Torn from Something

George’s father is a failed Olympic gymnast who seems overly standoffish and dejected even for a Russian. He still looks teenaged in his early 30s except when he takes off his shirt, because there’s something too dog-eared about his muscles. George thinks he’d look exactly like his father if his father were a worm. He’s a 12-year-old nobody much who wishes he could play guitar and is watching an American cartoon.

Every country dubs its language over foreigners’ TV shows, but in Russia it’s a racket. One sermonizing voice reads the actors’ dialogue as though the show were an appliance and their gab were its instructions while the real, sweet noises rollick faintly in the background. That’s how the rest of the world sounds to Russians if they pay any attention at all.

Donald Duck and his preposterous cohorts are like dolphins signaling their happiness to Russians through a bleak, indifferent surface. It’s a form of mind control that dates back to when the Communists ran everything and makes children of an introspective bent think they can hear the truth attacking through their fruity little thoughts.

George is chuckling at the TV’s muffled playthings and hoping his mother will stand up. His father was scrubbing their bedroom furniture and walls with her fighting, flopping body for a long time. That sounded too familiar, but not the silence afterward that will not stop. George’s mind is saying, If your mother’s dead, you’d better kill yourself.

George’s father barges in the living room and sits bizarrely near his son, which he’d never thought to try before. He seems dazed by the unprecedented access, and his hands throb from having finally killed his wife. He knows he’ll have to kill George now, but first he tries watching the cartoons’ rat-a-tatting nonsense.

George isn’t old enough to be a loss. He’ll just turn one dead body into two, which isn’t very different. People in their building have heard him beat his wife and son so many times they must be numbed. Maybe he could rape George if he finally wants to. Would those screams sound inconsistent? The only danger is he might kill himself for doing that. Is that a problem?

When George’s father was an 8-year-old, investigators from the agency of sports made a routine visit to his school. After watching him cartwheel and twirl above the playground’s swings and jungle gym, they bought him from his parents. He was positioned in a prison-like academy for potential medal winners along with close to 40 other boys with magic bodies.

He was trained to win gold medals in gymnastics with short daily morning breaks to add a barren education. Sometimes he contested in minor showcase competitions in far-flung Russian provinces. He never won anything, but the crowds were full of pedophiles and girls who liked the prettiest contestant, and that was him.

So many film crews shot George’s father’s grimacing, angelic face that it became the public’s mental image of Russia’s gymnastics might for years. That usefulness kept him in the running long after better gymnasts had been axed. Nowadays, when people see George’s father on the street, they often ask if he looked younger and important once.

George’s father unties his shoes and shakes them loose. He whips his T-shirt off. He unzips his pants, or starts to. He rises to his feet so he can slide them down, but he’s infirm from having killed his wife and so much less attracted to the chance of winning something that he slumps back on the couch instead and rubs his sore hands together.

He starts to push George’s head into his crotch, but the head feels like a lightly garnished skull. It makes him stop and think about the brain inside and then his son’s dumb thoughts, whatever they might be. He pets the head while envisaging the thoughts he’d like to work with and then, having made George game, lifts his hand off like a starting gate.

George looks up weirdly at his father, then removes his T-shirt too. He holds the T-shirt tensely in his hand. George’s father rips it from his son’s hand and holds it stiffly in his own. He gives it half a chance to be a shirt, then thinks the Russian equivalent of “fuck it” and wads the cloth until it’s flower-shaped, then sniffs the image.

His erection’s coarse, straightforward wish gets dubbed atop whatever happiness his son and he had made together. He sort of wants to give the flower to George, but love seems stupid, so he drops the shirt, then makes a fist instead. George takes a giant breath, then arcs his back to make the strongest chest his rib cage can create.

“Why did you take off your shirt?” George’s father asks.

“Because you did,” George says.

“Aren’t you scared?” George’s father asks.

George nervously unlocks the tongue and buckle of his belt, which has a cowboy style. “Yes,” he says.

George’s father puts one hand inside the flash of underwear and grabs.

“It says yes too,” he says.

“It probably thinks your hand is mine,” George says.

“Do you jack off?” George’s father asks.

“Sometimes,” George says.

“What do you think about when you jack off?” George’s father asks.

“What’s the right answer?” George asks. He looks into his father’s eyes, which either don’t mean shit or are outdistanced by his mind’s scared shit, then thinks about the question. “Sometimes my mother.”

“Your mother doing what?” George’s father asks and starts jacking off his son, who winces.

“Not this,” George says. “You should lick your fingers first.”

