The World Doesn't Require You Page 6

  In addition to the music, as if a complement to the notes, you’d often hear the huffing of physical activity. Stay fit, our teachers preached. Master your breaths, then your music, then your self. We jogged and trained in the art of slapsmithing to stay lean and upright, and in our spare time we squeezed out notes hoping our music would please the masters. Only flabby sounds can come from flabby people, Grandmaster Deity taught, and we believed it. We understood the slapping movement of slapboxing, our forms, this aggression, this pantomime of violence, as tied intimately to our beloved Riverbeat, and so we dressed in our brown robes, we sparred and we practiced, each note, each movement a piece of the steady march toward becoming something like beings of light. This life wasn’t perfect, but it was ours. I had a band, rice at every meal, a secondhand guitar gifted to me by the masters after I completed trials in both slapsmithing and music. I wanted for little. My only need: to stand as I did, not in perfection, nor in mastery, nor even in competence, but in constant work and growth. To be honest with you, my band and I, we sounded like shit, and despite my deep affection for them, the sight of them often broke my face, turning it into a rage mask. It was a universal sound that bonded us and nothing else. We weren’t friends, but we were about that work. We were there to learn. There to conquer the minor trials and the major one on the horizon that stood in the way of us joining our teachers in mastery. The music was everywhere in the air at the time, and we let the notes, both sour and sweet, pass over us like dandelion snow.

  The Kid’s car pulled up in front of the Temple one starless night when the sky appeared vast and dark. I was sitting on the porch when his golden car grumbled in. On security duty it was my job to eye passing cars as suspiciously as the people in Cross River and Port Yooga eyed us. The wrong balance of things, of people, could topple the serenity of the new history we were building. The Deity’s wife stood leaning into the doorway peeling an orange, enjoying fully the early summer warmth. She wore shorts so short, when I stood behind her I thought I could see the beginning of a curve, but I may have been just imagining that. I could never figure the truth of her flesh from the fantasy of it.

  I rose and approached the car. The man who stepped out of the Honda wore wrinkled clothes—perhaps freshly fished from the bottom of a dirty laundry pile—and had a thick knotty beard and dreadlocks that scraped at his shoulders. His cheeks looked like shallow dry lakes and his skin the pale dust of arid earth.

  Hello, he said. I’ve been driving for days. I didn’t think my car would make it. I’m exhausted. I’ve come to—

  This not no flophouse, I said. There are motels a few miles to the south in Port Yooga or a little bit to the west in Cross River. I suggest you go to one of those places.

  I’ve come to learn Riverbeat from the Master. He shambled forward a step, two steps. I put my hand in my pocket and thumbed the rough handle of the knife I kept in there on these nights. I wasn’t supposed to have the weapon, but self-defense is a human right. There were women and kids here to protect, after all. If I were Master Deity I’d steady my core, center my breaths, and prepare my palm to repel him with a slapboxing attack. I’m not the Master, though.

  Don’t step any further, I said.

  My little buddy Osiris is weary too, sir. The man pointed to a plump cat at his heels, black with flecks of brown in his fur, a tuft of white beneath his mouth, a golden left eye and a creamy right one.

  If you could spare a little kindness, he continued. The only food I have belongs to this little fellow. I’d appreciate if you could save me from a Fancy Feast dinner, at least, or just provide me with a place to rest my head. Look, my will to learn from Master Deity is strong, but if you all don’t see fit to teach me, at least let me rest.

  Out of luck, bruh. We out of spaces and—

  I felt a shove at my shoulder that nearly knocked me to the earth. Master Deity’s wife pushed by me.

  Who taught you compassion, Slim? She placed a hand on the man’s shoulder. I’m sorry about that. Some people can be overprotective. I’m sure you can understand. Follow me. I think we have a guest room available in the basement. You may have to share it with a few others. Is that okay?

  The man nodded and the two of them stepped up the stairs, followed by the cat.

  Now, you get settled in and I’ll bring you some rice . . .

  Master Deity’s not going to be happy about this, I said, and the nagging whine of my voice disgusted even me.

