by Ronald Malfi
I think about it. “The sound of the brakes. On the bus. The bus was coming to the last stop. Then,” I continue after a pause, “opening my eyes.”
“Good,” she says. “Write that. I’ll put on more coffee.”
So I begin to scribble everything down. I write until my hand hurts. And when I cannot write any longer, Nicole offers to take over. She writes as I dictate. She sits in one corner of the sofa, her feet pulled up under her, the spiral-bound notebook over one small thigh, and scribbles intently as I walk her through my brief, brief life.
When we finish, she sets the notebook down on the table and yawns.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m keeping you awake. I’ll go.”
“Wait,” she says. “Do you want to stay?” Realizing what this must sound like, she quickly backpedals: “I mean here, on the couch, just for the night. Just in case you wake up in the morning and have no memory.” She continues chewing on her lower lip. “I can be here to fill in the details.”
I open my mouth to say that’s not necessary but what comes out is, “Yes. Thank you. Thank you so much.”
For the first time she smiles.
There, says a small voice at the back of my head. You wanted to know what pretty looks like and now you do.
SIXTEEN
I am dreaming of an endless winding highway. I am a shadow, a faceless figure, shambling down the center of the roadway. A cool breeze overtakes me. There stirs an itching at the base of my skull, where my neck meets my cranium. My fingers rub at it, soft at first, then with mounting vigor. Soon, I am clawing at the scar at the back of my head with both hands. I pull my hands away only after I feel a wetness seep down the back of my neck, dampening the collar of my shirt. My hands are red with blood and there are bits of flesh and hair beneath my fingernails. But this does not stop me from my task, and I am quickly digging at the hole opening at the back of my head once again, furious now, blood spilling down my back and pooling on the blacktop at my feet. I dig at the scar until it splits open like a mouth; I grab the lips and part it, hearing it tear like brittle cloth, and peel and peel and peel the skin away from a skull of fused metal and titanium screws, of gears and cogs and the motorized whir of some invisible machine.
I wake, startled. It takes a moment for me to assemble the events of that day. Just as I see the haunting silhouette of a petite young woman standing over me, I remember where I am. Still, my breath catches in my throat. I sit up from the sofa, my neck stiff.
“Hey,” I croak, my voice rusty with sleep.
“I’ve been thinking,” Nicole whispers. In a knee-length white gown, she looks like a specter, a phantom. Maybe I’m still dreaming…
“Yeah?”
“I’ve been thinking,” Nicole whispers, “about the notebook.”
My brain still cloudy with sleep, I say, “The notebook? What about it?”
“We should stop writing in it. We should get rid of it, even. Destroy it.”
“Why?”
“Because if you were meant to write all this stuff down, you’d already have notebooks. You know—from the other times you’ve started to remember.”
“Nicole, I don’t understand…”
“What if you’re not supposed to write this stuff down? What if you’re not supposed to remember the stuff all at once?”
“That’s ridiculous…”
“Then why haven’t you left notebooks for yourself in the past?”
“Maybe I just didn’t think of it.”
“You thought of it tonight.”
“I thought of it after talking to you. Which I haven’t done before. So I think everything’s fine. It’s okay.”
“No,” she insists. “I think we should get rid of the notebook. Just in case.”
I ease back down on the sofa and drape an arm over my eyes. “Whatever you think is best.”
In the morning, Nicole is showered and dressed and waiting for me to get up from the sofa. She sits across the room in a chair with a plate of sliced fruit on her lap. She is in her post office uniform.
“Hey,” I say. “Been staring at me long?”
“Do you—remember?”
“Nothing has changed. I made it through the night.”
“Good.” She sets the plate of fruit on the chest and rises, grabbing a coat from a peg on the wall. “There’s coffee and some fruit in the fridge.”
“Where are you going?”
“I have to go to work.”
“Where’s the notebook?”
She looks instantly sad standing with her hand on the doorknob. “It’s on the counter by the coffee. I didn’t throw it out. Although I think you should consider it. There’s a reason you never wrote to yourself before, uh…uh…”
“What is it?”
