makes me want to
The Neo-Beats
uncollected memories
one. In Atlanta, it's always twelve noon, so hot your lungs feel sticky with the humidity and your limbs are too heavy to move.
We'd been on the road for three months, two days, sixteen hours, and forty five minutes and the only reason I know is because in Atlanta there was nothing to do but count the seconds.
Ben was at work. Megan had gone with him. Jay was just gone. We hadn't met Trace yet.
The only reason it worked, five people living in a studio apartment the size of a matchbox, was because we were gone all the time. In Atlanta, it's always too hot to stay inside.
Like I said. Ben, Megan, and Jay were gone, so it was just me and Rae in the place, no buffer, no chaperone. Nothing but air and a miscommunications between us.
I was laying across the pull-down bed, flat on my back, staring at the ceiling and counting the seconds. Forty one forty two forty three forty four. In Atlanta it's always too hot to write. The humidity warms up your thoughts until they're too sticky to put on paper so all you can think of is the heat. All I could think of was the heat.
It was noon, and there was sunlight coming in from the one window, landing straight on my chest and burning.
Rae was in the bathroom, talking on her phone. The door was shut between us, muffling the sound of her voice from specific words into just a dull noted hum. Once or twice I tricked myself into thinking I heard her say my name.
After a minute, she came out, running a hand through her hair, damp with sweat. Our place didn't have any air conditioning. She said, Tom, it's hot as fuck.
Hot as fuck. Yeah. I was distracted by the cut of skin showing between the end of her shirt and the start of her jeans.
She watched me, leaning in the door frame. Said, Listen, the door doesn't lock anymore, the humidity's swelling the door up too much. Said, I'm gonna take a shower, cool off. Said, Don't come in, got it?
I didn't speak. Just nodded.
Rae smiled in that way she had. Yeah alright, she said, turning around.
The door didn't shut all the way, and maybe Rae expected me to be a gentleman and turn around, but who the fuck am I kidding -- Rae never expected anything from me. Through the thin seam left open, where the wood was swollen and warped too much to fit right, I saw her shirt come up over her head, saw her eyes catch mine in the mirror, saw her teeth catch at her bottom lip and she smiled. She laughed at me. I groaned without meaning to and rolled over, my face in the pillow, hips shifting against the mattress.
In Atlanta, it's always too hot to think.
two. I wish I could tell this in order, but truth his I wouldn't even know where to start. I can't think that clear. In Atlanta, maybe I didn't see Rae through the crack in the door. Maybe I shut my eyes and imagined it, her arms wrapped around herself, almost demure but not quite. Maybe that's what I was thinking of, when it was too hot to think.
Listen. I wish I could tell this in order, but I don't know what the order is anymore. I know some things, but I can't tell what really happened and what is my mind filling in the gaps. Parts of this are probably fantasies, parts are
This is what I know to be true. I know I met the Neo-Beats in L.A. I know we went to Austin and Atlanta and Chicago and El Paso and New Orleans. Probably more. I know we met Trace in New York City. I know by the time we reached Detroit, the Neo-Beats were rotting from the inside out.
You're probably best off assuming anything else I say is a total lie.
three. Trace was neither boy nor girl, straight shaped in genderless clothes, with dead slanting eyes and full wine colored lips. There was a cut on Trace's mouth, an asymmetric red seam that would sometimes open and drip black blood as Trace spoke. Of all of us, Trace kept the oddest hours, sometimes gone for days at a time, but always back whenever one of us had cigarettes to share.
There were times Trace would shiver and crackle and jump like static electricity, unable to be contained or calmed. Trace would heave around our place like a hurricane, pulling the covers off the bed, the papers off the walls, the food from the cabinets, the clothes out of the suitcases, and leave it all in a whirlwind of a mess on the floor.
And there were times when Trace would be still, infinitely still, in a crumpled mound in the corner, dead eyes open. Trace would be there for hours, silent and cold, and those eyes would hardly even blink, always watching and never seeing.
In New York City, we were restless, anxious, wound up too tight. We thought at the time that the heat had followed us up from Atlanta, settled in our skin, sunk into our veins, and fermented there, but maybe it was Trace, Trace and her black blood, that had poisoned us.
four. I'm ahead of myself. Four towns before the Neo-Beats ever met the disease that was Trace, they were jumbled together in a smoke hazed basement club called Zepplin's, grouped around the bar and wearing the sallow, wary expression that is the uniform of the Neo-Beats.
