Hot Kids From Cold States

Parker and Kirima (2009)

2009-09-17T23:11:00.000-07:00

The day Kirima and I found the church, I had a really bad cold. My cold was the kind that's embarrassing because your nose is so stuffed up that your voice sounds weird and your whole face feels hot. Being an eighth-grader in general was the equivalent of that kind of cold, I guess, so actually having one on top of that is just kind of ridiculous and brutal. Vulnerability tastes bad, like someone forcing you to eat canned soup.

Kirima was Inuit. She had round cheeks and shiny hair the color of polished black wood. Her clothes were just embarrassing--awful, worn stuff like big tee-shirts with dancing cats in aprons hanging off of her, colored jeans that were tight around the ankles, dirty Keds. That was the shirt she had on that day, the dancing cat shirt, and I watched the shadows of the twigs and trees wash over it, the cotton worn and vaguely nubbly up, up close. The cats were faded and cracked, her light brown skin beneath them seeming as if something under the surface of it would smell like canned black olives. She pointed at the little, pointed old building with the stained glass, all swelling with organ and song. "I told you I heard singing", she said.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm walking inside."

"You can go, then, but I'm not. You have no idea, Ki, who they even are."

"Just come on, Parker."

Of course I'd have expected something so dilapidated and exquisite would have been home to likewise dwellers--a charming, robust and wholesome race of gnome people in felt clothes and pointed hats, sweet and pure as a cartoon. Not especially handsome, but they would be tender, elite. We would not be allowed; such inadvertently perfect beings would have no use for the irrefutably awkward, which was us, stuck simultaneously at the most awkward point in their lives. I felt sad, too, because I knew that Kirima's affliction was temporary and that someday she would be lovely to everyone. The guilty ache of being selfish like this stung the most, in my chest.

But when we went inside, the faces were not elfin at all, but almost disgustingly human, to the point where you wanted to turn away. Unwisely nourished, atrophied, aged. Possessing strong feelings and not the mental capacity or the social skills to hide them or let them out gracefully, which is the ugliest and most uncomfortable thing of all. If you've ever watched a retarded person cry, then you know what I'm talking about. Vulnerability is nauseating, it makes me want to fucking throw up.

By that point I was feeling pretty shitty about the human condition and even worse about myself, because I was some stupid blond kid in unfashionable clothes, too-tight thermals with planets and race-cars that the kids at school made fun of. That day, my tee-shirt had wolves on it. Given all of this, when we opened up the heavy wooden door and it creaked open just like you'd imagine it would, and every sad backwoods eye in the place, all twenty or so of them, turned and looked right at us, falling silent, I wanted to run for the doorway or fall to the floor. Kirima wasn't scared, though, and she walked down the short, shabby aisle like a bride in hand-me-downs and when she reached the front up there, I almost couldn't breath at all--not through my nose because of my cold and not through my mouth because I felt so awed and terrified.

It isn't that I don't remember what she talked about, because I do, but since it won't come to me word for word I'm not going to try, because that would be like trying to describe the inside of your sternum when you feel sad or a feeling you had when you were four. I could see her, though, as the queen of Alaska, riding a narwhal, cartoon-queen in a parka, the works. She was everything beautiful, then, about religious parents who made you eat dinner at their house. She was everything wholesome and kind about idealistic America, my pioneer in a coloring book. She was Disneyland, minus the mean parts, I guess, and if she hadn't been messed up or if she had grown up right, she wouldn't have had any chance of ever being that at all. And I wanted to say so, but my insides were nowhere near big or colored-in enough yet to know how, and so instead I just started feeling that hot-liquid in the chest feeling you get when you know that you'll probably cry.

But I didn't cry yet, and when I looked up, everyone in the building had stood and they were doing the weirdest thing ever, clapping in time as if she were singing, though she wasn't. Then I remember her ending and the preacher, who looked about ninety, with blinky half-crossed blue eyes and white hair, holding her hand up in his as if she'd become the champion of something.

Afterward, though, I couldn't find her, and when I did she was all the way around the back side of the building, her old shoes hidden in the overgrown brown of it all and her face on her arms up against the brick, crying. I'd never seen her cry before.

I should also mention that on this day, my cat was dying. My kind, wonderful cat who was a year older than me so that I had known him even in my mom's stomach, and now I was fourteen, was dying, and I wasn't even allowed to act sad about it because my brothers would make fun of me. My cat was at the animal hospital that day for about the tenth time in the past few weeks, and something inside of me knew that it would be the last time, the needle would stick and I would never see him again. I had sat on the couch at home that morning, trying really hard not to breath too loudly through my nose, my wonderful sweet cat in his carrying case, about to go. No one had told me anything definite about it, but I knew. I didn't pet him or say bye to him, because my brothers were watching. I acted as if nothing were happening at all.

I sat down next to where Kirima was standing and thought about my brothers. I thought about the time they told me I wouldn't be a nerd anymore if I burnt all my books, and I agreed to--just like that I agreed to, without even fighting it or thinking for a second. I remembered my books loaded into a wooden fruit crate, desecrated and ramshackle in the Radio Flyer wagon, pushed into the yard--Charlotte's Web and The Boxcar Children series and Bridge To Terebithia, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn and that old copy of Catcher In The Rye that I'd only ever skimmed and not quite gotten the jist of yet. I felt vaguely guilty in my stomach and not much else. The match was just about the strike when mom came outside screaming, grabbing my brothers by the wrists, telling them no. She took the rusted handle of the wagon and she wheeled my lovely books back inside.

Thinking about it then, around the backside of the church, I cried, too. I sat there and had a cry as horrible as my cold was. We didn't touch or hug each other. We just cried out there, together; Kirima standing up with her arms up against the building and her face on her arms and me sitting down a foot away from her, my back against the building and my face down on my knees.

I can’t know for sure, but I think Kirima did it because she knew that she’d be going soon. And it was true, two weeks later she would be placed in a different foster home and I wouldn’t see her again. I know she was sad at the prospect of not seeing me, but it was a lot more than that. The weird light in her chest had finally been recognized, and though she’d always known herself that it was there, having it acknowledged out loud so suddenly was jarring. She also knew that as with anything else, she would be ripped away from all of this before she had any real chance to explore or love it. Kirima’s chest was a layer of worn, nubbly cotton adorned with faded dancing apron-cats, then dirty white, and then finally when all of that was cleared away the green shone in a lovely, lovely light. All the other people in the places that we knew couldn’t see it because they were bitter and threatening; they were drown bodies in a lake of their own misguided self-worth and made cold and hard as corpses by tradition. I wanted to tell her that, but I was crying too hard to talk.

I don’t remember exactly, but I think I did it because I was thinking about my mom. Just then was the moment in which I first started to see people in terms of varying combinations of smart and kind. Stupid mean people make up the underbelly of what is, and maybe they like it there or maybe they don’t. Smart mean people run the world, for the most part, and they do the best, because really, who else could run the world and who else ever could do well in it? Stupid kind people suffer the most, quietly abused all their lives by an idealism that they go to bed with each night without the first clue that it’s their murderer, too, and smart kind people are something else entirely.

Smart kind people grow up early and they see exactly what is and they spit in its face--some more quietly than others, but they all do it--and then it all overwhelms them so much that they make mistakes and especially when they are born poor, they are made to live in the image of less than they really are. So the veterinarian at the animal hospital that day was saying “I’d put him to sleep if it were my cat” to a shabby, unfashionably dressed woman who hid her beauty with very short hair the cheapest glasses available, purchased so that my mean brothers and I could eat. He had no idea that the green eyes through those glasses read more and better books than he ever would, because libraries are free, or that she was wonderful. She knew but had given up on trying to make anyone else know, but I wondered once if she had been Kirima.

I told you it had something to do with my mom. The current setup of the world rewards the blindly accepting, the uniform, the quick. It didn’t seem to accommodate wonder at all--unstable childhoods, educational questioning, momentary breakdowns--punishing these feats instead with vague humiliation. I cried then, I guess, because Kirima reminded me of my mom in that way--doomed, at least for the moment, to be viewed as last when she was first by those who were actually last and had the horribly audacity to think the opposite. After we were finished crying, I had so much snot streaming down my face that I felt embarrassed to lift my head up from my knees.

Seven years later, I would show up early-early to see my favorite band play, earlier than the band itself, even. And when the band did show up, I would approach the lead singer, my hero, and ask him what he was reading. When he smiled and told me all about it, I finally felt the same honor that I felt on the day that I cried with Kirima, queen of Alaska. But that was the only other time.

And at home, when all the world beats and spins inside of me in the mornings and my nose bleeds, red into the bathroom sink, I think about her and I imagine her dressed crazy and leading a band, shaking a tambourine and beating a xylophone up onstage, and when she isn’t doing that I imagine her volunteering with sick kids in hospitals and voting in every election she can. She smiles when she does these things, the twenty-something Kirima in my mind, and when her slightly slanted black eyes crinkle and her round cheekbones rise, her teeth jut in front of one another in several spots, crowded and double-rowed in places like a low-income apartment building.

And when the front door of my apartment building shuts behind me, I squint into the sun reflecting off of the bay and the glass of big office buildings. I am still drowsy but the city busses are up, sliding by with their accordion middles, attached on top to the telephone wires by stiff long strings. And my kind, wonderful cat is among them; his face shines from the dips in the telephone wire, the swollen places in which they are pregnant with electricity, he plays the accordions that compose the busses’ midsections, hitting middle C when they go around corners, or perhaps he is someone on the bus itself now. His face is everywhere, feline in appearance but as human as mine in expression, saying I don’t forgive you because I was never upset in the first place, I always knew you loved me and there wasn’t even one thing to forgive. We live together forever as friends.

I imagine the inside of my chest as a small wooden stage. At intervals different creatures take the stage and introduced themselves. The world as a small sphere of blue and green paper mache does dizzy pirouettes, demonstrating how it lives inside of me, the newspaper clippings of which it is composed emanating sad and desperate, or maybe just interesting, through the bright and elementary paint. The world exits stage right and a mystery beast, regal and fierce, takes its spot proudly and tips its hat before becoming feral, but only for a second, bearing its teeth and utilizing its claws in a swift, singular reenactment of how it ripped the inside parts of me in half. It bows then, giving a small nod, and then it is gone. In its place now is a mob, people clamoring atop one another and screaming, gesturing wildly. It is every disapproving look that ever chilled me to the bone, blatant but not quite discernable, as a kid. How come, how come, their little voices cry. It crescendos and then the stage is still and silent, occupied solely by my dad, looking down and pulling on the chain of an old manual yard mower which in turn makes plaintive, lazy, half-mechanical sounds. My dad: what the hell ever happened to that guy, anyway?

Out on the street now, a man selling Real Change newspapers offers one to a girl in dirty canvas shoes. I’m sorry but I’ve barely got a dime myself, she says, before walking into Nordstrom. This man’s teeth are not like low-income apartment buildings, but like rain-soaked cardboard boxes, and his clothes are fished blindly from the donation bin at the Salvation Army. How’s that for a non-ironic wolf shirt?

Finally!

2009-09-03T11:23:00.000-07:00

The record is DONE! It is all recorded and mixed. Now I am waiting on the final cut from the studio, and after that its off to the presses. I think it is a really cool album, and I feel proud that I made it. Details soon as to where to get it!

Long-overdue update

2009-08-27T08:30:00.000-07:00

Oh man, its been a while. August 17th was supposed to be my final recording date for this album, but I got really sick and had to postpone it. Now it is scheduled for Monday. We have two songs to record completely and one to finish up, and then I'm good to go. There have also been some, er, pleasant developments in my personal life that have brought a few changes, making it so that all I do anymore isn't sit around writing and writing songs (though I still really do enjoy that). I really need to get to work on the novel again. Looking to move to Seattle again, looking to stop being painfully shy and actually start booking. Also, there are two new finished songs that I've been hoarding that will go up on the music page today, so keep an eye out.

Comments on here, especially on my writing, are always appreciated, since I'm not so painfully shy online.

Yet ANOTHER two new songs released!

2009-08-10T20:41:00.000-07:00

Both brand new this time. I spent today in the studio, and now two more are all mixed up and ready for listening. "Its you I like" is a story song about old churches and awkward best friends in a small town (and you also don't hear me play guitar very often, which I do in that one). "Chlorophyll inhaler" is way Beat Happening-esque. I love how it turned out. A week from today should be the last studio date and then soon the record will be out! Order it, I'm broke and its made with love.

Two new tracks on the music page

2009-08-06T09:40:00.000-07:00

Its the craziest week ever. Ten hours in the studio over the course of the past two days, and now I hate Matty Cries! Not really, because the tracks sound really good, but I need to hear someone else's singing voice besides my own for a while. If you go to the myspace page, you can now hear the new album version of "empathy & sacrifice" as well as the epic, never-been-heard-before album closer, entitled "songs in basements". The two songs kind of go together, since one is the opener and one is the closer. Consider this a teaser.

Ps- More writing coming soon, hold tight.

Tee shirts and record design worries

2009-08-02T14:16:00.000-07:00

Its really down to the wire, and I feel slightly overwhelmed at all the things to do in order to get this record into a real, tangible form. I'm not overwhelmed as to the songs themselves (with the exception maybe of which of my background singers will actually show up), but all the other stuff. The album design most of all. I have the artwork ready, and I know how I want it all to look, but its just in paper form and I don't know how to translate that exactly. I want to get it done quickly and get this thing out as soon as possible. Its worrisome.

Here's a tee-shirt I made for my friend Chris in Omaha. Its probably the coolest one I've made. You can't really see in the photo, but the snow is white puffy paint. If you'd like one, give me a size and an address and I'll make you one.

Studio time the day after tomorrow, and I feel very ready.

Oh, whoa!

2009-07-31T10:18:00.000-07:00

I would have been happy with the generic-looking blog I achieved yesterday via some transatlantic help and my very limited html skills, but that just wasn't good enough for my friend Ben from England, who created this rad-looking template for me. And now look! Thanks, Ben!

Now that I can blog again, what will be on here? More chapters of Hot Kids the novel, obviously, and the few of you with the attention span to read it will get to read all about Matty's cross-country adventure. There will be uncool Midwestern parents, and anthropomorphic construction equipment, and theme parks, and the verbalization things you're afraid to say. There will also be short stories, a lot of which are archives (as new as 2007 and as old as 1999, and yes, I know I was 12 in 1999) but some of which are new. There will be boy stories--kind of funny accounts of failed interpersonal relations I've had over the years. And of course there will be news about the record, where and when Matty Cries plays, etc.

I'm really excited for my show on the 8th, if you're in the Seattle area you should come (info can be found on my myspace page). I'm open to playing anywhere, really, once this album comes out, so if you'd like to me come to your city/state/country (I'm not kidding... give me an excuse to whip out my passport and get on a plane, and I'll do it) and you have a roof I can sleep under and a possible venue where I can play, contact me.

-RH

Fixed!

