She was on top of the dome. I saw her from far away, but as I waited, she moved closer to me. She was wearing my harness. Suction cups were fastened to her hands and knees. A delicate paintbrush hung in her fingers. Despite the great cold, her face was sunburned pink. Her hair blew wildly in the places it escaped from her hat. She ran the paintbrush in small careful strokes over the farthest reaches of Greenland, where the land met the Arctic Ocean. Then she stopped. She held the brush aloft, and she turned her head slightly, looking up. It felt like she was staring right at me. Another moment and she would start speaking.
I opened my eyes, and the phone began ringing on the kitchen wall. I jumped up and staggered forward a step or two. I was sure it was her. She had felt my presence and intuited the Whitcombs’ phone number somehow. Nana was calling me home. I grabbed the phone and pressed the plastic to my ear. “Hello?”
“I’m calling from beyond the graaaave,” said the caller.
“What!”
“Just kidding. I didn’t croak yet, man. I’m alive as hell.”
“Jared?”
“Yes, for God’s sake, man, relax. Do you think I’d call you if I was really a ghost. No way, I’d haunt you while you were on the toilet or something. I’d fly away with the TP.”
I realized I was clutching the phone white-knuckled with my right hand. I loosened my grip. “I thought you were Nana,” I said.
“Well, I’m not. Get over it.”
I breathed a little easier. “Are you . . . better?”
“Kind of,” he said. “I don’t know. They’ve been giving me atomic bombs of immunosuppressives. I feel like a big fat water balloon full of meds right now. I could probably pee out of my eyes if I tried hard enough.”
It was pleasing to hear his voice, but I didn’t know what to say to him. I could already feel the irritation growing in spite of my best efforts to quell it. Part of me had never expected to hear from him again.
“Meredith is pissed, I bet,” he said.
“She is,” I said, passively.
“Yeah, Janice is in a fury, too. She’s not really speaking to me, except to make sure I’m still breathing. She brought me a milkshake from McDonald’s this morning and almost threw it at me.”
He laughed longer than usual at his own joke. Then he cleared his throat just to fill the silence. “What?” he said. “What is it with you? I still haven’t forgotten about your betrayal, okay, so don’t start with me. You don’t have a leg to stand on.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “You’re a major asshole.”
He exhaled. “Wow,” he said. “Did you really just say that?”
“What did you think you were trying to accomplish? Why did you stop listening to your doctors?”
He sighed. “Look,” he said. “I don’t know, entirely. I’ve been talking to a counselor they brought in for me. He asked me if I was trying to off myself.”
“Were you?”
“No.”
“But you knew what would happen if you stopped taking the medication.”
“I hoped it might be different. I was feeling better. I thought maybe they were dosing me up too much, trying to keep me weak.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Tons of reasons.”
“Like what?”
He let out a quick breath. “They don’t want me to take any risks! They just want me to be this bedridden clone all my life.”
I didn’t speak.
“That’s how they keep you down,” he said. “This whole country’s on pills. That’s how they turn us into zombies.”
“You’re being dramatic,” I said. “And foolish.”
“I was experimenting,” he said.
I just waited for him to speak again.
“The experiment failed.”
Meredith walked into the kitchen without looking at me. Her bare feet squeaked on the linoleum. She wore pajama pants and a T-shirt. Her unwashed hair touched her neck in wisps. I felt a swell of guilt replacing my anger. I had been in a bed with Jared’s sister last night.
“Hello?” he said. “I just humbled myself. Did you hear it?”
“I don’t know what to say, Jared, except that today is Friday.”
“Is it supposed to mean something to me? Because it doesn’t mean something to me.”
“The talent show is less than one week away. It’s next Thursday.”
“Oh,” he said. “That thing.”
“We need practice,” I said. “And we need an additional song. Don’t we? We need two songs. This was all your idea.”
I tried to gauge Meredith’s reaction. She was standing over the toaster, grabbing a pastry with a paper towel.
“The band is broken up right now,” Jared mumbled. “In case you forgot.”
“I didn’t forget,” I said.
“So,” he said.
“So what?”
