Instead, there was poetry woven through the muted notes.
I took a long pull from my beer and somewhere, deep in the house, vibrations trembled their way out under our feet.
THIRTY-TWO: THE LOVE SONG OF MOSES HILL
THE ENTERTAINMENT TAPERED OFF and the porch roared into applause but I could still hear the band underfoot.
I drank the rest of my beer and stared between my feet, my vision beginning to sway. I knew I was standing right above the forest from Faisal’s story—the one that held out hope for all of the dead and ugly things—and I needed to see what the drums really were. Especially if it was too loud and too out of place to ask Faisal to finish his story and especially if I’d lost track of how many beers I’d already had.
I leaned over to the group and said, “Hey, I gotta…” but could barely hear myself over the music and the beer-colored excitement. Matty scrunched her face up and cupped her hand behind her ear. I shook the can and pointed at it, motioning to them that I’d be right back.
The band thanked everyone for showing up and said that the next song was called “Double the Flagpole.”
I expected to hit a wall of people and noise when I opened the front door, not a small smattering of people talking quietly. The house wasn’t silent though. There was still the deep rumble of bass somewhere and just off the main room in a coatroom under the stairs there was a parrot flapping and quoting poetry.
The living room was filled with hideous couches, and a young couple was sitting in the corner gesturing back and forth in sign language. The bass was coming from the back of the house, through the dim little kitchen where a handful of college students were huddled around a yellow polyurethane tub.
What I thought at first was a half-bathroom nestled in the corner of the kitchen was the door to the basement. I knew because it rattled on its hinges.
“This guy!” one of the college students said, pointing at me and catching me off guard. He had a top hat on. “I love this guy. He was in my poli-sci class last year and we…” He itched his face with the back of his hand. “But yeah. Give him a cup.”
Top Hat’s friend dipped a ladle into the strange tub filled with neon-colored liquid and chunks of tropical fruit and filled a red Solo cup for me. I was anybody; I chose to be someone who nonchalantly drank out of large colorful tubs. From the living room there was a squawk! noise followed by, “Do I dare! Disturb the universe!”
“Quit with Prufrock!” one of Top Hat’s friends yelled over our shoulders.
Top Hat hugged me and I said thanks, but all at once I was invisible to the undergrads, who resumed talking about French cinema. The rattling door beckoned me and there was no one to tell me to fuck off or come on down, just me and the rattling door. Just me and the drums and maybe the answer to whether or not things can be dead on the outside and alive down below. I dumped the drink down my throat.
But the door was locked. The hidden drums were inches away and I couldn’t see them.
On top of the beers I’d already lost track off, the new drink was working fast. The edges around my thoughts were starting to get fuzzy, but it was becoming increasingly important to find Faisal and tell him we could see the drums if we could just get past this goddamn door.
I weaved past Top Hat and his friends and opened the front door, caught between the warm air of the house and the cold wind of the open night. Ten feet away Matty, Michael, and Faisal were swaying in a small triangle with Matty in the middle. The sky couldn’t decide whether to rain or snow but it felt like I had a say in it. Like I could make it rain when it had been snowing for so long.
They saw me at the same time and smiled and gestured for me to come over. Of all the people on all the porches in all the world, none were as unshakable or as complete as Matty, Michael, and Faisal in that rare, perfect moment. And I was welcome with them; they’d welcomed me since the start, even though I was convinced that we were all just seconds away from falling through the thin ice at any given moment.
They were warmth in an otherwise cold expanse. Looking at them, I didn’t want to be Nobody or Anybody, I just wanted to be me. The same me with all of the history and scars. No lying, no pretending, just me.
Just like them.
The Entertainment tuned their instruments for their next song and the lead singer said, “This one’s called ‘Gately versus Demerol.’ Two, three, four…”
The bass underfoot trembled in unintentional harmony with the music before us and the sound swelled and the lights behind the band backlit them into spectacular anonymity. When they finished and had managed to sincerely thank everyone for showing up, I edged through the crowd of people toward the trio.