That's where the Neo-Beats found me. I didn't find them. I wasn't looking. I wasn't doing anything. There were too many words inside me, stuck in my throat like marbles. I was choking on them, strangling myself to make something great. By the time the Neo-Beats found me, I'd spent a year in L.A. trying to write, with nothing to show for it. The words had turned into parasites, and burrowed into my body. My stomach, my lungs, my heart, all were fodder for more mislaid potential. By the time the Neo-Beats found me, the words had left me like a ghost, a shell being gnawed away at by something unexpressed. By the time the Neo-Beats found me, it was like I didn't exist at all.
I don't remember what I was doing there. Nothing important, probably.
five. Ben warned me first, a rare moment of speech. Rae was right about him when she called him dead. There was nothing extraordinary about Ben, nothing worth noting or remembering. Ben was Megan's brother and shadow: her silent, darker half.
It was a gas station halfway between Here and There, like an oasis in the desert. That sounds melodramatic, but after ten hours on the road, wherever you stop is paradise.
Jay was asleep in the back, Megan was buying coffee. Rae was just gone. We hadn't met Trace yet.
I was cooling my pounding head against the sharp cold car exterior. I was still new enough to get carsick, whereas everyone else had solid adapted stomachs to keep up with the constant swaying of the car as we drove. Ben was pumping gas and watching me. He shook his head and exhaled a dry laugh at my expense. Said, I give you six towns, tops.
This was the most I'd ever heard him speak. I stared, stuttered, What the fuck?
But Ben was done, like a prophet spouting riddles and then withdrawing away. He shook his head again and the conversation was ended with the metallic clang of the gas shutting off.
Megan finished paying inside and approached us, carrying two styrofoam cups and a wary look. Maybe she could see Ben's prediction hanging in the air. "Here," she said shortly, putting one of the cups on the hood of the car. It was for Ben, I knew. Megan never bought anything for anybody but Ben.
If Ben murmured a thanks, it wasn't audible to me. But Megan nodded like he had and got in the car -- front passenger seat. These were the days when Ben was driving and he and Megan were inseparable. I didn't know their story yet, so their closeness seemed strange to my outsider mentality. Ben and Megan lived in their own little world within the Neo-Beats, contained and separate. Their conversations, their history, their entire lives were for each other and no one else to know.
When it all changed in New York City, when their shell broke open for everyone to see the rot inside, Ben said, She's got me chained and tethered.
It was true in more ways than one, but halfway through Texas, standing with my face pressed against the cool windshield, I didn't know it.
Rae came with a gust of wind then, from around the back of the convenience store, walking fast with her hands tucked deep into her jacket pockets and her hair falling in her face. Her hair was always falling in her face -- I'd noticed. She didn't stop moving as she hit the top of the car twice and climbed in, moving Jay's feet off her seat in the back. She said, It's time to go. Now.
We never found out what spooked Rae so bad. Nobody ever called her on it. Her word was good enough and we all climbed in and took off. Maybe I looked over at her once or twice as we drove, trying to figure out what happened through the lines on her face. But every time I looked, Rae was staring out the window and revealing nothing.
It was two hours before she calmed down. I knew was because her lips softened from a thin austere line into gently parted when she took a breath.
She sat right next to me, I couldn't help but notice little details.
Rae caught me looking once, glared for a moment and then opened her mouth to say something, but Ben interrupted. His eyes caught mine in the rearview mirror and he said, One.
Austin City Limits flew past on a sign.
six. Even when I first met the Neo Beats, it was always Rae that held my attention. From the very start, I wanted to know her, inside out, backwards and forwards, up and down. I wanted to pick her apart, examine every fragile little memory embedded in her head like diamonds in a hunk of coal. I wanted to hold up her emotions to the light and look through them, understand how they colored her world like bits of broken glass bottles. I wanted to know her favorite things and why, I wanted to know where she was running from, and why. I wanted to know by heart all her little habits, every little quirk, every irrational fear or distaste. I wanted to know everything about her.
And I wanted to start with that smile.
Fragile is the wrong word for it, but it's the first to come to mind. I didn't know it in Los Angeles, in that seedy bar, but there is nothing fragile about Rae. She might be cracked, chipped, bent, bloodied, stretched thin or hammered out, but she doesn't ever break. So when she smiles, and you think it looks fragile, watery, sad, whatever? You're dead wrong.
