The Listeners

by Leni Zumas

  The magicians played again the following week after a protest at the university. I didn’t care about South Africa but Cam made me go; it was important, he said, horrible things were happening and we had to do something. Horrible things, I thought, have already happened. But I queued up with the rest of them, a line of kids in black britches and gray glimmies, scarred boots and leathers, hair chopped up. They yelled, Divest! and End apart-hate now!—pale cheeks tomato-ing with righteous anger and June heat. I did not yell; I was merely waiting for that night’s show.

  Apartheid No, Freedom Yes! they screamed in the bar. Practically every kid in there had also been at the protest. Cam screamed too. A guy from our English class bought us whiskeys with his brother’s license. With each sip, I brightened. I could not wait for my new loves to take the stage. Cam kept brushing against me. I brushed back. “I bet your hand is smaller than mine,” he babbled, holding his palm up. I pressed mine to it. “Shit, a whole knuckle smaller.” We kept our hands like that for a long time, and when he looked at me, I did not look away.

  In his parents’ car, after, he stared at the wheel, a true smile on his mouth. Then he turned. “Um, hey.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Come here,” he said.

  Our mouths bumped; I smelled whiskey; his lips were dry, at first.

  BECAUSE RILEY’S BUILDING didn’t have mailboxes, the postman threw everything onto the hall radiator, and you had to sort. I saw flickers of the lives going on in other apartments. Man on the ground: antiwar pamphlets, amateur magician newsletter. Woman on the fourth: handstitched brocade envelopes from an unpronounceable town in Wales—faraway lover, or devoted aunt?

  Nothing from Cam, of course. Maybe he never even got my letter. What if the secretary had misspelled the address? Or what if he’d called my apartment after I moved out? You left a forwarding notice. But what if the phone company had mixed up two digits of Riley’s number?

  My brother’s mail was a postcard inviting him to attend a furniture sale. His name on the label was a blue cube, and salty. No flavor if someone spoke it, only when I saw it written down. My own name written was chewed aluminum foil: sore, bright, silver-black.

  If the Russian writer whose numbers had colors and feelings had been a genius, then maybe we sisters were too. I said doubtfully, “Genius?” and my sister said, “We could be. Mert and Fod should’ve put us in a special school.” She made me bring my library books to the basement, where we would read for an hour before dinner to sharpen our brains; and she reminded me not to tell Riley. He would feel bad, she explained, for not being a genius too.

  But the fact was, I was just as normal-brained as Riley, except I heard colors. Only our sister had any genius in her.

  From the windows upstairs I couldn’t see the door to Mrs. Jones’s parlor, only the people using it. Here, a big-bubbed college student; there, a crew-cutted soldier. 8:52 PM: handholding couple with matching white veins in their ears—the girl’s idea to go, I was guessing, and the boy humoring her. Mrs. Jones stayed open until midnight on weekends because people were more likely to buy fortunes when drunk.

  The bathroom had no windows and was big enough for a little table where Riley had laid out pans and strung up a wire. In his pans floated smoky prints, harsh and cold. He would have stayed in here forever, safe from people, if he hadn’t worried that the chemicals would eat tunnels in his skin. He played no music here. All was flat: the sheets of silver paper, the taut wire clipped with drenched images, water dripping neatly into the pans.

  In the crowd of icebox pictures, Cam laughed on the steep cracked steps of Belfry Street, and barrettes had caught the black spilling hair so you could see his eyes, and his cheeks were dark from not shaving. Riley had taken this one himself—had told Cam not to smile, which was a good way to get a person to smile.

  The spider-haired girl from the video channel, throwing out minor questions at the interview’s end: “So what about you and the drummer? You have an obvious rapport onstage—and you’re the two founding members—ever any romantics between you?”

  Me: “We tried that on for size in high school, but…”

  What was I, a vacuum-cleaner salesman? Tried that on for size. There were things you wished you could suck back into your mouth.

