by Zhanna Slor
Tao looks up at the gray, darkening sky, snapping his fingers, which are tattooed all the way down to his elbows. “I don’t know, man, I think we have,” he says. And then I remember where I’ve seen that hat before. I stand up and retrieve my phone from a pocket, scrolling through for a picture of Anna. It takes me a while to get to one. But when I do, she is wearing that exact hat. Long black hair, eyebrow piercing, red-cheeked—from drinking, most likely. Her arm is around some tall, thin man whose head is cropped out. I’d snapped the picture from her MySpace months ago, back when she still posted photos online, because she looked so happy. I’d done so partly because it made me feel less guilty for being gone. Like, if Anna was happy, then it didn’t matter that I hadn’t visited and barely ever called. But of course, that’s a stupid thing to think. The faces we show the world are rarely our true selves. True unhappiness? It’s a personal matter. I’d already learned this the hard way once: if Anna was having problems, I’d never discover it from her Internet accounts. Probably not from a phone call, either, now that I’m thinking about it. Anna was always so private about what she was feeling. I can’t remember if she ever cried in front of me once after the age of four. So maybe she is happy in this picture, but it’s just as possible she isn’t.
I swallow the lump in my throat and walk up the stairs, bringing the photo over. The air is thick and wet, like it’s going to start snowing any second, but Tao doesn’t even look cold. “Are you maybe thinking of this girl?” I ask, so close to him now I can smell the grease in his hair. “You’re wearing her hat.”
“Oh. Yeah!” He looks at the tiny, pixelated photo, then at me. “Shit, you look a lot like her. No wonder I was confused.”
I take out my pack of Camel Lights again, offering him one, which he takes eagerly and without thanks, like he is used to people giving him things. He passes the joint to Liam, who either has a very high tolerance or is also going to be this spacey soon. I try not to cough from all the smoke now billowing around my head.
“Where did you find her hat?” I ask this in the most innocent voice I can muster. Which is maybe the wrong approach, since Tao inhales, then looks at me strangely, like he is suddenly suspicious.
“Why are you asking?”
“She’s not in trouble or anything,” I explain. “Did she give it to you? Where did you find it?”
“Uh,” he looks down, and licks his lips. “I dunno, man. The hat? Coulda been anywhere.”
“Maybe she left it here after a show,” Liam suggests.
“Okay…” I look from Liam to Tao to Liam again, having the strong feeling they are leaving something out. Snow starts to fall then, out of nowhere, covering us all in thick white flakes. Typical Wisconsin weather. Right when you think it’s warming up there’s another blizzard. Tao doesn’t move, or attempt to put on shoes. “Well, do you know where she is, by chance? Or who she’s been hanging out with?”
Tao glances at me skeptically, then focuses on Liam, who shrugs. “I think she’s with Tristan,” Tao finally admits.
Liam’s eyes grow large. “No shit?” His lips turn down into a disgusted pout.
“Who’s Tristan?” I ask.
“Just some crusty asshole,” Liam says. “Stayed here a couple of times and then I’d find shit missing the next day.” He shakes his head. “Not cool, man.”
“He’s really tall,” Tao adds, shaking his head and looking again towards the sky. “Like a space creature. He can reach anything.”
“Does this Tristan guy have a last name?” I ask, frowning.
“You want his social security number too?” Tao jokes.
Liam laughs. “Last summer a guy came around calling himself Twigs the Clown.”
Tao perks up and turns to us again. “Twigs was here?” he asks. “I love that guy.”
“Do you know anything else about him?” I try. I don’t have time to sit here and listen to them talk about a clown. “Anything at all?”
Liam and Tao exchange glances. “No,” Liam says. “Why would we?”
“I don’t know,” I say, taking in a deep breath. “Just asking. Thanks.” I turn on my heels and start walking away. At least I have a name now. A lead. That’s enough for one visit. More than that, I can’t be around Liam anymore. It’s too confusing.
