“There are only forty thousand of us,” Mesia says.
“Goddammit. I already—”
“Of us,” she repeats.
“I don’t—”
“I’m telling you.”
We walk into one of the rooms. Inside it feels like it’s 1996 and there’s tobacco smell, but of course no real smoke is coming from anywhere. The cozy oppression of a college bar refuses to go unnoticed. These places are supposed to let us forget about the question, but it only takes too hard of a look at a wall corner and the question is back upon us.
You want to know, then you don’t. Thirty-six times.
It’s supposed to be nine o’clock and maybe it is. It’s dark outside. They got that right. I look around to make sure my bandmates are here. They are. I don’t know why I always check. They’re so reliable.
Mesia and I are now a yard and a half apart because I have to start soon.
She says, “I want—”
“I don’t.”
“The fact that I can want something so much—”
“Means nothing,” I say. “So did—” To change the subject I add, “It will be pitch-perfect tonight. It will feel real.”
“Good lu—I’m not supposed to say that, am I? Break a le—or is that just for actors?”
I nod. I love you. I really do.
The stage is not high, as this place has low ceilings. Of the four Pale Pachyderms, I’m the least talented musician, but I am the frontman. I would sing, but it hurts my throat. Guitar is more my speed; I prefer to just play. Some songs go better with few words or none, and those are the only songs I write.
I’m ten inches taller than Mesia so it would be less of a bend to kiss her forehead, but she demands lips. Then she turns around and joins the audience, now forty or fifty strong.
“I checked you,” says the guitarist to the drummer.
“And I—”
“No, I mean I checked you.”
I have checked both of them. Their conversation means absolutely nothing.
I test my guitar to make sure the amplifier works. One of the people (Rob) by the bar is smoking and the light of his cigarette is the wrong color and takes too long to go out. I have played here three times, so I’ve begun to learn some of the names. Names. I have been told there are ten billion names in the world.
“Ready?” The voice doesn’t seem to come from anywhere.
I start playing. The drummer’s supposed to do that, but I do. Usually, I don’t notice the crowd, but there is a girl with black hair who looks just like Mesia, but younger—too young to be ordering anything alcoholic, and since it’s a college bar, they definitely do check. If I know anything, she will be twenty-five before I see her again, and she’ll be even more striking. She walks diffidently to the counter. Whatever she orders has no ice in it. I realize she came into this place with no coat, though it is supposed to be March.
I finish the first song. The second song. Rob’s cigarette glow is still too yellow and bright. The third song. The black-haired girl is even closer to the front than Mesia. She’s stunning. As I start the fourth song, I guess there are more than a hundred people in this tiny venue. It must be—it would be—uncomfortable. Fifth song. The smell of beer, the indoor temperature over eighty degrees, is starting to nauseate me. Sixth. I enjoy music; no, I love music. Seventh. As the young girl leaves the front to greet a tall male friend, I realize she has no left hand. It is perverse, but I feel relief.
There’s a problem with the amp. The audience doesn’t seem to mind the pause. I look at Mesia to see if there is motion in her shoulders.
“Fixed,” says a voice, and then my bandmates are arguing about something.
“No, man, you don’t get it.”
“You don’t get it. There are new writers, fucking great ones you don’t even know about.”
“And they will—”
Mesia comes up. I am so worried she will ask why I was looking at the younger version of her, and I will have to explain that it was not attraction but a deep, gut-rolling fear—
She asks, “How many more?”
I put up four fingers.
She smiles. “You’re good. You’re really good. I can’t believe it took so long for you to let me come.”
As she walks back into the bar crowd, I realize that she’s rolled up the sleeves of her black T-shirt. The light makes her arms pale and long. She finds her place and looks over her shoulder at me before she has turned her body around. What a good thing I have.
My bandmates are still arguing.
“The world isn’t stable if there are too many people in it.”
“It’s not the number. There’s too many egos. Everyone has to be some fucking hotshot. No one’s reading because everyone wants to be a famous writer, and the only way to fix that would be—”
I really don’t want to hear this, so I start playing the eighth song. I play the ninth song, the best I’ve ever done it. There are two hundred people listening and it worries me to realize that if anything bad happened in here, it would be unreal. People would try to pass through each other. Tenth song. We pretend we’re finished, but the crowd demands an encore. This enthusiasm is rare and refreshing. This didn’t happen the last time. I—we—play the final ballad, nine minutes of prog-rock in 7/4 time. There’s applause. I’m old enough to know that everybody who’s real gets listeners over time, but it still feels good.
