Ophelia, Alive Read online

  The motley drama—oh, be sure

  It shall not be forgot!

  With its phantom chased forevermore,

  By a crowd that seize it not.

  Through a circle that ever returneth in

  To the self-same spot,

  And much of madness, and more of sin,

  And horror the soul of the plot.

  Smelly dreadlocked kid is gone now, and he says Thank you and puts his guitar down and goes outside for a smoke. I can see him out there, his cigarette a single glowing ember amid the snow and the smoke and the window ghosts. Some guys come onstage and unplug some stuff and then plug it back in, and then another act takes the stage, a duo this time, two skinny guys in bandanas with lots of tattoos. One of them straps on a guitar and the other drums on an upside-down beach bucket. Guitar Dude sings “Puff the Magic Dragon” with a wink and a nod while Bucket Guy closes his eyes and pounds. Come on, guys, the song’s not really about drugs. Snopes debunked that one, like, a billion years ago.

  But see, amid the mimic rout,

  A crawling shape intrude!

  A blood-red thing that writhes from out

  The scenic solitude!

  It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs

  The mimes become its food

  And seraphs sob at vermin fangs

  In human gore imbued.

  I’m starting to see what I missed as a kid, when I would wake up in cold sweats scared of the Worm, as if it were some sort of giant monster that would find me in the night. But it’s not about that, it’s about the inevitability of death, that we’ll all be eaten from the inside in the end, by the entropic heat death of the universe, if nothing else. And maybe when we’re huddled in bed at night as kids, glancing sideways at our half-open closet door, all we’re really hiding from is the inescapable decay of our flesh.

  But if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a god kissing carrion...

  Anyway, it’s not like rich white kids have much else to worry about.

  Now that barista in the bandana is up on stage saying, “Please welcome Kate...” and Kate my roommate is up there now and suddenly things feel less awkward. Maybe because someone I actually know is here, or maybe because she can rock those dreads so much better than the white boys who just climbed down. She plugs in a few more things, and there are a few more sparks, and she starts playing some chords. Bendy, loopy chords, with a finger in a glass bottleneck, sliding up and down the neck of her guitar. And then her voice comes through, one of crystal and coal, one that barely needs a microphone at all:

  Trying to forget the things from last year,

  Trying to push the night on through.

  Trying to forget the things from last year,

  Trying to push the night on through.

  Because I know that things won’t last here,

  Behold, I’m making all things new.

  Out—out are the lights—out all!

  And, over each quivering form,

  The curtain, a funeral pall,

  Comes down with the rush of a storm,

  From midnight soil, a new shoot growing,

  It’s small but strong and breaking through.

  From midnight soil, a new shoot growing,

  It’s small but strong and breaking through.

  Something beyond my seeing or knowing,

  Behold, I’m making all things new.

  While angels, all pallid and wan,

  Uprising, unveiling, affirm,

  That the play was the tragedy “Man,”

  And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.

  A river flowing in the desert,

  A heartbeat in the carious rue.

  A river flowing in the desert,

  A heartbeat in the carious rue.

  Something that overcomes all effort,

  Behold, I’m making all things new.

  As she plays the ghosts on the windows fade and the lights in the bare rafters warm, and the room is filled with old friends sharing life over steam and biscotti. I didn’t see it before, but I see it now; just people huddled together inside the drafty walls, crowding around tiny bits of the sun, trying to push away the ghosts for just a few minutes. I look back toward the door where I was waiting in line earlier, and I can almost see my hour-ago self still standing there, staring at my shoes and trying not to acknowledge anyone, ignoring that they’re all just the same as me, looking for somewhere to hide, and that sometimes that takes a crowded room and a beat-up guitar and a four-dollar cup of coffee.

  And I make up my mind that I’ll just stop thinking thoughts about other people and thoughts about myself and just let myself get lost in the sound and the light and the warmth and for the first time in years I escape, if only just for a few minutes.

  And then, before I realize it, I’m alone.

