The Listeners

by Leni Zumas

  Son smiled.

  The platters of food to bring out.

  “I can help,” Riley said, rising to follow. “You could help too,” he called over his shoulder at me. “…”

  “What’s that?”

  “Beverages.”

  “Okay, well, what does everybody want?” I asked without getting up.

  Fod said, “I haven’t had lamb in God knows how long. Have you?”

  “I’m a no-flesher,” I reminded him.

  “Still? Well, good for you…”

  I dipped a finger in the jelly jar, licked it.

  “That’s pretty disgusting,” he said.

  My mother brought a plate of bright stalks. Our pee was going to smell.

  Dark on my underwear—the fifteen-year-old Quinn had hoped it was from asparagus. Please be the asparagus. No, it was blood. At first it made no more than brown breath on the cotton, but by morning it was falling red and real. Oh no oh no oh no.

  “Mert forgot napkins,” explained Riley, throwing them at me and Fod, who wasn’t looking—his hit him in the face.

  “Jesus,” he said mildly.

  In the day, there would have been consequences. A slam of the table and a raised voice; or, before my sister died, a slap. Time had diluted all of Fod’s intensities. He still loved football, but not in that maniac way. Every autumn Sunday of our childhood he had been at the bar or next door at the Walkers’. If the team lost, family dinner could be expected to be awful. I don’t understand, Mert would say, what’s so fascinating about men jumping on top of one another; and Fod always answered, Then I feel sorry for you.

  It was a sore subject too because I’d never liked football and had resisted my father’s early attempts to school me in it. Come watch with me! Mrs. Walker has the good kind of chips—No thanks, Fod. Oh, it’ll be fun, I’ll explain everything—it can be a little confusing at first—No, Fod. I was a bad child, I knew; other children were not bored by football, and could enjoy it with their fathers, could impress their fathers with memorized statistics and game analysis.

  When I tried to swallow, the wedged potato resisted. One mouthful of water forced it down the esophagus, another into my stomach.

  Mert was watching with the old worry, from the bad times. “Are you feeling sick?”

  I nodded and tapped my forehead.

  “Well, at least try some more potato.”

  I goaded a small bite onto my fork. Two more made three. Six more made nine. If I only ate nine, the worm couldn’t come. Worm you are banished. Stop and breathe, the good doctor had said. When you start counting or listing, fill your lungs with air. But if I breathed, I would eat, and if I ate, the blood-logged worm would come sniffing.

  Mert clamped a hand on my elbow.

  “Sorry,” I said, “what?”

  “Back to Earth, pettle! I said do you want pistachio or chocolate?”

  “Neither.”

  “Oh, but it’s the brand you like, just have a little bit—”

  “No thank you, Mert.”

  “So kids,” Fod cut in, “have you been reading about the torture in the army prisons?”

  Mert said, “Let’s not talk about the war, please.”

  “But the war is happening.”

  “So is dessert, and we don’t need to discuss torture while we eat.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re fortunate to have the luxury of—”

  “Stop it,” she said.

  “But—”

  “I said—”

  I scratched my wrist, hard, while my brother built a sculpture of lamb bone and jelly.

  “NO IT IS not yellow, it’s silverish and a girl. Eight is yellow.”

  “Eight is yellow?”

  “Of course, Fod.”

  He shrugged. “My eight’s red.”

  “Mine too,” my sister said and I was alone; then she reminded me, “But our sevens are both purple and boys!” and I was not alone.

  “This conversation is boring for some of us,” said Mert, whose numbers did not have colors.

  “Is your nine green?” continued Fod.

  “Yes,” I said happily. “Also three is green a little, but mixed with blue.”

  “Hmm, my three is orange,” he said.

  “No, black!” my sister shouted.

  “How can three be black?”

  “It just is,” she said.

  But only a zero could be black, not any of the regular numbers. They were talking about something else now, but my head kept pounding on the fact of the black three.

  “Remember you’ve got the—”

  Triplet prongs dripped with melted night: a gruesome, furious three.

