Wild Awake

kitchen is hot and softly vibrating, as if someone just shot a gun. In the living room, the piano looks like it did on the day the movers delivered it to my house: a beautiful bomb shelter, a flotation device in an ocean whose depths I was afraid to see. Maybe it’s not discipline I’ve been lacking all this time. Maybe it’s something simpler—something that’s been staring me in the face this whole time.
    I march to the front hall and open the door. The high noon sun is blinding, and the azaleas are snickering at me. “Hey, Mr. Hardy!” I shout. “Can I borrow that shovel?”
    The first azalea bush takes fifteen whacks.
    The second one takes ten.
    I wrap my arms around the bushes, wrestle them out of the earth, and heave them, panting, onto the lawn. Mr. Hardy gapes at me from his driveway. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! What are you doing to those pretty flowers?”
    “They’re diseased,” I shout back. “You should probably kill yours, too.”
    I go back into the house, sweating all over and electric with holy rage, and play through my repertoire one last time. I play passionately, brilliantly, as if Tzlatina Tzoriskaya herself was sitting on the living room couch. I drain my entire being into the keys. As I play, I hear things in the music I never heard before. My grief over Sukey. My fury at my parents. My vulnerability, my savage ugliness, my playfulness, my hope. It’s all there, laid out with terrifying clarity, where anyone could hear it—where I can hear it myself.
    Holy crap , I think, Nelson Chow was right .
    All this time, I’ve been afraid of the music, and I’m not afraid anymore.
    When I’m finished playing, I lower the piano’s heavy lid and slide the curved wooden cover over the keys. Shuttered like that, it almost looks like an instrument again instead of the massive winged creature with polished white teeth it had started to become in my mind. Leaving the living room, I glance over my shoulder, but it stays like that—placid, benign—and I know the next time I play, it will be from love.
    I want to see what the world looks like from the ground. I ride my bike to the Salvation Army thrift shop and buy a lime-green radio, then bike to Skunk’s house and leave it on the patio outside his door, tuned to the mystery station.
    Next stop is the Imperial. I spy an old microwave someone put on the curb with a STILL WORKS sign and decide to bring it to Doug. On my way up the stairs, I make a list of all the things I need to remember to tell Doug about the microwave. Number one, don’t put metal in it. Metal will make it spark. Number two, don’t put anything in it for longer than five minutes. Longer than five minutes and even the rock-hardest frozen thing will be reduced to a hissing, bubbling goo. Number three, never put cat food in it. There is no reason to ever put cat food in a microwave, and I know you’re going to be drunk some night and try it. Number four, don’t let a crackhead sell this microwave for crack. Number five, do not make any part of this microwave into a deadly weapon.
    When I get to the fourth floor, Doug’s not in his room. I unplug his hot plate and thunk down the microwave in its place. I plug it in and stand there, setting the time. Doug would never in a million years bother to set the time.
    I’m about to pay a visit to Sukey’s rooftop when I hear a grating yowl. Snoogie has wandered out of the closet and is skulking across the room in my direction. She gets close and starts pressing herself around my legs, doing that round-the-leg figure-eight thing cats do. I bend down and scoop her up, a skinny hot bag of bones with fur like a ragged bath mat. She sticks out her legs, claws extended, and rakes them against my shirt. I flip her around so her back is against my chest and her razor collection is sticking out in front of us as protection against crook-nosed Kids who might be roaming through the hall.
    “Let’s find Doug,” I whisper, and she meows in response. “He needs a microwave tutorial.”
    The usual suspects are drinking on the front steps of the hotel. I say hi to Jasmine, who is wearing a stretchy purple tank top, leopard-print sweatpants, and sparkly pink eye shadow that goes all the way up to her eyebrows. She’s sucking on a cigarette like it’s a stick of honey.
    “Aw,” she says. “Doug wanted you to have that kitty.”
    “I brought him a microwave,” I say. “I left it in his room. Where is he?”
    Jasmine stubs out her cigarette.