Listening for Jupiter

by Pierre-Luc Landry

  “Fucking hell… That girl! They’re paying her to sing the US national anthem for this all-girls softball league.”

  “And what day is it?”

  “April 29.”

  I sighed.

  “It must be a lot to take in, eh?” said Chokichi. “There’s no hurry.”

  He took my iPod and began to search for something.

  “I started listening to some music while I was watching over you. I really like this,” he said, showing me the cover of Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark.

  I smiled.

  “Watching you sleep isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Plus Saké confiscated all my gear. But in the end it wasn’t so bad; I could listen to your music. That album is my absolute favourite.”

  We talked about Joni Mitchell for a few minutes. My mouth was dry. After all, I’d just been asleep for over a week. I got up to get a glass of water, but this time my legs were having none of it. I fell over the bed. My head landed on Chokichi’s stomach.

  He laughed, sending my head bobbing up and down. I started to laugh too. He leaned down and kissed me. I closed my eyes. He ruffled my hair with one hand. Then the apartment door flung open and we heard Saké yell: “Chokichi! I’m starving! Would you peel a few cucumbers and make gazpacho?”

  Chokichi scrambled up. My head fell back onto the mattress. I heard a thud: Saké had just tossed her bag on the table. Chokichi went to the kitchen and told her I was awake. She ran to my room right away.

  “Yo, Holly! Glad to see you back. How do you feel?”

  She kissed me on the cheeks and gave me a hug.

  “OK, I think.”

  “You think?”

  “I’m just not sure, is all. I’ve been awake for a couple of hours, at most. And I’m scared I might pass out again if I fall back to sleep.”

  As I spoke, an awful cramp tore through my ribcage. I winced and breathed in through clenched teeth. Chokichi and Saké jumped over to help.

  “I’m all right. It’s just a cramp.”

  I got up and walked to the bathroom. I locked the door and lay down in the bathtub. I counted to 1,276, then got up and came back out. Both of them were at the kitchen table, smoking.

  “I want one,” I said, sitting down next to them.

  “You sure?” asked Saké.

  “I want one,” I repeated.

  She passed me a cigarette. Chokichi gave me a light.

  “Do we have anything to drink?” I asked.

  Chokichi got three glasses out of the cupboard. Then he opened the freezer to look for ice, and filled the glasses halfway with big cubes. In the meantime, Saké went to the living-room section of the pint-sized apartment and came back holding a lime and a bottle of rum. She cut the lime into three pieces, put one into each glass and poured rum over the ice, filling our glasses to the brim. We drank. Then we ate cold cucumber soup.

  Saké had brought along—all the way to this tiny one-bedroom she’d found online—an old stereo and a collection of tapes from a Chicago second-hand store. She rummaged through the box and put on Kiss Me Deadly, by Generation X. Before she pressed play, she told us how the group first got together. She talked about Billy Idol and announced that the first song on the album, Dancing With Myself, was one of her “all-time faves.” That’s what she said. She cranked up the volume and pushed on the little triangle.

  She didn’t come back to sit with us. Nope. She tossed her shoes on the sofa, hitched up her dress over her hips and climbed onto the table. She started dancing, screaming the lyrics at the top of her lungs. I drank my glass in one gulp and joined her. Chokichi did the same. All three of us were soon standing on the table, dancing as if our very lives depended on it. We didn’t move our feet, though, because we didn’t have much space. Eventually Saké started jumping up and down, clearly drunk, lost in the music. One of the table legs gave way under our weight, followed by the other three. We fell flat on the floor, in an infernal din of cracked melamine, clanging metal and cries of shock and pain. Our downstairs neighbour banged on the ceiling. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t move, like I was paralyzed with joy at feeling my whole body ache from the fall. Saké pulled herself up, adjusted her wig, dress and nylons, and sat down on one of the two chairs that had survived our fall. I stayed lying on the debris, beside Chokichi, still shaking and crying from laughter. Chokichi finally got up to refill our glasses.

