-
Julie stirred the black mess in her cup as she got down off the table and stretched in the dark. They’d broken up three weeks later, Sonya and Derek. For no real reason either—the bed incident was water under the bridge. She just met someone new during her visit home and changed her mind. So strange, there was no explanation. It just...ended. It was just that time of year. Every year was the same. People were young and impulsive and taking advantage of the freedom their youth allowed—it was too cruel an opportunity because, as it turned out, nobody wanted that kind of commitment at their age. Nobody but Alex van der Haar. He defied change, by just being who he was.
–
“Dude, when are you coming home to visit?” Clark had his feet up on his bedside table and the phone resting on his face. He pouted at the voice on the other end of the line who asked him why he was in such a hurry to have more potbellied young men in his life. Wasn’t Stone Cold Briefcase enough for him?
“No, it’s just that Mom’s turned your room into her new nail salon and the whole house smells like that pink stuff they use to remove it.” He laughed at his brother’s groaning. “Yeah, she had Beatrice come over and they went nuts all of Saturday. The house hones now.”
Clark clicked through his playlist to Explosions In The Sky and settled the mouse pointer over “The Birth and Death of the Day”.
“What’s that noise?” Alex’s voice crackled over the line.“Are you playing guitar-zero with your dumb little friends?”
“No, I don’t have anyone to play with, you big meanie. It’s sad, but we can’t all have imaginary friends like you, now can we?”
This was no joke. Alex had an actual, for-real, imaginary friend. When he had been much younger, it had started out like any other make-believe situation—bored kids, spouting weird ideas that grown-ups only pretended to understand. He was a quiet kid, a loner, and he’d clearly needed a friend just as off kilter as he was, so he had made up Frank. Alex had brought Frank with him into his teenage years, which was when everybody’d started to get a little concerned. Still, his marks never slipped too drastically and he’d never gotten into anything too bad. Once, his mom had caught him stoned and sitting on their balcony after a house party somewhere in their neighbourhood. He’d fessed up, promised to never do it again, and, given the tumultuous nature of her romantic life, Virginia had decided he could be doing worse. He’d refused to rat anyone out, but had dutifully handed her a small bag containing the offending green contents of his night out. That had seemed to be enough for her. It never came up again, even when she caught him talking to himself. After all, he wasn’t hurting anyone.
Everybody loved his brother so much. “Okay, man, well I’ve got to go as well. Yeah, I’ll send your love to Cynthia. Say hi to Julie for me. Okay, later.”Clark tossed his phone absentmindedly onto the bed then stretched his arms under the soft hum of the ceiling fan. He missed that boy so much when he was away. He let out a long breath then got up to go see what Cynthia was doing.
–
Alex rolled over to Julie as she got into bed, sitting upright against the headboard. “Did you like Lou Ferrigno as TV’s The Incredible Hulk, baby?”
“I preferred him in Fiddler On The Roof.”
He put his leg over hers as she sipped her coffee. The curtains let in enough of a breeze from the open window that he felt it on his ankles, and pulled in harder to the warmth of her body. “Why must you taunt me?”
The woman was a saint, Alex thought, for putting up with him for as long as she had. “How’s your brother doing?”
“He’s a rockstar with better skin, abs, a face, and personality than his older brother. He says hi.”Alex brought his face up to Julie’s arm in the maudlin glow of the router LED. Clark was a much cooler kid than Alex ever had been in high school. Alex grimaced to recall himself at his brother’s age, stuck giggling perpetually at dirty doodles with his cronies at breaktime. Tossing fluorescent lightbulbs over the side of Settler’s Valley on their Christmas holidays.
“Did I ever tell you about Chammie?”
Julie had slid further down into bed next to him by this stage, her coffee half finished. She set the mug down on the tiles under her side of the bed. “Hmmm?”
