The Half-Life of Planets (6 page)

Fortunately I don't have to wait because Liana is sitting right near the window with an iced latte in front of her. “Hey!” she says, and smiles and waves.

“Hey,” I say. I keep the CD in one hand and put my other in my pocket so I don't fidget too much. Liana sweeps her hair off her shoulders and waits for me. Her hair is brown and long with choppy shorter parts at the front, and I want to touch it.

“Hi,” I say to her, and go over to the table. I don't touch her, of course. It's difficult enough to negotiate the rules of how normal people converse; when and how they hug, much less kiss or run their hands through each other's beautiful hair, is simply too advanced for me right now. Also I have a boner. I shrug and gesture to her with the CD. “Today's soundtrack,” I say.

“Cool,” she says. “Let's hear it!”

Behind the bar, Gary, the owner of Espresso Love, a short, stocky man with a goatee, who is perpetually clad in a black T-shirt, calls out, “Hank! Got anything good for me to play? You've got to rescue me from this freaking Tori Amos.” He points to the speakers, and one of the staff, a tall girl with shoulder-length red hair, who looks not unlike Tori Amos herself, rolls her eyes.

Gary allowed me to start playing music here largely because of this problem. “I hire 'em hot and crazy, which…I mean, I'm sorry, I have a weakness…but girls who look like that have absolute crap taste in music,” he said to me one day, and I offered to help him out.

I throw the CD to him Frisbee-style. I practiced the throw in my room for quite a while, hoping to get it right. “Here you go.” He catches it and pops it in the CD player.

I turn to walk to the table, and the Tori Amos girl bends down to pick up a spoon she's dropped. I look. Tramp stamp.

I look back over at Liana, who is looking at me looking at Tori's lower back. I wonder if I should tell her about how I check for the tramp stamp, but I decide we'll be better off if we just pretend that whole thing never happened.

“I'm back,” I say, and sit across from her. The sunlight slants in from outside, making her right half seem like it's illuminated. I will myself not to stare at her. It's difficult. When someone is beautiful, you just want to look at them. I hear Van Halen's “Beautiful Girls” in my mind and start chording it.

“So,” Liana says, “we meet again.…” She grins. “How's your summer so far?” She looks at my hands, and I stop playing.

“Is this the Pogues?” Liana asks, saving me from giving a truthful answer to that impossible question. A girl paid attention to me for the first time. So far, it's the best summer of my life.

“Yes!” I say. I'm about to talk about Kirsty MacColl's backing vocals, but that will pretty much blow the entire game.

“Okay. Got it. I'm sure I'll be able to figure this out,” she says, smiling.

“Hank! Your first decaf Americano is up!” Gary calls out from the bar.

“Did you order two coffees?” Liana asks, looking at me the way kids do in the cafeteria, like I've got no place being here. Or anywhere.

I swallow hard and nod. “Yeah. See, I always drink the first one too fast…” I stop talking, wishing I'd only ordered one, and that Gary hadn't shouted my order across the room. Not that I actually ordered. I get the same thing every time I come in here. “It's bizarre.” I look at her. “It's okay. I know it's weird.” She gives me another long look. I get up and collect my coffee.

“Dude, you're reminding me of my misspent youth,” Gary says. “One time after a Pogues concert—” He looks over at the table where Liana is sitting. She gives a little wave. This is an adorable gesture. “Sorry, dude. Didn't realize you had company. She's cute!”

“Yes she is,” I say, and return to the table. “So here's my first drink. He'll make my second one in about five minutes. I know it's kind of a freak-show thing to do.”

She laughs. “It's not a freak-show thing.…” She tucks her hair behind her ears. “It's brilliant. I mean, all the time I have to nurse my coffee so it lasts longer. Why not just guzzle one and then savor the next?”

I smile at her. “That's exactly my point,” I tell her. We sit there not saying much while she fiddles with her wallet. Or the thing she uses as her wallet. The silence makes me nervous.

“Shane MacGowan was recently voted the ugliest man in rock and roll. I think maybe Stiv Bators deserved consideration, but I don't know if you had to be alive to—” I say, and Liana is smiling. I'm playing the chords to the Pogues' “If I Should Fall from Grace with God” along with the CD, and Liana is staring at my hands.

