Bridge, p.22
Bridge, page 22
Bridge manages through the tears: “You know you’re my best in the whole fucking world. In all the worlds. Most of them.”
“The important ones. And the others, it’s only because you haven’t met me yet.”
“Oh, hey.” Caden pokes his head in, lurking with squeamish uncertainty. “Is she—”
“Herself? Yeah. She’s been through a lot. We need a minute.”
“I really think she should take a break.” He fiddles with his shirt, plucking at the buttons, unhappy that they’re still there.
“That’s the plan, yes,” Dom says. “Go home, get dinner, I don’t know, sort through some more boxes.”
“Sure, sure. So, I mean… you’ve been doing a lot. Which is fine, obviously. Important.”
“You want your turn?” Dom cocks their head. Bridge stays tucked against them.
“I’m only wondering how much we have left. It’s a finite resource.”
“No kidding,” Dom snarks.
“Can I—you know?”
“Yes, of course. Fuck, sorry.” Bridge raises her head, wipes her nose on the back of her hand. “You’ve been great, Caden, really. Thank you. Of course you must take some.”
“Okay.” He smiles, relieved. “Thanks.”
“Where do you go, Caden?” Dom asks.
“Everywhere I can,” he says. “I want to live as much as I can, every life.”
Bridge can kinda understand that, but even through her grief and exhaustion, his words don’t sound entirely right. “Is there someone… in one of the otherworlds?” She’s thinking about her mom and her tortured teenage love affair. Herself on a train to Cambridge—to see Sam, surely?
“No.” He shakes his head, too emphatically. “It’s, well, you know what it is—it’s being on the frontier. Like surfing, when you go out past the break line and it’s just you and the vastness of the sea, and you get a sense of your scale in the universe. It’s deeply humbling, all these other… possibilities.”
“Really?” Dom says. “Humbling.”
Caden is unruffled. Or pretending to be. There’s a neediness (one she now recognizes), a jonesing seeping through his nonchalance.
“If you tried it, Dom, maybe you would actually understand. I like seeing what I’m capable of in different circumstances. It’s aspirational.”
“You don’t need to explain anything.” Bridge waves him off, but Dom is already digging into the Tupperware, slightly turned away so he can’t see how much there is left. They pinch off three strands, using a bit of tissue and hand them over.
“Oh,” Caden says, that spike of hunger under the cool-don’t-care. “Could I maybe get a few more? For the babysitting, using my place as your base.”
Dom shrugs. “Sorry, man, all out. I’ll have to get you some more tomorrow.”
“Okay,” he says, frowning down at the three strands in the tissue. “Yeah, cool. That’s cool.” Gives them a half-smile that says it’s really not.
CADEN
Your Own Personal Star Maker
He can’t wait for them to be gone. He watches them from the window, crossing the street toward the big ugly Grand Am Dom drives, which has managed to pick up a parking ticket. They swipe it off the windshield and he imagines he can hear them swearing. He waits, to be sure, until the car has driven around the corner and then he goes to look at the tissue on his desk beside his keyboard with its three strands, looking sad and limp. Three? Are they fucking kidding?
This could have turned out differently—if he’d found it before them. The irony is that he had looked in the freezer compartment when he broke into the house, while Jo was in the hospital and Bridge was sitting listless at her side, more interested in her phone than her dying mother. He’d caught a glimpse of them through the open door of the ward, got that close, before one of the nurses intercepted him.
Search best places to hide your stash, and the freezer is among the most common, along with in a sealed plastic bag in the toilet cistern, taped under the couch, behind the television, in the heating ducts, behind a painting, at the bottom of the cat litter (although Jo didn’t have a cat). He had opened the freezer and hunted through it, but he expected it to be in its own container, not embedded in the damn ratatouille. Was he supposed to defrost all her frozen meals on the off chance it’d be there?
It’s not enough. He has so much more to do. There are dozens like him that haven’t quite made it, because music is hard, there are so many competing voices, it’s so difficult to break through, so much luck and who you know. But there are a few successful Aidens too, a couple of Adrians, including a sound engineer doing forensic work with the cops, isolating a man’s voice on a video where he’s ordering a hit on his business partner and the distinctive sound of the air conditioner that proves it’s not doctored footage.
