Worlds of Hurt

by Brian Hodge

  Today, though, just carvings, oak plaques in bas-relief half an inch deep, old goddesses of the British Isles—Arianrhod, Brighid, Rhiannon, others. Even when it was the same goddess, no two were quite the same; Janika had a deep aversion to stocking pieces that came from molds. In his hand, Rhiannon sat naked and serene and strong upon a horse whose shoulder muscles were stylized into spirals. Her hair was unbound to her waist and, with the help of three ravens, she hoisted a crescent moon above her head.

  He knew nothing about her, only that if he could rest assured that a being like this was waiting for him on the other side, instead of what he’d found the first time, then he would have no fear of death. Might even look forward to returning. Trading in a bicycle and Pittsburgh for a white horse and green fields didn’t sound half bad.

  Andrei was only dimly aware of the door opening behind him, and it didn’t fully register until the tall cup appeared on the desktop at his elbow. Logo of a jittery little guy chained by the ankle to a dark-roasted oval: Slaves To The Bean.

  “One triple-espresso mocha. You owe me five dollars,” Manon said. “For a guy who’s supposed to be obsessed with his health and safety, you seem to be trying hard to make your heart explode.”

  He smiled over his shoulder and went for his wallet. “I don’t want to nod off at the wrong moment.”

  “Enough of these and you’ll never nod off again.”

  Had he not known for certain that Manon was French, he wasn’t sure he could have spotted this in her voice alone. Her accent hinted at it, but was only a grown-over foundation, a ghost through which he heard more of the world, even if he couldn’t determine precisely where. Well-traveled—he’d always gotten that impression about her, envying Manon all the places she must have been, probably many of the same places he’d always meant to get to before it seemed safer to stay put.

  Most days, she even looked like some sort of neo-gypsy, decked out in whatever happened to stick to her in the last six or seven places she’d passed through. No wonder Janika had hired her—she was a living abstraction of the Global Village logo. When she took his money, her wrist clattered with a half-dozen bracelets of metal and wood.

  For two hours he inventoried and stocked, tagged and stickered, then came midday and Manon, fresh from the Australian section. She carried a hollow length of eucalyptus branch in each hand, gave him the one he was most accustomed to playing. From top to bottom, it was painted a mottled mix of greens, the colors of tree frogs and algae, circled with bands of black and red, and undulating with lines of yellow dots daubed as precisely as sequins.

  They settled onto the floor and she widened his horizons a little more. Today it was a playing technique called a bounce breath.

  Before he’d taken it up, he hadn’t thought of the didgeridoo as much more than a novelty item…the buzzy, twanging drone heard in commercials for Australian beer and all the better kangaroo documentaries. But the more Manon taught him, and the surer his rudimentary grasp of it grew, the more it seemed to him that an entire steaming world lived in that sound—the Dreamtime, the aborigines called it, the mythical age when their first ancestors came into being.

  As an instrument, it was stupidly simple and dauntingly complex. No circuitry, no strings, no reeds, no valves, no moving parts at all—just 40,000 years of proven technology.

  A couple of months ago he’d walked into the shop while Manon was demoing one to a couple of buyers on the brink who, she told him later, probably wouldn’t do anything more than prop the thing in a corner, and what a shame, too, turning it into an inert piece of museum art when it really needed breath to live. Andrei was hooked, and it wasn’t just the unexpected erotic rush he’d felt while watching Manon go at it, not much over five feet and huffing into an ochre-painted branch longer than she was tall. Her cheeks puffed out and whapped inward, and leaping through the drone and its sinuous rhythms were the feral calls of dingoes and kookaburras.

  I have got to make that sound, he thought, and when Manon said she would be happy to teach him whatever she knew, it turned the day into the best day he’d had all year. She’d been making good on the promise, too, and didn’t laugh when the first tone he’d made on it sounded more like a despondent cow.