  RILEY GROPED ALONG the rough plaster for the switch. The basement scared him. Our sister’s boxes were down there. He couldn’t find the light—oh, there. The bulb flickered. He stepped very quietly, waiting at each wooden step. Heard grunts. And me crying. The sobs came in little shots. Someone was hurting me? Faster grunting. It took him a while of listening to figure out the other voice was Cam’s, and that I was not being hurt, or not exactly.

  We had sex twelve days after the kiss in his parents’ car. Neither of us had done it before. Embarrassed to be a virgin still at sixteen, I pretended, at first, to know what I was doing; but it was Cam, hard to lie to. Plus I was afraid I’d bleed. In Nzambi’s class we had read the old classic psychology treatise about a girl who left a red mark on the sheet and was frantic to change it so the family maid wouldn’t see evidence of her sluttiness. Most manuals warn of first-time blood. What if I leaked enough for the worm to smell it, smile on its eyeless face, and start crawling at me? Towel, I thought. I could be quick, mop up before the smell traveled.

  “What are you doing?” Cam asked when I got onto my knees and stared at the rug.

  “Checking something,” I said.

  BELLS, CRAZY BELLS, bumpy under me: what? Oh yes. How’d you get there, octopus?

  Dots of pain flew at my eyes. I would sew it back on—but I couldn’t sew—get my mother to sew it—but she couldn’t sew—she was a failure, she always said, as a housewife—and my father didn’t sew because men didn’t—so Octy was crippled forever, and I hated my sister. It was only a stupid game! Why should I keep on playing a game that was so giantly stupid, named after people dead a million years, during which I was obliged to do giantly boring things like hold the end of the sheet while my sister wrap-twirled into a mummy?

  She had taken a knife to Octy.

  I rubbed my eyes, pressed the pain in deeper. I was too old to cry. I hated being oldest. My sister’s crime would not be punished enough. In my wet fingers I held the amputated tentacle, tufted at its broken end, bloodless.

  As the oldest, you got in trouble the most and for things you hadn’t even done. Where did all the ice cream go? Riley. What? Riley ate it. Why the hell did you let him do that? The little ones were smaller, which made them cuter and less hittable. Fod used to hit us all, but me the hardest. As I grew, I measured my height compulsively, recording each new quarter inch on the door frame, believing that if I got taller than my father, he would be afraid to touch me.

  After my sister died, he stopped hitting. It was one of the perks.

  I was never up early; but the tidiness of Riley’s apartment disturbed sleep. The white walls were so loud. He had a proper toaster, which I loved, no waiting for an oven to heat; and he bought new bread from a real bakery, God bless him. I noticed his crumby morning plate and decided to wash it so he would mind my presence less.

  The world looked astoundingly clean at this hour. Everywhere was the strumming of quicker blood, a clicking of the day’s gears; across every building (none more than ten stories) the new pink sun laid a stripe; water clung in beads to grass blades and parking meters, soon to die in the heat and therefore brave; and the people were emerging with their game faces on. The gainfully employed marched past: ironed-flat normals, spruce girls with calamity cuts. My hair was an old brown hang. I inhaled fresh shampoo from pedestrian necks, little glows that would be gone by midmorning. Bog-sweat hadn’t yet ruined the air, but it would, any day now, I was bracing myself. So humid your shoes went green inside. The pedestrian current swelled as the bells fell down the hill. Out of the current, the city rested—here, a stone ledge clean of pigeons; there, a red stoop—but inside it, all was rushing.

  Here was the doughnut shop. A maple, ma’am? Why th
ank you, I think I just might! Teeth sank happily into sugar-bright flesh. A second maple, methinks. The shop was blessedly noisy, hot with machines and voices and traffic to conceal the beeps. Legally deaf by forty was my prediction. If correct, I’d buy a state-of-the-art gaming system (including projector and wireless controls) with my disability check. And I wouldn’t be able to hear Mert tell me, ever again, that it wasn’t much of a life.

