Without Corina in my mind, I feel empty, small. Just a bag of guitars. She’s walking next to me, but she’s far away. She’s in another galaxy, another universe. Another body with a mind that I can’t feel.
I feel lost in every way I can.
We’re going to catch a Greyhound south to LA.
We buy a set of clippers at a Walmart, along with some glasses. Corina cuts my hair in the bus station bathroom. Shaves me down into a buzz cut. I try and argue with her because I like my long hair, but she says it’s the best way. Then she hands me the reading glasses—the kind old people get from the rack by the pharmacy. They’re thick and black and they make the world look like I’m staring at it through a fish-eye filter.
“I can’t wear these.”
“Do or don’t, but with them you look like a somewhat hot schoolboy.” She takes them off my face and twists her lips. “Without them you look suspiciously like . . . you.” I can hardly hear what she says over the guitars.
I put the glasses back on.
Corina takes the rest of our money to buy the tickets because I can’t even hear the cashier. We only have enough to get us as far south as San Francisco.
The bus is in the station already, so we get on and take seats in the front.
“What’s wrong with you?” Corina asks when we sit down.
I shake my head. I don’t know what she’s talking about.
“You’ve been all up in your head—what’re you thinking about?” She’s just asking, but it feels like she’s pressing and the guitars are so loud it’s hard not to get angry.
“Nothing.” I say it low, below what I can hear, because if I say it over the guitars, I’ll shout it. “It’s just loud.”
She squints at me. “Loud? The bus is stopped. Nobody’s talking.”
I sigh. I want to yell, to tell her about what she doesn’t know, but instead I lift my hand and point at my skull. “In here.” Then: “Guitars.”
“You can’t tune them out?”
I try to think of something to say that isn’t no, something to do that isn’t just another shrug, but I can’t. “No.”
Corina takes my hand, squeezes it. She leans against me and I shift so we can be closer. “If you aren’t going to be much at talking, you’re gonna have to make up for it by being my pillow.”
I smile. I’m all guitars in my mind, but my heart feels better.
I look down at Corina’s face. In all our time together I’ve only touched her like this once, in her room, when we first kissed. I’ve barely been able to look at her without worrying that people would know.
From here I can see her hair up close—the way it curls right at the roots, dense, soft.
She still smells like vanilla.
As the bus starts moving, I close my eyes, try to tune out the guitars by focusing on the feel of Corina against my side, her hand on my arm, her breath on my sleeve, but it’s not enough. My mind is a mosh pit of noise intermixed with flashes of life from this morning when I ate breakfast and everything was fine.
Paul on the floor again. The Live-Tech torture, Bishop.
YOU THERE? I call out for her.
She is. I can feel her, but I can’t hear her very well. The guitars are so much louder now than they were before the patch. It’s like ripping it off tore the rest of the cover off the drain in my brain and the Jungle flooded in unchecked.
HOW DO I GET IT TO QUIET DOWN?
If there’s an answer, I don’t hear it.
I reach for my backpack, pull out my notebook. Corina doesn’t stir when I lay it open on her lap, secured in place by her arm.
I close my eyes, ready to drown in my sea of noise, hoping to be deep under when she wakes up and reads. It’s still a scary thought, but not nearly as scary as having her not know me.