The crowd demands a second encore, but we have to get off the stage for the next act. The number 817 appears on my wristwatch and that number isn’t the time. I add up some numbers in my head. Good, good. The next time I play, we’ll have a real stage and better acoustics.
I skip goodbyes. Mesia and I leave the venue. There is half a mile between this place and the gate, and we could skip that too, but I enjoy the cold so we walk through the snow. The sky is a pleasing black. I love that. I can’t stand light pollution.
We have known each other for two years, but we still walk hand-in-hand.
When I met her, I had no band. I had no music to back me. I was a poet, with only my words. I wrote every line myself—no covers, no samples, no buffs. I gave a reading in this typical steam-heated New England bookstore where I felt either too old or too young to be there, and she did not rush the podium, but she did position herself so I would see her on the way out.
“Every word,” she said.
“Every word what?”
She smiled and her eyes meant it. “If I said I was ‘hanging on every word,’ it would be...”
“Cliché.”
“Which everyone uses, but never in high register.”
“Not if they’re any good.”
She touched her bare elbow. “You secretly think your low register is everyone else’s high one.”
I tuck my papers into a folder. “The reverse. But you might be the only one who's figured that out.”
We did not fall for each other immediately, because I did not trust my intuition. There were six months of slow electricity. It was hard to forget about the question. It took a meeting on the first floor of a college library, although we were both too old to be in college. It took a silver couch from the 1970s. It took her to make the first move. The rest is all we know.
In the present, as we walk under late-winter stars, the air warms as we approach the gate. We step through and it is still ten minutes after ten but the time changes by a hundred years.
“Thomas,” she says.
I am still sweaty from the performance, and the winter coat—it’s also March here, but the air is humid and salty—will make it worse, but I am in no mood to take it off.
“Thomas, I have an idea.”
“What?”
“I’ll prove it. I was a singer. Am a singer. We’ll go back through the gate, and I’ll hold a high note. I won’t stutter.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Mesia doesn’t say anything. We walk twenty yards in silence.
I owe her an explanation. “Five years ago. They fixed that five years ago.”
“A fact that is completely fucking irrelevant to me, because—”
It would be either way. “Mesia, stop.”
The stars are harder to find here. There’s a lamp with no top-cover and I reach for a gun that doesn’t exist and arguably hasn’t for two hundred years, and even though my hand is empty I raise and point as if to shoot out the offending light. Still, there are places worse than this. There are places where the sky is orange. Orange.
It isn’t so bad, I decide. I don’t like the color of city light, but adore the faint creases of Mesia’s face. She looks twenty-four; I wish she looked thirty. The black headband suits her. I am so glad we met, and that she loves my poetry, even though I don’t write anymore. She chose to meet me. She could have stayed in the audience. I’m lucky.
We are about forty steps from my house when she stops.
“Do you believe me?”
For a moment I am so convinced she is feeling something raw I almost break. I do not break. But I do tell her the truth. “I do, Mesia.”
“It’s not like they lie, and I have money.”
I shake my head. “It’s been free for years. And you’re right. They never lie.”
The air is still and it must be seventy-five. Even in the tropics, nights are supposed to be cool.
I add, “When?”
“Only once. Eight years ago. Sophomore roommate.”
“Oh.” I already know the answer, so I don’t ask.
She laughs but is nervous. “More than one?”
“Thirty-six. I checked friends, neighbors. I didn’t think I was hurting anything. It turns out I wasn’t.”
“But the stakes were never...”
“One with stakes. Lapianne.”
“Oh.” She looks at her own shoulder. “I understand. I do, but I really want you to know—”
I step around a palm frond in the street. “I know you do.”
“So why not? You and me, this is all we have in this fucked-up world. Why not make yourself sure of the one thing we both want you to know?”
There are ten billion names in the universe. “The odds.”
I may or may not be a talented guitarist. I may or may not be improving. I think Mesia thinks I am.
leave us hanging