Songs Only You Know

by Sean Madigan Hoen

  “Guess that’s it,” she said. “You never liked it here anyway.”

  The truck left our driveway, headed for Dearborn. I packed my guitar into my minivan, coaxing Ozzy into the front seat as I selected the perfect song for the twenty-minute ride, a punk rock barn burner about making a run for it, going out of this world and never coming back. I turned up the dial as I blazed the highway, speeding past Mom in her station wagon and Caitlin in her Escort, then past the moving truck, and everything else.

  6

  Repa wagged his head, swung his fist like a hammer.

  “Never,” he said. “No way. I can’t live with it.”

  We stood in an alley behind an impoverished strip mall. On the opposite side of the building was a Chinese carryout with greasy windows and a few brand-X businesses. Our new practice room was one flight up in a warehouse above a Big Lots discount store. In the trunk of Ethan’s Toyota Corolla were two hundred black T-shirts on which the band’s logo was printed above the image of a man with a gun to his head. Ethan held one up, spreading it wide for our inspection. If not for his efforts, there’d have been no shirts or decals, no accessories whatsoever, only song.

  “It’s a shit vibe.” Repa turned to me. “You know it.”

  Tuesday-night rehearsal had been the usual three-hour storm of dirty noise, a half-conscious run through our set—then again and again. Four times was routine, though we’d become so enraptured it was difficult to tell whether we improved anything one set to the next. Our touring had left us in tip-top form, and we always played best with no audience but one another. Local gigs, however, were becoming lucrative—as much as two hundred dollars per show—and our rehearsal space was the fruit of an increasing band fund. Between songs, the three of us had split a case of beer and a handle of Popov, more than usual for a weeknight. We were feeling the effects now that we’d ventured into the autumn evening.

  “Can you imagine,” Repa said, “the kind of chickenshit who’d wear a thing like that?”

  “I got a deal on these.” Ethan teetered, an easy kill when it came to booze. His brown eyes took wild courses, as if glimpsing a number of worlds at once. “Only cost two bucks apiece,” he said.

  Early October. The orange-black hue of the season, the moon visible through the shedding trees. I sensed a good mixture coursing through me—a deep, fuzzy buzz that might last awhile—and wanted the night to end somewhere other than my new basement digs. It would come on like that, the purr of some drunken muse, asking: What else is there, where else is there to be? That’s when I’d pine for Lauren. It didn’t help that we’d met in autumn, four years earlier, tangling on a bed of flannel shirts in Ford Field. It had been my first time; hers, too. A time that could seem so distant, but I remembered the smell of her then: a lotionlike sweetness. Once or twice I’d picked up that scent in movie theaters or concert halls, had trailed it until it disappeared. I thought I might never find it again, yet the fall breeze revived the possibility.

  Repa snatched a T-shirt, spreading it wide, dancing with it across the gravel lot, while I pictured Lauren’s dorm room, out there in the land of student riots and parties gone Babylon—Michigan State University, a mere hour’s drive. I knew there’d be a pumpkin on her windowsill and paper ghouls dangling from the ceiling. At this hour she’d be asleep in sweatpants torn at the knees and some faded T-shirt, the kind of thing only a slumbering young woman could wear with any grace.

  “Oh, baby. Yes!” Repa’s argument veered toward the abstract. He kissed the silk-screened face, tongued the gun. “Do me. Do me where there’s pain.” Trotting now, clicking his heels, inspiring Ethan to break into song. They laughed; they traded verse. There could be hours of this. Neither of them noticed me inching away. By the time they’d realized I’d left, the shirts would be folded and stowed, awaiting future scrutiny.

  As I cranked the starter of my minivan, driving eighty miles of highway to Lauren’s East Lansing campus seemed a valiant idea, a challenge to my wits. I knew the DUI preemptives: slapping my jaw, palming an eye when the lines in the road doubled. Set the cruise at sixty-five; keep the blood sugar up; more beer, candy, nicotine. Windows down. Never, ever use the heater. Just outside the city the highway would open up, stretching empty and dark through the Michigan farmlands. It was a straight shot on Interstate 96, the junction just a few miles away. A quick westward turn off Telegraph Road, before I gave myself time to think it over.