Half her mouth curls up in a grin. “Nothing. Just sounds like a name should go there.”
She leaves.
“You are a peculiar young lady,” I say to the empty apartment.
* * *
It is midday by the time I step out of Nicole’s building. The sun is overly bright, brutalizing my eyes. My first destination is the library once again. This time, at a computer terminal, I type in the exact headline from Nicole’s article, baltimore man struck by city bus, and search through countless online newspaper databases. When I locate the article—and it is the exact article—I find the date of the accident was August 31 of last year.
August 31.
Struck by city bus.
Somehow knowing the exact day is disturbing. I sit for a long time, staring with a blank expression at the computer monitor, not moving. Kids with knapsacks strapped to their shoulders filter in through the front doors of the library, noisy in their quietness.
I search other local papers on that same date and read the varying accounts of my accident. All write-ups are brief, cursory, as unimportant as one man in a large American city can be, but there is one quote that disturbs me. Some elderly man, some unnamed eyewitness on the scene, says, “He just walked out into the street like it was on purpose.”
Like it was on purpose, I think. Like I saw the bus and walked out into the street on purpose.
I head east through midtown, from the corner of Madison and Cathedral to the light rail station on Howard. I sit on a bench and watch people file on and off the tram. Their faces are grim, stoic, statuesque. There is dignity to them. There is compassion. Watching them, I am aware that I am an outsider. I cannot look so dignified and compassionate in my absence of self. Unlike them, I have been rendered useless—broken, ruined, wrecked, discarded. There is more dignity in their desire of the day-to-day than in my search for the impossible. Is this all it takes? A few weeks and I have given up? A day in late summer glaring on a computer screen cripples my momentum?
In The Odyssey, it takes Odysseus something like twenty years to get home to Penelope and Telemachus. When you don’t know who you are or where you’ve been, you realize you could have easily been searching for your way home—for your own Penelope and Telemachus—for equally as long. For a whole lifetime. For a lifetime of lifetimes.
As the tram pulls away, I am left alone with a squad of dirty pigeons pecking at a discarded bit of pretzel.
* * *
Hours later it is coming on dusk. My feet burn from retracing the Green Line and my lungs are sore from breathing in nothing but cold air all day. As I mount the steps to my apartment building I am caught off guard by two sharp bleats on a car horn.
“Mozart!” Clarence calls from the cab of his rusted red pickup. I notice someone has taken a thick swipe of white paint over his name on the side of the vehicle. “Hey, Mozart! Been sniffing around for you all day, man!”
The truck sputters and dies in the street. Clarence hops from the cab and bounds over the curb and up the porch steps. He nearly crashes into me in his excitement.
“Hey, Clarence.”
“Boy,” he says. “You look like shit. You need to take better care of yourself.”
“Yea
h, I’ve heard.”
“Hey,” he says, “you need to do me a favor, yeah?”
“What?”
“Here.” He slaps the truck keys into my hand. “The truck, bro. Have it. Take it.”
“What? Why?”
“I don’t want it. I’m through.”
“Through with what? Driving?”
“Hauling junk,” he says. I quickly envy his childlike elation. “I’m through, bro. Take the truck, keep it. And here.” He pulls a frayed nylon wallet with a Velcro tab from the rear pocket of his jeans. “Take this, too.”
“It’s your wallet, Clarence…”
“Yeah, man, but not no more. I’m through with it all.”
“Why are you talking crazy?”
“What’s crazy about it? See, I got to thinking, and in thinking, I start wondering why you should be the only one so goddamn lucky to start over. Experience is cheap, so I can have as much of it as I want. So, see, I’m doing it now, too. Just like you.”
“Clar—”
“And quit it!” Laughing, he holds up one finger. “That ain’t my name no more, either!”
“Then what is it?”
“Don’t know. Haven’t gotten a new one yet. But I will, jus’ like you did. And it’ll be something good. You’ll jus’ see, won’t you, Mozart?”
“Clarence, I don’t want your wallet and I certainly don’t want your truck.”