  “Back to Earth, Quinn!”

  I turned glazily to my mother: “What?”

  “I said I’ll pick you up at two thirty tomorrow.”

  “Why?”

  “The dentist. So all those aspiring cavities can get their due.”

  I BROUGHT THE cigar box to work to rake through my trove, the yellowed sheaf of old mail—too embarrassed, of course, to read it when anyone was around, so I waited to pull the box from my bag until Ajax had gone out. “Defend the compound,” he instructed as usual, and saluted.

  Thank you for making such incredible music, it is really getting me through, when I am in a bad state I put you on and it makes the shadow leave and I want to say thanks.

  Yrs forever,

  Dagger

  Cleveland, Ohio

  Ah, Dagger, dear stripling. Ours forever. I rubbed my wrist. And the Neptune Beach letter, another favorite: Hi kids!!! Down in the ditch of pathos and ennui that is upper Florida, we celebrated your new record by throwing a Suicide Party. Guests were required to announce at the door their preferred method of self-offing. We are one thousand strong, your swamp fans.

  You stood on a stage and people loved you. You yelled for thirty minutes and they knew the words better than you did. You drank for free beforehand, and during, and after. Liquor was plied; necks were slavered upon. The crappy sadness of a sports bar in a midwestern city on a Tuesday could be concealed, even changed by the slavering and plying. We had met with luck in the hospitality department. Local outcasts, who relied on music for their reason to wake, welcomed us to their hamlets in the manner of younger cousins at a family reunion, escorting the more august relatives to the best lawn chairs, bringing them extra helpings of slaw. Eat with us tonight? Drink with us tonight? Sleep with us tonight?

  Nobody had come through the door in two hours. I’d counted the ceiling tiles many times but began again, certain not to be interrupted. The string of bells on the door clinked softly in a push of wind; an ambulance shrieked from Wisconsin Avenue; I counted and counted and lost my place and had to start over. A beef patty abandoned by Ajax had drawn a spider, who made a methodical journey across the cold meat. We’re in trouble, Ajax had told me the day before. Revenue was taking a serious dive. But revenue had been taking dives for such a long while that I couldn’t bring myself to be concerned; the store would prevail, as it always had, in the face of corporate cupidity and the Web. The city’s loyal sparks and mock intellectuals, along with isolates who liked to mail order, would keep us clinging to life.

  At the clinkle of bell string I glanced up, ready to chuck a hollow How’s it going? at whoever had wandered in at day’s end; but it was, to my surprise, my brother. Behind him stood a long, milk-colored girl.

  “This is Pine,” rushed Riley, “and this is Quinn…”

  I shoved the mail into its box, dropped the box under the counter. The girl shook my hand with a papery palm: “Pleased to meet you.” She had a husky little British accent.

  Riley added, “We just stopped by to say hello.”

  He never stopped by. Was this his lady friend? Or was she merely a fellow picture-filer at the archives who liked to sit quietly among dead people’s faces? She was so pasty you could see the veins in soft blue strings down her arms. Her garb—khakis and accountant vest—was even more gruesome than my brother�
�s. They hunched daily in the same bunker. Once in a while Riley must have come across a weird one, an interesting one; these maybe he showed to Pine before filing; but the archive photos on the whole were unremarkable documents to be sorted and stored and never looked at again. The chief, catching them bent over a streaked shot of two women in wheelchairs holding either end of a banner—Mr. President how long must women wait for liberty?—hurried to scold: You are paid to be meticulous, not to frolic. He put a warning hand on Riley’s shoulder. Pine stared at the hand. Riley stared at the photo—Suffrage march, 1917—until the fingers went away.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Nice shop,” Pine said.

  “Quinn doesn’t own it,” Riley was quick to assure her. “Just an employee.”

  “Assistant manager,” I said.

  FOD EVENTUALLY STOPPED asking if I wanted to go next door to the Walkers’ for the game. I figured he was waiting for Riley to be old enough to appreciate football. It was hard, even then, to imagine Riley appreciating football.