“Guys,” I yelled, showing them my cup. “We have to go inside—there are things inside that you need to see. Faisal! It’s your house! From the campfire with the basement! We just have to break into the basement.”
A faraway part of me was aware of the fact that I’d lost my handle on context and social norms. For example, instead of saying, “Hey, I’m noticing similarities between this house and the one you were telling us about at the campfire. Moreover, I want to explore what the drums mean to me on a personal, metaphorical level, specifically how I’ve spent the last year feeling, at best, robotic, and at worst, dead. Let’s go check it out!” I’d decided on out-of-context alcohol-infused word bombs.
He smiled. “I don’t know what that means, but I intend to find out. Why are your teeth green?”
“There are literal gallons of this stuff inside. But we need to figure how to get into the basement!”
“We should get going,” Matty said, squeezing Michael’s hand. “I’m exceptionally pregnant and my feet hurt. Plus I don’t want to worry about Test figuring out that we’re gone.”
“What if I get you a cup of the hobo potion that Moses drank?” Faisal asked her, totally unfazed by the mention of Test.
“I just…” She groaned a little. “Okay. But then promise we’re leaving or I tell my dad you got me pregnant,” she said to Michael.
Michael’s eyes flicked open wide.
“Moses, Faisal: it is very important that we are not in there for long.”
The music under the house had changed. It wasn’t gone, but it was different and we followed it.
THIRTY-THREE: MIMICRY
“HUMAN VOICES WAKE US and we drown!” the parrot ominously squawked from the other room, tucked away under the stairs.
Faisal froze and tensed his shoulders up. “What the fresh fucking hell was that?””
“There’s a bird that’s been quoting T.S. Eliot since I came in earlier,” I said. I figured that if I talked slow and enunciated every word they wouldn’t know I was drunk. If they were as drunk as I was, they weren’t showing it, and it felt wrong to be disproportionately more fucked up than my friends.
I caught myself smiling a stupid, half-in-the-bag grin because they were my friends and because there was a big cartoony bird quoting modernist poetry.
“This is a nightmare,” Faisal said, leaning past us to see the bird. “I hate those things.”
“Parrots?” I said.
“Even when they quote poetry like little Shakespeares?” Michael said.
“Yes, even then.”
“What if it was quoting Total Recall?” he asked.
“You know how I feel about parrots,” he said.
“But I also know how you feel about Total Recall,” Michael said with exceptionally convincing eyebrows.
“Faisal’s afraid of birds,” Matty said to me.
I put on a very serious listening face.
“I am not afraid of birds; I just don’t trust animals who have any kind of handle on human language.”
“But it’s just mimicry,” I said. “Except for the ones that learn how to count and have a vocabulary of almost two thousand words. Those birds are…” I trailed off when I realized how heavy my arms felt and how if I turned my head back and forth it felt like there was a delay in my vision.
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br /> “What is it what is it what is it!” the parrot said to the coats. “Etherized!”
Faisal grimaced and made a “yick” noise. “Just … where’s the basement?”
Across the room, an Imperial stormtrooper was whispering something to a girl dressed like a sexy tree. They were sitting on one of the ratty couches talking and he kept trying to flirt with her by taking her hand and resting it way up on his inner thigh. She’d pull her hand away, he’d lean in and say something to her, and he’d try to drag her hand back. Right as it looked like she was going to get up and leave, he braced his hands out, said something we couldn’t hear, and pulled an Altoids tin out of his pocket.
Drunk Moses couldn’t focus as concisely as he would have liked, but the still-pounding bass underfoot faded to background noise as the asshole on the couch kept trying to flirt with Tree Girl.
The sexy tree girl looked at it, looked at him, and eventually nodded with a tight-lipped, “quit being a douchebag” smile.
“There is absolutely no reason why you and that bird aren’t best friends,” Matty was saying to Faisal, leaning into the small room to get a better look at the parrot.