  “Hit me again,” said Saké. “To the brim!”

  “Coming right up.”

  I calmed down and wiped my eyes.

  “So now will you tell me how you guys kidnapped me from the hospital?” I asked.

  “I need a drink first,” said Saké.

  Chokichi handed her the first glass and put the other two on the counter. I got up. Saké was already drinking, on her third or fourth sip. Her drink was gone in no time. She wiped her mouth.

  “Aaaah…”

  Chokichi clinked glasses with me. We drank. I didn’t down my drink, though. I wanted to have some left to survive the story I was about to hear.

  “Actually, what surprises me most is how easy it was to pull off,” Saké began. “I thought stealing a corpse would be harder.”

  I almost choked on my drink.

  “A corpse?”

  “Sorry, I meant a body. It’s just that you didn’t help much with the actual ‘kidnapping,’ so the whole corpse thing seemed about right.”

  Saké rose from her chair and turned off the lights. Chokichi lit some candles he’d gotten out of the cupboard. Those two were acting as if they shared one mind, like they no longer needed words to communicate.

  Saké sat down and went on. “First, I rented the apartment. I was looking for something that wouldn’t be close to Chicago, but not too far away either, so we could get there the same day. So I took a look at a map, found this little spot and skimmed through the classifieds on the Internet. I took the bus over, met with the landlord, gave him a deposit and got the keys. I went back to Chicago, met up with Chokichi and the two of us put the rest of our plan together.”

  She paused, refilled her glass and took a sip of rum.

  “We had to rent a car, preferably a van, but a plain- looking one, so we wouldn’t draw attention to ourselves. I let Chokichi take care of the van, while I looked for costumes and worked out the onsite logistics. But I’ll let Chokichi tell you that part.”

  Chokichi cleared his throat.

  “I thought it best to work undercover, on the sly, so I wouldn’t leave a paper trail, like in the movies, you know? So instead of going to a car rental where I’d have to show my passport and credit card, I called up a friend in Montreal. He knows people, so he gave me the number of a guy who recommended another guy, and so on, until I got the address of this mechanic—a small-time crook, I’m told—in La Grange Park, a suburb of Chicago. I went over to his shop and we met up in the backyard, where he fixes cars for friends and people he knows. I told him I was looking to rent something nondescript for a decent price. I thought he’d try to sell me a van with an exterminator’s logo, like in the movies, right? But no. He shows me this battered wreck he put back together, something ridiculous: a small yellow school bus. Bright yellow. ‘People never suspect a school bus,’ he says. ‘They always assume they’ve got every right to be there. They’re school buses, for cryin’ out loud.’ And he had a point. I mean, my imagination is more likely to run wild if I see an exterminator’s van parked on the street than if I see a school bus. Plus there’d be lots of room in the bus for us to move your body and our things. I traded him some of the morphine for the bus. It didn’t cost us a cent.”

  Then they told me how Saké spent days staking out my floor at the hospital to decide when they should go ahead with their plan. How she got uniforms so that she and Chokichi could pose as nurses. And they finally came to the pièce de résistance, the crux of the matter: my kidnapp
ing. They stole a stretcher from the ambulance entrance, brought it up to my room and, when the floor was empty, unplugged me, put me on the stretcher and ran full speed to the parking lot, where the bus was waiting. They loaded the stretcher onto the bus, started the engine and drove for ten hours straight to Madison, Alabama, only stopping for gas. They put me in the bedroom, and Chokichi watched over me virtually night and day. Saké got rid of the uniforms, the bus and anything else that might have incriminated them. She got hired to sing the national anthem for an amateur sports club and started wearing wigs, dressing like an exotic dancer and living on a diet of cucumbers and rum.

  “I feel great. Like a woman. Healthy. Never hungry. And always drunk. I wouldn’t have it any other way!”

  She took a timely sip of rum.

