Wordplay

I could hear bass thumping from the small parking lot across the street, so I assumed I was in the right place. I had never been to an actual “art show” before, but already I felt out of my element. People were walking by in nice outfits – nicely pressed button-up shirts and khakis for guys, cute dresses and skirts for girls – and there I was in a pair of old jeans and a wrinkled button-up that I was too lazy to iron. Part of me knew it was a bad idea to even think of going to the show, what with the way things had ended between us, but another part of me wanted to see her, to say hi and extend an olive branch. I didn’t think anything romantic or sexual would spring up – nor did I particularly want that. But I liked the idea of talking to her. Maybe even being friends again.

I felt passersby staring at me as I leaned against my car in the dark parking lot – a sight I would no doubt be suspicious of myself if I were in their shoes – so I took a deep breath and made my way up the grassy slope towards the street.

The bass grew louder and more pronounced as I followed the modest stream of people across the now defunct railroad tracks. The steady pulse grew stronger and began to vibrate within my body. I softly groaned. We had never really traveled in the same circles. She was always a bit more pop-minded than me, more inclined to the vapid radio-friendly nonsense. I could deal with most of it. The tinkling acoustic guitars were fine and the cookie-cutter popstars were bearable, but the “dance” music where the only “dancing” people did was a poor excuse to dry hump in public was where I drew the line.

I quickly tried to find my happy place as the pounding began to extend to the back of my skull. But much to my surprise, the people in front of me took a sharp right turn away from the booming warehouse in front of us. Unaware of what was happening, I kept in step and followed them around a corner and towards the back of the parking lot. The steady beat grew quieter, my head stopped pounding, and I gave a sigh of relief as we all neared a warmly lit building. I stepped into the short line at the front door and looked around.

There were signs and banners on the walls of the building and beside the door displaying the art show’s logo, a large upside-down triangle teetering at the top of a mountain. It was an image that meant absolutely nothing other than a false sense of grandeur. I chuckled quietly to myself as I noticed the building’s permanent sign sporting the silhouette of a person kicking a board in half, the logo of the children’s martial arts dojo this was typically home to, peeking out behind the banner as it gently flapped in the breeze. I considered pointing this out to the person behind me, but I thought better of it. No sense in making myself feel like more of an outcast.

Small talk abounded. People were talking happily to friends and strangers alike about the show, the weather, or the easy talking points of what was going on in their life. They were the kinds of things someone could gently smile at and say, “Oh, that’s cool.” Or, “Good for you!” Or, “It is nice, isn’t it?” It was soul-crushingly mundane, but it was at least more inviting than the strobing lights and brain-rattling bass a hundred yards away.

As I neared the front of the line, I pulled out my wallet and showed the petite twenty-something woman guarding the entrance my ID. She glanced at it, handed it back, and stamped my hand. I tried to fathom what it would look like if she actually had to put her bouncer skills to the test. She wasn’t even up to my shoulder and looked as if a stiff breeze could blow her down. Then again, I was about to walk into a place where they attempted to make little death machines out of children. As she waved me through, I noticed her hands looked well-worn and callused. The exact type of hands that punch through hunks of wood and cinder blocks on the regular.

Yep. Ninja.

My head was swimming as soon I broke the threshold. It’s not that the music was loud. It just didn’t make any sense. Instruments were playing over each other, seemingly competing for the spotlight, like they were all having their own showstopping solo at the same time. I figured the cacophony was a sound check, but when I overheard someone say how much they were loving the music, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. Of course it was jazz. Once my eyes returned from their long journey, I beelined for the open bar in the corner of the room.

As I waited for my beer, I examined the large, overlit room. The walls were obviously dirty and the carpet clearly stained. It would have been an easy fix, had they wanted to actually hide everything and maybe make the room look mostly presentable. Of course, this being a local art show that strived to be something far fancier than it was, I imagined the conversation that no doubt occurred when deciding how to light the room, opting to highlight the room’s flaws with harsh white lights, rather than hide them. “It’s more earthy that way,” a young woman trying very hard to emulate the look of Audrey Hepburn no doubt said, having no idea what that even means.

I saw the young bartender heading my way with my beer in his hand and quickly pulled out my wallet. I thanked him, pulled out a couple wrinkled up ones, and held them out to him. He shook his head. “It’s an open bar, sir,” he told me.

My hand hung in the air with the crumpled singles. “I know. It’s a tip.”

He beamed at me, surprised about my slight generosity. “I’m not sure I can even take tips. No one has left one all night,” he said.

