The Listeners

by Leni Zumas

  I HAD THE apartment to myself tonight since my brother, slow flower, might have been getting some sex. I was rooting for him. In fact I had sent up a prayer.

  I sat in the push of the fan, lights off, watching. 7:42 PM: white female, big hips, fly-eyes. 8:48 PM: black male in baseball cap and hiking boots. 9:19 PM: white female, fake-fur jacket, peppermint tights. The dungeoner appeared a little after ten. I wondered if he was some high-school dragon plonker in love with the Middle Ages and without friends in the twenty-first century. The future he wanted: You will get out of here. You will never see those popular kids again. Or an also nerdy but older person, more genuinely eccentric, living alone in a dark apartment where he cataloged the pinned corpses of his collection (butterfly? rat?) and ate only food that could be delivered.

  Well, frankly, I had nothing better to do. Downstairs, in the window of the takeout next door to Mrs. Jones, I settled in to wait. Should have brought a magazine. But how long could a fortune take?

  I counted the white veins on pedestrians, and the lights in the sky.

  Then he came out: stark-white, maybe a few years older than I was. Couldn’t figure out his hair because the hood covered it, but he had freckles and his nose was pointy. His gaze veered toward the takeout. I watched it land on me. The eyes stopped. I didn’t move. If you asked the dungeoner why he wears a hood, how would the dungeoner reply? I smiled, which I didn’t ever do at strangers. Slowly, the dungeoner turned back to face the street, and walked away.

  I hoped Riley was meeting with success. Pine, in her accountant’s vest, might be saying, “I have cooked you some classics from my homeland,” leading him to a table laid with brown and yellow foods. “Toad in the hole, garlic mash, baked beans on toast, fish fingers all in a line.”

  “Looks delicious,” said Riley.

  “You are the politest boy I’ve ever known,” she said without looking up from the crumpet she was slicing.

  Pine had probably done it with tons of boys back in England, figured Riley, and it was probably no big deal.

  I’m sorry you never got to, sister.

  Pine forked the crumpet onto his plate and asked, “Have you ever heard of the Strello mountain in Portugal? It has this lake where the remains of sunken ships allegedly float to the surface. But it’s an inland mountain. Mysterious.”

  He shook his head.

  “It seems like a place your sister might have liked. The one who—I mean, you once told me she loved a good shipwreck.”

  “Yeah, she did.”

  “We should go there,” Pine said.

  Riley stared at her. “Where?”

  “To the Strello mountain.”

  “I…”

  “I’m a good traveling companion,” she said.

  “I don’t know if I am.”

  “You are kind of moody,” Pine said.

  “Shut up!”

  “Well, you are. But I’d still go with you. I mean I’d—I’d very much like to go with you.”

  She was a lake dweller; he could kiss her. Go on! but Riley couldn’t quite. He asked, “What if there are ticks in Portugal?”

  “Then at the slightest itch, we’ll tear off our clothes to see if dark pins have buried themselves in us.” Pine laughed and nodded at the table. “Please, help yourself.”

  “I will,” Riley said, “but first…”

  “Mm?”

  Every blood cell had run up to his face. He couldn’t. He couldn’t. Yes, Coyote, you can!

  She was waiting.

  He leaned forward and his shoulder knocked a plate into the saltshaker, which tipped with a clatter. “Oh, I’m sorry—”

  “It’s nothing,” Pine said.

  Go on.

  “Well,” he said, and lifted his mouth into the vicinity of her mouth. She bent to meet him.

  WE’D ALL DONE it a thousand times before. You pride yourself on how well you drive in a compromised state. But now this one little time it couldn’t quite be pulled off, because of the ice. There was a lot of ice. And trees like skinny black arms. Even in the sun such ice would have been hard to see, and this was night. After the show, we’d refused invitations to stay with adoring nineteen-year-olds because our next city was so far. If we hadn’t refused, we would have woken up achy from dorm floor, and eaten eggs with the kids, and been on our way—late to the show, but all intact.

