Wild Awake

by Hilary T. Smith

  Later, at home, I Google the Imperial Hotel, and just as I feared, the top hit is for a yoga condo that will soon be taking its place on Columbia Street. A month ago this wouldn’t have bothered me, because the Imperial is a horrible murder-hole unfit for human habitation, but now that I’ve met Doug and found Sukey’s rooftop it feels like a profound injustice, and I immediately fire off an email to the developers, informing them of my objections.

  That night I sneak back to Skunk’s house very late, after Denny has gone to bed. I rap softly on Skunk’s sliding glass door, and he answers it a moment later.

  “Oh, Crazy Girl,” he says, and lets me in.

  We’re sitting in the radio temple, drinking pine-needle tea and taking turns reading the Tao out loud, when we hear footsteps creaking upstairs, and then Skunk’s aunt appears at the top of the stairs wearing those big-butt sweatpants I borrowed the first time I stayed over. I’ve never met Skunk’s aunt or uncle before, because so far we’ve managed to evade them. But here she is. She stops when she gets halfway down the stairs and stares at me like I’m an escaped baboon Skunk has been harboring in her basement.

  I’m about to offer her some tea, since she seems to still be awake at four a.m. anyway. But then I realize maybe she’s awake at four a.m. because the sound of us reading woke her up. Skunk has been more worried than usual about thought control, and we have been reading the Tao to throw the agents off. I smile and say hi, assuming she will realize in one look that her nephew and I are hopelessly in love and give us one of those wistful glances like the old couple we walked past at the Zen garden.

  She looks right past me to Skunk.

  “What’s going on?”

  Her voice is sharp. Maybe she wasn’t already awake. I don’t see how we could have woken her, though—we were being very quiet. I lean my face down to the teacup Skunk’s holding and lap it with my tongue like a cat.

  “Kiri, this is my aunt Martine.”

  I swallow my tea. “Hi.”

  She frowns. She has a pale, puffy face that says I Have to Work in Three Hours. A face like a day-old hamburger bun. She looks at Skunk.

  “What are you doing up this late?”

  Skunk indicates the teacup.

  Martine sighs and rubs her forehead like he’s giving her a headache. The way her glasses sit on her face looks unnatural, like she’s a person who normally wears contacts and on the rare occasion she actually wears her glasses people look confused and say, Whoa, I didn’t know you wore glasses. She takes off her I-didn’t-know-you-wore-glasses glasses and presses her thumb and forefinger into her eye sockets. Her hair is cut short in that I-don’t-have-time-for-hair style that my mean kindergarten teacher had. Her face is square and droopy. With her glasses off, she looks like a haggard dingo.

  “It’s four in the morning. You should be asleep. Don’t you take your meds at eleven?”

  Skunk stiffens. “Not always.”

  “You’re supposed to take them at eleven. Every night at eleven.”

  “Only if I need them.” Skunk’s voice is strangely petulant. I get the feeling they’ve had this exact same conversation before. Martine’s hand flies off her eyes.

  “Mon dieu. Does this mean you haven’t been—”

  “Can we talk about this later.” He doesn’t say it like a question. I glance back at him and see a coldness I haven’t seen before. His face has closed up like a cardboard box. He won’t meet my eyes. On the stairs, Skunk’s aunt is shaking her head and muttering swear words in French.

  Maybe a little mediation’s in order. I sit up.

  “Sorry we woke you up, Martine. We were trying to be quiet.”

  She glances at me, then raises her eyebrows at Skunk. Her jaw tightens.

  “Who is this?”

  I can feel the muscles in Skunk’s arms clench like he’s trying to bench-press a minivan.

  “Kiri’s my girlfriend.”

  Even though my presence here is obviously getting Skunk in trouble, I feel a pleasant tingle when he says that. Martine’s glance swoops over me.

  “What’s she doing here at this time of night? Why isn’t she at home?”

  I’m not sure why she keeps talking about me as if I’m not in the room. I clear my throat. “Actually, I don’t have a curfew.”

  She ignores me.

