Indestructible Object

by Mary McCoy

  I don’t know what it is, but it looks like art to me, and that gives me an idea.

  The guitar player is barking instructions at the rest of the band, and because he seems to be in charge, I walk up to him. He doesn’t seem terribly friendly, and I’m nervous to ask him what I’m about to ask him. There’s a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket, left over from my next-to-last paycheck at Java Cabana, money I earned when Vincent and I were still together and my life was stable and happy. I decide that if I don’t need to save that money for a deposit on an apartment, I might as well spend it on this.

  “I’d like to request a song,” I say to the guitar player.

  “We don’t really do that,” he says, then bobs his chin in the direction of his guitar case, which doubles as a tip jar.

  I throw in the twenty-dollar bill and say, “It’s not really a song I want. It’s more of an improvisation.”

  I can tell that my twenty dollars has bought me, if not a song, at least thirty seconds of the guitar player’s patience in which to explain myself.

  “Our friend is on that train,” I say. “We think he’s making a mistake. We want you to play a song that will convince him to get off that train.”

  The saxophone player has been listening in. She comes over and asks, “What’s your friend’s name?”

  “Max,” Risa says.

  “Rhymes with Stax,” the saxophone player says. She raises her fingers in a snap, just like the logo from Stax Records, the Memphis soul label that was around before my parents were born. We have a ton of Stax records in our house. Or we had a ton of Stax records, before my dad loaded them up in crates and moved them to a new apartment. “Why do you think he’s making a mistake?”

  “Because he’s my friend, and I love him.”

  “What’s so great about you?” she asks.

  “My heart is an indestructible object.”

  While the saxophone player considers this, Risa opens her wallet and throws another ten dollars into the guitar case.

  “Sold,” the guitar player says.

  He takes the mic and counts off, and the band roars to life, a fury of skronk and dirge. Gradually, a hook emerges and the drummer falls into a shuffle, and the song takes shape just in time for the singer to lean into the mic and begin to speak.

  “This is a song for Max, which rhymes with Stax and relax and panic attacks and train tracks.” He doesn’t sing it, or say it, so much as he preaches it, like he wants to save every Redbirds jersey and knee sock–wearing tourist in the Amtrak station from hellfire and brimstone.

  He continues.

  “This is a song for Max, who is on the train.

  “Max, if you can hear me, and you are on the train, there are two fine women here on this platform who wish for you to disembark.

  “These two fine women paid thirty dollars of their hard-earned money for me to make this announcement.

  “I don’t know what Chicago holds for you, Max.

  “Maybe you’ve got a family there, or a job at the pet-food store, but Max,

  “I’m asking you, as you consider the alleged charms of Chicago,

  “that you look in your heart and report honestly what you find there,

  “that you ask yourself,

  “does the city of Chicago have in it two fine women who will chase your narrow ass to an Amtrak station and buy a song to get you off a train?

  “I’m going to answer that question for you, Max.

  “It does not.

  “Because shit like this only happens in Memphis.”

  And with that declaration, the band, which has been vamping behind the guitar player, erupts in a squalling fusion ecstasy. The member of the band whose role was unclear begins to dance wildly in front of the band, wielding the leaf blower. Then after a few bars, he puts it back in the cardboard box and pulls out his next trick, a baton that he twirls and tosses up in the air. He manages two full spins before he catches it.

  “I want you to give it up for Leon Humphries on the hurdy-gurdy,” the guitar player says, and I realize that’s what the mandolin with the jack-in-the-box crank instrument is called.

  During the saxophone solo, the man with the baton tosses it up so high that it almost hits the train station rafters, and somehow, it lands right in the cardboard box. He gives the audience a relieved smile, then reaches into the box with both hands and pulls out a bathroom sink basin with a mirror and an electric razor in the bowl. He sets it down on the train station platform and sits in front of it, then proceeds to shave off his lumberjack beard, all the hair falling neatly into the sink while the band plays.

  I realize that what the guitar player said during his monologue was true. Shit like this only happens in Memphis.

  Now the band is singing Max’s name over and over with a refrain of “Don’t go back to Chicago.”

  Through the whole song, I run my eyes up and down the platform, checking the doors of each train car, but there’s no sign of Max. After ten minutes, I can tell the band is ready to wrap it up. I think about asking them for one more chorus, but I exchange a glance with Risa, and I can tell that she already knows it’s pointless. If Max wanted to get off the train, he would have done it by now.

  The guitar player gives me a shrug, and he and the band come rollicking to an instrumental finish. Disappointed, Risa and I give them a round of applause. I notice that a small crowd of curious train passengers have gathered around them, and while most of them seem mystified by what they’ve just seen, they throw dollar bills into the guitar case anyhow, and the band moves on to the next song.

  Over the loudspeaker, the conductor announces final boarding to Chicago, and suddenly, I wonder if I’m ever going to see Max again. He’s eighteen. When we were kids, we’d been thrown together once or twice a year because our parents were friends. Now that was all going to change. If we were going to be in each other’s lives now, it would have to be because both of us wanted to make the effort. And what if Max didn’t think I was worth the effort?