2009-07-30T20:30:00.000-07:00

Check it out, guys, a friend I've never met told me how to fix this blog. Now its not a mess anymore, or confusing. The one thing that still needs fixing is the novel chapters--they're in order from newest to oldest, where they should probably be vice-versa. But otherwise, we're back in business.

I'm playing a show in Seattle on the 8th of August, and my last three studio dates are August 4th, 5th, and 10th. Then the record will be all done, and it will just be a matter of getting it pressed and sent back to me. Please buy it, I am tragically broke.

Commander Venus, or, The Lorax (2007)

2009-07-30T13:40:00.000-07:00

The day that I found out, I put on a Commander Venus album and danced about the house, jumping up and down on the couches and knocking over all the garden statues. Your brother came over and scolded me, telling me I should be more upset.

"You're not crying, either" I said, skipping across the kitchen floor to "Showcase Showdown".

"Yeah, but that's different. I'm just not crying. You're dancing around to Commander Venus like nothing even happened."

"I like Commander Venus," I said. "They were a good band, especially considering how young they were. And almost all of them went on to front successful bands."

"That's not the point and you know it. Now turn this weird shit off and cry or something, you're making me feel weird."

"Would you rather I turned on Tilly and the Wall instead?"

"You're hopeless. I'm going home."

His eyes hadn't even been moist, the damned hypocrite. Besides, I didn't see what the big deal was. You had wanted to be dead, and now you were. When I spoke to Dustin later on the phone, he told me that when your car had hit the tree, he didn't hear the scream of the engine folding in on itself or the shattering glass of the windshield, just one line of the song that you were listening to at the time. Soon I will follow. Don't say shit like that, I said, it freaks me out. At which point he had called me a fucking poser and hung up on me. I didn't see what he was all bent out of shape about. I lay in bed and tried to think about who you had been on Earth, but all I could conjure up was a rather small boy, usually wearing a large hooded jacket, who liked video games and authors who had been so cool for so long that they were really quite the opposite now.

I read that it was raining in Seattle, and a cliché frost fell over the bleak Midwest on the day of your funeral, making the high school football fields look as if they went on forever. Outside of the church I smoked a cigarette to look cool and stared into the frozen, hungry eyes of a statue of a girl with an animal's body. Your brother came and put his arms around me, the bones and meager triceps squishing into my parka and making me warm.

"I'm sorry, Vikki. About yesterday, I mean. I shouldn't have said the things I did."

"You didn't say anything."

He pulled away from me and sat down slowly on the marble bench as if he were old. He sighed, pulling the hood of his jacket up over his head. "Vikki, talk to me. Please. This can't possibly be the full extent of our reaction."

My eyes glazed over then, not with tears but rather with the visions of the story that I, oh, that we, were a part of. I could see the toy rockets hurdling reckless to the ground, marigolds and sunlight mean and blinding in the summer. And I could see us, you and I, my friend, while you were here still, having parties at your house that only the two of us came to. This was Iowa and no one understood us as far as we were concerned, and so on Fridays and Saturdays as our classmates all met up in supermarket parking lots to go drink out of kegs, you and I would stay up in your bedroom and dance to our favorite bands. We could go all night, sometimes, and on into the morning, your little beige house at the end of that cul-de-sac shaking with the sound. We rarely even bothered to take our goddamn parkas off.

So what was I supposed to do now, I wondered? There was a whole wide world out there full of people who might understand me perfectly, and I wasn't particularly excited about meeting them because that would mean admitting that I wasn't special or original after all. I preferred the coddling, familiar alienation of the little town I'd been complaining about having to live in for as long as I could remember.

But I would go away, I decided, become a traveler, riding the interstate buses. I would ride until I came to that cemetery in Missouri, and then I would lay down with my ancestors and sleep. Not forever, but for a while, maybe. I won't expect it to make me sad, but it will. That and the vague recollection of a story I read in grade school; something about a boy with no name who's only friend had died in a car crash. She had promised to find him a name, but she never got the chance. It was the saddest thing that I had ever read.

And the word "mine", and the fact that certain places only exist anymore inside of certain people's memories. And the realization that the act of one person missing another is, perhaps, at once the most lovely and the most painful aspect of the human condition. Except for now it just felt like being kicked in the stomach; nothing less and nothing more, either.

"I'm sorry, Dustin" I said finally to him. "I just don't know what to say. I hope you're okay, though. I think you're going to be okay."

I knew that this was where we were supposed to have some sort of breakdown; where we finally realized the stark reality, the tragedy of all of this and cried on one another's shoulders, Dustin and me. But this isn't a fucking indie-movie, sorry. He and I had never cared for one another much, if you want to know the truth. Besides, I liked my emotion ready-made and packaged fresh in Nebraska, wrapped in clumsy metaphors and delivered to me via my stereo at a frequency at which I could revel in its depths but never really had to get my hands all gross and dirty with it. Anything else would have been just too weird.

But I read your favorite book aloud at the service, at least. I am the Lorax, I said, I speak for the trees. They fall and fall and fall until there isn't one left, no not one. And oh, for the tears that I wished to feel running down my face like hot tea with lemon and honey, making feeling curl up inside of me and trickle out, a fast school bus in a movie that we watched in kindergarten.

For days afterward, Commander Venus was playing in my head. Fine disaster. Fine disaster. Fine disaster.

Untitled existentialism-humor story (2007)

2009-07-30T13:30:00.000-07:00

"You can't be an existentialist; you cried at The Notebook." Tom stated, as if he knew.

"That was a long time ago," I argued, which meant it was two years ago, when we were sixteen.

"You still cried."

"So did you."

"I'm not claiming to be an existentialist."

Tom bit his apple and leaned against the oak tree, looking self-satisfied. I shook my head mournfully, wishing he understood. "Existentialists can cry, you idiot. That's the whole point. You can do whatever you want because none of it means anything."

Tom threw his apple into a bush. "Whatever, I don't feel like talking about that anymore. Now put down that stupid Camus novel and lets go inside; my mom will buy us Taco Bell."

"I'm not hungry."

Later on, in the kitchen over Crunchwrap Supremes, I brought it up again. "I just don't see what one thing has to do with the other," I said, opening up a packet of hot sauce. "Why The Notebook of all things? If I cried at something more artsy, would that be okay?"

"Are you still on about that?" asked Tom absentmindedly, sucking the last bits of soda out of his cup.

"Yes."

"Drop it."

"No. I really want to know, Tom. How does crying at a movie make me not an existentialist? I'm interested. I want to hear your theories."

Tom sighed, tilting his face up towards the wooden cupboards with their faded floral insides, yellow and lazy in the sun. His wavy blonde hair made him look younger than eighteen, I decided, and kind of stupid too. He looked like someone who might surf if we lived somewhere where people did such things; like someone who would sit there and look handsome and not have much intelligent to say. Finally he spoke:

"All I'm saying," he began, "is that that particular movie is everything that… in theory… as an existentialist, you don't believe in. Its way too romantic, you know? Too idealist. And the fact that you'd shed tears at something like that shows that at least in some capacity, you believe in it. And that's what prevents you from existentialism, at least in the true sense."

The problem with Tom though, was, he did. Have things to say, that is. The jury was still out however, as far as I was concerned, as to weather they were actually intelligent or not.

"That doesn't even make sense," I said, feeling kind of embarrassed because I wondered if maybe he was right. "You don't even know what it means."

"What's so great about being one, anyway?" he asked, taking a drinking glass from the cupboard above him and filling it with water from the fridge. "Existentialists don't seem to be very happy people. They're all like, bummed out all of the time."

"Yeah, because they're right. About the world, I mean."

"They're still bummed out. I'd rather be wrong and happy."

"See that's the difference between you and me. I'm not afraid to face reality. You'd rather live a lie."

"Man whatever, you don't have any idea what you're talking about, and besides I only ever cried at that stupid movie to impress the girl I was with. I wanted her to think that I was sensitive. I can turn it on and off like a faucet and it doesn't mean a thing."

"Well so can I. How do you know that's not what I did too?"

"I really don't care, Marcus, one way or the other, that's why. You're the one who keeps bringing it up all the time."

That night I slept over on the trundle bed in the living room. In the morning when the August sun came in bright with a vengeance through the patio door to make us too hot we laughed and whispered the way we used to in middle school, Tom and me, the tacky orange-and-cream floral bedspreads tangled about us before either of us were really awake enough to get up. I could hear his mother making coffee from the kitchen, smell the English muffins and eggs that I knew would await us when we finally made the effort to rise from our fort of secrets and old jokes and saunter in.

"Are you still going to see Jenny when fall comes?" Tom asked, his hair a mess of curls upon the dotted pillowcase, his slim body a shapeless lump under a bad 70s print with one worn-out sock sticking out the other end.

I scratched my head, my back already starting to feel like a hot skillet with cooking spray on it. "Why wouldn't I?"

"Well I don't know, wasn't she going to go to school in New England or something?"

"I don't think she is now. She hasn't said anything about it for almost a month."

"Oh. Maybe she didn't get accepted."

"I don't know."

I rolled over until Tom hit me with a pillow and proceeded to knee me in the back. "Ow," I muttered, rubbing my sore spine.

"Get up."

"I'm coming. Good God." But I took an extra minute or so just lying there, thinking of the girl who danced with me on porches when no one was looking and snuck into bible camps at night to go skinny dipping and always ate a little extra in the spring so that she'd be nice and fattened-up for her bathing suit and summer.

But I spoke to her later on that morning on the telephone, hiding in Tom's attic just to get a bit of privacy from him and his overly-talkative parents and his redundant little brother who was ten. Her voice was crackly and distant, full of broken plans and bad reception. "I'm sorry," she said, "I thought you knew."

"When are you leaving?"

"Before the end of summer."

"Are you coming back?"

"Maybe. For Christmas I'm sure. But not to live, no, at least not for a while."

I stared forward at a magazine rack covered with dust. The title written on the yellow spine of each volume was the same. Time. Time. Time. "I've got to go." I said.

Tom was already in his swimming trunks, awaiting our walk down to the lake just minutes from his house, but when I got outside I just walked fast ahead of him, past the thicket where we used to pick blackberries, past the tool shed where we used to smoke pot. How strange it suddenly seemed to me, the afternoons and mornings of this summer spent straddling that fine line, that ever-deadly picket fence between childhood and adulthood, the place where doing childish things is still accepted, but not ever talked about, and just barely.

When we got to the deserted lakeshore he caught up to me in hot pursuit, sitting down beside me just inches from a sticker bush and looking annoyed. "Why did you run like that? I'm all out of breath now thanks to you."

"I wasn't running."

"Whatever. What happened to you?"

I threw my hands up in the air, the lovely weather seeming now like some ironic joke. Tom cocked his head to one side, his hair reflecting the same light that just soaks into my bangs, straight and dark. Its always been like this with us, it seems, things just bouncing buoyant off of him and then seeping into me like a kitchen sponge, like a brand new flesh wound that everything hurts. "She's going away after all," I said. "She's leaving."

"Who, Jenny?"

"No, Tom, the fucking queen of England."

"Sorry, I didn't know."

"Yeah, well I didn't either" I muttered, putting my face down onto my drawn-up knees. I didn't close my eyes then, just kept them open and staring down at the green and yellow grass but not seeing it, really.

My favorite singer is an existentialist, I think. He hasn't said so, but I can tell. My favorite album of his is all about how something so terrible happened to him, something so lovely and wonderful ended so tragically that he can't even eat or sleep once it is gone, just lay in his bed in that big empty house full of mirrors and be haunted by this horrible dark thing until eventually, in the last song, it kills him. Except that's not even how it really happened, and once you listen to it a few times through you realize that its just about him getting dumped by some girl when he was like, eighteen , and being all depressed about it. And he didn't die at all, he's still alive and over it and probably really happy, and I think that the girl has a band of her own and they're friends now and they laugh about it. Its all just one big joke. Somehow this is even more depressing, to me anyway, than the original concept. At least if he had died, pale and fever-stricken in that shower, she could have come by and put flowers on his grave and it would mean something. It doesn't mean anything at all the way that it is. It might be funny, but it doesn't mean anything.

"Its not that big of a deal, Marcus" Tom said, "you'll be alright."

"No I'm not going to be alright" I said, ignoring the fact that I was practically crying now. "And it is a big deal. I'm not like you with things like this. I don't just rush out and find new ones all the time."

"Yeah, but it really doesn't mean much, does it, in the end? I mean really, nothing means anything, right?"

"That's not true," I said through my hands, "something means everything. This means everything! I'll never be okay again from this." Even as I said the words, I know that they weren't true, but they felt important just then, and besides no one had to know that but me.

"Ah, I think you will" Tom said, reaching over to pat me gently on the back. How awkward. I wanted him to stop, but he just kept at it, his hand up and down again in a way that you should be fine with your best friend touching you were this a movie, but in real life it just feels weird. I sniffled and felt sorry.

And Tom, he just kept doing it, patting my back like he was fucking obligated, and here I am having a breakdown.

"You know this proves you're totally not an existentialist, right?" he said, somewhere in between my ridiculous sobs and his horrible, creepy back patting.

"Shut up, Tom."

"Sorry."

Capgun (2005)

2009-07-29T13:50:00.000-07:00

Down on her knees on the floor of her bedroom, dressed in the shortest little cutoff jean skirt. And she always loved that damned Death Cab For Cutie CD, and I never let her listen to it. I said that all the songs sounded the same and that it put me to sleep, and besides, it made her sad.

The last time I had stood waiting for her outside of my parents’ house like I did earlier tonight the August air was pleasant and lukewarm. Tonight the cold stung me through my sweatshirt, and immediately upon stepping outside I could feel the tiny bumps form on my arms. For a minute I thought maybe she wasn’t going to show; maybe this was her payback for every time I’d made her cry and now that she’d found me at my lowest she was going to stand me up and show me what a real broken heart feels like--the kind of broken heart that nobody’s there for.

But that car of hers pulled up a few minutes later just like it always had, that same impossible-to-place look on her face and she stepped of the car to greet me and I saw that she was wearing a fucking jean skirt, one that barely even covered her ass. And in the middle of November. Black gloves and a faux-fur lined jacket layered over a floral long-sleeve thermal shirt, but still... that miniskirt. She was always wearing little skirts like that.

She hugged me without saying anything, ribs on ribs. We got into the car and she stared straight ahead, gloved fingers on the cold wheel, no radio or anything. She’s still single, but I heard that now she’s been hanging out with some twenty-three year old. If she becomes his girlfriend, I realize, then she’ll suddenly be the eighteen year old, as opposed to being the eighteen year old like she always was when she was with me. Both are said with inflection, but in a different way. With him she’ll be the one who can’t get into bars. With me she was the one who could buy cigarettes.

So now we’re sitting on the floor of her dimly lit bedroom at three in the morning and when I get done explaining it all to her, tripping and stumbling over words and touching my hair like an idiot and choking up--she hugs me again. Oh God those hugs of hers, they fucking kill me. I don’t feel like explaining it. Not to anyone, or ever. Not even to her. Crying would be letting her win, finally giving her what she wanted. I could never do that.