  One day my sister said, “I’ll go.”

  Fod, shocked: “You really want to watch the game?”

  “Sure, why not,” she said. She was already getting into her coat.

  And she smelled like trees.

  And she loved Cadmus and Europa, would bribe me to play it: a marble, a dollar, some chocolate. I waited while she tore a sheet from the bed to wrap herself in.

  “Oh Cadmus, what shall become of me?”

  “Who cares,” I said.

  “No,” my sister whispered, “you have to say: You are lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Europa mine!”

  I repeated the sentence without enthusiasm.

  “Again,” she ordered. “Say it again.”

  “WAS THAT YOUR girlfriend?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Was it?”

  “Shut up.”

  “What are you, twelve?—was that, or was that not, your girlfriend who came with you to the bookstore?”

  “No it was not,” Riley said.

  “Okay then.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Out of curiosity.”

  “Did . . . ?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Did we look like a couple?” he hollered.

  “Not especially, no.”

  The eggs on my plate were blisters of pus and my throat was shutting, but I managed a few mouthfuls so Riley wouldn’t notice. A bullet was a mouthful of pennies. My brother was done with his oatmeal. The waitress refilled our coffees. I watched him pour white blood into the cup.

  “She grew up in a remote village,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “My friend. Pine. She’s kind of different because of being English but also from a village.”

  “Hmm.”

  “And she wants you to come for dinner.”

  “Me?”

  “Us. She invited us. She likes to cook.”

  “But I don’t know her,” I said.

  “She’s my friend. Please?”

  Remembering what I was about to ask for, I said, “Sure, of course. I’ll check my schedule.” I straightened up in the booth. “Also. I was wondering something.”

  Riley narrowed his cute eyes. He knew I was about to beg. It was not hard to guess: I was wearing the fake-nice face. The face bothered him more than the begging.

  “The first is coming up,” I said, “and I’m a tiny bit short.”

  “I can lend you some,” he said sadly.

  “That’d be great. I’ll pay you back in a week.”

  “All right.”

  “No seriously I will!”

  “I believe you,” he lied.

  CAM ONCE EXPLAINED to my brother that Stradivarius had sprinkled volcanic ash between the wood and the varnish on his violins, lushening their sound. “Well, that’s the theory.” A smile, a push of black hair back. “Next time I build a guitar,” he added, “I might try it.”

  Unlike most of us, Cam actually knew how to do things.

  “But where would you get the volcanic ash?” asked Riley.

  “I know a few ash dealers,” Cam said.

  “Now get out,” I told Riley, who was knifing slivers he didn’t plan to eat from a hunk of cheese.

  “It’s not your kitchen,” he whimpered. “It’s Mert and Fod’s kitchen.”

  “Get the fuck out of here!”

  “Don’t be an asshole,” Cam told me.

  FROM THE SUBWAY I climbed to a street ateem with suited normals and walking-homers and, here and there, an aimless spark lighting the first smoke of nightfall. I passed a crone hauling a one-eyed dog under her arm. Where the second eye should have been was a pucker of fur and skin. This stupid city, why did I love it? Its buildings were mostly not beautiful; its couture was often terrible; and many parts of town were as segregated as they had been in the fifties. But I’d been a baby here; my childish lungfuls had been of this air; and here I had become some mock version of adult. I creaked like one, had the scuffed look of one; but indoors, I was not much better than fifteen.

  Uphill past the park, toward the churches, I winced at the streak on my lungs. Creak, creak. I used to make this walk no problem, sucking cigarettes.

  I tripped and slammed my head into a lamppost. Forehead wet, fingers red. How much beer was at home? There’d better be enough, and the game-machine had better not stall again tonight or I would kill it. “Kill,” I said aloud, wiping my hand on my britches. In case I was out at home, it might be safer to go directly to the bar.

