Shit happens.
There’s no way around it.
Bailey in the moonlight, fresh from seeing Emmitt, eyes the sky with dark glasses on.
Just after my mother died, I was sent each day following school to stay with my Aunt Germaine. A guidance counselor at South Renton High, Germaine was a spinster living over on Delmore Street, a stout old girl with sausage-shaped hands, small grey eyes, and a double chin which shook like soft rubber. My father grieved my mother’s death hard and took advantage of Aunt Germaine’s support to remain downtown after work where he drank himself into a convenient stupor.
I remember my mother having an incredible voice, at once willowy and soulful, arced and bluesy. She sang jazz and torch songs with spectacular range even as my father’s raw accompaniment on the piano choked the melody or rushed the lyric. (I can still recall my father’s shoulders hunched and enormous hands mashing, his booted feet stomping against the pedals and broad hips swerving from side to side, rocking a half-second off the beat.) A look would come over my father’s face each time my mother entertained him with any of his favorites—“Black Is the Color,” “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” “Make the Man Love Me,” “My Last Affair”—and tilting his head to the side, his eyes would squint uneasily down at his hands. A second later he’d snap his shoulders back and start pounding away at a wild rendition of “Salt Papa Blues,” yelling above the din for my mother to catch him if she dared. She’d laugh and cover her mouth and my father would howl and play even louder than before.
In those days I shared a bedroom with my older brother, Tyler, whose taste in music ran from Bad Company to Warren Zevon and Uriah Heep. I, in turn, marveled from an early age at my father’s music and listened intently to the would-be lyric of his flawed recitals; the mystery of the sound, how it seemed to come together out of thin air. Although I was forbidden to touch my father’s piano, I couldn’t help but want to try the trick on my own, and one day, with my mother upstairs, I snuck into the front room and sat down. An arrangement my father played the night before was still in my head, and bringing my fingers to the keys I performed “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.”
My mother followed the sound, thinking my father was home early, though the playing she would later say sounded much different, and how surprised she was to see me there on the bench. The look on her face caused me to jump up, convinced I was in trouble and would be punished for touching my father’s piano, but instead, and trembling with surprise, my mother said, “That’s very good, Bailey. Go ahead then. Play something else. I don’t mind.”
In secret, she began instructing me on her own each day, wanting to make sure my gift was nurtured slowly, without my father overwhelmed by my talent and turning such into a sideshow event. I played what I heard with no idea what I was doing at first, my hands tiny and without initial grace. My mother helped improve my technique, had me listen more closely to the music, showed me how to break the larger chords by starting them before the beat, unable as I was to reach a minor tenth from black to white keys. She described how each piece of music possessed a natural symmetry and that it was important to identify and respect the essence of the arrangement, how music was controlled centrally by the aural image and the body was the conduit through which music’s fundamental magic was transformed.
I was given picture books that demonstrated how to read the notes, was taught about staccato and legato, how to use my hands, and never to hit the keys too hard or misconstrue power for proficiency. “You want to deliver only what the music asks,” my mother said. “A word to the wise,” she’d smile and kiss my cheek. I was amazed by how much she knew, how well in secret she also played, and concentrating on whatever she put on the stereo, repeated the scores back to her, everything from Motown to Chopin to jazz. In playing for my mother, I was elated not by my own accomplishment but the chance to please her, and believing music mirrored the world in all its brilliance, assumed everything else in life was equally magnificent and abiding and would endure forever.
That winter, an executive at a small record company heard my mother sing at a club where my father coaxed her to perform, and impressed, offered her a chance to cut a demo at a local studio. She said yes only after the man reluctantly agreed to let my father accompany her. They were given a date for the end of the month, and ecstatic, my father insisted they start rehearsing at once. Practices were held first thing in the morning and immediately after dinner, with arrangements selected and rejected, played and replayed, again and again. On the afternoon of their scheduled recording session, my mother sat in the front room sipping a cup of hot tea. (All the long hours of rehearsal had exhausted her, though she did her best to hide as much from my father.) Restless, my father’s own playing went poorly, the more he rehearsed the less compatible his fingers found the keys, and nervous, he asked my mother to sing one last song, “for luck.” They did Ned Washington’s “Wild Is the Wind.” (“Love me, love me, say you do.”) My mother started out very soft, then rose with, “Like the leaf clings to the tree, oh, my darling, cling to me.” When she finished, my father got up from his piano without saying a word and went off to shower. A heavy snow was falling, already several inches outside, and standing by their bedroom window, my father complained of his bad luck.