“Masha, wait,” Liam says, catching up to me on the sidewalk. The snow is falling harder now, but none of it is sticking to the ground yet. It’s actually quite beautiful. And somehow sad, too. “I’m glad you stopped here. Really.”
“Why?” I ask.
“It’s… good to see you doing so well.”
I look at him skeptically.
“What? Come on I was joking before, you do seem happy. Tired, but happy,” he says. “Which is all we can really hope for right?”
I shrug.
Liam steps forward to hug me. “You’re shaking, girl.”
“I am?”
“You’re freezing,” he says, holding me tighter. I let him stay there for a while, because he’s right, I am cold, and because he smells so good. Or maybe because I could really use some human interaction right now, I don’t know. I can’t think straight when I don’t get enough sleep, I turn into a quivering baby. Part of me wants to cry, and part of me wants to pass out, and neither one wants to keep walking in the cold. But I know I have to. This isn’t my world anymore. I don’t have time to get bogged down in nostalgia.
“Thanks,” I say, shyly. Wrong, wrong, wrong, my brain keeps yelling. You have a clear conscience now, don’t mess it up. After a moment, I wiggle out of his hug. “I really should go. It’s about to really blizzard out here.”
“You can come back inside if you want,” Liam says. He puts his hands up in surrender. “I won’t try anything, scouts’ honor.”
“I have to find Anna,” I say. “Sorry. But thank you.” Then I start walking as fast as I can down Center Street, feeling like I dodged a bullet. Before I can get away, Liam calls out my name again. I spin around, but don’t head back.
“You should try Bremen Café. Or Foundation,” he suggests, but doesn’t explain why. I would have tried both those places anyway, but I thank him and continue forward. Speeding through the torrent of giant snowflakes, I can’t help but wonder if Rose led me to Valhalla only to throw me off. She is perfectly aware of our history, after all. Liam claims he doesn’t even know Anna. Maybe she was there at some point for a show, long enough to leave a hat, but this is nothing new for my sister. She is always leaving stuff everywhere. When we were kids, I would find her things in the most random places; a toothbrush in the freezer, a fountain pen under a cereal box. Once I discovered an entire box of photos she’d taken of a neighbor’s dog in my winter boots. In my room. She had no idea how they got there; she was just like that.
Which begs the question: why would Rose send me to Liam’s house? She couldn’t have known that some random train-hopper would be walking around with information I needed. And maybe Anna is with this Tristan guy, but I am not sold on it. It doesn’t sound like her to become so nihilistic. Train-hoppers live nowhere, and don’t care about anyone or anything; Anna is the opposite of that. She’s sensitive and fanatical. She wouldn’t leave her room for a week once because her friend’s parakeet died. She wouldn’t fit in with that crowd. They’re not all bad, but many of them walk the line of criminality and drug addiction. They’re definitely not artist types.
No, it doesn’t sound like Anna to fall in with them. But I better ask around to make sure. I head towards Bremen Café, only a few blocks away from Liam’s, because in Riverwest, everything is a few blocks away from everything. As the snow falls harder and harder, I pick up the pace. There are people out and about everywhere, biking down Center Street, going in and out of bars. You can hardly tell it’s the middle of February, and a weeknight. Unlike suburban Wisconsin, where my parents reside practically in solitude, and hearing a car drive by makes you jump because it happens so rarely.
I’m about to
slip on a patch of new snow when I catch myself on a patio table and realize I’ve managed to reach the door for Bremen Café. Not the door actually, but the crowd of smokers standing outside of it. I find my balance and push my way through them, to find more smoking inside. My glasses fog up from the heat, making the whole place appear like a blob of leather. I pocket them and head straight to the pool room in the back, but Anna isn’t there, of course. That would be too easy. I don’t see Rose either. There is, however, a group of train-hoppers hanging around playing pool. Maybe they will know something. I turn into the room, watching. Some heads are bobbing along; others are focused on the tables. No one even looks in my direction. I check my outfit—jeans, black leather coat, red beanie hat—and decide I can’t appear so out of place here. But maybe there’s something about my energy now that I can’t see. Like I’ve sold out, or something. As if people can smell that I have a job and a lovely apartment and a healthy relationship. As if they can detect I go running on the beach every day.