  “Did you tell her, Philippe? Does she know about your condition? Does she know you need to be careful?” I’m assuming she’s talking about Skunk’s paranoia thing, but I don’t know why she has to say it like that, like an accusation. Look, lady, people are gonna worry about your condition if you talk to my boyfriend like that.

  Martine the Dangerous Dingo takes another step down the stairs and looks around with a brief, disapproving glare. I try to fend her off telepathically: Away, dingo! Out of our temple!

  “Explain to me why I am seeing this, Philippe. Why did we have that long talk full of promises and today already you are not taking the medicine like you’re supposed to, like you promised Dr. Winterson you would?”

  Martine has a bit of a Quebecois accent. You can hear it when she says “Philippe.” Which is Skunk’s other name. I reach down and squeeze his ankle. Hi, Philippe. He puts down the teacup.

  “I am taking the medicine. I take it when I need it.”

  “You need it every day, Philippe. It’s only been six months. You’re not better yet. Do you understand what could happen if you stop taking your meds now? C’est un problème, Philippe. Un grand problème.”

  “I’ll decide when there’s a problem—”

  Martine holds up her hand.

  “No. Don’t interrupt. We’ve talked about this before, Philippe. We agreed that as a condition of you living here you would do everything Dr. Winterson said. You’re supposed to be taking your meds, seeing the counselor, going to the support group, and getting your life on track. If the doctor says meds at eleven, it’s meds at eleven. Every night. No four a.m. tea parties. And no overnight visitors in my house.”

  Skunk’s aunt looks at me again, then lays into him in French.

  “Vraiment, Philippe. T’es imbécile. C’est pas à toi de choisir si tu vas les prendre ou pas les prendre. C’est à Dr. Winterson à dire.”

  “On peut parler plus tard, Martine? Ecoute. Ecoute-moi, là. S’il te plaît. On peut parler plus tard?”

  They go back and forth like that in sharp bursts, as if they’ve both forgotten I’m here. I do the best I can to mentally translate: Martine’s general vibe right now is It’s not up to you to pick! It’s not up to you to pick it! Skunk keeps saying, We can talk later? Please. We can talk about this later?

  I thought he was tensing up out of anger, but no. My poor dearest love-bison is quivering with humiliation. This has to stop. I have to stop it. She can’t be allowed to hurt him like that.

  I wave my hand in the air.

  “Martine?”

  She looks at me like she can’t believe I’m still here.

  “How did you get here, Kelly?”

  “On my bike.”

  “Bon. It’s time for you to ride home. Take all your things. Philippe and I have a few things to discuss in private.”

  chapter thirty-two

  When I get home from Skunk’s house, it’s almost five in the morning. I tiptoe in through the garage and slip upstairs to my bedroom. There’s no point going to sleep now, so instead I lie on my bed practicing Sesquipaedia in my head until I finally hear Denny get up, and then I go downstairs to start some coffee brewing and do my house-sitting chores, the garbage and the recycling and the azaleas.

  When I take the mail in, there’s a big white envelope with the words INTERNATIONAL YOUNG PIANISTS’ SHOWCASE printed on it in a fancy font. I rip it open. Inside, there’s a copy of the official program, a printout of directions to the concert hall, and a checklist of things to bring to your recital. I scour the program until I find my name:

  KIRI BYRD, 2:07 P.M. SUNDAY

  J. S. Bach, Italian Concerto

  W. Beethoven
, Sonata in C–Sharp Minor, op. 6, V. 2

  F. Chopin, Nocturne in D

  C. Debussy, La cathédrale engloutie

  A. Khachaturian, Toccata

  I’m listed again under the master class heading, along with Prokofiev: Concerto No. 2.

  I call Dr. Scaliteri.

  “The program came!”

  “Kiri, I am teaching a lesson right now.”

  “I have a question.”

  “Kiri—”

  I hear someone plunking keys in the background. “Make the left hand float,” says Dr. Scaliteri to someone, probably Nelson Chow.

  “Dr. Scaliteri. Dr. Scaliteri? I’ve decided to change which piece I’m playing for the master class.”

  “You cannot change this piece.”