“You always hear music, don't you?” she says.

“Uh. Yeah. One more freak-show thing, I guess.”

“I don't think it's freakish. I mean, it's…it just shows that you're passionate about it.”

She's just said
passionate
. I have the urge to grab my skull to stop it from exploding. Instead, I take a big gulp of coffee that's too hot.

“How's your brother?”
It seems like the right thing to ask Hank, given how we met and everything. Plus it distracts me from looking too much at his lake-water eyes. They have rings, like a planet, but I can't tell him that. I also can't tell him that I think I get him, how his voice rises and dips with so much feeling. All that passion and depth make him kind of nervous, which at first was unsettling, but now only makes me more curious about him.

“My brother?” Hank furrows his brows and wriggles his fingers around. I've noticed he's always doing that—shifting his fingers, not fidgeting really, more playing chords. I wish I could hear what he's playing. “Chase is fine. Still fine. He's always fine. He's healthy enough to do his usual weights and lifting…” He stares at me and stops his description of Chase's workout. “He's pretty fit,” he says, and then looks like he wants to take the comment back.

“Yeah,” I agree because it's the truth, and then, just to make it clear I am not fixating on Hank's hot brother, I add, “My dad's okay too, in case you were wondering.”

Hank nods. “Your mom said so, so I figured…”

I exhale sharply through my nose and push my hair from my face. “Well, she always says that, so you can't really go by her view of how he is.”

Hank nods but then says, “I don't think I know what you mean.”

I sigh and look out the window. Melissa Winkle and [insert name of boy here] are far enough away that I can't make out the girl's face, can't see much of him except to know they're having fun and get to kiss each other and hold hands and wander around being a couple. I focus back on Hank. “It's just…it's a pattern he does, this health crisis and then back to life as usual on planes and traveling all the time, and so what? I mean, if you're not going to change, then your pattern becomes…”

“A big wheel that keeps on turning,” Hank says. “You find references to the big wheel turning not only in Creedence songs, but also in Steve Miller, Journey—I suppose it could be the sun, but it's kind of interesting that the wheel is a Buddhist image that turns up in all these western rock songs.”

I sip my coffee and wonder why Hank always has to revert back to music. It's like a tic or something. Like the way my mother shakes her foot when she crosses her leg. She can't stop it. I find it so annoying I can't look at her when she does it. I study Hank's expression. He studies me. It's like we're trying to figure out how and why we're here, or maybe I've just been spending too much time at the science lab. “I don't think I know any of those songs,” I tell him. “Are they on the mix?”

He shakes his head. “They don't fit the theme.”

“Right. The theme.” My thumb goes to my tattoo, and I trace the familiar hip skin, imagining the blue sphere.

“But I guess songs about wheels turning would be a good mix too. Not that the mix we're listening to now is necessarily connected by a lyrical theme. I mean, well, they could be connected by a lyrical theme, but they aren't necessarily connected that way.” He swipes his hands though his hair. The hair looks soft, not brushed or anything, but he's one of those guys with naturally soft hair, who probably has no idea of its appeal, which only makes him more appealing. What's the scientific name for that? Being clueless?

I laugh at his rambling, at the fact that he rambled and then cut himself off. “You're not going to give it away? You're obviously dying to tell me.”

He shakes his head and continues to chord some unheard song on his coffee cup. “I do want to tell you, but I'm just afraid—” he says, and it comes out all mysterious. He's like the tortured artist I've always wanted to discover. The kind of guy who stays awake at night wandering the streets and thinking about you and then sitting in some funky warehouse writing songs about you. I imagine him there tonight, lying belly down on the concrete floor of the warehouse, immune to the coldness because he's so intent on immortalizing the hurricane of feelings he has for me.

“Afraid of what? That we'll have nothing to talk about if the game is over?” I joke, but Hank doesn't hear the joke in my voice and looks like I dumped coffee on his head. “I mean, not that I expect that.”

Hank looks at me for a long time. “Really?” he says.

I'm not sure how to answer this, so I tune in to the music. “Wait. Is that…What the hell's his name? Bill somebody?”

