The Listeners

by Leni Zumas

  “How’ve you been?”

  “Fine, how are you?”

  “I’m good!” I say. “Hey do you want to get some dinner?”

  “No thanks. I had a big, um, snack.”

  “You sure? What about some Ethiopian?”

  “I’m not hungry,” Riley said. He reached for the chain on my collarbone. “You haven’t worn this in a long time. Where’s it from, again?”

  “Cam’s bike. He wrecked it in the park.” I backed away, took the links in my own fingers. “Do you remember our video for ‘Safety-Pin Improvisation in the Wilderness’? I was wearing this, remember? The director had that wandering eye that slid around all over the place—”

  Riley, nodding, made a room in his head: quick, thick, soft-walled. He had heard it all before.

  “So no dinner?”

  “Sorry,” he said, “I’m just not—”

  “Hungry. Right. Okay, then, well—oh, I have something to ask you, almost forgot!”

  His eyes went smaller. Who could blame him.

  “So…huh, this is a weird request kind of, but…I have to move out of my apartment next month, and…”

  “How come?”

  “They’re selling the building to developers.”

  “Oh really,” he said.

  “So I was wondering if I could crash here for a week, couple of weeks, just until I get a new place?”

  “More space at Mert and Fod’s,” he pointed out.

  “Yeah, but Mert and Fod are there.”

  “Well—”

  “Oh thank you, Coyote—”

  He sighed. “Only for a little while.”

  I SAT UP in the covers, listening: the clomp of heavier shoes than Fod wore, and a chair being moved, and Mert’s fluttery feet going to the kitchen, where she opened the icebox with more gusto than usual. Where was my brother? I didn’t want to go down alone.

  “Ri?” I pounded the wall.

  “I know,” he called back.

  “Quinn! Riley!” Her voice was angry, though an outsider wouldn’t have been able to tell. Only the family could hear the tiny knots that grew on our mother’s vocal cords.

  Riley was standing outside my door when I opened it. “Were you napping?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s cold today.”

  “Yeah,” he said, although cold wasn’t why we napped.

  “Oh children,” Mert said downstairs, “look who’s here.”

  Mr. Walker got clumsily up from the armchair, bald head popping with sweat, big red hands sticking out of checked sleeves. “Hello,” he said.

  He’s scared fuckless, I thought, and he should be. He should be frightened for the rest of his life.

  “Hello,” Riley said and shook the red hand.

  I folded my arms.

  “Well!” huffed Walker, sitting back down, “it’s good to see you two.”

  Shouldn’t be two, should be three, you gun-loving fuckface. I should slice your throat but my knife’s upstairs.

  “I’m making tea,” announced our mother. “Some nice hot tea on a winter’s day.” She didn’t normally sound like a detergent commercial.

  “That sounds nice,” agreed Walker.

  Riley glared at the carpet, off somewhere, not with us. I kicked him gently to drag him back; I needed an ally. His little sock twitched.

  “How are your new schools?” bellowed Walker.

  “They’re just fine,” Mert said. “Some excellent teachers.”

  “Our school system,” I said loudly, “is ranked forty-sixth in the nation, but at least we’re beating Mississippi.”

  The kettle shrieked and Mert said, “Excuse me.”

  We excused her and sat, Walker and the two who should have been three, in silence. “You know, kids,” he said eventually and I braced for it please don’t please don’t please don’t but Walker did not. He covered his mouth with hammy fingers and stayed that way until our mother brought in a tray of blue and white tea equipment we had never seen before.

  Later, Riley twisted a licorice strand around his finger and sucked it and asked, “Where did those cups come from?”

  “She probably bought them special,” I said, “for the gun-loving fuckface.”

  “But she didn’t know he was coming over—maybe they were from her bridal drowsy,” Riley said. He placed a red coil on my knee. I nudged it off onto his bed and he yelped: “No food on the bed! Ants will come!” and I said, “Stupid, it’s winter, the ants are all sleeping.”

  “IF LOST DEEP in the California wild, how would you stay alive?”

  “Suckle honey,” said the youngest.