  “No, it’s fine, I’m learning a new one with that technique I told you about. It’s a little-known composer, very obscure. It’s going to be a world premiere.”

  “Kiri, I have no time for this nonsense. You will play the Prokofiev.”

  Whoever’s on the piano bench plunks away. “Good, Nelson,” says Dr. Scaliteri. I knew it.

  “You just haven’t heard me play it yet. How about I come over this afternoon?”

  “Excellent, Nelson. Your sound is flowering.”

  “Dr. Scaliteri?”

  “Have I already talked to you about the recital in October?”

  “What recital?”

  “Oh, that’s right, you’ll be at Juilliard. It would be worth flying back from New York City.”

  She’s talking to Nelson. Why is she talking to Nelson? She’s supposed to be talking to me.

  “Dr. Scaliteri? Should I come over?”

  “Well, think about it. I’ll give you the information.”

  “Dr. Scaliteri? I can come over now.”

  Nelson starts plunking, oh excuse me, floating. There’s a click and a rumble like Dr. Scaliteri just put down the phone on her desk. Did she seriously forget she was just talking to me? Or is this a subtle way of letting me sit in on Nelson’s lesson without letting Nelson know that I’m listening? Maybe Dr. Scaliteri is trying to show me something, let me listen in so I can give her my input later. I’m starting to think we’re in on this whole Nelson Chow business together.

  I keep my ear pressed to the phone, listening intently for the next twenty minutes, until Dr. Scaliteri starts dialing a number, like she’s forgotten we never hung up. I pick up the program for the Showcase, find the number on the back, and make a call of my own.

  I bike to Skunk’s house so I can see him before Aunt Martine gets home from work, but when I knock on the glass door he doesn’t answer, and when I try to open it, it’s locked. There’s a big pile of cigarette butts on the concrete. I go to the Chinese grocery store and buy him a dozen dragon fruit and leave them in front of his door in a circle of pear blossoms with a note that says The Way that takes its meds at eleven is not the true Way. Love, Kiri. There are brown birds chirping in the tree, and Skunk’s van is not in the alleyway. I wonder where he’s gone. I call his phone, but he doesn’t pick up—I can hear it ringing inside.

  Text from Lukas: WHY DID FEDEX DELIVER AMP 2 MY HOUSE?

  Text back: B O B SAT NITE NEED MAX SOUNDAGE OBVS

  “Stop pacing around the house like that,” says Denny. “You’re making me edgy.”

  “I don’t know where Skunk is.”

  “Who the hell is Skunk?”

  I prop up the cream-colored International Young Pianists’ Showcase program on top of the piano and play my entire recital all the way through six times.

  “Stop playing like that,” says Denny.

  “Like what?”

  “Like there’s someone holding a machine gun to your head.”

  I remind him that the Showcase is in sixteen days, Mom and Dad are due back in fifteen days, and it’s my personal responsibility to ensure that they come home to the kind of impeccable performance they have come to expect.

  Petra calls to invite Denny and me to dinner. She assumes my parents finally saw reason and sent him home to babysit me, and I don’t correct her on that point. When I decline the invitation, she asks if she can speak to Denny.

  “He’s not here right now,” I say with a rush of paranoia that makes my hair stand on end. Why does Petra want to talk to Denny? What’s she plotting, anyway?

  “You tell him to make sure you are eating real food,” says Petra. “I can give him instructions for roast chicken, if he doesn’t know how.”

  My suspicion dissolves into relief, and I remember how much I love Petra.

  “He knows how to cook a chicken,” I say.

  As the day progresses, I become more and more worried about Skunk. What if Martine took him to some evil mental hospital and had him committed because he goes to bed at four a.m.? She’s a nurse. They would believe her word over his, even though Skunk is obviously and thoroughly sane. Too bad he doesn’t have his phone, because then he would be able to call me for help.

  I try calling him one more time just in case, but all I get is the same constipated robot voice telling me the subscriber has not set up their voice-mail in-box.

  I start calling hospitals.

  “Is there a Philippe in your psychiatric ward?”

  “Philippe who?”

  “He’s really big. Like a bison. He has tattoos all over his arms.”

  “What’s the last name?”