One of George’s bandmates is a fried, revered guitarist who still picks out flabbergasting notes, but they’re strange now. George thinks he’d play guitar remotely like his bandmate if his bandmate were a drunk. He’s a skinny 16-year-old prodigy from Brixton drinking gin and watching dead guitarists play the blues with old acoustic instruments on some TV thing.

Every older era’s sense of scale and vintage tech turn off the young, but to radicals like George, it’s especially deterring. Between the dead guitarists’ minor outreach and the distanced, scratchy footage, they might as well be fiddling with loaded rifles that’ll only hurt themselves. That’s how other people’s sadness sounds to George when he cares at all.

The blues’ originators could be dolphins signaling their primitive unhappiness to more experimental artists. The fact that even innovative art grows cordial over time is a catastrophe that makes groundbreaking young musicians with drinking problems for good reasons know they can’t be gods with giant amps despite the bliss that animates them when they’re trying hard.

George is playing his unplugged Strat with the TV’s ghosts and hoping his bandmate hasn’t quit their band despite the recent hellishness of being with him. He and other members had been yelling one another in the background for a long time. That sounded usual of late, but not the silence ever since that will not stop. George’s mind is saying, “If my bandmate quit, I’m dead.”

George’s bandmate joins him on the couch and sits unnaturally close. He’s never longed to be right next to George until right now, and it’s disorienting to be pressed against someone he only hugs onstage in acts of showmanship, and his dilated eyes are wet from having quit their band. He knows he needs to say goodbye, but first he tries watching the TV.

George isn’t bold enough to be the leader of the band or play the notes alone without lessening their vistas. If the band breaks up, there’ll just be two casualties instead of one. Their fans aren’t smart enough to understand their genius anyway, so would George’s lack of daring even sound that different? Still, George would know. Is that a problem?

George’s bandmate used to play guitar in shitty local bands as though they mattered. The leader of a critically anointed band that played electric blues observed him bend strings incongruously and fit him in their higher ranks. George’s bandmate gigged and played on albums with this band until their orthodoxy started to feel dumbass and claustrophobic.

He started his own band that used the blues as roots not a criterion. He came across a 15-year-old George playing wildly with a local band and hired the boy to be their novelty. Their complicated grittiness exhilarated critics, which ushered in the public, who didn’t understand a thing but lied so they could gawk at George, who looked 13 years old if anything.

But George’s bandmate wanted to rewire the way sound whistles through guitars, which needed psychedelic drugs, he thought. George needed to destroy something inside himself that no one else could understand to play at all, and alcohol helped. Their problems worked artistically, but George’s bandmate went insane, and George’s playing stalled, and now it’s all fucked up and over.

George’s bandmate watches him exaggerate the notes that legends play so simply in the past. He doesn’t know if he’s too fried to judge the difference anymore, but even on a muted Strat, there’s something cold in George’s tone that, say, the legends just unleash into their music like hysteria. This so depresses George’s bandmate that he wants to join the band again but doesn’t.

He tries stroking George’s head in hopes that, with the help of psychedelic drugs, he’ll somehow feel what’s going wrong inside a brain so young yet status quo. He can’t, and George tenses at the touch, which makes his playing worse, which makes him stop and drink instead. So George’s bandmate borrows the guitar and plays the licks.

George drinks. Even six weeks back, he would have learned something or thought he had from studying his bandmate’s outré fingering and hazardous decisions. He might have taken the guitar and tried to top him, and their band would peak. This difference kills him, so he grabs the instrument away, then throws it at the TV set but nothing breaks.

So, that’s that, the band is over, even if, when George’s bandmate plays sans George in the future—if, that is, he doesn’t drug himself into a state where music sounds too idiotic—it could expose his young friend’s insufficiencies and so detach his risky notes from the cohesion George’s playing lent them that he’ll just end up scribbling obscure crap.

“Why did you do that,” asks George’s bandmate. He’s on his feet retrieving the Strat from where it struck the floor. Now he sits down again already playing it.

“Because you quit,” George says.

“You’re not inside yourself,” says George’s bandmate. He tries to twist his guilt into an interstellar note.

“Is that it?” George asks.

“I know I’ll sound like I’m a barking dog, but I love you,” says George’s bandmate.

“So, don’t quit,” George says so flatly that he knows he really means it.

“Do you still believe in reinventing sound?” asks George’s bandmate. By now, his soloing has edged into a string of noise.

“Sometimes,” George says.

“What do you think about when you believe that?” asks George’s bandmate.

“Usually you,” George says.

“Me doing what?” George’s bandmate says. By now, he’s playing notes that don’t connect and make no sense at all.

“Not this,” George says and blunts the fret-board with his hand. “Not this crazy motherfucking sounding shit that makes me feel so lost.”