  The music has stopped, and the crowd has left, and nothing lingers in the golden air except the clanking of dishes being bussed and the shuffle of the guys tearing down the stage. I look down at the bottom of my mug, and it’s a sad, swirling halo of dregs that roll from side to side when I tip my fist back and forth. The almost-used-to-be-white bottom catches the light and shows a spiderweb pattern left from a thousand previous refills.

  I push myself free from my slouch and find the place to drop off the used mugs. A brown tub stored under the cream and sugar that they leave out for the non-hipsters who drop by. And then I just stand here, looking around the mostly empty room, wondering what I’m supposed to do.

  I reach into my pocket and pull out the flyer Kate gave me, the one I’ve been thumbing since that night on the skywalk, tattered and worn now, soft like a piece of muslin. Still warm from my body heat. Some of the deep black texture from the laser printing has worn away, but the name and the date still catch the light in a way that only the darkest blacks can.

  I wander back toward the stage, where she’s unplugging cords, loading speakers onto dollies. Her leather skirt obviously isn’t conducive to all the bending over, and her dreads flop around, narrowing her field of vision to only the cable spaghetti directly in front of her. Still, she’s probably done this a thousand times.

  I don’t know why I’m standing here watching her. I should just go.

  “Here.” Before I can turn away, there’s a mountain of black cable flying through the air and into my face, and it almost knocks me over, but I catch it. And then she’s throwing another. “Take this too.” Then she grabs a dolly and she’s flying out the door with it, saying “Follow me,” and we’re out the door and into the night, and I’m glad I wore my sweatshirt. She’s far ahead of me, and I’m running to keep up. She’s turned a corner with her stack of speakers, and now she’s loading them into the back of an enormous van made of dents that reeks of cigarettes. It looks like it probably hasn’t been cleaned out since the ‘70s, but she’s clearly got a system for loading stuff into it. She puts the speakers in first while I stand here buried under a pile of black cable, only able to see thin slats of what’s going on. Black boxes sliding into their slots, barely illuminated by a dusty dome light, clunks and clacks, and then she starts digging me out of rubbery blackness. “Thanks for your help.” She hangs them on some hooks, and then says, “C’mon, I have more to get,” and drags me back up the hill to the stage, where she starts rolling cords and stacking speakers again.

  “Kate?”

  “Yeah?” She doesn’t even slow down; she’s stacking and rolling twice as fast as she was before.

  “Kate, um...?” But what am I going to say? Thanks for the show, but I have to get going? Yeah, that’s bitchy. I can’t say that.

  “What?”

  “What am I doing...?”

  “You’re helping me tear down my equipment. C’mon.” She throws me another stack of cords, and then another, and she and her dolly lead me out the door and down the hill and around the corner to her van again, where she starts sliding stuff into place and hanging cords up like before.

  “Kate...”

&nb
sp; “What?” she grunts, pushing a stubborn speaker into a tiny slot.

  “Why am I here?”

  That didn’t come out the way I meant it to, and honestly, I’m not quite sure what I meant to say. “Because I invited you?” she says, staring blankly.

  “Um—”

  She sighs and she wipes the sweat off her forehead and says, “Look, I guess—I guess I don’t really know why I invited you here, honestly. You just looked like you needed something to do with yourself that wasn’t completely awful and depressing. And I had this coming up, and it seemed like an okay thing. That’s all this is, really.” She slides forward and sits on the bumper, her heels dangling above the frozen asphalt. “God, I need a cigarette. You want one?” Pulls some Camels out of her coat, grabs one in her mouth, and lights it behind her hand.

  “No thanks, I don’t smoke,” I tell her. But I sit down next to her to escape the wind.

  “Is there anything you aren’t uptight about, Phelia?” she says, and I stare at my feet. She adds, “I’m sorry, that came out wrong. It’s just—maybe you wouldn’t be so down all the time if you were willing to try something new every once in a while.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” She’s still holding the pack out, so I grab one. “You know this stuff kills you, right?”

