Jon Udelson

Troy Carls and I sat side-by-side in the Micro where he told me about a movie—or about something else I couldn’t be certain didn’t happen to him. A robbery at the world-famous dealership, his story went, the mass transport of trunks full of loaded syringes, terrorist or humanitarian intrigues, a plan to be stopped or executed without error. He spoke fast and I scribbled hard on my napkin, by now gone full stain with ink, unable to keep the plotlines straight. But I was into it, into all of it. Troy recognized my need to know and knew I couldn’t get enough.

            “Get my next one,” he said. “Or I can’t keep going.”

Well, what do you think I did?

            Not even a thank you.

            The secret and unspoken side of Troy’s story went like this. Either off camera or behind his back, which won the award for biggest back in all the worlds, another plot veered in the direction plots tend to veer. A man, possibly a woman, maybe a group of them, but who no one knew, who had nothing to do with nothing but their own dreams about time and the human contraption, bunkered down. They built a bomb of clocks and gears, of chemicals and percussion. They built it for their own reasons apart from the plot contained within the frames feeding through the projector of Troy’s mind, the audio track zapping out the speakers of his mouth.

            I know this because scenes before what should have been the climax to Troy’s story, when after much deliberation the players he spoke of finalized their grand maneuver, or their maneuver to stop the maneuver—the syringes emptied, the blueprints laid out, the targets, possibly the sick or possibly the healthy, all accounted for—the bomb detonates. Offscreen but somewhere close enough. An explosion fills Troy’s screen.

He tells it like it is. Everyone we knew to feel anything about is suddenly dead. The end.

            It was quickly becoming the only story we knew how to tell. There was no point in asking more.

            “Where did you see this?” I asked. My attempt at figuring out how much of this wasn’t actually not real.

            “From the high ground,” Troy said. Where else?

Troy would be dead and gone inside of four months. I knew this then the same way I knew everything. People I spent my entire life sitting stool-high next to now turned jelly around me, and others whose names I had only heard once or twice before and whom I barely believed real began saying I could prophesy after dosing from the Micro’s dirty taps. But the truth was simpler—for me, for us, back then, for how we were. It was more that from atop the crag of time I felt the present with the soles of my feet, my toes curling over the edge. One step farther and it was all air.

            Not that anybody ever listened—honestly, truly listened. Which was fine with me, better perhaps. I wanted no part in helping carry the imbalanced weight my words would have in their heads.

            I decided to keep it a secret from Troy, though looking back I sensed he knew.

            “Don’t you guys have a gig tonight?” he asked. We had changed subjects a few rounds back, from what was either that movie or else some obscure angle of Troy’s life, but no matter how much I try now, I can’t remember the intervening conversation. It was probably about either music or the band or money, but it might have been about my increasingly vivid dreams of the chasm where this life we all tried to live would eventually lead us, which I couldn’t be sure weren’t real. I thought on Troy’s question and patted around for my phone to text our screamo lead singer Scout, but then I remembered I had lost my phone about a month ago.

            “I hope there’s a show,” Troy said. He looked giddy, and I believe I drank that night with the last true mosh pit king. He sat there round-bodied and thick-fisted, mostly bald at almost twenty in a way that made him look strong, my height despite hunching lower on his stool than I did on mine. An image churned behind his eyes. “I really want to punch that fuck,” he said.

            Never had I punched anyone in my life, and I wondered which fuck Troy was talking about and I wondered why he wanted to punch them. The pit references a ritual of fraternal, even intimate touching, I’ve learned. But I never understood them, no matter the number I’ve presided over on stage. Perhaps that knowledge would have been the solved puzzle piece that finally gave form to what’s otherwise an image of Troy in scatter. I wish I could ask him now, but he’s settled into the one place I won’t look.

We did have a gig that night, but not at the Micro, though it was there that somebody finally let me use their phone to call the band. That somebody turned out to be Troy. He hadn’t let on that he had a phone, so I bought him rounds while I mathed out our next move. This information floored me—really, never in my wildest. Normally I would be mad, harbor a spiky grudge, but because I knew of his impending death, I instead sat there impressed at Troy’s ability to keep it together while he ripped me off.

