The Listeners Read online

  A bullet, depending on its angle of entry, can cleave the striations of a muscle in such a way as to trigger profuse hemorrhaging that is difficult, if not impossible, to stanch.

  At the new school, my teachers were all fake-nice. They knew, of course. I felt eyes, eyes, eyes. I couldn’t laugh or tell a joke because the eyes believed I was sad all the time. I wasn’t, though—I was nothing. My skull made a room with nothing in it. My one worry was Riley, who was so shy. The middle school was three blocks away and I’d go over during lunch to see if I could see him. Be brave, Coyote, I would whisper at the windows.

  Lunch was a relief because I could be alone, away from the eyes. I ate my sandwich outside and checked my teeth for lettuce in a parked car’s mirror. There was one crew of boys I didn’t hate. They were not like regular boys. They slouched darkly at the ends of halls, in tight britches and heavy boots, their hair pink or blue or black-black. The tall one was in English with me; his best friend, the hot one, wasn’t in any of my classes. I stayed on the lookout but rarely saw the hot one. The only chance was at lunch, and the cafeteria had all those eyes.

  I was The Girl Whose Sister Got Killed. They knew the story. They put me in honors English, where the teacher said: “Quinn is an interesting name.”

  I said not really, it was some dumb British relative’s name.

  “Are your parents British?” asked Mr. Nzambi.

  I gouged at the desk with a pencil. Mr. Nzambi waited. When the silence got bad enough, a boy blurted: “Well everyone’s parents are, originally,” and Mr. Nzambi cleared his throat and a black kid said, “Except mine!” and another black kid said, “Yeah, or mine,” and I felt bad for the boy, who sounded racist when he might not have been.

  Mr. Nzambi moved on with attendance. When I looked up, the boy was watching me. I could not know—Cam told me only much later—that he pitied me because of my lame beige sweater.

  WHEN I CALLED the law school, I disguised my voice. This was not, I knew, exactly necessary. In a choked rumble I said, “I’d like the mailing address of your visiting tax professor, Cameron—”

  “Okay,” the secretary said, and told me.

  How could it be that easy?

  Well, he wasn’t a CIA agent.

  “Thank you,” I grunted, and noticed that my voice sounded like a cartoon dog’s, and hung up the phone.

  HE PASSED ME a scrap in Nzambi’s class: Want to go shopping after 8th? It was better than going home. We took the bus downtown and went into a shop with glittering walls. A girl with shot-up hair stood at a mirror adjusting a white leather dress that did not even cover her whole butt, and I stared (until I remembered not to) at the scrumptious tuck where her netted thighs started.

  Cam bent over the case of hair dyes, tapping his plastic rings on the glass. “Magenta or cobalt? What should I get?”

  I said, “Isn’t Pete’s hair magenta?”

  Cam frowned and ran over to a rack of fur.

  I looked around cautiously, ashamed to be there in my regular shoes.

  “Try these on,” Cam said, returning with a pair of inky britches that were small enough for Riley.

  “Won’t fit.”

  “They’re stretch,” he explained.

  I did not buy any garb that day; left the store with a small pin only; but I had memorized how the britches looked. How they made me look: hard and dark, as if I knew something.

  For Christmas I asked for a record player and Fod said, But you listen to tapes. That’s about to change, I said. Cam had a whole crate; some of them his cousin had put him onto, but many were his own finds—he spent hours after school and on Saturdays at the record store, laboring through the racks. He invited me one day to go and I agreed, hoping Pete would come too, but Cam showed up alone. The guy at the counter told me, With those eyes, you should be a tambourine player. I smiled but felt weird, and wondered why, an early blip of sensing that, as a girl, I was at an unnamed, unpointable-to disadvantage. Cam led me through the aisles. Have you heard | do you like | have you heard | shit they’re amazing | have you heard | they’re so overrated | have you heard this shit? and no, I hadn’t heard much of any of it. But I planned to.