  Sitting side-by-side now, they worked the bounce breath—a pulse that came from the diaphragm—until his lips felt like stiff rubber and his sound began to turn ragged and muddy. It would get better with practice, she promised him. He hoped so, even if he suspected it wouldn’t happen as soon as he would like. It had taken almost all of his first two months just to catch onto circular breathing, the trick for sustaining the tone indefinitely—in essence, turning your face into a bagpipe bag, squeezing out air with both cheeks while snatching a breath through your nose. Simple in theory, but he’d spent weeks on the verge of hyperventilating before making the breakthrough.

  When they set their instruments down, Manon tapped his, the gentle flare at the end. “You should buy this, you know. It won’t always be here, and by now you each own a little piece of the other. You shouldn’t let somebody else take that away.”

  Andrei skimmed his hand along the wood. “I’ve wondered how I’d feel if I came in and saw it was gone.”

  “Last week, Janika refused to sell it. No maybe about it, someone took it up to the counter, ready to buy. She told him it was on layaway and she’d forgotten to put it in the back. And if that was the first time she’s done it, I would be surprised.”

  “You were there?” he asked, and Manon nodded. “The buyer she turned down—did he go back and pick another?”

  “No. It was this green one or nothing.” She crinkled her nose. “He wasn’t buying it to play. Just look at.”

  Andrei winced. “That was the kind of question where you were supposed to lie.”

  “So buy it. You’ve got an inside connection, you could get a good deal.” Which sounded like a joke, Manon pointing out the obvious, but she wasn’t laughing. She had this way of fixing you with her eyes, a gaze that was incredibly direct, and while he’d seen it make other people uncomfortable, Andrei appreciated it. Her gaze enforced honesty, would set lies alight like the sun through a magnifying glass.

  “It’s not that I haven’t wanted to,” he said. “I just thought Janika would think I was wasting my money. Like I should be saving it for something more.” Like when I get my life together.

  “It’s not a waste if it makes your day better. It’s only a waste if you put it aside and let it get dusty.”

  She was still watching him, almost studying him. There were times she seemed to not even blink. When Manon grew this direct, it brought out a sharpness in her face—or to her nose, at least, narrow and pointed and upturned a few degrees, a pixie’s nose. Normally he didn’t notice it, because her mouth was generously wide, as though overcompensating, and if she wasn’t exactly quick to smile, he still found warmth there.

  “You don’t think your sister makes that distinction?”

  “Consider it sold, then.” He slapped his hand down around the wood. “Which obligates you to continue the lessons in perpetuity.”

  “Or until your lips fall off.” Manon reached for a pump spray bottle and spritzed the beeswax mouthpiece of her didge with a mixture of tea tree and lavender oils, to sanitize it before it went back out onto the floor.

  “You’ve never told me,” he said. “Where’d you learn to play?”

  “An Australian guy I know. Or used to know. It’s been a long time.”

  At first he thought she might have meant some Crocodile Dundee type, a lean, leathery fellow who stared down predators and picked up all sorts of talents out in the bush. Or maybe a surf bum who never strayed more than a few blocks from Bondi Beach, toking ganja all day and droning along with drum circles.

  But it wasn’t like that at all, was it? She had this look as though she’d already expected him to get the wrong idea.

  “Straight from the source, you mean?” he said. “An aborigine?”

  “Yes. Except
I never heard him call himself that, or anybody else. Blackfella, that’s his word. Blackfellas and whitefellas. Datjirri is his name. First name.” She handed over the spray bottle and Andrei began cleaning out of habit, even though the didge wouldn’t be going back out on display. “His last name is a long string of N’s and R’s and G’s, and some U’s in there somewhere. I can never remember it.”

  “How’d you meet him?”

  She shrugged. “Just around. A long way from here, that’s for sure.”

  She went for her bag and flipped through a pocketbook, pulled out a worn snapshot and handed it over. It showed, from the chest up, what appeared to be a man in weathered middle age. Angular face, broad nose, deep brown skin and long, dusty-looking ringlets of hair that didn’t so much hang as shoot out of his head. He wore a fraying shirt, its sleeves ripped away to leave his knotty shoulders bare. Blurred vegetation filled the background.