            “You know where the place is, right?” Scout did her best to not give me directions over the phone. Forever skeptical about all the electricity in the air, she loved reminding me it’s not actually voices you hear on the other side of a call. I told her I didn’t think so, that I forgot. “Then you’ll have to drive around,” she said. “It’s close by, a little over from you—that way I think.”

            But I told her I couldn’t see however she was gesturing with her hand.

Scout sighed. “Don’t worry, love” she said. “It doesn’t matter.” She paused, then finally: “You’ll find it.”

And it turned out she would be right, but not in the way I thought.

            Troy and I finished our rounds and hoofed it to my truck, a mile, maybe mile-and-a-half away. Most nights I’d leave that centuries-old Ford rusting in the train station parking lot, westbound side, on account of the precinct’s shift-changing post built off the ticketing booth. Everyone knew they moved the real post years ago, but we also knew that the old post’s sign still hung legibly and, because of that, retained power.

            Along the way, Troy told me the same story he began the night with. The cars and the life-altering compounds, the machinations of individuals who existed on a plane of competence neither of us could fathom, the explosion searching out the gang of them since time began—even if none of them knew it, even if there was nothing to know. No detail about it had changed. The sky was shot through with a silver not from the moon. It wasn’t raining, but it seemed to be. “Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

            “Listen, just listen,” he said. A switch flipped on at the bottom of Troy’s brain as another flipped off at its top. “God, I mean, fuck. Fuck. Without writing on your tiny little crumpled napkins please! What’s wrong with you?”

Inside of Troy, I realized, hid a swirling galaxy of despair, possibly a whole dimension you could at times catch peeking out, but only for a second and only if you knew where to look. At his teeth, never ruined for too long from the mosh pits. At his blackened eyes, which learned long ago how to quickly heal. At the thick headphones horseshoeing his neck, a pair which cost more than I made in a week and blared loud enough to keep soundless any decibel of outside noise. Even at the clothes he wore that night, new and ironed. They dragged heavier on him than they needed to for the time of year and fit his body so well there was exactly zero chance he bought them himself. I knew Troy came from a good family who cared for him relentlessly, one who must not have known the person he really was, must not have been able to see through that despair to the meanness and pettiness beyond. Either that or they had already prepared for the years of personal misery ahead. As for Troy, he believed so devoutly in the misery he’d summon down upon them that his soul lived confined inside the perpetual knowledge of what he will have someday done. I couldn’t imagine a life like that.

            I listened, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t care. All I wanted was to get to the gig and to Scout. But what else could I do?

            By the time we found my truck, Troy had finished his story for the second time. He believed he shared some arcane insight about our collective mortality. I told him I didn’t understand, but Troy didn’t say any more about it. The engine turned over fine, and we reached our destination without incident, which surprised me—I genuinely believed we would wreck on the way. The venue seemed much larger on the inside than the outside, and I hadn’t known how many other bands we would be playing with that night. It turned out I had booked us for the first night of a metal festival. And as soon as I handed Troy his drink tickets, he disappeared down into the mosh pit, which slickly surrounded him with its undulating mass.

Or that’s only what it seemed to do at first. I watched as Troy whirled his body inside the pit. He pushed, got pushed, pushed back even harder, and after a while the mass of forms seemed to move at his discretion. He turned his shoulders and waves of shriekers moved one way, he’d bash his head through the air and they moved another. A skinny kid dressed in red leapt at Troy from what seemed like ten yards out and punched him in the forehead, succeeding only at bending his wrist forcibly enough to break it. Troy howled so loudly I heard him above the music, and he punched that fuck clear across the floor and howled again. Despite it all, I saw a love in Troy I had never seen before. In his motions, his legs and his hands, his neck and his feet. In his yells I recognized what I always misunderstood, that he ruled as the benevolent king of a state that required its own misbegotten class of compassion. And so the pit erupted on in flows of ardent and amorous fury. I saw them rage and churn and I saw teeth shatter and I saw human joints dislocated into the places they always ought to have been. The more bodies that entered the pit, the harder it became to discern Troy’s, and I began to lose sight of him, in the swirling motion, in his own, in the waves of a passion separate from what I believed passion could be. From head to toe, I watched as Troy changed shapes and colors and blended out from my view, and from where I stood, far back and a few steps above, I couldn’t be sure if he dissolved into the pit or, with the whole of his spreading self, enveloped it.

