The Listeners

by Leni Zumas

  “They try to draft me, I’ll shoot my toe off,” declared the drummer. “How you like me now?”

  When Mink drew near I said: “Bad day or something?”

  She turned. “I bounced three checks.”

  “Oops.”

  “Ninety dollars in fees.”

  “Re-up ici, madam!” shouted the singer.

  “One second.” Mink hunched and unhunched her shoulders, slow; then bent to serve.

  The singer looked over at me. Kept looking. I decided to be flattered.

  “Hey,” he said. “You’re that—I mean you were in—I mean you used to play around here, right?”

  “I did,” I said.

  “I thought so.” He took a pull from the glass Mink had set down. “There’s an old poster of y’all up at WMUC. I have a show.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “So this is totally weird, because I just saw another guy from your outfit. Today. A few fucking hours ago. And now I see you.”

  “How come you didn’t see her?” I said, pointing at Mink. “She was in it, too.”

  The singer looked. Shrugged. “Time is a hammer. Anyway, for some reason I thought that guy died. Didn’t one of you, like, die?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Oh. Sorry, I don’t know why I thought that.” He swallowed more beer. “I kept thinking when I saw him—this was on the subway, right—isn’t that guy dead? And really tall, by the way. What is he, six four?”

  Geck was not tall.

  “I think you saw someone else,” I said.

  “No, he had the exact same face as on the poster. And the hair. Old-fashioned, you know? Like, a black flop.”

  Geck was blond.

  I fretted my wristband. Pluck, snap, pluck, snap. Stretched the rubber far enough to break. When the bracelet had first been assigned to me by the good doctor, I didn’t intend to use it, until I discovered that it worked. It brought my brain back to itself. If terror, crack band brutally hard. If dread, flick elastic and focus on pinch: dread gone.

  CAM DIDN’T COUNT as a ghost; he was perfectly alive. I had never doubted that he was, though in ten years I hadn’t heard hide nor hair.

  He had been good at every school subject.

  He had loved American cola.

  He had opposed the shaving or waxing of pubic hair, believing nether-whisker removal to be decorative where no decoration belonged. “The cock is an organ,” he once said. “It’s not like you’re going to dress your liver up in a bonnet.”

  SNOW IMPROVED MY ragged neighborhood: the scrawny trees went gentle against the falling white, and each fin-gerwide housefront appeared to be a holder of secrets. A gray cat looked up, flakes collecting on its lashes. Hello, cat. I turned my key, climbed the black stairs, wondered if his eyes would catch too much cold in them. Poured a glass of half cherry juice, half whiskey, and drank it in two swallows. My octopus watched from the couch. It was too warm in here, the first-floor stereo too loud. Pulled off my glimmie and drenched socks. Thermostat had been jacked—it was hard to breathe. I stomped on a loose board. Should open a window. The music tightened to a tunnel, sharpening, grinding, and my eyes had too much water in them: the couch reeled in jelly: I needed to sit. Where was Octy? I would sit with him. First open a window, then sit. First sit, then open—? I couldn’t hear anything except wind raking the hairs. The floor came up through the water to meet me.

  And I woke up in the bells. They fell straight down from the cathedral. The news of Cam was still there—I prodded my throat, where it had lodged. He had the exact same face as on the poster. But it wasn’t him. Couldn’t be. Pinstriped Jacket had been mistaken.

  It was my day off, and I wished it weren’t. You have a brain, why don’t you use it? My brother too sat for way too long at windows, stayed in his apartment for stretches of more than twenty-four hours. I, at least, was mostly able to fake it, but Riley was all bashfulness, a scuttler at life’s hem. Had he ever had sex? Of course, he was three decades old! But had he? His bedsheets were decorated with ladybugs, and how could that teen-friar body dare tangle up with another? It was mortifying to picture him naked, all bone and hair, no ass, eyes bulby with terror, skin freckled and moled—a chalky hide like my own, inherited from Belfast, Cardiff, Manchester.

