Deep Cuts

After the Gold Rush

On September 11 my dad called early—“Do you have a TV? Your mother isn’t sure you have a TV,” he said over and over, as I switched on Megan’s old, hulking TV in the dark of dawn. The towers were coming down in slow motion, the chyrons stacked and screaming. “Columnated ruins domino,” I whispered at the screen, terrified. My dad hung up to call my brother, and Megan left for her parents’ house, leaving me alone with the TV. When Joe knocked on my door, I collapsed with relief in his arms.

He sat down on my bed and didn’t leave. I tried to go to class but there was a cancellation note taped to the door, and when I got home Joe was still in my room, cleaning up. He’d moved all the CDs out of the bay window seat and covered it with pillows so we could watch the news from there instead of the bed.

For dinner we shared a bottle of Trader Joe’s wine and ate beans from the can with tortilla chips, and then we lay down in my bed together at some crazy early hour, eight or nine o’clock. My head was in the crook of his arm, but we faced the ceiling, not each other. We had seen each other often at work that summer, had nursed a shared obsession with the Shins’ finally released full album, Oh, Inverted World, over countless beers and Sundays on his porch—but we hadn’t been this physically close since the night after his first show. His warm skin and wiry muscles filled me with a yearning that felt somehow comfortable; I’d gotten used to the yearning, I supposed.

“Do you see yourself having kids one day?” he asked, voice barely above a whisper.

“Maybe. Obviously not any time soon.”

“I’ve always thought I’d be a dad. A good one, you know? Really do it right. But days like this…”

“Yeah. Morally speaking, it’s an increasingly dubious choice.”

“Exactly.” I felt his chest rise and fall. “You know they’re going to turn this into votes,” he said. “I have paid just enough attention in my poli-sci classes to know this for sure. They’re going to turn this into the worst kind of votes.”

Nobody was saying things like this yet, at least not that I’d heard. It made me feel scared. “Do you regret voting for Nader? I mean, I know it wouldn’t have made a difference, but—”

“I didn’t vote for Nader,” he said.

“Really?” A year earlier, the wisdom in our circles had been that four years of Bush would be better than Gore; we’d do our time, and then the pendulum would swing back to a true left.

“Didn’t feel right. Never told Zoe.”

I thought about this a long time. Joe in the polling booth, hand veering at the last minute, following his gut. I had an election night secret too—I’d been turned away because I was registered under my old dorm address, hadn’t voted at all—but I didn’t confess. I was too tired, too comfortable. We fell asleep like that, on our backs, his bicep my pillow.

The next day we had proper cancellation emails for our classes, but stores and restaurants were open again. We went out to get coffee and croissants and brought them back to our bunker. My dad kept calling; he was talking about the topography of Afghanistan and had started watching Fox News because the coverage seemed more honest.

“I think my dad is turning Republican,” I told Joe in the early afternoon, when we decided it was time to start drinking. I had made us a pitcher of margaritas from a mix.

“Told you,” he said. “Votes.” He had left a message for his dad telling him to call my number, but hadn’t heard back. It was clearly bothering him.

Zoe came over briefly, all lit up with anti-war energy. She had gone to Joe’s to check on him—they were in a distant sort of touch, downgraded from siblings to cousins—then figured he was with me. It was my closest interaction with her since the fight in Cafe Milano; I had been submitting her my music column via email. The next Ring Finger would be an all-pacifist edition, she told me, doing a shot of tequila. “You can go hard-core folk, I don’t care. Fucking Pete Seeger it.” She wanted to organize a protest in the plaza, but it wasn’t yet clear what we would protest; the news kept predicting different plans for retaliation. I thought it would feel good to have the three of us together again, but there was a bitter edge to everything she said, and Joe hurried her to leave.

“Better just us,” he said quietly once she was gone, and shut the metal blinds in the bay window. Thin stripes of bright sunlight fought through, painting the floor. He sat down in the window and looked at me with a tired smile.

I sat next to him. The news was on but muted. We were listening to Neil Young. Joe had tried to show me some music he was working on earlier, but neither of us was in the mood. Since our “Never Is a Promise” night, I’d become more careful with my critiques, kinder and more likely to swallow complaints; and he had dramatically slowed down his output, producing new fragments for me on a monthly basis instead of the near-daily clip he’d maintained the previous year. I wasn’t sure if these events were related—if my gentler approach had curbed his productivity—or if he was just focused on the live act now that the album was finished. In the old days I would’ve asked Zoe.

“Do you miss her?” I asked.

“It’s weird what I miss,” he said. “I miss her parents. I miss Sunday dinners at her house so bad it hurts.”

I took his hand.

“Thanks,” he said with an embarrassed smile. “Times like this kinda freak me out. Upheaval or whatever.”

