Names for the Dark

I

At the beginning of every Fall, students in the choirs of many high schools all over the nation would mail audition tapes to the organizations in charge of regional and statewide choir events. The students whose auditions had been selected would be notified a few weeks later and receive their music in the mail. On a Thursday or Friday a few months later, they would leave school early, travel to the location of the concert, practice their music over the weekend, and conclude the event with a concert performed before a large audience. Although many organizations ran these events on a regional or statewide level, there was a choral directors’ association which selected students from a number of states on the East Coast. Students were placed in either the women’s choir or the men’s choir. Both choirs were large, with about five hundred singers participating in each. Organizations running events of this size were well recognized and able to obtain experienced conductors to direct the choirs. The name of the person directing the men’s choir was Dr. Scruggs.

“Oh he’s a marvelous conductor,” gushed Mrs. Patrick as she guided the car around a bend. “He’s new in the music community, but he’s written some incredible choral arrangements. You three should feel very privileged to be under his direction for the concert.”

In the back seat, Airiss watched the afternoon sun flash between black trees. The boy sitting next to him looked up from his music and spoke.

“What did you say his name was?”

Airiss did not recognize this boy and concluded that he had been selected from the other school in Boone County that Mrs. Patrick taught at. He had a medium build, brown hair, and a square head with a dry expression. Judging from his deep voice, Airiss thought, he was a bass.

“It’s Dr. Scruggs- isn’t that a funny name?” their music teacher wondered, as if she had just read something delightfully absurd out of a children’s book and were repeating it to a preschooler.

It was a funny name, thought Airiss. But he was watching the sun and did not speak. The boy next to him made no answer, either, and James in the front seat said nothing because he was asleep. Airiss decided he would talk to James about it later, because James always liked to talk about curious things, and the name Dr. Scruggs was curious indeed- it made him think of Brillo pads and muddy dogs and Chia Pets and soap bubbles and PhDs, and those were all good thoughts. A funny name- although Airiss was a strange name too. The boy beside him must have thought likewise, for he told him so at dinner in a jerky attempt to make conversation.

“Mmm yes ‘tis, ain’t it?” Airiss mumbled, as he waved his fingers through the candleflame. His mind was mesmerized by this dancing dim glow that made more shadows than light.

“Airiss, please do not play with the atmosphere. You will burn yourself.”

“Hey James, watch at this fire…”

Airiss’ pale blue eyes grew as if they were trying to swallow the light.

It was not necessary for James to see Airiss in the vicinity of a flame to know that he would be playing with it. James had actually been looking the other way the whole time, watching singers mill into the spacious marble lobby through a revolving door. He suppressed a grimace, and with a reasoning voice, addressed the absurd.

“But Airiss, you’ll get soot on the lovely white tablecloth.”

Airiss grinned, made whooshing sounds, and waved his fingers above the candlestick more rapidly until he accidentally tipped it over. As he stealthily moved to smother it with a napkin, his wide eyes ricocheted off the tabletop to check for witnesses and collided with those of the boy opposite, who was now pressed stiffly against his chairback.

“Hey!” Airiss blurted, “What’s your name again? I forgot.”

The boy muttered that his name was Drew.

Just then a server came and Drew ordered water. James ordered tea. Airiss wanted root beer, but the restaurant had none, so he settled for black coffee.

“You know,” ventured Drew, “coffee is the worst possible thing for your voice. It’s the caffeine.”

“That’s alright!” and Airiss leaped off towards the buffet and sped into a girl carrying a salad.

“Oh, sorry!” she yelped, and spurted back to the table where her friends were sitting.

James and Drew followed Airiss to the buffet. When they were seated again, the two began to talk. Although James did not go to the same school as Drew did, they knew each other by living in the same neighborhood and were good friends. James balanced his arm straight up on the table, and, as he conversed with him, slowly wound his pale hand in the air. Airiss did not speak. His thoughts were with the girl, and he began to stare from across the room at her long brown hair- a streaming waterfall of beauty which he could not ignore, not even long enough to eat. This was fortunate, as girls created such an intense passion in Airiss that, if he tried to think about them and eat at the same time, he threw up.

Normally, James wore the sedate expression of a ghost. There were times, however, when a cocked eyebrow betrayed the quality of undeceivable alertness in his narrow face. This is what happened when he noticed that Airiss was suspiciously quiet.

“Are you viewing that girl with the long brown hair?” he asked.

“Not now. Tryin’ to et. Cain’t think about the girl.”

Airiss slid the wad of chicken up and down the plate as he thought about the girl. She had brown hair and brown eyes and tan skin and she was not too skinny and not too much either and had- he was sure- the lovely alto speaking voice that blessed words with texture and solidity as they were formed from white teeth that shone not too brightly upon the occasional smile. He wondered what her name was, if there could ever be anyone else like her, if any two stars in the sky could ever be the same. Then he stopped sliding his food for a moment and wondered: could he meet more like her. Because- Good Lord- there would be hundreds of girls here by the time all the schools came!

“Drew!”

“…Yes?”

Airiss pulled the fork out of his chicken and leveled it at Drew’s head.

“I want you to tell me if you got a girlfriend.”

“I… do not.”

“You wanna go meet some tonight? Girls?”

Drew could see Airiss’ sharp teeth whenever he grinned. He was not interested in meeting girls in the slightest. He had better things to do, like read, or study, and the thought somehow reminded him of trash who cruised down the Riverside Drive in cars with cheap custom jobs, farting mufflers, who hung out in the smoke-filled bowling alley, around the two movie theatres, who wallowed in the Saturday nightlife of Cedarville: a milltown.