  MY BROTHER HESITATED at the door, not a bar-goer. I pushed him through. I wanted to enjoy the evening, my treat to pay him back for all my recent borrowing. Plus the bar was the only place in town where they still knew me, and I hoped he might see that I was popular in certain circles.

  “Minky!” I shouted.

  She gave Riley one of her nicer smiles. It occurred to me that he could practice with Mink before taking a stab at Pine—get rid of the virgin stigma—but this was a nasty thought, made nastier by the thought of Meli’s little face and by the fact that Riley was hiccupping fiercely.

  “You haven’t even had a drink yet,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “Been a while since I’ve seen you,” said Mink. “How are you?”

  “Good,” Riley said, not looking up.

  I elbowed him.

  “How are you?” he added.

  We took our glasses to a booth. I rubbed the inside of my wrist, scratched my elbow, and felt my brother wishing that I’d worn something more than an undershirt. He didn’t like looking at my shoulder. The sailor’s ghost had a crooked face; the dragon was pretty, but how his tail went into the doll’s mouth was disturbing; and the doll, cherries for eyes, looked dead. Though the stars were hidden, Riley saw them. Leaden circles printed on the skin. When he’d found me in the basement pushing a cigarette into my shoulder, he hadn’t called out. My burning skin had smelled horse-mouth gray. I threw the butt at the cinder-block wall, wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, then noticed Riley standing there. Don’t tell, I’d said.

  “Something wrong with your beer?”

  “It’s fine,” he said, “I’m just drinking it slowly.”

  “So how’s work and all?”

  “It’s fine.”

  In a family of overtalkers, how had he ended up this way? I stifled a yawn. “Fine as in you love it, or fine as in it’s okay for the next six months until you find a better job?”

  “Fine as in I don’t love it but don’t want to apply somewhere else either.”

  “Ah so,” I said, glancing across at Mink, who had not come over to chat as she normally would on a slow early Tuesday. Please come over to chat.

  Riley was saying my name. I snapped back to attention.

  “What’s that?”

  “I need to go home.”

  “’Tis but nine forty-five! I’ll fetch us another round.”

  “I have a job,” he said.

  “Good for you. Beer again, or something else?”

  “Neither.”

  Life of the party, this one. “Well, fine, let me just see if there’s anyone I need to say goodbye to…” I stood and surveyed the room; surely an associate or two was here. Surely.

  THE MAIN CHARACTER in the book we had to write a paper on was obsessed with his sister, kept thinking of her while he got ready to drown himself. The sister wasn’t dead as far as I could tell, but the book was confusing; she might be dead. Or was she just a slut? Dead to the family on account of sluttery? I consulted the blank notebook page, hoping I might already have jotted something down, and looked again at Nzambi’s list of essay topics. 1) How does the novel’s narrative structure engage questions of time and memory? I wrote in the notebook: This paper is even more retarded than the retarded brother character. I was in my underwear, but it was starting to get very warm in the room, unbreathable. The cone of desk-lamp light was burning all the oxygen; my chest ached. If I had to escape, there was the bed in my way, and the other chair, and the mountain of clothes Mert said was evidence of a disorganized mind. It is Tuesday night you’re in your room in your house but my voice got sucked away. My eyes were blurrying. The light had scorched up all the air. I staggered to the window and groped at the sash, which wouldn’t rise; I squatted for leverage, then fell over. 2) How does the sister’s absenc
e act as a presence? The blur-ried eyes were worsening. I couldn’t hear my own voice. Not a single crumb of air was left in the room. The next thing was my cheek pushed into the carpet and my eyes level with a dust bunny. I sat up wet-skinned. When I was able to stand I went to the mirror and was impressed by how white my face had gone. I was so damn pale already, who knew I could get whiter? I’d passed out, which was kind of interesting—more interesting, certainly, than the retarded paper I was not going to write.