I gave a cursory glance down the length of the bar at the sport coats and the coifed hairdos and shook my head lightly. “That honestly doesn’t surprise me.” I placed the two dollars on the counter, opened up my wallet, and put down another five. I gave the bartender a smile and a nod as I grabbed my beer and turned to wind my way through the crowds of people.

They were all overdressed and huddled into groups. Some smiled, some laughed, and some looked entirely too serious, their brows furrowed and their hands waving in the air, while those they spoke to nodded along, as if their head was on a spring and someone gave it a solid tap. I thought it would be fun to play a game while I eavesdropped: whenever I heard the word “inspiration” or any variation thereof, I would take a drink. After five minutes, however, I realized I would probably have some sort of liver failure by the end of the night if I kept it up, and decided to pull back.

I scanned the faces around me as I walked the floor. There was no sign of her. Maybe she was in another room. Maybe this was the wrong show. Maybe I actually had seen her, but I just didn’t recognize her. After all, it had been almost a year since we last spoke and even longer since I had last seen her. Perhaps the face that was beginning to grow distant and hazy in my mind was no longer the face I should expect to see.

My drink was getting low and the jazz band was about to bring up a flute player, so I took that as my cue to head out. I threw back my last sip of free alcohol, tossed the can into a nearby wastebasket, and turned for the door. That was when I saw the girl. She blended in perfectly, but felt oddly out of place. Her hair was done up in a simple ponytail, her dress was modest, but still flattering, and her shoes looked to be a brand new pair of orange high tops. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary, but something seemed different. She floated through the room with a slight smile on her face, like she held the secrets to life and the universe. Or maybe she just found the whole affair as amusingly delusional as I did. It wasn’t until she was about ten feet away from me that I spotted the pencil behind her ear and the large black notebook in her hand. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen anybody with a pencil. Or a notebook, for that matter. I remembered seeing paper in some vintage store one time a few years before, but that was for show, a decoration that people would lay out in their homes to make themselves look sophisticated. I’d never seen it out in the wild. Never for actual use. I started to follow her when I heard a familiar voice from across the room.

“Holy shit. Monty?”

I winced and hesitantly turned towards the voice. “Hey, Victoria.”

“Oh my god! Monty!” I had a split second to register the same black, curly hair I had remembered so well before I found my face buried in it. She threw her whole body into me and I fumbled with my arms, unsure of how to hug her back. Before I even had a chance to mistakenly place my hand on her ass, she pulled away.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Ah, you know. I saw you post the flyer online and I didn’t have anything going on, so I figured I’d support you and drop in and say hey, see how you’re doing.”

“That’s so sweet. Thank you so much.” She grabbed my hand. “That really means a lot.”

I stared at my hand in hers and immediately recognized the familiar comfort of her fingers intertwined in mine. I looked up into that same warm smile and recalled the quiet moments and the shared dreams and the stupid, hilarious inside jokes and for those few seconds I remembered what it felt like to be happy with her, with Victoria, and I longed for it. And then her friend called from the side of the room, “Hey, V!” And those memories of happiness melted into petty arguments and distant conversations and missed dates. That was when V had taken over.

I slid my hand out of hers as she turned back to her friends. “Give me a minute!” she yelled.

“No, we need you now!” I could see a small group of people posing for photos and doing a Q&A via 10-second video recordings.

Victoria groaned and rubbed her neck as she turned back to me. “Sorry. I have to do this. Are you going to be around?”

“Actually, I was just about to–“

“No! Just… a little while. Please?”

I sighed and looked around at the growing crowd and the flute player on stage doing her mic check. She was already playing flamboyant scales while the rest of the band behind her adjusted their fedoras and horn-rimmed glasses. Victoria must have noticed me grimacing. She crossed her arms and her tone became withdrawn and annoyed, the way it always would when I did something she did not approve of. “You know, there’s a lot of great art here if you’d just give it a chance,” she said.

“You mean this isn’t it? I thought it was some sort of ‘avant-garde’ thing where the lack of art was the art. Now I feel like a moron for staring at that white wall and talking to the guy next to me about how I ‘just couldn’t see it.’”

She reluctantly laughed and lightly nudged my shoulder. I always was able to make her smile when she least wanted to. She pointed behind me. “No, you goon, it’s over there.” There was a narrow doorway by the rear of the stage where people were slowly filtering in and out, careful to step over the band’s cases and extra equipment strewn about. Above the door was a sign sporting the same logo I had seen outside of an upside down pyramid precariously balanced atop a mountain with an arrow pointing down to the opening in the wall. The logo somehow made even less sense here, but I let it go and turned back to Victoria.