“No thank you, not tonight. I have to get settled in.”

By the time the three returned to their room, Airiss had forgotten about girls completely. His streaky blonde hair was just long enough to wind a finger in absent-mindedly, and this is what he did as he stared out the window at other windows that glowed like mooncheese, and over the streetlight fluorescence that tinted clouds orange. Because the lights in their room were on, he could not see much more than that, and he wondered what the city would look like in the day.

Airiss squirmed.

“I’m bored. Lessgo do somethin.”

“You could memorize your music,” offered Drew from the floor, prone on his stomach, hidden behind the long part of the bed, “that’s what I’m doing.”

Airiss ignored him.

“Airiss, why don’t you go downstairs and meet some girls?” James spoke from the other bed. He was sitting against the headboard and reading a book. He looked up, consulted his watch, looked back down, and with his delicate white fingers, turned a page.

“Oh gosh, I’d forgotten.” He started for the door. “What time is it?” “It is nine o’clock,” James told him without lifting his eyes.

“When’s curfew at?”

“Ten,” the voice said flatly from the floor. “If you’re not back by ten you’ll get in trouble.”

Airiss blew out the door, letting it float behind him and close with a click.

“Damn he gets on my nerves,” Drew gasped the second he heard it, as if it were the sound of an airlock sealing off a vacuum and he could once again breathe. “He fidgets and flies all over the place and almost gave me a headache. You can’t have an intelligent conversation with him either, and when you do, he talks like he’s half-raised!”

“Airiss’ southern accent has a tendency to kick and bang into the words of the English vernacular,” explained James. “He did not move to the county as we did, he has always lived there. And he’s not trash like I can already tell you think he is- he’s very intelligent… has much depth. It’s simply that he also has the enthusiasm of a preschooler who has had too much orange juice.”

Drew told James that too much orange juice did not do that to anyone he knew.

“But he’s not so strange if you understand him, Drew. Unique rather- and if one learns to accept individuals like Airiss as they are, it makes life easier, and sometimes, one discovers all sorts of fascinating things about them. Why don’t you do that, try to understand Airiss?”

Drew shuffled some papers in agitation and rolled over on his back.

“Can’t you just save time and tell me?”

“Yes, but it’s rather… ineffable…” and James dove into his book, instantly confident that he had resolved a future conflict between Drew and Airiss, one that he had foreseen since he learned of their selections for the choir.

James was always dealing with things that he couldn’t just tell people, thought Drew. Too vague. Too complicated. Find out for yourself. It was because he was an artist, since artists were always dealing with things that were too impractical to be straightforward about. Like the piano. Whenever James played the piano- and he could play extremely well- Drew always seemed to hear vague, indescribable things that seemed like questions. Not good, hard questions like, “What will we eat?”, “What will we wear?”, or “Where will we sleep?”, but instead: “What is… ?” And the fact that such a question never finished itself would agitate him to no end. But he liked to hear James play anyway- just as he had heard him play earlier that evening, when the men’s choir had congregated in the cavernous social hall of a brownstone catholic church two blocks from their hotel, where they were assigned seats and shouted at by a large hipped lady with straw colored hair. After she had covered all the rules of the event, she introduced Dr. Scruggs, a thin, glowing-faced bald man in his thirties who hopped onto the platform at the front of the room, smiled, spoke a few words of introduction, and promptly hopped off the platform and out the door, since the remaining thirty minutes that the choir had until dismissal would not be enough time to practice tonight. Off the brick walls a roar of talk began to echo, over which could be heard the self-aggrandizing intonations of students taking turns on the accompanist’s piano. Drew and Airiss could only convince James to play after he had heard a ninth-grader butcher a polonaise by Chopin.

“I’ve got to stop this horror,” he muttered in his quiet voice, and pushed through the ring of people surrounding the piano. Drew watched as James sat down and lowered his ivory fingers to the ivory keys. His fingers seemed to flap like fish when he played. They stirred the piano into a black brooding leviathan that shook waves across the room, waves which rose expectantly, even menacingly, but did not resolve themselves until the end, when they fell in a crashing cadence that impressed everyone, especially Airiss, who admired James and knew that he was talented and practiced several hours a day, and believed that when James grew up, he would still play the piano, he would go places, he might even be famous.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” asked Airiss.

“A singer,” replied the beautiful girl with the long brown hair. They were sitting on a chartreuse love-seat by the elevators, from which they could see the tall buildings and the great, orange cover of clouds. Fifteen floors below, singers and their chaperones were still checking in at the lobby desk.

“Really?”

“Yeah, I’ll sing at concerts and stuff. I’ll be famous.”

Airiss thought about this until he realized it was depressing him.

When Airiss grew up, he wanted to be one of two things. The first was something nice: a nice job, a nice family, and a nice home that the sun would always shine on. He would always keep in touch with his nice friends, too, he explained, although most of these would hopefully be from college, since he did not have many in high school right now.

Airiss also wanted to be a hobo.

“A what?”

“A train-bum! I’d live in these rail yards and boxcars and ride all over the country. I’d be a migrant laborer, and that is how I would eat, except sometimes I’d Dumpster-dive and get dysentery oncet a week. I wouldn’t bathe- and I’d go to Mexico!” he exclaimed suddenly, “I’d see all these things I’d never see any other way and I’d meet war veterans and alcoholics and mental cases and risk life and limb to be free as I dream and I clatter and roar into the night! Ohhhhh the things I would see!” Airiss stroked his bony jaw with fury as his eyes glowed like a clear sky.

