The Music of Razors (22 page)

THIRTEEN

CANDLELIGHT

H
OPE’S MOTHER WASN’T SOLD ON SUNI. WHEN HOPE
and Suni had first started seeing each other a little over a year ago, he had come home with Hope one afternoon and met her mother, uncomfortable the whole time. Hope had tried to dissuade him from ever coming over. All she could think about while he was there was how embarrassed she had been by the ripped covering on the sofa. Toward the end of the visit, when her mother pointed out it was getting dark, Suni had asked if he could see Walter. Hope’s mother had lost most of her friends when they’d moved, and anyone who knew Walter as a little boy didn’t come around anymore. Having a total stranger ask to see him was so unusual Hope had expected her mother to erupt. But after an unreadable moment, she’d acquiesced, and Hope had taken Suni upstairs.

The body was where it always was. The nurse at the time, a young guy on an internship trying to earn extra cash, was pointlessly manipulating Walter’s legs. Hope didn’t know why her mother bothered with maintaining the physio at all. Walter had twisted out of shape from lack of use years ago, muscle contractures contorting his arms into a spastic, huddled tangle about his chest. She could tell the nurse knew it was pointless, doing it to get it done, get paid, and get out. Hope had wondered what he thought of it all: this girl and her crazy mother, this breathing corpse and the Japanese kid they’d just led into the room. Felt sorry for the kid, probably. It hardly surprised Hope that most of the nurses never lasted two months, and after a while her mother had to stop hiring them at all.

The worst part of Walter was below the waist. More bone than skin, really. Legs that were practically vestigial, having been unused since he was four. And he’d been twenty then. They looked like they belonged on someone half his age—half his age and dead. It made her think of Auschwitz. The body was ghost-pale with hair to match; dark blue veins faint on his forehead and hands. He smelled like an old man, a dank body odor mixed with soap. The quiet, lingering scent of rubber and shit built up over the years.

The bed stood by a large window that looked out on a fairyland of streetlights and lawns and amber-colored lounge rooms.

Suni had stood there, staring at the body, maybe mesmerized, maybe adrift in his own thoughts.

Then he had said, “Th-that’s him. Jesus, that’s rrr-rrr-really him.”

Hope had felt instantly sick. Telling Suni about Walter, about how much he creeped her out, had been a mistake; about the years she’d spent scared out of her mind that she’d be in his room one day, alone, washing him, and he’d open his eyes and croak something, something he’d seen in the dead place he’d been all those years.

“That’s enough. Say good-bye,” her mother had said, abruptly.

Without saying another word, Suni had left the room. But not without glancing back one last time.

He never asked to look in again. Still, the incident had made it easier for Hope to break off their relationship when she felt she had to.

But then it was always like that. She bit down on it, told herself she was a tiger, and got on with her life. It was a habit that had served her well. If she could last till she got out of home she’d be fine. She could take risks then. She knew people that had lives smoother than her own had been, and they were a complete mess. Hope didn’t do drugs, had never tried to kill herself, and by that standard she was pretty much intact. She just had to last till she graduated. No problem.

Suni lived in a two-story house with an undercover garage. The garage and laundry took up half the ground floor, and Suni’s room the other. It gave him a place to himself—a place that usually wasn’t intruded upon by his mother, who occupied the space upstairs.

Hope crept through the yard toward his window. The jasmine blooming beneath the stairs filled the air with a warm and heavy perfume. It was almost eleven, and the upstairs lights were off. Soft candlelight glowed amber from behind Suni’s curtains. Hope climbed three stairs and knocked lightly on the glass. The curtain was drawn aside and Suni opened the window.

“Hey,” he said, sticking his head out to look upstairs. His hair was tied into a loose ponytail, and his glasses were propped on his head. “She asleep?”

“Looks like it.”

“Cool.” He stepped aside, rubbing an eye with one finger, to let Hope slip under the railing and through the window.