  GRAND RIVER AVENUE WAS empty as my minivan rattled into town. East Lansing’s bars had closed, the fraternity mansions dark but for porch lights. Night crawlers outside the 7-Eleven and no one else around. I’d arrived this way a few nights the year before, when Lauren had been a freshman, cold-calling her from an all-night diner’s pay phone and waking hours later in her bunk. My hit-and-run experience of the collegiate dream.

  We claimed we were taking a break, or broken up. But it only took one of us mustering the late-night nerve to call, and once we found each other there’d be an exciting instant when our old passions proved their endurance. She was another world, a place where I sought shelter when my soul was on the fringe. I never knew it until I arrived.

  I pulled up to the same old diner and punched the buttons of a pay phone carved with initials and plastered with stickers. The line rang, a jangling moment that forced me to consider my alternative if Lauren didn’t pick up: sleep in the minivan, in some lot far beyond the campus’s parking-ticket entrapment.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m on Grand River. Can I come over?”

  “You know where to go,” Lauren said. “I’ll let you in.”

  Sun blasted through the dormitory windows, alerting me to the worst headache and a sucked-dry feeling—in a matter of minutes I was scheduled to begin the morning shift at Repeat the Beat Records, where I’d been employed the past couple months. I climbed out of Lauren’s bed to reach for her cordless. “Calling in drunk” was how Repa described this type of postbinge operation, when you awake half cockeyed, feeling thrashed enough that your voice conveys an indisputable illness.

  “I’m sick, man. Don’t think I can make it.”

  The record shop’s manager, a progressive rock connoisseur with a poodled mullet, wasn’t yet onto me.

  “You sound like hell,” he said.

  Lauren had left for class. Her hair raking my face as she climbed over my aching limbs was the only memory I had of her having been there at all. The only other evidence was a water bottle nestled in my crotch, a note stuck to it: DRINK. It said so much about why I loved her, though I was no longer in love.

  My hair had grown long, chin length, and smelled of stale spirits. I lay down ass-flat on the floor to allow my intestines percolation time. A feeling like rug burn worked itself up my throat. For a while I stared at the ceiling, upon which fluorescent decals were arranged in the shape of a constellation. When this cosmos became too much to consider, I turned to Lauren’s walls, decorated with art assignments and poems and a photo of me that I couldn’t remember being taken.

  And there, perched on her windowsill, was the pumpkin—a sallow, yellowing gourd, really.

  Caitlin was nearby, in a dorm I’d never seen. Worse than the bruised tenderness of my eyeballs was the guilt of realizing she hadn’t crossed my mind the night before. I’d been putting stock in the idea that here, in this state-college wonderland, Caitlin would have her shot at good living. Surely Mom was also banking on this. Caitlin would be the long-distance proof that our family was carrying on. Her academic awards would outshine my van tours. She’d return to Dearborn blonde and fit, tan from spring-break travels, carrying scholarly medallions that would divert attentions from my expanding gut and mangy hair and the mounting, never-mentioned evidence that I was becoming a drunk. For Caitlin: a career in humanities or veterinary science; something useful and peaceable and immune to future calamities.

  I’D BEEN ON CAMPUS a couple days when there was a knock at Lauren’s door. She wasn’t due back for hours, and I inched down the v
olume of her stereo, hoping the slow fade would fool whoever was outside into believing the music had been carried off by wind.

  Three more knocks.

  I’d been indulging in a faux breakdown, the type of catatonic rest I believed any hardworking musician deserved. The greats had holed up in Chelsea Hotel. My reprieve was Marshall-Adams dormitory, where Lauren kissed me hard before leaving for biology, the two of us carrying on as though we each hadn’t seen a world of new things we had no way of sharing. Though she must have known the days had temporarily broken me, because she held me tight as we lay watching VHS tapes. In her arms I’d been able to sleep for hours on end, never once thinking anyone might discover me.

  From the hallway, I heard my sister call my name.

  I walked over and slid the deadbolt.

