Every Anxious Wave Read online

  “Yes, and he’s pissed. He’s subsisting on walnuts and raccoon meat.”

  “You know what was really plentiful in Atlantic waters a thousand years ago? Eel. He should eat eel.”

  I picked up my toilet brush and scraped at the barnacles. “Lena, I’m hoping that we can get Wayne back to the present sooner rather than later, so…”

  “When can I see Elliott Smith play? I never got to see him play when he was alive. I don’t think he ever played Montana.”

  “I’m afraid the wormhole is unavailable for concertgoing for the time being. Until you figure something out, the wormhole may only be used to retrieve Wayne.”

  “We need to take another trip so that I better understand the velocity and relative time dilation through space-time. I have some mathematical equations I’m working on. I want to see Elliott.”

  “Nope. Not happening.”

  “Excuse me?” she asked.

  “Work first, Elliott later.”

  “Look, I’m going to be honest with you. You can’t know that Wayne is in the year 980. Any date you type into that system of yours is arbitrary. I’m pretty sure that time did not move at the same pace in 980 as it does today. The Earth’s axis has shifted a lot over the last millennium and there’s no way we can count on there being a twenty-four-hour day in 980. It could be 981 or 994 or 1237 wherever Wayne is right now.”

  “Okay.”

  Lena exhaled loudly. “Second, as I mentioned, your wormhole could have shifted. As far as we know, there is no way to affix one end of an Einstein–Rosen Bridge to any single, fixed point. I don’t know how you’ve been keeping your wormhole in your closet, but I need to examine it further, because as it stands, it’s already defying everything we physicists know about time and space. There is no way to verify that Wayne is on Manhattan Island. He could be in Antarctica or he could be down the street in Chicago and bullshitting you. We can proceed assuming he is where you say he is, but again, I cannot know that for certain. So the problem I’m dealing with is how to apply the metrics by which I understand all this stuff and make them go backwards. Synchronizing the clocks will be ridiculously difficult, if not impossible. But I’m willing to try.”

  “Thank you. Do whatever you need to do.

  “I need a trip and I want to see Elliott.”

  “Fine. Come by at seven. We’ll go see Elliott.”

  “We?”

  “Well, yeah. Wanna go on a time travel date with me?” I made a fist and bit down hard on my knuckles, realizing too late that I’d just put the hand that had touched the toilet brush in my mouth.

  “A date? Like a date date? I thought I was your employee.”

  “Well, yeah. You are my employee. I mean, is that cool?”

  “Is that cool?” she said, a crack in her voice. “I mean, that strikes me as unprofessional. But it’s not like other people are knocking my door down. I don’t know. We’ll see on the date thing. Your need for immediate gratification where getting Wayne back is concerned doubled with this out-of-the-blue date request is freaking me out. Ease up on that. Girls like me hate getting bossed around. See you later.” The phone went dead.

  Way to woo the honeys, Rico Suave. No wonder I hadn’t had a real girlfriend since the nineties.

  Also: Was that a yes?

  I cleaned my apartment with unusual fervor. Washed sheets, put laundry away, scrubbed the tan streaks of piss off the rim of the toilet. I hid my bottle of happy pills in a drawer in the bathroom and threw an unopened box of Q-tips over said evidence in case Lena was a bathroom snooper. I was a bathroom snooper. I actually hoped that Lena was a bathroom snooper, too, because we’d have that in common, wanting to know what prescription drugs are zapping the brains of the ones we love, and if they use a good brand of deodorant.

  Other than music, I feared that she and I shared very little. Music isn’t enough. Disappointment looms large when you spend an evening leaning in toward a pretty woman, engaged in a fierce discussion of the success of New Order post Ian Curtis’s suicide, and then figure out you can’t talk about anything else but bands. Bands! Bands! More bands! My ex-girlfriend Meredith liked country. Country. How much Emmylou Harris I listened to for that Meredith McCabe.

  Meredith had lived beneath the pool table in an anarchist squat in Cambridge. Her sole possessions at the time we were together (1990 to 1996) were a sleeping bag, a toothbrush, and a mayonnaise jar full of broken jewelry she’d hoped to fix and sell from a blanket in Harvard Square. Meredith dumped me in 1996 to move in with a woman she’d met in the shower line at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. Not a single worthy lady had revealed herself to me since. Meredith remained the one for whom my heart would not heal. With her, my life was golden. I had muscles.