She’s taken her coat off now and it’s just her in that thin little thermal top, so thin and clinging that her ribs stick out beneath her breasts and I can see them. She’s sitting with her knees bent, that tiny skirt riding up, her thighs just slightly parted and revealing her panties. And I can feel her ribs against me, almost like a bird’s ribs--the squish of her small breasts against my chest. She smells like something sweet cooked with vanilla, lots of real vanilla, and something from the summer. I wonder if I ever smell like that.

The feeling mosh violently inside of me like punk-rock kids; like throw-up, I just let it come. Her arms and kind words are the fingers down my throat. And from the stereo there in the dark Death Cab is playing the song “Tiny Vessels”; Ben Gibbard’s voice fills the sound void in the room singing I spent two weeks in Silverlake, the California sun cascading down my face. There was a girl with light brown streaks, and she was beautiful, but she didn’t mean a thing to me. Yeah she was beautiful, but she didn’t mean a thing to me.

Later we lie together in her bed just like we used to and I bend my back so that I can lay my head in the crook of her arm near her breast and she touches my hair like she always did and Ben Gibbard is still singing from the stereo, singing I need you so much closer, I need you so much closer over and over again. And it’s true, Death Cab really does put me to sleep, because soon the songs all run together and I’m out cold.

I stumble back into something of consciousness around two the next afternoon, my vision hazy and my memories of the night before an embarrassed blur, coming to the surface and breaking like a wave. I reach out for her, stroking her hair, and she rolls over, wide awake and staring into me with bedroom eyes and she sighs, smiles, and says: “I love Death Cab for Cutie.”

Fucking dammit. I tell her I want to go home.

The sky is white as we drive back across town to my parents’ house, the car engine whirring like a vacuum and sucking us up into the road. We don’t talk, except to say goodbye, and feel better. We don’t say I love you. We never have and we probably never will; and I don’t love her anyway so who really gives a shit? I probably should, but I don’t. I don’t love anyone. I just want to be alone. And to fuck.

I walk in through the garage, past my father shining his truck against the backdrop of his gun collection on the wall. The biggest one is polished so flawlessly that it shines like a mirror. When I pass it I can see my own reflection, in skinny girl jeans and eyeliner, there in it’s silver barrel. I’m not what he wants. I was never what he wanted. He grunts at me. I say fuck you, dad. I hate him.

My mother is making poptarts in the kitchen and I don’t even look at her; I don’t feel like talking or explaining, or answering stupid questions like where were you last night that I’ll have to make up lies to answer, anyway, because she doesn’t like me spending the night with girls.

The air in my bedroom is almost as cold as outside, and my unmade bed and lack of decor suddenly strike me as wonderfully tragic, like the backdrop for a cinematic suicide. I pick up my toy capgun from off of the floor and press the barrel to my heart and pretend to shoot it, bang bang bang. But there aren’t even caps in it right now, so it just makes a stupid clicking noise. I throw it back onto the ground. I kick it, and for the first time in forever, it seems like, I laugh. But I know even then that it isn’t fucking funny. No, it isn’t funny at all.

I lie down in bed, sprawling out across the tangled sheets that smell like orange Kool-Aid and girls I almost fucked and cigarettes I wasn’t supposed to be smoking. Apathetic, I reach over and turn on the radio. I cringe at the song that's playing, quickly turning it off again. I don’t want to hear it. Death Cab for Cutie. I fucking hate that band.

Really old, like 2007 or maybe late 2006

2009-07-12T19:14:00.001-07:00

(When my blog is fixed, there is going to be a section where I just write about people I dated/pseudo-dated/made out with once, etc. Roughly 30% of it will be sexual, so I wouldn't get too excited. I actually have had sex in my life. Sometimes I forget that fact. Ps- Now I think "categoric" isn't actually a word. Oh well.)

So many things I wasn't
and that I could be
until I held your kind heart, broken
in my hands.

The languid emotion that is me, was me
clumsy and crushing like child's boots
unfit for tender things
and I wept at its exquisite quietness.

Such wonderful softness
and with such perfect simplicity
the something made one soul
one life, one set of hands
and with such stoic vulnerable freedom
it does move about.

My lover
has no gender, no age
no categoric physical description anymore.
Only spirit and city
kind words and idle feet
loving me but gone.

My favorite little life
you are no longer drawn towards familiar things.
No comfort found in bedsheet-pants,
no solace for the weary in mine arms.

We are moving and market and tall buildings and the sea.
We are ourselves!
A picture perfect circle rather than a wandering puzzle piece.
You cried too, but you were glad
and I was let down at the realization
sometimes all I really want to feel is love,
you said.

Frantic spinning contradictions in a mass of man-made lights.
The ones in the sky look about the same from far away,
and offer no more in the way of an answer.

And so I leave, my friend, unfinished
my soulmate is soulmates exist
but if they don't then I am paper,
fold me up and tuck me away, please
in your box with funeral love.

In the way that you tucked me once,
close into bedsheets,
saying my, my, mine, my.

How I spent my second day of being famous, by Rachel Horton, age 22

2009-07-08T22:16:00.000-07:00

You can read my interview on Thunk with Ryan Manning here (copy and paste):

http://metaphysicalthinking.blogspot.com/2009/07/ryan-manning-v-rachel-horton.html

On my second day of being famous, I woke up at 5:30 because a bluejay was being loud and obnoxious right outside of my window and wouldn't stop. I went and slept in another room for about another hour and then I got up. I felt different. I had a cup of coffee and didn't want to eat because the idea of what people might be saying was making my stomach feel sick. Obviously, this will take some getting used to.

I turned on my computer and my interview was waiting for me. I did it, and then it continued through most of the day. I didn't take a shower or put on makeup, but I did comb my hair and put on purple jeans and an old striped shirt from Goodwill Outlet. I felt really depressed because of my period, and all I could manage to eat was a mango. Around 11 am I got back into bed with my clothes on.

I half slept and was conscious and dreamed the whole time. Since when do I do that? Being famous is weird. As I was first drifting off, I half-dreamed in my mind about my feelings being a mason jar full of pasta sauce inside of my chest, pushing against the inside outer wall of it and trying to come out. I know that sounds like I'm trying to be bizarre for the sole sake of being bizarre, but that's really what I dreamed. I made a mental note at the time to remember it. I half-dreamed that the pasta sauce was coming out of a woman's head, making her hair beautiful. My mom is a model, the woman's daughter shouted.

Before I was famous my dreams were always really mundane, and I almost never remembered them.

In my half-dream my mom was standing above my bed or walking around my bedroom, talking to me, and I felt freaked out because I knew I was half-dreaming and that my mom was at work. Usually I wake myself up when this happens, but I was so sleepy still that I didn't let myself, and instead I forced myself to keep talking myself down, saying "your mom isn't here, Rachel, she's still at work, you're just hearing people talking outside" for the next three hours. In my half-dream, My mom was listening to NPR. I also half-dreamed about Loony Toons characters, and how if they walk off of a cliff and don't look down, they won't fall--they'll just keep on walking on the air.

At about 2:30 I forced myself to get up. I didn't feel depressed anymore. I ate something and took something for my cramps. I walked downtown and got an iced tea at Starbucks and sat outside with my notebook, arranging some songs that I'll be finishing in the studio next Tuesday. Some people tried to get me to join Greenpeace. I was famous, but no one really treated me differently or made a big deal out of it. I sat and I thought about how maybe I could be less wordy and more cynical and more abstract and more people would read this, but then I thought that that might be kind of dumb, and nothing would make me stand out at all anymore.

This makes me sound like an asshole. But really, I'm not. I've lived away from home excessively, I've worked two jobs while in school, I've had no time for existential hand-wringing and three-hour half-dreams in the middle of the day and doing what I love most. I get that some people never get to do any of those things. But I'm here, and I'm doing them, and I'm trying to figure it out, and I feel really really awkward. I want people to comment this. I'm going to feel stupid now when/if no one does. I want people to talk about me on their blogs. This makes me an asshole, I know, but I can't help how I feel. Everything feels completely different all of a sudden, and the only thing I can think of that might be worse is if nothing felt different at all.

Things that have come to my attention

2009-07-08T08:50:00.000-07:00

I need someone better at computer-related things than me to help fix this blog so that the chapters of the novel can be in one part and maybe the short stories can be in another and the normal stuff can just be here, and you can just click whatever you want off to the side.

I was not a graphic design major.

Not that many people have the attention span for whole novels, or writing as wordy as mine. I'm not sure I even do, except for when I'm writing it. I could blame the internet for this, but I'm not sure if that's true.

And its so odd that there's this whole kind of blogger world, and a lot of them remind me just of me, and I want to meet them and cry with them but then I think that if we really met we'd be aloof and sarcastic and polite and humorous like people always are when they meet. I wonder what would happen if I just said "can we just cut through all of that, because I already know what you're actually thinking about, its not like you didn't put it online for the whole world to see."

Or some of them might try to sleep with me. That tends to happen. And then I would maybe mess around with them and then say something nice and leave, and I'd walk around whatever city I was in feeling annoyed because I know for a fact that they think what I think because they told the whole world, but that's different than telling one person in real life, and people have to be careful about that.

Oh, and Ryan Manning interviewed me today.

A conversation with my mom

2009-07-07T17:29:00.000-07:00

My mom came home today and was asking about my day, and I said that I got my wifi hooked up and then said, "oh by the way, I got famous today" and she said, "that was quick" and I said "yeah, it was." Then she said, "I'm thinking of veggie lasagna for dinner tonight, how does that sound to you?" and I said, "Good."

I wish everything in the world didn't hurt my feelings.

Introduction

2009-07-07T12:39:00.000-07:00

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

The City Has Sex

2009-07-07T12:38:00.000-07:00

Vivian strolled through the Pike Place Public Market, thrilled for no particular reason. A small-boned, dark-haired girl of almost average height (though not quite), she was dressed in thick snow boots, warm woolen tights, and a hooded parka just long enough that it covered up the short dress and thick sweater beneath. Black mittens covered her hands, and a colorful home-knit scarf wrapped warmly across the lower half of her face, obscuring it.

When Vivian walked, she swayed, not in a manner which suggested sexuality so much as an eager disposition towards precocious adventure. It was really something in-between a sway and a skip, sometimes breaking stride to turn in a little circle in front of a fruit stand or in the middle of an intersection, able to contain her elation no longer. Sometimes she forgot the sway altogether and took off running at impromptu moments, smiling wildly.

Surely, the more cynical or faultfinding members of the audience are, by this point in the description of our heroine, rolling their eyes. Their complaint, most likely, is that this Vivian sounds as if she is someone out of a children’s storybook and not a real person. Which was precisely the problem, actually--it was true. Yet here she stood, as though through some kind of semi-cruel joke, where Elliott Avenue meets Alaskan Way, with reddened cheeks, a heart pumping blood and real as any stranger. Everywhere she went, people were either charmed by or skeptical of her.

It was the perfect sort of winter day, though, and most of the strangers she passed seemed to be the former. And rightfully so; who could resist a young woman so happy! Vivian was twenty-three. She had round cheeks and circular, amber-colored eyes with a shiny appearance as if encased in a thin layer of glass. She had pale skin, and a strange little nose. It had been a smidge forsaken by straightness, veering more to one side to a small degree. Her nostrils, should one take the time to study such things, were not quite matching in shape, but the whole feature was saved from coarseness by the fact that it was slightly upturned.

Vivian loved the Market! She and Seattle had been involved in a playful and passionate love affair for years now. The city sometimes betrayed the girl by growing too familiar or windy or full of stomachache-inducing people, and the girl sometimes forsook the city by growing restless and tired of it and running off elsewhere for a few months without much warning. But both of them always relented, eventually, and wound up laughing hard in one another’s arms, the smell of tides and raw seafood and carnations swelling all around them as they shook. Neither was a particularly steady or predictable lover, neither prone to being terribly emotional or possessive when it came to the one they adored, yet it always came back to the fact that their adventures together were inevitable, for they were far too alike to have it any other way.

The girl bought a muffin and a cup of hot herbal tea from an outside stand next to the fish market, turning away as the cylinder of sweet-smelling steam warmed her hands. Vivian didn’t like to see the lifeless fish being tossed from man to man amongst the ice like big silver chew-toys. She herself didn’t eat such things, though she made good use of the produce stands. When she had finished her muffin, still clasping the little paper cup of warmth close to her body, she headed towards the pier.

She loved the pier as well, and today it was particularly inviting, the first lights of the holiday season having appeared on the outsides of the restaurants. Her partner was a worldly and grandiose hipster, encircled by planes and secretly ruled by marine mammals, watched over flawlessly by enormous steel giraffes, and today she was feeling especially pleased. She opened up Milan Kundera’s Life is Elsewhere and began to read. She had just gotten to the part in which the family’s servant girl loses her fiancé and the boy, the young poet, is entranced by her tears, having discovered the unmistakable beauty of sorrow. Vivian then noticed a few small droplets, as if from some distant lawn sprinkler, appearing on the pages. She decided to ignore them, and read a few more lines.

But the droplets grew larger and quicker, so the girl put her library book back into her bag and again began to walk. She couldn’t have made more than a score of paces before a flurry of perfect, tiny snowflakes encircled her every angle. Vivian, delighted, began to run, subdued laughter ringing out from beneath her scarf. Oh, the air smells just like peppermint! she thought, twirling in a rapturous little circle on the sidewalk somewhere between the train tracks and the beloved aquarium. How could anything, anywhere possibly be more perfect?

And as she ran, the snowflakes increased in both frequency and size, until she stopped short just before the sculpture park, and the city was a world of fresh new swirling white. The colorful hard-candy wall in the distance adorned with the falling peppermint shavings now was almost too much to bear. She readjusted her scarf so that it covered the majority of her cheeks, which were tingling now, and her unmistakable little nose, which was beginning to give way to sniffles, courtesy of the cold air. And yet Vivian suddenly felt as if she were surrounded by an invisible force field of warmth, and she stood chilly but not cold as her darling changed before her from his gray coat to his white.

It was the most beautiful thing that she had ever seen, she decided.

Ps- This chapter is named after a Bright Eyes song. Its on an album of theirs called Letting Off The Happiness, so if you've never listened to that, you should, because its really good.

Those Two Blondes

2009-07-07T12:37:00.001-07:00

My mother is a pretty, rather birdlike woman with long dark hair and thin legs. She comes from Portland, Oregon. I saw a picture of it once, and it looked like Oz to me--a foreign land full of strange, loud, unapologetic people, and so many bright colors that even in the faded photograph, my eyes ached looking at it. At twenty-one she left, her feelings perpetually hurt but her pride more than intact, to find her very own Kansas.

Figuratively, anyway--she found Minnesota. That was how my brother Elliot and I came to grow up here. Our house was all one level, but not horribly small. A picket fence graced the front yard, but the less-kempt backyard stopped short at a tall wire one, with train tracks directly behind it. My bedroom and Elliot’s were side by side, the only two in the house whose windows faced the trains directly. Clean, though the light fixtures on the ceilings caked with dust as the years went by, neglected by the two blondes who slept beneath them. In the summer there were plastic wading pools and metal turkey roasters full of dirty, lukewarm hose water and rubber likenesses of marine mammals to swallow the drowned insects whole, and in the winter there were tiny metal dump trucks full of snow and pop-bottle rocket launches.

