The Music of Razors

by Cameron Rogers

  The bed stood by a large window that looked out on a fairyland of streetlights and lawns and amber-colored lounge rooms.

  Suni had stood there, staring at the body, maybe mesmerized, maybe adrift in his own thoughts.

  Then he had said, “Th-that’s him. Jesus, that’s rrr-rrr-really him.”

  Hope had felt instantly sick. Telling Suni about Walter, about how much he creeped her out, had been a mistake; about the years she’d spent scared out of her mind that she’d be in his room one day, alone, washing him, and he’d open his eyes and croak something, something he’d seen in the dead place he’d been all those years.

  “That’s enough. Say good-bye,” her mother had said, abruptly.

  Without saying another word, Suni had left the room. But not without glancing back one last time.

  He never asked to look in again. Still, the incident had made it easier for Hope to break off their relationship when she felt she had to.

  But then it was always like that. She bit down on it, told herself she was a tiger, and got on with her life. It was a habit that had served her well. If she could last till she got out of home she’d be fine. She could take risks then. She knew people that had lives smoother than her own had been, and they were a complete mess. Hope didn’t do drugs, had never tried to kill herself, and by that standard she was pretty much intact. She just had to last till she graduated. No problem.

  Suni lived in a two-story house with an undercover garage. The garage and laundry took up half the ground floor, and Suni’s room the other. It gave him a place to himself—a place that usually wasn’t intruded upon by his mother, who occupied the space upstairs.

  Hope crept through the yard toward his window. The jasmine blooming beneath the stairs filled the air with a warm and heavy perfume. It was almost eleven, and the upstairs lights were off. Soft candlelight glowed amber from behind Suni’s curtains. Hope climbed three stairs and knocked lightly on the glass. The curtain was drawn aside and Suni opened the window.

  “Hey,” he said, sticking his head out to look upstairs. His hair was tied into a loose ponytail, and his glasses were propped on his head. “She asleep?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Cool.” He stepped aside, rubbing an eye with one finger, to let Hope slip under the railing and through the window.

  The room was warm and smelled like boy, the way it always did: like warm skin and socks. Candlelight flickered on the dresser, reflected in the mirror, and cast a glow throughout the room. Faded gilding on the wrinkled and bubbled wallpaper glowed a subdued, tarnished gold—old designs remembering how pretty they used to be. On the floor other wicks burned in plastic cups, arranged almost ceremonially around where Suni was working. When Suni had been younger his father had given him a lightbox to draw on—a small table on wheels with an opaque acrylic surface—but Suni still spent most of the time drawing on the floor, and the lightbox had always been a glorified lamp-cum-beside-table. The alarm clock and a couple of empty Coke cans sat there, underlit by the suffused white glow. The drawing of the clockwork cube lay there, atop the folio, the tools of Suni’s art arranged haphazardly within arm’s reach. It was reverent and altar-like, and Hope was sure it was intentional. Suni had his single bed as well as a spare bed against the opposite wall, beneath a sliding glass window that looked out on the yard, behind bamboo blinds. There was a foldout bed that doubled as a couch, and a dresser and a clothes rack he’d made with a broomstick and two lengths of nylon rope hung from the rafters. He had plenty of floor space, even if it was covered in ugly tan patterned carpet that kind of matched the wallpaper.

  “How is everything?” he asked, wandering back to his work.

  Hope glanced at the ceiling, and the downy spiderwebs that clung to its chocolate-brown underbelly. “You disappeared today.”

  Suni shrugged and sat down on the floor, cross-legged. He adjusted his glasses and picked up a charcoal stick. “There’s a lll-little wine left by the buh-bed if you want some.”

  They had a glass of white each, Suni let the player cycle through his CDs—all old stuff—and they talked for a few hours. Suni alternated between letting Oolric, his orange furbomb of a cat, lounge around on his lap, and working on his drawing. Pistons lanced and pumped through the device as multitudinous gears turned and ground, a crafted prison for the person trapped within. The prisoner’s slack, senseless face was the centerpiece of one of the planes, while arms and legs stuck out elsewhere at strange angles. Great pistons were placed to grind perpetually through the body of the captive, who seemed incapable of dying, with the end result being to provide power to the cheap-looking music box atop the contraption.