  “Carve a bow and arrow to slay animals,” said the oldest, who was playing again even though she had quit the game, for good, many times.

  The middle had devised the question to showcase her own superior reply: “I would find a buckeye tree and gather its deadly nuts, which Native Americans used to put in rivers to make fish sleepy. The river dilutes the poison from the nut so the fish don’t die, they’re only sort of stunned, and you can scoop them right out of the water.”

  It was a thing the youngest and the oldest couldn’t stand about the middle: her need to be smarter than they were.

  EVEN THOUGH WE’D been told it was not going to be a free-for-all, I turned on the television at every opportunity. Riley did too, since it hid other noises, like Mert’s crying; but we were always aware that if we pushed our luck, the machine would be taken away.

  “It’s morning again in America!” it said cheerfully. “Today, more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country’s history. With interest rates and inflation down, more people are buying new homes, and our new families can have confidence in the future—”

  “For god’s sake shut up!” Mert yelled from the kitchen.

  “But I wasn’t—”

  “Not you, pettle, that bastard’s reelection ad.”

  “America today is prouder and stronger and better,” continued the ad. “Why would we want to return to where it was less than four short years ago?”

  IT WAS WARM enough that today I would have something to talk about at the convenience store, could say, Did you know this city was built on a swamp? and wait for Two Thumbs to say yeah he knew. Up at the counter I took my customary peek at the baby tentacle, and was stunned to see the hand—the whole hand—bundled in white gauze. Had there been a surgery? Had the tentacle been chopped? But why would he have wanted to do that? The nub brought him luck! The guy was calm as ever, ringing up purchases with the good hand, while I could barely get out Hello.

  The radio on a shelf above the register reported how many American soldiers had died last month.

  The man in line behind me said, “Goddamn ridiculous.”

  Two Thumbs said, “Right?” and slid me a pack.

  The man added, “My sister’s boy is over there.”

  My apartment was even sweltier than outdoors. The fate of the tentacle troubled me—had wrecked the morning—made me unable, in fact, to look through the want ads. The male knows nothing of the beauty he’s hacked off a limb for and the female knows of her mate only the fertilizing arm. Maybe Two Thumbs had cut away his limb to impregnate someone. Stuffed the bloody nub up a girl’s causeway, left it lodged there until it sprouted?

  I glanced again at my answering machine, but no red light. It had now been a full week since Cam should’ve gotten my note. A week meant the person wasn’t going to call or write back. A week was not covered by any of the usual excuses.

  I ripped open the new deck. Where were the matches hiding.

  The only thing I could think of was to go to bed again. It was eleven fifteen in the morning. I finished the cigarette and tacked the zebra sheet back up across the window. Beeps and whistles batted soft at the eardrum, and I watched their tinfoil twinings as I dropped toward sleep. Dreamt of nurses in an Arctic hospital, naked but for white caps and, at their necks, white stoles.

  AT MY FRIEND’S house, in a room walled by
windows, it was too loud, too much window. I put my hands on my eyes against the nickel of Sunday-morning light. Observatory Place had drapes, but this modern fancy kind of house didn’t. My friend—Julie? Janie? Janice? Janine?—slept on. I hated waking before the other person; the only thing to do was get a book from the shelf, and I wasn’t the biggest reader. Finally she got up and we headed for the kitchen, hoping for doughnuts; instead, before we’d even finished the stairs, I smelled pancakes. Thick black blood. I started to throw up but swallowed it.

  “Good morning, ladies,” said my friend’s mother. “These are hot off the griddle!”

  “Yum,” my friend said. She got the juice. I breathed through my teeth, heart batting. Juice didn’t help, only made my mouth sweeter and the blood blacker, swelling in the air, it slid down the walls of the air and I could smell my sister’s body—

  “Here you go,” the mother said and put a plate before me.

  “No thank you.” I expected the mother to remove the plate, but it stayed.

  The mother’s tongue went clock-clock. “Why don’t you try a little,” she said.

  I could barely breathe. “They look good but no thank you.”

  “Are you allergic?” she suggested.

