by Brian Short
“What?” I asked. “Why?” I looked beside myself, and realized that I was again two people. And how had I been able to hear him, his voice, so clearly, while he, so soft-spoken, had removed himself, was now putting the rest of the audience between us, and with all these heavy decibels being launched through the air?
“I don’t know if I can take it,” Proteus said. He’d walked off to the side of the room, cutting a path through the sudden crowd, where, as far away as he could get, he leaned his back against the scuffed drywall and slid down into a crouch. It was hard to watch. He hung his head, staring toward the floor, so clearly and so completely had he been beaten. And by what?
Fine, I thought. It isn’t just her, you know. I turned back to watch the band; really, to watch Vivianne, though I couldn’t help but admire Vinny’s ability to disappear. If he wasn’t as good as he was, he would’ve been noticeable, but because he was so good, he was completely invisible. I wanted to ask him how he did it, but I knew it was one of those things that can’t be told, only done.
I turned toward Proteus at the far wall. He looked up, just in time to meet my eye. “I will disappear too,” I vowed, “like this.” Understanding what I was getting at – or even if he hadn’t – Proteus nodded with that same beaten, hangdog look, his eyes again fixed on the scummy floor. Although I was becoming annoyed, I still wished that there was something I could do for him, but I could see that he was inconsolable. Or at any rate he didn’t want consolation; he wanted to feel the pain.
Every so often, Vivianne shot a look at me. Sometimes these were questioning glances, as if she were trying to judge my reaction. Some were practical and predatory, as if to triangulate my position in space and assess how she might best intercept me and make the kill. At other times, these looks were downright sultry – smoky, inviting looks, suggesting all kinds of possibilities. This was safe enough for her to do, I figured, because she, behind the microphone, shielded with her guitar and at the center of everyone’s attention, was unapproachable. She could later act as if that hadn’t happened. Then I noticed how she was sending these same bedroom looks all throughout the small venue, not just to me but to any number of people, anonymous sexual targets I couldn’t tell from the crowd. What was this game she was playing? Was it part of the act, of her persona as sudden rock star? Did she even know that she was doing it?
It was well into the set that I saw something pivotal and truly dangerous happen. I didn’t understand it at first; it took a moment to sink in and resolve itself. Mid-point through the bridge of a song, a look crossed Vivianne’s face that wasn’t meant for anybody. It looked as though she’d taken a blow to the head and was stunned and lost. It was an inward look of disorientation, a dizzy, sick look. At the same time, she hit a single wrong note and sustained it, a string bent just slightly out of tune. Though it didn’t last for long, something turned then, in the song and on her face, and I felt as though she hung precariously at the edge of some familiar abyss. There was a decision that she needed to make, either to let herself fall in, or to climb back from the edge – it was not clear to me which way she had decided when again she was back in command of herself, the off-note dropped, the music carried again ahead. She howled like some animal and the crowd responded. I could feel it in my skin. Wherever it was she was going to next, she was taking the whole room with her.
Was this what had bothered Proteus so badly? Had he known that this moment was coming and what it meant? Did I? I couldn’t be sure that he’d even noticed anything happening, because when I turned to the wall where I’d last seen him, he wasn’t there. Looking around the room, I couldn’t find him anywhere.
•
The drummer Vinny had gone to many places and had seen many things, Proteus learned in talking with him after the show. He’d travelled through Central Asia. He’d studied Buddhism with the exiled monks in Kathmandu. He’d walked across Scotland, dug graves in Ireland, cooked bangers and mash in a dismal B&B in Wales, and eaten psychedelic mushrooms in Southern France, seeking visions of the slaughtered Cathars.
“I’d stayed near the Findhorn community in Scotland,” he said, “where they grow those impossibly huge cabbages in nothing but sand. They had guest rooms… hell, they kept an entire hotel there for guests, practically, but it was too expensive for me. I was broke. But no one seemed to mind if I pitched my tent nearby, so I lived in the forest, where also, interestingly, there was a whole community of Tibetan Monks. At least, I think that’s what they were – I never did quite understand their trip.”