  “Don’t call me bitch.” My sister shoved herself to the edge. Her shoulder poked up.

  “I didn’t,” I said.

  She was waiting.

  Finally: “Sorry.”

  The shoulder lowered. She turned her face to me in the hot dark and said, “Yeah you should be.” Giggled. “I so can’t sleep. How are you s’posed to sleep when it’s like a steaming washcloth is over you?”

  I grabbed at the soft part above her elbow. “So will you switch places now?”

  She said okay, but only this one time.

  We crawled over each other, switching. I liked her side better because it was closer to the wall.

  Her eyelids were shaking. I watched them lower. “No school tomorrow,” she said in a small contented voice.

  I yawned: “You’re a genius detective.”

  “True,” she said, smiling with her eyes shut.

  We had deep-dish pizza the night after she died. Somebody brought over two larges, hamburger and plain. The curly nubs of burger were her flesh except cooked and good-smelling, so I did not eat. Riley ate a shit ton, then puked in the downstairs bathroom.

  I THRASHED IN night waves until three octopi saved me. They dragged me to the horizon. Green foam drank me. Through black sky jumped a long-haired star. I would never know land again. Then the boy and the curtain. Tall red pleats. I was naked. He was naked. Red lines ran down his white skin. He wanted to. I wanted to. Am I allowed? You never got to. But it was happening: he was in me. He was too big for—

  Radio. National publicky voice. Thirty-nine prisoners, it said, have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since the fall of 2001 and there have been ninety-four cases of proven or suspected abuse, according to a new report by the army.

  Orange bash of hammer on black-draped human skull. Fake-bloody white fingers scraping brown cheek—

  I clicked it off and sat up into another day of unemployment. It still felt strange to imagine not being greeted, five times a week, by that grummy stucco square. I needed to ask my parents for a tide-over. Oh Cadmus, what shall become of me?

  Scrape, scrape. Shut up, I said to the wall. Fucker must have been huge by now, living off the land-fat—maple icing, canned cheese—huge, and diseased, and dead the second he showed his face. The hammer awaited! I’d been wondering if the rat chewed me in the night. Now and again along my forearms, between my ribs, was a red dent I couldn’t account for. What size precisely was a rat mouth? Tiny rustlings: I slammed my elbow at the drywall, pain welcome, all blood dashing to that spot. Sun. Hot. Hurts. Ankles cracking on the way to the toilet. Dark yellow piss—sign of illness? Insurance was one thing I hadn’t lost, because the bookstore had never provided it. The bathroom sill was a tiny museum: air plant growing from a coral ball, splinter of blue glass, Cam’s pomade jar, the beer tab he’d given me one day after class. You can wear it like this, he’d said and slid it onto my pinky and for the rest of the day it had been like being his wife, even if he’d picked the wrong finger. That was before we’d ever even kissed, yet I felt married. Being fifteen in honors English—those days were petals, safe and whole, unhurt.

  I jogged to the kitchen, returned with the hammer in both hands. Swung back like in baseball and the hammer met the wall; plaster sprayed into my mouth. I’d tidy it up later. First water in the kettle, bread in the oven. Fuckedly, I was out of butter. Cherry jelly on the knife, smooth; I’d only buy it if no lumps of fruit meat were visible through the jar glass. Poured water across the coffee, waited for it to trickle, brought cup and plate to the floor by the couch and punched on the game. This one was called Cull and the object was simple: kill every citizen over thirty. You had a range of devices at your disposal—gun, sword, nunchucks, gilded mirror. You roamed the high street at dusk, when folks were flocking into public houses; picked out the thinning hairdos, the broadening flanks. Using your silencer, you delivered a bullet into a brain. A forty-two-year-old dropped softly to the pavement; nobody minded. A pack of guilloteens surrounded an injured thirty-five-year-old, cackling at its pain until one teen chopped its throat with an ax. Good riddance! sang a naked-except-for-stilettos boy who sank a heel into the dead old back.