  I radiated a burrito and spooned on salsa. Stared at the swollen lump under its cheerful sauce, fat-drenched blood slowing and hardening. “It’s fine,” I said out loud. But that whitish chicken-yellow smell of raw fat in the gash—I breathed, breathed, waited for new air in my mouth. Burrito into trash.

  It had been a long time since I noticed the blood in my food. Years, maybe. But the blood seemed to be back.

  Never fear. I flipped on the plastic machine for a round of my newest game, wherein the streets of an island city were strewn with poked corneas, wrung necks, and slit throats. Nighttime always. Knives and guns were the standard, but once you accumulated enough points you got to use poison-dipped arrows or a laser that from a hundred feet could stop a heart.

  On my street, I was one of two white residents, the other a hunchback elder who slabbed on clown-blush for her trips to the store—unless there happened to be some white invalids or white serial killers who never showed their faces. Two Thumbs handed me a new pack and nodded, businesslike. I wished he would say something, even a weatherly remark, because I liked his voice, so squeaky for so jumbo a guy.

  “Busy today?”

  He shrugged.

  I stole a look at the stub; its teeny nail was clean.

  Crossing into the next neighborhood (whiter, sprucer) I passed a spark whose mouth was half gone under a chunk of hair. Then I saw them: not one poster, not two, but twenty. Their faces marched the whole way down the block. These mooncalves were never supposed to get big; in fact, they’d claimed not to want to. Their creepy little efforts to make art without bowing to the marketplace had annoyed me but had also been a comfort: they would never be famous. Yet now they were everywhere—piped loud into coffee chains, ten feet tall on construction barriers. The singer, Jupiter, had lost major weight since last I saw him. Where have you been hiding yourself? he’d said and I muttered something about a new project I was assembling, and he said anytime we wanted to open for them we were welcome to. You guys helped us so much when we were starting out, he added, palming a supermarket cantaloupe as if he could have learned something from how it felt.

  We did not help you intentionally, I’d wanted to say.

  Cam had hated them too.

  I wondered if there might be an official name for the syndrome where you feel like you have to leave the house or you will die, but then, after ten minutes of being outside, all you want is to go back in.

  Back at the ranch I was greeted by two pieces of mail. One was from my landlord, memo-style: Your final warning. Once again it was past the fifteenth and I had not paid this month’s, and he wanted me to know that he could start eviction proceedings if it happened one more time. But he was all bluster and no organization. I had been here long enough not to fear him.

  The other was a letter from Carlton E. Shutz, Wilson High School alum:Here’s hoping you all are happy, healthy, and thriving in every way—that your kids are eating their vegetables without insisting on the airplane-spoon trick every time; that your spouse puts the cap back on the toothpaste; that your neighbors’ skateboarding stunts don’t start before ten on Sundays; that your jury duty was brief, interesting and came out the right way; that your team has a good shot at the Final Four, and that even if your team has no shot, that your pool picks have an uncanny, lucky feel to them; that your running times and mortgage rates are down and your bowling scores and IRAs are up; and that you’re still (happily) surprised every so often by the world despite our more than a third-of-a-century worth of experience in it.

  It went on to ask for a donation to Wilson’s alumni fund. I didn’t remember Carlton E. Shutz and I did not know we had turned fifty-five instead of thirty-five. Mortgage rates? Cap back on the toothpaste?
Or by thirty-five did pretty much everyone have an IRA?

  “IF A DRACUNCULUS got under your skin, what would you do?”

  “A quoi?”

  The middle read sternly from her notebook: “A worm bred in the hot countries, which grows to many yards’ length between the skin and the flesh.”

  “Use a razor,” said the oldest, “to chop a flesh-flap, then pull the worm out.”

  “I would use a snake-charming flute,” said the youngest, “and play it near my body and the worm would hear and crawl out the way it came in.”

  “Down your throat,” whispered the middle.

