me. He plays drums, I’m guitar and vocals.”
“No shit.”
“It’s at The Garage. Here.” She dug into her floppy wreck of a bag and rummaged, flipping quickly through a number of sizable items, then what must have been a stack of loose-leaf pages, until she found what she wanted and forcefully pulled it out: a black-and-white photocopied page with an image of a woman, herself, wearing torn jeans and a t-shirt, her body in a provocative and potentially lethal pose, electric guitar at her waist, black hair spilling off her shoulders and down over the slight swell of her breasts. Behind her, at something just recognizable in the photocopy grit as a drum set, a vaguely manlike shape flailed, his arm and stick a blur of arc swung toward a floorstanding tom. Above the high-contrast photo bold, sans-serif block letters spelled the word FISHKILL, worn and pitted, as if the word itself had seen years of abuse already. At the bottom of the page, the venue and date were added in thick felt pen and again photocopied.
“Wow. Fishkill.”
“That’s our band. Vinny and me. You can’t say no.”
“I wouldn’t. I can’t. No, you’re right. I’ll be there.”
“You have to.”
“I’ll be there.”
“You’d better not not show up.”
“I’ll show up. I’ll be there.”
“Because you have to. This is me threatening you with death if you don’t.”
“I’m going to. I swear it.”
“You’d better.”
“I’m swearing it.”
She grabbed the collar of his shirt and balled it in her hand, then pulled herself up from the chair and kissed him once on the lips.
Stunned, Proteus stared into her large, round eyes.
“You… have… to…”
“I know it.”
“Tomorrow. Friday. Eight pm.”
•
Across the street, the pale-yellow sodium lights of the new grocery store’s parking garage flickered unevenly and hummed. I stood out on the porch with the others in the close night because I’d started smoking again. Willy in the corner turned around and around in counterclockwise rotations. When I looked in his direction, his gaping eyes met mine each time he turned to face me, though I don’t think he was meeting my eye so much as, by chance, fixedly gazing for a moment, for a degree or two of arc, straight at me, because his stare was stuck forward, so that everything at eye-level got that look. Mary stood from her place on the steps, and she did face me. She walked straight up to me and looked at a point on my forehead and said, “It’s a floor brain,” then walked past and inside, the screen door banging shut behind her.
I took a long drag, blew smoke into the air and coughed.
•
Long Davis bent through the doorframe of the office to look in and found that Eugene was already there, in the plastic chair, explaining:
“TWO SODAS I HAD TWO SODAS A FANTA AND A DIET DR. PEPPER DO YOU LIKE DR. PEPPER?”
I said, “I’m not such a fan, although when I was a kid –”
“YOU HATE ME YOU SHOULDN’T SAY THAT YOU HATE ME.” Eugene’s round face was becoming colorful.
“I need for you to calm down, Eugene.”
“I had pancakes with eggs and sausage.”
“Very good.”
“Can I get a cigarette?”
“The waiter was an ASSHOLE I TOLD HIM FUCK YOU ASSHOLE GO FUCK YOURSELF.”
“Eugene…”
“I shouldn’t have left him any tip.”
“That’s better.”
“Can I get a cigarette?”
“Davis, I will give you three…” I waited to see if he was even vaguely curious what the conditions were. He wasn’t. So I said anyhow, “But you have to leave me alone for one hour. That means no more cigarettes. Nothing. Not for one hour. Okay?”
“He looked at me like I was a Nazi so I said fuck you you fucking Nazi.”
“Eugene…”
“M-okay.”
“That was a bad thing to say I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Thangyew.” Rubberbanding Davis bent back through the door, retreating, three cigarettes now cupped in his dirty palm. I would see him again in less than one hour.
“Do you think that I’m a Nazi?”
“Eugene…”
“You shouldn’t say things like that.”
“Eugene, I’ve got paperwork I need to do in here, so I need for you to go now. Go watch TV with the others. Okay?”
“Okay.”
But once he’d left I wondered who the person was who remained, who still sat in the office, this figure at the desk, the man staring into the tattered logbook as though it meant something to him, though both he and I knew perfectly well it did not. The scattered words, the scribbled lines, the notes, the sense of it all evaded him, not because it was itself without sense, but because the man (so called) could not concentrate, could not put the pen-scratched words together into any meaningful order – even the ones he had written himself. Looked at this way, the lines and swoops and curls had a certain beauty, and a certain ugliness too. They were the epiphenomenon of meat, of the mass of gooey brainstuff thinking. Or they were something more perhaps, cogito ergo… but he couldn’t figure out what. Is this, he thought (with his mind slotted into a certain track, sensing some shape, the dimension of some meaning behind the meaning that he couldn’t find in the words themselves), the Golden Body?