Dad was a rare sort. There was nothing particularly effeminate about him, but he conducted his life with a perfect, un-self-conscious sort of androgyny that has stuck with me at least this far into my own adulthood. Almost everything I know about being a person, I learned from him. Mom was rather progressive, as Midwestern moms go; college-educated and able hold her own in most any discussion, working part-time as a research scientist because she liked to. She was secretly a bit disappointed that both of us were boys, and secretly glad--too glad--that we both got our father’s hair color. She was sad, of course, to find out we both had the heart condition, but not defeated. She hadn’t desperately wanted complete happiness anyway, I don’t think, so much as she had tenderness. And that, to say the least, she got.

Tenderness was also, coincidentally, what my brother hated most. Everything mom had ever meant to run away from, everything she had seemingly escaped, crossed those four state lines and caught up with her in the form of her oldest son. I was the spitting image of the relatives she cherished, but Elliot seemed to be some kind of unfortunate throwback, mirroring effortlessly the tastes, humor and mannerisms of the ones he had never met and had barely heard of. He swore like a logger and walked with a swagger. His nose was small and upturned, but his tongue was razor-sharp; his hair pale but his comedy pitch-dark. Our dad, having never seen anything like it, stood dumbfounded and slightly amused, a little squint on his soft-featured Midwestern face. But mom shook her head and made her mouth into a small line of patient love mixed with the deepest annoyance, and watched her own black-sheep story repeating itself, only backwards.

When I was eight and Elliot was twelve, I had to have open-heart surgery, just as he had five years prior. I had been three at the time of his, and the one vague memory I kept of it was of an elevator door opening to reveal a hallway where my brother, eyes shut and head limp to one side, was being pushed out of a room on a gurney. This image hadn’t bothered me at the time, but it haunted me as my own surgery grew imminent, and on the night of I kicked and screamed, not wanting to be wheeled out of a dark room in a gown, unconscious and half-dead looking. Elliot alternated between reassuring me and trying to scare me further with stories of his own, because sometimes the doctors were kind, intelligent people who would fix me quick and painlessly, and in other tales they were crazed maniacs who would cut me open and leave me to die. But he concluded to give me his fleece bathrobe, red with trucks on it, to wear while I was there. It was sized for a preteen and hung off of me comically, the sleeves dragging, but I loved him for it and would have worn it straight onto the operating if I could have. I remember looking at it in the chair across the room as the plastic half-circle was placed over my face, and I drifted off to somewhere else entirely.

If I dreamt at all, I don’t remember it. When I awoke mom and dad were there, but it was Elliot’s face I saw first. He sat in the chair closest to my bed, holding his Nintendo Gameboy but looking at me, his eyes puffy; with the same delicate shoulders and arms, the same pointed chin and slightly sunken chest that would follow him even into adulthood. He looked at our parents and asked quietly, “can I?”

They nodded yes, and he reached into a Styrofoam cup with a plastic spoon and carefully brought some slushy, orange-flavored ice to my lips. I swallowed as the blurriness began to clear away and I looked at him, and towards the back of the room at my father’s parents, who had come, then out the window at the lit-up, racing freeway far below, and then back at Elliot. My room was full of balloons, one emblazoned with a cartoon teddy bear and the words Hug me, I was brave. There were a few stuffed sea animals (my favorite, though I had never seen the ocean) and a quilt handmade by my grandma, embroidered with my full name, Matthew Alexander Madison, and just my size. Strange tubes seemed to be attached to my body from every which angle, but someone had draped the red bathrobe with truck over me, and I was glad.

Later on, when grandma and grandpa had gone for breakfast at the Ihop across the street and our parents were down the hall pouring waiting-room coffee, Elliot reached over and took hold of the bathrobe, carefully uncovering me and making me cold “What are you doing?” I exclaimed, frightened, but he said nothing. I began to cry. “Elliot, stop it!”

But then I stopped short, startled by the sight of my stitched-up chest. My brother smiled, lifting up his own sweatshirt to reveal a healed version of the lengthy, vertical gash that now adorned my torso. Forever, I realized. “See?” he said, pointing, “now we are twins.”

When I was well and we finally arrived home, what our grandpa called “the kiss of February” had come, and the trash cans that resided against the back side of the garage, frozen shut, were dripping water and beginning to thaw. Little green patches had appeared, scattered, in the dirty, aging snow, and I finally felt fixed and happy. That night I tried to give Elliot his bathrobe back, but he refused, saying “keep it, its too dorky-looking for me anyway.” Despite the hidden insult, I was comforted, and it remained in the back of my closet well into high school.

When I was twelve and he was sixteen, it was legal for Elliot to drive, and so he did. He drove aimlessly and usually too fast, with me in the passenger seat on days that none of his friends could come out. In the summer, when popsicles turned to liquid almost instantly on the porch and the trash cans up against the backside of the garage festered and stunk, we took countless trips to our town’s small lake. I wasn’t a strong swimmer, and he knew it, which amused him to no end. “Swim across, Matty! Swim all the way to the other end!” he’d laugh, grabbing onto me in the wet and pointing across the expanse of liquid blue.

“I don’t want to swim across” I grumbled, “Lakes are stupid. I’d rather see the ocean.”

“Go to Seattle” Elliot said.

We didn’t, but we did sneak out that winter to see his friend’s band play all the way down in northern Iowa. I had just gotten my first guitar and was learning the chords, and Elliot loved to take me to shows just to tease me, telling me to go get onstage with the bands. I didn’t until years later.

The sheer length of the forbidden trip was so that it required us to leave virtually the instant our parents’ heads touched their pillows. Elliot barged into my bedroom, wading through the mess on the floor and pulling the covers off of my clothed body. He had told me which jeans to wear (the embarrassing ones, in my opinion, that barely fit) and lent me a striped sweater for the occasion. “Matty!” he said, a whisper with the inflections of a yell, “get up! Lets go!”

He got angry at me for not having my shoes on, I almost cried, and we were both momentarily paralyzed by the sound of footsteps that turned out to be the dog’s, but somehow we made it outside, and we ran around back, frantic and laughing through the slush. It was Christmastime, and the lights of our neighborhood shone conspicuously upon us. The thick falling snow was on our side, trying to keep us hidden. I can still see him--his frail, stretched-out looking body crouching down out of view in a way that made his chest look even more hollow; his pointed, almost elfin face, unmistakable for anyone else’s.

“Elliot!” I cried under my breath as we ducked behind the trash cans, now frozen again, to hide from a passing car. “Elliot, I have to go to the bathroom!”

“Hold it!”

The taillights disappeared, and we ran, still crouching, past the garage to the driveway, him tugging at my jacket sleeve to hurry me along. The string of lights wrapped around a nearby lamppost turned his pale hair red and green.

“Its cold out here, I need to blow my nose!”

“Just use your sleeve!”

“Elliot, I don’t have my inhaler!”

“Shut the fuck up!”

The driver and passenger side doors slammed shut in unison, and Elliot turned the key in the ignition and put the car in reverse, rolling blindly backwards into the night.

The show is a tired, nervous blur in my memory. We only made it in time for the last two sets--Elliot’s friend’s band, and then a small-looking, college-aged boy with an acoustic guitar. I imagined hoisting myself up onto the low stage and lifting his shirt to see if he had a scar like we did. It seemed as if he must have, under those lights. Tears filled my eyes, and I didn’t know why at all.

We made it home in time for breakfast, which our parents were already having, and got grounded for a month. No computer allowed, but while dad was at work we used it anyway until one day it froze. We panicked, turned it off manually and hoped for the best. When dad turned it on that night the homepage for Friendster.com popped up, David Dondero blared loudly through the speakers, and we knew we were busted.

The next day Elliot told me that he was going to run away to Oregon and live with our mom’s relatives. He would dye his hair black, he said, so that no one would find him on his way. “They sound way cooler than dad’s side of the family,” he said, wrapped in an old Sesame Street blanket and eating the last of the green bean casserole, “I don’t know what the hell her big problem with them is.” He never did get around to doing it.

When I was fourteen and he was eighteen, it was legal for Elliot to smoke cigarettes, and so he did. We both did, all night long at the Denny’s one town over. This was just before the smoking ban, and the waitresses never asked any questions, even though I was underage and looked it. We rarely ordered anything but endless rounds of coffee, with creamer in the tiny metal pitcher. So many nights that summer we came home jittery and coughing, not smelling like ourselves, for four or so hours of reckless, tossing sleep. In the mornings we’d go swimming in the lake, and I would look from his chest to mine, now healed in a fashion as identical as our hair coloring, and feel glad. Twins, he had said to me. Twins, I wanted to be.

By the time fall came, smoking cigarettes in diners had gotten old. That was when Elliot met a girl on the internet and decided to fly to Seattle, the city he idolized, to meet her. I was terrified. Besides Minnesota, we had been to Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas, neither of us had ever been on a plane, and the Northwest might as well have been a foreign country. But my brother had no fear. It was a big independent music festival, he said, and she could get them into the after party, which he wasn’t about to miss.

I was expected to cover for him, and did, because even though he was a legal adult he still lived with us, and didn’t have the time or the patience for the lengthy argument we both knew would ensue if he let our parents in on his plans. Elliot claimed to be spending a long weekend in Iowa, seeing a few local bands play. Little more was said, and he bought a plane ticket with his own money, left his car in a friend’s garage, and was off to Seattle, where the oddly-shaped mammals all sing in the Sound and real, live indie-rock stars roam around parties, shining, and smaller than you expected them to be.

For the next two days I didn’t dare call him, and only heard from him once--a laughing, muffled call from the corner of a men’s room during which he claimed to have just been eating vegetable tempura with Ben Gibbard. Several hours later I couldn’t sleep, gave in, and dialed his cell number. When he answered the background was silent, not full of music and laughter like it had been, and he sounded choked up. For what might have been the third or fourth time in my life, I heard something reminiscent of sentiment in his voice, which terrified me because I took it to mean that something terrible must have happened. I pried, but all Elliot would own up to was that he had gotten a nosebleed, a feat he was somewhat famed for, and that he was coming home first thing in the morning, earlier than he had planned. When he did, he seemed shaken. I tried to ask him what had really happened, but he yelled at me and then uncomfortably changed the subject. I never did find out what had upset my fearless, faux-worldly brother so much.

When I was sixteen and he was twenty, it was about to be legal for Elliot to drink alcohol, and so he planned on doing it. I felt a secret resentment at the fact that no milestone was ever my own in this family, not really, because no matter what my brother would get to do it four years before me. He lived in his own apartment across town now, much to the relief of our hurt, determined mother, who no longer had to come home to find off-color articles clipped from The Onion taped to the refrigerator door, or the John Waters movies she detested playing on the TV.

Then he got sick again. He swore at our parents, and then at the nurses in the hospital, laughing the whole time and offending them all terribly. I took dad’s car out after school and drove to see him. He looked well, and had obviously been amusing himself with trips to the hospital gift shop, because when I sat down his face broke into a smirk and he said “Here, I got you a present”, handing me a copy of Mattie Stepanek’s Heartsongs.

Elliot convulsed with laughter as I tried not to be amused. “This is for kids,” I said, annoyed. “Why did you get me this?”

“I thought you might like it,” he laughed, not trying very hard to conceal his true motives. “Its that sappy kind of shit you like, and he has the same name as you, only spelled differently. He was all sickly and shit like you, too. Look, he even kind of looks like you.”

“Funny,” I said flatly, looking down at the front cover, a picture of a smiley preteen with big glasses and what looked like a wheelchair behind him. “Didn’t this kid die or something?”

“Yeah, something like that,” answered Elliot, regaining his composure. “I would never want to go out like that, though. If I’m going young, I’m going at my own hands, you know? I’d shoot myself before I’d sit around and fucking wait for something I had to kill me. No way in hell.”

He wasn’t laughing now. “Don’t say that,” I said, “You’re not actually thinking of that kind of thing, are you?”

Elliot scoffed. “I’m not dying.”

I said nothing, and after a few second he looked irritated. “Mom and dad aren’t telling you stupid shit about me, are they?”

“No,” I said quietly, “No one’s told me anything.”

“Good. Because I’m fine.”

“I should go. I have a lot of homework.”

“Okay. Enjoy your new book.” This little burst of sarcasm was followed by another fit of laughter, which probably would have lasted longer had he not started coughing uncontrollably in the midst of it.

“You need to borrow my inhaler?”

“Get the fuck out of here, Matty.”

“I love you, too.”

A few weeks into January he was allowed to go home. I noticed that he dressed more warmly than usual, and when a trip to the lake was suggested, he let me drive. We stared out over the frozen water, too cold to even get out of the car, with the heater going full-blast and our many layers on.

Elliot shook his head slowly, spoke likewise. “That ice has got to be so thick. I bet you could run on it for miles and never even feel so much as a crack.” The circles under my eyes were from last-minute book reports or all-night song writing, blue and faint, but his were different. They were deeper, and not blue at all, but pink. “I always wanted to run out onto it as a kid. I wanted to slip on it and just kind of glide, you know? See how far it would take me. Mom and dad never let me.”

I listened and looked and felt horribly old all of a sudden.

“Matty, I’m your brother. You know I love you, right?”

He didn’t talk like that. Something was wrong.

“What the hell, Elliot? Why are you being like this?”

“Like what? Matty, I’m your fucking brother, okay? I can’t tell you that I love you? That’s all I’m saying. You know I do, right? Right?”

“Yes,” I said, dropping my cold hands into my lap and staring down at them. “I love you, too. You’re like, my best friend, okay?”

Elliot looked sideways out the window. For a second his eyes were the slightest bit shinier than usual, and then the passenger door slammed and he was gone. I got out, too, and followed him to the lakeshore--solid and terribly, terribly cold.

“Its not fair.” he said, kicking a brown patch of snow around with a bitter little laugh, “I get the more screwed-up body. Go figure.”

“That’s not true,” I said, “mine is screwed-up, too.”

Elliot shook his head again. “Not like mine. I have it worse than you. Everyone’s always known that.”

“Yeah, but Elliot, you’re fine. For God’s sake, you just got out of the hospital. Why do you keep saying stuff like this?”

He turned his face from me. “Don’t pretend to be stupid,” he managed to say, with the worst quiver that I had ever heard in the voice of someone so tough.

I put my face in my hands. Elliot continued, stoic as always. “You know, when I was a kid I used to lay in bed in the mornings, or when I was sick, and watch the trains go by outside my window. Or I would look up and watch the planes go past up in the sky. I’d make up stories about who was on them and where they were going. On days that I stayed home, I’d sleep, and I’d dream about them.”

“Oh my God, Elliot. What am I going to do?”