The room was warm and smelled like boy, the way it always did: like warm skin and socks. Candlelight flickered on the dresser, reflected in the mirror, and cast a glow throughout the room. Faded gilding on the wrinkled and bubbled wallpaper glowed a subdued, tarnished gold—old designs remembering how pretty they used to be. On the floor other wicks burned in plastic cups, arranged almost ceremonially around where Suni was working. When Suni had been younger his father had given him a lightbox to draw on—a small table on wheels with an opaque acrylic surface—but Suni still spent most of the time drawing on the floor, and the lightbox had always been a glorified lamp-
cum
-beside-table. The alarm clock and a couple of empty Coke cans sat there, underlit by the suffused white glow. The drawing of the clockwork cube lay there, atop the folio, the tools of Suni’s art arranged haphazardly within arm’s reach. It was reverent and altar-like, and Hope was sure it was intentional. Suni had his single bed as well as a spare bed against the opposite wall, beneath a sliding glass window that looked out on the yard, behind bamboo blinds. There was a foldout bed that doubled as a couch, and a dresser and a clothes rack he’d made with a broomstick and two lengths of nylon rope hung from the rafters. He had plenty of floor space, even if it was covered in ugly tan patterned carpet that kind of matched the wallpaper.

“How is everything?” he asked, wandering back to his work.

Hope glanced at the ceiling, and the downy spiderwebs that clung to its chocolate-brown underbelly. “You disappeared today.”

Suni shrugged and sat down on the floor, cross-legged. He adjusted his glasses and picked up a charcoal stick. “There’s a lll-little wine left by the buh-bed if you want some.”

They had a glass of white each, Suni let the player cycle through his CDs—all old stuff—and they talked for a few hours. Suni alternated between letting Oolric, his orange furbomb of a cat, lounge around on his lap, and working on his drawing. Pistons lanced and pumped through the device as multitudinous gears turned and ground, a crafted prison for the person trapped within. The prisoner’s slack, senseless face was the centerpiece of one of the planes, while arms and legs stuck out elsewhere at strange angles. Great pistons were placed to grind perpetually through the body of the captive, who seemed incapable of dying, with the end result being to provide power to the cheap-looking music box atop the contraption.

The drawing left Hope wondering how Suni’s mind worked. He’d said he thought the cube was his greatest piece. The entire mechanism, he said, was a metaphor for life. The captive’s own body powers the machine, and while the machine works the captive suffers; and while the captive suffers the music box plays. As the music ends the greatest piston slams through the captive’s body, withdraws, and the cycle begins again: an endless circuit of pain for a little beauty.

Some of Suni’s artwork hung on the walls around the room, rendered on thick cartridge. The piece that really bugged Hope was the gray-shaded watercolor of four headless people playing cards in a room piled high with bodies, sprawled and layered over one another, all eyes and ribs, fingers and feet. It wasn’t the subject matter that bothered her so much as the neat-haired little boy standing off to the right, staring like he was going to say something. Though the piece was three years old, it still held the acrid chemical perfume of the maximum-hold hair spray Suni used to lacquer all his art.

“That piece with the little boy, what does this mean?” She looked over her shoulder. “Suni?”

“Whatever you wuh-want it to mean,” he said.

She looked at it again.

“Www-what do you think it means?” he asked.

She thought about it, then shrugged. “It’s your picture.”

“It must make you think of something.”

The boy in the picture had very old eyes. Not wrinkled, not clouded, just old. She wondered if Suni had gone for that effect, or if it was just an accident. There was an archway or something—a way out, all thickly penciled shadow—just beyond the body pile. Someone was standing there: a long, thin shadow in a hat.

“I used to have this dream, when I was a kid.” She went back to her drink. “It makes me think of that.”

“A suh-sleep dream or a wish dream?” said Suni as he popped in a Creatures CD.

“Sleep dream.” “Pluto Drive” started up, eerie and menacing and slow. “Got anything livelier?” she asked.

“No circus music.”

“Well, anything perkier than this.”

“I can work to this.”

“I can sleep to this. Got any chocolate?”

“Maybe upstairs. What was the dream?”

She had a sip of wine. It tasted like watery gasoline, just the way wine shouldn’t. “I’d wake up and think I could hear Walter mumbling in his sleep.”

“Yeah?”

She nodded. “I’d cry, because I knew that now Walter was back my parents would finally forget I was even there.”

Suni sucked his lips for a second, and then asked, “What was he saying?”