  Standing in the doorway, Caitlin was a wreck. Her eyes had the drear of someone who’d stared too long at the sun. Her blonde hair was tangled and streaked with red dye. She wore a sweatshirt and blue jeans.

  “Will you talk to me?” she said. “Lauren told me you were here.”

  Beneath a shaft of light, standing in the institution-green hallway, my sister came suddenly and fully into focus—clearer than ever before. Funny how, glimpsing someone I’d known my entire life, I saw afresh the sunspots fading into the angles of her nose, the graceful bend of her wrist as she pressed the butt of her palm to her forehead. The first etchings of crow’s-feet as she clenched her eyes. Cafeteria food had added weight to her face, rounding her soft cheeks.

  “Don’t cry,” I said. “It’s okay.”

  I followed her outside, where we set out beneath the towering grids of dormitory windows. So many people, stacked atop one another—groping and studying and dabbling in expendable lifestyles. Music was blaring, bad stuff. I’d never have admitted it, but places like that terrified me. After we’d walked far enough that I became lost, Caitlin said, “Can I have your keys? Just go for a drive?”

  “I’ll drive you,” I said, knowing she wouldn’t be able to massage my minivan’s temperamental ignition. “Where you wanna go?”

  We didn’t look each other in the eye, a kind of avoidance we’d perfected in churches while shaking the hands of strangers—Peace be with you … And also with you—before proclaiming the mystery of faith and accepting Christ’s Body on our tongues.

  “I can’t stop thinking about driving a car into a wall,” Caitlin said, “so that no one would know I meant to do it.”

  I gripped her wrist, yanked her until we were standing still. Then she snatched back her arm and avoided me by examining a silver watch Lauren had given her as a birthday present, precious to her, I could tell, like some anti-evil talisman. The sidewalks were littered with scraps of leaves. I felt the thick, prickling lethargy of having sat motionless for one day too many. Chatter sounded in every direction as students reeled by with backpacks. I’d endure it each time I was there, a longing for whatever I was missing out on: the collegiate verve, the mid-American coming of age. Then I’d think of the band and be satisfied that I was where I belonged.

  “Don’t talk like that,” I said. “It screws with your mind.”

  Caitlin huddled into me, crying slowly. Like my mom, a two-pronged vein rose in her forehead when she was upset. She could seem so childlike, not in her gestures or words but in how completely her face gave away her feelings. This, I knew, was something she regretted about herself.

  “I just want to leave,” she said.

  I held her tightly. Small crowds passed us thoughtlessly—we were typical, indistinct, a couple who’d had a spat or flunked our chemistry exams.

  “How long have you been here?” Caitlin said. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

  There was no excuse. Over two days, I’d accomplished little more than the alphabetization of Lauren’s CD collection, recordings from a couple years earlier that already rang nostalgic—aside from a copy of my band’s CD, which I’d confiscated on sight. One more attempt to cleave my life in two: music and all else. I’d also read from her diary, the better half of it about me, and none of those bits were entirely flattering. Between classes, Lauren smuggled me fish sticks from the cafeteria, asking what my problem were as I scarfed the items, wounded by her secret theories about my life. Distant is what she’d written. Unreachable.

  “I was going to call you,” I told Caitlin, though I’d already compartmentalized this visit to East Lansing as a private misadventure, a semiclandestine bender.

  Visiting my sister should be an official event, a rose-in-hand occasion.

  “I hate it here,” she said. “These people are nasty.”

  “What about your roommate?”

  “She and her friends stare at me when I walk in. She lets these guys sleep in our room. I came home the other night, and some ass was in my bed. She sucks. She has pictures of herself in swimsuits all over the place.”

  “Man,” I said. “That’s sick.”

  Caitlin said, “I want to die sometimes.”

  “Hey, now.” I gave her a gentle shake.

  Having indulged so often in dark fantasy, I felt a glib ownership of her idea, as though I’d braved the trenches of depression and had gleaned profound insight. “It’s gonna be fine,” I said. “Smart people get that way sometimes.”

