by Tom Stern
“I don’t think that you think I’m wonderful,” Veronica elaborated upon her intended point, pulling Walter from his stream of consciousness. “You don’t tell me that you think I’m wonderful.”
In truth, it seemed much more likely to Walter that Veronica’s version of love was the correct one. It was much more straightforward than the idea that resentment and frustration were essential components of truly caring, much easier to reconcile than the notion that love means sometimes just getting naked and feeling good. Maybe Walter’s version of love was a crippled and malformed one. He didn’t know. Nor did he know how the hell a person was supposed to know such things.
“I just want you to be happy again,” Veronica pressed even further on as she sat down on the edge of the bed.
Walter understood that Veronica was simply seeking a connection with the man with whom she had spent years of her life. What Walter did not know was why he could not help but answer this perfectly reasonable desire with obfuscation.
“So I used to be happy?” Walter asked. “But now I’m not?”
Walter still cared about Veronica, but he feared that perhaps he did not really love her anymore.
He even wondered if perhaps she didn’t really love him anymore, either.
Maybe it was just as hard for her to see as it was for him.
“What are we even talking about, Walter?” Veronica seethed.
Walter noticed now that Veronica was crying. He did not recall when the tears had begun, but they were unmistakably here. And like a siren’s song, they brought Wallace hobbling in from the bedroom that used to be a storage room that they had aspired to make into an office.
“Veronica?” Wallace asked, as he limp-waddled his way up to her and pulled himself craggily up onto the bed beside her. He took her hand, symmetrical and delicate, into his, uneven and severe. His digits, not able to bend at the knuckle, caused his hand more to sit atop than really grasp hers. But there was something counter-intuitively gentle and affectionate about both the gesture and the image.
As Veronica proved unable to talk through her tears, Wallace looked to Walter and suggested…
“Maybe we should say nothing for a moment.”
Walter sighed at the presence of yet another brilliant everyday decision made by the little shit who seemed to consistently find options in the space and time of existence that would never, not even in a moment of greatest clarity, occur to Walter as possible courses of action. Silence, for example, was more or less the furthest option from Walter’s mind. At best, he might have been able to consider not saying something horrifically contrary to his own best interest, but he wasn’t even truly exploring that as an option right now. Instead, he followed the first impulse that presented itself coherently enough to seem justified, which amounted to foisting his own insecurities and suspicions regarding their current circumstances into the already confusing conversation by predicating them of Veronica instead of owning them as his own…
“Maybe Veronica just needs to say what she really means, which is that she’s miserable and she wants to end this.”
Sure enough, this accelerated Veronica’s tears, her head shaking adamantly.
Wallace took in a sharp breath as his facial features contorted into some bizarre combination of attributes that, interpreted literally, suggested a massive seizure was about to ensue. Belying this surface, however, his expression still somehow managed to convey the shocked disapproval and pained disappointment it was intended to communicate.
“Why do you do this?” Wallace asked Walter, a deep but gentle disappointment in his tone.
“Excuse me,” Walter answered imprudently before he could catch himself, “you little fucking mutant?”
“You can’t do that, Walter,” Veronica yelled.
“It’s okay, Veronica,” Wallace reassured her, climbing down from the bed. “I understand,” Wallace explained gently to Walter, “that you did not choose for me to be here. And I’m sorry that I’m an inconvenience to you. I want you to know that we care about you, Walter. But we will not tolerate your cruelty.”
“You don’t tolerate me! I tolerate you!” Walter corrected.
“Walter!” Veronica screamed. “Stop it!”
Wallace put his crooked hand up to Veronica, gently dissuading her from wasting the energy.
She fell silent.
Wallace swallowed hard, stifling the sting of Walter’s words and the tears they invoked. He took Veronica by the hand and ushered her out of the bedroom, turning back to add one last thing.
“You will look back one day soon and you will not be proud of this behavior. You will look back with hindsight and knowledge and you will be ashamed. But I want you to know that I will never give up on you, Walter. You are my brother. And that means something unbreakable.”
Walter was left in the kind of silence that most people make a lifelong practice of avoiding, if at all possible. An after-the-storm, guilt-ridden kind of silence. A nothing-else-to-think-about-but-what-I-have-done kind of silence.
But Walter refused to remain in this silence. Perhaps out of pride, perhaps out of self-preservation, perhaps out of a burgeoning sense of shame, he insisted on some sort of sound around him, even if he needed to fill it with noise himself.
So he packed up a suitcase and a bag and he left.
