The Listeners

by Leni Zumas

  “But why would you—”

  “He’s my friend. And I’m the assistant manager.”

  In a softer voice: “I’m just worried about you, pettle. It doesn’t seem like much of a life.”

  Red flared in my stomach. I peeled my finger with great care: one strip, two. “I’ll write you a check next week,” I said.

  Octy preferred the couch arm, but was willing to be moved: kitchen counter while I heated up a dinner, bed pillow when I did not want to be in bed alone. The little face of thread mouth and marble eyes could always see me. Its gaze never withered. Good night, I told him, patting a grubby tentacle. Only six were intact—the seventh hacked off by my sister, the eighth gnawed to stub by the pet rabbit of a dirt-child who had lived for a few minutes at the house I rented with Cam and a rotating cast of others on Belfry Street. Sleep well. You too. And now the dark bag of room tightening round my body, pressing the quiet at my skull to enlarge the sounds inside. The ring, the ring, I hated it and nowhere for it to go, trapped forever in the ears. I once knew a guy who was able to tell what notes his ears were making: C sharp, middle E. Make sure to wear your earplugs! They’d bought me fancy ones the Christmas after Cam and I started the band: Promise to wear them? said fiddly old Mert, who hadn’t known you couldn’t hear your own voice very well with plugs in.

  I tapped on the radio, lit a cigarette. Dark whales rode the walls and the fist-fat rat gurgled through the plaster as it dreamed. Mert used to sing us to sleep with “Clementine.” A clementine was a baby orange. A rat was a baby devil. Under the radio, impervious to smoke, snarlings of tinsel plinked and bounced. I hit my ear with a palm and slid a game into the machine. Skatepark in the California sun. You chose your own look: silver vest or black glimmie—leather briefs or green pegtops—shaved skull or blond mop. I liked playing as a boy. You could turn the blood function on or off. I kept it on to see his mangled knees and leaking face, gushy spats on the concrete.

  “YOU ARE CADMUS and I am Europa. We are the kids of a king. The god Zeus stole me to Greece and you looked and looked but couldn’t find me. On your search you got advice from an oracle, met a cow, and killed a dragon.”

  “So can I cut open Dragony’s stomach?” I asked, pointing at her stuffed monster.

  “No that’s over, you already killed it and now you are even more sad because you still can’t find me.”

  “This is stupid.”

  “No Cadmus, it’s not stupid, you are sad.”

  “Can I take a prisoner?” I said. Riley was somewhere downstairs; I could rope his wrists together, pull off his underwear.

  “No Cadmus, you are gentle and good.”

  “Well what am I supposed to do then?” I stood in her room wishing we had video games like regular families, or a TV at least. Lack of TV stuck you in rooms with lame sisters who wrapped themselves in sheets, pirouetting, singing “Where am I? Where am I? Where am I?”

  When we played Nakedies, my sister would hold a lit lighter to the inside of Riley’s fat pink thigh. I’d blindfold him with his superhero undies, the knot so screwy he couldn’t undo it himself and so tight he couldn’t rip it off, and we’d leave him like that. The weird thing was he never told. I undid the blindfold and whispered, “I bet you will this time!” but Riley stared back and said he wouldn’t. Why not? “Because I won’t,” he said. The tears made his eyes so green.

  I WOKE IN the night to cramps, the first swelling roll. The pain was veiny brown—a side of killed meat. When I stood, the collecting blood squirted out and I would have to throw these panties away. A girl’s stomach was raining. “Why does it look like rain?” my sister had asked, and I crumpled the paper I was using to explain periods to her: “That’s just how I drew it.” “How do you make the stomachache stop?” “Aspirin,” I said.

  I thumbed off the cap, shook five into my palm.

  In the morning, still bleeding hard, I hobbled to the convenience store, where a boy no older than twelve was buying cigarettes. Two Thumbs was staring at the ceiling. The short aisles contained nothing but plasticked pies. I consulted the soda case. Will you get me some ginger ale? Reached for a green bottle. I have a—My sister hadn’t known yet to call them cramps; she said stomachache. Puddle on the bedsheet: a perfect red sun. Two Thumbs watched the sun through the ceiling; he was refusing to actually be here. I smiled at him and he smiled back but only with the front of his mouth. “Dollar fifteen,” he said.