“They weren’t Tibetan?” Proteus asked.
“No, they were. But they were different from the ones I’d met in Kathmandu. I don’t know if I can quite explain it. Maybe it was the location. Their practice was… strange. But they had a special relationship to what was going on around there, with the things that lived in the forest, and the things in the air and on the ground.”
“There were things.”
“Yes. I don’t mean the birds and animals. There were things there without bodies. Elemental spirits, and the monks had some kind of relationship with them. They seemed pretty well adapted to it all. There were prayer flags strewn all throughout the forest, hung in places where these spirits lived, around special trees and groves and rocks. To them, to the monks, they’d been tuned in to these sorts of spirits forever and had ceremonies to honor them from way back. The spirits really like ceremonies, I guess. Sometimes you might see things just go shooting off through the woods. Things that weren’t quite there. And if I tried to follow after them, there’d be nothing at all, of course. These monks – since we were all living in the woods, we’d have meals together – when I told them about whatever blurry thing or bright spot I thought I’d saw, they’d just laugh. But it was from them that I learned how if I just sat still and waited… things would approach me.”
“Things like what?”
“Well, like for instance, one of the first things, I woke up one night in my tent because something jumped onto my chest. It scared the shit out of me and I almost screamed, but then I saw what it was, and it was just a cat. No big deal, just an ordinary cat. Except that it wasn’t exactly a cat at all. It was, but not entirely, because it wasn’t quite there. It was sort of transparent, if you follow me. I could see right through it, because it was mostly just the outline of a cat with nothing in the middle, like a blueprint, or an animated plan for a potential cat that hadn’t happened yet. That was the sense I had of it.”
“So what happened?”
“It jumped down and scampered off.”
“That’s it?”
“What else do you want? Would it make you happy if I told you it ran straight through the wall of my tent?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Is that what it did?”
“Yes.”
“I guess that’s good enough then.”
“The forest was full of weird shit like that. Nothing harmful, nothing all that scary. Unless, I guess, you scare easily. But playful. Things that would mess with you, in a fun sort of way.” He lit a cigarette with a match, shook it out, and then looked around for somewhere to throw the spent match away. Finding nothing, he held onto it, pinched between two fingers. “Vivianne tells me you were a Zen Buddhist monk. Is that true?”
“Yes,” Proteus said, “for ten years. But I wasn’t a very good one.”
“Oh.”
“I had to leave the monastery.”
“The other monks kicked you out?”
“No. Not exactly. They probably would have, though, if I’d stayed much longer. I wasn’t very good at it.”
“Were you… bad? Starting fights or something?”
“It wasn’t like that. More like… I lost sight of the practice. I got sidetracked by something, and it ran at counter-purposes to what the practice is for. I guess.” Proteus looked at his feet. “I guess I might have lost my mind again. Yes, I think that’s what happened. I lost my mind. Something came along and took my mind away from me. Cut it up into e
qual parts. It was all a bit… unfortunate… really.”
“God,” said Vinny, after a moment’s thoughtful pause.
“Maybe.”
•
Cigarettes were lit up between us, trails and curls of smoke and us speaking in jets and a blue haze in the air. The whole room was thick with it, and the bare, human smell of sweat, and of spilled beer and perfume. We were in one corner of the room, Viv perched on the steep wooden steps that led to an office loft, while I, facing her, my back to the wall, leaned into the soft board or whatever it was behind me that buckled and bent, yet was support enough to hold me up without breaking.
“Marg isn’t with you?” I asked. I hadn’t seen her anywhere in the crowd.
“We broke up,” Viv said. “Just yesterday in fact. There were things, you know, we could never quite see eye to eye on.”
“Always there are these things, yes?” I said. As if I knew.
“These were important things. But it’s okay. I mean, we’re still friends.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. This is not a problem.”
I felt a sudden, thick flush in my crotch.