“Ain’t my truck,” Clarence—or whoever—shouts, already bounding down the porch steps and strutting up St. Paul. “Ain’t got my name on it. You see my name anywhere on it, Mozart? Because I don’t.” And he laughs again as he one-foots a hopscotch grid on the sidewalk. “No, sir! I sure don’t!”
* * *
On the street, narrow-eyed children, wise beyond their years, eyeball me like the stranger their parents have always warned them about.
* * *
I stock my medicine cabinet with toothpaste, a toothbrush, some roll-on deodorant. I buy some canned soups and stack them in a pyramid on my countertop. I buy clean socks and underwear and even a new shirt, which I wear for the first time at The Neighborhood one evening. We play a double set and, during intermission, Maxwell and Dougie sneak off with their women. Timmy Donlon sets saucers of Old Bay along the bar and rounds up a group of thick-chested, overly confident men. Winner gets a free pitcher, Timmy Donlon hollers over the crowd, and each overly confident man is provided with a plastic drinking straw. There is an iron bell over the bar, rung when a tip is more than generous, that Timmy Donlon rings now. The overly confident men, a half-dozen in all, jam the straws up their noses and begin snorting the spicy seasoning from the saucers. Two men immediately tap out, coughing and sputtering, red-faced and doubling over as if from a roundhouse to the stomach. Bleary-eyed and trying to laugh, both men dump an arm around the other’s shoulder and slink in a defeated fashion to the far end of the bar. Meanwhile, the others continue to snort down the Old Bay, and the crowd, which is sizeable for a weekday, cheers them on. Maxwell Devine, uncharacteristically jubilant, has returned from his romp upstairs; he sits behind his kit and kicks off an up-tempo beat that compliments the event. The crowd claps and a few women clamber to tabletops to shake their asses. I turn around on my piano stool and jump right into “Flight of the Bumblebee,” which fits perfectly with Maxwell Devine’s drumbeat, and this sends the crowd roaring.
Another man drops out. He, too, is sputtering and rubbing his eyeballs with the heels of his hands. Drool snakes from his gaping mouth and, just as he pushes himself away from the bar, an impressive sphere of snot bubbles from one nostril, roughly the size of a ping pong ball, before it bursts in a spray across the blouse of a meaty, rhinestone-clad woman with bad teeth and thinning bronze hair.
Maxwell clashes the cymbals as one more man falls out. This leaves only two, and they are making their way to their second saucer of Old Bay, tears wringing from their eyes, mucus spilling from their nose, their reddened cheeks quivering while their foreheads burst with sweat.
“Here we go here we go here we go here we go!” booms Timmy Donlon from behind the bar. “Here we go here we go here we go!”
“Pick it up faster, Wurl,” Maxwell Devine shouts to me over the clash of his drums. “Let’s shake the walls down, eh?”
I pick it up faster.
“Here we go here we go here we go!”
One of the contestants starts to gag. He is a burly, strong-armed fellow in a tight-fitting T-shirt and frayed jeans. His Adam’s apple jumps reflexively and his tongue lolls from his mouth. A single cough sends spittle peppering the top of the bar. Still, he’s got that straw shoved halfway up his nose and, even through the choking coughs, he’s snorting the spicy seasoning straight off the saucer. His friends are at his back now, too, and they are cheering him on. He can’t back down now. He can’t lose this.
“Here we go,” Maxwell chirps, and I follow his lead as he picks up the tempo even more. I can hang with him all night. I am that good.
Timmy Donlon’s voice sounding like a parody of Maxwell’s: “Here we go here we go here we go!”
He won’t hold it, I think, watching the sputtering man in the T-shirt struggle to stay in the game. He’s fading fast and won’t hold it.
More women: dancing on tables. The place is nothing but meaty legs and sagging breasts and big Baltimore hair. Women call me darlin’ and hon and sugar, and they step together at the foot of the stage to watch Maxwell and me motor along. They clap their hands, which are like curling acrylic talons, and their big Baltimore hair makes up the entire audience.