It's not a broken smile. It's just far off. When Rae smiles, she gives the impression that she's not doing it because of you, she's just suddenly remember what it was like a long time ago to be happy. The one thing I was right about from the very beginning? Whatever made Rae start running was never going to let her stop. Not for money and not for happiness. I always knew Rae was just passing through, watching the world go past her window.
Even still, with me already guessing there in the bar, drinking a beer and talking shit with Jay, my eyes were on Rae, watching her watching me. I felt lucky, singled out, selected.
You can't understand how pathetic I felt, later.
seven. You can't understand how pathetic I feel, now, four o'clock in the morning, laying in bed, shaking. You just can't understand it.
They say all good authors lie, so maybe that's what I'm doing. I told you before, maybe this is all a lie. Maybe I've gotten so fucking good at lying that I can even lie to myself, so good that I can convince myself to wake up shaking and cotton mouthed in the night, certain the phone just rang.
In Detroit, something changed. I changed. After a year and a half of too hot to think, I finally found a place where I could sit and write, and nothing else. In Detroit, I changed, and words came, too fast to get down coherently.
I'm so fucking pathetic, I don't even know what I'm trying to say.
A phone call. That's what I'm trying to say, in Detroit as my fingers shake, stiff and frozen. The air conditioning is still on, blowing cold air still into my motel room. I'm so pathetic I can't even figure out how to turn it off.
There was a phone call just now, that woke me up in the freezing air. I put the receiver to my night and dethawed it with my breath, chest heaving in the dark. Heard the crackle of static that meant long distance, and then that voice echoing on the other end. Heard my heart stop beating.
My first question was, What the fuck. Shortly followed by, Who is this? because I wasn't sure I trusted my ears, and then How did you find me? Where are you? Rae? Rae? I'm so fucking pathetic, I didn't even know what to say.
Maybe it didn't happen. Maybe I dreamed it. Maybe it's what I was thinking about, laying there in the dark.
Maybe it's a total lie.
You're probably best off believing it's a total lie.
eight. Cut back to Atlanta, too hot to think. Everyone's gone but me, spread eagled face down on the bed, breathing and counting the seconds. One hundred sixty seven one hundred sixty eight one hundred sixty nine.
uncollected memories
one. In Atlanta, it's always twelve noon, so hot your lungs feel sticky with the humidity and your limbs are too heavy to move.
We'd been on the road for three months, two days, sixteen hours, and forty five minutes and the only reason I know is because in Atlanta there was nothing to do but count the seconds.
Ben was at work. Megan had gone with him. Jay was just gone. We hadn't met Trace yet.
The only reason it worked, five people living in a studio apartment the size of a matchbox, was because we were gone all the time. In Atlanta, it's always too hot to stay inside.
Like I said. Ben, Megan, and Jay were gone, so it was just me and Rae in the place, no buffer, no chaperone. Nothing but air and a miscommunications between us.
I was laying across the pull-down bed, flat on my back, staring at the ceiling and counting the seconds. Forty one forty two forty three forty four. In Atlanta it's always too hot to write. The humidity warms up your thoughts until they're too sticky to put on paper so all you can think of is the heat. All I could think of was the heat.
It was noon, and there was sunlight coming in from the one window, landing straight on my chest and burning.
Rae was in the bathroom, talking on her phone. The door was shut between us, muffling the sound of her voice from specific words into just a dull noted hum. Once or twice I tricked myself into thinking I heard her say my name.
After a minute, she came out, running a hand through her hair, damp with sweat. Our place didn't have any air conditioning. She said, Tom, it's hot as fuck.
Hot as fuck. Yeah. I was distracted by the cut of skin showing between the end of her shirt and the start of her jeans.
She watched me, leaning in the door frame. Said, Listen, the door doesn't lock anymore, the humidity's swelling the door up too much. Said, I'm gonna take a shower, cool off. Said, Don't come in, got it?
I didn't speak. Just nodded.
Rae smiled in that way she had. Yeah alright, she said, turning around.
The door didn't shut all the way, and maybe Rae expected me to be a gentleman and turn around, but who the fuck am I kidding -- Rae never expected anything from me. Through the thin seam left open, where the wood was swollen and warped too much to fit right, I saw her shirt come up over her head, saw her eyes catch mine in the mirror, saw her teeth catch at her bottom lip and she smiled. She laughed at me. I groaned without meaning to and rolled over, my face in the pillow, hips shifting against the mattress.