  I remember one of the last things I’d said to him before he ran off: I don’t care what you do with your own life, Max, but don’t be a dilettante with mine.

  When you go around saying asshole things like that to people you love, they get on trains to Chicago without saying goodbye to you, and you deserve it.

  “Are you okay?” Risa asks, and I shake my head.

  “Come on,” she says. “I’ll buy you another Coke at the Arcade.”

  “No, you won’t,” I say. “We gave all our money to the band.”

  “Fuck,” she says. “Never mind. I’ll take you home.”

  The train doors close, and the crowd that had gathered to watch the band floats away, waving goodbye to their friends and family in the passenger cars. The band wraps up their song and starts packing all their gear back in the cardboard box, probably getting ready to move to Beale Street, or outside the bus station. Or, this being Memphis, they’re probably all in two other bands apiece, half of which are playing shows later on tonight.

  The saxophone player empties the spit out of her horn before putting it in its case. There must be a cup of it in there, and I watch in horror as it splashes onto the concrete, onto the side of the cardboard box, onto a pair of knee-high black patent leather boots.

  My eyes shoot up, and I see Max standing in front of us, looking like the spit on his boots is penance for all of this.

  “You came,” he says.

  “Of course I came,” I say.

  His eyes well up with tears. “I’m sorry, Lee.”

  “I’m sorry too,” I say.

  He takes my hands in his hands and squeezes them, and then we fling ourselves into a hug that feels like a promise.

  Max sees Risa standing to the side, watching the train as it pulls out of the station. He lets go of my shoulder and throws his arm wide, inviting her into our reunion hug.

  “The Objects of Destruction team is back together,” he says.

  Risa gives me an odd smile bef
ore she steps forward and finds a semi-gracious way to mostly hug Max. She gives my shoulder a cursory touch so I know that I’m not being brushed off, but also that this shouldn’t be considered a group hug in the truest sense because the three of us aren’t picking up in the same place we left off—things have changed.

  If Max was the kind of person who picked up on nineteenth-century English manor house detail, I wouldn’t even have to tell him what had happened.

  Or maybe I’ve rubbed off on him because he looks back and forth between the two of us, suddenly anxious, and asks, “What’s going on? Did someone die?”

  Risa and I both burst out laughing, a little harder than the situation warrants. It relieves the awkwardness, puts the level of shittiness and disappointment into perspective.

  “Nobody died,” Risa says. “We’re just happy to see you.”

  It’s only the three of us on the train platform now. Even the Elvis impersonator is gone.

  Max looks down at his boots. There’s still a splash of the saxophone player’s spit on one of them. After a moment he looks up and meets my eyes.

  “I know you’re not happy with the podcast, and there’s stuff you would have taken out. And I’m sorry I posted it without your permission. But that doesn’t mean it’s not good, Lee,” he says. “Even before I heard the band playing that song for me, I was already thinking about getting off the train because I didn’t want to stop working on it with you.”

  Risa gives him a shove. “You mean we spent thirty dollars, and you were about to get off the train anyhow?”

  Max gives her his Imp of the Perverse smile. “I said I was thinking about getting off the train. The song really sealed it, though.”

  “So what do you think we should do?” I ask. Earlier today, the only version of this that I’d bothered to imagine ended with me deleting everything. But after talking to my mom, after finding out Max feels the same way, I know that I’m not finished with this story either.

  “We figure out how to turn it into something better,” Max says. “Just because it’s not perfect doesn’t mean it’s not art.”

  “You sound like my mom.”

  I take out my phone and show them the picture my mom sent me, standing in front of her New Orleans hotel window, holding a sign that says, YOUR HEART IS AN INDESTRUCTIBLE OBJECT.

  I’ve looked at it a lot since she sent it, the calm, reassuring look on her face, the comfortingly familiar loops and flourishes of her handwriting. The words that I can’t fully wrap my head around, but that I know mean something fierce and true about the person I want to be.

  They’re comforting now, too. They remind me that the pain of losing your family, of being left behind, of being rejected—even the faintly ridiculous pain of being dumped three times in one week—is endurable.

  Hearts are made for this. They’re made to be battered, filled up with big feelings, emptied out again. They’re made to swell and ache and break and piece back together again.

  They’re made to be used, even if everything you’re ever going to use them for ends.

  “My mom is a very wise person,” I say.

  Max isn’t paying attention to me, though.

  “I thought you said she was in New Orleans.”

  “She is,” I say as Max takes the phone out of my hands and zooms in on the picture, away from her face, away from the sign she’s holding.

  “No, she isn’t.”

  That’s when I see what’s behind her, what’s out the window in the top right-hand corner of the photograph: the Hernando de Soto Bridge; the bridge tattooed on my dad’s shoulder; the M Bridge; M for Maya; M for Memphis.

  “She’s at Harold’s apartment,” Max says, and I know that he’s right. I remember that view from the last time we were over, the corner of the bridge that’s visible from the window near the recording-studio setup. “Why didn’t she tell you she was back?”