My mother went upstairs and picked out my father’s blue suit from the closet, placing it along with a white shirt and bright paisley tie on the bed. She then returned downstairs where she slipped on her boots and coat and the thinnest pair of white cotton gloves. The temperature was well below freezing and the snow was falling harder than before. I watched from the window as my mother retrieved a shovel from the garage and began clearing the drive. The absolute chill stirred her for a moment and her movements became animated, but the cold was deceptive and wrapped itself around her, bearing down until her muscles trembled and her head went light. Her lungs seized and hyperventilated as the last of her body’s heat escaped, her legs buckling and giving out, the snow’s pretense at softness offering no resistance to her fall.
Afterward, my father removed every stick of furniture from the house, replacing it with a cheap wooden table and mismatched chairs, a faded brown couch that sagged in the center and poked at the flesh with hard metal springs. (“Gone, gone, gone!” he howled.) I woke one night to the sound of my father shoving his piano through the side door and down the steps, pushing it into the center of the yard where he took an axe to the keys, shattering the ivory and wood, crushing the pads and wires until the legs collapsed and everything was reduced to pulp. He soaked the remains in gasoline then and ignited it all with the first match struck.
“These are the things I remember,” I tell Emmitt who—as Dr. Speckridge—stares at me from behind his desk, his bird eyes black and shrinking as he removes his glasses. (He has an oval head and high voice that cracks oddly at awkward moments.) “Elizabeth?” he asks, and I roll my hands over as if to catch something about to fall, and thinking again of my father as he stormed about while the glow of the fire raged and filled the sky with sparks and ash, I picture him fully ablaze and exposed by what comes of love. Shaking my head, I say, “Liz?” and realize then as I do now the danger of wanting anything too much and how I learned so young the way to want for nothing.
Niles Kelly walked east, away from campus and in the opposite direction of the downtown district where the Reedum & Wepe once stood and his father by the window watched the universe crash beneath him.
“Sit then,” the man motioned to Niles as he arrived, pointing to a large blue pillow tossed atop a red rug. Several other pillows and rugs were set in a circle around the center of the room. Niles’ host was thin framed, dressed in grey slacks, leather sandals, and a long white cotton shirt. A beige cap was perched on the crown of his head. His skin was dark copper. Niles dropped onto the nearest pillow as Massinissa Alilouche offered him tea.
“You are feeling all right?” The question was asked as Niles was sweating, his shirt damp and cheeks red. “I’m fine,” he explained. “I walked from campus, that’s all.” A long table to Niles’ left was stacked with papers and books. A box filled with several small vials of medicines was stored beneath the table, tiny white labels affixed to each. Behind a half wall, the kitchen was arranged with a stove near the sink, a refrigerator no larger than a hatbox, and a round table covered with additional books and medical paraphernalia—tubes of salve and bandages, cotton balls in a plastic container, a flashlight and stethoscope, unopened packets of sterile syringes, a jar of needles, and thread all set out in no particular order. At night, the pillows in the front room were arranged for reading and sleep.
Niles glanced toward the table and the stack of books, spotting on top Camus’ The Rebel, followed by Thoreau’s Walden and essay on Civil Disobedience, next to Tahar Djaout’s posthumously published novel, The Last Summer of Reason. The books were dog-eared with tabs jutting out from several of the pages. Massinissa Alilouche observed Niles staring at the books, paused a moment, then turned and retrieved a legal-size envelope from the table and set the folder down on the pillow beside his guest. “What’s this?” Niles asked.
“A gift,” Massinissa Alilouche answered. “All that you need.”
Niles was skeptical, though he placed the envelope inside his backpack, and said, “Shoukran.”
“There is nothing to thank me for,” the older man waved him off before asking as he always did at the start of one of their sessions, “How have you been, my friend?”
“It’s been an odd month.”
“Tell me.”
For the last two years, once every few weeks and sometimes more, Niles had come to Massinissa Alilouche’s apartment in an effort to achieve a sense of closure, forgiveness and healing. That he’d chosen to discuss his troubles with a Muslim was perceived by some friends as strange, though no one was actually surprised given Niles’ tendency to favor alternative perspectives. Their arrangement began some ten months after the Reedum & Wepe was reduced to rubble and ash, and in the course of their conversations Niles learned a great deal from Massinissa Alilouche about the teachings of the Qur’an, Muhammad and Allah, and how in the East a man believes his fate is set 10,000 years in advance and peace is found in accepting the ensuing order.
Recently however, their sessions together had turned querulous, with Massinissa Alilouche testing Niles’ conviction, and rather than embrace the challenge and feel secure in the decisions he’d made, Niles had surprised himself with how uncomfortable and defensive he’d been. After he finished recounting the events of the last month and what had him struggling to move forward, Massinissa Alilouche offered encouragement, only to say, “Perhaps your desire to reach a state of grace through acceptance is a false prophet. How can you have faith in what you’re doing if you’re not at peace with your decision?”
“But I am at peace.”
“Sahbee.”
“It’s true.”