“Billy Bragg!” Hank says, and starts miming playing along.

I listen for a minute. “I'm going to need another few songs before I can guess the theme. The first one was really rowdy, but this one's kind of sad. It's…” Just then, the line “Something waiting for the worms to claim” jumps out, wraps a cold hand around my heart, and squeezes. Everything's about to come rushing to the surface, but fortunately, Hank comes to my rescue.

“Okay, okay, I'll tell you,” he says. “It's Kirsty MacColl.” He starts talking, stuff about producers and backing vocals and somebody power boating where they shouldn't have, and I can't really follow it. It's as though he's reciting liner notes from the inside of one of my parents' albums. The ones I look at sometimes when I'm poking around, rummaging through the basement. Those albums are chucked away, boxed in no particular order, along with ancient letters and photographs my parents refuse to acknowledge. So while Hank might not be saying what I want to hear right now, while he might be spewing facts or fictions about music history, I'm glad for the distraction.

A couple days, a whole lot of coffee,
and one probably-too-long lecture about Kirsty MacColl later, Liana and I are sitting at our same table and drinking our same drinks and trying to get the conversational ball rolling.

I've brought a mix with what I think is a pretty obvious theme: it's Hanks, a collection of songs by Hank Williams and his grandson, Hank Williams III. I am not a fan of Hank Williams, Jr.

Hank Williams III is still putting music out, but I've only included songs from his first two releases because I don't listen to music recorded after 2003.

2003 is the year when I first really got into music. I enjoyed the way I could put headphones on and shut out everything that was happening—the nattering relatives, Mother, even the seemingly endless parade of casseroles and cookies that passed through the house. It was a weird, confusing time, when all the normal routines in the house went completely out the window, when everything I thought I knew or understood changed. And the song, as Led Zeppelin said, remains the same. Unless you're listening to an old vinyl copy and putting new scratches and pops in it every time, you can listen to, for example, “The Ocean” one thousand times and it will always sound exactly the same.

So my mix doesn't feature any music from Hank III's most recent album. I am nervous because the theme is so obvious that it won't make much of a game to figure it out. Also because so many people say they like “everything but country,” and here I have two country artists. Hank Williams is singing “Settin' the Woods on Fire,” and neither of us is talking. We're just listening to the song. I'm afraid Liana's going to hate it, and I can't stand the silence.

This is what Allie used to make us do when we first started social skills group: we had to chuck this little foam ball with the name of a prescription drug printed on the side at each other, and the person who caught the ball had to continue the conversation. So after a full two minutes and thirty-eight seconds of silence, I ball up a napkin and chuck it at her. I know it was two minutes and thirty-eight seconds because that's the entire length of “Settin' the Woods on Fire.”

“Why'd you throw this at me?” Liana rolls the napkin ball back to me.

“Well, that's how you do it,” I say, and send it back to her. “You throw the ball, or in this case, the napkin, at somebody, and then they have to speak.”

“So, what, we like, talk and play a rousing game of napkin catch?” She grins and twists her hair up into a coil with a pencil from her bag. The pencil has teeth marks on it. I get slightly lost in the vision of the pencil surrounded by her mouth.

“So is this like, demented flirting or just a way to pass time?” she asks while she rockets the ball my way.

My impulse when she mentions demented flirting is to run from the café. But I have the napkin, and I have to say something. “No, uh, it's, uh, I just, it's a kind of an exercise. For when you're having trouble talking.” I fling the napkin back at her before I stammer any longer.

“I wasn't aware we were having that issue,” Liana says, and cups the ball in her palm.

I breathe in, letting the air-conditioning fill my lungs. I hate the heat—August's heat seems to have arrived early in July this year—but the constant chill of the air-conditioning makes me feel stuffy and muddle-headed. I mean more so than usual. I got very stuffed up at work today, where Stan keeps the air-conditioning set to arctic so that the humidity doesn't warp the necks of the guitars. Also, Stan wouldn't let me near the Jazzmaster because someone called about it. If someone's interested in buying it, Stan keeps it in its spot, clean and untouched, so as not to put off the buyer.