Does being an adult have a smell?
Being existentially lost has a smell; the room is drowning in it. Like grease and beer and sourness. I breathe out of my mouth, get closer. Hakol le’tova, I remind myself. Everything happens for a reason. There’s probably a reason for all this too. I just may not understand what that is for a while.
My glance falls on a young girl who’s wearing a relatively new t-shirt and is staring into space, bored. I head towards her first. “Hey, I like your shirt,” I tell her pointing at it.
The girl finally looks in my direction, aggressively confused, septum piercing hanging crookedly from her nostrils. “You like Reverend Glasseye?” she asks, studded brows arched upwards, suspicious.
“I do. What’s your favorite song? Mine is ‘Sleep Sweet Countrymen’.” She relaxes a little now that I’ve brought up a relatively unknown New Orleans band that is popular among train-hoppers but continues to eye me suspiciously while I take out my phone, its screen stuck on my sister’s face. “Have you seen this girl?”
“Are you a narc or something?”
“No.”
“A cop then?”
I shake my head again, for some reason embarrassed. I used to get confused for a train-hopper all the time, and now I look like a cop? Sure, my jeans are new, not bought for two dollars at Salvation Army, but it’s not exactly like I am wearing a goddamn suit. My boots I’ve had for five years, at least. I never dye my hair or paint my nails; I haven’t completely changed.
I stop this train of thought. Why am I trying to justify myself? I take in a deep breath, try to remember I am twenty-five years old, with a boyfriend who loves me. That I speak three languages and can wake up at eight a.m. without an alarm. This insecurity I once had, the one that allowed me to confuse being part of a subculture with being part of an actual family, belongs to another person I can hardly relate to, most days.
“I’m not a narc,” I explain. “I’m her sister.”
The girl looks to her right, where there is a redhead in suspenders and a stained striped shirt, with five piercings at least that I can count at first glance. He reminds me of an aggressive Doberman who has spent all day playing in the dirt. For a moment I wish I’d left my septum piercing in, not taken it out years back after getting too many strange looks in Jerusalem, where I’d lived before the kibbutz. Kids would quite literally point and laugh at me on the bus. David hated it. And what is a piercing anyway, if not a message to outsiders, another human version of butt-sniffing? In one country, it could mean anger or confidence, in another, it looks incredibly silly.
Things that work in some places do not work in others.
“Is she bothering you, Mary?” Doberman boy asks, stepping forward. Unquestionably the alpha male of the group. His black boots echo against the linoleum floor, and his glance is hard, like a wall.
“Nah, she’s just looking for someone,” Mary tells him, to my relief.
“I’m...” I struggle to think of an explanation that wouldn’t silence them, then find myself babbling nervously. “Look, I don’t live here, I’m in town for a few days and want to say hi. Someone told me she might be hanging around here.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to be found,” Mary says.
“Maybe I don’t care,” I explain, getting annoyed. I know that train-hoppers don’t think much of outsiders, but it’s not like I’m asking for their friendship or something. I put my phone back into my coat and look from Mary to the Doberman, but they’re mute, wide-eyed. What am I doing still standing there, letting them push me around? I have three more bars to look through, and that’s not including the ones farther out from Center Street. I am about to give up and head to the next dive when I smell Rose again. Turning, I see her behind the bar pouring out a line of shots. Her eyes grow large at the sight of me. Large, but duller than before, like some spark has gone. “You came!” she says, looking behind her to a large clock above the beer cooler. “You’re really early.”
I don’t tell her I have no intention of watching her play. “Can you come outside with me for a sec?”