  She didn’t turn. She called: If Dave has a problem, tell him to see me.

  It would be a lie to say I forgot about the Kid after a few days passed, but I had trials to prepare for and he seemed harmless, a bit annoying in the way he did nothing but eat rice, watch us, and walk about with his hands clutched behind his back as if he were a master. After a month or so he became like a chicken or a cow, part of the farm fauna that served as the backdrop to my life. I didn’t befriend the cows or the chickens, I just passed them on my way from here to there and I could scarcely tell one from another. Late one night I got off work and walked with tired limbs to meet my band at our practice spot by the pigs. I heard the singing chick’s voice from a distance. At first I thought she was shouting, but as I got closer I realized she was singing a song I had written. Her destruction of it made my already weary joints ache. She could sing when she wanted to, but tonight her voice made even the stars ugly. I said nothing to my bandmates, preferring to let my guitar be my greeting as well as my contribution to any conversation. The drummer played something beautiful and I nestled my sound within his rhythm. And the keyboard coon pressed his fingers to his keys; he stunned me—it truly amazed me the way he could turn any melody into a mediocrity. I rested on the slats of a wooden fence strumming my guitar, lightning-fingered, hoping my notes could quiet the grunting of the pigs, the grunting of the singing chick, hoping it could turn the keyboard coon into a virtuoso, and then, together with the drummer, strike a hole right through the universe. I felt a tingling, no, a burning at the back of my neck. You know that feeling when someone’s watching. I twirled as if the force of a bullet had spun my body. I must have looked a sight. Standing there a little ways off, blank as ever, the Kid spied on us.

  Don’t mind me, he said. I’m just checking out the sounds. After he finished speaking he settled into an unbroken gaze. That was his annoying habit and it repelled me. He had a stare that made you feel dead.

  Hey, boy, the singing chick called to the Kid. Hey. What do you do? You play an instrument? This was an odd thing for the singing chick to ask; everyone knew the Kid did nothing except eat our rice. He didn’t sing, didn’t play guitar, practice slapboxing, play bass, cook, stand guard, sweep, milk cows, tend pigs. The guy was fucking useless.

  Huh? No. I, um. I scat.

  You want to sit in with us? the singing chick asked.

  I would love tha—

  No, I cut in. You and me on vocals. That’s the scheme. We don’t need any more vocalists. I can do any scatting we need.

  We just practicing, the keyboard coon said. Stop being so butt-tight.

  Do I need to remind you of the trials? I said. We trying to gel here. We don’t need—

  Guys, I don’t want to be a bother, the Kid said. I’m just trying to find my place.

  Well, it ain’t—

  Across the way, the sudden rubbery scent of gasoline. It shut my mouth and took my words. As I breathed, the grit of black smoke collected in the back of my throat. We could see it rising in the distance nearly as well as we could taste it.

  Someone over by the cows pointed and shouted, It’s the rice people!

  Me, the band, the Kid, we stood solemn. Every time something happened to one of the Ruins, it happened to us. A tragedy and a failure in the mission to reclaim the land. The people on that rice farm on the other side of the Wildlands traded with us. They had been particularly insular, particularly unfriendly, but I took all squatters among the Ruins as a sort of extended family, comrades in this journey. One hadn’t burnt in so long
. The last fire was before I or any of my bandmates arrived. The threat of flames hung over our fire-hazard homes at all times, though. A burning now and then was inevitable.

  Fucking weirdos, someone said. I didn’t look up to see which idiot was speaking. Probably the keyboard coon. It didn’t matter. This moment stood taller than my band. Taller even than if we stood on each other’s shoulders.

  It seems like . . . the Kid said slowly, it seems like it’s the fate of all the Ruins to burn.

  What kind of shit was that to say? Had the smoke intoxicated him? Did he not believe, and believe deeply, in the meaning of our existence, of our reclamation? If not, then why was he here? To jinx us? To curse our mission? If the Temple burned, I’d have nowhere to rest my head; I had no other home. I wasn’t unique in this. This was not at all a game to me.