One thing Caden’s done better than all his otherselves is change his damn name. Aiden Lyleveld is a good moniker for a mild-mannered veterinarian or a junior logistics manager at an international shipping firm or a woodworker who makes custom furniture, and okay, yeah, some of them are musicians too, or producers—one in particular, in SG, is more successful than he could dream of being but also balding, fat.
But here, he changed his name to Caden Lyall as soon as he turned twenty, back when his band, Five-Eyed Cat, seemed to be getting traction. But by now, he’s given up on his own rock-star dreams. The truth is he doesn’t have the voice for the big time, but he knows he could produce the shit out of other people’s music. Once he gets the track down, finds the voice to sing it, and it finally blows up, he’s going to drop the last name. Become just Caden, plain and simple.
He settles the VR goggles over his eyes with the fake therapy app. He doesn’t have a babysitter or care about explaining to his otherselves what’s going on. Dr. Fawn thanks him for being part of the study. He cable-ties his left wrist to the radiator anyway; there’s a pair of scissors tucked under his mattress, but Aiden from the SG world, who will be here momentarily, won’t know that.
He hopes he has the timing right. From what he has been able to gather, SG Aiden normally wakes up late and starts recording around two p.m., working with musicians on the other side of the world in Yemen and Nairobi and Kyoto. Overachiever. But that’s what makes him so good at what he does—and his songs are so very stealable.
Caden used to drug himself while he was swapping, but he found when he came back that he was groggy and couldn’t remember all the notes. And he needs to remember. It’s not technically stealing if they’re songs he has written himself, albeit in other existences.
Besides, SG Aiden isn’t a rock star. He’s a producer with a $150,000 studio and a hit, a fluke he wrote for an up-and-coming rapper from Kenya, Sisterkilljoy, a dynamo with a shaved head who machine-guns her lyrics over a hostile bass line that’s wound through a soaring melody he thought was Persian when he first heard it. But going through Aiden’s hard drive, pulling up the files on his DAW and interpreting the confusing labels (it’s reassuring to see his otherselves are as disorganized as he is, even if this one has made it work), Caden realizes it’s something unique, that Aiden’s brought in a lot of indigenous instruments, ouds and koras with extra strings that resonate to make the sound richer, deeper, very similar, in fact, to the kind of sounds he used to code the dreamworm doors, with all the complexities of the intermodulation. There’s a Japanese shakuhachi flute in there, and ritualistic drumming with a triplet base, and he’s pushed the A key, or maybe that’s an effect from the instruments playing at 432 Hz instead of 440. But the best part is how Sisterkilljoy’s rap segues into a dreamy chorus sung over a scratchy sample of recovered choral archives from missionaries in Zambia in the early 1900s. Talk about otherworldly.
He has no idea how SG Aiden found the track, but he’s on the trail here. He plans to hunt down the rapper too. If he can find all the elements, he can reproduce the success. The song’s so good, any musician would be elated to have it. Would pay real money. Career-changing money.
That’s another thing he’s trying to learn from his alter (what did Bridge call it—otherself? That’s better, he has to admit): the schmooze and the moves. Aiden is still an introverted weirdo, but he’s made the contacts, and Caden needs to memorize his e-mail address book and, more important, the tone of Aiden’s correspondence. Caden doesn’t have his confidence; not yet. At first he’d considered just stealing Aiden’s life. If that was possible. It might be, he thinks, with the mysterious device Jo had him build.
That’s something he hasn’t told Bridge and Dom about. Well, there are a few somethings.
The note for Bridge, for example, on the kitchen table when he broke into Jo’s house looking for the dreamworm. Of course he read it:
Bridge, I found the best one. Like when you were a kid and we’d go to the dreamworld. Come find me, I’m waiting for you. Like we always wanted. The instrument is the key. Rat-fooey and where I’d hide my sex tape. The very first one. Call this number when you arrive, and I’ll come get you. I’m sorry to be so cryptic, but you’ll see. I can’t wait to show you. I love you. Everything is going to be okay. Better than okay.
