The Listeners

by Leni Zumas

  The game began: two black lanes, headlights, your fingers pale on the wheel. The road twisted through a forest. Above, stars, but it wasn’t advisable to look up. Keep your eyes on the. Keep your speed under the. Don’t reach down to change the. Don’t be drunk when you.

  NEW TO THE band, Geck had never gone with us to the diner and didn’t know the rule. We didn’t hear him order because I was too busy slapping water on the small fire I had made from ashing into a napkin and it wasn’t his fault, as Mink reasoned later, because how could he possibly have known?

  I lifted my head, alert like a hunting animal; the waitress hadn’t even reached our table but I could smell what she was carrying, the death on her arm, sizzle of cooked sister.

  “What the fuck, did somebody get pancakes?”

  “I did,” Geck said uncuriously.

  “You what?”

  “Blueberry,” he nodded.

  The waitress was about to set down the plate but I pushed it away and it sailed to the carpet.

  “Christ,” said the waitress.

  “That was my food,” said Geck.

  “I’m still charging you for that,” she warned.

  “Fucking fine,” I said, flicking and flicking the rubber band.

  The first song Geck wrote for us went into heavy rotation on college stations. They screamed for it at shows. Our hit. Cam hated the song because it was the kind of thing we had promised each other, at the start, never to play: catch and froth, as close to sugar as we would ever get. We did not play it sweetly; I grunted, shouted, refused to actually sing; yet it could not be anything but a sing-along song. It made people who had never heard it feel as if they’d heard it before—to hum with it, mouth lyrics when they didn’t know them, and to declare at once Oh I love this one, what it’s called again? I knew it was second-rate but could not hate it, because it sent us into every basement in America, and the record sold so well that the scouts began to sniff.

  I IMAGINED HIM on his plaid-spread single bed under a shelf of elementary-school swimming trophies, toes brushing a carpet dusty with shed skin. He sipped from a plastic cup of vodka and strummed his guitar. His fingers were clumsy, getting fatter like the rest of him. Thank you, tapioca! Thank you, plum-sauced brisket! Dejected, Geck got the cane from under his bed. Rubbed its brass knob. He had not believed at first that the cane had really been made from a bull’s diddler, but the gift giver had sworn it was genuine beef-cock. They used taxidermy, he explained, to cure the tissue, then they stretched it over a metal rod. Geck had been impressed; the cane was three and a half feet long. What happened to the balls? They made them into Rocky Mountain oysters, his buddy said.

  “Jonathan? Dear? Quinn is on the phone.”

  He knotted the drawstring on his sweatpants. “Medicine woman!” he jovialed into the receiver.

  “Never call me that,” I said.

  “Sorry, sorry. How are you?”

  “Fine, you?”

  “Not good. Thanks for never calling me back.”

  “We’re on the phone right now,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah, after three days.” I could hear him taking another sip. “So, want to go to a meeting with me?”

  My neck flinched: what was he implying?

  “I keep slipping,” he went on, “and the likelihood of me getting to a meeting improves rapidly if another person goes with me.”

  “Such as your sponsor,” I said, relieved.

  “Such as you. Come on, Quinn, I don’t have that many friends.”

  The commute to his neck of the woods—train and bus and walk through grummy dusk—took over an hour. Geck’s parents were retired enough to live in Florida but didn’t. The living room smelled of old people’s mouths. Mrs. Geck asked if I wanted something to drink; Geck shooed her away before I could answer.

  “May I offer you a nail,” he said, “for the lovely box your coffin is sure to be?”

  I stuck it between my teeth, slapped my jacket for matches. He was already on my nerves. That tends to happen if you’ve slept with a person, no matter how long ago: your irritation threshold is lower.

  “Jonathan,” came a call from the next room, “would you like some cookies?”

  “No, Ma,” he shouted, “we’re fine.”

  “I wouldn’t mind a cookie,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, you don’t get one. She hovers like a goddamn chopper.”

  Out on the sidewalk, I asked, “Isn’t it against the rules to be drunk at a meeting?”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “I’m serious, Geck, can’t they kick you out?”