I never saw him alive again.

            I don’t know why I feel the need to tell people about my dealings with Troy that night. They weren’t unusual in the least, not counting that strange story he told me. But everyone always asks me if I felt in danger—if I thought Troy had a hidden motive and that maybe he planned to strangle me in my truck, or worse. What do they understand that I don’t? I didn’t pick up on any such vibe, but maybe I should have. If I understood what Troy had told me, maybe I wouldn’t be alive today.

Several tickets later I stood backstage, confused about where I needed to be, calling out for Scout in one direction, then rotating my body ninety degrees at a time and calling out for her in another. If there’s a single image of me riding a stray beam of light through the cosmos for all eternity, it is this. Not that my yelling mattered. Given the surrounding sound of all those noise-making machines, of all those noise-making bodies—really all machines of their own—yelling out would be the same as pretending to.

The hallway backstage sloped slightly downward, and I let it suck me toward its terminus. I tripped along in my confusion, unable to keep my balance, endlessly falling forward nearer a room that felt like a secret kept from me. I reconnected with old acquaintances along the way, and they told me stories of their newly-engined gods. I talked with young and tatted parents, who sketched out for me the anarcho-lives their children would live, the revolutions of economic redistribution their grandchildren would incite. For a spark, I thought I saw you instead of someone else, also searching and your face on fire, and I hoped you saw me too. I did all this inside the music of a metal festival pouring through the walls, the ceiling, the ground. The thrashing static of the guitars, the guttural screams of the singers, the booming cylinders and clashing cymbals of all those wired drummers. Together they formed a terrible noise trying desperately to reveal the heart at its center by hiding it just enough so it would only take looking for it to know it wasn’t hidden at all. I believe it was a sound sufficient: to deliver us to those outer orbits, deliver us in an upward rain of our mortal bits if we let it, if we didn’t have Scout to find.

I pushed through the last door at the end of the hallway, found them there, but no longer as bandmates waiting for me. They were there, all of them, and Scout was there too. She asked what took me so long, told me I missed their set. How could I tell her I’m sorry? “Who stood in for me?” I asked instead.

“Oh love,” she said, “how do you keep forgetting you’re just the manager?” Scout called everyone love. Of course, she knew what I didn’t say. But as I stood there dumb, she grabbed my hand anyway and said, “Let’s whip.”

Scout didn’t kiss me while we danced, it wasn’t like that for her. We’d knock hips occasionally, meeting only for isolated moments at our middles. The room we were in might have been a universe, the hallway we jumped into an astral interstate to all of spacetime. A few of our bandmates watched us from their seats, and others pretended not to, and still others had their eyes closed to the sight as if trying to remember some forgotten moon they’d never inhabit again. Not one of us heard the boom outside that night, the explosion part of somebody else’s story but always coming for us. If those blasting vibrations did exist, the music inside mixed with all those beautiful human sounds had drowned them out. There was no fire, no smoke to speak of, no blazing shrapnel constellated in the air, no percussion except our collective own. The walls of this impossible venue stood unbreachable that night. A collapse, yes, somewhere, but not here.

I flailed my arms with Scout beside me flailing her arms too. We danced to a little corner all our own, not because I deserved it, but because she forgave me and, sensing her own time, missioned to ordnance out her life’s allotment of kindness in her own brand of devastating bombardments. I count myself thankful to be her only target in that moment.

There’s so much mystery to everything, but only a tiny bit of sense to everything too. That’s what makes it so dangerous to think you understand a person, or to think you understand the stories they tell you that more tell of them. I didn’t know then where Troy had disappeared to, if he ever left the pit, but I wondered it while Scout and I danced. He didn’t spend his night standing atop the rafters, looking down on us, watching us move in our unruly ways. I know because I kept looking up to be sure.