I squeezed his hand.

“And I’m probably going to fail out of school this year,” he said. “So there’s that aspect of missing her.”

“What are you talking about?”

He sighed. “I can’t pass a test without Zoe. For multiple-choice tests, she would tuck her hair behind her left ear for A, right ear for B, cross feet left for C, cross feet right for D. And she basically wrote my papers for me.”

I must’ve looked shocked because he rolled his eyes.

“Come on, Percy. Like I’d be able to write and record all these songs, and work, and practice, if I was a real student. It’s over now anyway—she won’t help me in class, she just says hi and then goes and sits across the room. Which is fine, I understand. This whole charade was for her anyway. But it’s just hitting me now, that it’s really over.”

I still couldn’t believe it. “But Zoe’s so…principled.”

“Ah, but see, the system is rigged against me,” he said, raising a knowing eyebrow. “Poor blue-collar boy with a dead mom and a drunk dad, education wasn’t valued in my home…How could I ever succeed in this world? She was correcting an imbalance.”

I nodded. I could hear her saying it.

“But I suck at school,” he said. “And I’ll suck at any job this education gets me.”

“That’s not true.”

“I think it is,” he said. “I went along with it because I loved her, but now it all seems ridiculous. I’ve always known what I have to do. I have to make a living from music.”

“That’s incredibly difficult, Joe,” I said, as gently as possible. “Increasingly difficult.”

“I know.” He looked down at our interlaced fingers. “That’s why we gotta make it good.”

This carried an implication of pressure, of responsibility, as if his songs were mine too. But they weren’t mine. Were they? Over the summer he’d self-released a thousand copies of Funny Strange, and the songs were all credited to him, “with special thanks to Percy Marks.” I didn’t love that phrase. There were a few close calls on the album, two or three lines that were entirely mine, one melody I’d hummed out for him that ended up being a song’s secondary hook. He’d asked me once if I wanted co-writing credit, but it was early on, and I’d demurred. Still. “Special thanks to Percy Marks”: it hit me in my gut, every time.

“I can copyedit your papers,” I offered. “Fix your comma splices.”

“What the hell is a comma splice?”

“Exactly.”

“Have you been judging my commas all this time, in emails and stuff?”

“No,” I said, but he looked away, wounded. Of course I’d judged his commas; his commas were like gnats that crawled onto the screen and settled in random corners of his sentences. But I had surprised myself from the very beginning by not caring. What had all my proficiency with the English language gotten me? Joe could play guitar. He could sing . I would trade every last drop of my innate understanding of punctuation for a voice like Joe’s.

“” began to play, and of all the songs about the end of the world, it was the perfect one for the moment, so imagistic and unsettling. I knew we were both thinking it, how the title could’ve been on the news that day: we had pillaged the earth for its riches, stoked violence for its oil, and now it had come to this. But my favorite lyrics were the personal ones, the way the narrator lies in a basement watching an entire ecosystem collapse while having the vague, weary thoughts of everyday life. Thinking about what a friend had said.

“Hey,” I said during the flügelhorn solo. “Remember that night you came over here, after your first show?”

He took a breath, not quite a sigh. “Of course I do. The night we made the promise.”

I untangled my hand from his because it was starting to sweat. “The promise, right,” I said. “Kinda silly, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think so,” he said quietly.

A red banner at the bottom of the TV screen read: Caller From Hijacked Plane: “I’m Going to Die.” He took my hand again and scooted his body closer so our thighs were pressing. It wasn’t enough. I felt a bottomless thirst for closeness. The song ended and he started it again.

“So what are the parameters of the promise?” I said. “I mean, we’re holding hands right now, so I guess that’s in bounds. What exactly did we promise not to do?”

He turned toward me. His eyes moved over my face. “Kiss, I guess,” he said.

“On the lips? Be specific.”

He nodded.

I straightened up and kissed him slowly on the cheek. The feel of it surprised me—tiny pricks of stubble, a cheekbone close beneath the surface. A man, not a boy. When I drew back his eyes were closed.

“So that was in bounds?” I asked.

He nodded.

I stood up. I walked around the length of his legs—they were pointed straight out, bare feet crossed at the heels—and then stepped back over so I was straddling him.

“Percy.” He looked up at me.

“What. I’m just trying to get a good angle.” I held his face and kissed the other cheek.

He tilted slightly toward me. His lips parted, and we were breathing in perfect unison, and then he said, “You’re ruining this song.”

I dropped my hands, mortified. He wouldn’t look at me. My legs were frozen in place, trapping us both in the moment, refusing to admit it had happened.

The phone rang, then rang again. “It might be my dad,” he said. I let him go.