Mouthquake

by Daniel Allen Cox

  I told Ingenue the story of my lost boy, and they moved their chair in front of mine, interrogation-style. Ingenue took out a sketchpad and started to draw a face.

  Tell me, sister. What does he look like?

  Like an asshole. Draw an asshole where his nose should be.

  Sounds like he’s the perfect face-fuck. Get in that. Or I will. But seriously, what does his hair look like?

  Dirty blond and always in my face.

  Always in your face…like this?

  Yeah. Round chin but square jaw, can suck a pacifier really, really well. Honestly, I’m seeing this all through club light, but I think he had green eyes and sort of orange fffffffffffffffffffffffffff-ff-fff-sorry-fff, um, you know, like orange dots on his nose.

  Sweetie.

  Yes.

  You apologize every time you stutter. Don’t you realize that’s your special power? That most of us dream of having a power like that? Never apologize for your stuttering. It makes the rest of us feel like shit, takes away our hope. And honestly, boyfriend, it makes you look like a privileged fucking cunt.

  Sorry. Whatever you say.

  No, you’re not sorry.

  Uh, right.

  So you were saying. Green eyes?

  Yeah. But does that even make a difference? You’re using a pencil.

  Is this him?

  Ingenue turned their sketchpad to me so I could see their rendition of Eric. It was bang-on. I was surprised to see him wearing a T-shirt on which was written his phone number, in jumbled order, along with a floating question mark, but that was him, standing cool, with his zipper undone, and dripping sex. The strangest part of the image was the backdrop. I could tell by the surrounding buildings that he was standing in the train yards in Pointe-Saint-Charles, close to the tracks. And his eyes were closed. I was perplexed.

  What’s wrong? That’s him, isn’t it?

  Um, yeah. But why is he there?

  Dove, you said when you kissed him it felt like your gums meshed together, right? That you traded a gallon of saliva, and you could taste his loneliness, and when he pulled away it was only because of the sacred primacy of music, he had to dance it out, and that you figured you’d be coming home together last night, right? Right?

  Weird, I never said that. Now that I remember, though, I told him to meet me outside, yeah.

  But he didn’t. God, can we do something about that shit on the ceiling? It’s giving me shingles. And then when you called today, he hung up on you. You called back and he hung up again, right?

  Y-yy-y-y- mhmm. I mean, yeah.

  Then he’s in the train yard.

  Right now?

  Listen, I have to go. I’m not your fucking psychic. I’m doing a Crystal Waters cabaret at World Beat tonight. It’s a contest. I’m going to own that fucking bitch.

  With that, Ingenue got up, sang and shimmied the opening bars to “Gypsy Woman,” and left me there with my bottle of Baby Duck, an ashtray full of questions, and the drawing of Eric. I had a boner to take care of so I got dressed—as Johnny Cash put it so well in his song “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” in “my cleanest dirty shirt”—and headed to the Metro where I tried to negotiate about the fare. If the landlord could wait, why couldn’t they? No dice. Maybe they didn’t like the open bottle of wine. So I left the Metro and walked through the horror of downtown, the disgusting crowds of morning people dressed in bright colours, the putrid sun. Thank god for my sunglasses. When a night creature walks through the day, they walk alone.

  I found Eric by the tracks. I compared him to Ingenue’s sketch a few times, and, yep, but his back was turned to me. I had the sudden idea that we were both sleepwalkers and not awake, the somnambulant who have lost their way out of nightclubs, looking for misplaced drugs, perhaps stumbling to take a piss or wander from bed to bed, and we get caught in these ugly daytime positions against our will. Luckily, we don’t remember any of it.

  I called Eric’s name, but he didn’t turn around. Like he hung up on me again. Or did I have the wrong name? I yelled a little louder, and when I did, a train barrelled by, the steel wheels screaming the cry of morning so loud, so brash, I covered my ears, but he just stood there and soaked it in, let the rumble fill his body. And then I understood that he heard through vibration.