  AMONG US THREE, I was boyest. My sister with her painted nails and whimsies was very girl, and Riley, dazed and scuttling, seemed despite his penis not boy at all. I was only half girl, so lanky and teatless, never scenic from across a room.

  My sister did her sanding on the sunporch so the flakes of skin wouldn’t fall on anything Mert could yell at her for. The porch floor was already a mess. Riley sat at her feet, watching her scrub.

  “Pourquoi are you doing that?” I asked, swinging past.

  “I am making my touch receptors closer to the surface,” my sister said. “To sense the teeny grooves of locks, safecrackers’ fingers have to be incredibly alert, so they sandpaper off the top layer of skin, which is dead and blocks feeling.”

  And she held up her hands, dribletting red, ten little pads torn open.

  We played on our parents’ bed, leaping and twirling in bare skin. Fod came in to tell us time for dinner, and in the middle of the word dinner he stopped, muttered “Goddammit,” hauled me by the arm away from the little ones and into the bathroom.

  He pointed to my downstairs.

  Three hairs.

  “No more Nakedies for you, hear me?”

  THOUGH I HAD been eating again for years and years, the extra hair on my lip and chin had never quite gone away. Your mustache, Riley used to cackle, your beard! I uncapped the jar of cream, the plastic powder vial, scooped portions onto a plastic square and stirred with a tiny paddle. Daubed mixture above mouth and along jawline. Fifteen minutes. I proned myself on the couch so the drying bleach wouldn’t fall off. Ten minutes. The bearded lady. The good doctor had explained it was my body’s way of staying warm when it couldn’t be sure there would be enough flesh to do the job. Five minutes. My arms were still hairy too: I kept them in sleeves. One minute. Hot water and washcloth.

  I remembered of course where the notebook was—in my blue cardboard suitcase, stuffed up on the top closet shelf, where I stowed things I couldn’t stand to throw away. The notebook was rubber-banded to a cigar box of fan mail. I sat straight down on the floor and opened to an early page.

  Hicky kidlet in blue lipstick whispers, “When I heard that song Floors it was like you eavesdropped my brain.” The sparklers are tiny in Iowa. Child-shaped. The second we started to play they lined up all dutiful and solemn but the whole time hardly moved.

  Teased up the page corner to see what might be next—saw the word fumes—then threw it down. But picked it up again.

  Escape me from these people!!! I have 5 more weeks with them which I don’t know how I am going to stand. Shows haven’t even been good so far so what is the point? I am hiding in way back after yelling at M for doing nails in van (fumes) and I made a crack about vanity but not even harsh and she starts to actually C-R-Y and C goes Apologize! and I said Is this a charm school?

  Smoke rolled off my thin black letters, the colors churned up. Cam had liked to criticize my manners, much like a persnickety aunt. A very tall aunt.

  I knelt on the floor and stretched out. Here I am. Here I am. The kitchen clock clicked. The rain pelted. The cathedral sat on its hill. Here I am. I could hear the colors still, all those terrible bright shapes, but they were knotting together—slowing. I was in my apartment on a street in a city in a country on the floating scab of a globe.

  “IF FOD KILLED Riley from punching him in the stomach, what should be his punishment?”

  The youngest looked at the oldest, and the oldest looked surprised.

  “Come on, what?”

  “I don’t know,” said the oldest.

&nb
sp; “There would have to be punishment,” said the middle matter-of-factly. “Which do you think: water torture on a schedule, or life imprison?”

  ACROSS THE BUS aisle, a calamity-haired baby spark had been sneaking glances. It was a half recognition—he couldn’t quite place me. Hope crackled. Hey I fucking loved your last record was what they usually said. Then hope dashed on the rocks of shame: had I fallen so low I needed a high-school student to remember my name? I put my cheek to the window glass and snapped the band, wanting pain so bright it was all I felt.

