“That Jamey,” she said, not unkindly, “always big on theory, he just couldn’t quite pull the rest of it together. Would’ve made somebody a decent manager, though, maybe.”
I said he might’ve at that, and watched as Mae set the violin in its case, and maybe it was the line of her jaw or the fall of her hair or the birdlike bones of her hand, but for a moment I was overcome with a sense of Mae’s fragility, hearing the collision of insanities and rush hour, and imagining all the things that could happen to her down there. Rape and murder and intimate arson. It was too much. Or just plain disappearance, like Andre now, his turn come around, because none of us had heard from him for days, and when for a moment I wondered what it would feel like to fling myself off the roof, I thought I might’ve understood some of the things that had guided that final needle into Jamey’s vein. You can’t protect anyone, really.
Which must be why prayers are needed.
Lately I’d lie awake each night, unable to sleep from the worry of it all, feeling our mingled heat under the covers, Mae between Rachel and me. I’d listen to their breathing, wondering how I’d react if one of them were to stop, or if someone with weapons and cruel intent came through a window or broke the door down, and I’d never tasted all these worries before, didn’t know where they were coming from or why, but by god there they were.
Unable to keep it all inside any longer, one night I crept out of bed and went to the western window in the kitchen to pray, Nihil, keep them safe, but felt no true connection, that it would take more than that to convince him to listen, and I didn’t have the advantage of a violin, or an anvil to drop on a car, a noise that Nihil might’ve liked in his earlier incarnation.
I drove away before anything could happen to them, out to the slaughterhouse, the woods and walls cold around me, until I stood in his chamber looking upon him. His arms were no longer over his shoulders, but lower now, woven into the springs with one thrust forward, fingers clawed as if demanding his due. I trained the flashlight over him, all bones and skinny cock, and when I dropped to my knees I left the light on his face, like an illumination from some medieval painting that Nathan might’ve once admired.
“Nihil,” I whispered, and in that stillness my whisper seemed to roar. “You knew them once, like you knew me, so help me keep them safe, help me protect them, because I need them so much…”
I kept praying, for minutes maybe, and didn’t stop until I saw a flicker behind Nihil’s dead lids, like the languid back and forth rolling of a dreamer’s eyes.
Turn out … the light, I thought I heard, even though no one’s lips had moved, can’t bear the light…
After a moment I obeyed, kneeling before him in darkness that the filtered moonlight from above could barely touch. From around me came the murmur of a relieved sigh, then soon, the erratic creaking of rusty bedsprings.
*
It was Jamey who, between opiate nods, made me consider the vitality of the ear in ways I might never have otherwise. Hearing is the first of our senses to connect us with the world, the only one to bridge that gulf before we’re born. In our envelopes of fluid and meat we see nothing, taste nothing, smell nothing, with nothing of the outer world to touch. But we can hear it.
The sounds of the world awaiting us have already imprinted us by the time we’re expelled into their sources, and even then we’ve spent months attuned to the body we’re grafted to, the rushing of blood and bubbling of gasses, the circadian flow of meals through the System. Although on a smaller scale it’s not so different from the music of we who traverse the sphere of the world, shuffling through a city’s bowels with no greater concept of our ends than a crust of bread or chunk of cheese.
So, if we’re prenatally imprinted by the world around us — and matter and energy being the same — who’s to say it can’t shape us somehow? That the neverending urban clatter and crash can’t become as familiar to some as a father’s voice; more, even?
Linking ideas like this was what gave Jamey and Nathan their most fertile common ground, like a pair of alchemists who realize they have the same formula written in different equations, and it was Nathan who provided the offhand historical footnote that may have explained the process of Jamey into Nihiclass="underline"
The Catholic Mass, of all things.
*
So I spent a few days coming to terms with the fact that a friend of mine, clearly dead if unspoiled, had undergone this reawakening of sorts, and if at first I’d been intrigued and vaguely entertained by the notion, now I wasn’t so sure.
Used to, I’d taken solace in the belief that once I was dead, that’d be it, a total snuffage of my flickering spark, but Nihil had ruined everything. I’d heard the body squirm in its springs, heard it sigh and complain about the light, and coming back like that seemed the worst thing I could imagine. Jamey had only wanted to be dead — was nothing sacred? — and me, I’d spent too much time thinking about all the things I never wanted to be, with anything eternal strictly bottom of the list.
I couldn’t bear to burden Rachel and Mae with this, because Rachel was so happy that the other half of her sexuality was now out of its shell, and Mae saying how wonderfully relaxed things were with us as compared to her family in Los Angeles, all that tradition and old world servitude and everyone’s expectations of her being a world-class soloist if only she’d strive harder, and how everyone out there dumped on Koreans, even in the Asian community, especially the Japanese, because it’s just not life if you can’t lord it over someone. I hated to spoil their honeymoon.
Nathan. Nathan would help me through this crisis.
“Why are you telling me this?” was the first thing he said to me. “I don’t want to hear this.”
“But…” I said, and watched him scowl, something I’d never seen him do, not at me. “You were the one with the theories about this. If it hadn’t been for you, all I’d’ve thought was he’d been in a coma all this time.”
“No, no, no, no, no.” Nathan was shaking his head, the two of us squared off in some bureaucratic line downtown where I’d confronted him, wasting another day outpaced by snails. “Don’t you get it, I was just basically bullshitting when I said that about his eyes, I didn’t expect you to take me seriously.”
“You didn’t see them blink?”
“I figured it was maggots, finally, that his time came,” and when Nathan started twisting and wrapping himself inside his coat and trying not to look around at the faces that were trying not to look at us, I knew what the problem was.
Nihil was okay as long as he was a static concept, a joke, a theatrical prop, a conversation piece, our private urban legend, our scarecrow on the hayride. Let him slip those boundaries, though, start looking us in the eye, and it wasn’t fun anymore.
“It never happened and you know it,” Nathan told me, hooked on dogma as much an opiate as Jamey’s smack and the family values of my mother and stepfather, whichever they’d settled on. “Never.”
Everything Nathan said sounded so much like an order that I didn’t see any point to continuing, so I left him to his denial.
On the bus home, I counted pawn shops and Vienna beef signs as they slid past my window, until a woman near the back wearing purple stretch pants bent her little boy over the seat and started swatting, and as he cried his older sister let a thin stream of drool run from the corner of her mouth, but the only movement she made was to turn her head away and pop a finger in her mouth, and then came my stop, and when I got off and the bus rolled away in its stinking roar, I could still see her empty face against the window and the hammy flailing arm behind her, smaller and smaller down the block, and I just knew that Andre was dead.