“Chammie. Chris Chamlyn was this kid I hung out with once or twice in high school. Really bad Tourette’s. He went to... I think it was one of the developmental schools back in PE because of it. Anyway, this guy, right, has these insane twitches that happen at regular intervals throughout the day. They’re so routine that everybody who knows him has just stopped reacting to them. It’s background noise to them. He would tick, like, in his face. Like biting your nails, I guess, only it’s whipping your head back and forth or letting out a yell while you’re talking normally to someone.”
Julie mumbled, “Wow,” and steadily fell back to sleep, her arm in the gap between Alex’s head and the pillow.
“He used to come over to Cath Margolis’s house with us, though, just to smoke a blunt. I always felt so bad for how obviously aware of his condition I was. I think I kind of snubbed him. Maybe. Like I just overdid not acknowledging his twitches and went straight into ignoring him instead. It’s just... You should’ve seen the god-awful condition this kid was in some nights when he got there, you know? Just snapping, back and forth, his brow all sweaty. He couldn’t get through a sentence most times.
“The kicker, though, was that smoking weed made him normal. Honest to God. And I hated it—you know me, I don’t gel well with that shit.”
Julie mumbled, half asleep already, “Didn’t stop...you...cronies smoking up weekend...fuckin’...Cheech...”
God, he loved this woman. “Well, Captain Erudite, straight, or whatever, I know enough anthro to know that nobody is normal, at least not all the time. He just became so calm, man, it was unbelievable. He’d start talking more confidently, with no sign of the tic. For, like, three, maybe four hours at a time, he was like everyone else there. You could have met him for the first time and have no idea. And I still could never really muster the motivation to be his friend in any way. How messed up is that?”
Julie shuffled under the covers and pressed herself up against him, saying nothing.
“Babe?”
Lying there in the supernatural darkness, Alex could feel the give and pull of her breathing on his arm, and he wondered briefly how long she’d been asleep. He closed his eyes. The world outside his head felt massive and far away, like the ceiling of a great hall. This was falling asleep to Alex van der Haar, slowly allowing him to believe he was at the bottom of a cold, dark nothing. The same natural pulse of quietness that had rocked him to sleep as a child pushed its way into his eyeballs and made him feel like he was falling. The magnetism of sleep started in on him. His brain threw up a series of thoughts like highway road signs, trying and catch his attention before he sunk into oblivion. Rice paddies. Photosynthesis. His first kiss. UFOs. William Burroughs. An old man and a guitar.
–
Alex dreamed about a floating city. He was lying on his back in the dark, the ceiling above him a solid black panel from which he could draw no familiar shape or texture. He sensed the ground on which he stood was moving forward through some unknown space by the way it lurched back and forth. Everything groaned softly, in some unseen void, as a ship adrift out on the ocean. He sat up, slowly turning his head, a pivot in the centre of a plain he could not see. He understood, intrinsically, that he was here alone.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and made for the visible outline of a door at the edge of what he now believed was his room back in PE, opening it up onto a wide expanse of deserted buildings and shifting light. It was like looking down from the rim of a valley and watching the shadows of scudding clouds shift by in double speed, only it was all around him.
He stepped outside onto an orange pathway, and felt immediately familiar with this place, though in his waking life he knew he’d never seen it before. Plastic palm trees loomed sadly from troughs
on the side of the pathway, passing by him as much as he did them, as he walked towards the middle of an open city square. A pair of tekkies hung limp by their laces from a telephone wire, swaying in an unfelt breeze, possessed and lazy. The sky above and to the right, through gaps between the tall buildings, was a racing blur of purple slashes and random shapes traced against a grey background. Everything felt suspended about this city, like silk netting hung loosely from a nightclub ceiling, all dangling threads and mirror shards.
There was motion out there. A feeling of movement, though the city itself was too big for it to be immediately obvious. From the centre of the square, Alex could see in many different directions, down long umber streets interlaced between these abandoned skyscrapers.