He smiled wryly, looking upward. My eyes are green, like dad’s, but Elliot’s were a pale, milky shade of brown. “You’re going to be an indie rock star,” he said, with such flat earnestness that I almost snickered. “Like all the ones I met at that party in Seattle two years ago… you’re going to be exactly like they are.”

“You’re ridiculous. I can barely even play.”

“Neither can most of them.” He rolled his eyes and held out his arms to me. “Ugh, for fucks sake,” he muttered, “come here, kid…”

The next week he was back in the hospital. His heart was failing.

This is the part in which the story gets rather surreal. No one was sure how my older brother managed to get out through the only exit door, past the only guard who never seemed to sleep and always questioned, even when you had on normal clothes. There always had been something fey and otherworldly about Elliot, like there often is about people not meant to grow old. And sure enough, the daring escape from the hospital and the run to the lake--without even a jacket on, in Minnesota, in January, while sick--was a feat only possible at the hands of Elliot Madison, stoic elfin boy-wonder extraordinaire. No one was sure where he got the jeans and sweater he had on when the ambulance brought him back, blue and unconscious, but breathing, somehow. The ice hadn’t been as thick as he imagined.

A very sick young man, they said. Beside himself, and didn’t grasp the reality of what he was doing. But he was running, he was gliding, he was seeing how far he could go. In between segments of a ten-year-old sitcom, the television in the waiting room sang advertisements for shower cleaner and fast food restaurants and hotels. I wondered how anything, anywhere, possibly could be so normal.

A few days later I was sitting at the foot of my own bed, practicing guitar. I had been trying for half an hour to play F major-seventh right, but I kept messing it up. Dad came in, wearing the look that he wore now and then to tell me that he’s seen and felt more than I think he has. He sat down next to me. “I used to play, too, you know” he said. He opened his mouth and said something else, and I threw the once-beloved instrument down on the ground, hard, hearing all of the acoustics rattle inside and the vibration of the strings swell and then dim behind me.

Elliot Thomas Madison. Stricken, handsome, emotionless Midwestern hero, with the concrete heart inside of the sunken chest. He had been to Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas, as well as Washington State once, but no one needed to know that. A pale, frail-looking blonde with an upturned nose, he was unshakeable, and brave, at times to the point of being ridiculous. I imagined his breakable limbs running awkward out onto the ice; then the remarkable grace as he stopped running and took flight, gliding, arms outstretched for all those trains and planes to see. In four and one-half years I would turn twenty-one, and live the whole rest of my life being older than him.

On the drive home from the service, I sat in the backseat, staring up at the car’s interior light. I knew that soon I would be looking instead into the light fixture in my bedroom, still frosted with the now-consecrated dust and the tiny remains of a few unfortunate potatoes, shoved up into the crevices to their death when the back ends of light bulbs got stuck. I looked down at the floor mats, and before my eyes, I swear there were green beans--I could see them--tragically befallen from dinner plates, some of them mashed shapeless into the carpet by the malicious abandon of excited snow boots. And plastic cups of apple juice left warm on counters in the summer; and then I was crying. Dad pressed a fistful of Kleenex into my hands and I held them to my face and cried, just like a little kid. We were driving down Main Street and I didn’t even care who saw me like that. I leaned down and pressed my face and arms into my knees anyway, because I wanted to disappear.

The next thing I remember I was home, wearing my pajamas and my red bathrobe with the trucks on it that cut into my armpits now, the sleeves too short. But the worn fleece felt comforting when I touched it, and I was lying sideways under the covers in my own bed, my knees drawn part of the way up to my chest. Dad had his hand on my shoulder, and mom was stroking my hair. “Every single day now,” I sobbed, “I will have to wake up in the morning and remember that he’s not here, and remember what happened.” I took the tissue from my bathrobe pocket and blew my nose. “Every single day, for the rest of my life.”

I mashed my face down into my damp pillow and dug my fingernails into the mattress where the fitted sheet had come loose, my back convulsing in a way that hurt it. I could hardly breath through my nose, and the bed shook. I wanted to erase what had happened more than I had ever wanted anything in the world.

Neither mom nor dad tried to justify what I said, or contradict it. They just left me to the realization, letting me fight with it and bargain it away until eventually, maybe, I became its friend. Don’t tell me that he lives inside of my heart, I thought. My heart is not here; it does not freeze in the winter or stink in the summer; its carpeting and floors have known no green beans. Don’t you tell me he’s in heaven or that it’s better there. He’s my brother and I know him. I know he’s got to miss the things that make the world the world.

No one said those things to me, though. Mom could touch my hair as sadly as she ever had, and go to fix me soup. Dad could look at me, tears in his own eyes now, and gently contradict me for the first time all day. Somehow, I was consoled. I fell asleep while it was still light outside and before my soup was warm, having never felt so humiliated or so comforted before, all at once.
And when I woke up, it was morning. I heard the coffee pot brewing and long, creaky footsteps on the kitchen linoleum, a sleepy stab at normalcy. The kiss of February had come, washing both the snow outside and my own chilly, tangled bed in a golden light the color of the hot chicken broth that I felt as if my heart were full of. I woke up and instantly remembered--knowing that it would get better, wishing that I could fast-forward to when it did, and part of me not really believing that it ever would at all. I took my guitar up off the floor but didn’t play it; I just lay there holding it close to my chest, feeling the pulse of my own body in the hollow, shiny wood.

My brother Elliot was my first real friend. He was my best friend, at times my only one, and sometimes he was also my worst enemy--but that was to be expected. And the story ends there, I guess, as vague and sentimental as it started. I remember a lady at church telling me once, when I was still pretty little, that sometimes it wasn’t the meanest words that held the most potential for breaking people open, but rather just the opposite of those. So it wasn’t the cold of the lake or the blunt reality of loss that day that made me cry; it was the devastating kindness of it all, that kindness that I never talk about. I talk about the funny parts--the mean parts--and I remember us laughing, still, as we pulled out of the parking lot, shaky Christmas lights and street lamps illuminated, casting their colors and shadows onto the hair of those two blondes.

Meghan, or, Saint Matty

2009-07-07T12:37:00.000-07:00

The first time that I saw her was in my eleventh grade poetry class. She came up to me afterward to tell me that she liked the poem I read aloud that day. I said thanks. This was how we met.

After that we would skip school sometimes, buying tons of food and not ever eating it. Actually, I ate sometimes, because I was so thin to begin with and didn’t like hunger, but I usually tried to starve, too, out of some kind of morose comradeship. Meghan wasn’t exactly fat. Not thin or small like me, but not really big or chubby, either; she was just kind of medium. Her hair was a pleasant light brown, like maple syrup or an autumn leaf, and her face was pale and soft.
I remember one particular afternoon we spent at her older brother’s house while he and his fiancé were at work. She played the grand piano, and I fed ground carrots to the small canary in the wire cage, both of us ignoring the picnic spread out on the carpet. After that I went into the bathroom and locked the door behind me. I took my clothes off, right down to only my underpants, and stood in front of the full-length mirror, trying to hate myself. I just wanted to know what it was like.

I guess I could be more masculine, I thought, though this realization didn’t exactly start up any fires inside my head. It wasn’t that I was vain, or would have minded waking up one day with twenty more pounds or a few extra inches of height--it just didn’t matter to me much either way. In my mind, broad shoulders and big muscles were something I simply didn’t happen to have--like dark hair, or a vagina. Even the long, deep, oversized earthworm of a scar down the middle of my chest was, for the most part, just another feature passed over by the bar of soap when I showered or the cotton of undershirts when I dressed myself in the mornings. So I emerged from the master bath, clothed and defeated, alluded once again by a brand of suffering I chased but couldn’t seem to catch.

Though God knows why I’d have wanted to suffer even more after the previous school year. I liked Meghan because in the months since my brother died, she was the first person who spoke to me without fumbling and disguised condolences. Teachers, classmates, the guys I played music with and even my own family acted as if I were made of glass sometimes, and it bothered me. Somehow this resulted in me becoming a virtual junky of the stuff, watching movies just because I knew they’d make me sad. Once, when film My Girl failed to bring forth the desired sorrow, I got frustrated with myself and threw the DVD case hard against the screen door. I felt like the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz.

By then I was having sex. It weighed on my mind, messed with my appetite for food, and made it hard to concentrate in class. I told my friend Noah about it, in between songs, in my bedroom on a day when school had been cancelled due to snow. We were sitting on my bed, Noah at the foot and me at the head, by the pillows, and he toyed with the knobs on the four track recorder and looked awkward. My parents eyed my C report cards but chalked it up to latent grief, and the refrigerator door grew increasingly bare. I still got teased occasionally by football-playing idiots who remained unaware of my new double-life.

The school year ended and summer came. I formed a band and played shows around town with Noah, his younger brother Elijah, and the McMenemin twins. And even though the empty space where my own brother had been filled neither physically nor emotionally, even though the horribleness of missing him was still acutely there, so much that I even still cried sometimes, a funny thing happened: I began to feel okay. Okay sometimes even gave way to good, bringing back moments of lightheartedness I had thought were gone forever. I embraced them, no longer a junky of sorrow. I began to watch movies that made me laugh.

There were long nights that summer, lasting long after the shows had ended and the parties dwindled down. They were the kind of nights that you’d hardly expect out of real life--the long, philosophical talks when we looked at the stars, the hilarious things that our drunken friends did. I was eating now, whole meals filling my stomach and feasts filling my dreams. I was sleeping with such dutiful satisfaction that it felt like a hard-earned reward. Even throwing up from too much alcohol now seemed like a reminder that I was a real, wonderful human body; fully functioning and very much alive.

But as I was growing happier, Meghan seemed to only become sadder still. Deep in the soil of creative souls, there tends to grow an unfortunate strain of selfishness, and I grew annoyed. I ate more and more and she ate less and less, though I grew no heavier and she got no thinner. I was sick of hearing her throw up her meals. I was sick of begging her to sit up in bed, and the concept of beautiful sorrow became a blatant myth right then and there. I realized I’d known early on that I could never really fall in love with her.

My parents thought I was a saint. Elliot, though kind at the core, had been prone to sarcasm and unafraid to cause a stir. Being younger, this left me with the Saint Matty niche, and a terrible feeling of fraudulence whenever I happened to do or think anything typical of a worldly-sinful seventeen-year-old. I cared deeply about Meghan and maybe even loved her, but I was young enough to still believe in the concept of being “in love” romantically, and old enough to know that this wasn’t it. I had three reasons for staying, two kind and one cruel.

The first, I guess, wasn’t really kind or cruel but somewhere gray in between the two, veering slightly more in the direction of kindness. Her weighty, enveloping sorrow (a sorrow I had originally thought we shared, but soon realized that I couldn’t even begin to compete with) worried me greatly. It annoyed me to no end, but it also made me sad, and I was terrified to leave her alone with it.

The second reason was that though I had never been fully infatuated with her, I was far from bored or repulsed. There was something quietly fascinating about her, vaguely beautiful, and we shared scattered moments of wonder that could have added up to an enamored state had they been more than just that--moments. She was a talented musician, classically trained, and watching her play violin made me sick with embarrassment of my own clumsy guitar picking, ill-timed drumming and meager attempts at keyboard.

The third reason was the one I was ashamed of, the one I didn’t dare speak of even in my own head. But the pressure was on, and the starved souls of the kids in town wanted songs, and lots of them. After a few glorious, mutually cathartic nights on stage, I realized in horror that I was running out of material. My childhood had been happy, my parents loving and still together, and I was from the same uninteresting place as my audience, and they knew it. Of course there was Elliot, but I couldn’t stand the thought of exploiting his memory as a means to stay popular. That was where Meghan came in. I knew that as long as I was with her--my mournful, violin-playing, eating-disorder stricken muse--I would never come up short on sorrow. It was the most selfish thing that I had ever done.

I know it sounds awful, or like it barely had to do with her, but it wasn’t always that way. I really did feel some of the things I said. There was one day in particular that summer, at the local park. Something about walking past plastic wading pools on front lawns and feeling blasts of air conditioner through the front doors of various houses made me feel as if goodness was all that existed, like everything around me but the sky could disappear and I would just wrap it around me like a favorite blanket and feel right at home.

The mourning sound of violins and a singer with a speech impediment swelled around us, where no one could see. Her hair in my face was so sleek and clean-smelling that it almost seemed wet, and I clenched her soft lower back in my hands. You are a saint, Matty Madison, she whispered.
Walking home we wove among the trees that I swore had hearts just like we did, so much that I almost feared their branches would swoop down and take us. She was simply happy for once, and I was content and free of the racing analysis that usually plagued my brain. It was as if the troubled parts of us had never existed at all. My God, I remember thinking, she could be so pretty if she always were like this. Alone, on the path back to my house, I found a marble statue of a lamb.

The winter of senior year fell, and Noah and Elijah’s parents were out of town for the weekend at a church retreat. Noah in particular didn’t have enough mischief in his soul to throw a party, but it was Midwinter Break, and both brothers possessed just the amount to invite the band over for drinks.

Elijah was just outside the sliding glass door, puffing on one of the cigarettes he didn’t usually smoke. Noah, wine cooler in hand, was laughing and light-headedly daring me to kiss Jaime McMenemin. Having had a few myself, I was obliging, as his brother Ted looked on in disgust from the hearth. My phone vibrated in the pocket of my jeans.

I put on my parka and went outside to answer it, taking Elijah’s place in the snow and leaning up against the side of the brick house. After several minutes, Noah came outside as well.

“Meghan,” I sighed, hating myself for not possessing so much as a wavering voice. “She’s in the hospital. Pills or something. They pumped her stomach.” It all seemed so matter of fact.

He hugged me. A good musician, Noah was an endearingly un-hip sort, sheltered, and often breaking social norms--not out of any kind of rebellion, but because he wasn’t aware of them.

“Is she going to be okay?” he asked.

“I don’t know. They don’t know.”

“You should be there.”

“I know.”

“Well come on.”

“You’re drunk, Noah.”

“I am not either. Get in the car.”

Selfishness runs rampant, like an ugly brook, not just in the souls of boys or poets but throughout the entire human condition. And so when night had given way to a white morning, and Meghan was okay, I was not a saint, but a very human, rather damaged teenage boy, and I knew I couldn’t love her anymore.

I walked out the hospital doors and didn’t stop until I got to my intended destination. Suddenly apprehensive to do what I’d planned, I strolled further back towards the bramble, dead and snow-covered in the January fog, where the older graves were. I watched the dates grow longer ago and less readable the further I went, some of them so washed away by rain and time that they were hardly more than blank stone. 1950, 1920, 1904. I crouched down and squinted to read 1890.

My hands and nose were numb by then, and everything was still. I realized that I had wandered not just to the snowy bramble, but straight through it, and I came across the little stone lamb who had greeted me so whimsically that day in the summer.

“Hey..” I whispered, smiling, kneeling down to brush the snow off of it. I was half crazy by then from cold and lack of sleep, talking to a statue. I examined the little hairline cracks in it’s face, wiped the frost from it’s blind-looking eyes and ran my numb hands over the bumpy, blue-green tinted white of its body. I noticed that the lower half of it was emerged in the earth, and I began to dig.