  Caitlin tugged at her sweatshirt sleeves, pulling the ends over her hands, staring off with a look that said, No, I wasn’t hearing a damn word.

  After that we walked aimlessly, saying nothing.

  Months earlier, while driving home from the Atlanta rehab, my dad had told me about an acoustic chamber he’d stood inside while studying automotive sound cancellation—his attempt to establish a bond, seeking common ground through auditory science. The chamber, he’d said, was a room-sized vacuum where audio waves were rendered inaudible by the balanced vibrations of carefully tuned, opposing frequencies. Sound pitted against sound, equaling silence; a void where even the most deafening decibels existed unheard, quiet as air, yet occurring nonetheless like mute explosions. This was the silence between Caitlin and me: both of us waiting for some unknowable frequency to lower in pitch, so that whatever was there would begin to wail and prove it existed.

  We reached her dorm, where she stood at the door, asking if I’d come by again.

  “I’ll come back real soon. You just have to take it easy.”

  “Can’t I just take your car?”

  Tears had glossed the skin beneath her eyes, and in them was a look as though another night in the hormonal wilderness of Michigan State University would be unbearable. Whatever she meant to tell me, I wasn’t ready to understand.

  “Goddamnit,” I said.

  I hugged her, holding on a little longer than usual. Up close, I noticed the puncture in her earlobe where an earring was supposed to be.

  “I love you,” I said. “Don’t let these fucks get to you.”

  “But they’re everywhere,” she said.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Trim that nasty-ass hair before you come back.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Yeah, maybe.”

  “Or else I’ll do it.” Finally, she smiled. “Nice and neat.” Reaching for my bangs, pretending to snip them clean with her fingers.

  LATER THAT EVENING, GRAND River Avenue filled with students protesting a campus-wide ban on the football-season tailgate parties for which the school was infamous. Through Lauren’s window, we heard the commotion stirring through the courtyard. I’d decided it was my last night there.

  “Want to check it out?” she said.

  “They’re rioting over tailgating? Aren’t student riots supposed to be about wars?”

  “Some people,” Lauren said, “think this is fascist.”

  When we made it to the street, there was fire and a mob of hundreds chanting Bullshit! Bullshit! gathered around the blaze. A young man in a mesh jersey was lifted above the crowd, reaching for a traffic-signal box that hung from a cable above the avenue. They lifted him until the steel
box was cuddled in his arms; he dangled from it, piñata-like, as those with bottles in their hands raised them to the light.

  Lauren took my arm as we watched from a distance too far to tell what, exactly, was on fire. East Lansing had brought about no drastic changes in her, not that I could tell. Her brown hair was crimped at the bangs. We were wearing flannel. She leaned into me.

  “My sister’s okay here?” I said.

  “I think so.”

  Lauren kept her eyes on the crowd. Behind us a police squad in riot gear arrived, their face masks drawn, some with leashed dogs, charging toward the conflagration. When, at the periphery, a boy in a backward ball cap dug into a box of beer and the first bottle was thrown aimlessly into the crowd, Lauren and I retreated to her dorm. As we passed Caitlin’s building, I counted the windows, unsure which was hers yet convinced it was one that was unlit, and that inside all was quiet.

  A late-October morning, trees bare up and down the street, a season’s worth of fallen leaves swept to piles at the curb; half the kitchen painted white, the other half still yellowed from years of stovetop fumes; the gas heater getting its first chance to prove it worked and doing a fine job, warming even my lair in the basement. Our new home: shaping up and in working order. Mom and I: housemates, grateful exiles. Everything seemed to be coming together slowly but coming together nonetheless, and this was the state of things in general when the psych ward called.

  The band had just returned from a two-day jaunt through Canada. I was coming around after a heavy sleep in the basement and could tell from Mom’s voice—monochromatic and blunt in the kitchen upstairs—that everything was not at all in its right place.

  “And she’s safe? She’s okay?”

  Usually I rose from the mattress in a doltish, uncaffeinated trance, but I tore off the sheets and dressed frantically, calling up the stairwell to my mom, who wasn’t answering. When I entered the kitchen, she stood clutching the phone.