  The Kid’s presence now seemed to me like a harbinger of some coming terribleness. I wanted to pelt him with a rock shower. I glared at the rising smoke. I glared at the Kid. I glared at the smoke. I couldn’t tell you at the moment which I hated more.

  After the rice farm burned, I went into Cross River or Port Yooga from time to time to buy cigarettes and a newspaper. It was madness there. People involved in a war against their individual sovereignty, their humanity; it was a war they didn’t know they were fighting. I couldn’t imagine again being so under siege. The Kid in his idleness, his thoughtlessness, reminded me of that way of life. The Deity had made a bad decision letting him into the Temple. Who was this clown, anyway? So many outside the Ruins wanted to see our destruction. So many fools wanted to leave the past in the past as if the past had ever passed.

  It nagged at me to see Master Deity’s mental assuredness slipping. Bad old-man decision after bad old-man decision. This wasn’t the same Dave the Deity who invented Riverbeat out of church music and trained our Riverbeat hero, the late Phoenix Starr. Nothing is worse than an old crazy god. I volunteered by way of Mistress Deity to be part of the delegation to the other surviving Ruins—Dave wanted to form an alliance for protection when the authorities inevitably arrived to roust us. Not a bad idea, shades of the old Dave. We also needed another source of rice. He ignored my offer, though. Didn’t even give me the respect of a face-to-face refusal. His wife told me to focus on my trials. How’d you ask him? I said. I’m not sure you conveyed how serious this is. Look, she replied. You should be studying your arts instead of studying me. Likewise, my offer to join the Empty Ruins Committee (in case ours somehow met its end) was also rejected. The old man had definitely lost something, perhaps even his will to lead.

  One night on the porch, I tried to gently tell this to the Deity’s wife. She ate her orange and stared straight ahead; eventually she said, Why do you worry about these things, huh? I’d think you’d worry about playing your guitar. You act like you mastered it, and you haven’t. You have an easy job, sitting on this damn porch all night, but you don’t take advantage of it. Why don’t you practice? Always with a complaint about someone else. Do you think that’s going to make your music sound tripiotic?

  I stuttered, unable to spit my rush of words. Master Deity’s wife sounded foolish speaking the Cross River tongue. She shook her head, huffed, and walked into the house, dripping little droplets of juice onto her bare feet and the stairs. She talked to all of us like that. She used to call us her children, but that just seemed phony and pretentious to me.

  The good thing about the fire, though, was that it pushed back our trials for a month, theoretically giving us more time to practice. We were fools, of course, so instead of practicing we spent much of our time bickering. Me and the singing chick got into it often because I tired of the grunting and shouting she tried to pass off as singing. The line of gold bracelets on her arm jangled as she argued with me that night, creating a rageful music. Her arm’s music sounded better than our own. I hated it. I hated her arm and her bracelets. I hated her face with its flat, boxy nose. I hated our audience, the pigs who responded to our music by snorting and rooting in the mud. One day I joked with the drummer that they could be the singing chick’s sisters. She shot us icy stares. She was a mismatch of intolerable temperatures. Hate wafted from her in waves and I felt seared by her peculiar heat. She turned from me, hoping her shoulder could end our dispute for the moment, and it should have, but the next thing she said opened for me yet another old wound:

  So I’m gonna start singing before Mistress Deity finishes saying the band name, the singing chick said. When she says, Introducing the Roda! at the R—

  God, you’re ignorant, I replied. How many fucking times do we have to go through this, huh? It’s the Whore-uh. The band is called the Whore-uh, not the Roda.

  It’s Roda, she screamed (or was she singing?). It’s Portuguese for circle, you dumb fuck. It’s used in capoiera. Whore-uh is stupid. It’s nothing.

  I turned to the keyboard coon. He had come up with the name: It’s Whore-uh, right?

  He shook his head. Slim, we’ve been through this a million and four times and it always ends the same way. I said Roda, not Whore-uh. He rolled his tongue at the R in Roda, making the word sound guttural, like grunting. Like the singing chick’s vocals. You misunderstood me. Maybe I fucked up the accent. That’s possible, but it’s Roda. R-O-D-A. Roda. It hurts my ears to hear you say Whore-uh. It sounds dumb. The group’s name is the Roda.

