School of Velocity

by Eric Beck Rubin

  Did I remember the time we went to a bar in Den Bosch, like this one, and saw a guy drunk out of his mind rubbing himself against a nut dispensing machine, yelling, Look at me! I’m fucking nuts! Did I remember how, later that night, the same man was kissing the nut machine, as if he was trying to make up with it? Did I remember the year we had a vice-principal named Bent? The year we had a supply teacher named Chisholm? That time he went on a date with Sisi Vermeulen and ended up getting sick in one of her gloves?

  When Lena came back with cakes and coffees, Dirk distributed the plates and mugs, then added two shots of cream and a mountain of sugar to his and raised it for a toast. “To … Ile de Réunion!”

  He took a slug that left some liquid dribbling down his chin. He winked at Lena, as if the entire thing were on purpose. She smiled at me. I felt the table warm up.

  “Sorry about all that,” Dirk said, dabbing at his chin, perhaps sensitive to the idea that he might be crossing a line with Lena. “It’s been a while since I saw the Old Man. The silliness stops now. Scout’s honour.”

  After a pause, Lena began to ask Dirk questions. She asked him about school. Living in the United States. Being far from home. His answers were general, his sentences brief. At a certain point he pulled out a pen and started doodling on a napkin, then scratched out what he’d drawn, and crumpled the paper. “Never mind me,” he said. “What about you? You two? How long have you been going out?”

  I looked over at Lena. “We met at a bar, not far from here.” I was trying to control the edge of overconfidence in my voice, but failing. “I saw her, the crowd parted, and that was that.”

  “Impress, Old Man. Impress. And when did this biblical event take place?”

  “Late August,” I said, again looking at Lena.

  “Seems like longer,” she said. “In a good way.”

  “When’s the engagement?” Dirk asked.

  “After Lena completes her legal training. Which gives you about six months to steal her away from me.”

  Dirk smiled and rapped his knuckles across the tabletop. “Still not over that one, eh?”

  Lena looked confused; I told her I’d explain later.

  “And what about school, de Vries?”

  I told him about the Sweelinck prize, the showcase concert, signing with an agent, drawing out certain details, but again unable to help myself, sometimes with Lena egging me on. “I’ll be going on tour right after I graduate.”

  That’s when Lena asked Dirk if I’d told him about Japan.

  Dirk cocked an eyebrow. “What about Japan?”

  Lena looked at me as though she couldn’t believe I hadn’t said anything. “We,” she said, “or at the moment he, is going to Osaka in late April to begin his first tour.”

  Dirk leaned forward. “When were you going to drop that bomb, Old Man?”

  “I told you I was going on tour,” I said.

  He opened his mouth, seemingly on the verge of saying something, then sat back and shook his head. The look on his face said he was doing some kind of mental calculation but couldn’t believe the outcome.

  “But you didn’t say you were going to Japan. And in April, of all months.”

  He was quiet but the wheels were still spinning. Lena and I waited for his next words. Finally he muttered, “I knew there was a reason.”

  He shifted in his chair. Placed both hands on the table.

  “Jan, do you remember … Gargantua?”

  “Of course,” I said. I turned to Lena. “It was this play Dirk did about medieval France, based on a sixteenth-century novel.”

  “Giants, havoc, a character named Dingdong. Actually,” Dirk said, “the Old Man here was integral. He thought of performing the music onstage. The big number was some kind of a berserka, right?”

  “Mazurka. By Chopin.”

  “Like I said.” He paused again. A twinkle in his eye. “What if I were to tell you I’m in the middle of forming a troupe to put on Gargantua. Like, right now. I’ve already booked small stages in Chicago and Upstate New York.” He looked around, as if checking if someone was overhearing. “And the idea is to bring it to Japan. One of the actors found some New Theatre festival in Tokyo, and everyone’s super excited about it.”

  I shook my head. I didn’t understand the connection.

  He looked around again. “The festival’s in April! You, me, Gargantua, old times, Empire of the Rising Sun!”