  After the train had passed, he turned around and saw me. I was still calling his name, as if wishing my mouth to be the reason he’d quaked on the edge of the ties.

  We walked back to the Plateau together, sharing a single pair of sweaty sunglasses. Taking turns. Halfway back to Prince Arthur, he lifted my arm, stuck his nose into my pit hair, and took a good raunchy whiff.

  I forgot to ask Ingenue what their special power was.

  THE MILLIPEDE

  Eric is deaf.

  He says it’s not an impairment to him, just a quiet space somewhere behind the senses. He says being deaf doesn’t mean there’s no sound in his head. He says he can hear music as well as I do, just differently. Eric says a lot of things.

  But I don’t believe him that it’s fine, that he doesn’t want to hear again. I know he knows what he’s missing, that he’s never heard the emotion in my voice, the sound of my key in the lock, the sound of me turning to him in the dark and saying something intimate just before sleep. It has been years since he’s heard the sound of a dog drinking water, David Bowie caterwauling, or Tina Turner telling us why heroes are unnecessary. I refuse to believe he doesn’t wish for these things.

  So I forgive myself for pitying him. I forgive myself for dreaming about hearing restoration surgery that neither of us can afford because we’re young and poor. I forgive myself for wanting something for him that he doesn’t want. I forgive myself for thinking selfishly, because one day there will be a song I really, really need him to hear.

  You might say that to compensate for his deafness, and perhaps out of protest, I indulge my own sense of hearing.

  We moved in together a few months after meeting. Our new apartment didn’t sound like other apartments. Nobody does acoustics like me. I wallpapered because I found the unadorned walls too sonically reflective of cutlery clatter. I chinked my closet with expanding builder’s foam when I twigged that the downstairs neighbour had a habit of falling asleep in front of the news and the sound came up through the floorboards. I disabled the doorbell so people had to knock, and I padded the front door with soft foam so they had to knock quietly. I regularly oiled every door hinge.

  It took me forever to figure out how to place our stereo speakers just right. They couldn’t be facing each other, nor could they be facing away. I learned and internalized the concept of “toeing in” wherein the lava of sound is directed at the listener to form an equilateral triangle, which helps to avoid distortion. The speakers point at the ears of the listener. The third ear completes the triangle. Move your head back a few inches, and the music will disappear completely. Enjoy the mystery. Headphones are an acoustic crime of the highest order.

  If I were really serious about sound, I would’ve coated the surfaces of the apartment with a dusting of Italian moss and installed a cork floor. But I’m not that serious.

  It’s in my nature to question a story the first few times I hear it. The expression “unreliable narrator” is kind of redundant, because narrators are always unreliable. They constantly struggle with their own biases, failing memories, unscientific understandings of the world, narrative interferences from other similar stories, and the distractions of daily life. You can hardly blame anyone for not telling the story straight. That’s why I always like to hear it a few times.

  Tell me again how you went deaf.

  Maybe I should start charging you for this. Especially because it seems to get you off.

  Work is work. I’d support that arrangement. Listen, I just want you to tell me again, in case I missed any details the first time around.

  I was pretty thorough, if I recall. Remember, I was trying to impress you.

  Your memory actually did impress me. But
that’s not what you were trying to do. You were trying to get my sympathy.

  Of course I was, that was the fastest way to bed you.

  Did you know that I always knew we would meet? Ever since I was a kid. I’m serious. I imagined you more as a Derek, but you’re still pretty much the same guy.

  Right.

  I have a special narrative request, if you don’t mind. Tell me the story from the point of view of the ears.

  You’re such a psycho.

  Our conversations are magical. Stutterer and deaf person, we have such interesting ways of communicating. We meet somewhere in the middle of the other’s irregular speech. He lipreads my thoughts through a stutter, and I read his through his slur. When we speak to each other, Eric stares at my mouth, and I stare at his hands. I don’t understand sign language so he doesn’t sign to me, but his fingers still try to decode what he’s saying. He can’t help it.