Inevitably, the choking, sputtering man gives up. Only he doesn’t so much give up as he sneezes and falls backward into his friends, who catch him under the armpits and try to prop him up against the bar. They push him forward, not wanting him to lose, but he has already lost and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
The crowd explodes. Timmy Donlon clangs the bell as the only remaining contestant—square-jawed, steeply-browed, mustachioed—thrusts his hands straight into the air, victorious. His T-shirt says smell my face. His friends swarm him, slapping him on the shoulders, the back, across his broad chest. There is a whip of yellow snot, like the tail of a comet, along one cheek, and the lower half of his face is peppered in the red-brown seasoning. He wins a pitcher of beer but you would think it was the goddamn state lottery.
Maxwell and I come to a crashing conclusion, the sound vibrating in the walls long after we’ve stopped. The women at the foot of the stage shriek and applaud. My ears are cottony from the noise.
I dribble off the stage, my legs wobbly, my eyesight bleary. My fingers are still numb from the playing.
“You a’right, Wurl,” Maxwell intones.
“Yes,” says a middle-aged woman with an okay face and very red lips. A second later and she’s kissing me hard on the mouth, forcing her tongue halfway down my throat. It is like licking the bottom of an ashtray.
Afterward, in the backroom, Timmy Donlon cuts us a stack of cash, which Dougie Devine counts and divvies out. My cut is not an equal cut. Dougie tells me this outright: “You ain’t a Devine and you sure as hell ain’t Johnny, so we ain’t splittin’ this three ways down the middle, you dig? You a mean piano player and you got chops, that’s straight up, but you ain’t one of us. If that’s cool with you, Wurlitzer, then we gonna do all right, the three of us. If it ain’t, then we all go our own ways from here on in. Ain’t no pain.”
I tell him it’s cool with me, that I have no intention of doing this forever, and that I certainly have no intention of replacing Johnny.
“Ain’t nobody replace Johnny,” says Maxwell from the rear of the room. He is sprawled out on a heap of empty beer kegs, trying to light a cigar. He looks sleepy and lethargic, fat with alcohol. “You a mean tick-tock, Wurl, but ain’t nobody replace Johnny.”
Dougie gives me sixty dollars. I don’t ask how much the band made as a whole. I don’t care, really.
“Clarence the Clown says you’re some kind o
f spy,” Dougie says, unimpressed. “Says you don’t know who you are no more.”
“Clarence the Clown,” echoes Maxwell.
“Clarence likes to tell stories,” I say.
“Know what I think?”
“What’s that?”
“That you some resurrected mother come back from the dead to play piano. How’s that? Maybe you got the spirit in you, white boy, and maybe you be carryin’ the Monk’s soul in your body. That’s what me and Maxie be thinking. Right, Maxie?”
“White boy carryin’ the Monk’s soul,” Maxwell mutters.
“How’s that, Wurlitzer?” Dougie says.
“I guess it could be true.”
“True as true,” Maxwell practically sings from atop his heap of beer kegs. He’s gotten his cigar to light and he stares now at the glowing red ember, hypnotized. “Thelonious Monk.” Only he pronounces it The Loneliest Monk.
“That’s me,” I say. “Loneliest as they come.”
“Shoot,” says Dougie, and hands me another ten dollars.
* * *
I wear out my feet again hiking the Green Line. I am becoming familiar not only with the Line itself, but with the people that populate the Line: the strippers and prostitutes along The Block; the men making out with other men in the park of the cultural district; the savage little children in basketball and football jerseys that ebb and flow like the tide from one end of the city to the other. It is one week before Christmas and the sky is terminally gray. As dusk falls, the frosted colored bulbs—the big, chunky ones from the 1970s—come on in many windows. Like a poke of bone through skin, I feel overly exposed. My body shakes, my body trembles. My shirt and jacket have grown way too big for me; the stalk of my thin neck—the neck of this concentration camp survivor—protrudes from the gaping hole in my clothes, the skin hardened and broken and splitting in places from the cold.