Bedwin returned from the kitchen with two small plates in hand, the triangles of pizza draped over their edges. “I don’t have any beer or anything.”
“That’s okay.” She’d quaffed a beer beforehand, looking to take the edge off her panicky enthusiasm. “The movie good?”
He looked shocked again. “It’s one of the ten greatest films of all time.”
“So you’ve seen it before.”
“I guess you could say I’m studying it.”
“I don’t want to interrupt if you need to—”
“No, it’s fine. But if you want to watch it I don’t mind rewinding to the beginning.”
“That’s okay.”
“Sure,” he said, his tone only slightly injured.
“I’d love to see it another time,” she said. “I wanted…”
Bedwin waited, his pupils wide. The two of them stood balancing pizza on tiny plates, crowded together in the room’s clear spot.
“Is there a place to sit in the kitchen?”
“Sure, sure.”
They perched at two corners of Bedwin’s red linoleum table, their pizza before them. Bedwin nibbled, ready to understand her invasion here. Lucinda imagined she could say or do anything and rely on his obedience, a disturbing prospect, actually. Perhaps she’d underestimated the responsibilities entailed in invading the sanctum of a mind as tender as Bedwin’s. In the room behind them the player reached some limit and clicked off the film, the space filling with blue light and a dim undertone of static.
Her own agenda boiling within her, Lucinda tried to pacify herself with a few bites of pizza before pulling the crumpled yellow sheets from her bag and smoothing them across the table between them.
“Look, here’s the thing,” she said. “I have some more ideas for songs. Do you like ‘Monster Eyes’?”
“It’s so great,” he said, with fannish sincerity and awe.
“Maybe we can do it again. Look.”
The five sheets were headed with titles. Beneath them, fragments of lyrics lurched in urgent scrawl to the margins, oblivious to printed lines. The jottings resembled crazed dictation, perhaps some Ouija boardist’s blind record. She hadn’t examined them since fleeing the gallery, but she didn’t have to. Bedwin would see and understand. Each notion would make the root of a song as good, as unexpected and pure, as “Monster Eyes.” Bedwin only had to set them to music.
“What’s that—‘Astronaut Food’?”
“Yes.”
“I like that.” Bedwin murmured phrases to himself, discovering them aloud. “Secrets from yourself…bomb-shelter provisions…”
“And this one,” she said, overeager, rustling pages. Bedwin flinched, taken aback. “‘Dirty Yellow Chair.’ See?”
“Yes…it all looks terrific, Lucinda.” He spoke gently, wonderingly.
“Nobody has to know I gave you these. Let’s just pretend you came up with them yourself, okay?”
“You don’t want to write them with me?”
“No. Just take them. You don’t need any help from me, you know it.”
“I shouldn’t tell the others?”
“It’ll confuse them. Matthew won’t like it. You’re our songwriter. These are just ideas, anyway. They’ll be your songs.”
“Sure, sure. Lucinda?”
“Yes?”
“Are you okay? Because you seem a little excited, I mean maybe a little bit upset about something.”
“Nothing, I mean, nothing’s wrong, everything’s great.”
“Okay, no problem, I was just checking.”
“Maybe I’ll let you get back to your movie now.”
“You could watch a little. It’s really a tremendously interesting film. Or at least finish your pizza.”
“I’m not really hungry,” said Lucinda. She stood, brushing her lips free of possibly imaginary flour. She’d barely eaten. She recalled the last words of her talk with the complainer and felt the urgent call of her fingertips to her own body. She ought to be in the bathtub, afloat in silence and dark, so that she could recapture the twilight realm of the phone call. She might even call him: she thought this for the pleasure of thinking it, even as she was certain she wouldn’t. But she needed to be home, to dwell on their talk. Her errand had been essential: she needed to deliver the yellow crib sheets, the guilty jottings. Those were for the band, and they belonged here with Bedwin. She’d had to deliver them, and now she had to go. Even as she skirted the table’s edge and high-stepped through the blue-glowing piles of books and records she realized she’d forgotten to tell Bedwin about the Aparty, the gig of playing silently. It didn’t matter. The songs were more important. She’d brought them to him and he’d understood. She’d announce the gig to the band at their next practice.