  “Could you just go look if he’s there?”

  Denny comes home from skimboarding.

  “Denny, can you drive me somewhere?”

  “No, get a license.”

  “It’s extremely, extremely, extremely urgent. I need to go a psychiatric ward.”

  “No shit.”

  “I need to find someone.”

  “If they’re in a psych ward, they’re probably not allowed to see you anyway.”

  “Please.”

  “I told you. Get a license.”

  I go on the internet and look up the symptoms of psychosis. Somehow I end up taking a self-scoring suicide quiz on a mental health website. According to the quiz, I have an 87 percent risk of committing suicide. This sounds serious. I wonder if maybe I’m on the verge of suicide right now. Maybe that means I can join Skunk in the psych ward. The website says there’s a hotline you should call if your score is over 50 percent. I call the hotline. It rings busy. When I hang up the phone, it rings immediately. I think it’s the hotline calling back, but it’s my parents calling from Lithuania, where they are eating herring and snurkleberry jam.

  “I am bringing you and Denny some snurkleberry jam,” titters my mother.

  “Maybe you could study piano in Lithuania,” says my dad. “Then we’d have an excuse to come here all the time.”

  “I haven’t slept in three days,” I say.

  They chortle as if I’ve made some funny joke.

  “There’ll be plenty of time for sleeping after the Showcase,” says my dad.

  “If you’re stressed, you can borrow my gym card,” says my mom. “It’s in the basket on top of the fridge.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “They have something called Hot Yoga. That might be relaxing.”

  I stare at the ceiling. I don’t need to relax, I need to find Skunk.

  “Is the computer working okay?” says my dad.

  “They have Sunrise Pilates on our ship,” says my mom.

  I am not sure how to decode this. Surely we must be talking about something bigger than computer viruses and ambiguously spiritual exercise regimens. There must be something buried deeper, a subtext I’ve been too thick to parse.

  “I’m dying,” I say carefully, trying to load each word with as many layers of meaning as I can.

  “All right,” says my mom. “Go take a nap.”

  chapter thirty-three

  When I answer my ringing cell phone on Saturday morning at four a.m., Skunk’s voice whispers, “The Way that can be experienced is not true.”

  I hold the phone close
to my face and whisper, “The world that can be constructed is not real.”

  I hear the crackle of a radio in the background. Sometimes Skunk tunes one or more of his radios to static when he’s feeling paranoid. I spread my legs out on the kitchen floor, where I am sitting and organizing the cleaning supplies, soaps and detergents and powders and sprays.

  “Hi, Kiri.”

  “Hi, Skunk. Are you listening to the radio?”

  Pause. “Yes.”

  “How many radios?”

  Pause. “Three.”

  “Is this a three-radio alert?”

  Pause.

  “I was worried you were in a mental hospital. I called all the mental hospitals asking if they had you. I was afraid your aunt Martine had brought you in for not going to bed when she wanted. She seemed like kind of a, excuse me, bitch.”

  There’s a very long pause. Skunk says quietly, “I was in a hospital. Not this time. Six months ago. I had a thing. That’s why she’s so afraid.”

  This time, it’s my turn to pause. “Afraid of what, Skunk?”

  “Afraid it will happen again.”

  “The Thing?”

  “The Thing.”

  Pause. “Where did you go this time?”

  Pause. “Guess.”

  “Not a mental hospital.”

  “No.”

  “Um.” Pause. “Um.” Think. “Lucky Foo’s.”

  “No.”

  “Montreal.”

  “No.”

  Pause.

  Pause. “Give up?”

  Skunk’s voice is very quiet. I picture him sitting on the floor in the radio temple with his hand cupped around the phone, trying to hide the sound from his aunt Martine. Maybe he’s using the radio static as a foil. Wouldn’t Aunt Martine hear the radio static and take him to a mental hospital?

  “Skunk?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you sure your aunt’s sleeping right now?”

  Pause. Static. “Yes.”

  “Okay.” Pause. “Are you smoking a cigarette?”

  Pause. “Yes.”

  Pause. “Be careful.”

  Static.

  Pause. “I went to the marshlands.”