by Jay Nichols
* * *
Three-fourteen in the morning: Russell sits cross-legged on the dais of his dormer window, loudly strumming his Guild acoustic guitar to an audience of one. Apollo lies by the foot of the bed, his eyes drooping but his ears erect, patiently listening to the concert that refuses to end. His head rests on his forepaws; his tail lazily swishes the hardwood floor.
"Shit!" Russell calls out midstrum. Grabbing his left hand with his right, he begins massaging his palm with his thumb. He’s got it down to an art now. Second nature. "Christ, that hurts," he says, digging between the tendons. The pain feels like an itch, a burn, and a cramp all rolled into one. He inhales sharply then throws the guitar pick in the general vicinity of the night stand, where he keeps all his other picks. Music time is over.
Apollo stands and walks over to his master. Arriving at the dormer, he rests his chin on Russell’s thigh and lolls his tongue toward the aching hand.
Russell’s heart melts, and he wishes that all it took to heal his hand (whose pains he cannot find the cause of) and his heart (which is breaking more and more every day) was a little bit of doggy slobber. Because if that were the case, he’d bathe in it.
Patting Apollo’s head with his good hand, he thinks, If it were that easy, boy, everybody would have a dog. He gently nudges Apollo’s breast until the Dane backs up to the center of the room. Then he stands, lays the guitar on his bed, and walks to his desk. He has a project he is working on—a puzzle—that is nearly complete. He has no idea what he is going to do with it once it’s finished. All he knows is that he has to finish it. He needs to see it whole.
Bending the gooseneck lamp down, he gets to work. It isn’t especially enjoyable work, but it passes the time. And that is his secondary motive for doing the puzzle: to slay the days and hours until he can officially call summer over.
"This summer has really sucked. Have I told you that, Apollo?"
Russell doesn’t turn to see the dog’s reaction.
He fiddles around with the puzzle for a while, and when he marries the last piece, he announces drowsily, "There. All done. I guess it didn’t take as long as I thought it would. Looked like a lot more pieces all spread out."
Tapping his fingers together, he says, "Now to get this sticky stuff off. Here boy."
Apollo comes to him and juts out his long tongue. Russell rubs his fingers on the soft, wet organ—regretfully so because he knows how bad it must taste. If it does taste bad, Apollo doesn’t show it. He just does as he is told, happy to be of use.
"Thanks," he says, drying his hands on Apollo’s back, "I owe you one."
Apollo whines.
"What? You don’t like that?"
He whines again.
"I’m sorry, boy. Come here."
Russell reaches out and wraps his arms around the dog’s trunk. Pressing his crown against Apollo’s neck, he says, "I didn’t mean to piss you off, ya big lug. I’ll never do that again. I promise."
And he knows it is a promise he can keep, because he made it to a dog, not a human.
"Let’s try to get some sleep. It’s—Christ—four-thirteen in the morning. What the hell are we doing up this late? What are we turning into—night owls?"
Russell sniggers as he stares at Apollo’s upturned face, which doesn’t bear the hint of a smile.
No, boy, he thinks. I know it’s not funny. We’re turning into something else, but I don’t know what.
Then the strange traitor voice—the one that sounds like a cicada—tries to whisper inside Russell’s head, but he drowns it out with a loud Jimmy Page-ish guitar lick. He hates that voice. Its tone is painful to listen to and its words are those of treason.
Do you know that for sure, or are you just scared that that voice—that monotonic, inflectionless tongue—is really your own? Are you frightened you’ll one day become that voice, that all of your talents, idiosyncratic quirks, and creativity will dry up and leave you like everyone else: boring, crass, and untalented; a total waste of organic material; a person who is only a person in the strictest biological meaning of the word, but who is really more beast than man? Is that what you’re afraid of?
Russell stares off into a corner and answers his own question. "Yes. That’s exactly what I’m afraid of, and you know it."
