THIRTY-TWO: THE LOVE SONG OF MOSES HILL

THE ENTERTAINMENT TAPERED OFF and the porch roared into applause but I could still hear the band underfoot.

I drank the rest of my beer and stared between my feet, my vision beginning to sway. I knew I was standing right above the forest from Faisal’s story—the one that held out hope for all of the dead and ugly things—and I needed to see what the drums really were. Especially if it was too loud and too out of place to ask Faisal to finish his story and especially if I’d lost track of how many beers I’d already had.

I leaned over to the group and said, “Hey, I gotta…” but could barely hear myself over the music and the beer-colored excitement. Matty scrunched her face up and cupped her hand behind her ear. I shook the can and pointed at it, motioning to them that I’d be right back.

The band thanked everyone for showing up and said that the next song was called “Double the Flagpole.”

I expected to hit a wall of people and noise when I opened the front door, not a small smattering of people talking quietly. The house wasn’t silent though. There was still the deep rumble of bass somewhere and just off the main room in a coatroom under the stairs there was a parrot flapping and quoting poetry.

The living room was filled with hideous couches, and a young couple was sitting in the corner gesturing back and forth in sign language. The bass was coming from the back of the house, through the dim little kitchen where a handful of college students were huddled around a yellow polyurethane tub.

What I thought at first was a half-bathroom nestled in the corner of the kitchen was the door to the basement. I knew because it rattled on its hinges.

“This guy!” one of the college students said, pointing at me and catching me off guard. He had a top hat on. “I love this guy. He was in my poli-sci class last year and we…” He itched his face with the back of his hand. “But yeah. Give him a cup.”

Top Hat’s friend dipped a ladle into the strange tub filled with neon-colored liquid and chunks of tropical fruit and filled a red Solo cup for me. I was anybody; I chose to be someone who nonchalantly drank out of large colorful tubs. From the living room there was a squawk! noise followed by, “Do I dare! Disturb the universe!”

“Quit with Prufrock!” one of Top Hat’s friends yelled over our shoulders.

Top Hat hugged me and I said thanks, but all at once I was invisible to the undergrads, who resumed talking about French cinema. The rattling door beckoned me and there was no one to tell me to fuck off or come on down, just me and the rattling door. Just me and the drums and maybe the answer to whether or not things can be dead on the outside and alive down below. I dumped the drink down my throat.

But the door was locked. The hidden drums were inches away and I couldn’t see them.

On top of the beers I’d already lost track off, the new drink was working fast. The edges around my thoughts were starting to get fuzzy, but it was becoming increasingly important to find Faisal and tell him we could see the drums if we could just get past this goddamn door.

I weaved past Top Hat and his friends and opened the front door, caught between the warm air of the house and the cold wind of the open night. Ten feet away Matty, Michael, and Faisal were swaying in a small triangle with Matty in the middle. The sky couldn’t decide whether to rain or snow but it felt like I had a say in it. Like I could make it rain when it had been snowing for so long.

They saw me at the same time and smiled and gestured for me to come over. Of all the people on all the porches in all the world, none were as unshakable or as complete as Matty, Michael, and Faisal in that rare, perfect moment. And I was welcome with them; they’d welcomed me since the start, even though I was convinced that we were all just seconds away from falling through the thin ice at any given moment.

They were warmth in an otherwise cold expanse. Looking at them, I didn’t want to be Nobody or Anybody, I just wanted to be me. The same me with all of the history and scars. No lying, no pretending, just me.

Just like them.

The Entertainment tuned their instruments for their next song and the lead singer said, “This one’s called ‘Gately versus Demerol.’ Two, three, four…”

The bass underfoot trembled in unintentional harmony with the music before us and the sound swelled and the lights behind the band backlit them into spectacular anonymity. When they finished and had managed to sincerely thank everyone for showing up, I edged through the crowd of people toward the trio.

“Guys,” I yelled, showing them my cup. “We have to go inside—there are things inside that you need to see. Faisal! It’s your house! From the campfire with the basement! We just have to break into the basement.”

A faraway part of me was aware of the fact that I’d lost my handle on context and social norms. For example, instead of saying, “Hey, I’m noticing similarities between this house and the one you were telling us about at the campfire. Moreover, I want to explore what the drums mean to me on a personal, metaphorical level, specifically how I’ve spent the last year feeling, at best, robotic, and at worst, dead. Let’s go check it out!” I’d decided on out-of-context alcohol-infused word bombs.

He smiled. “I don’t know what that means, but I intend to find out. Why are your teeth green?”

“There are literal gallons of this stuff inside. But we need to figure how to get into the basement!”

“We should get going,” Matty said, squeezing Michael’s hand. “I’m exceptionally pregnant and my feet hurt. Plus I don’t want to worry about Test figuring out that we’re gone.”

“What if I get you a cup of the hobo potion that Moses drank?” Faisal asked her, totally unfazed by the mention of Test.

“I just…” She groaned a little. “Okay. But then promise we’re leaving or I tell my dad you got me pregnant,” she said to Michael.

Michael’s eyes flicked open wide.

“Moses, Faisal: it is very important that we are not in there for long.”

The music under the house had changed. It wasn’t gone, but it was different and we followed it.