  “Hail no. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. As long as you don’t cause disturbance, you can be as fucked up as you want. Which, by the way, I am not. Just because I’m not acting suicidal doesn’t mean I’m—”

  “But you’ve obviously had a few.”

  “A few does not drunkenness make.”

  “Pick up the pace. We’ll be late.”

  “Good,” he said. “It’s fucking misery-town up in there.”

  The church basement smelled like burnt chicken. A circle of souls on folding chairs. Everyone stared at this one woman, who was sniffling: “One spoonful! I told myself one spoonful…”

  “She likes to party with the cough syrup,” Geck leaned to whisper. His breath was shocking.

  “Is your sponsor here?”

  “Um…” He craned around, subtle as a hammer. His eyes stopped on a woman with some of the profoundest cleavage I’d ever seen in person.

  I elbowed his elbow.

  “I don’t see him,” he hissed.

  The syrup eater thanked us for listening, and now it was a baseball-capped kid, who said: “I’ve been getting suggestions from people to just go ahead and spill it, stop keeping secrets and just hand it over to the group and to my higher power. I know the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, so I’m, like I said, trying something new and opening up a little, even though I’m really…”

  “Arrive at the point!” spat Geck, fingering his pockets. Suddenly he stood, and I was afraid he would outright leave, which seemed bad, especially as the boy had just begun sharing about sexual molestation; but he was only headed to the refreshment table. He returned with a fistful of beige cookies, dropped two into my lap, and whispered, “Pecan sandies. Lowest of the low.”

  “YOU WILL REGRET this,” Cam said. “It won’t end well.”

  I forked a bite of coleslaw. “What the hell do you know.”

  “Well, I know that you sleeping with our guitar player is a bad idea.”

  It was six months after Geck had joined.

  “We’re not doing it in front of you.”

  “It tends to cause problems,” he said.

  “No problems so far,” I shrugged.

  “Except maybe for you. The embarrassment of having sex with someone who has a fifth-grade vocabulary?”

  “What?”

  “I mean, doesn’t it get a little lonely?”

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  He stood, pocketed his deck, and walked out of the diner without leaving a cent.

  “Little baby,” I called after him.

  A scout from the label was blithering on about how much she liked us, and Cam said, “My lady kind of doth protest too much!” and she paused, first confused, then irritated. After we left the bar I whispered: “If you wreck this, I’m never speaking to you again.”

  I was quite advanced in the maturity department.

  And for three days we didn’t talk. He was stunned that I would put so much faith in a raggly little scout who, after all, was not making any signing decisions; she could only recommend; but I believed that this label, a major less evil than the others whose stable included bands we respected, was heaven-sent. More than dollars: it meant we would be known by everyone—kids on farms!—not just outcasts and aficionados.

  Cam told me I was venal, and I had to later look up
venal in the dictionary that sat under a speaker in the Belfry Street living room.

  I RESORTED TO knife. Blood came. I couldn’t stand the nnnnhhhhhhh NNNNNNHHHHH! and I took my little blade and shoved it in. Afterward looked like stunt pulled by some sickified spark imitating that painter, but it wasn’t, since I didn’t expect the blood I only wanted to cut out the ringing. It is still there as I write this, going nnnnnnnnnnnnhhhhhhhhhhhhh

  NNNNNNNNNNHHHHHHHHH!

  I saw this article about other musicians who have it (there’s in fact a lot) with little quotes by their names about how they’ve just gotten used to it or how it used to drive them crazy but now they’re so rich they don’t notice. When blood ran down my neck Cam noticed. Shit what’d you do??? He got a napkin and cleaned my neck and my ear’s hot shell.

  ME AND A man and a curtain. He hid behind the tall red pleats until I’d finished taking my sweatpants off. Red streaks marbled the milk of his shoulders. He swelled toward me. It was plain he would kill me, but not before we fucked. I did not try to get away. I loved the thick full feel of him driving up my downstairs, hitting the mouth of my cervix, again and again.