  The drawing left Hope wondering how Suni’s mind worked. He’d said he thought the cube was his greatest piece. The entire mechanism, he said, was a metaphor for life. The captive’s own body powers the machine, and while the machine works the captive suffers; and while the captive suffers the music box plays. As the music ends the greatest piston slams through the captive’s body, withdraws, and the cycle begins again: an endless circuit of pain for a little beauty.

  Some of Suni’s artwork hung on the walls around the room, rendered on thick cartridge. The piece that really bugged Hope was the gray-shaded watercolor of four headless people playing cards in a room piled high with bodies, sprawled and layered over one another, all eyes and ribs, fingers and feet. It wasn’t the subject matter that bothered her so much as the neat-haired little boy standing off to the right, staring like he was going to say something. Though the piece was three years old, it still held the acrid chemical perfume of the maximum-hold hair spray Suni used to lacquer all his art.

  “That piece with the little boy, what does this mean?” She looked over her shoulder. “Suni?”

  “Whatever you wuh-want it to mean,” he said.

  She looked at it again.

  “Www-what do you think it means?” he asked.

  She thought about it, then shrugged. “It’s your picture.”

  “It must make you think of something.”

  The boy in the picture had very old eyes. Not wrinkled, not clouded, just old. She wondered if Suni had gone for that effect, or if it was just an accident. There was an archway or something—a way out, all thickly penciled shadow—just beyond the body pile. Someone was standing there: a long, thin shadow in a hat.

  “I used to have this dream, when I was a kid.” She went back to her drink. “It makes me think of that.”

  “A suh-sleep dream or a wish dream?” said Suni as he popped in a Creatures CD.

  “Sleep dream.” “Pluto Drive” started up, eerie and menacing and slow. “Got anything livelier?” she asked.

  “No circus music.”

  “Well, anything perkier than this.”

  “I can work to this.”

  “I can sleep to this. Got any chocolate?”

  “Maybe upstairs. What was the dream?”

  She had a sip of wine. It tasted like watery gasoline, just the way wine shouldn’t. “I’d wake up and think I could hear Walter mumbling in his sleep.”

  “Yeah?”

  She nodded. “I’d cry, because I knew that now Walter was back my parents would finally forget I was even there.”

  Suni sucked his lips for a second, and then asked, “What was he saying?”

  She shrugged. “That’s the thing. I’d lie there, and I’d try not to listen. I didn’t want to know what someone like that would have to say after years of being dead.”

  “And that www-wuh-was it? That’s www-wuh-where it ended?”

  She shook her head. “After a while I couldn’t help but understand what was being said. Whoever was talking, it wasn’t Walter. Someone was telling him stories.”

  Suni blinked. “Stories?”

  “Every night a different one.”

  “And…?”

  “And what? I don’t remember what was said.”

  Suni shifted, sitting on his haunches. “You must remember something.”

/>   Hope stared at him. “I don’t. Why do you care so much?”

  It was as if someone had clapped their hands in front of his face. “It’s interesting,” he said, self-consciously.

  “I remember bits,” she conceded. “This man talked about coyotes. About the way they can sound at night, hidden from sight. Like they’re talking to each other about things you wouldn’t understand.” She sipped her wine and remembered some more. “One night he talked about how some of the angels that fell with the Devil were allowed back into Heaven, after a long time.”

  Sitting across from her, Suni was softly panting through slightly parted lips.

  “Suni?”

  He picked up the sketch of the clockwork cube and a pencil, rested the page on his folio, and began working again. Hope didn’t have anything more to add to the story, and Suni had made an excuse about needing to use the bathroom, so she left it at that. He’d come back about ten minutes later and started drawing. The subject of dreams didn’t come up again.