  Go on, pick up the receiver.

  I pulled it off the cradle, dialed, put it back down.

  Again up, again dial.

  “Good morning,” said my mother.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “How are things?”

  “Great, you?”

  “Oh, we’re fine—”

  “So Mert!”

  “Mmm?”

  “Question for you.”

  “Fire away.”

  I coughed. “Well, I need to ask you a favor.”

  “Oh?”

  “So, just, the bookstore closing is kind of taking its toll cash-wise, and I was just wondering if I could get a loan—I mean I’ll probably find something this week, but I won’t have my first paycheck for at least two—”

  “What sort of a loan?” she said, not in a nice way.

  “Well, rent money for this month and also utilities, I guess?”

  No response.

  “Mert?”

  “I’m here.”

  “So…” My face was horribly hot.

  “Quinn, if you are repeatedly unable to meet your financial obligations, you need to take a serious look at your lifestyle and make changes accordingly. Your father and I cannot, simply cannot keep bailing you out.”

  “I know, it’s just—”

  “Just what? Even when you had a job you couldn’t always pay your bills. Which is difficult to understand, frankly.”

  “Okay, I get it. Thanks anyway. See you soon, Mert.”

  “Hold on a—”

  I hung up.

  With electrical tape I patched the hole, although little chance in hell remained of getting back my security deposit. Landlord: You leaving food on the floor? Vermin come when people are filthy. I stuck the tape on gently, lest the drywall collapse further. The point was to deny the rat such an obvious portal. Force him to use ingenuity.

  A GIRL HAD said it stopped your period. This girl’s older sister used to not eat and she never got her period ever. So how long would the sister go without food? Days, probably. Or she’d eat an apple and a carrot and that was it. And lots of water. Water is crucial. The gym teacher yelled at us to get back to layups. “Deliver the ball gently to the rim,” he shouted, “as if you were giving a gift!”

  She never got her period ever.

  And all it took was not eating? I laughed out loud.

  I quit the sandwiches and started going to lunch in the cafeteria, where I drank no-sugar iced tea and chewed on hard noodles from the salad bar.

  THREE DAYS SINCE I sent the letter. The letter had been short. I did not catch Cam up on my life, merely wrote I’d heard he was in town and wanted to know how he was doing. That I hoped he was well.

  DON’T BE SCARED it’s not bad it’s good. She worried about pimples, but not about the shapes and scents flying around in our heads. We got born lucky, she believed, able to see things in a way other people couldn’t. But I did not want to see them that way. I wanted to be regular, like Riley, who hated when we talked about what color a number was, or a sound. Jealous, my sister reminded me, but I was jealous too—of Riley’s clean brain that took in noises as plain noises, names as plain names instead of boxes of sensation. Smell of trees. Darkest green. At school, at first, they thought I was slow. Nine minus two is purple and a boy. Colors were the only way I could ta
lk about numbers. It sounded wrong when I said it out loud, but it made total sense in my head—in there, never a mess. Girls, look at this room. What a goddamn mess. These (Mert snatched dresses from the floor) need to be hung up. And these (grabbing shirts thrown over a chair back) should be folded, not slopped! When your room’s all ahoo, she added, it makes your mind disorganized. My sister laughed and said, I prove your theory wrong because my room is messy but my mind is very organized. Stop showing off, said our mother, it’s not becoming. I’m just saying, she said but smaller.

  Cam wanted to know why I hadn’t heard the gunshot. How come I didn’t wake up until morning.

  I just didn’t, I told him.

  But my parents? My brother?

  We’d all slept all night.

  RILEY’S KITCHEN WAS idiotically clean, as his whole apartment tended to be: every surface flashing from a recent swipe, not a speck or crumb in sight. I left my juice glass on the counter and counted the number of seconds—six—it took him to remove it to the sink, soap, rinse, and rack it.