The ground was almost as hard as rock at the surface, so that I had to use a nearby stick and not my hands to break it, but it grew gradually softer the deeper I got; bitter cold throughout. The lower half of the statue unearthed, I realized that it was not a statue at all, but a headstone. “So that’s what you are after all…” I muttered, worrying for a second about how hard all that dirt would be to wash from under my fingernails. “What are you doing so far away from all the others…”

I wiped some of the dirt away with the sleeve of my coat to reveal the inscription of a name too weathered and faded to make out. Below that were two dates about seven years apart from one another, roughly two-hundred years old. And further down still, an epitaph:

Suffer, little children, to come unto me.

I pulled my hand away, my throat making a small, involuntary noise. I watched my breath clash with the chill and form tiny spirits, vaporizing and then fading. I had never felt so lied to in my life, and rarely had I been overtaken by such a dreadful, sinking feeling. I must have been the first person to touch it lovingly like that in years, decades, a century even.

I started walking back, hoping I could find my way still. I tried to imagine a tiny, home-sewn cotton dress or suit--just a fragment now, a fraying swatch of color or pattern--deep beneath the ground where I had just been kneeling. All that I could come up with in my mind was the image of a fall-apart antique patchwork tablecloth my mom kept in the kitchen at home. It had been around for as long as I could remember, but I’d never really given any thought to it before. Once, I realized in a state of elementary wonder, it had been new.

Unafraid now, I tromped back through the dates, the stones increasingly shiny and recent as I went. I began to recognize a few as belonging to older members of our church who had passed away over the years. I came to a large tree near the front of the cemetery. It resembled a snow-covered version of the one illustrated in that kids book, The Giving Tree. I sat down under it, the cold and wet seeping through my pants. Awkwardly, I wrapped my arms around the headstone sharing it’s soil in a trite and ironically earnest attempt at tenderness. I felt sick as the name in the stone met my eyes, slick and legible, not quite one year old.

One of the worst things to come to terms with is the fact that things end. Its not a sadness or a fear so much as a nauseating tenderness, the nauseating tenderness of things and people leaving. The four-track tapes are recorded over, and the plastic marine mammals all dry up in the garage. The worst part of all of this is that epitaphs never say a goddamn thing about any of it. My brother was not some stupid hallmark inscription he would have made fun of, or some biblical quote he didn’t even believe, or some song lyric that’s somehow supposed to make him being gone okay. I hated that someone two centuries from now would read his headstone and think that he’d been sweet, and never have a clue about his dirty mouth, or his ridiculous, unnecessary bravery, or how angry he could make people, or any of the real reasons I loved him. They wouldn’t ever know him at all, not even a little bit.

I tried to say something and failed. My self-expression had, by that point, boiled down to the unintelligible grief of a child, like a middle school support group or a very early Bright Eyes album. I held onto the trunk of the large tree to support myself. I felt a heartbeat, healthy and deep and very human, resound within it.

Some time after that I lay down on my back in the snow. All my life I had fought against the cold, huddling into myself, trying to keep it out, but now I opened my arms up and welcomed it in. Everything was still. The graves and the trees and the weather was quiet. At one point a pile of snow dropped gently from a branch of The Giving Tree to the ground a few feet from my boots. Now and then I sniffled. Time seemed to have become something else entirely. What am I doing? I thought. I am dying. I am lying down and waiting for the cold to kill me.

A few times I thought that I should get up and go home, but my limbs felt as heavy as my mind, and vice-versa. God, I had never been so cold. I remember thinking, now I know what a corpse must feel like. How a corpse waits until it’s parents drive by, bundled up and worried, to get out of the car and ask it, what in the world are you doing here, like this?

Why, they wanted to know.

I leaned my head against the iced-over glass of the car window. My forehead felt defiantly hot, suddenly. I imagined it melting the frost, forming spaces through which I could see. “Because I want to die!” I said. And then I shut my eyes and breathed in, deep and sudden.

Punk Rock Troy

2009-07-07T12:36:00.000-07:00

It was true.

Five-feet-eight and roughly one-hundred-and-twenty-five pounds, I had always been a bit sickly, my immune system never the best thanks to my heart. That day in the cemetery had really done me in, and during the entire week that followed I coughed and sneezed violently, too sick for school.

The house seemed suddenly huge and empty, full of secret passageways and rooms my cloudy mind invented, and during my first few days home alone I walked around for hours in a daze, trying to find them. On the third day my mom came home from work to find me, half dressed and tearing desperately through the contents of the upstairs linen closet. After that she stayed home.

On Friday, when the fever and chills had subsided, Noah came over with my homework. I was using the guest bedroom by then, my own having been overtaken by that horrible air of sickness bedrooms get. I was sitting up in bed under a stiff, veiny electric blanket when he came in. He set a stack of papers on the bedside table next to the Kleenex box.

A pastor’s kid, Noah tended toward awkwardness, even around good friends and especially when sober. He looked at me quizzically, and I felt self conscious. For the fist time it occurred to me how stupid I must have looked--sitting there in pajamas, all tired-eyed and snotty-nosed like a kid. It wasn’t the Matty he was used to seeing on stage when we played shows, or even in the halls at school.

“How are things at school?” I asked.

Noah shrugged. “Fine, I guess. The same old stuff.”

He couldn’t even look at me. Something was up, and I knew it.
“How’s Meghan?”

“She’s fine,” Noah said. “She’s… back.”
“Is that all?”

“Shit…” Noah rarely swore. “Look, I wasn’t going to tell you about this, since I know you’re not doing that well right now--”

“--I’m doing fine, I just have a cold” I cut in, annoyed, but regardless, I knew that he knew.

“Well since you left her at the hospital that day, she’s been hanging out with that Troy guy from school.”

I coughed. “Troy? With the mohawk?”

I don’t know why I was so upset. I wasn’t in love with her. I had wanted to be free of her, and now she was free of me instead. Free into the arms of some asshole who wore tight plaid pants and spit on people. I wished I could choke.

Noah looked out the window. “Well Matty, you just left her there at the hospital that day. You didn’t even say anything, you just left.”

“I know,” I said, not wanting to talk about it. “I’m a total asshole, okay? But whatever, I don’t really care, I’m just surprised its him of all people.”

“It’s not just that. People are talking.”

“Talking? About Meghan, you mean?”

“Well, yeah, her too, I guess. But I meant about you. People are saying stuff, Matty, and I don’t know what to say to them.”

“Saying stuff? What are they saying?”

“Just really stupid stuff. Like that you’re dying, or that you had a mental breakdown or something. Its so dumb..”

The word dying gave me a sick feeling way down in my middle. I swallowed hard.

“The twins’ parents claimed they saw you lying on your back in the snow, in the cemetery. Just lying there. That’s not true, is it?”

“I was tired,” I muttered. “I only lay down for a second…”

Silence. “Do you want to stay for dinner?” I asked.

“I can’t. My dad wants me home.”

“Okay. Well thanks for bringing me my stuff. I’ll see you when I come back to school. Next week, or whatever.”

But it wasn’t next week, or any of the ones that followed. That night after dinner, I ran a bath. I really do look like a starving kid now, I thought, with my ribs sticking out above my stomach and my spine like a dinosaur out of my back. I felt angry with anyone who had ever starved deliberately, ever chosen to look like this when I couldn’t help it. I got my wish now, I thought as I let my entire face slip down under the water, I hate myself now. I didn’t hold my breath. The next morning I held a pillow to my face until I could hardly breath, but I was caught doing it.

They had heard me choking on my bathwater. They had found the pills that I’d been saving.

I remember once, when I was maybe ten or eleven, having an asthma attack in the backseat of the car while Elliot and I were fighting. He was punching me, mom and dad were yelling at both us to stop it, and I had my face in my lap and my arms up over my head as if it were an earthquake drill at school, sobbing. I thought I really would stop breathing altogether. Elliot had a friend with him in the car, and I had been humiliated. Later on that day, our mother had hugged both of us together and pleaded with us to love each other. I can count on one hand the times I saw my brother cry.

The hospital was stupid. They took away my clothes, and I refused to cry the entire time, even when I was alone. I think that pissed the staff off. The psychologist they sent to my bedside the first night was a robotic woman who seemed to view me as a household pest, like a mouse or a termite. She said in an accusatory tone that she could tell I was very upset because I was on the verge of tears. If I was, I don’t remember it at all.

Noah and the McMenemin twins and their families came to see me, and I was embarrassed. Not because I was there, but because I felt like a phony and an attention seeker. Through all my passive grasps at suicide, I never wanted to die. I was too immature for my own emotions, was all. I’d felt as if I were going crazy, and since I had no recognizable reason whatsoever to be doing that, the only option I saw to make anyone take notice was to try to die in the safest, most ineffective way possible. I feigned normalcy with my friends and family, was pleasant in therapy, and did my school work from my hospital bed so that I’d still be able to graduate with my class.

On my eighteenth birthday my parents came with an outfit of my real clothes from home. I took a shower, combed my hair and put on the blue sweatshirt and black pants, feeling happy. They took me to breakfast at Ihop, where I drank coffee and gorged myself on strawberry pancakes and scrambled eggs. It all tasted so good.

On a side note, I feel I should apologize here for the rather Peanuts nature of the parents in this story. I’m aware that they appear, for the most part, as faceless pairs of legs, vague waa-waa voices who’s sole purpose was to serve me. I was pretty young then. I’m aware also, of course, albeit vaguely, that they think and feel and struggle as they go through stages, just like me, and that all of this must have been just horrific for them. That said, I regrettably can’t say much about it. I’m still pretty young, so waa-waas they will remain.

Anyway, I remember mom making a comment about how healthy my appetite seemed. We returned to the hospital, and I packed my things up and checked out. On the drive home, I felt for the first time the kind of redemption they talk about in church--like being acquitted of some awful crime, set free again into the vast and shining world. I noticed for the first time how storybook the big trees looked, bent and graceful in a way that spoke of much prettier centuries, or how the traffic on a freeway is almost like a song. And there, I guess, was born my innate weirdness. I knew that the songs I wrote didn’t have to be conventionally sad anymore, and with that realization, a part of me grew up.

Hardly anything compares to the wonderful inner lightness of realizing that you had made a huge deal out of nothing. I got pretty good at laughing at myself when once I noticed that the horrible, heaving ache in my chest could be cured by some nice weather and the promise of some new clothes and dinner at a pizza restaurant. Two weeks of my school’s spring break remained, and Noah and I took up a constant state of running back and forth to one another’s houses.

He had gotten new recording equipment for Christmas, and multi-tracking fascinated us. We hadn’t been able to do that with the four-track. I had written an entire album’s worth of lyrics while I was in the hospital, and together we set them to music. They were terribly sad on paper, but the right chords and some whimsical DIY production made a strange kind of light shine through them on tape, one that I hadn’t ever known before that. We became obsessed with the idea of actually producing and marketing it. On one particularly warm day, on our way back from a technically illegal recording session in an old church (we liked the acoustics), we passed the town graveyard, and on a whim we ran through the sprinklers.

By the age of eighteen I had acquired, through the avid knitting of my dad‘s mom, a collection of the most fashionably embarrassing handmade sweaters anyone could ever hope for. Until then, I had walked the halls of my high school dressed in solid-colored pullover sweatshirts with hoods, not baggy but not terribly snug, equally plain tee-shirts when it was warmer, and the occasional v-neck long-sleeve if I was feeling particularly daring. Following my leave of absence, however, I strolled back through those double doors in a hand-knit sweater emblazoned all over with trains, just my size. On chillier days, I defiantly layered with a parka. If people were going to talk about me, I decided, I could at least own it.

For almost my whole first week back I saw no sign of Meghan, though Troy recognized me in the halls. He and his friends were completely unaware of the fact that I subscribed to a counterculture far beyond theirs, and instead just thought I was a dork.

Then, just after sixth period had let out on Friday, I felt a familiar, soft pair of hands on my shoulders as I got my things from my locker. Meghan was dressed in an oversized jacket made of gray-green canvas, and I wondered who it actually belonged to. It looked like it had been made for someone much older and bigger than she was. She bit her lip and said softly, “Hey.”

“Hey,” I said back, a lot more quietly and awkwardly than I’d meant to. “How are you?” I actually did want to know, I realized. I was glad she wasn’t dead.

“I’m alright. Are you okay? I heard you were really sick.”

“Yeah, I got the flu and it made me kind of delirious in the head, so I had to stay in the hospital for a while. I’m fine now, though. It was no big deal.”

“Well that’s good. When you didn’t come back for so long I was worried, and then…what are you wearing, anyway?”

I had on worn black sweatpants that zipped at the ankles, and one of Elliot’s old tee-shirts from middle school with a wolf’s face on it. I laughed. “I don’t know,” I said, “what are you wearing? What do you have that big ugly coat on for? Its warm out.”

Meghan blushed. “It’s my dad’s. I don’t know, I just grabbed it on the way out the door today.”

“Yeah.”

We stood there for a few seconds, saying nothing.

“Hey listen, Meg… I’m really sorry about that day at the hospital. I feel really horrible about it. I was just kind of screwed-up that day, and I think with my brother and everything, the whole hospital deal was just too much. I shouldn’t have left, but I didn’t mean it to be mean.”

“It’s okay… okay, Matty, if I show you something, you can’t tell anyone, alright?”

Meghan shifted so that she was standing behind my open locker door, and she beckoned for me to come closer. When I did, she unzipped that stupid jacket and we both looked down at the little round bulge.

“Holy shit…” I whispered. “What, who? How far…”

“Four months,” she said solemnly.

I felt myself cringe. “Troy?”

“Yeah.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh my God, Meghan, I’m so sorry…”

“Don’t be,” she said, zipping the coat back up. “Just be my friend, okay? You’re like, the only friend I have.”

“Okay. But I’ve got to go now, my bus is here.”

It wasn’t, but I was glad I’d gotten away. I stood against a wall, waiting and trying not to think about anything. Troy and three of his friends were around the corner, about thirty feet away. I didn’t pay attention to their conversation until I heard my name.

“Isn’t he Elliot Madison’s brother?” One of them asked. “Do you guys remember that kid?”

“Yeah, didn’t that kid die?”

“Yeah,” said Troy, “he had some kind of heart defect or something. But I guess his brother has the same thing, is what Meghan told me.”

“But it was more than that, wasn’t it? Didn’t he go jump in a frozen river or something, and that’s how he died?”

“Yeah, when he found out he was dying, or some shit, he did that.” Answered Troy. “And this Matty kid isn’t much better. He just got out of the fucking loony bin. That whole family’s bat-shit insane.”

“Dude, why was she with him for like a year, then?"

“I don’t fucking know. He was all emotional and sensitive and whatever… like I guess when they lost their virginity together, they kept the socks that they had on, and they called them ‘their virgin socks’. I don’t do sappy shit like that, and she knows that. Fuck, man… like I found this notebook in her room the other day and it said some bull about ‘oh, I still love Matty, I’ll always love him’… I told her that shit was about over.” Troy laughed. “She’s got like, no self esteem left. I’m awesome.”

