Chapter 3
3.
In the morning, the city has flooded but my lips are dry. The sun is buried behind shelves of gray, the clouds a shadow over the city. Down on Tenth, cars run the stop sign by the corner store; a neighbor next door is playing a kick drum. It’s still raining. Water rushing down the curbs in an endless stream, cars spraying fountains onto the sidewalks as they drive over toward Twelfth. Sloane’s dog, Lou Reed, refuses to walk for days. Nick is gone.
I pee, brush my teeth, masturbate in the shower. I think of him, and even though it’s been less than twenty-four hours, he still appears in my head like a carbon copy—like I’m remembering a version of him from years ago, rather than the version I’ve just seen. My joint smolders as I smoke in front of the mirror, clouding myself out. My clit is like a fist, still pulsing. I reach between my legs—I’m still wet there—and take another hit.
Midday at The Venue, later that week. Light cracks through the windows alongside the stage. The bridge of one of Nick’s songs is stuck in my head. I haven’t heard from him since the weekend of the flood. Five days. Anytime we’ve come too close he tries to put space between us, as if five hundred miles up I-65 isn’t enough.
From the back room at The Venue—all pool tables and black booths—you can still see the flooding and the remnants of the storm downtown. Swaths of First Street have been submerged and the Cumberland is slowly receding, a mass of brown brackish water stretching over to Germantown. Thirteen inches of rain in thirty-six hours. A small tornado apparently touched down just outside town. The whole ground floor of the Grand Ole Opry was briefly underwater. The roof of a studio over on the east side blown off—a handful of musicians scrambling inside while rain pounded down, trying to save their master recordings. A whole pile of instruments destroyed at Soundcheck, where every musician has stored their gear at some point. And like the assholes that we are, Sloane and I spent most of the past week in the pool at her friend Abby’s place, in the beautiful clear days after the storm.
It’s odd, being at The Venue in daylight. We usually close only one night a week. Mondays, sometimes. More often Sundays. The posters stuck to the beams and the office door are garish, mottled with weathered pieces of paper, splitting strips of tape, and rogue band stickers melted into the wood. The Shins, Local Natives, Justin Wilson, the Wild Loose. Even though half of the posters advertise shows from months ago, I’ve never felt the need to take them down until Andy says something, until there’s no space for a show that’s actually coming up. The Justin Wilson one is a custom screen print, and it seems redundant, having it both on the door downstairs and on a beam upstairs. I carefully remove it, peeling back the tape so I can leave the corners intact. I’ve always liked trying to preserve things that were never meant to be permanent anyway.
I run my fingertips along the bar, as though I’m expecting dust. As though this place has ever sat empty more than forty-eight hours. I flick on the overhead fans and fingers of light stretch over from the windows on the opposite wall. The space was first an old flour mill, a million years ago, and eventually a cannery; now it’s a shell of exposed brick and wood beams, restored but still rustic. Sometimes I swear the venues in this town are the only places people seem to care about preserving.
Andy’s guitar is one of those three-quarter-size ones usually marketed to kids and teenagers learning chords for the first time. I can’t even look at my own guitar at home now. It’s been nearly a month since the Incident, as Sloane and I have taken to calling it, but the memory is like an earworm, a song you’re trying desperately to forget. It’s a distracting daymare anytime I pick up the guitar, anytime someone mentions a songwriter’s round or an open mic. Sloane keeps telling me it wasn’t so bad, but she wasn’t the one up there, the one trying to play. She doesn’t know.
What comes to my hands first is the little run of chords from “Norwegian Wood.” I’ve always liked the sound of that simple opening E, checking the tuning of the instrument with the reverberation of the bass E string. Someone’s been playing it in drop D, though, and I tune it back to standard by ear.
Jesus, Sloane said that night. It wasn’t even that bad! I mean, like, are you really the only person to knock over a mic? Have you ever seen Steven Tyler perform? Dude can’t even remember the words to “Crazy,” and I’m pretty sure everyone under the age of fifty knows them. As if knocking over a mic was the only thing that went wrong that night.
Andy’s left a couple of joints in the center drawer of his desk. I crack the window and take a few hits. Damp spring air rushes in. I do have pages and pages of lyrics—verses I wrote about Nick after he left, couplets I can’t stop thinking about, bits of alliteration that belong with a tune. But for months—closer to a year, really—I haven’t been able to come up with any kind of melody that sticks.
The weed is mellow, my head pleasantly swimmy as I try to match a melody with the chords, stringing the couplets about Nick back-to-back. But the tune gets lost, my voice gets tired. I try a different chord progression, struggling to chase the tune down, but the notes disperse until I’m just losing it, losing it, losing it.
You keep saying to play it / I remind you I hate it
A door creaks, then quiet. I sit up, my spine tense, and the moment is gone. I slide the guitar back into its case, set it on the couch next to me. The last latch has barely snapped shut when the door to the office opens and Julien appears in the doorway.
Standing there he seems awkwardly far away, as though he’s waiting at the threshold of my bedroom. Dark jeans, a faint white line where the fabric has faded in the outline of his shitty old Nokia phone. A carabiner of keys hangs from his belt loop and he flicks it open and shut with his thumb. His T-shirt is thin, a drab weathered yellow that looks like he’s either had it since childhood or got it at Goodwill last week.
—Were you playing? he asks, stepping out of the doorway, amber light rushing in behind him. He looks at me so intently that I instinctively put my hand to my lips, worried I have something on my mouth.
—No, I say.
—It kind of looks like you were playing.
—Barely, I say.
—Do you play out ever?
—No, I say. Definitely not.
He nods, his eyes still focused. My face is very warm.
—Stop looking at me like that, I say.
His head cocks just slightly to the side.
—Like what? That’s just the way I look.
A door opens somewhere downstairs, the sound of hinges swinging, air coming in. A voice yells up from the atrium, a girl calling Julien’s name. He glances at the time on his phone and then over his shoulder.
—It’s nice when it’s quiet, he says, finally looking back at me.
—It’s weird, I say.
Melodies I thought I came up with but realized later they were somebody else’s songs:
“The Wind” (Cat Stevens)
“Nothing Else Matters” (Metallica)
“I Will Play My Game Beneath the Spin Light” (Brand New)
“I’ve Just Seen a Face” (the Beatles)
“Sugarcane” (Michael Ford, Jr. I don’t know how any of this works. So instead I click through his photos again, just to make sure I didn’t miss anything. But I know I’m not there, because we’ve never taken a photo together.
As for his pictures, they range from reckless and stupid to sexy and vaguely staged. I click out of his page and search for Julien. We’re not friends yet, I realize, and I add him without overthinking it, annoyed that his profile is both private and minimal, just a photo of him with his back to the camera, standing somewhere in a field. It’s blurry—totally useless. I wouldn’t even know it was him if not for the name. I search for Jessika; I have an odd desire to confirm her birthday, to look at hers and Julien’s side by side, to calculate the exact difference in age between us. But I can’t, not now. Her profile is private too. When I type Colt’s name, nothing comes up at all.
My computer dings with a notification: Julien accepting my friend request. He must be online now. I navigate back to his profile, ready to click through his photos. As I hear Sloane’s keys rattle against the door, a message pops up in the bottom right of my screen: Nick.
I was just thinking about you, it says.