  The familiar room of crimson walls, black floor. Geck nursed a tonic water in a booth. If battling to stay off mood alterers, I didn’t know why one would want to hang out where they were sold; but this was his pattern. Every time he got clean he persisted in moping around the bar, sighing a lot, twirling a dirty pale forelock on his finger.

  “Watch any good moving pictures lately?” he wanly inquired.

  “Last night I saw a decent one about life on a planet run by people who look like whippets.”

  “What the fuck is a whippet.”

  “You know, like a very thin dog.”

  He tipped back the glass. Ice cubes kicked against his teeth. “I have a cane,” he announced, “made from the penis of a bull.”

  “Is that right.”

  “Serious,” he nodded. “Buddy of mine from treatment got it for me, on account of my leg. Minky!” he shouted. “Can I have another of these? With olives this time?” He added to me: “Imperative to give yourself some variety.”

  Geck had fifty-two days. Eight more until sixty, then thirty to ninety. When he hit ninety he’d be feeling much better. It was always the way. When he felt better, or better enough, he’d start to itch again. He had, as usual, a fat list of complaints about the recovering life. First of all, everyone was always so bleeding grateful. My name is Bucky and I’m grateful to be sober one more day; my name is Lucky and I have a hell of a lot of gratitude this evening; my name is Sucky and I’m just honored to be alive! Earlier this evening Geck had eaten five powdered doughnuts from the church table and had not been grateful. Some nights the meetings were a comfort, offering the solace of being among barely-making-it people who, like himself, survived each day on routines of coffee, cigarettes, and self-deprecation; but tonight no solace, merely a bad mood made worse by doughnut-nausea. And Deep Cleavage flirting with the asshole who lied about his clean date. And that dragons ’n swords nidget in his cape. And bus riding in suburbia—the fucking worst! Took an hour to go a mile, and the other passengers were these huddly little no-life-having people who reminded you, kind of, of yourself. He missed his hatchback. Hated asking for rides so suffered the bus and the endless walk after.

  “Such as, for instance, tonight,” he concluded, “it’ll take me a year to get home. Unless maybe I could crash at your…?”

  “Nein,” I said. “So is there anyone nice at your meetings?”

  “Nice? Um… developmentally disabled, maybe. Boring, absolutely. This one guy won’t shut up about how his coworker keeps putting his stapler on the guy’s side of their workstation…”

  And his parents’ house was always quiet, I imagined: carpets on every floor, footfalls hidden, a soft agitation snaking down every hall.

  “Jonathan? Can I get you a soda?” Geck’s mother pronounced soda like it was God’s greatest temptation. About twenty times a day she offered him one. The icebox was crammed with six-packs of the various colas, the lemon-limes.

  “No thanks,” he shouted.

  “You sure, hon? I can bring it up.”

  He licked and flipped slithery pages. His mother had had magazines waiting when he got out of Canterbury Recovery Center, a neat pile on his desk. Well, their desk. Everything was theirs. He had paid for nothing in this house except his guitar and a practice amp the size of a keychain.

  He told me now, “I guess it’s a taxi for me, then. An expensive and unnecessary fucking taxi.”

  “By the way,” I said, “have you seen anyone around lately? Anyone who isn’t usually around?”

  “You speak in riddles.” He dug around in his nose with one pinky, almost delicately.

  “Just, I don’t know, the other day on the train I thought I saw someone who used to live here—from back in the day—”

  “Well, I haven’t, and I’m glad. I don’t need any run-ins with former associates until I’ve improved my circumstances.”

  REPORTER LAST NIGHT said how does it feel to be the inspiration for hundreds of fledgling operations? and I felt kind of good because guy is from prominent national magazine that hears of every trend ten years after the fact—and I say humbly, Every new band that starts is good news, and he writes that down, and C snickers from the other side of the room which I could kill him for because you get over here and do the fucking interview then! but he’s just sitting there twisting key on snare—and reporter goes, So do you have any advice for those who are just starting out? and I say merrily Don’t get a day job! (wow what a brilliant imagination you have Quinn) but the question makes me think about how old I am, a quarter century, and how starting-out kids are so young, like me and C summer after h.s. with all our hopes. I don’t want to be just OK, C said that first summer, I want to be good. We’ll be genius, I promised, secretly concerned I wouldn’t be able to sing and play at the same time, which proved to be a well-founded worry but who cares now that we’ve got Geck whose guitar charms the snakes from their holes?