“Twenty minutes,” I said. “I have to work in the morning.”

“Perfect! That’s more than enough time. I’ll find you over there in a bit.” She gave me a quick hug and was off before I had time to react. I watched as she strode over to her friends and threw on the biggest, fakest smile I had ever seen her wear; V was back.

I shook my head and began absently walking in the direction of the stage. About halfway there, I noticed the guitar player staring right at me and I realized I had broken the threshold of art- and free beer-enthusiasts and had made my way onto the very empty dance floor. I almost felt bad seeing his face deflate as I quickly course corrected for the doorway to the actual art show, but the feeling quickly faded as the flute energetically screeched out its scales, which flowed directly into a cavalcade of noise as the rest of the band joined in. I quickly fished through my pockets for my emergency earbuds. A couple people shot dirty glances at me as I plugged them into my ears, so I showed them the biggest smile I could muster and yelled, “These are my hearing aids! It’s so good, I don’t want to miss any of it!” As soon as they heard “hearing aid,” they blushed and looked away. I hit a button on each earpiece, another button on my phone, and suddenly the bellowing instruments faded out and the soothing sound of punk rock filled my ears as I squeezed through the doorway and into the art room.

It was larger than I had anticipated. The walls were still blaringly white and overlit, and it was still noticeably a place where children go to practice kicking the air and chopping plywood in half, but it was impressive nonetheless. Paintings and photos lined the walls, sculptures dotted the floor, and people crowded around everything. They milled about in groups, surrounded each artist, and waved their arms in the air, clearly trying very hard to get their point across and look smarter while doing so. It looked legitimate, exactly the picture I always imagined of the events the most high-minded and elite must go to every week. My back immediately straightened, my head lifted, and my hands involuntarily ran down my shirt, the wrinkles defiantly springing back into place.

I wound through the crowd and stopped at the first display. There were two girls standing in front of the painting. One girl in a vintage dress roughly the color of sewage water spoke with vigor to her friend wearing a polka dot blouse and black slacks. Her head was shaking and nodding while her hands pushed and pulled and circulated the air around her, while the other shook her head disapprovingly. My earbuds had moved on to blaring classic rock into my ears, so all I could hear was falsetto vocals and a pounding piano, but their conversation looked interesting. I cautiously stepped around them to get a better look at the canvas hanging on the wall. On a plain white canvas was the word, “no,” stretched across it in black lower-case letters, and below it hung a plain black canvas with the word, “yes,” stretched across it in white lower-case letters. I stared at the moral argument splashed across the walls and nodded my head and rubbed my chin until I felt I had been there long enough to not look stupid in front of the two girls behind me.

The music in my ears faded out as I edged my way through the crowd. I caught a brief snippet of conversation between the two girls. “So I told her, ‘Mom, just stay out of my life! It has nothing to do with you!’ And do you know what she does? She tells me, ‘Helen, if you’re going to act this way you better think twice about your father and I paying for your–‘”

“ONETWOTHREEFOURONETWOTHREEFOUR” Chugging guitars, pounding drums, and a ragged, raspy voice drowned my ears. I looked back at the two girls as I walked away, the vintage dress still waving her arms in anger and the polka dots still shaking her head on a swivel. They were miles away, regardless of where they physically stood.

The next display was empty of people, save for the artist standing proudly next to his work. His hair was perfectly messy, his clothing ripped and torn. It must have cost him a fortune. He smiled at me as I approached and I nodded back quietly. I was careful not to make eye contact with him as I glanced over the words he had painted into the shape of a vagina. Words like “vote” and “hope” and “freedom” popped out at me amidst the mishmash of jumbled words, which suddenly made sense when I spotted the title card beneath the painting: “Cuntry.” I scoffed and was quick to move on for fear of looking like some sort of pervert for lingering too long.

I meandered along the perimeter of the room, passively glancing at the paintings and photos that lined the walls. There was more wordplay, something that looked like a dog had barfed up alphabet soup, and even a giant word search someone had made (which actually had no words to find, I realized after far too long).

One of the largest pieces on display was a sculpture entitled “Letter Opener,” consisting of a giant letter K that was placed on a gurney at the side of the room. Large halogen lights bore down on it. A tray table with rusty surgical tools lay haphazardly beside it. And down the length of the letter’s crooked arm was a large open wound, its insides disturbingly realistic with muscular tissue and spurts of blood. They encouraged patrons to grab a tool and poke around inside, eliciting quite a few people to nearly faint and me to giggle maniacally. The crowd was beginning to grow and I could feel people staring at me as I had far too much fun carving open the Letter of the Day, so I quietly put down the scalpel and walked off.