Bedwin followed her halfway, magnetized in confusion, holding his slice up near his mouth.
“Thanks, Lucinda, for, you know, coming by.”
“Sure. Forget it. Just write those songs.”
“Yes.”
“Goodbye, Bedwin.”
lucinda lowered a cauliflower head into her basket, where, with a five-pound bag of Integral Fare’s own granola, it dragged at her arm like a cannonball. She hoisted the freight to her hip and browsed in the greens for something featherweight, a bundle of rocket or watercress to camouflage her sorry load. Integral Fare ought to issue backpacks for those like her, shoppers embarrassed to push a monumental rolling cart with items scant enough for the express line. As she reached into the display a robot sprinkler began its misting cycle, instantly soaking her sleeve.
In the early-evening presence of so many moodily lit vegetable shapes it wasn’t remarkable to notice a slight pheremonal hubbub as shoppers ogled one another, or postured over their selections, waiting to be noticed. Tonight Lucinda felt a personal flutter, a disturbance in her field. A young redhead in a leather coat lingered pensively near a man in torn jeans. Her pursuit brought her edging through Lucinda’s orbit. The man loaded a rolling cart with heads of cabbage and lettuce and bundles of beets and celery, a flaunt of healthfulness, Lucinda thought with irritation, even as she realized the man in jeans was Matthew.
He appeared oblivious to both women. His cast was grim, lip bitten in ponderous consideration of kale and bok choy. Lucinda poked him in the waist with a carrot.
“Ow.”
“Ever feel you’re being watched?” she asked. Behind them the red-haired girl’s posture tightened in disappointment. She melted off to another aisle.
“I didn’t see you there.”
“I didn’t mean me. Several eyeballs were stuck to your pants. You ever notice that this produce section is a real meat market? Ha ha.”
“Sorry?”
“When I haven’t seen you for a while I forget how handsome you are,” she said. “Like a model on a billboard advertisement for vegetarian cigarettes.”
He blinked at her and fumbled at the cabbages in his cart. The robot sprayer arm finished its cycle. Lucinda heard the trickling of new moisture in the leaves. A scent of dampened mulch rose through the conditioned air.
“You’re not too much fun. At least say something, like ‘All cigarettes are vegetarian.’”
Matthew only stared. Lucinda felt the dawning of a new and original awkwardness between them. She’d relied on the band to enmesh them in something still near enough to a liaison, the tension of a bass player half turned to a singer, plumbing notes, jerking the song from his body. The voltage of the band’s aspirations, fierce as lust. Here they were nothing but two shoppers, bearing bald homely groceries in opposite directions.
“It’s good to see you,” Matthew said. He patted her clumsily on the elbow, then withdrew.
Now she spotted the glitch of panic in his raccooned eyes, his extra day’s stubble. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s a really gargantuan salad you’re making,” she said.
“It’s a lot,” he confessed blankly.
She counted the
green and purple heads in his cart, calculating volumes of leafy material. “Some sort of coleslaw sauna treatment, or are you throwing a dinner party?”
“I have a visitor.”
“Someone I know?”
He regarded her evenly, with a still, small defiance.
“A sick friend?” she asked.
“I guess you could say that. Someone who needs my help.”
Lucinda was silenced now.
“I think I should be getting back,” said Matthew. He pivoted his cart toward the registers.
“I’ll see you at rehearsals,” she called to his departing back. She felt like the redhead now, a thirsting stranger. “Don’t forget.”
At home Lucinda boiled the cauliflower whole, suffused it with butter and pepper, then devoured it with knife and fork as if it were a soufflé. The dish was either lame and lonely, or grand, she couldn’t decide, but consoled herself imagining translated French names—“white brain,” possibly, or “virgin moon.” She poured a scotch, just a small one, sat breathing its mellow fumes, barely drinking. Then wrecked the evening irretrievably by glancing in the hallway mirror for the foot’s command: it smiled encouragement and she dialed the complainer’s number. No answer. He had no machine. Each echoing chime of the unanswered line cast another band of shadow across her heart’s floor. After twelve rings she gulped the scotch and retreated to bed.
