Sweet Adaline

Chapter Five

She called just after four. It was a rugged, blistering heat that slipped between the cracks of the door jam and radiated through the windowpane. A violent bright cerulean sky breathed so hot, the waves of it distorted my perception in those waking hours.
It made more sense to live this way, I thought, holed up in that vacant apartment slowly amassing furniture as was it became necessary.
Most days I woke no sooner than past noon. My blanket blocked the light inside my bedroom. The blood that gurgled through my veins, pounded in my head like a Tom-Tom rising me for my wretched duty to the bottle.
"What're you doing?" she asked. I replied through flemmy morning gravel.
"I don't know yet."
"Then I'm coming over." There wasn't must to be said, considering how quickly the phone clicked and I knew she'd hung up. She thumped out a rhythm, and then again as I shook out my wet hair from my first shower in days. My head, filled with milky resistance to thought, still pulled me into the walls with each turned corner, attempting to test gravity. The apartment was a massacre, crumpled wrappers and paper bags amongst scattered clothes and bottles. More whisky stained coffee cups and pretzel remnants than I could recall collecting. There was no time. Her rhythm bumped louder, if she wasn't annoyed yet, I was.
"What were ya doing in here?" She posed at the door. I just backed off, let her roll in the way it was inevitable. "Whoa" She said. "You really don't have shit." That was all she said. Maybe there was more, but I was already in the kitchen finishing off my microwaved grilled cheese sandwich.
She'd come to visit with me more frequently through the following weeks. I did nothing with my time. Mostly, I stayed inside and read, or else I sat and ruminated over the  and how it came to be that way. We'd groove to brooding albums on a cheap cassette player, melding with those lyrics as they flowed through us. And when she'd come, she'd bring another and another.
We never had a great deal to talk about. She mentioned her mother once but I never pushed. I never mentioned Penny, and she never asked. I think it was the serenity of having someone that we could simply exist with, but not feel subject to entertain. She'd toy with my guitar while I'd read. On occasion, we'd exchange roles. But more often than not, we'd sit sedated and inhale the music that we'd share with one another.
I was sitting at my folding card table, forcing down a cold chow mein breakfast when the phone rang. It was two weeks old, and only she rang from it.
"I'm coming over." She said
It hadn't stormed for near a week, save the very rare bursts from rogue rain clouds that would move across the afternoon sky with hurried purpose, pelting heavy drops through the hot atmosphere. They fell abruptly and continued on, bringing with them the pungent urine stink of Bladderpods.
It was still clear, however, and showed no promise of even such a storm. We had gotten spoiled and now were disappointed every afternoon.
She arrived an hour later, soured by the weather, empty iced mocha cup in hand and her guitar over her shoulder. She wore a foolish grin she tried to hide from me. It was mildly contagious.
"What's this?" I asked coyly. "Mine isn't good enough?"
"Well, yours... isn't mine. Besides. I just wanted to bring it."
I shrugged disregarded. She came in and sat at the table, rifling through her bag for something. The second day she'd visited, my lack of furniture annoyed her so palpably that she dragged me to Wal-Mart and I bought the three piece set.
"I have something else" She said, pulled a cassette from the hunter green Jansport bag ejecting 'Congregation' and replacing it. "Brian made it for me. Well, I told him mostly what to put on it, but he put some other things on it too. You'll like him. If for no other reason than because he has awesome taste in music."
"Hmm." I nodded.
"I was thinking, maybe we might come by one time." She spoke, ignoring my response, absorbed in the process of winding back the tape to a song that she'd been listening to repeatedly in her walkman throughout the past hour of her trek via public transport. "Ok. This is hot! Check this out."
She'd timed it nearly perfectly as the last words danced from Dylan's tongue with his sliding nasal timbre, "A hard rain's a gonna fall," and strummed to finality. Then silence drew my attention to the radio and the girl, buzzing from the anticipation of my hearing what was soon to follow. Unearthly tones arose, synthesAngieed, harmonAngieing with the deep unmistakable tones of the organ. Then the dense and growling guitars took the waves epically.