  I was making materials the uterus discards. The discarded body went on a shelf, then into a box. The box was lowered. After the worm ate the body, there was no more to eat. Worm licked bone to white. A worm was a tongue. Each month, an egg came down. Did a chicken have a uterus?

  A worm was a foot and a stomach. The bloodworm’s eyes were grown over with skin. It nibbled sightlessly, taking its time. First the tender lining of the mouth. Lacustrina had had the head of a girl and the legs of a snake.

  Does the worm live in your vagina? The good doctor could be so stupid. Worms did not live in vaginas. Bugs did—if you slept with certain guys, later you might find bugs in the hair—but the bloodworm didn’t. It had been too hard to explain. I’d hated that look the good doctor got when she didn’t get it.

  WE SAT IN the kitchen, rainy morning, toast and jam. I took my chance. “So, Ri, how’s your love life?”

  One eye slitted and his freckles heated from brown to red. He put his fingers over his mouth.

  “Um,” he finally said.

  I nodded encouragingly.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Will you give me the butter?”

  “The Pinecone, right? You like her?”

  He shrugged.

  “You do, right?”

  “Kind of, but I don’t know if she does and we’re friends so I don’t want to mess it up and it would be the worst if I tried to kiss her and she didn’t want to kiss me back.”

  His face was so red that I would have laughed if I hadn’t been weirdly on the verge of tears.

  I cleared my throat and said, “It would also be the worst if you didn’t try, right? Maybe you guys would be really happy if you got together. Maybe not, of course—but the maybe yes is the important one.”

  He nervously smiled, the green of his eyes like a shoot on the forest floor.

  MY BROTHER WENT with us to the diner the day we left for the Purgastoria tour. It was a Wednesday but we ordered massive Sunday breakfasts and Cam told the waitress, as usual, “He’ll have the rye toast please!” and watched Riley’s face for the smile. I was fretting, running down loose ends out loud—We still have to call the, Mink have you heard from the, Is our percentage confirmed for the—but the others were in good moods. It was a soft blue day, warm for January, and our van had new tires.

  “Send postcards remember,” said Riley.

  “You’ve only reminded me a hundred times,” said Cam.

  “Last time you didn’t,” he accused.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be back at college?”

  “Next week,” Riley said. “We have a long winter break.”

  “We’ll put you on the list in Chicago,” Mink said. “Don’t forget to come.”

  “I won’t!”

  “Do we know where we’re staying in Madison?”

  “Not yet,” I said, “but—”

  “Lot easier if we still had a manager.”

  “If we still had a manager,” I hissed, “we would be even broker, because that fucking plonker would have cleaned us out entirely.”

  Cam said, “But after this trip, we have to get someone. Too disorganized otherwise.”

  “What’s disorganized? I booked twenty-five shows for thirty days. This is a well-oiled machine.”

  “You’re the queen of booking!” purred Geck, leaning to lick my earlobe.

  Cam closed his eyes.

  In Scranton, Pennsylvania, we argued about food. Supplies from store versus sit down at restaurant versus drive-through. I, a despiser of all hamburger-related in-gestibles, vetoed drive-through. Mink said a supermarket would save us money and Geck said supermarkets were too depressing.

  “Let’s decide by cephaleonomancy,” said Cam. We waited for the definition he would supply: “Divination using broiled ass’s head.”

  “You are a strange person,” said Geck.

  “We’ve passed like ten donkeys in the last hour,” Cam explained.

  Geck said, “Is a donkey the same thing as an ass?”

  In Rockford, Illinois, P.I.T. stood for Private Indoor Terrain and was downy-chinned boys and their skateboards in a cavern stinking bright of plywood. Across one of the half-pipes I sprayed our name, then the stars and stripes of our city’s flag. After playing for a jolly throng and drinking fake absinthe from the passed-around horn of a giant animal somebody claimed had been shot in Africa, we laid our sleeping bags at the top of a ramp. In that boy-built skatepark, falling to sleep in a row on wheel-scarred wood, I trusted deeply that things would be all right: I had my tribe to surround me, and thereby could not come to harm.