  THE NEXT MORNING I called heartily from the couch: “That sure was a long dinner.”

  “Shhh!”

  Pine was right behind him.

  I looked up meekly from the tangled sheets. “Guten tag,” I said.

  “Want breakfast?” Riley asked.

  “Depends on the selection. What are you—”

  “Actually, it’s a yes or no question. Yes, thank you for offering to cook me food, that’s very nice of you! or No, thank you, I have to leave in a minute to go find a job so I can stop living at my brother’s apartment.”

  Jesus. Maybe he had gotten lucky.

  While Riley fried eggs, Pine reclined with me. I tried to think of a conversation topic. Kids were screaming their heads off in the street below, so I remarked: “Somebody should get a shotgun.”

  “Do you not . . . ” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Are you planning not to have children?”

  “I don’t know. I guess not. Probably not.”

  Pine smiled grandmotherily. “It isn’t as if you’re out of time just yet. You have a few years before you need to worry.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “No—that sounded rude—I’m sorry—I’m not very much younger myself, almost thirty in fact—I didn’t mean to imply that—”

  “I’m not offended.”Although I was, a little.

  Was I?

  Not on the surface of my brain, no; but my throat had tightened when she said before you need to worry. I had gone for most of my menstruating life not thinking of babies at all. Majority of the last decade, nothing; and before that, nothing either, except after the crash, when I had believed my missed period meant I was going to have Cam’s.

  “ . . . bring up a child in a city, you know?”

  “What?”

  “There are so many toxins in a city,” Pine was saying, “I just don’t know if I’d want to expose a child to them. Pollution, crime, billboards, rampant consumerism . . . I was raised in a village where I drank milk squeezed the same morning from a cow I’d named myself.”

  “Hmm,” I said.

  MINK SMOKED, AWAY from us, one shoulder against a tree. In the stabbing cold she was sweating. Her narrow eyes hung wider; the blue was brighter in them. She hummed and stared at Cam’s cheek where it flattened into the window. All his blood had quit running. If you prodded that cheek it wouldn’t flinch; if you pushed a tweezer under his eyelid he wouldn’t cry; if you wrapped your fingers around his junk it wouldn’t move. Did Cam have a big one? Mink had wondered from time to time, suspected he did. He was tall.

  I stood with my face shoved into Geck’s jacket. Us two, having our hugfest, our little moment; Mink would have spat on us, had she had any energy left over from leaning against the tree. Maybe she should start screaming too and somebody would come hug her. Then Geck was moaning about his leg—if it was even really hurt in the first place—Mink had her doubts.

  “We have to start the van for some heat,” she said.

  Geck and I looked horrified at the prospect of getting back into the van.

  “You want to go gangrene?” she asked.

  She reached in to turn the ignition, but nothing happened.

  Each of us tried pressing the gas pedal with one hand, twisting the key with the other.

  “Hood’s busted shut,” Geck observed.

  “Or else what,” said Mink, “you’d fix the engine?

  IT HADN’T JUST been alcohol I relied on to sing; it had been the colors. They’d shown me where to put my voice. I simply had to move it up—or down—to where a certain color was. If a note was wrong, the color
would be wrong, and I wouldn’t go to it.

  In high school, Fod had memorized the periodic table with ease because each element was its own hue, audible on the wall. The colors were helpers, he’d explained to us in the garden, and we must not be afraid of what we saw or heard or smelled; but remember, other people might not understand. We didn’t have to tell everyone we met.

  “We shouldn’t tell?”

  “No, we can, but we don’t have to,” said my sister. “Right, Fod?”

  “Right, pettle. Not if you don’t want to.”

  It came from him, he said, and we would give it to our own children, or else it would skip a generation and our grandchildren would get it. Why didn’t Riley have it? It only wanted you two, Fod said. It was always referred to simply as it. Not until after she died did I learn the term synesthesia, which sounded like a cross between a crime and being put to sleep.

  SISTER, DO YOU remember blood?