  We were standing outside the Middle East on Mass Ave when Meredith kissed my cheek good-bye. The wind coming off the bay that afternoon was as cold and cruel as Ms. McCabe, and when I staggered into the nearest drinking establishment to warm my body and regain some composure, I tripped over some guy’s feet, face-planted into the contents of an ashtray someone had spilled, and split open my right big toe kicking a hole in the bottom wood part of the bar, for which I was asked to pay four hundred dollars. As I confirmed via a time travel trip back to that November day to rewatch the breakup, the weather was really that cold and I did kick a rather impressive hole in that bar. At the time, I’d felt that Meredith was worth such trouble and destruction.

  Lena arrived at 6:50 p.m. I’d put on a black necktie for the occasion. I wore my newest jeans—crisp ones that had never been splashed with beer or bleachy mop broth. I tucked in my shirt, which was pale blue oxford cloth, purchased at a real store within the past five years. It was clean and free of pit stains.

  “Hello,” she said, winded from the stairs. We hugged awkwardly, she trying not to touch my body with her breasts. Though Lena was dressed in a rather plain black top and red knee-length skirt, my eyes were drawn to her calves and feet: weathered purple Doc Martens boots that were appropriate if time traveling back to the nineties. Still, she was smiling. She was pleasant. She was here to help.

  “Nice boots,” I said.

  With great pride, she lifted up her left foot to put it on display. “My God, Karl, do you realize what it took for a teenager with no credit card in Butte, Montana, to acquire these boots in 1995? Before Internet commerce? A girl in Seattle I knew because she ran a zine called the Canadian Penny bought them and shipped them to me and I had my father reimburse her with a check. A check! Of course, all the cowboy assholes at my high school thought they were ugly and called me a freak. I love these boots.”

  “Quite a story there.”

  “Yes.” She sighed. Over the years, I’ve learned that women who sigh like this in the presence of a man are horny, and they’re trying to let you know. I considered the possibility of taking Miss Lena to bed after our return from our trip to 1997 to see Elliott Smith, but I thought better of it. Lena might have been horny, but it wasn’t my place to assume she was horny for me. Further inspection of Lena indicated not horniness but garden-variety suspicion. She stood in my kitchen with her arms folded in front of her, her holey black cardigan pulled taut across her chest.

  “Can I get you a drink?”

  “Water, I guess. Hey, so you’re coming with this time? Some sort of date bullshit?”

  Damn, she was harsh. “Yes. I mean, you should also be doing your calculations. Calculations first, date bullshit second.” I couldn’t tell if I was flirting or not. Probably not.

  “Hey, can we show Elliott our ‘St. Ides Heaven’ tattoos? And beg him not to kill himself?”

  I shook my head. “No talking to Elliott. You’ll really be pissing me off if you do that.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better if he wasn’t dead?”

  “That attitude is what got Wayne marooned in 980.”

  “Not wanting Elliott to kill himself is an attitude?”

  I didn’t want to fight with Lena, but I wasn’t going to let he
r mess with Elliott Smith, either. This was a quiet enterprise, this time travel thing, and its purpose was nostalgia. I liked to think that I was closer to a drug dealer than to a carny, but neither of those occupations garnered any modicum of respect.

  “Have you heard from Wayne?” Lena asked.

  Wayne’s texts had grown disjointed and unintelligible. I worried that he was starving to death, or freezing to death, or had lost a finger, or had gone completely loco in the cabeza, but he would have told me if anything bad had happened, or stopped texting if he was injured or dead.

  I MET PEOPLE. CONTACT MADE. DID NOT FIGHT OR KILL ME. VERY SMALL. MONOBROWED WOMEN IN COLORFUL DRESSES, MEN SMALLER THAN WOMEN, MORE TIMID, TOO. THEY HAVE DOGS.

  ALL OF MY SKIN IS ITCHY. I KEEP THINKING ABOUT THE TUBE OF LOTION IN MY TRUCK BACK HOME AND HOW I’D MURDER MY BEST FRIEND KARL BENDER WHO CAN’T USE NUMBERS PROPERLY TO HAVE SOME LOTION.

  ATE A FISH. I WOULD CALL IT SUSHI-GRADE.

  THIS IS LIKE BEING IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT. MY BRAIN HURTS, KARL. THERE IS NO ONE TO TALK TO AND I’M SCARED.

