Silver repetition, p.1
Silver Repetition, page 1
SILVER REPETITION
A NOVEL
LILY WANG
NEW YORK
LONDON
For my mom
I can circumnavigate myself,
but I cannot get beyond myself.
—Søren Kierkegaard
part 01
01
“THIS IS COOL,” I say, because no one’s speaking.
“I brought you here so you would think I’m a cool guy.”
We are in the Poetry Jazz Café. A young Muhammad Ali collapses against the wall behind the bar. Before us, a crowd, swaying along with the projection, shadows continuing their side-to-side movement with each loop of light. My date introduces me to his friend’s girlfriend. He tells me she just returned from Australia and is visiting her boyfriend, a musician whom we are here to watch. She holds her drink with four fingers blocking the label, the smooth ovals of her nails blushing under the subtle light. Her breath like mandarin oranges is the only one I can smell.
“He plays the trumpet,” my date leans in to tell me.
My date paid the cover. His name is Johnny.
The Australian girlfriend gives me a polite look before scanning the stage. During the day, the bar is shut to the public, situated between used-clothing stores with open fronts where construction vests hang like a slant of neon lanterns. People wander in the middle of the road, manoeuvring their baby strollers around parked cars and broken pieces of pavement. It’s quiet the way weekday afternoons are, when you can hear the puddles and the phone conversations and the clud-clud of skateboard wheels.
The deliberate atmosphere inside the café is the sharp purple of dreams, smoke-lit and narrow, swathed in silhouettes. Onstage, the lower half of his body obscured by the crowd, a rapper is chuckling; his mouth floats like a crescent on the surface of a lake. He could be singing or talking. The performance does not register as music to me. Johnny’s friend Erik stands behind the rapper, off to the left. I catch glimpses of gold as an offbeat and attractive sound furls from the brass. He plays unaware, he tests notes, he exchanges tender glances with the other members of his band. Candles flicker on darkened hardwood, melting onto silver dishes, warming our faces. It might all be music.
I don’t look at Johnny much because he is handsome, which annoys me. He has a serious mouth, full lips, crooked bottom teeth. When no one’s watching, I wipe the stamp from my hand and drink from Johnny’s glass. I didn’t have any ID to prove my age. Johnny smiles and asks to try my ginger beer.
Erik wrote a poem about Johnny’s legs. That’s how the two met. Johnny and Erik were at a bar high on cocaine once, and Erik had to get Johnny out of a fight. I must have made a face at “cocaine,” because Johnny says, “It’s part of the story, just listen.” He likes his stories. I tell him I’m not a spy. He tells me he kissed Erik.
There is an interlude. Erik steps down from stage, exchanges a few words with his band, and takes off his toque. He walks over to us and Johnny introduces me as his friend. Again, I feel the girlfriend’s polite gaze on me. I tell Johnny’s friends that I’ve never been to the bar before. Erik unrolls the hem of his toque and rolls it back up, scrunching the orange wool in his hands. He pulls his girlfriend in for a kiss. Oranges, mandarins. Johnny and I say our goodbyes and leave in a yellow cab.
Johnny and I had gone on three dates before he called it off. That was about a week ago. I didn’t know the first date was meant to be romantic. I hadn’t been sure. I don’t know what tonight is supposed to be, but I’m glad to be here. I’m glad Johnny texted. I’m glad we’re giving it another shot.
In the taxi, the driver’s silent presence makes both Johnny and me nervous. Light clumps on the oily glass.
“It’s not nice to talk to me about kissing,” I say, once we’re out of the cab.
I show Johnny the text he sent me, the one about kissing. I remind him he rejected me.
Johnny stretches his neck. “I lost interest for an hour.”