II.
The
Singer
1.
The hotel room was a temporary solution that Walter had stumbled upon but a few miles from the apartment. He checked in, deciding to stay one night. And then a second. Then days into weeks before the weeks threatened months.
A few days after Walter had initially settled in, Wallace began coming by every morning. He always brought with him a light breakfast of some sort: a danish or bagels or muffins and coffee. The two brothers would sit and eat at the small round table in the corner of the modest, unimpressive room.
Most mornings they would say nothing at all.
Other mornings they would discuss small, inconsequential things.
A few weeks in, Walter could not help but reassure Wallace that he was still committed to their business school agreement.
“With the added expense of your current living situation, we would need to amend your budget a not insignificant amount,” Wallace explained. “This would, of course, impact the time horizons for the projections.”
“I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” Walter replied.
This made Wallace smile.
Which made Walter regret bringing up the topic just a little bit. But it also made him happy for the little freak.
Wallace had also started to become a more regular presence at Sheprick Consolidated. Every few days his stabbing footsteps would sound their way across the hangar and into Mr. Sheprick’s office. Wallace was always clutching an ever-expanding file, balanced tenuously against his side.
Wallace would wave as he went by, but nothing more.
Walter appreciated this.
At first, Walter puzzled over what Wallace and Mr. Sheprick might be talking about during these meetings, worrying that perhaps the topics might include the Wells-Bergamot contract. But Walter reassured himself with the fact that he had the Wells-Bergamot file, which he was confident represented the sum total of intelligence regarding the account. Mr. Sheprick was nothing if not an entirely analog businessman. Sheprick Consolidated had undoubtedly suffered greatly over the years due to the man’s technophobia, keeping up with not a single modern advance or innovation.
Hours later Wallace would resurface with a smiling or laughing Mr. Sheprick walking him out. Again he would wave, but nothing more.
Walter appreciated this as well.
“Don’t you wonder what they’re talking about in there?” Beau would ask Walter at least once a week.
“No,” Walter would fire back. “Just work on the names.”
And that was all it took now to get Beau off Walter’s back.
At some point during one of the many sleepless nights he spent alone with his thoughts in his hotel room, Walter had stumbled upon the insatiable urge to put on headphones and to lie on the floor listening to music again, just like he had done when he was younger, just like he had done the last time he could remember really feeling like himself. But Walter had not packed headphones. So he went out in search of the biggest pair he could find. He wanted one just like the pair he had bought when he was sixteen. They were heavy and pressed both sides of his head in a firm embrace, dampening all extraneous noise down to a mere low ocean hum setting the uninterrupted stage for the layers of sound about to surge through them. He remembered putting them on and closing his eyes and listening. At first, he heard the whole song. Then he started pulling apart the sounds. Starting with whatever he found most interesting. Listening to just the rhythm guitar maybe. Then he’d start the same song over but focus on something else. The singer’s voice. Then the drums. Then the bass. Then the bass and the drums and how they worked together and separately. Then the guitar and bass. And on and on until he couldn’t even hear the song anymore, he could only hear a bunch of noises. He remembered starting with bands he felt he really should know. Surprisingly, they were rarely all that interesting to him. Only a few really blew him away. From there he would find the bands that blew away the bands that blew him away. And then the bands that blew those bands away. He remembered thinking about what must have made each of these people want to make music in the first place. And what kept them at it for years. And whether or not those two things were actually the same. He also thought about how and why their music came out sounding just like it did. How they all played the same instruments, but everything sounded so distinct from one band to the next. He remembered wondering if maybe there was something unique that came through the guitar, something that could only sound just like that one person who had lived that one life playing it. He wanted to listen to songs like that again. Right then. But he needed headphones to do it. And it was 3:00 a.m. So he walked the streets as if he did not know them all too well, as if he did not already know that nothing was open. Especially no store selling giant, vintage headphones. And any headphones he might still own were likely in one of the boxes that had been in the storage room that was supposed to be an office but now was a bedroom. And he had no clue where Veronica would have placed those boxes. Nor did he have any intention of going back to that apartment ever again, let alone tonight. So Walter swore to himself, right then and there on a dark and calm and all-too-familiar sidewalk in the city where he had lived his entire life, that tomorrow he would buy himself a giant pair of headphones so that he could listen to music whenever it was late at night and he needed to feel like himself again. And the very next morning, which was really only a few hours later, he did exactly that. He stopped in at Shoop Shoop Records on his way to work. He arrived just as the owner was lethargically unlocking the front door and before he had even selected the day’s first album to play in the store. Walter headed right to the back of the store, past the rows and rows of records and CDs, to the secondhand instruments and gear and record players. There were only a few pairs of headphones that were big enough to befit the pair in his memory, but he only had to try on the first pair to know he had found the right one.