  “Did you hear they wound up kicking that kid out of school?” Hope asked.

  Suni looked over. “The dope-dealing thing?” he asked.

  “Apparently. The VP mentioned it the other day. Didn’t come out and say who had been expelled, just that a student had been caught with dope and wouldn’t be coming back. And that anyone else caught could expect the same.”

  “Wanker.”

  Hope shrugged. “He has his good days.”

  “Ssss-suh-suh-’scuse me?”

  “There was the time that kid was leaving death threats in whatser-name’s desk. Julie Green.”

  “So? Wuh-what’d the VP have to do with it?”

  “Green said she knew who it was, and showed the VP the note. The guy had misspelled intestines. Spelled it t-e-n-e-s. So the VP calls this kid to the office, hands him a piece of paper, and gets him to write down the word intestines. And the kid misspells it the same way. So they caught him.”

  “Hope, that’s how I thought you spell intestines.”

  “Oh.”

  “No, really,” Suni insisted. “The guy is a wanker. So concerned about the image of his precious school…”

  “Well we do have a rep,” Hope said, then regretted it.

  “Www-we’re a suh-state school!” Suni cried out. “Of course every privately ruh-run buh-boys and girls school is going to look down their nose at us! That’s a given. It doesn’t mean we’re a fuh-fuh-ffff-friggin’ drug den. Not that I care. The whole place can burn, as far as I’m concerned. I wish those people would just explode.”

  “Poison them.”

  “We could brick up the front door and throw gnomes at anyone that comes up the path.”

  “That could work.”

  “It ccc-could.”

  Hope finished the last of her wine.

  About the time she’d changed schools and moved to a new house their doctor had tried putting both herself and her mother on antidepressants. Her mother took the pills, Hope declined, though she’d really had to think about it. At the time she felt like she was going to break in half if someone didn’t help her, and sometimes it still felt that way. But in the end she decided against meds and took up writing down everything in her journal instead. A friend of hers had been on pills once, took years to get off them, and never seemed quite the same again.

  “School heightens my appreciation of free time,” Suni was saying, touching up something on the paper. “I figure it works on the same principle as erotic asphyxiation.” He lightly licked his finger, smudged something. “Strangulation…,” he mumbled. “Amplifies the eventual orgasm. Damn…” He grabbed the eraser, delicately flicking it over a point on the page. “Shit.”

  It became obsessive, Hope’s journal keeping, going through a hardcover notebook a week. It was inevitable that her mother would eventually want to look at them, and when she finally did she also got around to burning them. Hope had come home to find her mother in the backyard with her books and a can of lighter fluid. Some were unsalvageable, but she managed to save most. On those occasions she felt the need to retrieve them from their place in the padlocked steel ammo container beneath Suni’s bed, she had to remember not to read them by an open flame. She trusted him with them, and her mother had no idea where Suni lived. The pages of every surviving journal before a certain period in time all had wrinkled pages and still reeked of Zippo fluid.

  When it came to drugs she only knew what she overheard, and what her doctor tried to prescribe. Suni had a little more experience with the recreational end of the chemical spectrum. Not a lot, but enough to indulge his fantasy of becoming something of a modern day Rimbaud-esque life-eater. It started her thinking about her mother again.

  “Ever wonder why we’re here?” she asked, staring at nothing, idly chewing her lip. “We’ve been living under the assumption that school never ends, that it’s all there’ll ever be. Only six months from now there is no more school. So we get jobs. We do the same thing day after day. Then we buy stuff. That can’t be it, can it? Years of mediocrity and desperation, with nothing but a new couch to tell you it’s all been worth it?” She looked at him, watching as he stroked the cat. “Tell me there’s more than that.”

  He thought for a second, looking happily lost in the steady rhythm of stroking, the smoothness of warm, soft fur. “I’ve been over this and over this,” he said, from somewhere far away, “and all it comes down to is that—arguably—we only have one little eyeblink of a life to run around with our pants on our head…before Time rolls on…squashing us in the process.” Oolric had his eyes closed, purring. Suni shrugged, careful not to wake him. “And that’s fine.”