  “No I just don’t eat them.”

  “Oh, well, that’s a little rigid, don’t you think? You’re much too thin, you know—”

  “Mom shut up,” said my friend.

  “I’m sorry if I say what I think, dear, but it’s obvious how skinny she’s gotten. Why don’t you try one pancake—they’re not too big.”

  “I can’t eat pancakes!” I shouted.

  My friend whined, “Jesus, Mom, way to go.”

  The more I cried, the hotter and blacker went the smell, tarring my chest, drowning every lung hair. My sister’s name was filling my mouth, wanting to be said, pushing into a scream; but I couldn’t unclench my teeth.

  “I think she needs to go home,” the mother said. “I’ll call her mother.”

  “That woman thinks you’re anorexic.” Mert stared at the road, her hands on the wheel at ten and two.

  “Well I’m not.”

  “That’s what I told her, of course—and incidentally I have no idea why she thinks she can make a diagnosis like that—but she said as soon as those pancakes were on the table, you acted, quote, like a horse who’d seen a snake.”

  “Well I’m fine, so can we stop talking about it?”

  We drove for a while. The rain was louder than our breathing. Then, almost home: “But why did you react that way to the pancakes? I’m just curious, pettle.”

  “I didn’t feel like eating them and she kept being pushy even when I told her no thank you.”

  “She can certainly be pushy,” Mert nodded. “I’ve seen her at parent–teacher meetings.”

  MY LEGS WERE taking me to the subway, but my head could not supply a destination post that. Well, air-conditioning would be enough. I’d sit on the cool train awhile, unsteaming my synapses. One day soon, when I was completely deaf and not just vaguely hard of hearing, I could be a trainy, one of those people who just rode, in winter and summer, to stay out of the weather. I would still have my eyes, which could look out, once the red line came up out of the ground, at the gray fields of suburb.

  From the black of the tunnel I knew it was there above me, my city, tight side streets and soil in squares for trees to come up from and the broad paved spokes running from the circles and the streets after rain with that itchy wet smell, a hard fog rising and gone, and the streets after snow with brown hills crusting and the streets after protests dotted with napkins and bottles and flags. I got homesick for Edinburgh Lane but only the version I’d made up later, good parts bigger, bad parts gone. My sister was a fish, floppy and bleeding, needing ice, fish pie, a fish-eyed stiff. In twenty years a body could do a lot of crumbling. Coyote and I could have visited the graveyard in darkness, with shovels, to check how much meat had come off the bones. By now she must have been so dry even the worms weren’t interested.

  When the train got tiresome I went to the bar. From the way Mink’s eyes were shining, I knew bad news was afoot.

  “Our friend is not doing so hot,” she whispered.

  I looked around. Saw no friends.

  Pinching my elbow: “Geck. In here yesterday all loaded. Just booze, I think—but still.”

  “The nidget didn’t even get to ninety this time, did he?”

  “I don’t count his days for him,” she huffed. “And if he’s drinking now, he’ll be on dodge soon enough. I don’t know how he keeps coming up with the cash. He’s not even working. How could he possibly fund it?”

  “Petty crime,” I suggested.

  “But he’s too stupid for crime.”

  From the bar pay phone I called Ajax, who answered hissing: “It’s one forty-five in the fucking morning.”

  “But are you up?”

  “No,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just wanted to see how you were doing, you know, with the bookstore sadness and—”

  “I’m fine,” he snapped. “Good night.”

  He hadn’t cared that I didn’t have a college degree, or that I didn’t read much. He had seen us play a bunch of times and he told me, during our interview, “You guys wrote fantastic songs.” Geck wrote the fantastic ones, I did not say. Ajax was fingering some huge dark beads around his neck. “Hard, what happened,” he added, meaning the accident that ended the band, but I thought, at first, he meant my sister—thought How could you know about that?—and my eyes prickled hard. Maybe he only hired me because he had brought me to tears.

  RILEY HANDED ME a papier-mâché face. In sixth-grade art they were doing Halloween masks.

  “Nice,” I said and handed it back.

