him self-conscious about guests, especially ones who threatened to invite themselves to stay the night. In late April, he began to wake up with spots on his ankles. One, maybe two per month. He’d moved in and immediately used steel wool, excess expansion rope he took from the job, and a dozen tubes of construction foam and caulk to close cracks along walls and inside closets. The roommate situation wasn’t about mice or rats, that he knew. The first spot on his ankle was thick in the center, almost as if a tiny marble had been placed under his skin. It itched and stung a little when he sprayed Benadryl onto it. Over the next week, the thick dot disappeared as a halo or a kind of atoll appeared around it. The marble had become an island on his skin an inch or an inch and a half in diameter. Shame decided that he had a large spider living with him who visited him in the night. Over the summer the bites moved up his body.
For ten years he’d lived on the road with the company’s traveling crew. He’d lived intensely alone, worked at least six days a week, studied after work and on his half-day off in his endless series of cheap motel rooms. On his half-days off he almost never talked to anyone. Ten years. Then, upon his return to the city, his first company had been a spider he’d never seen.
He’d come off the road last year and taken up Junior on his offer. He didn’t know how Junior knew he’d come back or why he’d offer him a place to stay in exchange for “services to be named later.” Upon returning to Chicago, Shame had found that, without his noticing, all of his senses had begun to work basically like the glass blocks he’d installed in the bedroom wall. Maybe it was only like this in Chicago? He didn’t know. He’d had enough of the road and didn’t plan on leaving town again. He didn’t know what his life would be about. He meant to figure that out here. As soon as he’d returned, he noticed things and, even more, people would approach into magnified focus and bend out of range in a rhythm that changed constantly but didn’t seem to alter in response to anything he could determine or control. On the job, no problem. Everthing fit in place. Off the job, things slipped and slid. Since moving into Junior’s building, the intensity of his perceptual exile was easing up bit by bit at Earlie’s.
The first step had been Earlie’s Café all the way up on North Broadway. He’d heard an interview with the manager who’d said they opened the place “because we love music.” Shame thought that was a place to start. He’d begun to go there after getting off work and cleaning himself up. Shame was clearheaded at work. But everything else he looked at appeared to him as if it was behind thick aquarium glass. He’d allowed people—he guessed they were people—to talk to him at the bar: Lester, Than-ha, JiLisa, Wayne, Reg, Karmen, the four Kims, and maybe a few others. He trained himself to sit still and listen while their faces slid in and around folding over on themselves. For weeks he watched people talk.
After a few weeks, he’d begun to sit at a table in a corner of windows near the garden and read. He’d intended to keep on studying as he’d done on the road. For years he’d traced the music of what he considered the great voices in American jazz: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, Wynton Kelly, Lester Young. He didn’t exactly know why he was doing it. It struck him that the music he studied (phrase by phrase, song by song, year by year, each artist one at a time) was older than he was. Sometimes twice his age or more. It also struck him that the music was much closer to the age of the old men he worked with. Maybe that’s why he’d done it. He didn’t know. He’d grown to love the music. It never felt old to him. Note by note, gliss by gliss, it felt like it’d become flesh of his flesh, as if his body bore the old-time music into the contemporary world. He’d become a kind of time warp. He wondered if this alone had caused his senses to bend and smear in the gap between the music he’d slow-poured into his brain like warm honey and the manic, info-flow world he found around him in Chicago during the first years of the twenty-first century.
As far as his studies went, he thought it wouldn’t matter that he was back in Chicago. It mattered. As soon as he arrived, he found it impossible to concentrate on the music as he had. In retrospect, the next part looked like a cheap setup. Maybe it was. When he arrived on the third floor of 6329, there’d been an old upright piano in the hallway. It sat on oversized, hard rubber studio rollers. On the back of the piano was well-stenciled script: Mount Carmel High School for Boys. He didn’t ask and he didn’t know why. He rolled it into his apartment mainly because he didn’t have much furniture. He’d never sat at the keys of a real piano before. When he did he loved the feel of the mechanism connecting his fingers to the felt-covered hammers he found hidden inside. From the time he rolled that piano into his apartment, it had seemed as if he didn’t hear recorded music anymore. He’d assembled a vintage stereo system before he found that listening had changed. He loved it, still, for the way it filled space around him with electrified warmth. He could listen, of course, but he didn’t hear it like he had on the road when it seemed like he could step inside the music and watch the world as if through a window in a song. On the road, he’d felt like he could grab hold of the sound, like it was made of physical components. At 6329 he always had music playing. But he didn’t really listen because he really didn’t hear it any more than a fish feels the water that surrounds. Maybe what Shame had begun to do with music had more in common with breathing than it did with listening. Or maybe more with drowning.
When Shame sat at the piano and touched the keys, he felt the notes made by the hammers before he heard them. It was as if the hammers were inside his body somehow. And he could feel the mechanism between the keys and hammers as if they were joined to his tendons and muscles. He began to suspect that the piano listened to the recorded music he played more than he did. Even if he couldn’t play anything, he began to hear music when he played the piano much more than when he listened to recordings. He didn’t hear what he played. It was coming from somewhere else. So he decided to leave music playing for the piano to listen to when he was out of the apartment. He turned it off when he came back. Then he’d play the keys and listen to what appeared in the distance. Because he did all of this, whatever it was, alone, Shame had no gauge for the intensity of what was happening to him.
There were the recurring dreams of being trapped in narrow alleys by collapsed buildings. His hands buried in brick, he tried to cut them off at the wrist but couldn’t cut through thick piano wires in his arms. The dream of showing up to work with keys instead of hands, pedals instead of feet. As he’d learn later, he could hear music performed live as well. But for six solid months, other than work, sleep, and log two hours a few evenings a week standing on the bank or wading ankle deep into conversations at Earlie’s Café, Shame had done nothing in his house but listen to what happened elsewhere as the living tendons of that old piano moved the hammers in his body.
During the first months, a few of the people he’d talked to at Earlie’s had worked their way up to inviting themselves to his place. They were all women. By then he had come up with the afternoon-chef job with the kids and so he’d clean up from the first shift—more on that to come—in the kitchen and cook dinner for the visitors from Earlie’s.
He kept it cool. He’d play the guests music that he couldn’t hear anymore on the stereo. Visitors were more interested in the glowing tubes of the amplifier than any music that happened to be playing. In contrast to the dice-roll of kids he’d host on the first shift, he enjoyed the adult company, the presence of a fully grown body in the room with him. Human stillness. He wasn’t studying anymore. He didn’t know what he was doing. It felt like he was skating. What he was skating on and what was below that, he didn’t know. People were there but it felt to him like no one really came to visit. No one stayed the night. And no one ever came twice which, at the time, was a good thing.
No one, that is, except Colleen, who turned out to be a very crucial presence, a real person and a friend. After a half dozen of these other dinner visits, he figured out what they felt like. He and his guest were ventriloquists’ dummies. They talked but in ways that, somehow, weren’t theirs to say. For years after I was dead, Shame hadn’t talked to anyone effectively. The ventriloquist thing with those first visitors didn’t bother him too much. He didn’t mind the feeling. But he didn’t recognize it and he didn’t trust it. Everyone was still cool at Earlie’s as far as he could tell, but none ever mentioned coming back to 6329. The closest he’d come to his visitors, in fact, was when he’d fall on his bed and watch them leave out the front. He’d watch them