Gert's deep narcotic words took me hostage, rounded by his sister Sarah in her rugged sultry tonal thunder. It was the aching lullaby for all my fractured consciousness. I slipped into it and lost my body in it's eclipse.
Then it was over, with nothing more but crackles from the handling of amplified guitars.
"What the fuck was that?" I asked emphatically.
"That? You'll like it. They're brother and sister. K's choice."
I nodded. "I see."
"Do you." she said. I glanced at her, now with her guitar in hand. She plucked out several notes and tuned the D string against the A.
I was across the room, and had settled back into a bean bag chair that thankfully, she had also coerced me into buying. These were the extent of my furnishing. I never planned on staying so I didn't buy much more. The more I drank and contemplated, the more I was drawn to the idea of following Penny. Until then, I marked time with Adaline.
We talked about the music. I picked up her guitar from where she'd lain it down. It was rich and light Gibson with Starburst stain. She had recently re-strung it with clean medium gauge steel strings, which she'd been continually tightening and tuning as she played riffs and progressions that had grown all too familiar over the past few weeks. The mystery of her skill had dulled as I witnessed her struggle with newer songs she simply hadn't grasped yet.
She was immersed in illustrating the inside cover of a white leather bound journal. It was the sketchy doodle of a girl sitting cross legged in the dark, illuminated by a stream of light that poured out from the entrance before her. She'd been at for over a half hour.
I was enticed to play those stainless strings, so fresh and taut beneath my fingertips. I strummed out something that looked familiar. Something I'd seen played recently. Then it came to me. It was that kid in the woods. What was his name, I thought. Something genuine, uncommon. Was it Forrester, or Carson? It wouldn't surface, but the way he played that song, that beautiful melody, was clear in my head.
I found the chords relatively quickly, and I picked them out In a number of ways, trying to find the order of the notes. It was a simple melody, I remember. I analyzed his fingering so studiously because I was certain I could find it on my own, despite my inexperience.
Then as I had begun to lose patience for the song, which was always my foremost excuse for abandoning my practices, I found the arpeggio. I plucked it out, and then the next chord. It was relatively identical for most of the chords. And once I'd played the first portion, the bridge came like second nature.
Adaline had stopped her sketch and was staring at me with a quite uncanny expression. Whether it was her amazement for the melody or for my ability to play it, the look became uneasy as I noticed it, not remotely masked. I couldn't find the words, but after a moment longer under her gaze, I ceased my search for them.
"What's that?" she asked, deeply curious.
"Um. Something I heard while I was staying up north, at that Trout farm in Oak Creek. I told you about that, right?" I asked, uncertain of anything I'd said or had omitted from our guarded conversations. I didn't seem as though we hid our lifes for a lack of trust. It just felt easier for us to talk without explaining much. Explanations were left to those who cornered us and would demand them.
"It sounds familiar. Where did you say you heard it? From who I mean."
"Oh, this guy I met my first week up there. He was playing it. He was actually the guy that set me up with the guest house, working for that couple. They were nice old folks. They were everything I imagined grandparents would be like."
"Do you remember who he was? I mean, his name or anything?" She asked, sitting back to detract from her obvious interest.
"Yeah. I was trying to think of it. I'm terrible with names." I racked my brain, rifling through for a good moment in the conversation where he might have said it. Then I remember him saying it only once. "I don't remember. Forrester or something like that. It was a cool name, though"
"Foster." she quickly replied.
"Yeah Foster. How did you know?"
"I had a friend named Foster. It just sounds similar." She lied. "I think I just heard it on the radio, that's all. And you met him? Sweet!"
"Yeah." There was something about the immediacy of her disregard, her placement of the song.
"You remember the words? Did he say where he was from?"