“I can think of every single reason in the world as to why me and that bird aren’t even casual acquaintances,” Faisal said with disgusted, fascinated horror.
Sexy Tree Girl’s face read like she was about to punch the stormtrooper to death. He held up his hands, holding onto the tin and pacifying the situation before pulling a blue pill out of the Altoids container. He balanced it on two outstretched fingers and, just as she reached out to take it, pulled his hand back. He pinched it between his gloved fingers, motioning like he was about to throw a dart and aiming at her mouth.
“What if it was quoting Tremors?” Michael said.
“The bird doesn’t get less awful the better it quotes movies, it gets worse.”
The stormtrooper tossed the small blue shape and it ricocheted off her ear, bouncing toward us. His laugh came out muffled from under his mask. She stood up, almost fell back, and then made her way past us.
“Fucking asshole,” she said as she made her way through the door. As she stumbled past us, I realized she was drunker than me. The stormtrooper bounded over to the door, still laughing, and he didn’t seem very drunk at all. Drunk Moses felt his back get sweaty and his blood pressure start to climb. Drunk Moses started thinking about which classic rock song was appropriate for tackling drug-dealing sex predators.
“Wait! Come back— Ah, fuck it,” he said.
I picked the small blue tablet up off the ground. It was about the diameter of a pencil eraser and there was an anchor carved into its middle.
“Matty?” the stormtrooper said through Faisal and Michael to her back.
Matty clenched her eyes shut at the muffled voice behind her and puffed a short, sharp breath through her nose. Michael and Faisal leaned back out of the parrot-room and looked over her shoulder at the stormtrooper.
“Matty,” Faisal whispered. “It’s a stormtrooper.”
“Maybe I’m not the Matty he’s looking for.”
“Matty Gable?” There was no mistaking the excited familiarity in his voice.
“No, I think he definitely knows you,” Faisal whispered.
She let out a slow breath and her face went pleasant as she turned around. When the stormtrooper saw her massive belly he jolted to a stop and pointed at her stomach.
“Jesus Christ.”
I decided it was a good idea to loudly ask, “Who is this goddamn stormtrooper? Stormtrooper! Who are you?” He still hadn’t noticed the tablet in my hand.
The stormtrooper lifted his helmet halfway off and rested it on the crown of his head; he was smiling a huge, open, and completely dead smile. Faisal’s face went slack and Matty tried to keep looking pleasant.
“The goddamn stormtrooper is Dalton Emmory,” Faisal said to me. The familiarity in his voice lacked any excitement and I decided that the most casual thing to do was to make unwavering eye contact with the drug-peddling, galactic douchebag.
“Oh. Shit,” Michael said, not exactly laughing, not exactly not. “Hi, Dalton. How you been, man?”
“You’re pregnant? That’s fucking crazy,” Dalton the stormtrooper said.
“Dalton,” Michael said. “Relax, it’s—”
“Fuck off, Mike,” he said as though Michael was a little kid interrupting the adult. “You’re pregnant? Is it mine?” he said, pointing at Matty. Her complexion had gone off-white. He looked back and forth between the four of us. “I’m kidding. Matty, Mike, guys, I’m kidding. Just, wow though,” Dalton said. There was nothing in his voice that said he was actually kidding. What his voice actually said was that he was the kind of person who added “I’m kidding!” to very serious statements.
“Come on, guys. We have to get back anyway,” Michael said with a more level voice than I would have expected.
Matty took a small breath, smiled, and diplomatically said, “It was good seeing you, Dalton.” She took Michael’s hand and started for the door.
“No, you know what: no. Sorry,” he said, his tone going cold and loud. “This is fucking stupid and we have to talk about it. What is your goddamn problem? I just want to talk. We don’t talk anymore,” Dalton said, fluctuating back to a calmer, more reasonable tone.
“Hey,” Michael said, stepping between them. “That’s enough, Dalton.”
Dalton wetted his lips and almost looked like he was going to apologize. To just let it go. Instead, he took a sip of his drink and said, “I cared about you, Matty.”