the set list grew. Bedwin had written four new songs: “Dirty Yellow Chair,” “Nostalgia Vu,” “Astronaut Food,” and “Secret from Yourself.” He presented them to the band at the same afternoon rehearsal where Lucinda unveiled the news of the Aparty gig, the chance to play quietly in front of several hundred of Falmouth’s well-dressed art friends. It was easy to picture them as tastemakers, rumormongers, a milieu capable of making a new band its pet overnight. Together, songs and gig, it presented an orgy of possibilities. Nobody knew what to say. The songs were so fine that Bedwin himself seemed astonished. The band’s only outlet for its bewildered gratitude was to commence rehearsing diligently. So they shirked paying jobs and sleep, gathering four of the next five nights to burnish the treasury of new material. Talk grew respectfully minimal. Denise regularly fixed sandwiches for Bedwin at the breaks, assuming this caretaking duty without resentment. Matthew arrived on time and expressed no exasperation at the intervals of tuning among the instrumentalists, gazing fixedly at middle distances while waiting for the players to resume behind him, then carving deep into the material, despite seeming otherwise somewhat wasted, skinnier than ever. At each set’s conclusion distraction overtook him, and he left before the others.
Lucinda held her secrets close. She felt a proprietary elation at having brought the others to this place. Yet hid inside the music, fingers throbbing on the neck of her instrument with a grace beyond her knowledge, agent of some higher purpose. The songs told her how to feel. She’d waited a week for a phone call which refused to come, then succumbed two nights in a row to the temptation to dial the complainer’s number. For reward, only listened to his line howl in vacancy. She felt no impatience. Her complainer would reemerge and find her, the songs said so. In the meantime she dwelled in his words, now made plastic and catchy by Bedwin and the band. Bedwin had written a backup harmony vocal for “Astronaut Food.” Since they only owned two microphones, Lucinda curled down to meet Denise at the mike stand mounted close on her snare drum to sing, “Am I just astronaut food for you? Are you gonna take me along to the moon?” The sentiment might have seemed plaintive or piteous, but she and Denise always felt beaming joy as their voices braided.
The fifth night in their siege of rehearsal, the last night before the Aparty, Bedwin said, with an air of pre-defeat: “What about ‘Robot Head in Mourning’?” Everyone understood: the phrase was a possible band name. The band still didn’t have a name and they’d grown embarrassed even to try. Proposals weren’t so much shot down as left to perish in the air. They’d even resorted once to sticking pins in a dictionary, with no success.
“Sounds more like an album title than a band name,” said Denise.
“Mourning like dead or morning like morning has broken?” asked Lucinda.
“I was thinking like dead but it doesn’t matter,” said Bedwin. “We could spell it different ways at different times.”
“I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said pour love on the broken places,” said Denise.
“I’ve been seeing that thing everywhere!” said Lucinda. “I saw it on a T-shirt the other day. What does it mean?”
“We could call ourselves ‘The Broken Places.’”
“Don’t you think that’s pathetic?” said Matthew.
“Pathetic is good,” said Bedwin. “Maybe we should use the word ‘pathetic’ in the name.”
“The Pathetic Fallacies,” suggested Lucinda.
“The Pathetic Chickens,” said Bedwin.
“Why chickens?” said Denise.
“Okay, hens,” said Bedwin. “The Pathetic Hens.”
“That’s terrible,” said Denise.
“Okay, the Fallacy Hens,” said Bedwin.
“We really need a name before the gig,” said Lucinda.
Matthew was nearly out the door, his mike cord bundled and shoved underneath Denise’s couch, his guitar case in hand.
“What about that one from before?” said Denise, looking up from cinching the screw on her hi-hat. “The opposite of a molar or something?”
“Not a molar,” said Bedwin. “The opposite of a wisdom tooth. Idiot Tooth.”
“Yeah, Idiot Tooth, I like that one, I always think about it.”
“How much can you like it if you can’t even remember it?” said Lucinda. She tucked her bass into the felt bed of its case. “Anyway, wasn’t there a band called Mystery Tooth?”
“Spooky,” said Bedwin, almost under his breath.
“What?”
“Spooky, Spooky Tooth.”