  “What?”

  “Use your eyes to follow my finger, Old Man. We would meet up for your concert in Osaka. Then you two could come to Tokyo for the show.”

  I started laughing. “Are you serious?”

  “You said late April, right?”

  “The twenty-first,” Lena said. “In Osaka.”

  Dirk bit his lip and started bouncing in his seat. “I’m thinking we’re going to do this. In fact, we are definitely going to do this. Dammit,” he said, standing up, “this calls for bubbles! Do they serve bubbles here?”

  Underneath the table Lena squeezed my wrist.

  “Um …”

  Dirk bolted to the bar. I turned immediately to Lena. “I know. The packing.”

  “Listen,” she said, taking my hands in hers. “I’ve had a thought. This is fun for you, right? How often do you get to see old friends? I want you to stay.”

  “What about getting ready?”

  “Stay tonight and, if you want, stay for a couple of days. Celebrate everything you’ve accomplished this term.”

  “But our plans.”

  “Don’t worry about that. I wouldn’t mind a few days on my own to relax. Warm up my parents to the idea that I’m dating an artist. I’ll make everything nice and cozy for your arrival. Then you’ll come on Christmas Eve, which is the important thing.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Dirk came back to the table, balancing three beers. Lena took the coat off the back of her chair and picked up her purse from under the table.

  “Are you leaving because all I got was beer?” Dirk asked.

  “It was nice to meet you,” Lena said, extending her hand. Dirk took it, pulled her close, and kissed her on both cheeks. Lena laughed, kissing him in return. I pushed back my chair.

  “You’re not leaving too?” Dirk said.

  “I’m going to walk Lena to the door,” I said.

  Outside, I told Lena I would come back to the dorm that moment, if that’s what she wanted.

  “The plan’s made,” she said. “You’ve been working so hard. Have some fun with your friend.” She smiled. “Even if I find him a bit much.”

  I pressed my lips to hers. “I love you so much,” I said.

  “I love you too, Jan.”

  As soon as she turned the corner, I spun back into the Easy. In my absence, Dirk had caught the attention of one of the waiters and asked for a menu.

  “Think we need a second round of these beers, no? And probably a couple shots. Good for making complicated plans.”

  Over the next two days, Dirk and I went everywhere in Maastricht. I took my bike out of the dorm’s storage and Dirk rode Lena’s, having promised to be careful with it.

  The first day, I showed him around my new city. Riverside, cafés, my favourite second-hand record store. We ate dinner standing up in a kebab shop and had some beers in a bar across the way. Heading back to the dorm, we passed a club that blared music onto the street, and Dirk, with a dangerous look in his eyes, persuaded me to go in, and pay our cover. We spent the night dancing, with Dirk pointing out women who either ignored him or gave him eyes, and in the early hours stumbled back to the dorm, where Dirk crashed on the couch, snoring so loudly it was hard for me to get to sleep.

  The next day, the plan had been to show Dirk around de Groot but we woke up late, with hangovers, and Dirk proposed instead that we take a train to the nearest Belgian town to buy some pot. I argued with him all the way to the station, where Dirk bought two tickets on the Ostend local. We got off a half-hour later in a small town, and Dirk, as if followi
ng some inner compass, led the way to the main road, where we found a kid in a beat-up denim jacket pacing the pavement.

  “I’ve never done this before,” I said.

  “Well, I’ve never been to this town before,” said Dirk, “so technically neither have I.”

  I picked a coin out of my pocket. “Loser buys,” I said, but Dirk caught the coin in mid-air.

  “Remember when we flipped on Caligula?” he said. The previews made the entire movie look like one long orgy scene; sheer salivation at the prospect of seeing it. When it came time to buy tickets, we flipped a coin. I lost, but Dirk, sensing my mortification was too great to overcome, went to the counter by himself and paid. Now he pocketed my coin as tribute, approached the kid on the walk, and five minutes later we were crouching behind a building while Dirk rolled joints with some paper he had on him. He lit two and passed one to me; we split a third on the train back to Maastricht; a fourth as we walked out the station and along the Maas.