Then there was movement. From the window of one of the buildings, flashing into the outline of the window frame. The only motion for miles around, and when Alex looked up to where it came from, a tall, thin figure looked back out to him, now motionless. Like a cat caught in a room as the lights go on, he dropped into a stoop, electrified with adrenaline. Did this person live here? From all the way over here, it was hard to make out features, and the individual wasn’t moving—just standing there. Watching him. Watching what he was doing here. He didn’t even know what he was doing here. This wasn’t fair. Why would anyone want to watch him?
Was he supposed to call out? His voice caught in his throat, his hand opened but left dangling at his side. He was scared solid, his whole body limp, like it was hanging from a washing line. He blinked, his eyeline fixed to this mysterious stranger. He’d been a fool to feel safe here, the whole city suddenly flooded with danger. This man was waiting for him to do something. What did he know?
This wasn’t safe. He shivered, looking around him for an exit. When he looked back up, a lonely hand flashed in the window, the rest of whoever it was retreating out to the side, as a single piece of white card drifted down from their open hand, into the street below.
Alex cried out, “Wait!” but the person was gone and the window was empty.
He watched the Polaroid photograph drift and spin and rotate freely through the air, floating over the distance out there and down to him. He stood there, watching it pinwheel softly down.
The picture came to rest, faceup on the wall beside his knee. Looking up at him from its surface was a man in a beret, hoisting a gun on his first day in the army. A picture older than him. Older than time. Long dead.
Rushing in like the tide, the sound of his own awakening approached him, though it felt like he needed to stay, to search out some life or person or feeling or noise or...Frank?
-
When Alex woke that night, his face slick with sweat and an image of a strange world burned into his vision, he could feel the same breeze drifting in through the open bedroom window. He grabbed the sheets and felt that they were real too, and that Julie was there. He looked at her and felt oriented, instantly, but scared, all the same. Like he was expecting a knock at the door at any moment, or a hand on his thigh from the other side of the bed. Something bad was about to happen which, in the way of all the best nightmares, it never did.
A tall glass of water and a few deep breaths went into him and, a few minutes later, Alex allowed himself to sink softly back onto the mattress next to Julie. It had only been a nightmare. Nothing to get all worked up over.
-
What Alex van der Haar didn’t feel that night—what he couldn’t yet feel, was the new dimensions the world was already taking around him. A new shape, made up of thousands of strands and points. How much it had changed, fundamentally, since he had gone to sleep mere hours ago, he couldn’t possibly know, but perhaps he felt, around the world, the lights of so many lives, all shining through the dark night, which were winking out like Christmas tree lights.
3. “Entertain Us”
Clark could shred like nobody’s business. His brother had bought him an Epiphone SG electric guitar for his birthday two years ago, with the proviso that he “practise the shit out of all those weird scales and whatever”. The axe was an upgrade from the banged-up old nylon-stringed acoustic his grandfather had left him.
It was kismet, him discovering music now. Like this, with Alex away at college and their mom having to work an extra job since their dad had passed away. Clark had become the archetype obsessive guitarist, cleaning his instrument with almost holy reverence after every session. He practised at least three hours a day, played in the school band, and was saving up money for a Valvestate amp to replace the Hickoryville vocal amp his uncle Tony had gotten him for Christmas last year.
He played lead guitar in a band with some of his friends. The kids called it indie, although nobody’d ever bothered to explain what that meant to him. Stone Cold Briefcase, that was the name, and they were playing the September Autumnal Jam at the Checkerboard Nightclub tonight. Over the speakerphone at home, Clark was arguing with their bassist Ronnie over a chord progression. “No, it... You can’t go ‘A, B, D and then back to A flat’, especially for a verse where, you know, we’re trying not to sound ridiculous.”
“We were going to sound ridiculous anyway. Our songs suck,” Ronnie responded.
“Our bassist, the voice of confidence. Look, it’s always been back down to G for the open chord part around there, man—we’ve literally always played it like that.”
He plucked the root, fifth and octave for his G-fifth chord from his chair by the computer then strummed the open chord version. Ron called Clark a sphincter over the phone as he swung his office chair around.