“It's your turn,” Liana says, and chucks the ball at me. “And P.S.: just so you're aware, sitting in silence for the length of a song isn't not having anything to say. It's just”—she looks out the window and then looks harder, seeing something or someone—“it's just chilling out for a second.”

“Or one hundred and fifty-eight seconds.” I feel kind of at sea, but the napkin ball is in my hand, so I have to talk. “There's this beautiful guitar at the shop. Vintage sea green Fender Jazzmaster. It's a beautiful guitar. Stan…” I pause to see if she's listening, which you can tell usually by how someone looks at you. Her eyes are focused on mine. “Stan's the owner. He sometimes lets me take it down and play a surf instrumental.…” My hands automatically start playing “Walk Don't Run.” “And it sounds amazing. I mean, not because of my playing or anything, but because the guitar is just…perfect.”

“It sounds cool,” she says. She looks out the window at people going by. A man with a dog. A couple of kids on bikes. An old man with a cane. I remember that old guy sitting at the table near us in the hospital cafeteria. Then I wonder why I'm thinking about him.

“Remember that old crying guy?” I ask her, and quickly throw her the ball. She smiles and catches it.

“In the cafeteria?” Liana nods. “He was so sad. It's awful.” She rolls the ball back to me.

At first I'm terrified that she means the music, but then I remember she's talking about the guy crying. “Yeah,” I say. This is a high-quality conversation filler. Liana sips her coffee and squints out the window at a guy and a girl about our age. They could be brother and sister. Or cousins. Or a couple. It's hard to tell. They're holding hands, though. I guess that makes them a couple. Or very strange siblings. “I mean,” she says, “not just that he was crying. Being that alone.”

I nod. I still have the ball, but I don't want to talk about being alone. On my “Hanks” mix, Hank Williams is singing about being so lonesome he could cry. “Yeah,” I say again, and again it appears to be the correct thing to say.

I take a sip of my coffee because I don't know what else to say. The Tori Amos girl with the tramp stamp is staring at us. Maybe she thinks
we're
cousins. Or a couple. Or maybe she just sees a family resemblance between me and Chase, whom she went out with after he stopped in for coffee the other day, worked his magic, and got her digits.

Silence invades again, and this time Hank Williams III fills it up. I listen, watch Liana's face to see if she likes what she hears, and let my fingers move on my coffee cup. I'm playing an imaginary Dobro. I look down, embarrassed, and stop. I don't actually know how to play a Dobro. I'm about to tell her something about Hank Williams III, but I don't have the ball.

“It's okay,” she says. “You know, you can actually talk without the ball. I saw you were about to say something there.”

I don't say anything, and gesture for the ball, which she throws at me. It misses and lands in my coffee. “Well, I like the rules,” I say. “I guess it just keeps…It makes things easy to negotiate.”

I'm fishing the napkin ball out of my coffee cup and trying to squeeze the coffee out of it into another napkin. I realize I could just crumple another napkin up, but Liana's already talking, so I guess the exercise is over. “Not me.” Liana shakes her head and touches the condensation on her plastic cup. “I like being surprised.” She thinks. “Being caught off guard. Otherwise…it's…”

I wait for her to say more but she doesn't. “Otherwise it's what?”

“Nothing.” She shakes her head. “Maybe I just mean science. I was in the lab before, and it's just—I can know the distance from Earth to any given planet, but…” Her voice fades out and she puts her fingers near her hip. “You can't know everything before you start a project. Otherwise you're not really testing anything.” She looks at me. “Sorry. Does this make sense?”

I shrug. “Not really.” I realize Chase probably would have lied and said he was following what Liana was talking about, and I wonder if I've messed up. I'm taking Mother's advice and being myself, but I have to balance this against everyone else's advice of blending in. I pause, take a deep breath, and try to remember Allie's advice about letting people get a word in edgewise and asking questions and listening to the answers. “How's your project going?”

“It's slow going,” she says. “I mean, in a lot of ways it's tedious, but it's just such a relief to be able to spend all my time doing what I'm interested in instead of being forced to march through
A Tale of Two Cities
or whatever else they're making me do in my other classes.”

“I know,” I say. “When I'm in class, I dream about guitars, but when I'm selling guitars, I don't think about trigonometry.”

