The Listeners

by Leni Zumas

  Did Pete ever hear Purgastoria, or any of the earliers? By the time our first record came out he was gone. When we played near his college, some meadowy town in New England, he was in the audience. He saw me see him—nodded—but left before our set was over. I did not tell Cam.

  In the table drawer I kept a book borrowed years ago from the library: Enchantments of the Octopus. I opened to a middle page:Strange mating ritual of argonaut octopus in Mediterranean female waits while some distance away male accumulates semen in ventral cavity extracts semen with a tentacle tentacle separates from male’s body, floats toward female, enters her belly, lets loose semen into her organs arm is messenger bringing male’s hoard to female male knows nothing of the beauty he’s hacked off a limb for and female knows of her mate only the fertilizing arm.

  One Christmas in midchildhood I’d gone downstairs with my sister very early and in the dark we stared at the stockings. She tried to guess the gifts from the bulges. Tree smell prickled the walls of my nose. Under the cold was black from dead candles. I’m going to look for just one tiny second, I explained, and was hauling a chair to the mantelpiece when Fod (where had he snuck from?) said “Greedy!” and I stopped, red. But the shame faded fast, replaced by excitement at my presents, the octopus most. It was soft and gray with a sewn-on mouth and black marble eyes. Fod said each arm had a different power, and it would be up to me to learn what all the powers were.

  Only the fertilizing arm.

  The other thing in the drawer was the old bike chain. Greenish-blackish links cold on my skin, Cam on my skin, the chain hard between my chest and his pressed ear. When he’d said I want to hear, I let him listen. Mineral neck. Sopping panties slicked up tight to the bone. In Milwaukee, I had wanted him again. My fingers are ten spots of blood who remember you.

  TODAY HE GOES, Planning any collect calls to your little shaver? What is a shaver. From the other night the one in 10th grade. He was of age, I said. Of age to what, go down on you before he does his social studies homework? He was 21 actually. If you believe that says C you are even stupider than I thought. I just hope you kept it to oral because otherwise he’s got a statutory case against you. Can we change the subject? says M who was driving and therefore had authority since whoever’s driving can claim they’re going to crash if people don’t change the subject. So C shut up and in the roadwatch silence I figured it out. Reason for all his bitchiness yesterday. HE IS JELLLLLUSSSSSS!

  THE PONG OF cheap meat and fry oil hung on the air. Little paper boats rode the counter, too grease-sogged to be ashtrays; I tapped my cigarette into a coffee can. On the wood paneling behind the register was a prehistoric poster from a place downtown that had been converted several years ago into a wine bar: gunpowder silk screen of a witch taking off her spiky hat to reveal a headful of cassettes, and in swooping letters the names of the bands. That had been a good show; I’d gone with Cam, who was acquainting me with the romance of the set list and the hand stamp. The first time I ever bleached my hair, Fod said at the table: So now you’re some kind of deviant? I’d expected my mother to be mad too, but she seemed not really to notice. (After my sister died, she noticed everything less.) Riley said, I bet if you put a thing in your nose she won’t give a crap either. A thing? sneered I. The new hair had made me feel the same way buying records did: like I lived in a secret country. After a trip to the record store, I’d spread out my purchases on the bedroom floor, each to inspect, to adore. I would play the records in a row then play them again, and again. I did not skip the weaker songs, because Cam had taught me you couldn’t always tell at first. There was a three-listen rule. If interrupted by school or dinner, I switched off the player but kept the needle on the vinyl exactly where it had halted.

  Another flier, older, tacked higher on the paneling: Show off or shut up!!! $3, all you can hear.

  And now I was someone to whom slender boys felt they could say, Whatever, lady!—unaware that I’d once stood on stages.

  Most shameful of all, I cared about this.

  Ajax said, “I know we’ve already been tightening belts, but we have to do something drastic. Last month’s revenue was a horror show.” Fingering the wooden arrow in his earlobe, he squinted out the front window. “I mean horror.”

  “Mmm.”

  “I don’t really know what else can be done, barring—well, barring.”