“Look, man, just because you get to jump around on stage with your amp turned half off doesn’t mean you get to rewrite our music. We wrote ‘Cannonfire Sylvia’ this way, and that’s the way it goes.”
A soft knock on Clark’s door was followed by the shy entrance of his little sister, Cynthia.
Ronnie crooned over the phone, “You’re so sexy when you’re all worked—”
“Yeah, numbnuts, I gotta go. I’ll see you later.” Clark hung up the phone and threw his guitar on the bed, picking Cynthia up underneath her arms and putting her on his lap. “How was art class today, Gorgeous? You know it’s presentation day coming up in a couple of weeks. What have you been working on this term?”
“Painting,” she mumbled, looking absently around the room and digging deliberately in her ear with her finger. Cynthia was probably the least feminine seven-year-old little girl Clark had ever known, despite his mother’s best efforts to the contrary. Her pigtails, desperately tied on the way out the door every morning, may as well have been tiny voodoo shrines to some ancient devil god of dirt and disorder, because everything this girl touched seemed to cough and sputter its contents all over the floor, her clothes, her shoes, and her face. She was a little bit of a slob. This suited Clark fine.
When it came to Cynthia, there was little he didn’t have time for. “Was that Alex on the phone?”
“Nobody that interesting. Do you want some cereal?”He stroked her ponytail.“You know, this hair of yours is getting a little long, Cynth,” he said, brushing aside her long brown hair as she excavated what she could from the recesses of her inner ear.
She inspected the finger, changed hands, and went to work on the other side.
“It’s dangerous. If an airplane comes really low, you might get sucked up into the engines.”
She looked up at him with a smile and shook her head.
“No, it’s true. I saw it on the news this one time. This Cessna was flying low over a soccer field full of little girls playing hockey, and there was a terrible accident.”
Her eyes began to widen slightly and the digging and head shaking slowed.
“Most of them were fine, but there was this one little girl with long, beautiful hair. Gorgeous hair—definitely the longest in her school. She was over at the water stand getting some orange slices during half time when the plane flew over. Right over where she was standing. And the next thing anybody knew—fwhup! She was gone!”
Cynthia reached up to her ponytail, a look of wonder crossing her face. “Did they find her ever, Clark?”
Clark smiled down at her and patted her head. He never had the heart to follow through on these potential horror stories. Not with Cynthia. “Oh yeah, that was the best part, Cynth. She was so small, this little girl, that she went right between the engine blades without even touching them! Can you believe that? She just shot out the back and just flew into the team mascot who, it turns out, is a giant marshmallow.”
“A marshmallow?” Cynthia laughed.
“It’s true. She was fine. Ask your cousin Portia the next time you see her. They were on the same team, The Rustenburg Roasted Marshmallows.”
A few minutes later, they were in the kitchen, where Clark was pouring hefty helpings of cornflakes into bowls for each of them. “What time is Mom getting home?”
What time does she always come home, Cynth?” he asked, knowing full well she was about to be a smart-ass. He opened the fridge and started moving stuff around to find her non-lactose, super soy fortified milk.
“When she comes ’round the mountain, Clark!”
Clark shook his head as he poured milk in their bowls and left the milk out with the cap off.
“Yes, Clark, she’ll be coming home when she comes ’round the mountain, Clark!”
He gave her a disparaging look, handed her a bowl, and shut the fridge with his foot then walked through to the living room.
“Clark!”
“Yes, Cynthia?”
“Clark, you know what!”
“No, what?”
“You know, Clark! Stop it! Just play!”
Clark put his feet up on the coffee table. He was in a corner now from which there was no unpainting himself. No matter what he did, this freckle-faced little terror was going to get her way. Taking a big spoonful of cornflakes and milk in his mouth, he looked at her and chewed. She stared right back at him, a smile forming on her toothy little mouth as she waited. She had him. They both knew it.
Nails in the Sky Page 3