“But what would your parents think?” the girl asked, nearly wailing with delight.

“Ha! The hobos can be my parents for all I know!” But he added, curiously and much more quietly, “How would your parents like it if you were famous?” And the girl did not answer immediately.

“Oh shit. I’m not really going to be famous. I’m going be like everybody.”

They were quiet for a while. Later, when they were hidden behind some curtains, they would listen to rain spatter on the windows. Airiss would tell her she had the most beautiful hair. The girl would peer down deep dark wells and tell him that his were nice eyes. Over the next two days the eyes would turn bloodshot.

This was because the night was long and rehearsal had worn Airiss down faster than he expected. But he was managing. He drank coffee and slept ten minutes naps during breaks, the evening, and sometimes at night. His heart and every pulse now seemed to stomp awkwardly against the limits of his body, as his lungs heaved for new air and his muscles ached and the inside of his head felt as if it would collapse into a black hole, pulling in the eyes first and then the rest of the world through the sockets. Airiss knew he was fine though. There were simply times in his life when he did not sleep.

“He yawns too much,” observed Drew clinically from the other side of the room. It was Saturday afternoon, the second day of the event. The conductor had spent the past fifteen minutes working with the tenor section, and since this left Drew in the bass section unoccupied, he began to study the people around him. He had not met many of them. During lunch and other breaks, they mostly clustered together by schools and talked. Although he was not an antisocial boy, unfamiliar people had a tendency to put Drew on guard, so during these times he chose to sit or look out the windows by himself. It would be nice to have someone to talk to, though. There was James, of course, who could always speak of intelligent things, but-

Drew had been awakened at five thirty by a painful heaving noise echoing from the bathroom. Drew lifted his head out of the covers to listen more closely. An ominous reek had mixed with the rebreathed air of the room, and light shone through a crack in the bathroom door. It angled along the floor in a yellow pane. A toneless voice from behind made him jump.

“Good morning.”

Airiss was lying on his back above the covers of his bed, wearing his clothes from the day before. His arms were folded beneath his head to support it as he stared at the ceiling and spoke again in the same voice.

“James’ feelin’ like crap. Said he got food poisoning.”

Drew lifted himself further out of bed and stopped, trying to decide if he should help James or go back to sleep.

“James told me to tell you that he’d be fine,” Airiss droned again, “and you don’t have to get up.”

Drew rolled out of bed and shuffled to the bathroom door. It would hurt his eyes if he opened it, so he spoke softly through the crack.

“Hey. James.”

“I’m doing magnificently,” James replied hoarsely. “Go to bed.”

“Should I tell Mrs. Patrick anything?”

“Yes, when she’s awake. Tell her that I’m not well enough to sing. Instruct her to call my mother so she can please come here and transport me home.”

“You’re not singing in the concert?”

Drew heard shallow panting.

“The concert is merely a concert, a hundred years from now it won’t matter-” he chanted, and barely finished the last word when he began to heave again.

So we left him in bed, Drew recalled. And now, without James, who would he talk to? The singers seated on either side of him were not very conversant (although one frequently lost his place in the music and asked him what measure they were on) and Airiss- well, nothing Airiss said was ever worth talking about, like his constant daydreams, the self-important proclamations of how he was feeling, or exclamations over absurdly common things; like the leafless tree outside their hotel, the individually wrapped cakes of hotel soap, pennies (which he liked to throw), or homeless people. Twice Airiss had tried to share with Drew his inexplicable fascination with homeless people. It was exasperating. During breaks, he wove through the clusters, mixing in and carrying on with the random acquaintances as if he had known them since childhood, before darting out of the crowd, never to be seen with them again. Once Drew had seen him slump in a chair and close his eyes, but even his rest, the heavy breathing of it, seemed to be for the exclusive purpose of mustering energy, a departure from the body to gather a psychic fuel. And then he would leap up again. In a way Drew almost marveled at him; he had so much energy- and at that thought, Drew swung his glance back to Airiss and witnessed the end of another yawn. “Why is he so tired, then?” The question was full of alarm and jumped in his mind like a firecracker: for when Airiss yawned, Drew had seen the boy’s eyes squint shut and his mouth open wide and his lips draw back and his sharp teeth gleam and his whole body tilt forward in such a way that Drew thought he could hear, tearing loose from within the black cavity of his mouth, his long and soundless scream.

When he opened his mouth, sounds came out. It was what Airiss loved about singing. When he sang, it was as if he could feel his voice transformed into an instrument of higher purpose, as if it had sprouted wings and risen brightly to angelhood. Like an angel, thought Airiss, angel-like: this was Mrs. Patrick’s description of his voice on the audition tape; a description which was as surprising for Airiss to hear as the sound of his voice in practice now- as amazing to him as holding his hand before his face and fanning the fingers and wondering what it was that made the muscles move, so stunning it was for him to believe that it was his own soul that could do it, guide a body and mind of such wild potential. The wild potential lurked in music too, and this was the other part of singing that Airiss loved- that something sung once would never sound the same if sung again. There would always be these details that changed from one time to the next that he could hear without even listening. It did not matter if he could not remember what the differences were: everything about a song was different- and therefore miraculous- each time he heard it.

Except for a Note.