•
Out on the porch again, but this time Willy had, miraculously, stopped moving. He now stood there right in front of me. He even looked at me – and not just towa
rd me, but at me, into my eyes. And my eyes in turn shifted from one to the other of his, trying to find the more cogent one, the one that held the attention, the interest. Smoke drifted up from the cigarette between my fingers. Smoke drifted up between us.
“You’ve got it now, don’t you?” Willy said, his voice hushed. “You’re here and you’re there. I can tell. I’ve seen what you’ve seen. I know you’ve been places, man.”
I looked back over my shoulder. From where I stood I could see into the office, to where Proteus sat at the desk, still looking down into the logbook, trying to find the sense in it. “You can tell?” I asked.
“I can always tell. I’m in two places also.”
“Don’t say anything to anyone,” I said. “I might lose my job.”
Sheets of heat lightning shimmered and flashed in the sky over the mountains, distantly. I took a drag from the cigarette in my hand and felt it burn my tongue. Why was I smoking again?
“It wouldn’t matter.”
I looked once more at Proteus, inside at the desk, craning my head back so far around. Like an owl, I thought, I can turn my neck in a half-circle: look at me now, now look at backwards-me, I’m all backwards-me now, la-la. Proteus seemed either oblivious or uninterested. Either way, he would not look up.
“It would matter to me. I might lose my job.”
“No, I mean, it wouldn’t matter what I said. Nobody could hear me. I tell people… I tell them about the future, I tell them things they already…. or things they… I talk, I make the noises, but I think there’s something wrong with my voice, like I’m not making the right noises. So nobody can hear me. It wouldn’t matter what I said. Nobody could hear me.”
“Ah, yes, that may be so.”
“You can hear me. But you’re in two places.”
“I’m here and I’m –”
“The future is just like the past, except it hasn’t happened yet.”
“I know about the future.”
“You do?”
“I don’t like to talk about it.”
“But in the future…”
“Everything, I know, everybody…”
“But in the past, you’re going to make me make the world, the whole world, and I don’t want to do it. I need to tell you something. I need to tell you this because I know that you’ve been places, so maybe you can understand. In the park, there’s a man. He’s never hurt nobody. He lives in the park. Other places too, but in the park when it’s safe? He lives… he lives… I’ve done things to help him. What I do, I try and help the man. It’s not… what… the police… They don’t help the man. The police will try and make me make him do things, but that’s not… he makes me… he does things… sometimes? But he would never hurt nobody.”
“Is this about the future?”
“No!”
“Is this man you?”
“What? No! He…”
“Listen, I think you’re talking about being in two places. I think you’re talking about the future.”
“No! It’s not that. It’s…”
“It’s about being here and being also here. Because I’m here, but I’m also –”
•
“– here?” I looked up from the logbook. In the dim orange light of the office, a small fly buzzed around in sloppy but regular circles. When it hit a certain point in the air, just above my face, it turned a hard, sudden left. I could see past the flying dot of the fly, out through the screen door, to the spot on the porch where Willy also turned in circles, only his circles were precise, widdershins. No, deasil. No, widder… ah, fuck, I can’t remember which is which. He circled counterclockwise, the antithetical direction, wasn’t it? Thesis, antithesis. His was unmaking, unwinding, undoing. His jaw hung open, his eyes stared forward. When he circled behind the doorframe, from my perspective, the man was gone, but then he reappeared a moment later and did it again, and he will never have circled around enough, ever.
There was a man who lived in the park, sometimes.
In me, there was a hole the size of everything.
SEVEN
The World
[2005]
When I got home in the morning, I tried to sleep, but the couple in the apartment next door were fighting. I got up from the mattress and banged on the wall between us. That made the woman scream louder. It was only the woman that I could hear. The man was quiet, so I couldn’t hear his side of the fight, only hers, which alone was enough fight easily for two people. I banged on the wall again, but that did nothing to stop the woman from shouting at the quiet man. Finally, I said – no, I yelled – at the wall, at her, “IF I TELL YOU ABOUT THE FUTURE, WILL YOU LEAVE ME ALONE?”
Silence. The angry woman had stopped shouting.
I went back to the futon mattress and fell onto it face-first and tried to sleep. A moment later, the woman started shouting again.
