The Time Traveler's Wife Page 10
By the time the guests arrived, John was busy rummaging through old records that had been collecting dust in a corner of the back room, between the cat’s litter trays and a stack of old wash cloths. He flicked through the cardboard covers manically, trying to remember the tune he had heard the girl in the elevator humming, only hours before. Whatever it was, it was here, in this pile of memories.
“Everyone arrived” Tracy shouted, leaning from the kitchen door.
“I’m coming, I’m coming. Just give me a second” John said.
“That’s what you said a second ago” Tracy replied.
John’s pressure was building, he wanted to break something.
“I’ll be there in a second alright? Just... go be a gracious host or something” he said, speaking clearly, under the heaviness of his frustration.
As he flicked through every cover, he felt small waves of familiarity, lapping at his conscious shore. They were landmarks, great weighted spikes that he had hammered into the asperous, rocky face of his youth, that which had given him footing and secured him should he ever fall, in the mountainous ascent from boy to man; from callow and inequitable expectation, to matured and dogged obligation.
And though each of these colored and spritely titled spikes felt familiar, as he ran his fingers from corner to corner, they didn’t seem like sure footing, not as much as they had when he was a boy. But he knew whatever the hell that song was that the girl in the elevator was singing, it was in here, somewhere.
And then he found it, near the end of the pile of warped and dusted vinyl, a record he hadn’t heard in a lifetime, since he was a young man, living life so differently than he did today; with more passion, with more exclamation, as if one day, his thoughts and his feelings and his ideas and his discoveries, as if they would account for something.
The cover was different than he imagined it; the same but different.
When he was younger, the images of human desolation and social disorder, and the scrawling illegible titles, they had more impact than they did now, and they stood out like a whore at a christening. Now, the images just looked poorly drawn and the scrawling writing, it wasn’t edgy or inauspicious; it was just annoying, no more artful or dimensional than a scuff mark on his shoe.
John slowly lowered the needle, wincing as it scratched its way on the warped ends of the record. He had forgotten the sound that a vinyl made, the warm crackling and grating, like the sound of thunder rolling about worn tires as they slowly turned on a loose gravel road. And as he listened now, his first instinct was to rattle a wire or a cable or to hit at the back of the player, to fix that infernal, broken sound.
It sounded nothing like he had imagined. The drums were less like pounding Howitzers and more like the rattling of copper coins on the inside of a crushed soda can. And the guitars, how he had once thought of them sounding like a mixture of gunfire and chainsaws, sounded like an elderly cat, crying for its supper.
And he thought about his youth; about how he had draped himself in black jeans and black shirts - painted with oral obscenities of moral and social rebellion – and black steel capped boots, the kind that could kick through the hull of a container ship.
He thought about his friends too and about how they trawled the streets each night in a sprawling net of vagrancy, looking for girls, fights, trouble, and purpose. And it seemed like back then, everything was so simple; so clear and defined; being a part of something important and having a voice where just being was all that mattered as if he was destined for something brilliant, even if he didn’t have the inspiration or the motivation to do so.
As he pulled the vinyl from its plastic sleeve, he felt as empowered and in control as he had robed in black attire; taking the record, in careful exhilaration, from its cardboard case, much the same as how a junky might draw blood into their filthy yellow syringe or in how a priest might eye a young boy as he is passed his clerical collar. He could almost taste it on his lips and on his parched and aching throat.
Then he thought about Tracy, and about how she was the contrary to all of that; how she was a bright burning sun to his infinite void like darkness. He remembered how, just as he loved to drown in this record, he loved just as much, to sit and listen to Tracy humming her silly folk songs, forgetting the words as she strummed on open chords.
And he was washed with an emotion that was kind and colored white.