  Two speeds: slow from your downstairs, quick from your up.

  Monthly creeping red, the chunks and glistening bits, you cried for it to stop. Four days, I warned with satisfaction, maybe even five!

  The bullet made a door and out out out it came, red water and brain.

  Red was hardening to black on Cam’s face; his head drooped weirdly to the side, like it wasn’t attached right; his eyelids did not flutter; but otherwise he might’ve been asleep. None of the bluish pallor I associated with deadness had yet chilled his skin, which was pale to begin with, ours all was, a whole team of ashen people. I tried, through the whiskey sog, to feel sad.

  I hadn’t yet noticed his hand.

  “IF YOU HAD only one leg, how would you get to school?”

  “Mert’d drive me,” said the oldest.

  “Mert is dead.”

  “Of what?”

  “Diploria.”

  “What does that do?”

  “Shrinks your skin,” said the middle, “until it’s too tight for your body.”

  “Then Fod would drive me.”

  “No, he’s in a mental institution because of gone mad after we lost the Super Bowl.”

  “Then Riley?”

  The middle looked over at the youngest, who was guiding a Slinky down the front steps. “No, his penis got caught in a Ferris wheel, and he can’t drive anymore.”

  “I’d buy a wheelchair I guess. This is a dumb one,” added the oldest.

  The middle snapped: “Then we won’t play at all.”

  “No, we can play, just think of less dumb of a one.”

  “If it’s so dumb you think of some because I’m not thinking of any more ever.”

  “Yes you are.”

  “No I’m not.”

  THE BLACK PLASTIC suitcase was packed neatly. I fingered his glimmie. Held up his gray turtleneck and smelled on it the pomade he used. Cam was the least decorated among us and had the fewest vanities; pomade was a rare indulgence. At home, he kept the black-orange jar on his dresser. The scream rose again, thrusting up, swallow, swallow, I would not scream. Swallow, Quinn!

  Lights from the road. We all looked up, saw the lights slowing. Witnesses. Police. Breath-testers. Killer-arresters.

  “We have to decide,” said Geck, excited by the idea of police, “what our story is.”

  “There’s no story,” Mink said. “We just ran off the road and Cam was driving. And”—she took the last cigarette from her pack, which we eyed, covetous—“we are never going to tell anyone.”

  I nodded.

  “Not even my wife?” asked Geck.

  Mink said, “I doubt you’re going to have a wife.”

  Rigor mortis had not yet set in, so Cam flopped in our clutch. The muscles gave no fight; the bones slid and sank. The britches he had put on that morning, navy corduroy rubbed thin at the knees, would have to be cut off by the mortician. The long-haired skin on his arms felt amphibian. And I saw his hand, or what was left of it: a red flesh-mash that brought to mind the body of the mother mole, with her seed-babies crushed inside.

  Those lights had kept going, had not stopped. But more would come—

  I raked Cam’s hair, stiff with pomade and cold, into a more flattering slant. Purpling veins webbed his yellow eyelids. The pimple near his mouth he’d been complaining of, how it wouldn’t give up no matter how many times he pinched it open, remained a fresh red; was it still growing? Does skin go on breathing for a time after the heart has quit? I stuck out my tongue to taste, but the pimple had no flavor.

  The passenger-side windshield was a blasted star, glass torn by tiny veins. “We have to break the whole thing,” Mink told us.

  I watched her expectantly, my shaken brain not bothering to grope for the reason.

  “Because Quinn doesn’t have any cuts on her face,” she said and pulled a shred off her lower lip. “It’s easier to break the windshield than give her the right-looking cuts.”

  Mink pulled the ride stand out of the back of the van. It was the sturdiest piece of hardware, and sharp-tipped, and she handed it to me. I stood on the passenger side, raised the stand behind my head—a bulky spear—and ran the metal hard as I could into the eye of the star Cam’s head had made.

