Introduction

In high school, I went places but I didn't see them; not really. I still haunted the pizza parlor at lunch hour, but I didn't see the old concert flyers that adorned its walls, not the homemade magazines on the tables or the band on the waitress's shirt; just a counter and a cash register and food, like tunnel vision. They say that’s what happens when you're dying, and maybe I was. My eyes still took in the city, gray and looming as the bus turned off the freeway and down into the bustling melee, but the smiling, nonhuman friends who dwelled in the aquarium tanks and the market with it’s foreign art and vintage clothes and sex shops was lost to them. In this same way I heard music but not how the lisps of independent singers sound on vinyl or the pleading, mostly-insane eloquence of sidewalk accordions; I smelled things but not fish and fresh flowers until it almost knocked me out. I don't really remember what I heard and smelled and saw. Dance clubs, maybe, and schools and roller rinks and laundry-mats; video rental places and grocery stores-- but that’s just a guess. I'm sure it was something like that.

In fact, I don't even remember exactly what it was that finally snapped me out of it, woke me up and brought me the gift of peripheral vision. It must have been something, because suddenly my eyes and nose, my ears and mouth and hands were so full of it all that I fell to my knees at the edge of the pier, those steel structures in the distance like huge light-up zoo animals, and mourned for the poor, degraded memory of all those wasted days. Or perhaps it was because I knew that there had to have been some kind of counterbalance, a death occurring somewhere so that I could live. But I found out soon enough.

Matty was a blonde. He was a poet. As far as I knew, he had always been that way. In my mind’s eye I saw him through adolescence--middle school, even--playing all the right music and reading all of the right books, so effortless and precociously that it would take the rest of us years just to catch up; that same wonderful, curious look on his face. This always made me feel ashamed of the way I used to be. I never told him about it because he never asked. Not that I would have, had he--I’d made that mistake before.

Matty was from the Midwest. As the tour bus sped down the interstate, he told me about his hometown. I didn’t know him well, but I liked the way he seemed to notice things that other people missed--the fragility of technology, the spirits of buildings that never were human at all. I liked how he described where he came from, too--not happy or shiny, but not so much mean or prejudice, either. People there weren’t that at all so much as sad, he said. His father worked a corporate job and was kind hearted and loving but melancholy, deep down. He hadn’t wanted Matty to go on tour.

Matty had a heart condition. The same one claimed his older brother when Matty was in high school. This death made his parents overly protective, he said, now making him feel stunted and young for his age. I asked him what he meant by that, and he reminded me of me then, because he said “I spent a lot of time just lying down.” People were taken by this, a rather small blonde from the middle of the country, so that when the words turned into songs, the sick boy turned into magazines.

People like tragedy, and whimsy, and charm, and they like all of these things even more when they come with a little bit of vulnerability attached. They like illness, too, especially when it comes with talent and a surprisingly nice-looking face. Given this, the reviews practically wrote themselves. Still, my new friend seemed to be fading somehow. I knew that Matty missed his family.

I missed the city. To help clear our minds of it, we looked at the pictures in my favorite Henry Darger book, the little naked girls who shared my name--the Vivians--running wild and lost through the forest, actually little boys if you looked closely. With the side of my face pressed close against Matty’s sweater, I dreamt of them. I dreamt that we were a Vivian army, the swirling hooked-rug colors of the woods enveloping us as we ran endlessly. The revolution came upon a lakeshore with a Dr. Seuss colored sky, and when we tried to use our rifles they turned into string instruments, and the hoarse and broken church bells all rang out, because we had won anyway.

I dreamt a quiet lake with an old wooden dock and a white dog who wouldn’t let us get out of the water. When we tried to hoist ourselves up onto the dock to sunbathe, the dog grabbed at our arms with its paws and swam around us in little circles--not forceful or threatening, just making it happily clear that we weren’t going anywhere anytime soon. I dreamt that America was an old wooden puzzle upon which we could skip from state to state with ease. Matty was a cartoon pioneer boy in a raccoon cap, and I was a little cartoon Indian girl in fringed adventure-moccasins, my hair adorned with plaits and feathers. We held hands, and the world looked like a television screen in the 1950s. We traveled the states, sinking down into each along the way to meet fifty different loving families, fifty new sets of enamored friends to play music for, fifty hot and lovely dinners cooked for us and varying vastly except for the fact that each one was delicious and nourishing, all full of homes.

I woke up with a start. His heartbeat was like a broken drum machine