“So before we can practice, I have to decide whether or not I want to reunite the band. It’s a hard decision. I just can’t make it on the fly. Also, I have to get the hell out of here.”
“How long are they going to keep you?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Not too much longer. Janice made it clear we don’t have any money. I’m sure they’ll kick us out soon.”
I heard the sound of voices in his room.
“Listen,” he said, “I have to go. They’re here to pump me full of zombie drugs again.”
“Jared,” I said.
“I have to go.”
“I’m sorry this is your life,” I said. “I wish I could help you.”
He was quiet. I heard the phone shuffling against his ear.
“All right,” he said. “I have to go.”
“I mean that,” I said.
“I know,” he said.
I hung up the phone and walked right by Meredith. I didn’t even give her time to ignore me. I just took the other pastry and walked back upstairs to Jared’s room. I excavated some equipment from the closet and grabbed my bass. I plugged into the amplifier and started practicing the only song I knew. The same notes at a steady rhythm. I played loud, hoping the sound would seep through the floorboards. I wanted the whole house to thrum and vibrate. I turned the volume up until I was sure it was damaging my ears. Then I turned it up further.
JARED WAS RELEASED LATE THAT AFTERNOON. AROUND three o’clock he was allowed to depart with Janice. I had been upstairs making noise when Meredith received the call. And soon after, she appeared in the doorway, squinting into the room. I stopped playing and Meredith entered. She switched off the amplifier, and all the noise disappeared in an instant, sucked out of the air.
“He’s on his way,” she said.
“I see,” I said.
“He’s still a little out of it,” she said. “So we’re supposed to leave him alone. He has to rest. They barely agreed to let him go.”
“I’ll begin cleaning up,” I said.
She moved over to the bed and tossed off the blanket. She peeled off the sheets and wadded them up. She chucked them into the hallway.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“He’ll smell my body spray,” she said. “He’ll know.”
She didn’t look at me; she just grabbed the sheets and took them downstairs. She came back a minute later with a new set. I helped her stretch them over the mattress. We worked at different ends tugging them tight. Then we replaced the pillowcases and flipped on the humidifier. I turned down the blanket so it looked like the bed was waiting for him. I put away the instruments and arranged his albums in neat piles. The room looked somewhat welcoming.
“This is good,” she said.
I assumed she meant the cleaning we had done, but I held out hope that she meant the night before, too. I didn’t ask for clarification. I just walked out behind her and closed the door to Jared’s room. Then we both waited in the living room. Meredith turned on the giant television and sat, unblinking, for the extent of a program about trying to have sexual relations with a stranger. I watched as a line of nude-torsoed men licked whipped cream off a woman’s neck. The woman chirped out the same laugh each time like some kind of stimulated machine. Then she disparaged the men for being “naughty.” She smacked one of them on the buttocks. I tried to gauge if Meredith was entertained by this, or if this was perhaps what she wanted. A line of men by a brilliant turquoise pool. Something sweet sprayed on her neck. Endless human contact.
She turned off the TV when the front doorknob turned. The screen went black and Jared ambled in, gripping Janice’s arm for balance. They walked in front of the TV, and the contrast was jarring. Where there had just been attractive tan people, now stood Jared. He was pale and drowsy. His skin looked almost gray in the harsh daylight of the living room. He needed help getting his sneakers off, and I watched while Janice undid his laces. Jared sat down and seemed to notice us for the first time. He pushed the hair out of the way of his glasses. I saw he was still wearing a hospital bracelet on his wrist.
“Hey, guys,” he said slowly. “There’s a real party atmosphere in here.”
Janice frowned at him.
“We sent the magician home,” said Meredith.
“Don’t get him started,” said Janice. “He needs sleep.”
“Yeah,” said Jared. “Don’t get me started. It’s bed rest for me. Maybe a stay in the country to hearten my constitution. The sound of the birds. The fresh manure . . .”
“He’s on a little morphine,” added Janice.