  “No, it’s for you.”

  I fingered its glitter crust. “Thanks but I’m not, like, gonna wear it.”

  Our father’s car was out front and when we climbed to the porch we heard Mert screaming inside. Not screaming—choking? We heard: “Oh God oh God oh God.”

  “It’s okay,” I said and rested my palm on Riley’s head. Before I could finish unlocking the door, Fod opened it.

  “Kids, your mother’s having a rough day. Go on up to the park.”

  “For how long?” I asked.

  “Just go.”

  The choke-squalls were worse with the door open. “Is she okay?”

  “She’ll be fine—now go.”

  We went. I steered us to a picnic table and Riley opened his backpack to see which library books he had and I lit a cigarette. Smoked half, heeled it out, lit another.

  “Here,” said Riley, and gave me a snail that he kept in a secret pocket of the backpack.

  I made Riley sit at the picnic table as long as possible, afraid of finding, at home, exactly what we found: her still coughing and weeping. It smelled of onions frying; Fod was in the kitchen to escape her. She was balled up in a chair, forehead on elbow, shaking her head.

  “Mert are you okay?”

  “No, squid, I’m not.”

  I wished she would just fake it.

  “Should we go back to the park?” asked Riley, looking up at me with such trust that I spat, “Fuck no.” He shouldn’t have trusted me. “Fod?” I called through the onion. “Are we eating soon?”

  “Yep!” he shouted back. “Want to set the table?”

  MY BROTHER AND I packed what I owned. The weather had turned cold again, but I was drenched—muscles tiny from lack of use, heart stiff from smoking. Riley busied himself with the silverware and cups while I slid armfuls of records into boxes, singing nonsense.

  “You still have a good voice,” called my brother.

  “Shucks,” I said.

  He sized up the kitchen table. In its drawer were my million rubber bands.

  “Do you pick out a new one every day?”

  “Depends,” I said.

  “But some days you don’t wear one—how do you decide?” />
  How had such an earnest person managed to land in our family? I told him that I gauged my daily panic level the minute after waking.

  “Do you want to keep these takeout menus?”

  “Why the fuck would I?”

  “Oh. I don’t—okay.” They went into the trash bag; his cheeks flared.

  “Sorry, Coyote, you’re totally helping out and I’m being a . . . ”

  “It’s all right.”

  I came to squat over the pile of newspapers in the corner. Underneath were the posters and pages, the yellow photographs—

  “What is all that?”

  “Documentation of fecal matter,” I explained. “Which I wanted to torch but couldn’t figure out where.” Into the trash bag they went.

  He was staring at my calf, which had a sea-green vein he’d never noticed before. Well on its way to being the leg of an elderly.

  “I think my familiar has left the building,” I offered.

  “The rat, you mean?”

  I nodded. “No more thumpings in the night. Haven’t heard him in two days. He must have smelled the packing and known cleaning fluids would follow in its wake.” I added a laugh, for Riley’s sake, but actually I was a little bothered that I had not gotten to say goodbye to the creature. Or kill it.

  The radio told how bad the traffic was getting on the bridges. It did not talk about the female soldiers or their periody underwear. The blood was food coloring stirred into water, but the prisoners didn’t know this. They believed the red was real.

  WHEN I GREW stars on my shoulder, nobody saw them at first. I started growing them spring of tenth grade, about the time I picked up smoking and discovered a band I loved more than any I had yet heard. The sounds this band made were torn wings, crusts of glitter hills, valleys of black flame, clouds cut in three by red lightning, bluish brain rising from cankered feet. Every hair on me pointed at the ceiling. The thick poles of sadness that stood in me were yanked out by the singer’s screeching and howling, and my shoulders fluttered. The drums were heaving and keeling and thwacking, each hit pulling the veins in my chest closer to the surface. The people onstage didn’t look any older than we were, white boys on whose fatless bodies hung cotton and denim, nothing especially special—but they knew something. They were pilots of the new land, beckoning Over here, over here! and I felt superior to every other kid in the room because I alone (I believed) was having my veins brought to the surface.