Seeker, pt. 1
I'm launching a short story in four parts this summer.
May
Today rises in front of him like a wall and sometimes a fog and usually a twinge, but not normally so thick like this. He wants to feel lighter, the earth loose under his feet, toes bouncing off more gravity than ground. The city seethes and breathes, he can see it in his waking hours whatever time of day, the handful of skyscrapers visible from the yard of the coffee shop piercing the blue, levity far from him but lingering somewhere down there. Or maybe not down there but to the south, where he didn’t live but wanted to, this main corridor, the romanticism of a one-way road into town, two turns to the right and straight onto the street he came here for, hoping for packed bars and only met instead with gaping open dark rooms, the bartenders even jaded enough to not care to nod their heads unless they meant it, unless something miraculous, magical happened on stage in their ears first and then their eyes, shoulders bopping, but this is all you could hope for when the rooms were this empty.
While it was this or the army, this or a tech school degree, this or a coal mine, this or an Amazon driver, this or that, the options many but so few as promising. I wanted to serve, he tells those who have, his way of acknowledging their service, unbeknownst to him that those who did serve, that linger around him now, brains marbles inside the jar where the contents of spirit used to be, those who like him having made it this far having held onto some shred or long let go of the ego that writhed under all our skin, our seeker who does not yet know that there will be people in life who will grin at the sight of your bloodied mouth and take you gently by the hair, pull you back and gaze at the smooth seam of your throat to neck, and slam your voice into it all the same.
He got here too late, convinced of it, this very fact that he can’t live on a reasonable bus route or bike route, that he lives with eight other guys, one of whom is in the backyard in a makeshift tent that the old lady next door threatens every morning by waving the green of the 311 app of her phone over the fence, a warning made worse by the fact that she needed to stand on two end tables stacked together to accomplish it. I got here as fast as I could, he tells people who have lived here longer than him when they ask. He laughs and they laugh, but it’s not for the reason he thinks and his admittance, the cliche phrase thrown over the fence, only adds to his outsiderness.
The house itself is a fact he’s still learning to live inside, the way eight people can occupy the same square footage and still manage to exist mostly parallel to one another, the kitchen a relay race of mismatched mugs and someone else’s leftovers fermenting gently in their tupperware, the bathroom a negotiation that nobody articulated but everyone understood, the living room belonging to no one and therefore to everyone in the way that public spaces belong to everyone which is to say barely and briefly and only until someone better arrives. The tent guy’s name is Reece and Reece is somehow the most functional person in the building, which includes the building proper, Reece who works at the plant nursery off 35 and wakes before anyone and sometimes leaves coffee in the pot without announcement or expectation, without the particular performance of generosity that the others occasionally attempted before abandoning it when nobody noticed, and he thinks sometimes that Reece has already worked something out that the rest of them are still circling, that a person can opt entirely out of the room and still be indoors enough to matter, still present enough to leave coffee, which is its own quiet argument about what presence costs and what it doesn’t.
He plays Tuesday nights at a place that doesn’t advertise it, a residency being too grand a word for what amounts to a handshake with a guy named either Rob or Rod, he can never hold it, the name sliding off the moment after it’s given, Rob or Rod who books the music the way certain people tend bar or run lights, not as a stepping stone to something else but as a calling that the world hasn’t yet agreed to call a calling, the kind of person who understands a room before anyone else in it does, who knows by the second song whether the night will open or stay closed, who has a genius for the social temperature of a place that has no credential attached to it, no office, no way to become anything other than what it already is, which is indispensable and invisible in equal measure, and sometimes after the set they stand out back in the heat and someone produces the cocaine the way someone always does, quietly and without theater, and the night elongates itself, becomes generous, and he talks to Rob or Rod about music with a fluency he doesn’t have at any other hour, the sentences arriving whole, and he thinks he can feel the city through the soles of his shoes even sitting still, the thrum of something below the street that has been going longer than him and will go longer still, and by two in the morning it feels almost like belonging, he’s almost got it in his hands at four, and by noon the next day it’s crept out the front door.
The music’s good, he knows this, not in the defensive way of someone who needs to know it to keep going, which is also true, but in the way that he’s been told by enough people who had nothing to gain from the telling, the old woman at SpinZone who hummed something back to him that he’d played three nights before across town, who couldn’t possibly have been there, who must’ve heard it through someone else or from the open window of someone else’s car, which meant the song had traveled, had moved through at least two people before landing in her throat, and that seemed like enough of a miracle to file away and occasionally retrieve. He files it. He retrieves it less than he should.
What he hasn’t told anyone is that he called his mother last Thursday and said he was fine and she said fine like a period at the end of a sentence she hadn’t started, and the silence after was the particular silence of a woman who won’t say what she prays, who believes something she will never be asked to prove, which is that he will eventually come back, not to her exactly, not to the town or the job or the life that was possible there, but to himself, whatever version of that makes it back through this particular fog this particular wall this particular twinge, and he thinks of this now standing in the yard in the morning watching Reece zip his tent from the inside, the sound of it like a held breath releasing, the old lady’s windows still dark, a temporary mercy, the skyscrapers to the south catching the first light before anything else does.
The lamp’s always on
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