  In Chicago, shy Riley could hardly bear the hissings of Can you get us backstage? Can you? I will so love you if you can. Their voices were a hot press Can you? Can you? and Riley hoped his head was shaking along with the rest of him. The pinprick in his forehead began to blare, a headache minutes away. When are they sound-checking? Are you going early? Can I come? He was shocked so many people knew who he was. It was a small college, but he didn’t have many friends—wasn’t known—or hadn’t been, until the fliers went up and a slew of our fans got friendly all of a sudden. Maybe he wouldn’t go. But he wanted to see us. He yanked up the hood of his windbreaker and left the dorm by the back stairs, happy it was raining because the umbrella further concealed him. The prickle in his forehead was bigger by the time he reached the club and stuttered to the guy on the stool who he was. A black tunnel with voices at the end, swivers of guitar, brisk thump of a drum, my voice going Coo, coo, coo! and Okay, how’s that? When he emerged from the tunnel mouth, Cam was first to notice: Hey, Coyote! he yelled across the big floor and Riley tucked his chin, shy, stroking the camera case dangling at his hip.

  Riley had taken our picture for the Purgastoria cover. All four dressed in drugstore Halloween, black nylon long underwear painted with bones: Cam tall and planky; me whatever; Mink with movie-star teats pushing out the skeleton ribs; and Geck with his arms above his head, reaching for nothing.

  I NOTICED THERE was no wine on the table. Water glasses sweated by the plates. My parents always drank wine at night; had Mert prodded Fod into giving it up? Did he have cancer? Did she have cancer? Did wine even affect cancer?

  “This polenta is a masterpiece, let’s be honest!” said Mert, bearing in a massive yellow mound.

  “Smells delectable,” said Fod.

  “Pettle, would you move the trivet? Thank you. Now, everyone, I have some really nice goat’s cheese, if you want to mix that in…”

  “Did you guys run out of vino or something?” I asked.

  “No,” said Mert, “we’re just not having any tonight.”

  “How come?”

  She looked at Fod, who looked at Riley, who looked at the polenta.

  “No particular reason. People don’t always have to drink with dinner, so tonight, we’re not.”

  �
��Well, but a particular reason must’ve made you choose this night not to serve wine, because every other night you do.”

  “Actually, a lot of the time when your father and I are on our own, we don’t necessarily—”

  Fod squinched his eyes. I believed my mother was not to be believed. I said, “Does someone have a disease and you’re not telling us?”

  “Oh, pettle, no! It’s simply healthier for all of us to drink less.”

  “When you say all of us, do you mean—”

  “You,” said Riley.

  “What?”

  “She means it’s healthier for you to drink less.”

  “According to who?”

  My brother spooned a glistening dump of polenta onto his plate. “I asked Mert to not have wine tonight, so get mad at me, not her.”

  “Jesus, Ri, it’s not like I’m an alcoholic!”

  “But you drink a lot.”

  “Compared to who? You drink like a Baptist grandmother.”

  “Stop yelling,” Fod said.

  “Then you don’t have to sleep on my couch anymore,” said my brother.

  “Is that a threat?”

  “It’s a promise.”

  I considered getting up from the table. I had done some storming out in my time, but I felt too lazy for it now.

  “Who wants broccoli?” asked Mert, holding up the bowl.

  We got a ride home from our father. Nobody talked at all. As we were climbing out of the car he said, “Sweet dreams, kids.”

  SOMETIMES WE WERE not alone. Unseen companions went where we did, reached their hands in. Tube blown, string broken, tire nailed on an empty highway. The companions had wooden legs and knocked gently, rattled softly out of rooms before you could catch them. I waited as long as I could stand before mentioning it to Cam. This sounds crazy but…but he did not think it was. He was good that way, a listener. I explained that the freakeries were friends of my sister. They spied for her, messed with us on her behalf. She had always been bossy; why not boss spirits? On the third song, drop the latch in my sister’s throat to kill her voice—she will panic! I panicked. Fell away from the mic, spat foam, yelled unheard at the light-studded ceiling.