The Leavers(7)

Roland stopped singing and said, “This is a song called ‘Please, Show Me Your Fangs.’ ” He began the next song, but Daniel didn’t recognize this one either. It was like he’d woken up in a foreign country where everyone spoke a language he had never heard of, and was required to give a speech. “Learn to play,” one guy yelled. Daniel couldn’t see the Jupiter booker anywhere. The room grew hotter, narrower, and he could no longer hear anything except a rapid acceleration of agitated drumming, a scurry of horse hooves, vicious brushstrokes of gray over black. Danger, the drumbeat signaled. He had to fix it—he had to right himself—he was slipping so fast he could do nothing but tilt, like clicking the button to bet in No Limit Hold’em despite knowing his hand was crap, clicking again, watching the money dip lower, clicking again, unable to do anything but pursue this singular impulse toward ruin. He knew it was the worst thing he could do to Roland, that Roland might never forgive him and he would never forgive himself, but he couldn’t bear to be onstage any longer.

He unplugged his guitar and pulled it off. The beats continued. “What are you doing?” Roland whispered. Daniel lurched off stage, shoving his way through the crowd. He heard Roland calling his name, laughter as he ran out of the room.

He stumbled onto the street, cold air punching him in the face. He had left his coat upstairs. On the Bowery, passing Jupiter, a crowd lined up on the sidewalk. He imagined his name on the sign out front and looked away, then crossed at whichever light came on first, wandering south. He should give up music, go back to school, make his parents happy. Hanging a sharp left, he took Mott down to Canal, passing noodle shops and bodegas, everywhere signs in Chinese. He could make out one character and piece it to the next: LICENSED ACUPUNCTURE. INTERNATIONAL CALLING CARDS. Deciphering Chinese was a welcome distraction, and he walked faster, sliding in the snow, wiping his runny nose with his knuckles. Upstate, he had occasionally formed the sporadic outlines of a word in Fuzhounese, sensed the shapes it might make in his mouth, recalled a Sh or a Tze, but trying to find the right word was like wrestling with air, the meanings there but the sounds long lost. There wasn’t anyone he could speak to, even if he could.

After years away, he was shocked at how many people there were in Chinatown, streets in places he couldn’t remember, storefronts packed upon storefronts. Being surrounded by other Chinese people had become so strange. In high school, kids said they never thought of him as Asian or Roland as Mexican, like it was a compliment. He wasn’t that Chinese-or-Japanese-or-Korean-or-whatever kid with the professor parents but the guy who played guitar, who was in all those bands, who scowled in the back rows of Honors classes but always passed (everyone assumed, despite his test scores, that he was great at math). At Potsdam there had been a few other Asian students in his lecture classes, exchange students that clumped together or other lone wolves he’d see at parties surrounded by their own non-Asian friends. He avoided them; it was mutual. But he wasn’t at Potsdam anymore. There was only the city and its long, Lost Weekend: dancing at a party on a barge; a cab ride over the Williamsburg Bridge with Manhattan shining in the distance, five of them crushed into the backseat, a random girl on his lap, Roland in the front gabbing to the driver about intestinal flora or mushroom foraging; watching A Clockwork Orange late at night and stepping out into a Saturday sunrise. Nights like these, the past and present and future rolled out in a sugary wave, everyone he’d ever known riding alongside him on a merry-go-round to a soundtrack of whistling calliopes.

He tripped over his shoelace and bent down to retie it. Was all that gone, after tonight? Maybe there wasn’t so much to lose. There were mornings he would wake up on Roland’s couch, another solitary day stretching out in front of him, and he would trudge around in the cold for hours, not wanting to go back to the empty apartment, convinced he had made a fatal mistake. And now he had. He’d messed up in front of the people he longed to impress.

He rubbed the goose bumps that had formed on his arms, teeth chattering, and passed a cell phone store with signs in Chinese taped to the windows. Junior year of high school, he had seen a Chinese woman in the Littletown Mall. Thin, with permed hair, gripping plastic bags with the handles twisted around each other. She’d honed in; there was no hiding his face, and when she spoke he understood her Mandarin. She was lost. Could he help? She needed to make a phone call, find a bus. Her face was scared and anxious. Two teenage boys, pale and gangly, had watched and mimicked her accent, and Daniel had said, in English, “I can’t speak Chinese.” Afterwards, he tried to forget the woman, because when he did think of her, he felt a deep, cavernous loneliness.

He thought of her now, wishing he had his headphones, wanting a song to soothe him, noise and a smoke to blot out the night. A man, in the kind of glossy puffer coat Daniel remembered seeing crammed on the racks of Fordham Road, eyed him, curious. “What are you looking at?” he shouted at the man’s back.

His phone buzzed. A text from Roland: you ok?? He checked his e-mail. There were messages from music mailing lists, an article on unemployment rates and college degrees forwarded from his parents that he erased without reading. There was the message from a Michael Chen, the one he had received more than two months ago, which he still hadn’t replied to but hadn’t deleted either. Instead he read it again, then closed it, keeping the words simmering inside him at a near constant boil:

Hi Daniel,