We walk across his driveway below a cloudless sky. Johnny steers me from the front of the house to a side stairwell. He reaches over my head and pulls on a screen door—black mesh passing through the night air before my face—and pushes open the door behind it. Everyone I know is settling into basement apartments. I keep finding myself at friends’ basement parties, turning my nose from wall to wall, peering down slender-necked vases full of artificial lilies, spring just beyond my view. While I envy their independence, coating those feelings of envy is the stale yellow pollen left over from childhood. Summers spent sitting on the landlord’s porch steps until their returning van plugged out the light, sometimes crawling up to their living room from the shared laundry, stretching our weary bodies across their cobalt couch. We laid our underwear across their floorboards to dry, so drunk on sunlight, my parents’ faces would glow bright red. My mom, more than any of us, thirsted for light. She would sit at the top of our basement steps with the door cracked open, one hand at the base of her pregnant belly. “Move, you’re blocking the way.” Our landlord said those cruel words to her. It was rare for the landlord’s entire family of five to be gone, and they always had dirty laundry that needed to be washed. My mom pulled up a chair and sat by the only window in our basement apartment, sat until snow caved her in, a ring of blue around the base of the house. When we moved her chair, there were four rings hollowed into the carpet.
Two more doors face us once we’re inside. Johnny gestures with slender fingers: one for his place and one for the laundry. I leave my boots by Johnny’s bike, kept vertically against the wall to conserve space, and let him lead the way into his living room. His basement is brighter than the one in my memory but just as yellow; time colours memory’s movement through me like water touching metal.
Johnny sits me down on his couch. I run my hands against the coarse threading of the cushions, studying the texture as a way to ward off my melancholy. I give each seat cushion a pat, counting three in total. The slipcover is orange-brown with flat felled seams, and despite its worn appearance, the couch gives off no smell. In fact, the basement apartment as a whole carries no scent, not a single spore in the air. Unsure of what to say, I keep my eyes focused on the patchwork cover, offering a compliment about the stitching. Johnny brags to me about not having any roommates. He disappears into his bedroom and returns holding a banjo. He pulls up a stool and takes a seat in front of me. I watch him strumming; a strand of hair falls between his brows. He knows a few chords but not enough for a song. Still, it is the most romantic gesture he’s made yet. After three or four tunes, Johnny twirls the head of his banjo with one hand and gives the strings a slap. “You haven’t seen my room,” he says.
The flooring in Johnny’s bedroom is the same as in his living room, washroom, and laundry. His bed frame takes up most of the space on the floor, his bedsheets a flowing chasm of white beneath the plain walls. Above his bed, cinched across a small window, is a piece of cloth evidently cut from the end of another curtain. Johnny changes with the light off. When he finishes, he hands me a clean shirt from his closet so that I can change as well.
Mid-sleep, I open my eyes and find Johnny’s back turned to me. I raise my arm and his shadow grows another limb.
Johnny doesn’t wake until late afternoon the next day. I don’t use my phone for fear of draining its battery. There is nowhere to explore. I pull a wooden crate from beneath Johnny’s desk and flip through his collection of vinyl, knowing there’s not a single name I’ll recognize. I lose interest quickly and return the crate to its spot. Standing up, I spot the olive handle of a stiletto blade. The blade is over three inches long, slender, tapered to a needle-like point. It serves no purpose on the scattered desk. Something like pity moves me to clean up the cheap pencils next to the blade. I linger for a while after by the bedroom door, pencils in hand, wanting to press my face against the door like it’s a satin pillow or breastbone.
When Johnny finally emerges, he isn’t at all surprised to find me reading his book on his couch. I lift up the Salinger. He says he hasn’t touched that one yet. I watch him do his laundry, sleepwalking in and out of his room with a white basket, the soft plastic sides flexing like cartilage.
In the story I’m reading, a man goes down to the beach for some suntanning, then he goes back into his room and takes out a handgun. There is a girl at the beginning of the story, but then she isn’t mentioned again. I read this story once before and had retained no memory of the girl. Reading it again, I feel like it’s two stories. When the hunger is unbearable, I leave.
I feel like crying on the streetcar, but I am not alone. When I am home, the urge is gone.
Johnny apologizes over text. It takes him two days to think of me.