  Later Suni crept upstairs and brought down half a bottle of white left over from the evening meal, which tasted unbelievably good after the stuff they’d just had from a box. After talking about Paris (someone Suni knew had met a terrorist in a nightclub), the subject turned inward again. It was almost one in the morning and Suni hadn’t touched his art in an hour. He sat with his glass on the other side of the divide of flickering amber light, content in her company.

  “Mostly I’m fff-fine,” he was saying. “Then I remember suh-something stupid, like how you look www-with your hair wet, and I’m right back where I started. I fixate on you. I’ve spent unwuh-wuh-witting hours flicking through a mental manifest of the things we did together, and by the end of it I’m convinced that if I can just be friends with Hope, ttt-tuh-talk to Hope, I’ll be okay.” He lifted his glass. “Which is, of course, bullshit.”

  Hope smiled, liking his voice. “I like the way you rant when you’re drunk.”

  “I’m so glad you appreciate my predicament,” he mumbled, tipping the glass to his lips.

  “What’d you do that pissed off Kristian?” she asked.

  Suni looked at his glass, scratched his nose.

  “Come on…”

  He opened his mouth, took a breath, then closed it again.

  “Suni…”

  He exhaled. “I…”

  “What? What’d you do?”

  “I…” He looked around, exasperated, as if he had left the answer somewhere on the far wall. Then he dug under the bed and pulled something out. “Here,” he said, and tossed her an accounts book, faint-ruled, with a red marbled cover. A pen tumbled out from between the pages as he did so. The book landed by her side. “I kept a journal. I wrote stuff about you in it. Since we buh-bbb-broke up.”

  Hope didn’t touch it, just looked. She knew she’d never read it. Suni was better, safer, if he stayed here, in the candlelight, as her friend. She had a flash of people walking away from that morning’s scene, sneaking furtive looks back at her. She was safer. “Kristian read it?”

  “Buh-bbb-bits. Saw me writing something and thought it might be worth ridiculing. Lost that idea pretty qqq-quh-quickly.”

  “Suni…were you going to give this to me?” She didn’t need this. She didn’t want this. But she could deal with this. She was a tiger.

  “Of course
I was. You don’t write something like that without wuh-wanting the person you’re writing about to see it.”

  “But we’ve got a good thing here, don’t we?”

  “It’s messing with my work, Hope! I’ve been nursing that one piece for the last month, for Chrissakes! If I want to guh-ggg-get into university I need a complete folio of a duh-dozen decent pieces in three different media, and so far I’ve only got four I’m happy with. It’s like I can’t even function properly anymore.” He hissed through gritted teeth. “I know we’re not going back to what we were, but I thought if you just knew…ruh-reacted…acknowledged where I’m at…told me why…anything… then maybe I could get over it. Like you.”

  Hope stared at the bottom of her glass. Tried to get transfixed by the play of candlelight through facets, through the faintly yellow remains of her wine…

  “Don’t you ever wonder why you wound up with a caveman like Kristian?”

  “He’s not…” She remembered Kristian’s hand around Suni’s throat and fell silent.

  “The only people who get to be with anyone,” Suni said, with great intent and deliberation, “are the people that don’t care about people. That’s why Kristian has you now, because he doesn’t care about you. Sometimes I think it’s a victory thing. Look at me, I went and tamed that girl that…”

  “Shut up, Suni.”

  “Maybe you think if you can make someone who doesn’t care about you love you then that’s some kind of victory. Jacks your self-esteem. And it’s not just you, it happens to everyone. It’s probably why I want you so badly now: because you don’t want me and I can’t have you. So if I want someone, I have to not want them before they’ll want me. And where’s the percentage in that?”

  Something red was boiling and rising inside of her, and she vented it with level and controlled words. “You don’t really think it works like that, do you?”