Dr. Scruggs stopped the choir, criticized the baritones for singing sharp, and paused for attention. With a bounce of his baton on the upbeat, he resumed practice at measure 52, section C. Rehearsals were going decently, Scruggs thought, considering that he had never conducted a choir of this size before. Five hundred booming male voices were under his direction, and the thought made him giddy with delight. Nervous, too- but he attributed this feeling mostly to the fact that the choir was progressing too slowly with the music. The large choir was not as quick or responsive to criticism as a smaller choir would have been, and he was forced to go over rough spots many times before the choir sang them correctly. It took up time. The two hour break for dinner was an hour overlong, and that took up time as well. And even before then he would have to lengthen that break by another hour, just to listen to all the auditioning soloists circled round the piano, singing a phrase, some singing a longer phrase if he liked them, the eager, earnest, serious soloists- that too would take up time. If he had all of this time, he would dedicate it to a piece of his own composition, which he would premiere on the night of the concert. It was the luminous manifestation of an artistic vision, and, after three years of waiting, something he wanted desperately to make perfect and real.

Yes, the Note is in thet song, thought Airiss, and with a sibilant insuck of breath, he began to vibrate and sway imperceptibly like a bottle rocket does in the space of time between the ignition of its powder and disappearance from the earth. He had never heard anything so beautiful! He had to tell someone- and when the afternoon break came, he hurled himself into the path of Drew, who was walking across the room to stand for several minutes in the bathroom line. He spoke to him as one fiercely inspired, effusive with the mad, scattered phrases that had gathered in his head during practice. Unlike a rabid animal, he did not foam at the mouth.

It transcended all earthly description, he told him, the way this Note was- its perfection- each time he heard it, it did not change- it did something to him that he could not explain- and because he would do anything to explain it anyway, he tilted his shaking finger towards the ceiling and silently pushed it past Drew’s ear, as if to illustrate the Note’s glorious ascension into the empyrean realms of music.

Drew glanced from Airiss’s freckled arm to his red eyes, traced the blood-bright capillaries, heard his heavy breathing.

“Do you sleep?”

The arm fell like a bird struck by a pellet. Airiss’ face drew back as if a large door had been slammed into it, and it took him a moment to regroup. When he spoke again, he hissed and squinted his puffy eyes. “Sleep’s got nothing to do with it. What about this Note?” Airiss suddenly found himself disgusted with Drew. He intended to pace over to a window and think, but when he turned around and saw the singers clustered around the piano for solo auditions, he marched out of the room as quickly as he could. Drew could eat dinner by himself. Airiss was not about to hear any lyric repeat itself fifty times over while he waited for Drew to pee. Especially not an insipid one. It was a pointless solo anyway; the whole concert could have done without it. Not only that, but his Note absolutely creamed it. His Note was like the spine of a feather that soared off of a wave’s crest and into the stars. Though it was not actually written in the piece, he sensed the hole in the harmony where it belonged. Airiss felt like collapsing each time he heard it, and at one point, he almost did. Yet nobody seemed to notice, nobody would have understood. Clearly, Drew did not.

“That sullen prick,” Airiss growled, as he swung out of the elevator that night and into the crowded lobby, “he did not even try to understand.” But look, there were lots of girls here and Airiss was going to meet several. He would. He had already met a beautiful girl with long brown hair and tonight he saw a pretty girl with short blonde hair standing among others. He wondered if she were friendly, if she wanted company, if she would maybe understand everything behind the Note if he told her about it. Then he dashed all these thoughts away and began his walk towards her.

At curfew, Airiss left the lobby in a fouler mood than when he had entered it. The pretty girl with short blonde hair did not get it, nor did the other four other girls he had met that night. He had been able to get the pretty girl with short blonde hair into the dark and kiss her, though, and that was fantastic. Airiss entered the room and found Drew practicing a solo.

Drew had been dealing with his excitement over getting the solo by practicing it for the past hour. It was practice: falling into a pattern, putting every note in its place- that always reassured Drew, and it was one of the things he enjoyed about singing, doing things properly, perfectly. Ay, his solo must be perfect. The solo was his and hundreds of people would hear him sing perfectly it tomorrow night and it would be perfect he knew, but he was tired now. As Airiss stalked past him towards the window, Drew sighed, lifted his binder to eye-level, and tilted the spine before him like a sword bared against the winds of destruction.

II

Before Drew went to sleep they had a short conversation. Airiss lay on top of the covers for a while after, but three hours later he felt cold and crept under them.

At dawn, he watched the orange night turn to a deep, beautiful blue. The blue moldered to gray and it began to rain. When it was time to leave, he drank three cups of coffee and tripped over himself in the revolving door. He had a headache and his body was sore. To distract him, he paid special attention to the homeless people, and spotted many of the ones he saw the day before. Once again, Drew did not care. But to Airiss, there was something miraculous about them, how securely they placed themselves on the sidewalk, shuffled through the hustle and bustle of pedestrians, emitted a dirty dim glow. Airiss looked up. It was cold, and as he scanned the heavy sky, he could see clouds of exhalation flicker over his face. He sucked in a breath that stretched his lungs and mixed with the stale air inside. Then he entered the church.

Dr. Scruggs was anxious. There was no substitute for practice. He pressed the choir hard, making such progress that when rehearsal broke at five o’clock and the singers piled up at the doors, Scruggs felt confident about every song except the one he had written. Technically, it sounded fine, but Scruggs wanted it perfect- not simply for the audience’s sake, or his career’s sake, but for the song’s sake. Yes, the song was everything. Said everything, too- a strange quality for that which had no words but vowels and no name but a number. After all, Scruggs had thought, composing late at night in his office at the university, words could be so limiting, so inadequate; who needed them? A wordless, nameless song said what language could not: anything.