“Yeah, well what are you gonna do if she starts hanging around him again? Kick his ass.”

Troy snorted. “Dude, I’m not gonna hit a fucking dying guy, okay?” he laughed. “God… even I’m not that mean.”

My bus came, and I got on it. It was the worst possible thing he could have said. I wanted him to want to hit me, and I wanted everyone everywhere to stop thinking I was dying.

That night it rained. Around ten I heard a knock at my window, and there was only one person who’d ever done that. When I let Meghan inside, I noticed for the first time that she kept her hair a little bit dirty now, and she’d stopped wearing makeup. Her eyebrows, once immaculately waxed, were a little overgrown.

“What are you doing here?”

“You’ve got to hide me here overnight. Troy is freaking out on me.”

“Why?”

“For talking to you in the hallway. I guess one of his friends saw us.”

“Why can’t you just go home?”

“He knows where my house is!”

“Oh, for God’s sake…”

Meghan lived alone with her father. Her brother and sister were grown-up, and her mother had been dead since she was little. I heard a car go past outside, a loud engine and some indecipherable shouting.

Meghan pulled on my arm, yanking me to the floor with her. “Shit!” she whispered. “He saw me come here. He knows. Come on, we’ve got to go.”

I went, mostly because I didn’t want my parent to wake up and know about the whole scene. She held my arm like we were partners in crime instead of lovers, running, through the wet and the dark, one hand on her stomach.

The abandoned church a few blocks from my house was an obscurely popular spot for neighborhood kids when they were hiding from someone or something, or doing something they shouldn’t, or just wanted to be alone. When we went inside, it was empty. We climbed the rickety steps to the second level, crouching down among what was left of the pews.

“Why are you even with that asshole?” I asked her, the flashlight I had grabbed on my way out the door illuminating the makeshift tent we’d made of her huge jacket. “Meghan, he’s so horrible.”

“I don’t know, okay? At first I wanted to get back at you, but then it got to be more than that.”

“Like what? Was he ever nice? Did he ever even pretend, even for like a day, to be a decent person?”

“No.” And then we both laughed. The whole situation was pretty absurd.

“What are you going to do with the kid?”

“I’ll put it up for adoption, I guess. Troy wanted me to drink it to death.”

“He what? God, Meghan, I hate him. Just don’t even talk about him anymore. It makes me too mad.”

“Yeah, I kind of hate him, too.”

A rock came through the stained glass window high above us, shattering what was left of the design. We jumped in opposite directions to avoid the falling glass.

“I know you’re in there!” Troy shouted from below. “Come the fuck out here! I just want to talk to you, you whore!”

Meghan hissed at me with wild eyes. “Don’t say anything! Just be quiet until he goes away!”

Another rock, bigger this time, came through the window, and I ran across after it hit the floor, both of us huddled in the same corner now. “Meg, he’s going to come hurt you,” I whispered. “We have to get out of here, this isn’t safe.”

“Goddamnit, Matty, just wait until he goes away, okay? God…”

Troy was outside yelling, but I didn’t pay attention to the words. “Meghan, just go home. Why won’t you just go home?”

“My dad molests me, okay?”

“He what?”

“He molests me, okay? He fucks me and stuff. He has since I was nine.”
And then, just like that it all made sense. Every last bit of this, and everything about her, stopped alluding me right then. If it were true, at least. I wasn’t sure what was truth and what wasn’t with Meghan anymore.

“You never told me…"

“Yeah, well…”

We heard a sound like a car being kicked down below, and a last angry exclamation from Troy: “Fine then! You can burn in hell for all I care, you fucking slut! You and your illegitimate fucking kid! Don’t try to contact me anymore, you insane bitch!” We heard the car door slam and the engine start up and then disappear.

I sat down on an old wooden crate and started bawling. Meghan looked at me, confused. For all my hyper-sensitivity, I had never cried in front of her before. She’d done it in front of me plenty, and I’d always appeased her with my shoulder, but now she didn’t give me the same courtesy.

“Why are you crying?” She asked, squinting.

I had lifted the hem of my shirt up and was crying into that. “I’m sorry, okay?” I sobbed. “Fuck… I’ve just never heard anyone say such awful things to anyone else before.”

Her tone softened, and I felt one hand on my shoulder. “Aw, Matty…”

I didn’t say anything more, I just cried. “You know, it’s not totally his fault he’s the way he is” she said. “He really didn’t have a good childhood. His mom was addicted to heroin and left when he was really little, and his dad’s a redneck, and a dick.”

She was crying too now, but just a little--nowhere near like I was. “I feel bad for him, sometimes” she went on, her voice shaky. “And I wonder--I wonder if anyone is really born mean, or is all the way mean, and I really don’t think so…”

“But that doesn’t mean it’s your job to try and bring that out in him,” I managed to say. “If anyone ever talked to me that way, ever,” another sob, “I swear to God I’d never speak to them again. I’d never--I’d never do anything…”

I felt her kiss my hair. “You are a saint, Matty Madison,” she told me. “It’s all okay now, I’m gonna go home.”

She sounded so okay that I let her. I didn’t look up to watch her leave, I just listened to her footsteps until those were gone, and then I cried for a while more, and then I got up and went home and fell asleep.

I didn’t see her again after that. She must have quit school. Troy hung around for a few more weeks, ignoring my existence, and then he quit, too. Graduation came and went, and Ted and Jaime McMenimen quit the band and went off to college in Minneapolis. Noah and I worked jobs and pooled our money to pay for the remastering and pressing of the album we’d recorded, and after a few fruitless weeks of local shows and sending it around to record companies, a decent indie label took interest and signed us. We toured for the first time in the fall.

The van turned into a bus and the venues got bigger, the backing band got more proficient and the agents got older. Noah went to school for audio engineering and didn’t tour with me much anymore, though he still worked on the albums when I was at home. But there really wasn’t much to tell about, from then on, until the day I saw her, in moccasins and playing a keyboard, for the first time.

If you know enough about hipsters to make fun of them, you are one

2009-07-07T12:35:00.000-07:00

In the grand tradition, now, of non-linear novels, our story jumps not only across miles and state lines, but years. Because Vivian and Matty were born in exactly the same year, and so if she is in her early twenties as we speak, he now is, too. The past three chapter deviated from this, providing a look into how Matty came to be as you will find him for the remainder of the short time in which you will know him. As for Vivian, though, there isn’t really anything more you need to know about her besides what you knew when we left her--standing on a corner in downtown Seattle, watching snow fall on a sculpture park.

Having seen enough, she turned towards home and began to walk. By now I’m sure you’ve heard enough already about how the buildings and the shipyards and the cranes were all her relations, the former of the three bowing down their long, graceful necks to greet her as she passed, or about how the sleek, intelligent water-creatures popped up from the depths of the Puget Sound to tell her hello. The trick of it, though, was that she didn’t see these things because of the little blue pills that the kids at the pop clubs on Capital Hill took or the long, sparkly white lines that the acquaintances who lived in her apartment building offered her on nights that she came to their parties. Vivian wouldn’t touch any of those things for fear that if she tried them, such magical, secret friends as the cranes or the seals would disappear from her line of vision and never come back. The kids who took them never seemed to see anything at all, let alone beauty, or if they did they didn’t talk about it. Vivian doubted that they did, though. There wasn’t much to those kids’ eyes.

Inside now, she climbed the stairwell to her floor and let herself into the apartment where she lived alone. It was a small studio with three white walls and one exposed brick one. Set into the middle of the exposed brick wall was a large window overlooking first the street, and then the freeway, and then finally the water. Boats and planes were always going by, and the Boeing cranes that Vivian called Zoo Animals shone in the distance at night, their lights as pretty as anyone’s Christmas tree. Set lengthwise against the window was a bed, and the bed was neatly made up with a clean white imitation-down comforter, a worn old electric blanket with an African animal print, and four pillows in mismatched cases with things like animals or Disney Characters on them. Pushed against one white wall was a desk with a laptop computer and craft supplies in clear plastic drawers, and on the floor beside the desk was a sewing machine and several musical instruments. Set into another of the white walls was a closet filled with clothes and tiny shoes.

The lights in the laptop perked up and flashed florescent. Vivian has 173 friends, they spelled out on the screen. Vivian thought it funny then, since more and more lately she felt as if she didn’t have any. Of course there was always the world, which was her greatest friend of all, and the thought was one of amusement rather than melancholy.

Friends invited you out to the bars at night or bought your album when it came out or let you sleep on their floors, Vivian mused, but the world itself was something far more precious. The world was a mom who picked you up at the airport when you’d been away, so that when you stepped off that plane, so goddamn tired you could barely spell your own name, there was a whole bed set up in the back of the car for you; with your favorite whimsical pillows and blankets and a movie on a laptop to giggle mundane at until the freeway sang you to sleep. The world was that one shining friend who dressed in rags and wrote the most beautiful songs that you had ever heard and made everywhere you ever went with them your favorite place because they were tender and exciting all at once.

Vivian’s phone rang. It was the booking agent she had recently acquired, and she almost considered not answering, because he was a realist and she had come to find him mildly obnoxious. Vivian was signed to nice moral indie label that was just big enough, and her recent album’s sales had been such that paying her rent wasn’t as much of a struggle as if had once been, though she was still far from wealthy.

“Hey,” she said, eyeing the screen of her computer, a site where strangers from all over namelessly uploaded their photos. Two high school kids were hugging in a sunny backyard by a trampoline, dressed in formal wear. She thought up a little story about them in her head.

“Hey Vivian. Listen, I’ve got a tour for you this winter if you want it.”

“Oh, good. Is it that West Coast one I wanted with that band that dresses up like animals?”

“No, this one’s bigger. You listen to Pippin Noelle, right, you know who he is?”

“Yeah,” said Vivian, staring at the screen still. Two girls her age in Capri pants and brightly colored tank tops smiled with Mickey Mouse at Disney World. She wondered what their apartments looked like. Everyone knew who Pippin Noelle was.

“Okay, well I talked to his guy out in Wichita today, and if you want the gig opening for him this winter, its yours.”

An old lady looked out of the screen at Vivian, surrounded by balloons and hospital machines. “I want it,” Vivian said.

“Excellent. This is a nationwide thing, Viv, not some little local living room tour in some kid’s van. You’ll be traveling on a tour bus and staying in hotels and all the works. So you get to work on finding a sub-letter for that apartment of yours, and I’ll email you the dates and all.”

“Who else is opening?” Vivian asked.

“This new kid, Matty Madison, and his backing band. He’s about your age. Talented kid. Little blonde from Minnesota, looks like a strong breeze could knock him over, but he can fucking write, you know? You should check them out. Anyway, get to work on finding that sub letter, the tour leaves in a month and a half.”

“Holy shit!” Vivian shrieked, putting the phone down and getting up from the desk. She didn’t swear often.

Vivian had met Pippin Noelle once, a few years earlier. She had been eighteen and on a Septa train to Philadelphia. Pippin was twenty-five then, slouched rather sadly in a window seat, listening to an Ipod. Vivian thought that he looked just like her.

“Excuse me,” she’d said, sitting down next to him. “Are you who I think you are?”

Pippin had smiled. “I don’t know,” he said, “who do you think I am?”

“I think you’re Pippin Noelle.”
He laughed a little then. “Yeah, that’s who I am,” he said. “Come here.”

He said nothing more, not even goodbye save for a little smile when the train came to his stop, but he pulled Vivian in close to him and draped half of the jacket he’d been using as a blanket over her lap. He took out one of his ear phones and put it in her ear, and together they rode for the next half hour, wordless and connected. He had been listening to The Postal Service.

The apartment door slammed shut behind her and Vivian raced down the hall to a man named Taylor’s apartment, where the standard Friday night dance party was going on.

“What’s up?” Asked Taylor, all tight jeans and brightly colored sneakers, his hand on one skinny hip.

“I’m touring with Pippin Noelle in a month, that’s what’s up!”

“Nice. Girl, we need to get you some better clothes before if you’re about to be touring with big name indie kids like that.”

It was true, mostly. When they weren’t just given to her, Vivian got almost all of her clothes at the Seattle Goodwill Outlet, where they were dug halfheartedly out of plastic bins and selected mainly because they weren’t too full of holes and looked like they’d fit her. Her wardrobe was full of dirty Keds sneakers and old, shapeless striped shirts or awkward ones with wild animals on them. Occasionally, if she felt up to it, she liked to dress in themed outfits--vintage dresses with panels of fabric from 80s cartoon bed sheets sewn into them, bright tights, plastic heels--but mostly she just wore the aforementioned plain shoes and shabby tee-shirts. Taylor and his friends had a hard time understanding this, especially since she was pretty.

Vivian entered Taylor’s apartment, her eyes greeted with a few dozen kids dancing wildly as if they were at some sort of autistic 1960s beach party, dressed in brightly colored shorts or leggings, ugly sweaters, shiny tee shirts. Vivian, as you know, had no interest in drugs, but she wasn’t adverse to getting a small alcohol buzz now and then, when the occasional called for it. Tonight she sipped her Pabst Blue Ribbon more quickly than usual. Perhaps it was simply a product the elation of the news she had just received, but the dancing kids excited her greatly. She didn’t mind if they were contrived. Everyone worth knowing in their twenties was contrived at least a little bit, Vivian reasoned, because that was how interesting people figured out what they liked. It was an adventure to strip away the layers and see what the cute present was inside of hip kids’ hearts. Most of them were kind and some were vulnerable, when you did.

Three beers brought her to that perfect state in which your coherence isn’t gone but your legs feel a bit lighter than they did before, and more things are funny. She pulled Taylor outside onto the balcony, watching the freeway. “Look at all the lights,” she said to him, not because she especially thought he would understand, but because she wanted to say it to someone. “Every one of them is a life, you know.”

Taylor giggled. “You’re a trip,” he said.

Vivian would have none of this. “No, no, I mean it” she pressed. “Haven’t you ever thought about how each individual light out there, going past, is at least one person, and that person has a hometown, and a bed, and a favorite movie, and a best friend and all the other stuff? Every single headlight on the freeway is a beating heart, Taylor, at least one beating heart. You’ve thought about that, right?”

Taylor looked down at his shoes, which were bright pink high-topped athletic sneakers with neon yellow Velcro straps. The damn things had cost a fortune.

“No, I haven’t ever thought about that before” he said. “That’s really cool though, Viv.”

He looked sad, suddenly, which Vivian didn’t think she’d ever seen happen before. It made her a little bit sad, too, because she was reminded then of her own unfavorable habit of assuming things. Maybe there was something to the eyes of kids like him, after all, and they just weren’t tough enough to let it show on the surface. Maybe they were too sensitive. Vivian didn’t think that she was sensitive at all, expect for maybe in her songs.

“Well you’re thinking about it now,” she told him.

Taylor smiled. “I suppose I am. Well fuck, Vivian, Pippin Noelle. You’re going to be famous.”

“I’m kind of famous already.”

It was true. Several people had approached her already that night, asking her where she was playing next, or if she was who they thought she was.