In Atlanta, it's always too hot to think.
two. I wish I could tell this in order, but truth his I wouldn't even know where to start. I can't think that clear. In Atlanta, maybe I didn't see Rae through the crack in the door. Maybe I shut my eyes and imagined it, her arms wrapped around herself, almost demure but not quite. Maybe that's what I was thinking of, when it was too hot to think.
Listen. I wish I could tell this in order, but I don't know what the order is anymore. I know some things, but I can't tell what really happened and what is my mind filling in the gaps. Parts of this are probably fantasies, parts are
This is what I know to be true. I know I met the Neo-Beats in L.A. I know we went to Austin and Atlanta and Chicago and El Paso and New Orleans. Probably more. I know we met Trace in New York City. I know by the time we reached Detroit, the Neo-Beats were rotting from the inside out.
You're probably best off assuming anything else I say is a total lie.
three. Trace was neither boy nor girl, straight shaped in genderless clothes, with dead slanting eyes and full wine colored lips. There was a cut on Trace's mouth, an asymmetric red seam that would sometimes open and drip black blood as Trace spoke. Of all of us, Trace kept the oddest hours, sometimes gone for days at a time, but always back whenever one of us had cigarettes to share.
There were times Trace would shiver and crackle and jump like static electricity, unable to be contained or calmed. Trace would heave around our place like a hurricane, pulling the covers off the bed, the papers off the walls, the food from the cabinets, the clothes out of the suitcases, and leave it all in a whirlwind of a mess on the floor.
And there were times when Trace would be still, infinitely still, in a crumpled mound in the corner, dead eyes open. Trace would be there for hours, silent and cold, and those eyes would hardly even blink, always watching and never seeing.
In New York City, we were restless, anxious, wound up too tight. We thought at the time that the heat had followed us up from Atlanta, settled in our skin, sunk into our veins, and fermented there, but maybe it was Trace, Trace and her black blood, that had poisoned us.
four. I'm ahead of myself. Four towns before the Neo-Beats ever met the disease that was Trace, they were jumbled together in a smoke hazed basement club called Zepplin's, grouped around the bar and wearing the sallow, wary expression that is the uniform of the Neo-Beats.
That's where the Neo-Beats found me. I didn't find them. I wasn't looking. I wasn't doing anything. There were too many words inside me, stuck in my throat like marbles. I was choking on them, strangling myself to make something great. By the time the Neo-Beats found me, I'd spent a year in L.A. trying to write, with nothing to show for it. The words had turned into parasites, and burrowed into my body. My stomach, my lungs, my heart, all were fodder for more mislaid potential. By the time the Neo-Beats found me, the words had left me like a ghost, a shell being gnawed away at by something unexpressed. By the time the Neo-Beats found me, it was like I didn't exist at all.
I don't remember what I was doing there. Nothing important, probably.
five. Ben warned me first, a rare moment of speech. Rae was right about him when she called him dead. There was nothing extraordinary about Ben, nothing worth noting or remembering. Ben was Megan's brother and shadow: her silent, darker half.
It was a gas station halfway between Here and There, like an oasis in the desert. That sounds melodramatic, but after ten hours on the road, wherever you stop is paradise.
Jay was asleep in the back, Megan was buying coffee. Rae was just gone. We hadn't met Trace yet.
I was cooling my pounding head against the sharp cold car exterior. I was still new enough to get carsick, whereas everyone else had solid adapted stomachs to keep up with the constant swaying of the car as we drove. Ben was pumping gas and watching me. He shook his head and exhaled a dry laugh at my expense. Said, I give you six towns, tops.
This was the most I'd ever heard him speak. I stared, stuttered, What the fuck?
But Ben was done, like a prophet spouting riddles and then withdrawing away. He shook his head again and the conversation was ended with the metallic clang of the gas shutting off.
Megan finished paying inside and approached us, carrying two styrofoam cups and a wary look. Maybe she could see Ben's prediction hanging in the air. "Here," she said shortly, putting one of the cups on the hood of the car. It was for Ben, I knew. Megan never bought anything for anybody but Ben.
If Ben murmured a thanks, it wasn't audible to me. But Megan nodded like he had and got in the car -- front passenger seat. These were the days when Ben was driving and he and Megan were inseparable. I didn't know their story yet, so their closeness seemed strange to my outsider mentality. Ben and Megan lived in their own little world within the Neo-Beats, contained and separate. Their conversations, their history, their entire lives were for each other and no one else to know.