  Ajax would always be worried about money. He didn’t understand that we were a beloved local necessity that would carry on into perpetuity.

  He said, “Mind not taking your check again this round?”

  “Um, no problem.” Dear Mother and Father: I regret to inform you that I will be moving back home at your earliest convenience.

  “Thanks, man, I really—”

  The radio said, “A report released last week describes female interrogators in U.S. prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo smearing menstrual blood on Islamic prisoners and taunting them with the threat that they will not be given water to purify themselves before prayer.”

  A clawed brown cheek, three red stripes, a white hand laughing.

  My elbow, daubed with my sister’s blood. She’d had her period all over herself.

  SHE BECAME A WOMAN three months before she died. It was a school day, but she hadn’t come down yet. Our mother called and called up the stairs. “Go tell that lazy lass to get a move on,” she told me, “it’s seven fifteen!”

  “I have a stomachache,” my sister said. “Will you get me some ginger ale?”

  “We don’t have ginger ale,” I said.

  She yawned, kicked the covers off, swung her legs down, and creakily stood. A red puddle lay in the bed.

  “It’s food for a baby,” I explained. “It grows on the walls of this pouch. If you don’t have a baby that month, the food falls down and comes out from your downstairs. It looks like blood but isn’t exactly.”

  My sister stared at the picture I was drawing. A girl’s stomach was raining. Black droplets fell to her feet. “Every month it falls out for about five days,” I added.

  “But how do you know when?”

  “When what?”

  “When it’s going to come out, so you can put the pad there.”

  I shook my head: “No, it’s not like that. It’s—always.”

  She was shocked. “The whole time?”

  “Yeah, but there’s a little break in the middle and not as much comes on the later days.”

  “And does your stomach hurt for the whole time?”

  “Not the whole time,” I said.

  AFTER WORK, WALKING home from the subway, I decided on twenty-four slivers of carrot. Twenty-one bites of spinach. The good doctor had said to stop and breathe when I felt myself making a list. Against the breath, stronger than breath, the list continued: nine bites of hard-boiled egg. Why must everything, the good doctor had asked, be divisible by three?

  When butter was cooking, I saw whitish chicken yellow and all my blood swarmed to the temples. Hot butter looked like raw fat in the gash in my sister’s head; it smelled like worms in the flesh of gashed girls. A worm was a foot and a stomach. From the stomach came juice that unstitched your flesh. Fizzling butter was the fat that had bled from my sister. Please stop cooking that please stop. Quinn, you can’t be this sensitive and expect everyone to cater to it. But can’t you use olive oil instead? No, said Mert, the recipe calls for—

  When beef was cooking I saw the bloodworm, and stomach juice hurt my throat. I ran up the sidewalk with a hand on my mouth—fleshy grease from the restaurant kitchens—and people were staring, because I was crying. With the other hand I wiped my eyes. If I took the first hand away, all the juice would spill. The bloodworm was gliding out of my sister’s eye cavity, its own bulging eyes grown over with a fine membrane—it navigated by odor. The worm made no sound. In and out of holes it went, chasing meat with its nostrils. It pecked flesh with tiny teeth the shape of nails. It had eaten her whole face. It had gorged until its skin was stretched so tight it had to
stop; and my sister’s body waited for the worm to start eating again. The bloodworm had lain on my sheet in the morning. I’d thrown the sheet and mattress pad and my underwear away. If Fod were to see my underwear—I waited until he’d put out all the trash, then brought my stains secretly to the curb. There was always more for the worm to eat unless you hid every drop.

  The soldier doused her gusset with food coloring, walked into the interrogation room, shoved her hand into her pants, and brought up a red palmful. She smeared it on the face of the Muslim detainee, for whom contact with a woman on her period was, according to the U.S. Army’s manuals on Arab culture, forbidden. This was more than contact: this was the womb itself in tracks down his cheek.

