Thank You, Goodnight (8 page)

“I’ll have to find some way to thank her.”

“All of these nice peoples at my home,” he called out, hammering away at the darkness with his flashbulb. “Must to take pictures, Teddy. But this time I
tell
you I taking pictures, yes? No secret! Ha!” He beamed at his own cleverness, the Scooby-Doo smile too big even for that moon face of his.

“Tell me something,” I said. “Everyone else around here speaks perfect English. Why does yours suck so bad?”

He let out an exuberant laugh, which I interpreted as incomprehension, and patting me hard on the back, started for the house. Then he froze, pivoted, and pointed to the sky in a stroke of excitement.

“Look!” he bellowed, presumably meaning
listen
.

The song wafting from the boom box was “Troubleshooter,” a slushy puddle of a ballad I’d written in a fever of melodrama after the death of my English lit professor. I heard my double-tracked voice whining through the verse—“The old school walls fall down like rain / With ghosts of Shakespeare, Poe, and Twain.” Why couldn’t I have just rhymed
rain
with
pain
like a normal person?

“This song I love it!” H-P shouted, striding away and singing
along. He couldn’t form even the most grammatically basic sentence in English, but damned if he didn’t know every last lyric.

“I’m not the only person ever to take a swing at that guy, am I?” I posed the question to a pair of boys shuffling skittishly on either side of me, bottles of local ale in their clutches.

“He’s quite entertaining, but a good man,” one said, his wire-rimmed glasses glimmering in the waning light. “And he really is a big fan of your music. A lot of people around here are.”

“You people scare me,” I said. “This place is like some kind of lost colony. You have no idea how alone in the world you are. There’s real music out there. I can show it to you. You’ve got the Internet in Switzerland, right?”

The kid with the glasses grinned up at me. “So what did Heinz-Peter do to make you so angry that you came all this way to fight him?”

I snorted; it hadn’t been much of a fight. Then a tiny itch of pride ripened inside me, and for some inexplicable reason I felt hesitant to elaborate.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess he captured a moment.”

*       *       *

At some point, it fell to me to man the grill, to poke and prod sausages and burgers, nudge them off their charred bellies and onto their backs. The affair had quieted down from a raucous backyard party into a subdued evening picnic replete with the easy murmurs and cinder-like aromas of a campfire. Tereza, a cagey ally at best, kept me company, and together we allowed our lungs to fill with mesquite as the charcoal hissed under the gridirons.

“You’re getting more comfortable with all of this, aren’t you?” she said, smiling. “You’re once more adjusting to your fame. I can see it.”

“Why aren’t you listening to Dr. Dog? Where’s your Pernice Brothers? Your War on Drugs? There’s all this good new music out there.”

“Don’t let all of this go to your head,” Tereza teased. “We don’t only listen to Tremble.”

“You realize that some bands actually deserve to be forgotten,” I went on, sliding a spatula under a sizzling mound of beef and hoisting it onto a paper plate. “Charles Darwin is alive and well in the arts.”

“I don’t think you really believe that your music deserves to be forgotten,” she said. “If you do, then you’re not the artist everyone here thinks you are. You’re certainly not the artist that my father is.”

Of course I wasn’t the artist that all these delusional castoffs took me for. They had no idea how utterly bizarre it was to have moved on with your life, to have changed directions in everything you did, and then randomly discover a lunatic fringe on the other side of some lost mountain that was still grooving to your music years after the rest of civilization had wised up.

Maybe every band was awarded some little time-warp town that remained forever loyal, perennially committed to the notion that the group for which it pined would one day rise from the ashes. Perhaps there was a village in Tibet where everyone wore a Men Without Hats shirt and sang “The Safety Dance” all day. Maybe a town in Cameroon woke up every morning breathless with sunny hope that Katrina would round up the rest of the Waves and launch a tour.

“You seem like a nice group of mountain people, but being cut off from the rest of humanity has messed with your minds,” I said.

Tereza’s eyes bore into me, her face beset by a disturbed crinkle crawling its way across her nose. “Is this how all Americans say thank you, or just you?”