  “Maybe you’ve seen him,” she said. “Does he look familiar to you?”

  Andrei scrutinized the photo. For some reason he couldn’t quite fathom, Manon seemed to want him to say yes. “Where would I have seen him?”

  “He’s traveled a lot too…played with some of these world music-type guys. Peter Gabriel, Sting, I don’t remember who. I thought you might have come across him that way.”

  He gave the picture another once-over, tempted to tell her that yes, on second thought, her friend did look familiar—Andrei hated to disappoint her, for whatever odd little personal stake she had invested in this—but he resisted the urge. She would see through it. He felt quite sure of that.

  Instead, he shook his head and returned the photo, almost feeling as though he should apologize. Just being overly sensitive, he was well aware of that, but this seemed to have become an evolutionary development. When so much of your life depended on the good graces of others, there arose a corresponding phobia of letting them down.

  He checked the clock—ten minutes left in Manon’s lunch break. She was going for the sandwich she’d stashed in the stockroom refrigerator, a runty thing the size of a file cabinet. On lesson days, she always ate afterwards. Very rude to blow wet crumbs down the instruments.

  “Another favor?” he said. “I was hoping you might cover my back on something, in case it comes up.”

  Manon looked intrigued, eyes brightening.

  “With Janika. There’s something I haven’t told her yet. I’ve, uhhh…decided to take a trip. Not for long, but a long way. For me. All things considered. To Wyoming. Jackson, Wyoming.”

  “This is a bold leap.” It was enough to give Manon pause while she unwrapped her sandwich. “What’s there?”

  “Somebody like me. I met her online a few weeks ago. I’m thinking maybe it’s time to meet face-to-face.”

  “Okay.” Manon cocked her head at him, seeming to have missed something. “Why would I need to cover your back with Janika?”

  “Because she’s got this contradictory kind of protective thing about me. She wants me living a normal life like I used to. Except she worries. I plan something like this and her first reaction, I guarantee you, is that it’s a bad idea. That I’ll get too far away from the panic room and have a breakdown. I figure if it comes up between the two of you, you could maybe support the point of view that it’s a better idea than she’s giving it credit for.”

  “You have a panic room?”

  “Not literally. You know what I mean.”

  “Look…I don’t want to get in the middle of something with the person who signs my paychecks. But if it comes up…” Manon gave him a sideways nod. She left the fridge and sat next to him again. “I have to ask you, though: Is it a good idea? You’re not just talking about a long day on the other side of town.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s the worst idea I’ve had since I got in my bud’s car and drowned. I just know it’s something I’ve got to do.”

  He’d hit a comfort zone under Janika’s roof that was starting to feel almost as dangerous as the outside world. He’d been sliding up on it a day, a week, a month at a time, getting to the point where it was hard to remember living any other way, and harder still to imagine living any other way in the future. Janika’s home had been his safety net, and there was a time when he’d needed that as much as air and food…but it was never supposed to be a crutch propping him up for the rest of his life.

  However terrifying the thought may have been, he needed a horizon again.

  Manon was watching him in that way of hers, serious to the point of unnerving, and for a moment he wondered if the idea of him flying off to spend a few days with a woman who wasn’t much more than a User Name hadn’t made her a little jealous. Silly thought, even if he enjoyed entertaining it. Still, he’d always gotten the impression that if Manon wanted something, she wouldn’t be shy about asking for it. If she’d wanted him, he would have known about it by now…not that he would ever have expected such a miracle. She’d seen a lot, done a lot, probably had a lot done to her. He’d always tried to be honest with himself—he had nothing to offer her.

  “When will you leave?” she asked.

  “End of the week, if it works out.”

  “If I don’t have a chance to tell you before then, have a good time. I hope it helps you grow.” She reached over, hand splayed—a couple fingers on the didge across his lap, a couple more on his wrist. “And be careful. Keep your eyes open, and your ears. People you meet online don’t always turn out to be the people you thought they were.”