And that was the beauty of it, thought Scruggs, as he gathered his scores and strode out of the large empty room, down the stairs, through the door, onto the street. It was malleable like the shadows, memories, emotions, all those other intangible things, the song was, and it could say anything to anyone so long as that person listened. It was complacent yet restless, energized yet tired, desolate yet inspired, helpless yet empowered, depressed yet triumphant- oh the list could go on and on without ever naming that singular feeling that rose at the end like- like-

Like something he couldn’t name, unless perhaps it were beautiful (but that word was too vague, he thought in the hotel, unlocking the door to his room, one floor above and fourteen doors down from Airiss and Drew).

Drew hummed as he dressed. Airiss gritted his teeth. Normally he did not mind humming, but being tired had made him irritable. His morning headache had degenerated into a throbbing monster, and Airiss realized earlier at dinner that his throat ached, too.

“That means your vocal cords are swollen. I told you not to strain your voice practicing,” chided Mrs. Patrick earlier in the lobby café. Then she spoke again, tossing her large blonde head and reminding him without words (although she probably never thought to imply it, Airiss thought with a merciless snap) what the most special part of his voice was: “Now you might not be able to use your upper register-”

The hell I won’t, thought Airiss, and he stole the salt shaker off the table when no one was looking.

Now he shook it violently over a glass of warm water to the time of Drew’s humming. If Airiss told him to stop, it would sound petty- and Airiss was anything but petty. Why, everything he did had a reason, although sometimes he was not sure what it was. Salt began to collect on the bottom of the glass. Airiss set down the salt shaker with a confident bang, and pulled from his pocket something wrapped in a brown paper napkin. He unwrapped it to reveal two lemon wedges, which he squeezed into the water. Then he stirred the mixture with a spoon (also from the restaurant) until most of the salt dissolved. Out of sheer novelty he ate a lemon rind. Then he began to gargle the water as he dressed. This would help his voice. The gargling did not block out the sound of the humming, however, and as Airiss listened, he recognized the tune of Drew’s solo. Airiss hated the solo; and yet, when placed in the context of his bitterness, it became something to be envied, a symbol of achievement and responsibility in the glowing presence of which he seethed with inferiority. He had to redeem himself.

Airiss swallowed the mouthful of salty, sour, tepid, regurgitated water.

“I met seven girls this weekend,” he snarled.

“Really?”

“Yes.”

Drew paused as if he had just received a shrunken head from a jungle tribesman and did not know what to do with it. He had to remain polite because he did not want to insult the members of the tribe, who were all cannibals.

“What’re their names?” he asked, buttoning his shirt and feigning interest.

Airiss was silent for a full minute.

“I don’t remember.”

Drew finished tying his other shoe and sprang up from the bed. He was actually too excited about the concert to be distracted by small talk, but he needed to reply so Airiss would quit staring at him. He echoed a good-natured, entirely fake laugh.

“You see? Girls are a dime a dozen anyway!”

There! That sounded like something Airiss would say. Honestly, Drew did not think much about girls in an amorous way at all. He had decided a few years ago that he would live his life free of the complicated mess until he bumped into That Someone. Then they would get married and have kids or something happy like that.

Airiss felt a flower of iron bloom in his gut. It quivered.

“That’s not true.”

But Airiss spoke under his breath, and Drew could not hear him as he stood in the bathroom, fixing his tie. When he stepped out, Airiss was gone.

“Everone and everthing in the entire world is special,” muttered Airiss as he stalked into the conference room where the men’s choir was gathering. Why did he talk to him, anyway? He was just so damn-awful… what was that word James used a lot-

“Pedestrian.” He hissed the word with venom. Sometimes he thought the whole word was crawling with pedestrians. There was nothing special about them at all, Airiss thought, and he sat down against the wall with his binder over his knees and began to trace the patterns on the carpet with his boiled-red eyes.

Thirty minutes later, the loud woman with large hips and straw colored hair took roll and marched the choir out of the hotel and down the street to the concert hall. Airiss’ anger slipped away as he looked for homeless people and thought about the concert. Airiss had sung in enough concerts to know that something happened in a performance that did not happen in rehearsals. Diction became clearer. Chronic errors vanished. Cut-offs were cleaner. Lyrics took on meaning. People watched the conductor. In middle school, Airiss had sung in an all-district choir that completely rescued itself from certain embarrassment by the energy, or zeal, or aura- whatever it was- of concert night. He knew that was it. Airiss could sense it, a vital thing that perfected everything it touched. This was why he would not be satisfied with the Note until he sang it during the concert. He imagined himself in Frankenstein’s castle, cranking his monstrosity up to the roof, where a lightning bolt would course down and electrocute it with life. But my Note is more of an angel than a monster, thought Airiss as he shuffled with the singers to the backstage door; like a bright angel I will fly into the stars. Then he entered, having spotted very few homeless people out and about on the cold evening.

In a room backstage, chaperones helped the singers line up as they waited for the women’s choir to finish. Everyone stiffened when the long applause began. The stage cleared, the applause died, and the rows backstage lurched into motion. Then the clapping rose again. Dr. Scruggs was waiting in the eaves, and he greeted the singers as they silently filed past. Airiss gave the man with the funny name a red-eyed wink.