  DON’T BE SCARED, said my sister. Don’t. Because it’s not scary, it’s good! Some famous people have it. Like the Russian writer—and the French composer—it’s a talent. Don’t you want to be talented? Yes you do. You can’t be scared. Fod’s not, is he? and I’m not, so you don’t have to be. You know how sometimes you wish you could rip everything out of your head? Like there is too much noise in it? Well, this is what I do: lie on your back like this—watch, Quinn—and close your eyes and say, Here I am. Here I am. Here I am.

  PINE ANNOUNCED, “WE are going Moroccan tonight!”

  Riley unlaced his rain-drippy shoes and left them by the door. I did the same. The girl must have been particular about floors.

  I sniffed: “Chicken?”

  “North African recipe,” Pine nodded.

  “Um, okay.”

  Riley widened his eyes at me.

  I mouthed, What?

  He asked Pine chipperly, “So when are you going to tell me your real first name?”

  She snorted. “You wouldn’t want to know, I assure you. It’s a very hideous name.”

  “Then how come your parents—”

  But she ran into the kitchen. Riley and I sat dumbly until she returned with steaming plates and cried, “Chicken magnifique! Just let me get the bread…”

  I inspected the meat. What were those dots? Wrinkled brown—fuck. The sky went thick rust-purple with the smoke of scalded grape: fizzling, flattening, blackening dots on their pyre. All gone. All gone.

  “What’s wrong?” Pine called from the kitchen.

  “Nothing,” said Riley.

  “But somebody made a weird sound.” She came back in, wiping fingers on a dishtowel. “Is it undercooked?”

  “No,” I said, “I just can’t—”

  “You don’t like the sauce?”

  “No—no—it’s the—” The sky was so heavy, so fuckedly purple, I almost gagged. Every atom of killed raisin hit my lung hairs. My mother shook me by the shoulders.

  Riley held a glass to my mouth. I sipped. “Sorry.”

  “No, no,” said Pine, “you’re ill, don’t apologize.”

  “I’m allergic to raisins.”

  Pine smiled. “Violently, it would seem.”

  Red boxes in single file on the sill, lined up along the baseboard, stacked in a pyramid on my desk. The guidance counselor in his bolero tie had repeated, “Bonfire?”

  “It wasn’t a bonfire,” I insisted.
<
br />   “All right,” said Mert, “blaze. Conflagration. Inferno.”

  I’d hoped the counselor was noticing my mother’s tendency to exaggerate. I refuse to cook food night after night for people who do not appreciate it. I hoped he would write it down in a file.

  “And there was nothing else being burned except—?”

  “That’s right,” said Mert, “which is what concerns me most. It feels like a ritual, some kind of cult thing.”

  “Why raisins?” the counselor asked. I shrugged. The counselor waited, asked again.

  “There were some lying around,” I said.

  “Fifty-five boxes!” screamed Mert. “Those little snack size! I counted—”

  “You went into my room?”

  My mother had been wrong: there were not fifty-five boxes—that was not a good number at all—there were fifty-seven. But I did not correct her. The guidance counselor asked again, “Why raisins?” and I smelled the sky, swollen rust-purple with the smoke of their dying.

  “Do you need to go home?” said Pine now.

  “No!” Riley said.

  “Maybe,” I said, holding a hand over my lips so the worm couldn’t get out.

  THE WILD WEST game was boring: you rode a bull around a ranch to save a girl. Always a girl. God forbid a fellow should ever find himself in need of saving. I chopped down the short list of distractions—more beer, another game, auto-pleasuring. Or walking (hood up, eyes down) whither and nither round the night city, blinked at by cats. I was homesick for teendom, when everything had stretched like a road. I’d decided to be a singer so I could lure Cam’s best friend, the hot Pete, from a girlfriend who did not sing. I’d planned to make up for my average physiognomy by being the pivot. The engine. I would make them look. I would do weirdness with my voice that wasn’t pleasing or pretty but made them look. My melodies (what passed for them) were blue or silver or bruise. Like runny fabric they bled on my eyes—not my eyeballs but the ones behind them, the louder eyes I’d wished my whole life I could turn off.