“Whenever I see you, Proteus,” she said, “it’s when I need to see you. You give me something that I need, at that moment, that only you have. But I’ve never given you anything in return. So it’s fucked up. It’s all one-way.”
“I wouldn’t know if that’s the case,” I said, with as breezy a tone as I could manage, “because as far as I can see, there’s only one thing of mine that you’ve taken. Honestly, it probably wasn’t mine to begin with, and I likely would have lost it anyhow. There’s no way to be sure, of course.”
“Of course.”
She did not ask me what it was, and I wouldn’t have been able to explain if she had, but her silence led me to suspect she may have thought she understood. Which she almost certainly didn’t.
“What I’m saying is that I don’t blame you.”
“And what I’m saying…” She stood. Her slender hand reached out, her expression that same open innocence I’d seen once before, at the monastery, when she’d finally surrendered her guitar.
“Vivi, sweety…” a nearby voice cooed.
Before her fingers could quite touch my cheek, a purple feather boa wrapped around her wrist and arm, pulling her back, then encircled her throat – her eyes widening in surprise – then wound down over her slim body, joined by feathers of other bright and improbable colors, strung around her by a swarm of feminine arms all waving and tugging at her at once, caressing her shoulders and waist. For a moment our eyes were still locked, and then with a slight shrug and tilt of her head, as if to say well, what can I do? she was pulled back into the crowd.
•
“Look, Vinny,” said Proteus suddenly, looking up again from his shoes into the drummer’s eyes, “I know you’ve been places. I know you’ve seen things.”
“I suppose I have.”
“In all your travels, I don’t know, maybe when you were eating mushrooms and looking for some traces of those murdered Cathars, I need to know, did – did you…”
“Yes?”
“Did you ever… see…?”
“Ever see what?”
But Proteus found that his mind was unclear. It had become thick and heavy, and the words wouldn’t come, and his mouth wouldn’t work. It was as if he’d driven a car into mud and could go no further, his wheels spinning futilely, splattering a fantail of muck behind him. But he couldn’t give up – no, it was too important that he get his point across, that he make himself understood, because he needed something.
Needed? Something?
Wait a minute: Needed? Something?
Vinny looked at him with an eyebrow raised, a familiar look, something wrong, his expression sliding into…
He needed answers, yes! That was it…
Or, no, if not answers, not exactly answers, then what he needed were questions – he needed questions that were better than the ones he already had, because these ones, the ones he had, were shapeless, formless. Entirely unsatisfying. Hm. He needed questions that had shape and form, that were a particular shape and form, that were particular and could be particulated. No, wait, particulated? No. He needed to talk to somebody, an actual person, who had seen what he’d seen, if there were any such person. And… and if anyone were a person, it was… it was Vinny, see? Right? Who was looking at him sideways now, for sure. So he pushed his mind forward, revving through the dense mud, splattering it all over as the words came with terrific effort – and even when they did come, they wouldn’t quite leave his mouth, not in the right way: “A big…” he said, “shiny… ah, maybe not so shiny, ah… metal…”
“A what? A big what? Metal, you say? I don’t know what you’re trying to say. What are you trying to say?”
•
I’d stood off to the side and watched as, in a moment, another girl, smallish, with red hair, curled herself up in Vivianne’s lap, all kitten-like, so languid and liquid, and started making out with her on the bench at the opposite side of the room. No one but me seemed to notice or care. The crowd by now had thinned by half, leaving empty spaces in the former garage, more gaps between people than people. The cement floor, now exposed, was covered in sticky, dried globs of spilled beer, peppered with spent cigarette butts and the odd candy wrapper or wadded bunch of cellophane, and a smell of marijuana smoke curled and mingled amongst all the other smells clinging to the air. Off toward another corner I saw where a group of four young people were passing the joint around. I thought to light up another cigarette, just for cover, for something to do with my hands, but the idea made me feel sick. Luckily, no one seemed to notice or to care about my presence either.