  From bed I watched the walls for a telltale thump or bulge. The walls were naked. My most recent New Year’s resolution had been to blanken. I’d ripped away everything. Silk-screened posters for great shows of old; black-and-white pictures of my body on stages; album covers I loved anchored by a nail at each corner. All had gone to the floor and stayed for days, tripping me in the night. Then I’d gathered everything up to burn but didn’t know where. Too much smoke for indoors, and out in the yard might attract a cop and cops scared me. The fear was unreasonable, especially for somebody as white as I was in a neighborhood where they expected black people to do the crimes. I’d just heaped the rejectamenta in a corner of the kitchen and thrown newspapers on top.

  The pink was darker where a flier or photograph had been, but the sun would do its work. My throat felt regular. No hands at it. I hadn’t been visited by the freakeries since the band days. They used to come when I was too neezled to ignore them. In a hot-walled bar somewhere south, one of those blank medium towns, a whole night had been full of freakeries, corner of the eye, corner of the eye. On their wooden stumps they had jumped just quick enough out of my sight line.

  C still scorns me for the sexual relations with G, and I scorn me too every time G says something stupid, which is every time the mouth opens. But the Offer rests on him. He is the reason for it.

  Geck brought us star. He gave us shredding divo, oily yellow hair flying as he flailed and twirred and flung to the whole room’s heart’s content. He was good enough—idiot-savantly gifted enough—that he could play amazing even when loaded. If he fell off the stage, he never lost his place in the song. If he kicked a boy in front and the boy bit his ankle back, Geck went on picking and grinning.

  The scout said, “The guitar parts are insane!”

  So we tolerated. I tolerated most. I let him in. I hated that Cam knew it. What kind of conversations do you guys have afterward? Can he even have a conversation?

  MY SISTER WAS extratalented in the odor department. She could smell on a book the reaction of the last person to read it. Crouched on the library carpet, she put her nose to the open Bible page: The woman was worried about not being good enough. And a dust-black hardcover: The man got mad because he didn’t understand this. And a fat paperback with a flame-haired nurse falling into the arms of a soldier: The girl liked this story better than her life.

  She could smell on a clean knife in the kitchen which flesh it had sawed the day before. This went into a baby sheep leg, she’d say. This made cubes from the chest of a chicken.

  Sickening food delighted her. Revolting creatures did not alarm her. The snails on Edinburgh Lane had no houses, were tubes of hard jelly that left smears on the sidewalk, and I couldn’t stand their bald, stalked eyes; but she picked them up. “You look like a banana,” she said, “and you look like puke.” They were not snails, she informed me, they were slugs and they wouldn’t hurt me and it was stupid to be worried.

  “I’m not,” I said.

  “Yes you are because you’re scared of the colors and noises.”

  “I just don’t want them in my head.”

  “That’s because you’re afraid,” she reasoned. “If you don’t be afraid, then it’s not bad if they’re there.” She cuddled two squirming tubes in her palm.

  And fat bled from her head. It was the color of blood but also of fat: whitish yellow. It had brains mixed in. When the medics turned her over, brains and fat in a lace of red globbed onto the pillow. Her brain had many things in it: the length of a giant squid, the way to the library, the story of Lacustrina who lived in a lake and had a silver heart no boy could break.

  DATE ON MILK was two months prior. I opened the soft triangle mouth: it had gone penis-cheese. But something about the stink was relaxing, a proof of nature’s workings—the reliable progress of decay. While my body collapsed, cell by cell, the milk was dying even faster. The rat, too, would meet its maker long before I did, unless it managed to infect me with twenty-first-century plague. The rat carried, I was certain, all manner of disease into the apartment, dropping flecks from his tiny brown lips; when he chewed newspaper his saliva dried to spores. Scamper, scamper, bump. I’m going to hammer out your brains. Are rat brains the same color as human? (When the little rabbit cut its foot on a nail at Belfry Street I’d been shocked that its blood looked just like a person’s.)