  III

  A few minutes after they’d first set eyes on each other, finally sharing the same room, same sky, Kimmy asked if he was nervous, and he told her no, not a bit. He’d told a lot of lies in his life, but this wasn’t one of them. He was never nervous meeting new people, although he tended to keep the reason to himself: that he was not like other people now, maybe never had been, and so he couldn’t help but regard them from that distance inside. Looking at a new face was like seeing it through glass, somehow, or a set of bars. Other people were lizards flicking their tongues in a terrarium in the reptile house at the zoo. They were primates sulking on a heap of tires in the middle of their cage. He walked the path past them, sometimes right up to them, but could never be considered one of them.

  Kimmy, though—now she was nervous. You could almost smell it on her, could see it in her quick birdlike movements as she showed him around her apartment, hands darting to adjust some item or other that she evidently thought was out of place…as though it were something he would notice, would even care about. Assembly line knickknack that looked like a quaint, thatched-roof cottage—for a moment she seemed to think their whole relationship hinged on it.

  Tiny place, so the grand tour didn’t take long. She’d put on coffee, and he’d seen everything before the brew was finished. Her home was barely big enough for her and her cat, or the cat that she claimed was around but in hiding. He hadn’t seen it yet; had to take her word for it that Punky took awhile to warm up to strangers.

  “Sorry it’s so small,” she said. “I used to live in another place, bigger, room to ramble and stuff, but that was with roommates. Then I started remembering, and, well…most roommates haven’t signed on for that kind of craziness. So I moved. I decided to move before they took a vote and asked me to move. Leave with a little dignity, you know. The illusion of control. It was probably a relief, since it’s not like they would’ve been hurting for my third of the rent. Around here, potential roommates practically fall off the trees. Or down the slopes, during ski season. Which it was when I started to remember. I’m sorry, am I talking too much? Yeah, I’m talking too much, I’m sorry.”

  “No, it’s fine, really,” he said. “It’s good having somebody talk to me like I’m a normal person, even though they know. Either they don’t know, and it’s this wall between us. Or they find out, and everything changes.”

  “Ain’t it the God’s honest truth.” At once, her cheek gave a tic. “Oops, habit. I gues
s that’s one old saying that needs a major rewrite, huh?”

  He’d wondered how she would talk, if her speech would bear any resemblance to the way she communicated online. All those abbreviations, shaving off letters every chance she got. He listened to her talk and wondered if she saw the amputated words floating in the air, if her fingers twitched along as though she were typing. Practice drills. To type that way, you first had to think that way.

  Just a way to save time and effort, shorthand for busy lives, but he found the habit annoying, as though she didn’t think her words were worth the time to spell them out properly. Or worse, that she regarded all words as fair game for whittling down, their form sacrificed for convenience.

  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.

  Couldn’t spell it out much clearer than that, could you?

  “Do you ski?” he asked.

  “Not anymore. I miss it something awful, though. Especially this time of year, when the season’s almost here, and you can just smell the anticipation of those first snowflakes.”

  Kimmy seemed to hug herself, hands cupping both elbows as they passed the picture window while wandering back into the living room. Tiny place with a stellar view, an unblocked panorama of the stark granite peaks outside of Jackson, jagged and gray against the autumn sky like the teeth of a logger’s crosscut saw.

  He volunteered to pour the coffee. From the pot’s station—the kitchen and living room were one, separated only by a countertop—he admired the expanse of wall directly opposite the picture window. A fifteen-foot stretch of knotty pine, glossy with coats of sealant, the wall anchored the entire room, gave it warmth and substance. Lots of potential in a wall like that.

  “I kept thinking what if I skied into a tree?” Kimmy told him. “So the first time I hit the slopes after starting to remember, I kept telling myself, ‘Don’t hit a tree, who wants to die like Sonny Bono, don’t hit a tree, who wants to die at all—die again!—knowing what you know now, so don’t steer yourself into a fucking tree.’ Well…guess what.”