  “Everything kills you.” She sucks down a wad of smoke and her ember lights up the cold, dry air. I still haven’t lit mine. Maybe I won’t. I’m flipping it between my fingers in a vain attempt to look cool. She watches me flip it around for a while, and the finally says, “Look, I don’t really know why I brought you here. Sorry if this is awkward.”

  “You said something about telling me what inspires you to write. Something about how you stopped being...what was it you said?”

  “Constipated?”

  “Ew. Yeah.”

  She kicks at the icy air. “God, I so didn’t want to have this conversation. I guess part of me was hoping you’d just walk out the door and go home at the end. I just—I’m terrible at being honest about myself. I guess that’s why I write songs? As long as you write songs, you can hide your words behind your music.”

  Wind and glowing embers. Silence like a vapor. “Who taught you to play slide guitar?” I finally say. I’m hiding the cigarette behind my back now, hoping she’ll forget about it and stop trying to talk me into smoking it.

  “Oh, that?” She laughs. “I wish I had an awesome story about selling my soul to the Devil at a crossroads or something, but I don’t. I watched some videos on YouTube, taught myself. I just picked it up.”

  “That’s still pretty impressive.”

  She sucks her cigarette down to the filter and tosses it into the street. An orange glow bouncing in the snowy blue, throwing sparks till it hits a snowdrift and its heat dissolves into the entropy.

  She lights another.

  “It’s really not,” she says. “It’s talent, not skill.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Y’know. It’s something innate, not hard work. Some people work their asses off to get good at something, and some people are just lucky and barely have to try.”

  “And you’re—”

  She laughs. “Yeah, I’m the latter. Some people can add huge numbers in their heads without using a calculator; I can pick up an instrument and figure it out without really working at it. I can’t take credit for what I do. It’s dumb luck, not hard work.”

  “That’s still...I mean, I’m impressed.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “Oh. Okay. I’ll try not to be. I guess.” Because what else can I say to that? “But I liked the songs.”

  “Don’t get too excited about a little bit of 12-bar blues. I found something that works for me, that’s all.”

  And we sit, staring at our shoes, till I finally say, “Were you going to tell me how...?”

  “God, here we go.”

  I’m a little startled at how she interrupts. “Um—”

  She sighs. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to snap like that.” Stubs out her cigarette on the bumper beneath her, lights a new one. “Sorry,” she says again. “I was just really hoping we wouldn’t have to have this conversation. I’m starting to understand why I used to hate listening to people talk about religion.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s fucking annoying.” And when I say nothing to that, she just leans against the wall of speakers behind her, and the van rocks on its broken shock absorbers, and she whispers:

  Remember not the former things,

  nor consider the things of old.

  Behold, I am doing a new thing;

  now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

  I will make a way in the wilderness

  and rivers in the desert.

  She says it to no one in particular. To the night. To banish the dark and the cold.

  “What does that mean?” she says. “Making things new? It’s such a weird turn of phrase, y’know? Things don’t get newer, ever. You fix stuff up, you put a fresh coat of paint on it, but it’s not new, it’s just shinier. Things die, they decay, and eventually they give way to the same heat death as everything else in the universe.” She sucks more smoke into her lungs, slowly killing them, and says, “Matter has been around for billions of years. It’s all old. Everything’s old, no matter what you do to it. Everything is gonna rot in the ground, and then the ground itself will rot away.”

  I’m thumbing the Poe book in my pocket, feeling each dog-ear, each bit of paper that rubs off onto my skin.

  “Do I sound like a stoner?” she says. “Sorry.”

  I laugh.

  “But, I mean, look at this,” she says pointing to her cigarette. “If you stand outside in the cold smoking a cigarette, you look like a badass—but all you’re doing is killing yourself. How is it badass to kill yourself, especially since the universe is already doing it for you? That’s not badass, that’s surrender.” I’m still hiding the cigarette she gave me, and she adds, “I’m sorry, I’m really not trying to kill you. I was just trying to get you to loosen up. Not a perfect illustration, I know.”