  “You should try it: a little black dress, a pair of nylons, red high heels, a purple wig and lots of eyeliner. A swig of rum in the morning, cold cucumbers for lunch, a couple more glasses of rum in the afternoon, then off to belt out the Star-Spangled Banner, pissed drunk before a bunch of little girls dressed in beige who want nothing more than to hit a softball. It’s full-on cathartic, really puts it all in perspective. It helps you see the world a little more clearly.”

  She burst out laughing.

  “I’m so damned drunk. Time for bed.” She blew us a few kisses. “Goodnight, boys!”

  Hollywood

  Underground poem #19a

  like a wave upon the rocks

  after a long walk

  inside your twilight eyes

  merely red and orange stains

  for whoever doesn’t understand

  Xavier

  I haven’t slept since I got back to Toronto. I don’t need to. Sleep doesn’t come, and I’m not tired.

  It stopped snowing, but the air is still icy. One night, while I was going round in circles, the lights went out. I looked out the window: the whole city was plunged into darkness. I’d never seen Toronto like that before. It was twenty below, but I bundled up and went out.

  The snow crunched under my feet. Cars were stopped any which way in the street and people were panicking, trying to get them to start up again. They tried to use their cellphones or warm themselves with cigarette lighters, but nothing worked: cars wouldn’t start, cellphones weren’t responding, lighter flames were blown out by the cold wind. You’d have thought generators would turn the lights back on in places, but nothing happened. Winter had paralyzed us. And it would be May in a few days.

  Then I looked up.

  I’d never seen anything so beautiful in my life.

  It was like I was looking at the sky for the first time, the sky that our ancestors would have seen before industrialization. It made me realize how the marvel of colour and light could have fascinated them so much. There was something everywhere I looked: a constellation, a cloud of red, purple, orange or blue dots. At last I saw the Milky Way, the long glowing trail arching across the sky. And I noticed the shooting stars, winking on and off after having run their course. I counted twenty, thirty, then lost count because they were moving too fast and there were too many at once.

  The city lights came back on, the cars decided to start, the cellphones began working again. I went home.

  A geomagnetic storm, they explained on TV, caused by a powerful solar flare.

  ∷

  The next morning, I got a text message from Gia. meet @ sheraton lounge, floor 43, ask for club room to get in. saturday 8 p.m. enjoy the view while u wait.

  Two days to get ready.

  ∷

  I walked up to the reception desk. I was offered a suite with a king bed on the thirty-eighth floor. I paid. I went up to the Club lounge. It was almost 8 p.m. They were serving appetizers. I ordered a martini and went to sit by the south side window. I sipped my drink as I listened to the music and admired the view. An old album was playing, a mix of jazz and country that sounded half-cabaret, half-folk. Strange, but incredibly beautiful. You could hear the dust of the old LP over the music. A female singer with a deep, gravelly voice was crooning and scatting, then began belting out: “Will someone remember me?” A giant shiver ran through me, as if I’d suddenly found myself on the roof and was exposed to the icy wind blowing over the monstrous city. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, it was snowing over Toronto. From my chair, I could see the CN Tower and the skyscrapers of the financial district: BMO, Scotiabank, TD. The buildings formed a wall that prevented me from seeing the lake only a few streets over. I closed my eyes again and focused on the singer’s voice. A dark voice, a voice of dust, cigarettes and scotch. A voice from an old record.

  A bar employee touched my shoulder.

  “Sir, I have a message for you.”

  He had roused me from my thoughts, but I acted as if he hadn’t startled me.

  “Thank you.”

  I took the envelope from his gloved hand.

  Xavier,

  You must learn to forget me. I only passed through your life like you passed through mine. I already have someone who shares my days. I reserve you for the extraordinary. Don’t look for me; I will find you when the time is right. In the meantime, get some rest and enjoy the beautiful view. You look adorable by the window.

  Paç fat!

  Gia

  I turned around. Nobody was behind me. I crumpled the note with the envelope into a ball and threw it on the ground. I was sure of only one thing: I had to leave town.