Whomsoever George is chatting with types or thinks as raucously as he does. To guess, they’re in their teens or early 20s—two needy losers or ironic raconteurs using punctuation marks and letters on their keyboards like little shovels as though the English language is a bunch of dirt so they’ll sound as convoluted as they really are.

Every website’s chat room hauls in lonesome people editing their vibes into emoticons and cramping up their sentences, but the site George frequents is for maniacs. To visitors, it might appear as though a bunch of suicidal people are transcribing some collective, self-inflicted shootout wherein the typos are escaping bits of shrapnel, but for them it’s more like finger painting.

George is like a dolphin flagging humans from beneath articulation’s choppy surface. It’s a form of operatic laziness about the rules of composition dating back to when the Internet freed every word that has eroded or been tortured over time into a jewel-like, pleading noise that helps George blurt and cry in public without losing his composure.

He’s slopping out his tumult while trying to detect if any other fumbling chatters are upset because of him, and he may have isolated one. There’s just the trace of intake in the guy’s harangue—dents or dings or maybe even wounds as codependent as those calling and responding bleats that saxophonists traded in the jazz records his father played incessantly.

If all the chatters, George included, were just segments in a kind of typist choir, each performing a distinctive tonal fraction of some abrasive score, then . . . That’s too difficult to imagine being true, so . . . maybe if their heated ramblings are just linguistic shreds dispensing outward from some disco ball–like application embedded in the website, which could possibly be true, then . . .

If the garbage in their voices could be scraped away, maybe they’re intelligent or draw less stupid pictures or are prettier or something great that some vindictive, lesser mortals have so teased or criticized into seclusion that they’re only true when fighting one another for attention with a font’s cache of modifiers as their weaponry.

Maybe when they’re not online, they shadow colleges’ or high schools’ walls. Maybe they’re goths or emos who have gussied up life’s hellishness into a daily Halloween. Maybe their trendiness solved people’s meanness into an issue of conflicting tastes in fashion, which hurts less but makes it extremely difficult for them to make close friends.

Maybe they write poetry about their feelings and read that to one another while imagining their listeners are attachés or scouts from lyrically impaired but otherwise amazing bands. Maybe no one actually listens, they just wait their turn to read, and vice versa, so they don’t know why they feel comfortable yet miserably alone when they’re together.

Maybe they grew bold enough one day to post their poems on websites set aside for gloomy, unsophisticated artists and admirers of incompetent, cathartic art. Maybe they grew confident enough to stop pretending their scribbles were poetry instead of suicidal scrawls they might have chickened out and torn in shreds were not the Internet a wildly more rewarding trash can.

Maybe someone loved them once or twice, or said they did, which they no more believed than actors buy the love of fans that only know them when their feelings are impersonations. So, love got lost, and now that they’re so doomed, or wish they were, they know that mutual addiction will have to do, and they’re trying to addict someone right now.

At some point, George’s chat-mate hints it might be safe to switch on their respective webcams and illuminate their separate cockpits, and George, gambling that the correlations in their ranting back and forth will make his chat-mate’s face a witching mirror image, types okay amongst a burst of words about his less than magical appearance.

George is startled that his chat-mate is a little boy, maybe 12 years old at most. He’s sitting in a brightly daylit room with posters of some athlete on the walls, and he looks strangely tickled that George is old enough to be his father and lives far enough away from him that, judging by a wall clock in the background, it’s the middle of the night there.

“My English . . . you already know it is very bad,” the boy says in some thick and somber accent. He leans into his desktop to study George, who sees some bruises on his face.

“I thought you were faking it like I was,” George says.

“No,” the boy says. “I try to write very hard.”

“So . . . why are you fucked up?” George asks.

“Because my father killed my mother,” the boy says. He leans back and looks away and starts to cry. “And . . . now he’s raping me sometimes.”

“I wish I could do something to help,” George says. “But it looks like you live very far away.”

The boy gives George a careful glance. “Why are you sad?” he asks.

“Because . . . God, so many reasons,” George says. “I’ve been bipolar all my life, and now it’s gotten even worse, and they’re saying I’m psychotic.”

“I want to kill myself,” the boy says.

“You shouldn’t,” George says. He mumbles “shit” under his breath and tenses up and moves his cursor to the spot where he can shut the application with a tap. “You’ll hurt someone. Hurting other people is the only reason I don’t do it.”

“No, just me,” the boy says. “No one cares. I—”

“Look,” George says, “if you’d told me this when we were chatting, I might have thought, Whatever, I don’t know this guy, maybe he’s lying, but . . . you’re a little kid, and . . . I can’t let you hurt me.”