•
“Proteus! You’re here! You really came!” Vivianne jumped and hugged me close, her body pressing against mine. Hers and my sweat, in the close air of the room, with its haze of smoke and beery, humid funk, made us stick to each other where our skin met past the thin cotton of our clothing: arms, necks, the touch of her cheek to mine. I felt like I might fall over. Her hair smelled like shampoo and cigarettes.
I’d seen her arrive some minutes before. That is, I’d seen the movement around her, the bustle at the doorway, the incoming flow of her sparkly entourage, mostly women, like so many planets in irregular fury around the sun, the whole mass of persons making its way only very slowly down the narrow corridor of this venue, aptly named The Garage. The place seemed to have been, not long previously, just exactly what its name suggested, now minimally converted into this new form. The broken cars, banks of tools and pneumatic lifts had been removed. Otherwise, it remained the same. Vivianne’s sudden flurry of arrival involved at least a dozen people – maybe two, I couldn’t tell – all in a flutter of boas, laughter, glitter, sparking cigarette lighters, and flashes off reflective clothing. Their footsteps, in numbers, echoed from the painted, scuffed cement floors, and searching looks were cast distractedly after beer (found piled in half-cases along one wall) or other desired objects. This mass arrival roughly tripled the size of the audience already there.
“Of course I’m here,” I said as she pulled away from me, our skins coming unstuck. I’d been waiting for two hours actually, fool enough to show up at the time posted on the flier, and had been the only one present until now who was not in one of the other bands before hers. I hadn’t understood either that Vivianne’s was the last act of the night.
Dressed simply, in faded camouflage trousers and a blue tank top, she looked no more or less a rock star than anyone else. The visible difference was that she’d brought the entire audience with her. “I want you to meet Vinny, my drummer. Without him, I’d be dead.” A short, easygoing man stepped forward from where he’d been concealed behind her and held out his hand, which I shook a little stiffly. His eyes seemed sharp, his ragged, short beard either fashionably or unfashionably scruffy.
“Vinny,” I said.
“Proteus?” he said.
“My… name…” I couldn’t finish what I’d started to say.
“Is… not…?” The drummer Vinny looked at me and smiled sheepishly.
“No.”
Vivianne had stepped away, distracted by somebody or something.
“I think I understand.”
“You do?”
“Some of us,” Vinny said, “are forced by circumstances to take names that are not our own. Others choose new names to suit them. But oftentimes it’s out of our control.”
“I wouldn’t have put it that way, but yes, that’s true. How did you know?”
“It’s just a talent that I have. Besides, Viv has told me a lot about you. She says you’re a fish out of water. I don’t think she means that the way it might sound.”
“No, it’s exactly how it sounds.”
“I have to get set up, but I want to
talk more with you. Later, okay?” That was when I noticed for the first time the several cases he’d been pulling behind him on a dolly.
“Of course.” I stepped aside to let him and the cart pass.
The assembly of the drum kit was a thing that I did not understand and that I watched with envy. I wanted to do that, to know how all those pieces fit together. More still, I wanted to know how to hit the drums with the sticks, how and when to do that, to draw the sound out from them that was inside, and how to make the music make sense, keeping time, using the drums. The thing that Vivianne did with her guitar was different, equally mysterious, and as I watched her set down her big amplifier and plug all of it in, turn all of it on, tune up the strings and find the tone she liked with the dials on the amplifier’s faceplate, I felt a similar kind of awe. But the guitar was not something I felt like I should know. The drums, however, I felt like I really should know.
There was a sound, a screech from the box, feedback. Vinny hit the drums in a tight flurry. Everything else stopped: a momentary silence.
“Good evening,” said Vivianne into a microphone, which she then adjusted to the level of her mouth. “We’re Fishkill. And we. Want. To fuck.”
“Yeeeaaahhhh!” roared a woman’s voice from the far end of the room (which was not very far), quickly picked up by two or three others. With a subtle, silent one-bar count between them, the air now charged and close, Fishkill started playing hard, rocking blues. Vinny immediately disappeared into his rhythm so that he wasn’t even there anymore. All that was left of him as a person were patterns, variations on the patterns, and fills – all so utterly competent and utterly unobtrusive. He left discrete marks on time and made the space open for Vivianne to come forward, driving her along. She, on the other hand, turned into something more than herself. Nothing about her had changed, except that everything had, and now she was pure charisma. She sparked. She became a spot of pure light. She was all sex and volume and inexplicable force, and without seeming to put any effort into it, she’d become the single, bright point on which everything turned.
“It’s not right,” said Proteus, “that one person should do this to us. That one person should be able to. And to everybody else as well.” He gestured around the room to include all of the audience in a wistful, defeated wave of an arm.