When it all changed in New York City, when their shell broke open for everyone to see the rot inside, Ben said, She's got me chained and tethered.
It was true in more ways than one, but halfway through Texas, standing with my face pressed against the cool windshield, I didn't know it.
Rae came with a gust of wind then, from around the back of the convenience store, walking fast with her hands tucked deep into her jacket pockets and her hair falling in her face. Her hair was always falling in her face -- I'd noticed. She didn't stop moving as she hit the top of the car twice and climbed in, moving Jay's feet off her seat in the back. She said, It's time to go. Now.
We never found out what spooked Rae so bad. Nobody ever called her on it. Her word was good enough and we all climbed in and took off. Maybe I looked over at her once or twice as we drove, trying to figure out what happened through the lines on her face. But every time I looked, Rae was staring out the window and revealing nothing.
It was two hours before she calmed down. I knew was because her lips softened from a thin austere line into gently parted when she took a breath.
She sat right next to me, I couldn't help but notice little details.
Rae caught me looking once, glared for a moment and then opened her mouth to say something, but Ben interrupted. His eyes caught mine in the rearview mirror and he said, One.
Austin City Limits flew past on a sign.
six. Even when I first met the Neo Beats, it was always Rae that held my attention. From the very start, I wanted to know her, inside out, backwards and forwards, up and down. I wanted to pick her apart, examine every fragile little memory embedded in her head like diamonds in a hunk of coal. I wanted to hold up her emotions to the light and look through them, understand how they colored her world like bits of broken glass bottles. I wanted to know her favorite things and why, I wanted to know where she was running from, and why. I wanted to know by heart all her little habits, every little quirk, every irrational fear or distaste. I wanted to know everything about her.
And I wanted to start with that smile.
Fragile is the wrong word for it, but it's the first to come to mind. I didn't know it in Los Angeles, in that seedy bar, but there is nothing fragile about Rae. She might be cracked, chipped, bent, bloodied, stretched thin or hammered out, but she doesn't ever break. So when she smiles, and you think it looks fragile, watery, sad, whatever? You're dead wrong.
It's not a broken smile. It's just far off. When Rae smiles, she gives the impression that she's not doing it because of you, she's just suddenly remember what it was like a long time ago to be happy. The one thing I was right about from the very beginning? Whatever made Rae start running was never going to let her stop. Not for money and not for happiness. I always knew Rae was just passing through, watching the world go past her window.
Even still, with me already guessing there in the bar, drinking a beer and talking shit with Jay, my eyes were on Rae, watching her watching me. I felt lucky, singled out, selected.
You can't understand how pathetic I felt, later.
seven. You can't understand how pathetic I feel, now, four o'clock in the morning, laying in bed, shaking. You just can't understand it.
They say all good authors lie, so maybe that's what I'm doing. I told you before, maybe this is all a lie. Maybe I've gotten so fucking good at lying that I can even lie to myself, so good that I can convince myself to wake up shaking and cotton mouthed in the night, certain the phone just rang.
In Detroit, something changed. I changed. After a year and a half of too hot to think, I finally found a place where I could sit and write, and nothing else. In Detroit, I changed, and words came, too fast to get down coherently.
I'm so fucking pathetic, I don't even know what I'm trying to say.
A phone call. That's what I'm trying to say, in Detroit as my fingers shake, stiff and frozen. The air conditioning is still on, blowing cold air still into my motel room. I'm so pathetic I can't even figure out how to turn it off.
There was a phone call just now, that woke me up in the freezing air. I put the receiver to my night and dethawed it with my breath, chest heaving in the dark. Heard the crackle of static that meant long distance, and then that voice echoing on the other end. Heard my heart stop beating.
My first question was, What the fuck. Shortly followed by, Who is this? because I wasn't sure I trusted my ears, and then How did you find me? Where are you? Rae? Rae? I'm so fucking pathetic, I didn't even know what to say.
Maybe it didn't happen. Maybe I dreamed it. Maybe it's what I was thinking about, laying there in the dark.
Maybe it's a total lie.
You're probably best off believing it's a total lie.
eight. Cut back to Atlanta, too hot to think. Everyone's gone but me, spread eagled face down on the bed, breathing and counting the seconds. One hundred sixty seven one hundred sixty eight one hundred sixty nine.