But then, he thought of the girl in the elevator and the song that she was humming; that very same song. He didn’t know the name of it then and he didn’t know the name of it now, but it was the same song and the way he felt in the elevator hearing her hum – feeling tired, despondent and insignificant, that very same feeling attached itself to the memory of Tracy, sitting in the sun, strumming on her guitar and humming away as he, from within his circle of black clad rebellion, shivered at the sound of her trilling voice.
But now, her voice sounded ordinary and shrill. Though she looked as she always had in that very memory, her image became polluted with how he thought of her now.
And now the memory of her, it was cold and vacuous and it was colored black.
“This is shit,” he said, throwing the cover across the floor and pulling the plug from the wall. “What the hell was I thinking listening to this crap? I was an idiot.”
“You were young,” John’s Nipple said.
“I was stupid. Everything I thought was stupid. All of it. Scrap it all” he shouted, digging his hands into the side of his head as the needle like pain ringed in the back of his mind, twisting and skewering and wrenching the memory from its place, and all those that were tethered to it; like all the times that he lay in bed after making love, with Tracy sprawled across his chest, listening to his beating heart and singing faintly, a song she would have only just made up, and with it, every memory and every dream that ever linked to the sound of her voice.
And hundreds of thousands of memories of which were all so finely woven into the fabric of this one image of Tracy, sitting in the sunshine and humming that impossible to remember song, they too went careening into John’s cerebral void. As concrete pillars, they quickly turned to shifting sand and silted from his thoughts, being swept away by the storm of his matured discontent, to settle somewhere in the nether of his subconscious, where they would do little to bother or inspire.
Then Tracy popped her head through the door. She was speaking demented like, her eyes white, wide and maddening, and her hands urgently whisking at the air, as if there were some imaginary cord attached to John’s chest that she was pulling on, catching his conscious vessel and pulling it back to shore before it drifted over some reclusive and ungetatable horizon. She seemed angry, he could tell, by how crooked and jagged her teeth looked as her face and her lips and her tongue, all contorted into unwelcoming shapes and dimensions as they sought to form pointed words of prickly offense, the kind that, like a jabbing pointed finger, served to rile one from their still, tepid boredom into the very least they could do, to suffice their social obligation.
“What are you saying?” John shouted, reading Tracy’s exclaiming face like some foreign journal. “I can’t hear you. I think something’s wrong. Are you speaking? Are you saying something?”
It looked like Tracy was shouting now and she threw her hands in blasted forfeit before leaving the room and slamming the door so hard that it jarred shut.
John dug his fingers into his ears, scratching at the yellow wax inside.
“I’m deaf,” he said, hitting the side of his head as if he were clearing water. “I think I’m deaf. Oh god, I’m deaf.”
“Shut up for a second” John’s Nipple said. “Can you hear me? Can you hear what I’m saying?”
“Yeah. I can hear you. What the hell is happening?”
“I don’t know what you’re on about. Explain to me your dilemma.”
“Tracy. Her mouth was moving, but she didn’t say a
thing. But I know she was speaking, or shouting or screaming or whatever. I could feel the vibrations of her voice. I could see them too, like distortions of light. I could see them, for just a second. What the hell is happening to me?”
“Everything’s fine John. Just keep your shit together. People will think you’re crazy or something. They’ll lock us up. People act funny when they’re suspicious or scared.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, apologizing to his nipple.
John rested his knee against the door and barged his shoulder, gripping the handle so that it wouldn’t fling back against the wall. As he walked out into the living room, his senses were overwhelmed with a furious buzz of people nattering, smoke billowing and lights flickering. The hallway was dark and choking and though his first instinct was to get down low and go, go, go; he kept walking towards the murky, diffusing glow of red and blue lights that painted an air of satyric debauchery. And as the smoke filled his watering eyes, John sighed, for her knew exactly how little dimension there was and would be, inside that room. He knew where everyone would be sitting, what kind of glasses they would be drinking from and in what common story was being told, which facial expression was being worn by whom.
“Why bother?” he said.
“Mini hotdogs” John’s Nipple replied. “They’re delicious, and better than