“Are you really doing this right now?” Faisal asked semi-rhetorically.
“How much did you care? Would you have shot someone for her?” I said, enunciating everything. I figured it was a perfect time for a stormtrooper accuracy joke.
“What? Who the fuck are you?”
“Dalton,” Matty said. “We’ll talk about this some oth—”
“No, we won’t. Because we don’t talk anymore.” He took a heavy breath in through his nose and sloshed his drink around in his cup. “And you’re fucking pregnant?”
The stormtrooper joke I had lined up died halfway up my pipes; the sulking idiot in front of us was another one of Matty’s defining moments. I’d been stupid enough to think that her mother had been her only one.
And even though I was drunk, I could see him fitting into her past. How he was a hurdle that she’d never asked for, and how we all get more than one defining moment.
Dalton was my bullet when I was eight, or Charlie’s last year.
He was all the things that a little girl named Allison walked into that made her name Lump.
He was Test’s desire to be command authority with a stupid new title like Coach.
Next to me, Michael was unambiguously not laughing. He kept half shaking his head each time the stormtrooper said something.
“Matty, come on, let’s go,” Faisal said.
“Shut up, Faisal,” Dalton said. “This is a conversation we need to have.”
Matty patted Faisal on the arm and gave him a shushing, calming look. “Dalton, this isn’t a conversation I want to have right now.”
“We dated for a year.” His pupils were tiny black points.
“I remember.” Her voice was iron.
“Do you remember how hard it was getting you to come out of your sexless little shell?”
Even as he said it, she didn’t flinch. Her face didn’t change at all.
The parrot behind us said, “No great matter! Great matter!”
As much as I wanted to go screaming toward the idiot, I knew that there was nothing I could add to the situation that Matty hadn’t already brought. As much as we all wanted to jump in, she had it under control—everything Dalton said to her bounced off.
And still, the more that bird quoted Eliot, the more I wanted to scream.
“That’s enough,” Michael said.
“You barely held a boy’s hand before me—I loved you and now yo
u’re knocked up?” The gears, somewhere in his stormtrooper head, turned. “The whole time: the whole time you were shooting off whore flares, but I didn’t care.”
“Then he said whore flares,” Faisal said to nobody, shaking his head.
When she didn’t fall apart or start crying, Dalton said, “Good one, Faisal.” His responses were getting desperate. Matty wasn’t folding. “I loved you, Matty—it took you almost six months to start loving me back, but you did. And then you broke my heart. And now you’re doing it again.” He flinched when he said it, like he knew he was barreling steadfast over a line he couldn’t uncross. Instead of shutting up and walking away, he said, “No, it’s bullshit: Little Miss My-Body-Is-a-Temple finds out how much she likes to fuck, then breaks up with me and gets pregnant.”
“Dalton,” Faisal said, like enough was enough, like he knew the whole story and needed Dalton to shut up as much for Michael’s sake as for Matty’s.
My moment—Charlie’s moment—had come and left a gigantic, lifeless crater. But not Matty. Matty had had her huge, shattering moment with her mother before ever dealing with Dalton, and she had come out gleaming and vividly alive.
She was the life that refused not one, but two extinction events.
Who the fuck was I, lost and robotic in the aftermath?
Michael didn’t say anything else—he was too busy staring at the stormtrooper and not blinking. When Dalton looked like he was about to keep talking, Michael cleared the space between us and the stormtrooper in two strides. He was only a couple of inches away from Dalton’s face when he said, “Enough.”
Michael wasn’t Charlie, but the more he talked to Dalton, the more he edged into Charlie territory.
“What’s the matter, Mike? Think you have something special with her? Join the fuckin’ club.” He was smiling but his face was pale and sick-looking.
“You’re full of shit,” Michael said, still just a couple inches away from the stormtrooper.
“Mike, stop,” Matty said. And this time there was something in her voice. It’s the hardest thing in the world, watching the ones you love try to take on your blowback.
Unstoppable Moses Page 17