She laughs. “Exactly.” The song ends, and the next one, “Five Shots of Whiskey,” begins.

“What's the project about, anyway?” I ask.

“Technically?” she asks, and I shrug. “A star census. I'm sort of explaining why stars twinkle.” She twists her mouth to the side. “God, that sounds dumb. But it's complicated. See, the moon and planets don't twinkle.”

“How about
not
technically?” I ask her. This makes her laugh. She chews on the sugar in her coffee.
Try to find common interests,
Allie says in my head.
Find out what she likes and pretend you like it too
, Chase adds. “The sugar never melts all the way,” I say. “That could be a scientific experiment right there.”

She crunches more. “True. But this is for college credit, if you're asking. My parents felt that I'd have a better shot at getting into a top place if I had extra credit in advanced science.” She pauses. “Which I already do…but…hey, it's better than working here.” She looks at Gary behind the counter, then reconsiders. “But maybe if I did work here, you'd provide the soundtrack.”

“So you like it?” I point up as though the music is in the air somewhere.

Liana pauses and listens for a moment. Hank Williams III is singing about how it's all gone wrong since you've been gone.

“Oh God, that is just about the saddest song I've ever heard.”

She pauses and listens, and Hank III continues to bemoan his fate: abandoned by someone he loves, alone, and turning to alcohol to try to ease his misery. I don't have any personal experience with this, but to judge by Chase's misadventures with the bottle, drinking appears to actually cause a great deal of misery. At least in the morning, or in Chase's case, even early afternoon.

Liana is looking at her lap. I don't know what she's thinking. She breathes deeply, runs a hand across her face, and looks up at me. “Did you do that on purpose?”

“I, uh…I didn't…I mean, I put the song on the CD on purpose, but in terms of trying to cause a specific emotion or something, no. As a matter of fact…” Chase would tell me never to reveal what I'm about to reveal, while Mother would tell me to be myself. I guess being myself includes not pretending that I understand things I don't understand.

I'm about to tell her. I open my mouth.

The door to the café opens, and someone walks in. The couple, or possibly very strange siblings, from outside. The boy is wearing a fake-vintage AC/DC shirt. The girl is wearing a shirt that appears to be several sizes too small for her and that reveals the tramp stamp on her lower back. It is a curlicue of thorns, or possibly barbed wire, that is, to judge by the tramp stamps I've seen, somewhat of a tattoo cliché. Liana's face changes when she sees them come in, and suddenly she's standing up.

“Look,” she says, “I have to go.”

I wonder if she's angry because of the music. I wonder if there were signs I couldn't read and I went speeding the wrong way down a one-way street again. I dig into my bag.

“I have a British Invasion mix if you prefer that,” I tell her. “I know a lot of people don't like country music. I just…it's Hank Williams. My namesake. And his grandson.”

Liana stares past me at the couple, who have their hands in each other's pockets. It doesn't look comfortable. The boy casts a glance over his shoulder and gives a big grin.

“No, Hank, it's not country music. Only that…” Her voice is wavy, like she's using the wah-wah pedal. “I just can't…” She squeezes her wallet thing and bites her lip. “Can we take a rain check?”

“It's sunny,” I joke, and point to outside even though by now I completely understand what she means. As a kid I thought it really meant it was raining. “But yeah. Of course. Tomorrow?”

She heads for the door. “Tomorrow. As usual.”

We have a usual? This seems hopeful, even though she is running away from me as so many girls have done before. I look at the couple. The guy who smiled at us still has his hand in the girl's back pocket. He starts kneading her butt ostentatiously, like he's planning on making baked goods out of it. “Tomorrow,” I agree.

Liana shifts her bag and chews on her lip. “By the beach, okay? On the path by the food shop. Around eight.”

“Okay,” I tell her. This is what people call mixed signals. She got upset by the song, maybe because she doesn't like songs about drinking, and then she left, but not without agreeing to see me again. I have no idea what I've done wrong, or if it was even me.
When you don't know, it's okay to ask.
“What happened? Did I do something wrong?” Almost certainly, but if you tell me what it is, I can avoid doing it again.