“Why does there always have to be something self-deprecating in the name?” said Matthew from the kitchen doorway. His beard was a week old now, a black frost that had overtaken his sallow cheeks nearly to his eyes. “What was that other name you guys liked? The Tedious Knives?”
“Knifes,” said Bedwin.
“What?”
“It was knifes, with an ‘f.’”
“Tedious, forlorn, morbid, crappy, futile.”
“The Futiles?” suggested Denise.
“Let Falmouth decide,” said Matthew. “I’m sure he’ll have a suggestion. Maybe he should bill us as the Papier-mâché Band. Or the Deaf-mutes.” He departed, not quite slamming Denise’s door. The rest were silent and unnerved in his aftermath, their songs all chased away. Bedwin slowly wound his cord around his amp’s handle, blinking at the floor. Denise leaned into her fridge and took out a beer. She waved the bottle at Bedwin, who shook his head. Lucinda stuck out her hand and Denise passed her a cold bottle.
“Things feel a little weird,” Bedwin ventured.
“It’s the gig,” said Denise. “We’re all a little cuckoo.”
“We sound good.”
“We sound great.”
“The new songs are okay, huh?” Bedwin didn’t meet Lucinda’s sudden glance.
“They’re the best songs,” said Denise. She put down her beer and opened her arms to Bedwin. He tolerated her embrace, his shoulders square, terror swimming in his eyes.
“I guess I’ll go home now,” said Bedwin.
After he’d shambled through the door Denise said, “So, what’s the matter with Matthew?”
“That’s not my department anymore.”
“Sure, but what’s your theory?”
Lucinda gobbled her beer and swallowed hard before speaking. “My theory is he has a new girlfriend who doesn’t speak such good English.”
“I’m not sure I understand you.”
“Maybe hostage is a better word.”
“Does this have something to do with the zoo?”
Lucinda nodded, wide-eyed.
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br /> “You want something harder than that beer?”
the two figures tumbled up the stairway in sloppy tandem, index fingers pressed to their whiskey-swollen lips, elbows at each other’s ribs. They left the hallway’s lightbulb chain un-pulled, as if illumination was their enemy, and so tripped on the stairs and over their feet. The banisters and stairs, even the walls of the stairwell felt muffled in dust, but beneath the dust’s mousy odor the drunken sleuths might have detected another scent, an acrid clue to what they were after, urine from another sphere. It was strong enough to bite its way even through their occluded noses. They sniffed their own fingertips stupidly, shrugged in the dark, advanced on creaking tiptoe.
“You got the key?”
“Fssshh.”
Inside the apartment, Denise flattened like a moth against the white hallway, pinned in moonlight that spilled through the kitchen. Lucinda slid past her, teeth bared and eyeballs bugged in commitment to their idiot foray. Their noses said they neared some goal. The rooms throbbed with mulchy life force, festering salad, mammalian sweat.
Matthew slept with his door open, sprawled on his back, nude outlines covered by a thin sheet. His penis was stiff under the sheet, a totem draped in pale shadow, nighttime body divorced from mind, rehearsing its secret forces. The invaders froze, shared a glance of dread, gnawed the insides of their cheeks. Matthew’s tongue lolled from his mouth, his head strained into its pillow as though smashing through dreams. Denise and Lucinda edged crabwise through the spotlight of the doorway, hands flat to the wall.
Past him, the smell was stronger. The room they discovered, Matthew’s parlor, with television, stereo, couch, held no answers. Lucinda duckwalked into its middle to examine its corners. There was no animal besides themselves.
At first sight the bathroom appeared empty. Yet here, their noses testified, was the source. Their eyes adjusted to the dimness as they bumped into the middle of a checkerboard tile floor strewn with celery butts and shards of cabbage. The invaders peered together into the only secret place remaining, a clawfoot bathtub glowing like an ivory icon in the gloom.
Shelf the Flyer gazed up at them, her yellow eyes training calmly on each of theirs in turn. The kangaroo lay on her side, filling the waterless basin of the tub, elegant legs spread like a book, neck and forepaws and tail slack as a sleeper’s. A trail of kangaroo piss beaded to the tub’s drain.
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