  The day was warmish. I stood naked in the kitchen, sweat nipping between my thighs. When I scratched, my shoulder felt padded—with defrosted burritos and maple doughnuts. The red-eyed doll, the dragon, the sailor sat over notched scars. Before I’d gotten all the work done, the scars had been tiny bottle caps under the skin. Mert had sent me to the dink after she barged in—I’d forgotten to lock the bathroom—and saw. We did not talk about it; Mert simply made an appointment and said she would pick me up from school at two thirty. The dink asked me to roll up my sleeve and I said no and the dink waited, then asked again, and I said no again. Your mother tells me you’ve been hurting yourself, said the dink.

  I brought the candy bar, my old knife, and sandwich bags to the couch and began to slice. Octy counted with me: one, two, three on up to thirty-nine. Each sandwich bag received six slices, which made six bags, and I was allowed to eat the remaining three right away. As I brought the first tiny piece to my mouth, I heard a whistling.

  Let me back in!

  Whistling turned to howling. Teeth hit the glass.

  I ate the second and third pieces and gathered up the bags. “Stop it,” I said.

  But please.

  “Stop it, I can’t let you in!” I bumbled toward the kitchen, eyes closed so I wouldn’t see my sister.

  The whistling quit and I opened my eyes. On the counter, next to a can of cheese, the hammer waited for its chance. Just show your face, I told the rat, and the floor’ll be wearing your brains! I was talking out loud again. The first sign. Not of mental illness—those symptoms usually appear by late youth—it was something worse, not glamorous at all. Crumble-brain.

  MY SISTER MADE her mouth an O and puffed at Riley. “What does it smell like?”

  He shrugged. “Your mouth, I guess.”

  “Is it bad?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is it like onions?”

  “Why, you ate some?”

  She blew into her palm and sniffed. “There’s this thing called period breath and I want to know if I have it. Some women give off an oniony smell during their menstrual. If it happens to me, I’ll—”

  “Kill yourself?” I suggested from across the room.

  “Go to a breath doctor,” she said.

  Riley leaned to smell again. “It might be a little oniony,” he admitted.

  This tale is of Lacustrina, who lived in a lake. She had the head of a girl and the legs of a snake. She had a silver heart no boy could break. She loved to sleep but preferred to wake. She envied the mermaids their saltwater cake of such elegant sweetness it made your tongue ache.

  You are Cadmus. I am Europa. I am stolen. You spent a long time looking, never found. You killed a dragon, and planted his teeth, and soldiers grew from the ground.

  MINK’S DAUGHTER WAS cute but clearly an only child, accustomed to being the sole getter of attention. My own ego problems stemmed (was my theory) from those two a
nd a half years before my sister: the newborn me in a basket, oohed and ahhed over; the baby me in her high chair, reveling in hours of gaze; the toddler me, destroying furniture but not getting punished because I was their one and only pettle. Naturally I’d been angry when another showed up. Siblings protected you from spoiling, since there was never quite enough to go around.

  After the soup, Mink brought out a plate of macaroons. Meli said she didn’t want any.

  “What’s up, bee, you full?”

  She shrugged. “They’ll go straight to my hips.”

  “You don’t have hips.”

  “Well I still don’t want any.”

  “Are you sure?” Mink said. “I mean, it’s up to you, but that bullshit shouldn’t be on your radar.”

  “I’m sure,” Meli said, shoving her hands between her knees.

  I’d seen them, heard them, hated them during hours of group therapy in my outpatient program—the girls who cared about nothing except how small they could get.

  “Delicious!” I said and bit into a second macaroon.

  Meli watched me with a new coldness.

  We monitored the street from the porch, me with my cigarette, Mink with her tea. The smell of green came like water from the trees. Mink hummed to herself, staring off.

  “You really think it was someone else?” I said.

  “Of course it was. Cam hasn’t been around in years.”

  “His parents might still live here,” I reminded her.

  Mink sighed and rubbed her foot. “Okay, so he comes for a three-day visit, then leaves. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  That was Mink’s way, not to worry about it. She was so good at looking right in front of her, never to the side, certainly never behind. Maybe it helped to have a kid, another body to shelter, clean, and feed. Maybe the daily effort of keeping your kid alive and all right helped you not feel guilty for anything you’d done before.