“Yeah, but I mean famous. You’re going to be so much more famous now, on this tour. You’d better get me backstage on one of those dates.”

Vivian promised that she would, and the two proceeded to leave the deck empty. And when she finally returned to her own apartment in the little dark hours of that morning, she looked at the world map on her wall and noticed that the two biggest masses of land looked like Big Bird and Snuffleupagus facing each other. She opened up her laptop.

I have a story to tell, she typed, and I have to write it all down, before I get too old…

Elliot The Otter

2009-07-07T12:34:00.000-07:00

A school bus full of fourth-graders from a small town drove through a large city on its way back from a field trip. Amelia Jenkins tugged on the sleeve of her mother’s pink fleece pullover. “Look, mom, look at the buildings! They’re so tall!” Amelia had never seen such buildings up close before, and doing so excited her to no end.

“I know,” said her mother, who had come along as a chaperone. “Oh, look at that black one, Amelia! It’s really tall.”

Amelia’s dark blonde bangs, cut just a bit too short, we full of static from pressing her face so close to the window. “What are they used for?” She asked, “do people live in them?”

“I think these ones are all office buildings, honey.”

“You don’t know that they are, though. People might live in some of them.”

“That’s true, people might.”

People certainly did live in one of them, several streets down, and sixteen-year-old Jenna Conrad watched the sun set from the small deck of her family’s ninth-floor two-bedroom. The moon had made an early appearance that evening, and being just between half and full gave it an awkward, rather adolescent appearance. An airplane appeared to fly over it, and Jenna remembered once having a dream as a child in which both the moon and an additional moon made out of clay, called “The Clay Moon” came out in the sky at night, so close that she could touch them.

The airplane looked like a friendly alligator or a pointy-faced sea lion. When Jenna looked up towards the sky she could see it flying away from her, and when she looked sideways, she could see that her neighbors one apartment building over were watching TV. Her mother called her in for dinner then. Dinner was lasagna, and afterwards Jenna would lie down in the bed that she shared with her two-year-old sister, Lila, and watch silly Disney channel shows made for preteens until they both fell asleep. The double-sized mattress in the middle of the room was surrounded by a messy sea of clothes and fashion magazines and bottles of nail polish remover, packages of Dora The Explorer pull-ups and bedraggled old Barbie dolls. Neither Jenna nor Lila knew that every night their mother waded through this sea to kiss them both on their dark, wavy heads. When they woke, though, invariably, the overhead light was turned off and the television set was muted.

A girl from America and a boy from Ireland, both in their twenties, stared down up-close at the wing of the aforementioned plane, watching the metal’s plain gray flash a lovely red, on and off, as the city gradually grew up before them from beneath the moon and clouds. They had become friends over the course of the flight, and discussed the difference in people’s accents. I am here, the Irish boy thought, and the America girl thought, I am home.

In the midst of all of this, just as all of it was happening, Vivian was shaking hands with Matty Madison from Minnesota and Pippin Noelle from Kansas. The singers, ages twenty-three and thirty, respectively, were each just a few inches taller than Vivian--four inches, five maybe?--and in possession of wonderfully frail-looking arms. She had always found such arms attractive--there was an unmistakable masculinity to arms like theirs that so many people missed because no one ever let them figure out masculinity, or figure out anything for that matter, on their own. Vivian noticed, though, for once a person sees things they can never unsee them again, and for all the pain this causes it is a blessing. The pain was tangible, edible almost in its wonderfulness.

The tour kicked off that night in San Diego, but the three musician hadn’t actually gotten a chance to meet until after the show. That night’s venue had been the largest Matty or Vivian had ever played, all balconies and bouncers and screaming kids, so both of them felt rather high from the experience and nowhere near ready for bed. A virtuous collection of backing musicians had helped ease their nerves, so there hadn’t been any emotional breakdowns pre-performance.

The thirty-year-old singer remembered doing embarrassing things like that, and as a result he was slightly wary of touring with such young kids. In the past two years he had grown accustomed to the same two opening bands, both of which were made up of men his own age or slightly older. Neither band was able to make it this time--no, member of both groups were beginning to do stupid things like get married and father babies--and he missed them dearly. Vivian and Matty would probably want to go to the bars, Pippin thought tiredly. He worried that they might get horrifically drunk in every city on the tour and that he would have to deal with tears, and puke, and all sorts of other things he hadn’t signed up for.

Matty, however, had other plans. “I read online that the zoo is having a special night time exhibit of nocturnal animals,” he said. “Do you guys like animals?”

“I love animals” said Vivian. She was the sort of person who wouldn‘t even buy leather shoes. “They make me really like the world, you know? The fact that all these cool, absurd-looking creatures exist makes me happy. I know some people think that zoos and aquariums are immoral, but I just kind of go anyway and hope they’re not. I guess I can allow myself that one slight lapse in social awareness.”

Pippin smiled genuinely for the first time all day. Matty’s suggestion for that night’s activity charmed him, Vivian’s clever eloquence intrigued him, and both made him feel as if maybe they wouldn’t be such insufferable tour-mates after all.

The trio decided to fill their stomachs at a diner before the zoo excursion, where all three ordered bad mixed drinks. They all picked at one giant plate of fries, which Vivian hoped were, in fact, vegan, though she wasn’t so sure.

Matty looked up at the buggy overhead light, biting his lip a little. “Diners kind of bum me out,” he said. His speaking voice had a mildly nasal, Midwestern quality to it that Vivian found cute and Pippin found comforting.

“How come?” Vivian asked.

“Its just that, um, well--my brother Elliot, he died when he was twenty, I was sixteen. He and I used to go to diners all the time. This one summer, we did. I mean its stupid, its not a big deal or anything. I just kind of miss him a lot.”

Coming from almost anyone else, such a morose declaration within the first few hours of knowing someone would come off as an obnoxious and possibly unstable bid for attention, but Matty was so blatantly sincere and sad about it that neither of his companions felt annoyed or leery. It was very obvious, even in the short time they’d been acquainted, that Matty was endearingly devoid of a lot of the hipster social conventions that most people had, and that no one had ever given him the memo that talking about your feelings wasn’t always okay. Both Vivian and Pippin had been chastised for doing so in the past, and it had hurt.

“Aw, Goddamn,” said Pippin, squinting one eye in the way he did when something moved him. He hoped that the story wasn’t a terribly sad one, because for all his jadedness he was still embarrassingly tenderhearted. “You should have said something. We can go to other kinds of restaurants from now on, if you want. Oh! We can go to Mexican ones! Caliente, mi amigos!”

The entire table laughed then at the sound of someone with a bit of a Midwestern lilt trying to affect a Spanish accent, and Pippin was glad that he had successfully deflected the possible sob story with humor. During all of this Vivian had said nothing, but had taken Matty’s hand under the table and held it firmly in both of hers. Although she was, of course, never sad herself, it wasn’t impossible for her to be moved by the sadness of others, and she didn’t like to see it.
Matty smiled and changed the subject. “Why are we all wearing black, you guys? We’re really not that famous."

“Yeah, I kind of doubt anyone in here has any idea who we are” said Vivian, looking around. She liked it when normality was tangible, and tried to surround herself with it more often than with what she perceived to be the opposite. Besides, indie-fame was a bizarre phenomenon in which one had a ridiculous level of celebrity in the eyes of a specific portion of people and to the rest of the world was absolutely no one. Musicians whose fans waited in huge lines outside of venues to see them could walk through airports undisturbed.

Pippin lowered his sunglasses over his eyes. “Speak for yourselves, guys,” he said. “These truckers love me. I have to come incognito or they mob me for autographs, saying my albums make them cry.” He was feeling increasingly optimistic, now, about touring with such lighthearted, intelligent people, even if they were a little bit young. He could make jokes like this around them without having to worry about being mistaken for an asshole.

They took a cab to the zoo. It was all lit up with white Christmas tree lights, making it look cartoonish and ethereal. Polar bears and harp seals slept behind walls of glass, the bright colors emanating from tourists’ sweatshirts and reflecting onto them, in those lights, making them look like Lisa Frank drawings.

Vivian looked around at the people. “We should have worn different clothes,” she said. She had a thing about being mistaken for normal sometimes when she went places like restaurants or zoos--it gave her an indescribable feeling that she liked, though for all her wordiness she couldn’t articulate why, exactly, she liked it. She, Pippin, and Matty, in their snug-fitting black pants and black zip-up sweatshirts, stuck out like sore indie rock star thumbs amidst all the fleece pullovers , lounge pants and souvenir sweatshirts.

“Yeah,” said Matty, eyeing a harp seal, “I guess we could have worn pajamas or something. That might have been cool.”

Pippin only smiled. Thirty really isn’t terribly old, in the grand scheme of things, and just beneath the very thin layer of elusiveness that permeated his persona, he was remarkably easily charmed, and had already been sufficiently won over.

The bears and seals may have slept, but the creatures of the night stared wild-eyed back at their admirers from shadowy habitats. Huge owls hooted hello from black branches with the silhouettes of dogs and forests, and strange, hunched monkeys looked out at them, unblinking and devious. An anteater scoured the ground of it’s small habitat for food, so bizarre-looking that it shouldn’t even actually exist, it seemed like.

Hot tea was ordered from one of the stands in the food court, and they sat on a high grass hill to drink it, looking down upon the chilly, dark zoo ablaze with its white lights and brightly-colored patrons. Vivian, who always carried an old copy of Maeterlinck’s The Life of Space around in her purse, looked up at the sky.

For centuries, it seemed, there had been nothing to do but look up at the stars, making up stories about them and what they might be, naming the constellations. The twentieth century came, then, all cynicism and technology, changing everything.

“I’m glad I can say things like that to you guys,” she said, when she had told them. “Other people immediately accuse me of being contrived when I do, or being a cliché, or trying to be deep. They never believe that its just how I feel. It’s kind of frustrating.” And she was brave then, because there was no guarantee that Matty or Pippin weren’t among those masses after all, that they wouldn’t sneer and make acerbic comments, insinuating that she had no real intelligence or originality--though she hadn’t claimed to.

Pippin ran a hand through the back of his light brown hair. It was a nervous mannerism he had picked up somewhere along the line. “It’s tough, I think” he began, “when there’s like, the mainstream and the counterculture, and you feel really… really alienated from both sides. If that makes sense. At least that’s how it was for me. Or is, I guess, its still that way for me, a lot.”

“Yeah, but if you really get to know most people from either side, if you even take a second to do it, so many of them are lovely. I hate that shit where you have to be mean and unhappy to be perceived as smart. It makes me so, so annoyed.”

Matty, who so far had said nothing, piped up then. A plane, or rather the lights of one, for the plane itself could not be seen, was going by, very high up. “I used to imagine, as a kid, that I could grab planes down out of the sky. I used to think that maybe that was where dead people went, and that you could grab them down for a minute and hold the plane in your hands and have them back. But now I wonder if maybe they’re animals--like sea animals, maybe. Like Elliot now. I wonder if he’s a seal.”

“It never stops bugging you, does it?” asked Pippin, who had a brother of his own. For a fraction of second he imagined how he might react if his own brother died, but he didn’t like the feeling of imagining that at all, so he stopped.

“No… I mean, I don’t know how it is for other people. And I don’t mean to keep bringing it up, sorry. But um… God, I’m sorry if this is weird for you guys, but I have a heart condition. I mean, a lot of the stupid interviews and stuff have mentioned it, so you might already know. It’s a genetic thing, kind of, and Elliot had it, too. So like… I never know how long its going to be, or how old I’m going to get. I mean its not a death sentence, per say… I could live to be old with it for all I know, especially since I had surgery as a kid and everything. But I could not, too. That can be a weird thing to come to terms with. It doesn’t make you any less scared, having something like that.”

Pippin muttered “fuck”, turning away and biting his lip. He hated his feelings. He didn’t even know the goddamn kid.

“God…” said Vivian, looking down. “Do you guys do drugs at all? Cocaine and stuff, I mean. You guys do that sometimes, don’t you?”

Pippin squinted. “Yeah, I do. I mean, shit… its not something I’m proud of. I don’t it as much as I used to.”

Matty shrugged. “I’ve tried it before.”

Vivian lay down in the cold grass. “Elliot,” she said, “Elliot the otter.”

Back at the tour bus, Pippin showed Matty and Vivian how the couch in the back room folded out into a bed. Most of the blankets he owned had been given to him by promotional companies, or stolen from hotels, so they were all solid colors or very muted stripes or plaids. Matty and Vivian, being less experienced, had brought their blankets from home, and many of them bore the pictures of odd, comforting looking cartoon characters, faded and slightly retro. Pippin nearly laughed out loud, seeing those blankets fill up the back room of his tour bus, with the fold-out bed so big that it filled the entire space up all the way to the door.

Vivian and Matty turned on the television and were laughing at one of those stupid shows in which a low-level celebrity tries to find love within a group of really obnoxious people. Pippin told them goodnight and went to his bunk. He wasn’t nearly as promiscuous on tour as he’d once been, and though Vivian was pretty, on principal he didn’t sleep with his tour mates. This was one of many recently-developed courtesies--he certainly hadn’t adhered to it at the beginning of his career. Besides, she and Matty looked rather cute lying there together. Something about Vivian reminded Pippin of his very first girlfriend, though she hadn’t been as little, and her hair had been different, since Vivian had the kind of bangs that only appear on the very hip and the very unhip. Still, there was something similar--maybe the nose.

Vivian made a mental note of the fact that all the shows of this nature had the word love in the title. Maybe this was why she had renounced her belief in love of the romantic sort. It was completely created, she reasoned, manmade. Of course there was biology, which made you want to have sex with certain people, and of course there was love. The two coincided sometimes, which was nice, but that was just a lucky accident--it couldn’t be forced or searched for, and it certainly wasn’t necessary. The love that one might happen to feel for someone with whom they wanted have sex wasn’t any different than the love one felt for their mother, or a baby, or their best platonic friend. It was real, anyway, and that was all that should matter as far as Vivian was concerned. The entire world, spinning on its axis and full of zoo animals and restaurants and favorite singers, was made out of it.

She liked to tell herself that this was the reason, anyway. There were other reasons, too. The entire concept of love had been cheapened by the many ridiculous media circuses bearing its name. The word itself had been throw around so freely before a generation’s eyes that it had almost ceased to mean anything. Besides, Vivian wasn’t particularly good at it. She’d gotten sick of hoping for things that never happened and getting excited about things that inexplicably crashed and burned in a matter of weeks, so she’d just stopped trying.

The bus began to move. Matty sat up and looked out the window at the lights of cars and buildings going past. “Cool,” he whispered. He turned to Vivian, laughing at the TV. “Can we change this shit?”

“Please.”

They channel surfed until they found Mister Rogers Neighborhood and fell asleep, not touching, to a woman talking about how sleeping bags were made in factories and the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. And right there, in the back room of the tour bus, Vivian opened up her mind again to the possibility of loving someone she might also be attracted to. When they woke in the morning, somehow, the overhead lighting was gone and the television set was turned off.