  For a moment, I’m too stunned to speak, but Max doesn’t wait. His brain immediately starts spinning strategies and conspiracy theories.

  “We could go there right now and ask her,” Max says. “It’s right around the corner from here.”

  Part of me wants to dive back into podcast-making, mystery-solving mode, go racing through downtown Memphis so we can bang on the door and demand answers, but then Risa touches my shoulder and asks, “How do you want to find out, Lee? How much do you want to know?”

  I appreciate the way she slows everything down and gives me a chance to ask myself what I really want, to consider all the possible explanations, which ones I can live with and which ones I can’t.

  After a minute, I look at her, then at Max, and I say,

  “I want to know everything.”

  CHAPTER 35 Weird Relationship Ghosts

  The three of us walk over to Harold’s apartment building together, but when I punch in the security code, Risa holds back.

  “I don’t think I should go up,” she says, stopping in the doorway.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “You can come along if you want to.”

  “It’s a family thing. I don’t want to make it weird.”

  The door buzzes while we hold it open, the sort of buzz that’s annoying enough to keep people from propping it open or navigating complicated interpersonal dynamics there.

  “You’ve been part of this since the beginning,” Max says. “Don’t go developing healthy boundaries on us now.”

  Risa smiles, but says, “I think I’ll just wait in the lobby.”

  “Are you sure?” Max asks. It’s nearly eleven o’clock, and the apartment lobby is dim and deserted.

  “The gloom is kind of nice,” she says, sitting down in a worn armchair and putting her feet up on the ottoman. “You go ahead, I’ll give you a ride back to Midtown when you’re done.”

  As soon as the elevator doors close behind us, Max turns to me and asks, “What happened between you two?”

  “She told me ‘I don’t think I can do this.’ ”

  Repeating her words makes me start rehashing the whole thing in my mind. I cringe thinking about the moment she left me in the Kwik Chek parking lot, the moment I let myself hope that maybe she wanted to be with me even though it scared her, the moment I leaned over to kiss her and she held up her hand to stop me.

  “And that’s it? That’s the end of it?”

  “I think so.”

  I want to tell Max all of it, but I don’t. The things Risa told me, the reasons she decided to break things off, they don’t feel like mine to share.

  Fortunately, I only have three floors to wallow before we’re on Harold’s floor. As the doors open, Max looks at me like we’re about to rob a bank but he’s having doubts about my reliability as a heist partner.

  I walk down the hallway with purpose, my arms pumping at my side because I am about to face my mom, a person I’d actually called “wise” just a few minutes ago. Only, a wise person wouldn’t lie to her kid, come sneaking back into town without telling anyone except her former, secret lover. A wise person wouldn’t make such a goddamn mess of her life.

  I bang on Harold’s door so hard it sounds like both of us are knocking. Everything Harold’s done the past week suddenly seems suspicious to me. I find myself scrutinizing all the times he wasn’t with us, the way he looked up and down the hall before he let us into his apartment before. How long had my mom been here? How long would she have stayed, not telling her own kid she was just a few miles down the road, and not hundreds of miles away?

  Suddenly, I feel bad for my dad and Sage, waiting for someone to show up to the housewarming party at the cursed fourplex.

  How could she do something like this to him? I don’t care how angry you are, how badly you want to get divorced. You don’t tell your family you’re in an entirely different city. You don’t get your friends to lie for you.

  “Mom!” I shout as I pound on the door. “Open up, Mom. I know you’re in there!”

  There’s still no answer, and finally, Max takes my shoulder l
ightly until I stop knocking.

  “She’s not here, Lee. Come on. Let’s go home.”

  “What home?” I ask, and tears fill my eyes. “There’s no one there.”

  My lip starts to tremble like I’m a little kid who’s skinned her knee on the blacktop.

  “I want my dad,” I say, and then I can’t hold it in anymore, and the tears come leaking down my cheeks.

  “Let’s go,” he says.

  * * *

  Risa drives us not to my house in the Cooper-Young neighborhood, but to my dad’s apartment on McLean. Max takes the front seat, and I ride in the back, watching the gas stations and bars and barbecue restaurants out the window. There aren’t as many houses in this part of town, but there are lots of apartment buildings, most of them identical to my dad’s, all with big balconies and wide stairwells that make it easy for people to move in and out of them as often as they do.

  Risa hugs Max goodbye when we pull up in front of my dad’s building.

  “In case I don’t see you again,” she says. “And if you don’t call me the next time you visit, I’ll be very cross with you.”

  “And Chicago’s not far,” Max reminds her. “You can crash on my couch anytime.”

  Risa looks over the back seat at me. It’s too awkward an angle to hug, even if she wanted to, but she holds an arm out to me and I take it.

  “I still want to go to Shangri-La Records with you sometime.”

  “I still want to hear your new songs,” I say, giving her arm a squeeze before I let it go. “Thank you for everything today.”

  “Everything?” she asks.