He turns off the desk lamp and does the same to the one on the night stand. Then he crawls across his bed and adjusts the floor fan to high. Lying on his stomach, with his feet on the bed where his head should be, Russell searches for sleep. But sleep eludes him, as he knew it would. The harder you try at things, the more they escape you. It is a universal law, one that Russell accepts as unquestionably as the law of inertia. After thirty minutes of tossing, he gives up his futile pursuit of slumber. It just isn’t going to come tonight. Maybe tomorrow, he thinks as he gets up and walks to the window.
He leans back in the cubbyhole and looks out over the tops of the courtly oaks, at the eternity of stars beyond. The moon is only the slightest sliver of milk glass in the dark, salty sky, but it sheds enough light to silver the faces of the oak leaves shivering in the tepid, night air. Russell delights in how delicately balanced the whole system is in order to allow him to sit where he is sitting and wonder the things he is wondering. The macro and the micro—so intrinsically entwined. Atoms, galaxies: both really the same thing. There is an order running through it all, but also much chaos. Russell knows this with every fiber of his being. He feels it.
Gazing at those stars above the quicksilver leaves, he recalls something he once said to Pete while they had played chess in Pete’s bedroom. He can’t remember the exact arrangement of words, or the circumstances that had caused them to come out, but they must have been talking about astronomy because what he said went something like this: "You know, Pete, some people look up at the stars for the first time—and I mean for the first time for real—and feel so helpless and small and isolated that they never bother looking up at them ever again. Okay, they may glance at them from time to time, and they may even learn the names of the constellations if for no other reason than to cut another notch in their look-how-smart-I-am belt, but every time they do it, they do it without excitement in their souls. The truth is those dots depress them, because in their heart of hearts, they truly believe their existence in the universe is insignificant. So they place all of their attention onto what they can immediately control, namely their puny lives here on earth. Other people, on the other hand, look up at the nighttime sky and see only endless possibilities and thus feel like giants among men. They grasp their uniqueness and accept the fact that they are small compared to the cosmos. It doesn’t bother them that they are tiny specks attached to a ball of rock and water, because they are tiny specks with brains and souls searching for a higher meaning to it all. They recognize their puniness, but they don’t accept it as the true representation of their inner selves. For them, the physical doesn’t equal the spiritual; for them, the sum energy of the body’s atomic bonds falls painfully shy of the energy inherent in the human spirit. These giants walk among regular men, but the regular men don’t see them as giants. They see them as artists, musicians, writers, actors, revolutionaries, visionaries, and are reviled for being ‘weird’ and for having ‘their heads in the clouds,’ while everybody else has ‘their feet planted firmly on the ground’ and ‘a firm grip on reality.’"
When Russell finished, Pete had knocked Russell’s obsidian knight over with his alabaster bishop and said, "You’re really talking about yourself, aren’t you?"
To which Russell replied, "Damn right. Now my question to you, Pete, is: What’s going on in your head when you’re looking up at the stars?"
Pete had grown huffy. "I think you already know the answer to that," he said, shielding his face with an open hand. Voice faltering now: "Why do you always do this, Rusty?"
"What?"
When Pete lowered his hand, his eyes had been pregnant with tears. "Why do you always try to make me feel so bad about myself?"
&
nbsp; To that, Russell didn’t have a reply. He didn’t know why he did it.
"Sorry, Pete," he whispers to the stars. The boards he sits on creak wanly in the dark room. In his berth between the bed and the wall, Apollo snores lightly. "I don’t know why I’m such an asshole."
Yielding to a sudden impulse to get out of the room, Russell throws open the window and climbs onto the roof. He sits on the dormer’s peak until daylight begins to orange the eastern horizon, searching for constellations he can’t find. Besides the Big Dipper, Orion is the only one he really knows, the only one that pops out at him. But it is hidden this time of the year. It rises with the sun, something that Pete had called being in conjunction, but he looks for it anyway. Not finding it, he sets his sights for anything resembling a crude stick figure animal. Eventually he spots a pattern that sort of looks like a scorpion. It has a curled tail, and at the tip is a stinger ready for a strike. Scorpius? Russell thinks but isn’t sure. Then again, he isn’t an expert at these things.