  GECK WOULD BE on the flowered couch at his parents’ house, where the world sank away. He had stretched across this couch for a lot of years with the same view (brown wall, green chair, white mantel) and in the same sausage-casing, though at different poundages and states of personal hygiene. Today he would be unshaven and thinnish. Wouldn’t be thinnish for long unless he started using again. Already he could feel new fat filling the pockety skin. His mother had been cooking up a storm. “Glad to have you home again, honey!” but she was not really that glad about it, nor, God knows, was his father. They were old. They didn’t need to be cooking for some son. He should have been cooking for them, or hiring someone to; he should have been buying them a house in a neighborhood with better trees.

  She brought him a blanket and nodded at the television. “Anything fun on?”

  “No, Ma.”

  His leg would feel terrible—throbbing, raw. The old injury made itself known when it was damp out, or when Geck was especially tired. A wee shot of dodge would have hushed the throb; clean, the whole bone ached. He’d rub arnica down his calf. Arnica was for muscles, not bones, but his legmeat hurt too and he liked the tingle of the medicine. Wanting it all over, that warm shiver, he would wipe the ointment on his forehead.

  “Ham salad for supper,” his mother would say from the doorway. “How does that sound?”

  “Good,” Geck would mumble, shifting on the cushions, his boxers disagreeably snug. Time to get some new garb for this plumpening bulk. Perhaps he and his dear mother would take a trip to the mall. They’d walk among the teens, all of whom were having more sex than Geck was; and they would browse for husky sizes; and they would eat cinnamon buns on a plastic bench.

  And when he walked into the bar, my first thought was that he was looking better these days—not all withered and sweaty. My next thought was that I’d seen it before, the betterness, and did not trust it at all.

  “Tonic water with lime,” he said. At Mink’s raised eyebrow, he added: “I’m on the wagonista.”

  “Congratulations,” she said. “Again.”

  “Yeah, well…” His eyelids fluttered.

  Mink, humming, busied herself with the nozzles.

  “It was my birthday rather recently,” he remarked.

  “Oh yeah? Happy birthday.”

  “The big eff oh.”

  If he was forty, Mink couldn’t be far behind. The same horror’d hit her when he had a birthday on tour: I’ll be thirty soon? she had said to me, in actual wonder. Geck had been mad at us for not getting him a present and made a series of dark comments about our oversight, particularly mine, since by biblical standards I’d known him better than they did.

  “Did I put enough lime in?” asked Mink.

  “Yeah,” said Geck, “it tastes all right, considering.”

  She could see he wasn’t long for that wagon.

  “Anyway, we’re playing next Saturday—you should come.”

  “Sure, uh huh!” she said.

  Geck turned to greet his drummer, a battered old guy who still managed to hit the tinies, bequeathing venereal disease to the next generation. I leaned on the faux zinc, under the chandelier, next to an ex–danseur exotique, a dirty-deeds bore who had done all her living already and now roamed the earth putting others to sleep with it.

  “Ever had your ass eaten by two guys at once?”

  “Why no,” I said.

  “It’s not a laughing matter,” she muttered.

  I edged away toward glingles-groined Lad, who was complaining: “Why do I always have to call?”

  “Because you are more charming,” Geck said. “Did you talk to that Providence guy? We need to book some additional shit in the north. Hey Minkum, where else did we play in New England?”

  I watched her blink. Did she ever miss it, our old life? Being gone for weeks and months on end and how we draped ourselves like characters from a pageant and etched our eyes into flowers, and could have robot-mouths when we wanted, and moved through the world—so it sometimes felt—like a different species entirely? A species akin to, though not the same as, today’s genus of the arrow-haired and the fly-eyed?

  “Western Massachusetts,” she said. “And Maine.”

  “Oh hell yeah, that VFW where all those earthlings got face-knifed by balders? That was Maine.”

  “So I’ll let you know,” said Lad, rising from his stool.

  “Yeah, yeah.” Geck waved him away and announced to me, “I saw Jupiter and those guys last night. I was on the list or I wouldn’t have gone, of course, but anyway, they did a cover of ‘Dear Done For.’ ”

  “What’d he say before the song?”

  “Oh, just that they were going to play a local golden oldie and hoped we would enjoy it.”