In those two days, I gather all the leaves in my backyard into large brown paper bags and move them to the front curb for pickup. Raking is more work than I thought. By this time of year, the leaves have mostly decomposed; what’s left has become matted and stringy, hard to clean off the tines. Each time I bring the rake up to the bag, I need to use one hand to steady the handle and the other to brush off the leaves and twigs. I give up on the rake and use both arms to gather the piles, rushing at the ground and hugging it, covering myself in dirt.
There is a smoke tree in my parents’ backyard, so most of what I collect is fluff. Come summertime the tree is covered in oval leaves of gold and green. It blooms, and slight winds carry the frothy, purple-burgundy clusters across our deck like dust. I can spend entire mornings just watching the tree sway.
The clusters turn lighter in the fall. Sometimes yellow, translucent, in the rain.
Johnny texts me, “I had a dream about a coffee shop in Leslieville. Do you want to go there with me this week?”
Our tree is dying. I tear the first bag when I try to close it; a twig springs loose and snags my skin.
I ask him, “When?”
The leaves around the base of the tree, the shrubs, I don’t touch. They will serve as mulch. Somehow the backyard feels smaller now, exposed.
I envision Johnny on the night he first called, before he changed his mind, then changed it back again. We were cutting across campus, and we both had our hands in our pockets. There was tension in my neck and shoulders, but Johnny was relaxed; he had a serene look to him as he guided me with his elbow. I trod alongside him, so cold that I couldn’t stop speaking. That’s when I saw the overhead street lamps. White sparks were blooming beneath the lamps’ oval covers. Even as we crossed the intersection, I looked back and up at them—those sparks of snow under the orange glow.
“Look!” I kept saying.
* * *
Johnny meets me on the station platform downtown and we walk to the streetcar together with our hands in our pockets, sharing the sidewalk. He’s in a good mood today. Every few minutes, he jerks one hand out to gesture at something before stuffing it back where it’s warm. My eyes follow his swinging arm to the trees. Bean pods dangling from the branches. Long black pods like mummified cocoons. I feel like all my hair could fall. Johnny makes a joke that I miss about the neighbourhood. The streets mostly look the same to me; some are just dirtier than others.
We think the coffee shop has closed down because the lights are off and there are stools stacked against the window, but when we step closer, we can see many people inside, in lines and in the seats, hanging their jackets on black wall hooks or draping them over armrests. Newspapers lie open on round tables, next to cups, plates, and little spoons for stirring. Upon our arrival—marked by a tinkling bell above the door—we are instantly greeted by the warm smell of espresso, sweet fig, chocolate shavings, orange peels drying in spirals, and other such ribboning scents. Bicolour croissants, topped with freshly whipped butter and flaky salt, rest above a display case. When it’s our turn to order, Johnny steps forward and touches hands with the barista.
“I didn’t know if you’d be in today,” Johnny says. He orders two coffees. “Friend from high school,” he tells me after.
We take a seat by the entrance, facing the street. From the window, I see people step off the streetcar, holding on to their scarves and looking left and right before crossing the street. Johnny adds sugar to his coffee then mine, tearing the corners off each single-serve before tilting the packs over our mugs together. He places the empty packs, two for each of us, on his saucer. He presses the tip of his finger on a stray sugar crystal and edges it off the table. I am struck by Johnny’s indifference and begin to feel the mistake I’m making. Sitting across from Johnny on an antique seat with fringed throws, ornate and flowery. Even my porcelain mug has been rubbed to a shine! I feel myself as I really am, an acquaintance.
I hear the bell tinkle again and again as more people walk in. I excuse myself to use the washroom and must hold onto the railing during my descent. The basement, which seems to be shared with the establishment next door, bears no resemblance to the café upstairs. The toilet is low to the ground and crooked; I have to crouch close to the unclean tiles, many of which are chipped and sound hollow beneath my heels. I stand before the dimly lit mirror, tucking the front end of my shirt into my jeans. The sink is so shallow, it is like a bar of soap that has only been used on one side. I wet my hands to style my hair, slicking any loose strands back with my fingers before heading up. Even now, in the dim light, my hair sparkles from the snow on that first night.