  At 10:04 I sallied down the block to the chain store. I would enter with confidence, chin high. With any luck, the manager would be a local and old enough to know me. Pastel carpet, blond shelves, disinfected air. I mourned the smoke-friendly dinge of our dead store. Gave my cockiest grin to the infant behind the counter, who forgot to smile back.

  “Help you?”

  “Yeah, I’m wondering if you guys are hiring?”

  I waited for a bloom of recognition Oh my God is that—? on the hairless cheeks.

  “Sorry, man. We’ve been slow. The Web is fucking us all in the A.”

  “Who’s the manager here?”

  But the infant said a name I didn’t know.

  HOW LONG DID you have to not eat before it quit coming for good? I wanted so badly to eat bread again, chocolate and butter and sugar again, but the books did not tell me when I might. I hadn’t bled in four months, which was not long enough, probably, to ensure everlasting drought.

  I asked the school librarian if there were any more detailed medical encyclopedias.

  A girl stopped me at the lockers: “Can I ask you something?” She was a popular girl and I had never spoken to her. “Um, a few of us have been wondering—is there something—are you, like, taking anything?”

  I frowned.

  “Because you look fabulous. Are you taking something?”

  “No,” I said.

  The girl said, “Then how are you getting the weight off?”

  I said, “I’m not doing anything.”

  “Yes you are,” hissed the girl.

  I shook my head.

  “Whatever,” the girl snorted.

  And Riley said at home: “When did you get so hairy?”

  “I’m not.”

  “Yes you are!” He ran two fingers along my arm. “Look at that fuzz. You’re fuzzy.”

  “I am not,” I said at the back of my mouth.

  “Fod she looks like a cat!”

  “There’s nothing wrong with her,” Fod said. “She’s going through puberty, there’s naturally some extra hair growth…”

  “But Fod she’s like a skeleton with fur.”

  I could barely breathe my heart was going so hard. They would take me to a doctor, who’d give me pills to force the blood to grow. And back the worm would come.

  38 DOLLARS LAST night. This is exactly why we are going to take the Offer, no matter what says Cameron the Virtuous. Less than 40 American bills. Guy hands it to me and I’m like OK, still waiting, and he goes That’s it man sorry slow night. One days worth of gas and tobacco. Slow night he says, like we were the polka unit at Penis Oaks Retirement Village. We are taking the Offer.

  ON THE PORCH I propped myself like a Southern gentleman of yore, boots on railing, hand closed around beading glass of liquor—no mint, but it could have loosely been classified as a julep. “Are you crazy?” I inquired of the cardinal on a low branch brushing near. Bird stared back. “Are you?” louder, and bird jumped away. Watching its flittery progress down Observatory Place, I noticed a guy standing—just standing, not doing a single thing—across the street. He wore a sort of cape. He was perhaps one of those creatures who dressed as their favorite fantasy character when the movie came out but forgot to take off the costume. What the dickens was he doing? His face, if he had one, was hidden by hood and noonday glare.

  I sat up with difficulty and called: “Hey!”

  Capey moved not.

  “Be warned, I’m in the neighborhood watch…”

  Now he moved. Down the street. At a brisk clip.

  If Mert had been around, I would have informed her that the area, once a bourgeois stronghold, was getting sketchy. But she and Fod were on campus, slaving away while their middle-aged daughter lolled on their front porch to escape the apartment of their not-quite-middle-aged son. This street was plagued by sketchy capes, but pretty too—trees all bursting green, and little red flowers at the fences. The paper lay open at the want ads. Just look on the computer, Riley had said. But I preferred the feel of a newspaper. I liked how the print stained my fingers, proof of effort, and how a newspaper made me appear, to passersby, just another citizen—an American taxpayer who knew how to fill a day properly, with a job and lunch at restaurants and kisses for her husband upon returning to her toy-strewn castle moated by lemon trees. And where’s my dear offspring I am never not nice to?—the offspring running qualmless into her arms.