“I won’t hurt you,” the boy says. He grabs his face and sobs and starts to shout things in some other language, and it’s so frightening that George could make some little kid he barely even knows feel this horrible.

George’s high school friend is still his best although they haven’t talked in years and live half a world apart. George had planned to move away from home but never did or barely even. He thinks he’d live in France if there had been a genius medication. He’s a 30-year-old failed musician with severe bipolar illness holding a loaded gun and listening to Nick Drake late at night.

Everyone who loves Drake thinks they share what made his early records sound so sad, then grow so bleak, but George extremely does. Maybe if he had unleashed his pain artistically he would feel different, but for now it’s like Drake’s lyrics are his thoughts after being edited and scored by someone just like him but more important.

Nick Drake’s songs are like a pack of dolphins signaling his solitude incoherently to George and other introverted messes. It’s a very tight relationship between suicidal artists and their suicidal listeners that has been curing or killing guys like Drake and George forever. When everyone you know is either very far away from you or hides, you find someone dead to love.

George is holding the gun like it’s a phone and wishing his old friend would somehow call him. His friend wrote him letters for a while, but George would never write him back, not even when he moved and got a new address, and now he’s moved so many times the letters couldn’t be forwarded to him if they were magic, and George’s phone is just a gun.

According to some article, Nick Drake grew so sad he had to move in with his parents. Every day he left their home and walked to an abandoned house, then sat down on the floor where local junkies gathered daily to shootup, then die or not. He wouldn’t do their drugs or talk to anyone, and none of them knew why he came or stayed or who he was or ever acted like they cared.

Maybe he admired their love of almost dying. Maybe he was studying the painless things they said when they were almost dead. Maybe they spoke for him just like his music does for George. Maybe they enjoyed the company or pitied him and thought, “At least we have this drug, and imagine if we didn’t.” Then he would leave, and they would say, “That guy is weird,” no matter what they felt.

Years later, a journalist learned where Nick Drake died and somehow met one of those junkies, who recognized Drake’s photo. He said Drake came and went for months. They’d only let him stay because one of the junkie girls thought he was handsome. The last time, just before he left, he’d started crying, and, when they heard and looked, he said, “You guys know me. Tell me what is wrong with me.”

When George’s best friend was 15, they met. George fell in love so fast his parents thought it was a gay thing. It wasn’t, even though George wanted it to be, but he was 12. For him, it felt like being a magician’s trick. He snuck around and lied about his whereabouts so they could be alone and talk. His other friends thought that was odd, but no one understood why George did anything.

Even as a kid, George stayed upset too lengthily and acted too revved up by friends and things he liked, but he was cute, which made the fluctuating mostly fun for everyone until he worsened. By 14, he would either not shut up or stared at friends like they were walls, and almost everyone he knew decided they’d had crushes on him that they’d now outgrown.

By 15, George would stay in bed for weeks. His best friend sat with him sometimes, and it was rough, but at least they were alone like George had wanted. Even his parents, who’d tried to exile George’s friend, said, “Be our guest.” Up until his late teens, George would sometimes find a drug or some belief or girlfriend, and he would tell his friend, I need to love myself or God or her or anyone but you.

He found an almost genius medication at 18, but its side effects made him so horny that love turned into an offshoot from his crotch. His problems grew as simple as the gap between his body and his friend’s. They started fucking, which made their love deducible at last and look completely normal from the outside. But then the pill stopped working, tearing George in half again.

One day his best friend said, “If I haven’t worked for you by now, I think I won’t.” He decided he was free to move across the world and be an artist. George tried to be an artist but was too fucked up to give his pain a surface. He found a girlfriend who got sick of his insanity. When she dumped him, he threatened her and was arrested. He agreed to move in with his parents to avoid a trial. The phone rings.

“Why did you love me?” George asks whoever’s calling him.

“Because you love me so much,” says the voice.

“But I don’t,” George says. “If I did I wouldn’t do what I’m about to.”

“I swear to God you do,” says the voice.

“What about when I was manic?” George asks.

“I pretended you were giving me a standing ovation,” says the voice.

“And when I was catatonic?” George asks.

“I would look at you and fantasize,” says the voice.

“I’m sorry that I never . . .” George starts to say into the phone, or, rather, to the phone since no one’s there, and not actually to a phone since what he’s holding to his head is just the gun. He never finishes the sentence, because he isn’t sorry.

“What’s that music in the background?” asks the voice. “It’s beautiful.”

“If you love me, you’ll hang up now,” George says. He thinks the caller would hang up then. He makes that happen even though it hurts. He knows it’s real because he hears the click.