When I get back to the table, I say, “How do I know you like me if you don’t hold my hand?”
“You want to hold my hand?” Johnny laughs and offers me what I desire most.
02
THERE IS A DOWNPOUR during the night. I sleep heavily, and if I dream, I do not remember.
I wake to the most orange sky. There is only horizon or no horizon. I put on yesterday’s pants and a new sweater, listening to the quiet unreality of rain. Giant peonies glimmer across the sky—with a wave of a sash, the tones change—dream salmon, saucer peony, the houses lined up side by side beneath those ever-drifting petals, white shutters shaking like rabbits in a snow country.
The bus stop is located relatively close to our house, but I cut across the lawn anyway. Blades of grass cling to my boots like tiny-winged insects; intending to rinse my boots off in the gutter, I step down from the curb only to scramble back when I see the bus arriving. Late, the driver does not return my half smile.
A call comes as I’m putting my earbuds in. I press my hand against my bag as the bus makes a long turn, all my weight shifting to the left. Since the number I’m using first belonged to my mom, every once in a while, someone will call speaking Mandarin. But this time it is English that greets me, wraps me in plain yarn, anticipates me. A girl speaks from the other side, and I am so unused to being addressed, it’s like I’ve taken a step back from language. I ask the girl for her name, or she tells me her name without my asking, or while I’m asking. I’m too stunned to retrace the order of our words. She is M. She is not as young as her disembodied voice sounds, her frequency altered by the electromagnetic spectrum. As the bus moves, sound unravels, handled by a succession of cell towers. I hear M’s words but only see the hexagon her sound makes. “We saw you with Johnny.” She pauses. “How are you?”
The last time I saw M, she was sitting in a tub with three other girls. There were girls barefoot on the washroom floor, a picket fence of arms and collarbones. Girls behind the curtain, sliding the plastic cover, slim metal clinking, metal rings collapsing. Some guy had put his face close to mine. I went into the washroom to laugh it off and saw the shipwrecked girls. Maybe the guy had tried the same thing with them.
I keep my voice low but worry I’m being too quiet. I notice how loud the engine is, not just the engine but the bus floor. Beneath the floor, the tires, the road itself. Out of the sound, there are peonies growing. Massive, fully double flowers.
“I’m sorry for calling.”
The light at the intersection turns dark green. Foliage of silver car casings.
“We went to the same high school.” M’s voice blooms from the phone. “I was a grade younger, but I saw Johnny around at parties. He was in a relationship at the time.”
Blue clots appear on the line. Her words like blue blood in my stream, all my veins turn into lakes at the confluence of those words. I wasn’t told this would happen. When M finishes, I thank her and hang up.
My professor once said that anyone who showed up late to his lectures would be put on the spot and expected to sing. He was joking, but sometimes, I hope otherwise. Sometimes, I imagine pulling back the narrow oak doors to forty half-shut eyes and tapping my umbrella on the linoleum, dripping, singing, tossing my umbrella to the professor and slipping my bag off my shoulder, freeing myself, spinning once, twice, shaking my damp hair loose. I want him to look at me. All of them—they will be surprised by my voice. Slapping against the ground, each step a wet tea bag. I seat myself at the end of a row of desks.
So, I’m being observed. I am under observation. Had I done something to draw attention to myself? Perhaps I have always been watched but only now become a threat. I don’t know what these thoughts mean. It is Johnny they are interested in.
The two of us stand in front of an empty lecture room. Everyone, including the professor, has flitted off to recite lines of poetry or tie strings of thread on bicycle tires.
“You’re wearing heels,” Johnny says.
On my boots are the corpses of the morning’s winged insects. “You don’t think maybe you’ve shrunk?” I snap. “Someone called about you.”
“Who?” Johnny lowers his chin to meet my gaze. “Who?”