“Then how do you explain?”
“That’s different,” Niles interrupted.
“Ibnee.”
“I understand forgiveness is necessary.”
“Ahh. So you feel obligated?” the man placed his hands on his legs, and shaking his head, inquired, “You are compelled?”
“To do what’s right, yes.”
“Then you are acting out of a sense of virtue, is that it?”
Once again, Niles was confused by the man’s question, and shifting about on his pillow, answered, “I’m doing what I think is best. What anyone else would do in my situation doesn’t matter.”
“Perhaps,” the older man moved his chair closer and sat now directly in front of Niles. “Then again is it not possible what you are doing is avoidance? Perhaps you are rebelling against a more human impulse.”
“Forgiveness is a human impulse.”
“Fehemt,” Massinissa Alilouche maintained a sober tone, and reaching for the top book on the table, offered a quote from Camus. “The logic of the rebel is to want to serve justice so as not to add to the injustice of the human condition…. (Nihilists) kill in the fond conviction that this world is dedicated to death. The consequence of rebellion, on the contrary, is to refuse to legitimize murder because rebellion, in principle, is a protest against death.”
“That’s right.”
“So then you’re a rebel,” Massinissa Alilouche leaned forward in his chair and touched Niles gently on his folded knee. “Dafee kwiyis. A minute ago you were the Lone Ranger. If you are a rebel, my friend, then you must believe in virtue. True rebellion must be noble at its core, and yet here is the problem, for rebellion is not innocent, and therefore virtue is not always easily resolved.” He flipped through the book once more and made his point by quoting again from Camus. “If rebellion exists, it’s because falsehood, injustice, and violence are part of the rebel’s condition. He cannot, therefore, absolutely claim not to kill or lie, without renouncing his rebellion and accepting, once and for all, evil and murder…. Thus the rebel can never find peace. He knows what is good and, despite himself, does evil…. His only virtue will lie in never yielding to the impulse to allow himself to be engulfed in the shadows that surround him and in obstinately dragging the chains of evil, with which he is bound, toward the light of good.”
Niles shook his head. “The type of rebellion you’re referring to has nothing to do with me. I’m not trying to change the world. I only want to get beyond what happened and move forward.
“And yet you haven’t,” Massinissa Alilouche pointed a finger as Niles tugged at the sleeve of his shirt. His voice remained soft, and setting the book back on the table, he invited agreement where there might otherwise be none. “We are all seekers in our own way, don’t you think?” The expression on his face was tranquil enough to put Niles at ease even as he cupped both his hands around the younger man’s face. Niles returned the man’s gaze, then slowly pulled away. Massinissa Alilouche smiled, and continued their conversation by asking, “As a student at the university you are hoping to discover what, a greater understanding of the world or of yourself? Perhaps a combination of the two, for they are rather difficult to separate, like salt from the sea, no?”
Niles shifted sideways on his pillow. “The two together, yes.”
“A sense of Truth?”
“A small sampling.”
“It is all we can ask,” the man rolled his head forward again. “And yet, sometimes truth involves more than forgiveness, no?”
Niles chose not to answer, did not understand why his host had taken this tact the last few sessions, and annoyed, clasped his fingers together tightly. Seeing this, Massinissa Alilouche leaned down from his chair and undid Niles’ grip, in the process speaking again advisedly. “In this world, circumstance is often uncooperative. Life tends to demand swift adjustments and even a complete transformation from the person we might otherwise think ourselves to be.”
No longer interested in debate, Niles wanted only to leave and reached for his backpack. Before getting up however, he couldn’t help but respond, and said, “Sure, circumstance has a way of jerking and twisting everyone around, but people don’t morph into something new because of it. That sort of reaction is too easy. A person has to know who they are and maintain themselves despite external factors.” He gave as an example a baseball sitting inside a pitchers glove, then heaved forward, and an instant later launched by the swing of a bat three hundred feet in the air. “At no time does the ball become anything but what it is despite how much circumstance changes.”
“And yet men are not balls, are they?” Massinissa Alilouche challenged him again. “A man has the ability to choose his trajectory while a ball is there merely to be acted upon.”
“But everything is acted upon, you said so yourself. Circumstance sets the tone. The reason I’m here is because of things that have happened and still I’m free to respond.”
“With forgiveness.”
“Yes.”
“But your impulse after all this time has not brought you peace.”
Niles got up and stepped toward the door. He was holding his pack against his chest, his otherwise slender frame puffing a bit in order to show how eager he was to invalidate Massinissa Alilouche’s contentions. “No one said it would be easy,” he grimaced, realizing as soon as he said as much how foolish he sounded, yet unable to think of anything else, he fell silent and made his exit, no longer trying to explain what exactly was difficult for him and had continued to allude him month after month for nearly three years running.