She shrugged. “That’s the thing. I’d lie there, and I’d try not to listen. I didn’t want to know what someone like that would have to say after years of being dead.”

“And that www-wuh-was it? That’s www-wuh-where it ended?”

She shook her head. “After a while I couldn’t help but understand what was being said. Whoever was talking, it wasn’t Walter. Someone was telling him stories.”

Suni blinked. “Stories?”

“Every night a different one.”

“And…?”

“And what? I don’t remember what was said.”

Suni shifted, sitting on his haunches. “You must remember something.”

Hope stared at him. “I don’t. Why do you care so much?”

It was as if someone had clapped their hands in front of his face. “It’s interesting,” he said, self-consciously.

“I remember bits,” she conceded. “This man talked about coyotes. About the way they can sound at night, hidden from sight. Like they’re talking to each other about things you wouldn’t understand.” She sipped her wine and remembered some more. “One night he talked about how some of the angels that fell with the Devil were allowed back into Heaven, after a long time.”

Sitting across from her, Suni was softly panting through slightly parted lips.

“Suni?”

He picked up the sketch of the clockwork cube and a pencil, rested the page on his folio, and began working again. Hope didn’t have anything more to add to the story, and Suni had made an excuse about needing to use the bathroom, so she left it at that. He’d come back about ten minutes later and started drawing. The subject of dreams didn’t come up again.

“Did you hear they wound up kicking that kid out of school?” Hope asked.

Suni looked over. “The dope-dealing thing?” he asked.

“Apparently. The VP mentioned it the other day. Didn’t come out and say who had been expelled, just that a student had been caught with dope and wouldn’t be coming back. And that anyone else caught could expect the same.”

“Wanker.”

Hope shrugged. “He has his good days.”

“Ssss-suh-suh-’scuse me?”

“There was the time that kid was leaving death threats in whatser-name’s desk. Julie Green.”

“So? Wuh-what’d the VP have to do with it?”

“Green said she knew who it was, and showed the VP the note. The guy had misspelled
intestines.
Spelled it
t-e-n-e-s.
So the VP calls this kid to the office, hands him a piece of paper, and gets him to write down the word
intestines.
And the kid misspells it the same way. So they caught him.”

“Hope, that’s how
I
thought you spell
intestines.
”

“Oh.”

“No, really,” Suni insisted. “The guy
is
a wanker. So concerned about the image of his precious school…”

“Well we do have a rep,” Hope said, then regretted it.

“Www-we’re a suh-state school!” Suni cried out. “Of course every privately ruh-run buh-boys and girls school is going to look down their nose at us! That’s a given. It doesn’t mean we’re a fuh-fuh-ffff-friggin’ drug den. Not that I care. The whole place can burn, as far as I’m concerned. I wish those people would just explode.”

“Poison them.”

“We could brick up the front door and throw gnomes at anyone that comes up the path.”

“That could work.”

“It ccc-could.”

Hope finished the last of her wine.

About the time she’d changed schools and moved to a new house their doctor had tried putting both herself and her mother on antidepressants. Her mother took the pills, Hope declined, though she’d really had to think about it. At the time she felt like she was going to break in half if someone didn’t help her, and sometimes it still felt that way. But in the end she decided against meds and took up writing down everything in her journal instead. A friend of hers had been on pills once, took years to get off them, and never seemed quite the same again.

“School heightens my appreciation of free time,” Suni was saying, touching up something on the paper. “I figure it works on the same principle as erotic asphyxiation.” He lightly licked his finger, smudged something. “Strangulation…,” he mumbled. “Amplifies the eventual orgasm. Damn…” He grabbed the eraser, delicately flicking it over a point on the page. “Shit.”

It became obsessive, Hope’s journal keeping, going through a hardcover notebook a week. It was inevitable that her mother would eventually want to look at them, and when she finally did she also got around to burning them. Hope had come home to find her mother in the backyard with her books and a can of lighter fluid. Some were unsalvageable, but she managed to save most. On those occasions she felt the need to retrieve them from their place in the padlocked steel ammo container beneath Suni’s bed, she had to remember not to read them by an open flame. She trusted him with them, and her mother had no idea where Suni lived. The pages of every surviving journal before a certain period in time all had wrinkled pages and still reeked of Zippo fluid.