  I KNOW YOU DON’T LIKE FISH BUT THIS IS THE BEST FISH. IT DOESN’T EVEN TASTE LIKE FISH. IT TASTES LIKE TRUTH AND BEAUTY.

  SO MUCH FISH. I ATE A LOT OF FISH STICKS AS A KID AND NOW I’M GOBSMACKED THAT HUMANITY WOULD EVER BATTER-FRY THESE NATURAL WONDERS.

  KIND OF LIKE EATING A TRANSLUCENT, SLIGHTLY SALTY BIT OF WONDER.

  FUCK YOU, YOU DUMB LOSER. I THINK I LEFT MY OVEN ON. MAYBE I’LL JUST SHARPEN THIS STICK AND STAB IT THROUGH MY BRAIN.

  YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE TO COOK THIS FISH. SO GOOD.

  HAVE YOU EVER DANCED NAKED IN THE MOONLIGHT? REALLY ANSWER THAT QUESTION. SINCERELY. THINK ABOUT DOING IT TONIGHT. DRIVE UP TO WISCONSIN AND FIND A MEADOW. AND A MOON. THERE ARE TWO MOONS IN THE SKY HERE. HOW DID WE LOSE A MOON IN 1,000 YEARS?

  I’M COLD BUT I’VE GOT ALL THIS FISH.

  I’d assured Wayne that Lena and I were working furiously to get him back, that he was much missed by everyone, and that his empty barstool was a constant reminder that something was wrong at the Dick. The truth was, I missed Wayne in the same hopeless way I missed Meredith: muddy with the fear over the possibility that I’d never see him again, and that it was all my fault. But mostly, I was worried about Future Me and this message about Lena and “the post-A world.”

  Post-A?

  Also, how was this going to work with Lena, exactly? I wasn’t even sure she liked men. She did seem to like me, though, what with the sighing and the not wanting to leave my side when our time together found its natural end point. But still, she was a girl who wore all of her hurts like fresh tattoos, who built walls around her heart and her body, who had long ago abandoned girlish predilections like flirting or caring about her appearance. Since I’d declared our outing a date, she couldn’t even look me in the eye. She stood over the computers in the bedroom, tapping at the keys, glazed-eyed, shifting her weight to one foot and then the other. I noticed how thin and worn the gummy soles of Lena’s purple Doc boots had become. I saw the golden glint the sun made as its rays illuminated her arm hair. I admired the generous curves of her breasts and belly, the arch of her calves in their torn black tights. Crusty edges made a girl more beautiful. Meredith was all bloody lips, missing teeth, and ghosts in her eyes that my love and kisses sometimes chased away. When they did, I loved and cherished Meredith beyond what I ever felt myself capable of, for which I had absolutely no point of reference in my life.

  I was raised by a man and woman whose marital rage peeled the paper off the walls of their bland suburban split-level. I feared that my relations with women would forever be marked by Steve and Melinda Bender and their failed pairing, his cheating, her chilling stoicism, and his draining the joint bank account and fleeing to Florida while she lay dying in a hospice unit that reeked of urine and medical-grade cleaning fluids. They belonged to that last generation of Americans who viewed divorce as a greater failure than daily misery. Seven months, from cancer diagnosis to death, I had never seen my mother happier—in a hospital gown, with me and my sister at her side, knowing that her husband wouldn’t be wherever she was headed.

  I had never accompanied someone on a time travel trip before. Nostalgia is, and should be, a solo endeavor.

  “Where are we going?” Lena asked.

  “Boston.”

  “How about Portland?”

  “Boston,” I repeated.

  She sighed. “Elliott’s best shows were in Portland.”

  “We’re going to Boston.”

  “Didn’t you live in Boston in the nineties?”

  “In the late nineties, I was touring so much with the Axis, I didn’t live anywhere.”

  “Yeah, but the Axis was a Boston band, even if you weren’t living there. So we’re going to visit your old haunts? Old you, maybe?”

  I didn’t answer. I stared at the computer screen, or past it at the greenish paint on the wall behind it, programming our trip to Boston, because I’d only ever been to Portland to play Axis shows and the city held no nostalgia for me, but Boston, city of college, of youth, of pain, of Meredith and T.T.’s, was the toy box of my longed-for past. I didn’t want to go to Portland because fuck Portland. This was my wormhole, damn it. Boohoo, big baby. Boston or nothing. Boston or I take my ball and go home. To Boston. Go Sox.