I watched her plate a sausage for a hungry guest. She delivered the food with a warm, hospitable smile and a gentle pat on his shoulder. It struck me as a nurturing gesture, maternal even, and I found myself asking where her mother was.

“She died.”

“Oh.”

“Two years ago.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“We were boating on the river.” She jerked her chin to the side, sig
naling that the river in question was a neighbor, a familiar friend. “We flipped over in the rapids and she hit her head on a rock. Drowned before my father and I could pull her to shore.” I watched the light from the burning coals flickering across her face as she kept her distance from the memory. “It’s amazing how quickly things happen, you know? One minute we were a family in a boat, the next minute we were in the water, and then we were on the riverbank and she was gone forever. She still had her life vest on.”

“I’m sorry I brought that up.”

“It’s fine.”

“That must’ve been really hard on you and your dad.”

She gazed out at the lawn crackling with life, friends and relations fading into the falling night. “We’ve never been alone.” She said it as though it were a mixed blessing.

The back door of the house suddenly flew open and Heinz-Peter came lurching out. “Teddy!” he called merrily. He was carrying a long wooden object—an oar? an ax?—and slinging it in the air as he giant-stepped his way across the dark yard.

I squinted at the implement that this madman was waving over his head. The remaining pockets of light finally revealed its identity.

“Oh Jesus,” I groaned. “Is he fucking kidding me?”

*       *       *

“You don’t get it,” I yelled at the crowd. “You people have all lost your minds.” They didn’t seem to care that they’d lost their minds. Maybe that’s the beauty of losing your mind. “It’s out of the question. Go hassle Wang Chung.”

At the sight of the guitar being wielded by their host, everyone untangled themselves from their conversations and joined Heinz-Peter in beseeching me to do an impromptu gig right there on the lawn. And no matter how forcefully I rejected their ludicrous invitation, no matter how much disdain and hostility I showered upon these hill-town hicks, still they egged me on. An intimate backyard concert,
they argued, would be an ideal coda to an evening they would cherish for the remainder of their lives. I told them to get a grip. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d picked up a guitar, and I’d long forgotten the chords and the words to all the Tremble songs. And anyway my mouth hurt like hell.

“I’d rather lick a train station toilet than play for you people,” I declared.

“You are with friends, yes? Play for us!” H-P cried out, holding the instrument out to me with the rallying charisma of a medieval ogre.

“You are not my friends,” I insisted.

“Play for us, Teddy Tremble!” he boomed.

“Listen to me carefully. You all need therapy. You’re embarrassing yourselves.”

The fucked-up chanting and screaming was growing louder and more fanatical. A real musician would’ve soaked up all this ego stroking, riled the crowd up louder like a shirtless stadium god, or bowed his head in a slushy sigh of false modesty. I, however, wanted only to take off down the driveway and never look back.

Tereza was now standing next to me, having managed to navigate her way through the crowd. Cupping one side of her mouth, she leaned into my ear and shouted above the fray. “Teddy, maybe you’re not the same person you used to be.”

“You’re finally realizing that?” I yelled back.

“It’s okay with me,” she said. “But if it’s not okay with you”—she turned an open palm to the crowd and offered up an innocent little shrug—“it looks like you’ve got a chance to go back, even for just one night.”

Go back where? I wanted to shake her. It isn’t there anymore!

“It doesn’t work that way, Tereza,” I shouted into the air between us.

She shook her head in bewilderment. “I don’t understand. You’re holding a guitar and there are people who want to hear a song. Are you really sure you don’t want to play?”

As we stared at each other, speakers of different languages on the
Tower of Babel, something inside me suddenly began to shift. As I scanned this mad pack of misbegotten zombies, locked eyes with each and every one of them, it all became funny. They weren’t putting me on. Their hearts were in exactly the wrong place, but their hearts were there, beating up a storm. A bunch of kids clamoring with everything they had to see their favorite musician perform just for them, and they would not be refused. I remembered what that was like. Who didn’t?

A powerful silence reigned for a moment; they smelled surrender.

“Give me the goddamn guitar,” I snapped.

If these fools wanted to hear the feeble warbling of a middle-aged has-been, then tonight was their night. They would recoil in disgust and never listen to or speak of Tremble again. It was high time they were acquainted with what we in the real world called reality.