When the choir was in place, the conductor was on the platform, and the clapping was finished, Drew stepped out from the front row. As a kind of tribute, he thought of James as he walked to the microphone. James had not really seemed to care about it before he left, but it saddened Drew to think that no one would hear James’ voice blended in with the other four hundred tonight. Just before he reached his spot, Drew figured that maybe, if he sang perfectly, he could somehow make James present in addition to himself and everything would turn out wonderfully.

But when he tried to peer through the lights, all Drew could see was an enormous void.

Drew forgot about James, sang his solo without event, and returned to the risers as the first song began.

Dr. Scruggs had a daydream once in which he likened the songs of a concert to a garden. The person who listened to the songs was like one who walked down a path and beheld the botanical arrangements on either side. Each was different. Some were like gay flowers that bobbed and swayed in the air. Others were like trees, hard and brave, with taproots so deep they tunneled into unknown caves and no machine could ever pull them over. Then there were vines; they made their own twilight and covered hardness quietly with broad, darkling leaves. If the vines had flowers, it was a kind of love. Quite often the flowers and trees and vines would wind into each other and create feelings of deeper intricacy. This was how Scruggs heard the concert.

But the metaphor broke down when Scruggs reached his own song. Trees and topiaries were organic, yes, but they did not have the special fluidity his song possessed. And so the path veered off the edge of a cliff, and the choir and the listeners fell into an ocean.

Airiss went rigid as he heard the basses enter, and a part of him that had been saving itself until this time activated. He drew his shoulders back, cracking the joints in his neck.

Here the basses enter, thought Dr. Scruggs, like a splash in calm waters before the tenors II’s wash over them, and in turn the tenors I’s wash over them. He knew the song like an old friend. Yet there were still things that he did not know about it, things that he wanted to hear, things that he was waiting for the concert to bring out. For in a performance, a ready choir would exude a charge- an energy without which the songs could not reach their final stage. It was only natural, Scruggs thought: after all, a choir does not perform simply for its own pleasure, but for others to hear, and, if a concert is the fulfillment of that ultimate purpose, why should the choir not sing better at that time than during any common practice?

As he sang, Drew thought of James again without knowing why.

The water was restless and it rose in low swells that barely crept above the surface. But soon the movement became greater, and transparent waves rose gently to fill the empty air. They strode across the surface like ghosts, passing into one another, falling through the surface, looming up again- each one taller than before, but never breaking; carrying on with a calm, inscrutable tension, the intensity made even more apparent by the protracted length of its building. Scruggs felt the air pulse with the voices. As their volume rose, so had the waves, and slowly he began to tingle all over.

James playing the piano. That was what this song was like, Drew reckoned vaguely. Because James played like he was heralding something great, like a whale would shoot out of the piano at any second, with the questions he asked. He was a charlatan when he did that, held the answer of mysteries- even mystery itself- within an inch of Drew’s ear and yanked it back just before the moment would complete itself. If Drew had been fooled by it once, did he have to believe it was real at all? It could have been a trick; nothing. Yet the question this song was asking, it felt like a promise, seemed to, though it was not finished yet. He felt as if he were in the presence of a vague miracle. Like the way James played his songs, maybe this song was building to something; but with the difference that it might succeed, Drew hoped, as the waves in his conductor’s head began to spin.

Airiss felt the crescendo swell like a graceful and monstrous wave. Here is my ramp, he thought.

We have shaped something from flatness, Dr. Scruggs thought with glee, with his face lit up like a lightbulb, with his arms hacking at the air. The waves of sound! The singular feeling! He had waited so long! Now it would rise and converge!

“Now!” yelled Dr. Scruggs. “Nowwwww!”

Airiss opened his mouth and a beautiful sound sailed out. And as the silver Note rocketed upward, it seemed to pierce a hole through the top of his head, out of which a black miasma of bitterness and headache burst forth, and a beam of stagelight entered, cutting through the fog of his sleep-deprived mind. Oh, this was it! He could not stop now! He would sing a few measures longer. It was so high and light that Airiss knew he was the only person who could hear it within the loudness of the choir, but he did not care; he felt, as a glow of euphoria passed over him like a sunrise, that this too was part of what he had hoped for, all he had hoped for, all of it was perfect. And a dim awareness, too, that something was wrong with his throat. It was on fire.

Drew’s folder nearly sprang out of his hands when a raw scream torched through the air.

His Note! It was reentering the atmosphere! The heat! was burning it to cinders!

Dr. Scruggs turned white as the scream filled the air for an instant, disintegrated into a whimper, and vanished.

The scream (where did it come from? He could not see) had left a vacuum in its wake. Into it swept a long, hollow gale which toppled the waves and tore something out from under the voices. Then Scruggs felt nothing.

Dammit, what the hell was that? thought Drew. Who screamed? (what happened to the song?) As he decrescendoed with the bass II’s, the song continued toward the end perfectly with every note in place. (Maybe it was nothing after all. Maybe it was nothing to begin with)

Airiss did not sing the last thirty measures of the song, or notice when people glared at him. Some horrible self-destruction had been set in motion- and once the applause roared and his row filed off stage, he fled from the building as if it were collapsing around him.

Skip, skip, skip went the dress shoes on concrete. He ran up the street, past closed shops and streetlights and strollers and neon signs. The cold air burned in his throat, and he stopped to bend over when he could not breathe. His heart throbbed in his ears. It did not matter if people saw him. He began to run again and fled into the hotel as if it were a bomb shelter on the eve of a nuclear holocaust.