  It was close to the end of the day when Dirk went back to the subject of Japan.

  “Oishi-katta. That’s Japanese for ‘berserka.’ Or, wait, I mean ‘delicious.’ See? I’ve been studying.”

  “Since when? Wednesday?”

  “Maybe, Old Man. But we’re going to do this. I’ve already decided I’m going to put your name on the grant application. Master Sonic Manipulator.”

  As we went along the river, Dirk played out the scenario one more time. “I come to your concert in Osaka. Then we head up together to the New Theatre festival, where you do the soundtrack. Onstage, like before. Except this time we’ll have a Hammond organ. Hammond or Wurlitzer. Or whatever. And after the first night, we’ll scope for high-end prostitutes. Sorry. Forgot about Lena. I’ll scope for prostitutes. The Ginza is where everybody says to go.”

  He went on. The stage setting, characters’ names, the props they’d need. I was seeing it. It was becoming real to me.

  As the sun began to set and the wind picked up, Dirk started calling lines from the play. “Ah! There’s Lord Grandgousier arriving with his men. What are you eating now, gigantic Gargantua? Nothing, just all the veal in France. Ah! veal! veal! veal! He’s eating all the veal in France!” Wind-whipped tears of laughter crossed my cheeks. For a while we walked in lockstep, our winter coats swishing against each other.

  When we crossed into the newly paved roads of the townhouse complexes, Dirk stopped and turned to face me. He placed his hands on my shoulders, firmly, almost like he was holding me in place.

  “Did you ever think, Old Man, why now? Why we’ve crossed paths at this exact moment, just as we find out we’re heading to the same place?”

  My teeth began to chatter.

  “Cosmic fucking intervention,” he said, a crack of a smile. “And Tokyo is just the beginning. There are the stages we’ve booked stateside. A workshop in Chicago called Hatch, where you get a grant to develop the project.”

  He seemed to be deliberately ignoring my own tour, as if it was secondary, but I didn’t mind. I was excited.

  “We are going to do this,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  He tightened his grip on my shoulders. “Yes?”

  “Yes, Dirk! Hai, Dirk!”

  He dropped his hands and tucked some stray hairs behind his ear. “Now take an address.” It belonged to a friend of his in the Gargantua troupe, Drew, in Ithaca, New York. I was to mail everything about my trip to Drew, and he would pass it on to Dirk. When I couldn’t find anything to write on, Dirk dug into his pockets, spilling a book of matches and two coins onto the ground before finding a pen and a scrap of paper. He read out the address as he scribbled, so I’d be able to decode when the time came. I slipped the scrap into my wallet.

  “I won’t lose this,” I said.

  “Better not, de Vries.” He pulled me towards him and squeezed. Air escaped from his puffy jacket. A whiff of warm skin. “The next time we’ll see each other will be on the other side of the world. Of the planet.”

  I nodded. He cupped the back of my head, like old times, then turned around and bobbled off on his splayed feet, moving through circles of light cast by the street lamps. When he got to the front door of one of the farther houses, he turned and flashed two fingers in a sign that could either have meant “peace out” or “V for victory,” which, as Dirk had once pointed out when we were at Sint Ansfried, were two pretty contradictory messages for a simple hand gesture.

  As he opened the door I called out, “I’ll see you soon!”

  I arrived at Lena’s parents’ home as planned and immediately fit in. Far-flung branches of the family tree had descended for the holidays and each day more neighbours dropped by to spread the love. It was my first happy family Christmas in ages, and I was reminded how good that felt. An overload of food being eaten at all hours, ebbs and flows to and from the dining room table, a present-surplussed living room and Christmas morning gift exchange, and even carol singing while I accompanied on the family room upright.