  He places his hands on my neck to feel the vibrations. Sometimes I think he knows what I’m going to say a few seconds before it comes out. And sometimes, maybe even before I know what I’m going to say. I place my hands on his sternum, not to feel the vibration, but to feel the pain in his sighs and what happens between words. He’s a breathy one. Having a conversation with him engages so much of our bodies. It’s so sexual. I think the real reason we talk is to have an excuse to fondle each other. We’re real pervs that way. I wonder if I’d love Eric as much if he were a hearing person. And I wonder if he wonders the same about my speech.

  Eric the teenager was a suburban brat, a long-haired boy of interesting bone construction. He had a keen social conscience and sense of politics. He was quiet by choice, prematurely aged, and silent beyond his years. This was mostly to boycott the stupidity he saw around him, but also to stoke a smug, adolescent sense of knowing it all. We have all been too smart to interact with the world at some point on our journeys to the centre of the idiot self. He retold his story:

  One day, hanging around in the basement with a bunch of other grade-ten intellectuals debating the relevance of Nirvana lyrics, a bug crawled into his ear, or that’s how it felt. In response, his face suddenly twitched and jumped. Eric knew enough about bugs to know it wasn’t an earwig. There was no wriggling. It was more of a slow, plodding, insistent crawl. He raised his hand to stick his finger in his ear but stopped short. That could just push it in deeper. At his friends’ encouragement, he tilted his head, hoping gravity would work. Then he pinched his nose and blew like you do on airplanes, but that didn’t work, either. That’s when he got more insight into the nature of the bug creeping into him: It had a corpulent, muscled body the shape of a worm, a hard helmet of a head, an antenna that probed and tickled. There may have been wings, because something was opening up. A boy knows when something is unfolding inside him.

  What a young know-it-all assumes at this point in the creation of his life story is that the insect was inching its way to the succulent brilliance of his mind, to feed on his brain, lay eggs, suck out his intelligence, shit prolifically into his faculties and lobes, and eventually carry everything out like loot into the bad world.

  Eric’s friends started to panic because of what was coming out of his mouth. He didn’t make any sense; he praised the group Genesis, which, in their social circle, was taboo enough to warrant shunning. They pretended not to hear him say that he wanted to hang a Phil Collins poster over his bed.

  For the most part, Eric felt calm. Then he felt the legs under the animal. They were manifold and behaved like hairs. There was something significantly problematic for Eric that an insect inside his ear, a growing itch in his face and head, was covered with legs identical to stereocilia, the “hairs” that made hearing possible. The perfect camouflage. The thoughts raced quickly through Eric’s mind, just ahead of the bug. It was planning to domicile itself permanently in his head. It would make a nest of wax and dandruff, absorb sound, become his ear, hear for him. Intercept the signals and rob him of all frequencies.

  The insect was no insect, but, rather, an arthropod. It was a millipede. And it was already driving him insane.

  Eric panicked and dragged his friends into the car garage adjacent to his bedroom, where they scavenged around for a tool. Nothing looked right to him; everything looked deformed and anthropomorphic, like something from either Naked Lunch, Beauty and the Beast, or The Flintstones, like a roto-rooter with wings, a weedwacker with grass stains on its lips, vise grips in a perpetual metallic death rattle, spools of conductive copper coil hibernating for heat, or nails all fighting loudly for a spot at the bottom of the box.

  Suction cup.

  The suction cup was just being itself. Eric’s dad usually used it to pull dings out of car doors. Eric’s friends held his head down against a tire, moved his long hair aside, and affixed the suction cup to his ear. Six hands pressed it flush against him to push all the air out and create a perfect vacuum. One friend grabbed Eric by the neck and held him down while the other two pulled the suction cup up.