I looked over to the “stage” not far from where Viv and the redhead were busy with each other, where Vinny dismantled his drum kit, where an electric spotlight hung over him, gerry-rigged to a rafter above, and though the light was off it still managed to call attention to the spot, though Vinny himself did his level best to remain invisible, and where, through glass window squares in the retractable garage door, shone the outside darkness which only reflected everything that was already inside back inside again.
I did not know why I was still here.
I closed my eyes and saw the future.
•
The future was a wide and level landscape of dust.
Along the furthest edges of this landscape were the uneven outbreak of brown serrations, short mountains grown from the even plains, some nearer, some further off, like so many broken teeth, and here the horizon folded in on itself with an atmospheric shimmer, both vibrant and oddly still, almost a solid thing in itself, milky, smeared, and translucent. If I stared forward, there wasn’t much that I could see but the occasional dust devil, threading along the edge, but if I looked toward the apparitions sideways – that is, if I put his attention at the corners of my eyes instead – I could just make out the diagonal scratchings of slanted dust clouds, angled in the direction of the sun. These moved without seeming to; that is, they moved slowly, so slowly that I couldn’t see that they were moving at all. But they did.
With sudden gusts, the wind threw rough specks against the skin of my face, pelting me, blasting against my cheeks. Against this I instinctively shut my eyes. And with my eyes shut a voice cackled, from somewhere behind, or from the back of my head, “Ayah! Here everything is the same! Everything is exactly the same!”
“The same as what?” I asked.
“As everything else! Ha-ha!”
•
Helping Vinny take his kit back outside to his car – the dolly he’d used before had gone missing, so now we had to carry everything – I told him, excitedly, though he wasn’t listening, “I bought a camera today… at a pawn shop… Really, I bought two cameras – two of them, one digital, just a little thing, and one…” and realized how much I sounded just then like Eugene at Inn House Manor, with his news of sodas and pancakes, and in a co
nfused, tangential moment wondered how in the world Eugene managed to afford all those meals at IHOP, realizing then that, of course, he didn’t smoke. “It’s the first I’ve had since I left the business, since, you know, since taking my refuge, in a state… in a state… of… Ten years. Ten years, see, without… without anything. No equipment, no… no objects… Not that they were against objects. No, nothing against objects, listen – but now that I have something… I’ve got this – I’ve – I’ve got these, see. These cameras. These are eyes.”
Vinny walked ahead of me, bent with the weight of the bass drum in one hand. I carried a stack of toms and a snare ahead of me, tiered, like a cake. He did not look back.
“Now that I have something…”
He reached his car. He unlocked it. A little Honda. A little, beat-up, bent-up Honda something-or-other.
“I expect the training should come back to me. Not the training, you understand. Or maybe, yes, that training too. That should be interesting, don’t you think? I think. Think? No, no, I mean…”
He lifted the lid of the trunk and hefted the bass drum inside.
“I don’t know what I mean.”
These other pieces I carried wouldn’t fit into the trunk with the bass drum already in there, so they went instead into the back seat. This was difficult, since there were only the two doors and the front seat had to fold forward to make way, which didn’t really give much space to pass bulky objects inside, but I handed each separate case to Vinny and he managed them through. He’d done this before.
“No!” I started, “I do know what I mean. I mean the visual training is what I mean. I mean composition. I mean to see, to frame, yes, to arrange… the visual field, the objects of sight. The objects, the divisions. Of color? Yes, color, but more importantly shade and texture and… and line… yes, there are, there will be, lines. Somewhere. I’m certain of it. Gradients too. There have to be. Divisions, and… and mergings. Nothing is haphazard. No accidents. Everything reaches the eye. Listen, because I’ve learned to divide myself, I can see the future. Or, no, that’s not it. Because I see the future, I’ve learned to divide… myself? Something…? Although of course everything is found, you understand, everything is found as it is, the way it is, but it must be something else… it must be… seen. Yes. Properly. Or else there’s nothing, and we can’t have that. We can’t have nothing. No value in it. Except the obvious, of course.”