  But even as I joined in, being introduced and reintroduced to aunts and uncles and cousins and friends, riding the fully furnished seasonal merry-go-round, I found myself at a distance, often watching Lena. The way she spoke or acted. The way she held or did not hold my hand. Whether she stood right next to me or inched away in the presence of her mother or father or little sister. I was, I realized, looking for some difference in her. Something to indicate that there was a change in our relationship, now that I’d come to meet her family. Or that she’d met Dirk. Something to match my sense that we had entered a new phase. I didn’t seen any clues, but that didn’t stop me looking.

  For my part I put on the charm. Smiled on cue, listened carefully, interrupted minimally, was happy to hammer away at the keys at any invitation. But there was a part of me that I couldn’t tamp down, that was growing inside me, slowly but steadily, like a bubble. Japan. Specific images. A subway car gliding along a station platform. Ideogramic lettering on a shop sign. An army of shoes marching along crowded sidewalks. I wasn’t picturing being there with Dirk, or without Lena; I had purposely put those questions out of my mind. Instead there were these images. At first they were hazy, but with every recurrence they came into sharper focus. A spare moment, a drop in the conversation, and my mind would wander.

  On the train back to Maastricht I told Lena that Dirk was serious about meeting us. She nodded but didn’t seem particularly impressed.

  “You should have seen the look on his face,” I said. “He meant it.”

  “Are you going to send him your itinerary?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t mind so long as you and I have time to ourselves,” she said, elbowing me softly in the side. She turned her attention back to her book. I looked out the window to the countryside.

  Back in town, with the beginning of my final term, I went back to what Lena called “the bunker,” the practice rooms, where I mowed through the repertoire Taub had given me and contended with the stunning workload from the conservatory, the tutors trying to cram every last thought on performance into our heads before we were set upon the world. Once again, music took over completely. The cascading, triumphant, sometimes sarcastic chords from Debussy’s En Blanc et Noir. The exuberant marches from Bizet’s Jeux d’Enfants, played by two pianists on one keyboard. The percussive runs from Grieg’s Norwegian Dances. Major, minor, diminished, augmented. Sostenuto, staccato, mezzo-forte, mezzo-piano, hands together, hands separate, changing keys from A to B-flat to E minor to A. Awake and asleep, I was tuned in full-time. As soon as one piece ended another began.

  Then, in mid-March, a surprise. Lena and I had just begun the process of booking her tickets to Osaka when she came home from work one day to tell me she had bad news.

  “All of a sudden the partners want this file done way earlier than planned. It’s kind of ridiculous. Almost everyone will be putting in overtime. I’d have, at most, three days off. Barely enough time to get to Japan and back.” She looked at me in disbelief
. “I’ve been upset all day,” she said. “I feel like quitting my job. Why aren’t you angry?”

  “How can I be angry?” I said. “This isn’t your fault.”

  “But this is your debut I’ll be missing.”

  “Professionally, maybe. But you saw my real premiere. At the conservatory.”

  She started to tear up. “I’m just so angry,” she said.

  Seeing her cry moved me to act. I sat us both down on the couch. “There will be other tours. Other tours to Japan, even.”

  “And I’ll come on the next trip, right?” she said, drying her eyes. “Even if it’s somewhere terrible, like, I don’t know, Moldova.”

  “Then it’ll be Moldova.”

  She reached for a tissue and blew her nose.

  “Think about it this way,” I said. “I wouldn’t be on this tour if it weren’t for you. All those nights in the practice room. For us.”

  “Do you really believe that?” she asked.

  “I believe that,” I said.

  She nodded, indicating she believed it too. “And Dirk will be there?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “So you won’t be alone?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry I’m crying.”

  “Don’t be sorry. You look beautiful when you cry.”

  “Just do me one favour,” she said. “Phone from the hotel. One call before you play.”

  “So long as you don’t hang up when the operator asks you to accept the charges.”

  That made her smile. We kissed. We went to the bedroom, to the bed. But afterwards, as Lena dozed next to me, I stayed fully awake. Unable to close my eyes or even to try to count sheep. Staring up at the sky, watching stars dance and wink.