The answers to both of her questions eluded me. I was sure I did know, but not there on the spot.
"I think, if I heard it again, like if we could find the single somewhere..." She said, popping of from her seat. She set her book back down onto the table and snatched up her bag. "Let's go and try and find it!" She exclaimed. "It's not like we're doing anything. Besides, you need to get out of this place for a little while."
I had found that arguing with Adaline, once she'd set her mind on something, especially when it came to music, was futile. We hit the used record store a couple miles down the road. The epicenter of rock for amateur enthusiasts. We'd spent many hours there, rifling through cd's and tapes for the glory albums to pad our growing collection. 'In Utero', 'Sgt Pepper', 'Houses of the Holy', and our most recent fave, the new Tool album 'Aenima'.
We searched the racks and all the displays for the album that we both knew did not exist. I only knew based on my intuition. She knew however, for another reason. Still, within her brewed a hope that, possibly, he might have recorded something and it just had gotten past her. The more she searched the deeper that notion settled in.
We instead found a used cassette of Elliot Smith's self titled album that she'd heard about through her boyfriend, Brian.
Promptly we returned and ran through it about a thousand times, appreciating it all the more and more.
She didn't mention the song or where she knew it from for easily a week or more, but like I said, days were lost to hazy hangovers. And between her visits, I argued with myself about the course I followed. I had begun to lose patience with this roller coaster. The start of it no longer seemed as clear. Still I knew I was a coward, that I drank to feed regret and simply to sedate. But I felt nothing anymore, and i was tired. Always tired.
I never had an appetite and Adaline was always there. She'd urge me out to take the sunlight, breathe the hot air and see the life that moved on the bright side of my front door. She meant well, to open up my eyes, but still my heart was empty and pickled gut would wretch up what I ate, there in the solitude of darkness. The only thing worth waking for. The empty vacuum of my space.
I'd gathered what I needed four weeks prior to her last return, before everything I'd come to take for granted was erased, and I mixed the whisky mash. It fermented for three weeks in a glass jug underneath my kitchen sink. I'd made it just to make it, just because I had the time. I've lied. I made to resurrect...something. Some piece of us. I made it to reclaim the Saturdays and Septembers when there was still a chance; a time when I believed, despite our arguments, that soon we'd be that same thing we were.
Over the course of those weeks, I deeply believed that my answer, my elixir, my solution, was what I kept hidden beneath that sink. I believed it so blindly that the anticipation was maddening.
Hours passed some nights, and I would idle with guitar in hand. That whole last week, I tried so hard to remember how that song that Foster sang went. But the more I tried, the further it extended from my memory. It even lost the rhythm. Only the chords remained, mottled and never consistent. She visited only one day that week, and every other day I descended deeper in the disheveled cavern of my mind that lay in motley disarray. The man inside the flesh was disassembling itself, rendering itself to scraps and shadows of its former self. It was no longer me. It was hollow man that I'd left to play the role. His passive understudy. And from his eye's I watched as the lights of a city that no longer needed me, passed. Time passed and even music seemed to lose the notes themselves.
When it would ferment no more, I distilled the batch of whisky many times over, until the proof was too high to drink and it was rendered nearly tasteless. Each time I ran it through, I waited...for something. With each drop of evaporated alcohol that fell into the glass, perpetuating ripples from the center to the rim, I felt of piece of that illusion break away. And the rumbling boil growled like an engine, driving the lingering faith from my spirit. It filled three mason jars. I didn't touch it. I couldn't. It ached to imagine it, sitting on the shelf in the kitchen, behind the cabinet door. I couldn't touch anything for days. There was just no point in it any longer. Let the feelings come, I thought, and they did. They broke free from my chest, flowing like rapids. They coursed through my veins and from my face, rendering me to a sopping mess. For three days I didn't drink. On the third I began to feel alive. Not free. Just survived. Then they came as I had begun to drift into an early sleep.