She looks around the bar, which is surrounded by several patrons holding out wallets. “You got another cigarette?” she asks. I nod. Rose whispers something to the other guy bartending, who seems annoyed but also resigned to this sort of behavior from Rose. His glasses shimmer from the bar lights, but for a moment it looks like he is watching me with some recognition. I wonder if I know him from somewhere. Then he waves Rose off, and she follows me outside without putting her coat on.
“Do you know a guy named Tristan? Probably a train-hopper, newish to town?” I ask Rose, once we get outside. We stand under the awning to avoid getting wet. Snow is now swirling in small little tornadoes around the orange glow of streetlamps up and down Bremen St., making me shiver in my shitty coat. Why didn’t anyone remind me to bring something warmer?
“Sure. Tall. Sticky fingers,” Rose says, waving her fingers around. She lights the cigarette and exhales happily. “Why? You looking for drugs or something?”
My stomach drops into my chest. I remember how sparkling her eyes had looked earlier in the day, and figure she must have had experience getting drugs from this guy. Which means he could be an addict, or that Anna could be. “No, no. I heard he might be with Anna.”
Rose’s large hazel eyes grow even more. But her face doesn’t quite match her expression. “No shit?”
“Do you know where he’s staying?” I ask.
“Nah. Could be anywhere. I’m sure she’s fine,” Rose says. She puts a hand over mine when she sees my face. “Anna isn’t stupid enough to get into that shit.”
I frown. I am no longer sure of that at all. “And you never saw them together?”
Rose directs her gaze away from me and towards the ground, which is littered with cigarette butts. “Okay, you got me. I did see them at Bremen once or twice. I didn’t think they were dating though.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. I guess I didn’t want to worry you.”
I can’t decide if she is telling me the truth or not. Maybe she has her own reasons for keeping it from me, but it isn’t like she is going to explain them if she hasn’t already. Is it jealousy? Maybe she liked Tristan and he wasn’t interested in her? “Then why did you tell me to go to Valhalla to look for her?” I ask, still perplexed.
“That’s where all the crusties go,” she says, nonchalantly. “She wasn’t there?”
“No.”
“What about Liam? Did he say anything?” she asks.
Then it hits me. I have to stop myself from rolling my eyes. Her reticence has something to do with Liam. Of course. Did she send me there to spy on him?
“Nothing nice,” I grunt. “Or useful. Not that I would expect more from him.”
Rose watches me intently when I deliver this bit of news, then licks her lips. “Mash, you look beat,” she says. Heavy bass combinations start vibrating
through the windows; a band has taken over the stage, tuning their instruments. “Maybe you should just go to sleep. Whatever the deal is, it can wait until tomorrow.” She then does something to surprise me: she takes out a giant loop of keys from the pocket of her jeans. “Here. Meet me at my house. Take a shower, sleep, whatever. I’ll be back around eleven.” Then she pauses, and looks to Bremen, then back at me with a smile. “Well, unless the night goes well. Did you see that banjo player? Mmm.”
At the mere thought of a bed, I feel so tired my eyes begin to close. The long day is really getting to me. I have a hard time sleeping on planes, so I barely napped coming here. “You still on Center and Weil? In the upstairs unit?”
“You mean your old house?” she laughs. “Yeah. Bob hasn’t raised the rent once, because of...” she stops, swallows. “Because of what happened.”
I nod, pushing away memories of the place. I’d really loved it there, until I didn’t. “I’ll go take a nap then, I guess,” I sigh.
“My brother lives in your old room, and my friend Vince is in...the other room, but they went to Chicago yesterday, so you’ll have the place to yourself,” she says. “He’s a rapper now, did I tell you that? My brother, I mean. He’s so fucking good, too. I know you hate rap but you’d like this, Mash.” Then Rose looks past me, towards the front entrance, where three more people are entering the bar. “Better get back in there,” she says. “Money doesn’t grow on trees, like everyone loves to tell me.”
I watch her leave and am about to do the same, when someone grabs my shoulder and pulls me back.
OCTOBER 2007