He ignored the elevators and shambled up fifteen flights of stairs. When he stopped at the door to open it, he dropped the key and noticed his hands were shaking. Inside, he spun about the room, yanking off dress clothes and pulling on ordinary ones. Dress warmly, he told himself. You cannot not stay here. You must walk. It was what he always did back home when he got wound up or thought about the wrong things at night. He stomped into his shoes and fell down on the bed to catch his breath.

Then he rose and left. Halfway through the door, Airiss heard someone shout his name. Drew was small and far away, bouncing down the corridor with his coat slung over his shoulder. He waved cheerfully.

“They loved us! We got a standing ovation!”

Airiss ran towards him.

He did not stop running until the revolving doors forced him to slow down. Outside, he hid in a corner and caught his breath. He made the air warmer by pulling the collar of his winter coat over his mouth. When he was ready, he began to walk.

Airiss’ shoes scraped over cracks in the pavement. His legs hurt from standing and his jaw was sore from singing. All weekend he had been fatigued, but now, in the fresh chill of the night, Airiss felt a promise of sleep. It drew closer to him on wings of black feathers that shook the air into silence with every soft stroke.

Like an owl, he thought. An owl lived in the barn at home. Airiss had never seen it before but he knew it was there because he heard its hoot if he went there at night. Airiss thought of all the other places he went at night. There were the fields, the pasture, the basement, the barn, the woods, the hill, and sometimes (ignoring municipal curfew) he wandered up the road and into town. He saw everything. The moonlight swirled in the brown river. The white kitchen glowed blue. Stars flickered best on cold moonless nights. The temple-like barn, and the owl ghost that lived there. Dumpsters and stacks of pallets behind the grocery store. Moths attacking streetlights. A black stray dog, seen across a field. A small cemetery beneath someone’s window. An empty street, a blinking stoplight. And no sound but gravel footsteps, the crickets and the wind until the birds began to chirp at five in the morning, when he sat in trees and watched the stars fade and the black sky turn blue. He never told anybody, not even James, of the world before the sun. It did not seem fitting.

The dark did not frighten him, and he could run very quickly. His hearing was acute. He had a fast metabolism and was never unbearably cold. Peggy knew these things and did not mind if he went for walks, though it was also because he did not tell her that he went into town, and because he did not go out so often. On other nights when Airiss did not sleep, he would read and write poetry at the desk in his room. Sometimes he would putter about the house and clean. When he did none of these things, he would lie still on his bed for hours and stare at the ceiling, thinking. He had to be careful not to think of things that would make him restless or panicked; for with him, the night had a way of amplifying all things through its shadows. But if he thought of them anyway, he went for a walk. He thought then, too, of course. But with walking he had things to see and hear that usually distracted him and weakened the thoughts. On the rare occasion that those things strengthened the thoughts, he could run.

So he could think about the concert now.

But the Note was gone, and there was no use bothering over it anymore. He had at least been able to hear it for a short time. What about Scruggs? Scruggs had looked as if his face had caved in. Airiss felt even sorrier for him because he liked his name. Where’d a name like that come from? Ireland? Russia? West Virginia? It was a curious name like his, Airiss thought, nodding sagely as he swung around a corner with long, flinging strides. Throughout the course of his days, people would politely make that remark (Drew had- (Drew had a decidedly bland name)); that his was a curious name; to which he would reply, yes, it was. This always led to an awkward pause and a change in subject. But Airiss was not being rude. In truth, it was all he knew about his name.

His walking slowed, as if he were readying himself to turn around and go back to the hotel. But just as he was doing so, Airiss spied a homeless person at the end of the block. Well! It was about time! Now he’d get to have a fine talk with one. He was a grimy, bearded old man wearing a turquoise-purple windsuit, whose legs stuck out in flat V-shape on the sidewalk as he sat against a fire hydrant. Airiss practically stood between the legs and opened his mouth to speak.

His voice came out as a dry rasp.

Well, this was a first. Unperturbed, Airiss turned on his heel and continued down the street as the old man watched him go. Fast, furtive thoughts began to slip through his mind like leaves down a gutter. Fogs of exhalation swirled into his face. He was still walking away from the hotel. It might be alright to go back to the room now, but now he was thinking more about the names and the homeless people until the two thoughts collided and he asked himself what the names of homeless people could be.

If they have them at all, thought Airiss, because you didn’t think of homeless people having any (here he passed several sitting against a garage door, but he could not ask). But of course they had names. Had to have them, because they were special like everyone else. Given to them by their parents or somebody from their past. But he did not know about those things, so they were nameless to him still.

In surrender, Airiss kicked a can banging down the sidewalk and rubbed the violet circles under his eyes. As if these actions had willed it, a concrete wall of reason buckled and collapsed, leaving behind a luminous haze of dust into which Airiss felt his mind make a brilliant leap- what if they simply appeared into the world, parentless, already knowing their names? What if, he thought, with no intentions of turning around now, the name itself came out of nothing?

Airiss heard a wailing sound travel over the city. It was a long, ghostly hoot.

“Hoo-hoooooooooooooooo-“

(In the interlude was a low rolling rumble that froze him to the sidewalk and forced an unshaven man in a black trenchcoat to stare at him as he paced by. Airiss stopped listening when he felt the familiar growing shadow above him.)

“Hoo-hoooooooooooooooo-“

Don’t move, Airiss thought. Maybe it will not happen.