In-jokes and code. He realizes now that rat-fooey is ratatouille, the way a little kid might say it, getting big laughs around the family dinner table. He’d looked for a sex tape, figured it must be on her laptop, but he didn’t have the password, and it was all useless without the dreamworm anyway. Frankly, he didn’t care where Jo had gone, what she was doing, if she was still alive somewhere. She’d abandoned him, taking the worm and his hopes and dreams.
He has also not mentioned that he knows all about this Rabbit guy—who is not, in fact, dead. He’s the one who gave Jo the plans for the device, a kind of radio transmitter. She wouldn’t tell him what it was for, but Caden has his suspicions.
They’d built it together. She insisted that she needed to know exactly how to do it, but it turned out both their electronics skills were up to shit. There were a lot of YouVid tutorials involved. Jo burned herself on the soldering iron; he cut his fingers on the wiring. She’d taken the transmitter apart and built it all over again three times, without his help. And then she’d smashed it with a hammer and ripped up the plans and flushed them down the toilet. She said she had it memorized. But he hadn’t been paying close enough attention, because how was he supposed to have any clue she was going to do that? He didn’t have it fucking memorized.
Two days later, Jo was hospitalized. She hadn’t left him any worm, and he couldn’t get into the ward to see her. And a few days after that, she was dead and gone. Unreachable. In this world.
He doesn’t owe Bridget anything. He’s not her friend. Because as soon as she knows, as soon as she finds Jo, if she’s out there, or realizes that she’s gone for good, that’s it. She’ll cut him off, same as her psycho-bitch mother. And he needs the worm—for his career, for his whole life.
He noticed something else, just before he ran out of worm: doors were shutting for him, connection after connection coming up as only dead air. The kind you had to yank yourself back from, that would give you a whole-day migraine. Maybe it was Jo on the other side, blocking him with the device? If music is the key, could it also be the lock?
And something even more disturbing.
The last time he visited the woodworker, one of his favorite stopovers, hoping to pick up some skills (although it wasn’t much good when it was his mind controlling his hands at the jigsaw or whatever it’s called), he couldn’t stop scratching his arm. And he’s pretty sure he saw something twitch under his skin, which freaked him out so much he hasn’t gone back to that world again.
And when Dom came back from seeing this scientist and was going on about parasites, Caden had to wonder: What if the dreamworm did lay eggs inside you?
But maybe it was just a trick of the light, or, heck, scabies, or a spasming vein. That woodworker dude was wiry from all that sawing and planing. And producer Aiden, in SG, has never shown the slightest sign of an itch.
He takes out one of the strands that Dom so very fucking generously gave him. It isn’t fair. The worm’s as much his as it was Jo’s. He’s earned it. He puts it on his tongue. It tastes like pennies and promises.
Jo’s Diary
June 2006
Bluebeard’s castle, locked in and I’m trying all the doors. I play the songs, spin the zoetrope, but my attempts to make my own patterns are pitiful, and Bridge complains that the slides of a running horse and a fat man who tumbles over and over—the ones Rabbit once used—are creepy and old-fashioned. She’s only seven; I can’t blame her. Apparently the ones I’ve tried to draw are even worse. I don’t have the skills to do this. Math and music are related, the same parts of the brain, but I’m a scientist, not a mathematician, not a musicologist, and definitely not an artist. It’s brutish stuff. But it worked before, with Rabbit, so I’m convinced it will work now that I have the key—if I try hard enough.
It was ugly when we got back from New Orleans.
I’d left without my cell phone, without telling anyone where I was going. I thought he wouldn’t notice. He was in New Mexico that week, and I told him I’d dropped my phone in the toilet. It was in my back pocket when I pulled down my jeans and then I peed on it, I e-mailed him. It’s going to be in the repair shop for a couple of days, so we might be incommunicado.