  His face grew prehistoric, like a Neanderthal’s. His hair was shaggy and stringy. I imagined him wielding his keyboard like a club if we continued this argument.

  The Kid walked by in the distance, hands clutched behind his back in the pose of the masters. His head and face were now bare, a style some adopt to note their first year at the Temple. The Kid presented me a chance to change the subject, a fresh start courtesy of a common enemy.

  I plucked a few strings on my guitar, leaned real close to the singing chick, and said, The fuck is wrong with this dude?

  She sighed as if a sudden exhaustion had descended on her like a fog. She sat in the dirt and looked away from me. Her inattentiveness to my personhood turned my existence momentarily into nonexistence.

  He don’t scat, play drums, sing, rap—nothing, I said. The nigga just stares at us.

  I heard he’s on the run, the keyboard coon said. He killed somebody or something.

  I whipped my head around. Why would Grandmaster Deity—

  Kinship, the keyboard coon said. You know Master Deity went to jail for manslaughter, right?

  But these the dudes representing us to the other Ruins? I said. I’m a goddamn college graduate. I got an A in Interpersonal Communications!

  The singing chick cocked her head toward me.

  Why would anyone ever pass you up for something like that, huh, Slim?

  Right?

  Nothing says diplomacy like childish sniping and passive aggression . . .

  I opened my mouth to speak, but the drummer found a way to still my tongue. The drummer—the guy who told me about the Temple in the first place—knew me well enough to know the next thing that was to come from my mouth would have been devastating cruelty. There would have been no Whore-uh, Roda, whatever-the-fuck after that. Possibly she would have challenged me to a slapboxing duel right there, and I would have been glad to oblige. Perhaps I would have been expelled for slapping her to the dirt and made to wander, a homeless wretch. It would have been worth it, I tell you. Now we’ve all been expelled, every soul on that farm. Now we’re all homeless. The ground is burnt and still stained.

  The drummer stood between us, threw up his arms. I stilled my acid tongue.

  Y’all motherfuckers need to stop gossiping and bickering like some fucking chickens, he said. I heard that shit about the Deity’s not even true. No matter what our name is, if we don’t sound right at the trials, Master Deity’s gonna kick us the fuck out of here. Can we practice?

  I looked over at the Kid, sitting some distance from us now eating with his fingers from a bowl of rice. His gaze remained fixed on our instruments. Except for the pigs’
grunting, we let silence enter our space. Our way of consecrating our practice area after defiling it with our anger and bad faith. I closed my eyes and listened for my breaths as I did while preparing to spar. I began thinking in melodies, in lyrics.

  You know, the keyboard coon said, you’re wrong. The Kid does it all.

  Huh?

  Sings. Raps. Scats nearly as good as the Master, and he’s getting better. Even mastered Forms one through eleven.

  Get the fuck outta here! He’s been here a shorter time than me and already knows more slapboxing?

  I mean, you’re really not that good at it.

  Fuck you and your keyboard. Why would you just make up some shit like that?

  He’s working directly with the Master—

  You’re such a goddamn liar.

  Master Deity said he’s the first student with the potential to be greater than Phoenix Starr. He’s training him in the exact same way.

  Yeah, ’cause that worked out so well last time, I said. Anyway, I don’t believe you—

  I heard the same thing, the singing chick said. Mistress Deity told me.

  I talk to her every night out in front of the Temple, I said. She never told me that.

  The singing chick shrugged. We have better conversations when you guys aren’t around, to be honest.

  I was again thinking in angry clipped phrases. My mind raged and it raged. I spit forth a profanity, spit slobbering at the corners of my mouth, spit dripping into my beard; it was all the destruction I was capable of at the moment.

  Slim, could you calm yourself? the drummer said. I heard about it too. I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d act like this. Frankly, though, who cares? We have work to do. If we don’t play something good at the trials, we won’t have to worry about the Kid ’cause we won’t live here anymore.