  THE AMP HAD been banished to the hour between five and six and absolutely zero after dinner because the racket made Mert want to cut off her ears. I tried to play along with songs I liked but couldn’t and it sounded like a field of circles with tiny black dots.

  “Green-legged triangles!” countered my sister. “Not circles. Listen.”

  I still heard circles, which infuriated her. “You’re not listening close enough. That”—when I clanged out a chord—“is triangle.”

  “It’s circles. I’m the musical one, I should know.”

  “You’re actually really bad,” she told me.

  “Shut up.”

  “I’m just making a scientific appraisal,” she said, “of the facts. Your ability to play is nonexistent.”

  “Shut up,” I yelled.

  Riley, flower on wall, waited in excitement.

  She went on: “I hope you learn soon because otherwise Fod will think it was a big goddamn waste of money.”

  “I’ll do you a mischief,” I warned.

  “Oh I’m so scared!”

  I stood up. “You want to get smashed?”

  “Nay,” said my sister, and there it ended, disappointing our brother, who loved to watch us hit.

  The blindfold made loud blackness, a hiss and reel across the backs of his eyes. He was afraid to touch the walls—their surfaces, when bumped, were damp and moving—and his own whines had a horrible pulse. The blackness lasted so long he had stopped crying and was nearly asleep by the time our father opened the closet door and said, “Goddammit” and yanked off the blindfold.

  Riley saw the heat in Fod’s face. His sisters were going to get hit. He cried, “No Fod, it was a game!”

  “A game?” shrugged our father, thundering downstairs.

  Riley rushed behind: “Yes and I knew I would be in the closet so it’s not bad and I just fell asleep before it was over. Please don’t do anything to them.”

  “Quinn!” Fod shouted at the door to the basement. “Get your ass up here!”

  “No Fod don’t, they didn’t do anything.”

  “Look, I’m not about to let them think it’s acceptable to leave you tied up in a closet.”

  “But I wanted them to,” Riley shrieked. When he heard our reluctant feet on the stairs, he began to cry again.

  THE RING WAS louder than usual, a stinging drone, shiny larvae trapped in the canals try to scream their way out. The only way to halt the ring was sleep. Please fall. Please fall. I smoked in the dark, ashtray cold on bare belly, picturing a hard green
cliff soundless but for the wash of the sea. Please, please fall. So will you switch places now? Okay, but only this one time.

  But it was not naptime; it was family-dinner time.

  Put your boots on, Quinn.

  They waited dutifully next to a red chip can on the kitchen floor. But my socks were too big, or the leather had shrunk. Shove, shove. Fuck. Wait—there. Yes. Now the laces. I wrapped one around my finger, tighter, tightest, the fingertip bursting. A gorged red nub. If all the blood stayed in the finger, it couldn’t run down the thigh.

  The last frost was over, and my father was busy planting. In non-football months, his passion was the garden. He squatted on the gray dirt, looking thickened, old. I did not want him ever to die.

  I would eat for my mother’s sake three bites of bread, nine bites of potato, and no bites of baby sheep. Couldn’t let her know I was counting again, that the worm was here again, or that all the wisdom I’d gotten from the good doctor felt iced over like a museum sword. The worm, which had been gone for years and years, was sniffing again. Looking for blood. And why? The sudden hot fear of Cam being back? But he wasn’t even back. Some little pinstripe had just seen his double.

  I dried my hands on the reindeer towel.

  Mert called, “I’m doing asparagus. You like that, don’t you?”

  “I…”

  “Quinn?”

  “Yeah.”

  Twelve bites, but small.

  We were not religious, had never gone to church except for funerals, but on this Easter Sunday our mother had seen fit to roast a lamb and unscrew a jar of mint jelly.

  “My, this is Christian!” bellowed daughter. Silence. She tried again: “What did the moneylender say to Jesus?”