  “Golden oldie? Those douches are our age.”

  “That’s not what it means,” Mink said. “It’s more like, the song is a classic. They were doing an homage.”

  “Mother,” I said, “fucks.”

  I wanted to tell Mink and Geck about the mistake made by the pretty little singer, and hear them scoff at it, and let them convince me it could not have been Cam he saw—that Cam lived in California, in Brazil, in the Alps for god’s sake and was certainly not riding any subways around here. But I kept thinking about that old sorcery rule about saying people’s names out loud. How it brought them back.

  MY FATHER WAS digging in the flowers. My sister was cutting with the little scissors. My brother, too young to be trusted, was indoors.

  “Fod, come here.”

  It looked like a stepped-on pomegranate, pink nubs tangled in a smashed fuzz. One nub had rolled away—I went closer—a big seed? With a stick, I prodded it. It had two tiny hands, or starts of hands, stuck together like praying, and a bulby head, and the curl of where legs would grow. It lay in a sack of skin.

  “Fod, come here.”

  “Hold your horseradish.” He kept digging.

  “I can’t because there’s babies.”

  “What kind?” asked my sister in her red coat.

  “Pink,” I said in my blue.

  They followed me to the road.

  “Mices!” screamed my sister.

  “Moles,” corrected Fod.

  “How did they get on the road?”

  “A pterodactyl,” she guessed.

  “An owl,” said Fod. “It must have dropped the mother’s body while it was flying, or thrown it up out of its stomach.”

  “But the babies are alive.”

  “No, love, they weren’t even babies yet—they were still developing.”

  “But they are babies,” she insisted.

  “No—”

  “Yes they are,” I chimed.

  “No, girls, they’re not.”

  I liked when my parents said girls because it made me as much of a girl as my sister, who was more girl. Girls, if this happens one more time, I am not buying cherry juice ever again!—our mother standing furious over a carpet stain; I had knocked over my cup.

  My sister at dinner explained about the moles. She didn’t tell about the baby she was keeping in a matchbox. It was velvet and rubbery, like an eraser. It was sleeping. Then it went gray. Had she forgotten to leave the box open at night for air to get in? She held a backyard burial to which my brother and I were invited. Flapping her hand over the matchbox she said, “The ground gets you now.”

  THE ANIM
AL’S NAILS were longer than its teeth, body thumping sheetrock as it ran. Could it see me? Where were its holes? It left the wall at night, putting bites in the newspaper and tracks on the counter. I intended to kill it with a hammer. Its nails came through the wall. My brother’s breathing used to come through the wall at Observatory Place, thinner plaster than at Edinburgh Lane; his sniffles and coughs had blown into my room where I lay all summer thinking about how Riley had just graduated from a good college whereas I had never even finished my bad one. He had a diploma (he framed it) and I had magazine clippings in a box. During the few hot months before Riley got his own apartment, we talked hardly ever, except to fight over TV channels or the last of the sugar cereal; but when I threw an unopened beer bottle into the living-room window, he told our parents a bird had flown at the glass.

  If only Octy would do battle with the rat, curl a furry tentacle round the vermin neck and wring until death throes, like tiny throat-clearings, could be heard. But I am too old to fight rats! Gnashy noises; the rat was chewing—what, a ball of blood and skin? Maybe when the old white lady down the block died the rat would whiff her corpse and find her through the pipes, nibble at the dry sinews, choke on the gristle. When you got that old, did your pubic hair fall out?

  The phone rang, and my mother was interested to find out when I’d be settling up a small loan I had promised to pay back by Christmas.

  “No, Mert, I know—”

  “But you said you—”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “…”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “I said, when do you plan to take care of it?”

  “Soon.”

  “We can’t keep lending you money. It’s humiliating for you.”

  I dug my nail bed for a wisp of skin to work at.

  “If you can’t—”

  “Look, as I have already informed you, Ajax asked if I minded not getting paid for a couple of weeks because the store is . . . we’re having cash-flow challenges. I said fine.”