So—fuck if I didn’t find myself sitting on an aluminum folding chair, twisting the pegs until the strings were in tune. My fingers, uncallused and alien, moved sluggishly at first, without the speed or agility they once had. But then, as if from hardwired instinct, they placed themselves on the right strings, on the right frets, at the right time. The songs flooded back and I had the random sensation of being rocked on my grandmother’s shoulder like a child, back to where I started after a lifetime of being away. The music came. Chord flowed logically to chord. I didn’t need to go looking for them; they’d been there all this time.

My thoughts, however, were anything but harmonious. A disquiet gathered in my head, faint at first, like the distant rush of a car engine finding its way through the neighborhood. But then the car was outside, honking in the driveway, and the hinges of every closed door within me started to shake. My mind went wild and my thoughts became unbound and unstable, disobedient and carried by no current. Like jazz.

Then something completely unexpected happened, and it was like I never saw it coming.

PART TWO

EXCUSE ME, DID I ASK YOU TO BLOW ON MY FOOD?

CHAPTER 4

I
came back weird. On that first morning after the trip, I awakened, showered, and dressed feeling slightly off and a little jittery. It was more than the routine anxiety of not wanting to return to work. I sensed an invisible force telling me I wasn’t supposed to return to work.

On her way out to an early appointment, Sara poked her head into the bathroom and called to me above the steady teeming of water on tile. “I’m going. I left you some coffee.”

“Thanks,” I shouted back. Then I pushed open the glass door and stuck my head out like a wet terrier. “Thanks,” I said again.

She smiled. “Bye.”

My mind seemed to be circling above something I wanted to say to her; I just couldn’t land on it.

Buttoning the sleeves of a light-blue oxford while avoiding eye contact with the bedroom mirror, I realized I was humming a tune. My mouth was forming words: “I could’ve sworn she’d gone missing, she was hiding in plain sight.” Then it formed the words again, then again. I just couldn’t place the song.

In the kitchen, I poured the remains of the coffeepot into a mug. But instead of taking a sip, I rested both hands on the countertop and stared at the stream of vapor rising out of the cup. By some mystery, I
felt like I’d already chugged a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, so I upended the mug into the sink and headed out.

It was out in the hall, awaiting an elevator to begin my six-block commute, as the one-melody phrase kept repeating itself to me, ever clearer, that I had a perplexing thought: I’d never heard this song before. “I fucking made it up,” I said out loud to the empty cream-toned walls.

At eight a.m., Metcalf was already popping Xanax like Flintstones vitamins. Before I could even set my briefcase down, he came bursting into my office with information, anecdotes, and tales of bad behavior that I’d missed during my European jaunt.

“I can’t deal with you right now,” I told him, waving him away. I faced the window and gazed out at the metropolis, surfing a sensation of coasting above the snarling zoo of buildings, as opposed to being lost within it.

I opted out of a practice group meeting, e-mailed my colleagues a succinct abstract of the Ireland deposition (“Went fine”), and fought off a progressively hysterical Metcalf, who kept returning to my door with a Big Gulp in his paw. I was used to these displays of Metcalf’s ever-tense mental state, which had accelerated a physical deterioration that was getting harder to ignore. With the vitamin D–deficient complexion, the jowls of Silly Putty, and the taiga-like hairline, he appeared to be in perpetual treatment for a disease that beat the shit out of him but didn’t have the decency to kill him dead. Several times a day, he would charge into my office, his shirt trying to untuck itself, and cry paralysis over a list of pressing issues he was unable to resolve without my input. My input was usually something along the lines of “You figure it out” or, if I was in a good mood, “Metcalf, you need a girlfriend.” My reward for being taxed with a human being so overwrought and frazzled was the gift of an occasional gaffe. There was, for instance, the conference call a few weeks earlier, an hour-long shouting match involving a dozen or so lawyers. As it concluded, everyone throwing out parting shots and threats of running to the judge, Metcalf was so busy scribbling on his notepad that he barely noticed himself absently chirping “Love you”
into the speakerphone. He would’ve heaved himself out a window if the fucking things opened.