  I laugh again.

  She says, “I imagine you’re not much of a partier.”

  “Well—I mean—I’ve been to a few—”

  “It’s okay,” she says. “You don’t have to be embarrassed of not doing stupid stuff. Isn’t that weird? How you get social points around here for acting stupid? Staying up all night, binge drinking, that sort of thing? People admire you for being destructive instead of creating.”

  “Not everyone here is like that.”

  “Yeah, I know. But it’s how I assumed everyone was, for sure. Maybe that’s on me. I was buying into the party culture, rebelling against a repressive childhood that I never actually had, y’know? One last hurrah of rejecting adulthood as a concept. No, though, you’re right—not everyone around here thinks that way. Maybe it was just me.”

  “It’s pretty shallow.”

  “I know, right? God. And it’s why I’m still here. It’s the whole reason I’m still stuck in school, finishing up credits.” She’s waving her cigarette in the air now, trying to stab out her demons with the fiery ash. “I should have graduated by now, should be out in the world, contributing, or something, but here I am, still making up credits because I bought into a lifestyle that only exists in Axe commercials, or something. I mean, right?”

  “I don’t know.” But she’s not talking to me anymore. Just shouting at the night.

  “I showed up here, told everyone I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t. Not really. I didn’t even know what writing was. I wasn’t ready to work, to bash a pen against a notebook for hours trying to make something happen. I just wanted to tell people I was a writer and feel really cool about it. And in between telling people I was a writer and feeling really cool, I just wanted to act stupid.”

  “You were a kid.”

  And she says, “Yeah, y’know, maybe that’s it. Maybe it was just the last throes of adolescence.” Sh
e sucks more smoke into her lungs and finally says, “You know that the very first teaching of Zen is to deny the teachings of Zen?”

  “Really?”

  “I dunno, I heard that on NPR once.”

  “Oh.” I breathe in some secondhand smoke and swish it around in my brain. “How does that even work?”

  “It doesn’t, right? I think that’s kind of the point. It doesn’t make sense on the surface, but nothing spiritual does, I don’t think. Anyway, I first heard that my sophomore year, and it occurred to me that any real pursuit of knowledge has to start with questioning what you already know. And that almost nobody actually has the balls—the ovaries—to do that. To question herself.” A beat-up car rumbles by, and the moon comes out from behind a cloud, and she says, “It’s probably not that brilliant of a revelation. It’s just part of growing up, I guess—realizing that the stuff you were laser-focused on was just a tiny shard of an infinite universe, and quite possibly the tiniest and least important shard. And you start thinking that maybe you should chain your soul to something bigger, something that’s outside the universe. So you start looking. And then, maybe when you find it, the poetry comes. And then the poetry turns into song.”

  She’s fumbling in her pocket with some rosary beads. Trying to hide them.

  “Anyway,” she says, “I’m not trying to Jesus-juke you or anything, I’m just trying to be honest about who I am. Like I said, it’s fucking annoying. I know it is. But I can’t pretend that the big questions don’t exist, or that they don’t gnaw at me, just because nobody wants to hear my opinions on them.”

  She sucks more smoke down her throat.

  “But don’t let me act like I’m some sort of deep thinker or anything. I know I’m not. I just needed something bigger than myself and had a friend willing to take me to mass.”

  “And things got better?”

  She laughs. “Better than what? Actually, they got worse. It’s kind of depressing to know you get meaning out of something that’s just an annoying cliché to other people. Kind of depressing to know that I’m pouring my heart out to you right now and all you’re thinking is God, she’s so annoying. But when a 2,000-year-old dead guy talks to you from a cracker and says Follow me, I mean, what can you do? It’s like getting abducted by aliens, right? You don’t believe it’s a thing until it happens to you, and then you’re the only one who thinks it’s a thing, and you’re like, Well, either I’m the crazy one or I’m not. But if it’s happened to you, then you’ll never convince yourself that it hasn’t. It didn’t matter at all before, and then suddenly it matters more than anything.”