  I broke it on the first go, straight into the cracked eye while Mink pointed the flashlight. I didn’t stop there: hut hut hut into the van’s hood, ramming and denting, hoping to pierce through to the engine.

  THE WHITE-VEIN PEOPLE sucked brain juice into their pockets, rushing. The good-suit people checked their watches, rushing. The spruce girls clicked little heels and tightened little scarves, rushing. The space-helmet man, propped against the mossy wall by the bus stop, hands balled in pockets, nodded at me. I nodded back but it felt forced, a mark of some conspiracy we didn’t actually share. He was one of the hundreds of patients discharged from the mental hospital without further ado, thrown out to roam. They were distinguishable from the vets, who muttered less and wore army-colored pants and held signs.

  I pretended to look for the bus but was watching Space Helmet’s face, wondering what the bells on the sky told him.

  The new owners had let art students mural the walls of the diner. One panel showed a line of blindfolded men in turbans, with scrolls labeled U.S. CONSTITUTION aimed like rifles at their heads; another had a row of mouths sewn shut with dental floss spooling from a box marked PATRIOT ACT.

  In the velvety mists of high school, before mobile phones and the smoking ban, my parents had not been able to reach me and we’d sit at the diner for hours, finishing cups and packs, making fun of people’s garb, while Mert paced her heels off on Observatory Place. It isn’t safe for you to be out until two in the morning. But what could have been safer than boothfuls of children in a café where they didn’t serve alcohol? “No guns allowed,” I’d muttered when Mert screamed, her voice worst first thing in the morning. I had almost told her that Cam, in fact, sometimes brought a book to the diner and read it at the table, which was in my opinion boring and rude; but Mert would have approved.

  He was already sitting down—at a table, not our booth—so I couldn’t see if he had the dad-denim pants on. He wore a thick green professorial blazer, despite the heat, and smiled up at me like a receptionist. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, sick at the thought of the next hour being like the pumpkin coffee, at which we had spoken of nothing important.

  I waited until we had ordered to say: “Look, Cam.”

  His mouth twitched. “Yeah?”

  “I apologize,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “For the whole—the whole thing. The van. Your hand. The—the—the what we did after.”

  He pursed his quivering lips. “The framing, you mean.”

  “Well, no, just that we moved you—”

  “So that the crash would be blamed,” he said, “on me instead of you.”

  “It was Mink’s idea,” I blurted, like a child.

  His eyelids fluttered, nearly closing, in what I took to be disgust.

  “B
ut we went along with it. I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.”

  “Okay, one of these is super hot, so be super careful, okay?” cried the waitress as she set down our plates.

  “Thank you,” Cam told her. He unrolled the paper napkin with his right hand, shook it onto his lap, and said: “Well, this looks good.”

  “Yeah,” I said helplessly, peering down. I had ordered the menu item least likely to resemble flesh, fat, or blood: spinach salad. A rare foray into the vegetables.

  It was strange to miss—so much—a person you were sitting right across the table from.

  Lacustrina never let boys touch her downstairs, because she had no downstairs. At her belly button, a snake started.

  Cam’s oaky eyes squinted. He ran his thumb down the spine of his nose. “How’s yours?”

  “Mouthwatering,” I said.

  I wanted him to reach for my shoulders, starred and unstarred, and thumb my breastbone hard and say, “You couldn’t have seen that ice—no one could have!” But he did not reach, did not forgive, and said only: “These eggs are a little hard.”

  I finished my glass of water, the only thing that would fit down my throat.

  I watched Cam eat small squares of cut egg, one by one, before starting on the buttered toast.

  “Why did you come back here?” I finally said.

  “I was offered a teaching position.”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t need to take it.”

  He put down the toast, brought the napkin up to dab his mouth. The wounded hand stayed in his lap. “I can assure you, it wasn’t so that I would run into you.”

  “I can assure you, I didn’t think it was.”

  “My father has cancer,” he said.

  “Fuck,” I said.

  “It’s a chance to spend time with him.”

  “But you said—last time—you said your parents were doing well.”