He carried them in a plastic Shoop Shoop bag to work.
Just having them in his hand made him walk lighter, sharper. Life suddenly felt a little less like only all of its heavy parts. Life suddenly felt like it had light parts, too. Open and uncertain and spontaneous. Parts that might unfurl just like a song. And Walter found himself wondering what his guitar might sound like. If he played one. Or his drums. Or even just his voice. He wondered if it would sound distinct. Or if his life sounded just like anyone else’s might.
So when Beau, of course, nosily asked Walter what was in the bag, Walter found himself doing something most unexpected and pitching his work-friend and fellow salesman to form a band.
“You and me. It will be an ongoing project that will require significant contemplation and planning before any actionable steps are taken,” Walter had qualified, “but eventually and when we are ready, we perform.”
Granted, Beau also did not know how to play an instrument. Nor did either man know how to sing. But Walter decided that these were just details that had to be worked out in the broader scope of the project. Every band started somewhere. And for at least some of them, Walter reasoned, that somewhere could very well have been desire alone. And maybe this time would prove to be one of those sometimes.
Beau fell immediately and wildly in love with the idea of working so intimately with his good friend Walter on such an important and personal project. He also liked the idea of fame, adulation, and groupie sex, which he assumed must come with the territory.
In their first band meeting, which took place covertly at Beau’s desk in one of those always long half-hours before lunch break hit, Beau and Walter decided that a few details needed to be sorted out before they could really start things moving. They started a list:
—We need a sound.
—We need to determine the ideal number of band members.
—Each member needs a prescribed instrumental and/or vocal role.
—We need to find those prescribed members (once number and roles are set).
—We need a look.
—We need a vision for our first album.
—We need a band identity (which is not the same as our look, although these two things should definitely be related).
—The identity includes things like how we will tour and where we will tour and if we will tour at all.
—It will define recording strategies.
—It will define parameters for album art.
—It will inform whether we will endeavor to release our work in traditional media formats or focus our efforts exclusively on digital platforms.
—It will include subsequent digital or analog marketing strategies.
—This is a broad and hugely important category.
—We will also, eventually, need a rehearsal space and a music tutor and a music coach.
—And, most immediately pressing, we need a name. (Walter suggests Work-Friends but Beau thinks that is silly gibberish.)
All of this would require countless conversations, which Beau had dubbed “strategy sessions” and proposed they schedule at least one daily.
Walter suggested that twice weekly might be a more sensible timeframe, allowing for adequate reflection in between meetings. “We shouldn’t rush this,” Walter explained.
Beau conceded.
But he could not decide whether he wanted to be the drummer or the lead guitarist.
Walter wanted to be the lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist.
Beau loved this idea.
Beau loved more or less everything about the band.
“I can’t remember ever having this much fun,” Beau would say at some point during each strategy session. And they weren’t even really doing anything yet, other than just talking.
When Walter found himself feeling unexpectedly and relatively better about life, he couldn’t help but wonder if it was the band that was making him surprisingly less sad and numb. The hotel room was feeling slightly less somber. The nights were feeling slightly less interminable. The days even had, in their scattered best moments, a little bit of a drive to them, teetering on the slightest tinge of a purpose.
Then, in another night’s middle, Walter woke up with a nagging thought unrelentingly yanking at his mind: why had Veronica still not even once tried to get in touch with him?
Not a single message through Wallace.
Not a letter seeking closure.
This simply wasn’t her way.
Walter simply could not accept that this was incidental. T
his meant something.
He asked Wallace about it during the following morning’s breakfast.
Wallace looked up from his apple fritter, thought a moment. And then he said…
“What?”
This monosyllabic implication of ignorance belied the eloquent little mutant.
“Why hasn’t she sought closure?” Walter pressed. “Or a way to work things out.”
“You want to work things out?” Wallace repositioned the point of inquiry.
“Not at all. I want to know why she doesn’t seem to want to,” Walter held firm.
“Well, I can’t speak for her,” Wallace uncharacteristically demurred before doing just that, “but you did break her heart, Walter.”
“When?” Walter could not help but take the bait. “At the end? Or over the years? Or both?”
“I think,” Wallace snipped, “the fact that you ask it like that…”