  Then a window on the north side exploded with a crash. I flung myself to the floor and rolled under a table to safety.

  Xavier

  Notebook #2, entry I

  I looked up “paç fat” in a dictionary online. It means “good luck” in Albanian. Good luck with what?

  A real estate agency took charge of my apartment. I kept only what I could take with me. I bought a new notebook: new life, new notebook. But I don’t know where to go. I’ve been at the airport for two days already. I haven’t decided where to begin this new life.

  I put the pebble that shattered the window of the 43rd floor of the Sheraton in my suitcase, in a cotton sock that I stuffed in the toe of a shoe, to make sure the X-rays don’t pick it up.

  In the meantime, while I’m still deciding, I watch the people passing by me and I draw them in my new notebook, trying to sketch the idea that I’m the focal point of a movie speeding by, the heart and soul of a silent film, even if I’m not doing a single thing.

  Hollywood

  “Are you ok?” Chokichi asked after I’d tossed and turned at least ten times over.

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “Are you scared?”

  “No. It’s just not happening. I can’t get to sleep.”

  We were lying next to each other on a mattress on the floor. An orange glimmer was piercing through a corner of the window, faintly lighting the room. I tossed again, turning to lie on my back. My leg touched Chokichi’s. I didn’t mean for it to happen; it just did. The mattress wasn’t very wide. But I didn’t move my leg. And Chokichi didn’t budge. I could hear him breathing. Nothing was going on. Madison was a quiet town. A car drove by every now and then. Chokichi was breathing faster and faster. If I had a heart, I guess I would’ve heard it beating.

  I heard a rustle under the sheets. Felt a slight pressure on my leg. Then Chokichi propped himself up, pushed back the covers and lay down over me, straddling my hips, pushing his stomach against mine. He kissed me furiously.

  I let him. I took off his shirt. He took off mine. He nibbled my earlobes, licked my chest.

  That’s how it all started.

  I was sticky with sweat. The air smelled of lechery. Chokichi was trying to catch his breath. We were in bed next to each other, backs to the wall, knees to our chests. I stayed quiet, looking down, eyes fixed on the hardwood floor, on the small pile of clothes we’d tossed there.

 
“Makes you feel kinda weird, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I answered.

  I felt a sting in the pit of my stomach. A cramp tore through my ribcage. I felt flustered. A delicious, painful feeling.

  “Me too,” said Chokichi.

  Neither of us moved.

  “There you have it. Your movie scene.” I said. I had tears running from my eyes, but I wasn’t crying.

  ∷

  I spent twenty minutes in the shower with no intention of coming out. I let the water run over my head and the rest of my body. My hands were still shaking.

  Hollywood

  underground Poem #24

  you will say it’s raining out

  and I will say nothing

  there is someone

  out there

  whom I can hear no more

  Part three

  Xavier

  In the end, for lack of a better idea, I opted for the most unlikely destination: a place where I could spend all my time in a hotel room without feeling absurdly guilty for not getting out and seeing the sights. I chose Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

  A one-way flight, four hours with a connection in Boston, leaving from Toronto at 6:45 a.m. and arriving at 10:50 a.m. for $436, operated jointly by Air Canada and US Airways. I’d never been to Pittsburgh; the city certainly didn’t fit into my cosmogony or mythical geography. All I knew about the place was that it was home to the Penguins, even though I couldn’t care less about hockey, collateral damage, I guess, from having grown up and lived in Canada all this time…

  I bought a ticket, checked my bag, went through customs and then waited about thirty minutes at the gate.

  The plane took off, then landed in Boston. The connection was a breeze: my checked bag went straight through. Boarding, takeoff, landing in Pittsburgh. By 11:30 a.m. I was in a taxi heading to the Westin Convention Center, just beside the Amtrak station. The Westin, since I was planning to spend an indeterminate amount of time in my room and I wanted luxury and comfort, to, you know, balance things out.