  “I think you have seen your old self,” Lena said. “The corners of your lips are curling under. You’re lying. I can tell when someone’s lying.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  That knocked the smile off her face. “You need me more than I need you.”

  “Way to start a date, Lena.”

  She picked her messenger bag up off the floor and hoisted it over her head, like she was going to leave and I’d never see her again. “Are you this much of a dick to all the women you date, or just me?”

  “You pick the artist, I pick the show. Fair’s fair.”

  She looked at me with her left eyebrow arched. “Fair? Really? I’m the physicist here.”

  “It’s my wormhole. You wouldn’t even know about it if I hadn’t contacted you.”

  “You’re being an asshole,” Lena said, and part of me loved her for not being afraid to say it to my face.

  On April 29, 1997, I was in a tour van with Milo, Trina, and Sam, nowhere near Boston, though I can’t remember exactly where we were that night. We were popular in Athens and Chapel Hill, but Milo’s then crush/now wife, Jodie, lived in Portland, and so we played a lot of shows there, mostly in the dark, piss-and-beer-smelling Reed College student union, though at some point we graduated up to playing actual clubs. That said, the Elliott Smith show in Cambridge would be packed with old friends, old bandmates, and probably my old bartender, Jake Crowley, my Boston-era ad hoc therapist and the man who mentored me when I bought the Dictator’s Club. Meredith and I used to talk about asking Jake to officiate our wedding. We’d get married in his bar, family expectation be damned, and have bands play all night long while we went out to the van to have sex whenever we got bored talking to people. Instead of gifts, we’d ask guests to donate money to build libraries in Nicaragua. Then, for our honeymoon, we’d go down to Nicaragua and build those libraries.

  * * *

  LENA AND I landed with a thud on the pavement of Mass Ave, right in front of the Middle East.

  Welcome home, baby boy.

  “That was some crazy harsh pull. I might barf,” Lena said.

  Around the corner came Jake Crowley. Nowadays, Jake is as plump as the guy who carves the ham at the Polish buffet, and his male-pattern toilet seat of hair has turned the color of cigarette ash, but here, Jake, his body lean beneath his black pompadour, sauntered past us and into the club. No amount of effort stopped my lower lip from quivering. Wayne had never explained the whole layer thing to me. I took a swipe at a Boston Phoenix newspaper box. My hand made no contact. I could see Lena, and she could see me, blubbering like a goddamn baby.

  “Can you see me?” I asked, waving my arms around like a se
a creature.

  Lena nodded her head. “Why did you want to come here when you knew it would make you sad?”

  “Because I want to be sad, Lena. I like being sad. You like being sad. Elliott Smith loved being sad so much he wrote the soundtrack to our sad lives and then he died so we could all be even more sad.”

  “Hot damn, dude. Calm down.”

  I shouldn’t be doing this, I thought. I should destroy the wormhole, let 1997 stay in 1997.

  Once Wayne was back, I promised myself. I would yank out the wires, pour cement on the wood floor, take an ax and chop the drywall into puffs of dust.

  Lena scanned the landscape. “So we can go to your old city but not mine. I see how it is.” She reached down and opened the Boston Phoenix newspaper box with no problem.

  “How did you do that?”

  “Do what?” She held the newspaper in her hand, flipping it open. “I just want to see what other bands are playing. Galaxie was over by ’97, right? Luna, maybe? Ooh, remember Atom and His Package?”

  “How is it that you’re holding on to that paper?” I took a swipe at the paper, but my hand went through it. It was all just air to me.

  Lena leafed through the Phoenix as the pages waved in the wind. “I didn’t do anything special. I can interact with the past. No big deal.” She gave the newspaper box a kick.

  My hands failed to meet the handle of the metal newspaper box. I walked through an old Tercel. I took a swing at a woman wearing cat eye sunglasses. I couldn’t feel cold, couldn’t smell the exhaust of the passing MBTA bus.

  And yet, Lena. Lena flipped through the newspaper. A guy on the sidewalk dodged her and said, “Excuse me.” She existed. But not me.

  “This is fucked up,” I said, swiping at Lena’s newspaper.

  Lena grabbed my arm and then stopped a couple walking a dog. Lena could touch me, but I couldn’t touch her. “Excuse me, but do you see a man with a ton of tattoos and a gray goatee standing next to me, right here?”