She stood him up and walked him through the living room and into the kitchen. I watched him hold Janice’s hand as he gradually climbed the staircase to his room. More than ever before, he looked like a child to me. It was hard to remember sometimes that he was my age. When he was at his most overbearing, he seemed like the ruler of his own small country. The reality was that he was scared sometimes. And he still needed his mother. After he was gone, I sat there on the couch, thinking about all of this. Meredith was quiet, too. She rested cross-legged on a nearby chair. I looked over at her and she snapped out of her brief trance.
“What do you think I should do?” I asked.
“About what exactly?”
She looked uncomfortable for a moment.
“The band,” I said.
“Oh,” she said, “that.”
“Speak honestly,” I said.
“Honestly,” she said, “I think you’re going to embarrass yourselves. Terribly. And I’d like to be there when it happens.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“But Jared doesn’t care about that,” she added quickly. “Not when it comes to music. He thinks it’s everyone else’s fault if they don’t get it. He’s always been like that. You should hear what he says about the music I like. He never changes his mind.”
“Janice knows about the stolen bass,” I said. “I imagine she’ll only let me keep it for so long. I think the band is dying.”
Upstairs we heard the sound of Janice walking around the room, speaking in a sharp tone to Jared. Her voice sounded desperate.
“And I think Jared needs it,” I said.
Meredith looked down at the carpet a moment.
“Well, then it’s simple,” she said. “You have to save your stupid band. What’s the matter? Don’t you have any balls?”
The smirk was back.
“Stay right here,” I said.
“You can’t order me around,” she said. “I’m not your dog.”
“Just . . . please,” I said.
“I’ll sit here because I want to,” she said. “Not because you told me to.”
I walked into the kitchen and turned into Meredith’s room. I was looking for a piece of paper, a certain size. I checked on her dresser and on the floor. I looked in her schoolbag but only found notebook paper. Finally I reached up and detached a small poster from above her bed. It was a picture of a well-built man standing on a sandy beach, with a small set of trunks on. His hands were on his hips. He looked like he could have stepped right out of the television program. I turned the photo over and found white space on the back. I grabbed a marker from Meredith’s bag. I came back into the living room and set the picture on the coffee table, facedown.
“Where did you get that?” she asked right away. “Let me see that.”
She grabbed for the paper. I grabbed back. We both held on to separate ends.
“Listen, Meredith,” I said. “I understand if you’re not in love with me. It’s okay if you want to forget last night. But if you’re really my friend, then I need you to help me with something.”
Janice was coming back down the stairs now. We both heard her. I felt Meredith’s fingers slowly release the paper. I uncapped the marker.
25.
Calculations
BACK WHEN I STILL HAD A COMPUTER, BEFORE IT went rolling down the hill like a boulder, I had come across something of interest in my research. One of the first groups to use the word “punk” was not a band. It was a magazine.
Punk Magazine
. They composed articles about the music in New York City in the 1970s. And once they decided to form this publication they knew they needed to inform people about it. So they walked all over New York City putting up posters that said, “WATCH OUT! PUNK IS COMING!” Nobody knew if it was a band or what exactly Punk was. But people began talking. And before these writers had composed a word, there was already forward momentum. Their words were already lodged in the minds of curious passersby.
That afternoon, when Janice lay down for a much-needed nap, Meredith and I traveled to the copy store in downtown North Branch and produced one hundred photocopies of a homemade poster. She loaned me the money for the paper and a large stapler that resembled a firearm. It all cost over forty dollars total, and if I didn’t pay her back in a week, she said it was going up to fifty. Along with the money, though, I also received her help. And as the big red sun started to descend, she held each poster in place while I blasted a staple right through the top and bottom. We fastened them to splintery telephone poles mainly, but also to community bulletin boards and weathered park benches. Each poster said the same thing.
WATCH OUT! THE RASH IS HERE!
We avoided people, and when someone snuck up and asked us what The Rash was, Meredith told them she didn’t know. She said we’d been paid to put up the signs. I couldn’t believe how casually she was able to handle these situations. She actually seemed to take pleasure in confusing strangers. I could tell, even more than with Jared, anything secretive charged her with a new energy. She’d begun the afternoon dragging her feet, but on the way home, she was more enlivened about our handiwork than I was.