You’re disgusting, he typed back. Sorry, I meant that’s disgusting. But don’t worry, my insurance will cover it.
He found out when the school phoned him. I’d e-mailed them to say Bridge was sick, but they called to find out how she was doing and when she’d be back, and I didn’t have my phone, and he had to fly back two days early.
I was out of my mind with worry. What were you thinking? You better believe this is being documented as proof of how unstable you are. Lawyers, the threat of divorce and sole custody. He said he was tempted to open a kidnapping case. Child endangerment. What were you doing, dragging her around New Orleans?
But he won’t do any of this. Because he loves me. He wants to make this work. No one else knows me like he does or understands how I can get—the paranoia, the terrors. Am I taking my medication? And do I honestly think anyone else would put up with this? Hasn’t he seen me through years of seizures? He’s had plenty of opportunities, so many women in his line of work, all the traveling, but he loves me, he loves our life, and he comes home to me. I need to trust him. He’s looking out for me. He wants the best for me, but I make it hard sometimes. He hopes I got it all out of my system on this reckless jaunt of mine. He’ll help me, and I’ll get to finish my PhD in a year or two when I’m more stable. It’s very stressful to be a doctoral student, he should know. But right now, I need to cut this nonsense out. Am I ready to face reality?
I agree with everything he says. I am duly chastised and shamefaced. I am put in my place. I have sex with him, because he expects me to, a kind of hostage negotiation. He still makes me come, devotional to my orgasm, the same way he places me high on a pedestal, bathed in the radiant glow of his love—as long as I do what he says.
He appreciates my “quirky” new hobbies—learning the sitar, the old-fashioned optical-illusion toys—and my spending quality time with Bridge (because God knows, he doesn’t). It means I’m putting aside science, my career, but I must remember to call him at the appointed times. If I suggest we see my friends (our friends, really; I realize I don’t have my own anymore. They’ve been cut off so subtly—Not really our kind of people, are they? and George is very loud, don’t you think?), he frowns. Don’t I understand I’m not ready? For fuck’s sake, Jo, you’re fragile. God knows what I would say in front of them.
And I see this, fuck, I see this now only because I have been other Jos, many Jos, who are not married to a controlling narcissist dickbag. It makes me feel more pathetic, even more contemptible and useless. Maybe I am fragile and unstable, someone who doesn’t know what she wants. Maybe I am the worst of all the Jos.
I find a man on the internet in Germany, Edward Balzer, who has a collection of optical-illusion toys and patterns and disks, and he is so pleased to find a fellow enthusiast that he scans them and e-mails them to me so I can print them out at Kinko’s. I have talked to him about hypnosis and meditative states and shamanism, and I asked him if he knew of anyone who used them for this purpose. He did not. “But please, you will keep me informed?” he said in his formal English. I don’t have a second language. Unless you count science. And desperation.
“Who is this German guy you’ve been e-mailing?” Dave asks, which tells me he’s reading my messages, which makes me even more squirrelly, more secretive.
“For the zoetrope. Do you want to try?”
“It’s really fun, Daddy, you should try it, you feel really funny and dizzy and whoosh and then you’re in a whole other place! And you’re you, but you’re also not.”
“Your mother’s not letting you have too many cookies, is she?” But the look he gives me says: I will be very disappointed.
“We’re playing. Bridge likes it, and it’s not video games or TV.”
“‘The man who has no imagination has no wings,’” Dave says.
“Is that Steve Jobs?” I struggle to remember his favorites. “Soros?”
“Muhammad Ali.” Dave ducks down and jabs at Bridge—left, right, hook—and although I know he would never hit her, or me, I flinch. She giggles and throws punches back, and he takes the time to show her how not to tuck her thumbs, how to propel herself from the hip. Bear barks and jumps up, trying to join in.
“Not on these pants! Goddamn dog.” And then he’s angry, sulky, as always, withdrawing to some arctic place where we can’t follow.
Are you ready to face reality? No. Not yet. Not this one. Not until I find the sickness and cut it out. Then I’ll make a plan to leave him. The caveat: I have to do it without losing Bridge.