  The morning lumbered on without any reappearance from the cape wearer. I made my way through an entire can of chips to defray the effects of the almost-julep. At 1:00 PM I would get up from the porch and become relevant. I would enjob myself, somehow. Riley needed not fear: I would be gone from his couch before he could realize how very much he would miss me.

  LAST NIGHT WAS town of sickified kids, really worst kind of kid, bred in suburbs but wild to catch plague of streets. Shitlings couldn’t be bothered to clap—after every song it was like somebody died—then vampirina put a shriveled rose on the stage at G’s feet which was the cherry on that crapcake and I said into the mic Where’s my rose? and this bunch of girls screams You don’t get one! and then, worst and worser, was looking down at the bunch of girls and one’s face was exactly like hers—I mean exactly—hair not same but face a replica, tiny ghost staring up at me and I couldn’t member how to start Northern Direction. G had to play the intro 5x. The ghost nodded along but didn’t clap.

  NO MATTER HOW hard I clenched my eyes, I still saw the sound her voice made, a forest branch, a green so black it could barely be heard.

  Why are you here?

  To talk to you.

  But I don’t want to.

  Yes you do, I know you miss me.

  No I don’t.

  Yes you do, Quinn.

  No.

  Don’t lie, it’s not becoming. Now let me back in, okay?

  But I can’t.

  If you try hard enough, you can.

  But I’ve tried really hard and I can’t figure out how!

  You haven’t tried your hardest. Better hurry, because the worm is coming.

  I don’t know how to!

  Well figure out fast, because listen, the worm—do you hear him sniffing?

  She could smell in a forest if a wolfberry grew.

  Something was on my arm. Patting.

  A voice: “You were shouting.”

  I sat up.

  “You were shouting in your sleep,” Riley said.

  I watched him go—now back—a glass of water.

  “Thanks, Coyote.” I sipped.

  “Better?”

  “Yes.”

  I held my lips tight so the worm could not glide out. For a long time the worm had been gone and I ate whatever I wanted. Cam had brought it back.

  “BODY LANGUAGE,” SAID the group leader, “is very important in communication!”

  The room stank of old hamburger, which was brutal in a room of people afraid of food. Even the overeaters were afraid. “Body language!” the leader repeated. “Think about it—it says everything! I’m closed; I’m open; I’m wary; I’m interested; I’m not paying attention!” She paused in her pacing around the chair circle to clear her mucousy throat. It made me nervous to have her walk behind us. Why was she outside the circle? Weren’t we in this together as she often proclaimed?

  I could feel my mother thinking it was all quite ridiculous. She sat still, one leg neatly over the other, hands clasped on her thigh, and her face was polite but behind it, I knew—

  “Crossing one’s legs, for instance!” the leader cried. “What does that say about one’s attitude? It
says: I’m guarding myself! I am not open to new ideas! But if both feet are on the floor—now that’s a different message! Uncrossed legs say: I am willing to consider new ideas! I am not shutting myself off—no, in fact, I’m listening!”

  My fingers tore a strip of notebook paper smaller and smaller.

  Back in the cold air, Mert tightened her scarf. She said, “That was interesting. What did you think?”

  “I don’t know,” I said miserably, “what did you?”

  Mert said, “Well, first of all, I’m not sure I buy the body-language theory. I think it’s misleading. Because, for instance, some of those women couldn’t cross their legs if they tried. They’re too—large. Does that make them more receptive to other people’s feelings and ideas? Or does it simply mean they’re too fat to cross their legs?” She loosened and reknotted the scarf, and sighed. “But if that group is useful for you—if it’s helping—”

  “Not really,” I said.

  Mert nodded. “You’re much smarter than that counselor, anyway. What’s she going to tell you that you don’t already know?”

  THERE MUST ALWAYS be someone to watch the body, ensure it won’t do the wrong thing: bulge too far, shrink too near. If I could have picked a body to be in, it would have been a man’s. That straight-down-ness, that bony plunge. In a chap-husk my thighs wouldn’t chafe; they would be lean and long and ready to run me away from machete or mastodon.