But an enormous fist smashed through the top of his head, dripping with black ink. As it filled his skull, Airiss felt as if the lush world of concrete, streetlights, homeless people, newsstands, and automobiles around him were drowning in a horrific flood. His vision began to blur. His body became heavy with sleep, a sleep of the wide-eyed restless which takes hold with force and is like a rising death.

Don’t fall asleep here, he thought. And don’t run. Don’t… run…

In the last bright corner of his mind, on the verge of being swallowed, Airiss knew he had thought about the wrong thing. He had to get back to the room somehow. He would make it if forced himself. Because it would be awful to sleep… or if it made him-

Run! his fear shouted. Run!

***

Drew had propped himself against the wall like a stiff board. Mrs. Patrick was sitting on the edge of his bed. For the third time in three minutes she tilted her eyes at the blue display of the clock on the nightstand. It read twelve twenty-four.

“That air-head. Where,” she hissed in a bewildered whisper, “in the hell is he?”

Drew repeated blandly that he had not seen Airiss since he had punched him in the face and charged down the stairs.

After a few minutes Mrs. Patrick began to clench and unclench her fists with such a slow desperate violence that Drew thought she was going to knock a lamp off the wall. Instead she covered her eyes and began to cry.

Drew’ face turned white. “Oh, come on, it’s only been two and a half hours,” he said in a lame voice. “I’m sure he’ll be back any second now.”

Actually Drew did not care if Airiss ever came back. That guy was a psychopath. He would tell James that if he ever escaped from this insane place, and James would agree with him, because by then James probably wouldn’t have a damn clue what else to think. Understand him, James said. Ha! James acted like he understood everything.

“That poor boy!” choked Mrs. Patrick in a strangled wail that made Drew tense his shoulders and stare at the floor confusedly. Then she began to make soft hissing noises. After a several minutes the noises had petered out and Drew looked up and spoke in the same lame voice that he used before.

“Um, he’s fine. It’s not like he would have left the hotel.”

Mrs. Patrick sniffed. “The desk said they couldn’t find him.”

“They don’t know what he looks like. Besides, he’s probably making out in a stairwell or something and forgot what time it is.”

Mrs. Patrick gave Drew a bleary look that told him to shut up.

“I’m tired,” Drew announced quietly, and he folded his arms.

Mrs. Patrick stared at the wall for a minute. When she spoke again, she had regained control of her voice. “Alright then. Goodnight,” she said without inflection, and she rose from the bed and paced rigidly out of the room.

Ten minutes later, Drew was in bed. Every night, just after he folded his hands and breathed a short, generic prayer but just before he fell into the bland, habitual sleep of the complacent, there was a tiny sliver of time during which he always stuck his head out of the covers and surveyed the dark room. He had left the curtains open and fluorescent light slanted onto the floor. The television, desk, and chairs had all transformed into unwieldy masses. It was interesting and even remarkable to think on how the morning would make the room bright and solid again. He listened to his breathing. It sure was quiet with no one to talk to, he thought, and he remembered the conversation from the night before. Drew had been making an attempt to understand Airiss.

“So there, what do your ‘folks’ do for a living?” he asked from an entrenchment of bedsheets.

Airiss lay on top on his covers and stared at the ceiling. He spoke in monotone.

“Peggy teaches English at Methusela County Middle School. We live on a farm but we rent the land out to farmers.”

Airiss paused as if these words had unfathomable significance. When he continued a few seconds later, Drew was listening with rapt attention.

“We raise a few llamas on the side, too- I named them all.”

“Can you ride a llama?”

“Ours is too small. A person’d kill it if they tried to do thet.”

“Oh,” Drew said with clear disappointment.

Airiss said nothing. After a few minutes, silence began to emanate from his body and fill the room like smoke. Drew could not stand it. He spoke again to clear it away.

“What about your Dad?”

“What?”

“Your-“

“Oh. Roger died from a heart attack a few years ago. It was very sad.”

Drew was about to offer his condolences when Airiss cut him off.

“Oh no no no no no it’s fine. It’s not like he was my real father. I’m really adopted. I don’t know anything about my parents. Except they named me.”

“Oh. I see. Are you and Peggy close?”

“We are good friends.”

Drew had gone to sleep last night feeling pleased with this conversation, but in the morning he was disappointed when he realized they had not talked about anything that made Airiss understandable.

Now in bed again, Drew pictured Airiss on a farm, but the picture was dry and dim like an old photograph. Because he was tired, though, Drew let his imagination roam with it. But the roaming turned to a trot and the trot turned to a gallop and then Drew’s imagination was running rampant-

Drew saw Airiss on a clear day. Airiss cackled and grinned as he crouched down on the back of a white llama and galloped through a field of shining grain. The field was endless as the clear blue sky that reeled around his head. His hair and bronze skin were lit by the sun. The wind roared in his ears. Drew basked in the glow of his vision until he noticed that Airiss was naked and carrying a massive scythe. When he swung it, hundreds of tiny grainheads hissed up in a cloud. Drew was alarmed to see the moon roll across the sky and halt in front of the sun. The sky darkened and the grain turned white. Airiss’ gaze was fixed on something. To his horror, Drew realized that it was himself, standing in the field. His heartbeat quickened to the thump of hooves. He was about to turn and run when he looked down in confusion and saw a pile of pennies at his feet. He bent down and scooped up a handful. He drew back his arm-

It was a stupid thought. Drew would have swatted it down, had he not just fallen asleep and turned it into a dream, which he would not remember in the morning.

***

(Airiss was not woken by the banging, or the swaying, or the hard floor. It was the sunrise, flashing between black trees, framed by a boxcar door).

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