  When you draw elements through a vacuum, you create an impossibility in space, a zero-gravity situation where blood can free-float, where screams travel but remain silent. The concave part of a suction cup was never meant to contain so much human pain. Eric’s head wouldn’t fall off the cup. It stayed suspended in mid-air as a set of shears got up and walked out of the garage with a side-winding garden hose. Eric’s friends had to mime to him to hold his nose and blow.

  Eric didn’t hear the rip. His friends did, and they’ve been trying to describe the sound to him ever since. The bug was never found.

  So? Is that different from the first time I told you the story?

  It always is. This time you forgot something important. Like reeeeeeeally important.

  What?

  You want me to tell you?

  It sounds like something I should know.

  Yes, it’s totally something you should know. Maybe I should charge you for it. Story analysts get paid a lot of money.

  You’re a dick, and I hate and love you at the same time.

  You forgot to say what ear it was. And can we assume that there were two millipedes? One for each ear?

  I can’t believe you. You weren’t even listening. You’re so busy fucking my lips that you don’t spend enough time reading them. That’s been the problem ever since we met.

  I plunged my tongue into his nearest ear hole without warning, deep-diving into the wax. I skull-fucked him until his earlobes turned a shade of red that matched the sheets. But I was still searching and curious, so I wrapped my tongue around his whole mind, the whole beautiful fucking thing, turning it over in a spit baste, looking for what, I don’t know, maybe pricked desire not yet worn sharper by use, or maybe something more liminal, the mud edges of a brain slicked and falling open, as if there could be more, and just before pulling out, I whispered something so that Seal could echo inside him forever unheard, about getting a little crazy just to survive.

  PUNISHMENT FOR RECORD THIEVES

  There was a time when I needed to listen to every song in the world. I was still looking for the missing parts of me. HMV had a lot of new music, and it had served me well these past few years, but I realized I needed access to older material.

  I figured the easiest way to do that was to quit being a bum and volunteer at CKUT FM community radio on rue McTavish. At the time, it housed Canada’s largest private record collection. I forget the exact numbers, but they were up there—tens of thousands of vinyl records, CDs, and cassettes, stacked in filing cabinets in the basement of the William Shatner Building at McGill. Musicologists from around the world made pilgrimages to the station. They begged to sleep in the aisles so they could catalogue in dreams as well as in wakefulness, even though that was against the rules.

  I would soon become very familiar with the four-letter word, the call letters that the deejays repeated endlessly in gravel voices carved by cigarettes and coffee and long nights during funding drives, on programs that were passed from friend to
friend like deathbed heirlooms.

  The coordinator squinted at me and frowned when he saw my shoes. They were brand-new.

  Do you steal?

  Is this what you ask all volunteers?

  Yes. We kind of have a problem. A lot of CDs go missing. We don’t think it’s the volunteers, but we can’t be sure. A few hundred pieces of music disappear every year, and we don’t know what to do about it.

  Only a few hundred?

  That’s a lot. That’s too much.

  Have you considered Klingons?

  No, we haven’t.

  I think you should. This is the William Shatner Building.

  Just so we’re clear, you can’t live here. Do you go to McGill?

  Uh, no.

  Where do you go to school?

  Here and there, but not Concordia, so don’t worry.

  The prospective candidate has to open incoming mail, take out the music, and listen to it on the CD player in the cubicle with the door closed. There’s a pair of headphones. You can throw the letter in the garbage.

  Do you only get CDs? No cassettes?

  Sometimes, but rarely. If you see a cassette, you should notify someone.

  What’s in the letter?

  Nothing, just some garbage from the record label saying we’re the first radio station to get the album and that we should be thankful. Just put it in the trash.

  What’s in the cubicle?

  You.

  If there are headphones, why does the door have to be closed?

  The prospective candidate is doing important and private work. After a first listen, they must label the jewel case with a sticker according to the colour code: green, purple, black, white, orange, pink, magenta.