Twenty-five minutes had passed and there was still no sign of Victoria. I was growing restless and tired and chastised myself as I stepped out a side door to what I thought would be my escape route, but what actually looked to be a loading dock with even more art illuminated by a single lightbulb at the doorway. Some chicken wire fencing had been hastily erected, its sides drooping and propped up by cinderblocks. A few small pieces were displayed. There was nobody else outside except for those few artists, but they hardly even registered that I had entered their domain. They were congregated in a small circle, drinking beer and chatting. They knew they were quite literally the outsiders of the show and they couldn’t give less of a shit.

They were my kind of people.

I closed the door behind me and pulled out my earbuds. I always enjoyed the quiet sounds of a late evening. The soft rustling of wind through the trees, a single grasshopper slowly playing its music, the distant rush of traffic. It was soothing. It even made the dampened monstrosity of soft jazz emanating from the walls bearable.

I approached the open cooler of beer by the group of artists. “Do you mind if I…?” They all stopped mid-conversation, took one glance at me, and waved me away. I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, so I took a can and awkwardly walked along the fence while sipping my beer. The work was basically more of the same, if a little less refined, and I drifted along the paintings and photos without registering a single image.

I pulled out my phone and absently worked my way through social media. It wasn’t long before I stumbled upon a brief video clip of Victoria in a Q&A. I figured it was what she was called over for, so I hit play. She was standing in front of her piece, a sculpture of nothing in particular. She always loved abstract art. The idea of creating beauty out of nonsense attracted her. “It’s a reflection of the world,” she told the camera. “We put meaning in what we see. We make sense out of the nonsensical.” The sculpture she stood next to and proudly flaunted embodied that well enough. It was, essentially, a blob that seemed to be becoming sentient, rising from the ground and contorting itself into a vague shape, as if willing itself into being. It was no different from any other sculpture she had made.

But something was off. It was textured in a way her other sculptures weren’t. There were small black marks up and down, and edges and creases that made it resemble a cocoon. I paused the video and brought the phone closer to my eyes. I had never considered why she would be a part of that show. Her sculptures were good, but they were simply shapes. They had nothing to do with words. My stomach dropped when I realized what I was looking at. They were pages torn from a book. I don’t know what book. I don’t even know where Victoria would have gotten her hands on one. It didn’t matter. All I knew then was that I felt sick to my stomach.

I put my phone away and continued down the length of the fence, chugging my beer. I was done. The people, the art, the music, I was done with all of it. But as I neared the end of the fence, something caught my eye. There was a single paper in a plain black frame. It wasn’t an ad; there weren’t any images or logos on it. It didn’t even look to be typed up; the letters were crooked and uneven, sagging slightly at the end of each line. I peered at it closer, my nose nearly touching the glass. It was a short, handwritten poem. On paper. With a pencil. It reminded me of something lost, a vague recognition of a world long since past, and a hazy memory slowly rose to mind of my parents reading to me as a child. I remembered the weight of the book in my hands, the aroma of the pages as they turned, the sound of the words as they whispered from my parent’s mouths.

“Please don’t judge me based off of that.”

I jumped and nearly dropped my beer as I threw myself around and the girl in the orange high tops burst into laughter. She doubled over and covered her face.

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” she said through her cupped hands. “Are you okay?”

I struggled to gather myself together as quickly as possible, clearing my throat and trying, once again, to flatten down my shirt. “I’m… Yeah… Did you do this?”

Her laughter slowly faded. “Yes, sadly. It’s not my best work, okay?”

“No, no. It’s great. I love it, actually. It’s really–“

“Atrocious.”

“Are you kidding? I mean, I’ve never read poetry, but–“

“Exactly. You’ve never read poetry. This is junk, trust me.”

The girl slowly pushed me to the side and sat in the chair beside her poem.

“Well,” I said, “can I see something else?”

She shrugged and threw her hands in the air, motioning to the empty fence space around her. “It’s all I’ve got, I’m afraid.”

“Then why put it up?”

“It’s the shortest thing I could fit up here.” I raised an eyebrow and she rolled her eyes. “I don’t do poems. It’s not really my thing. Everything I usually do is a little more long form, you know? And that doesn’t really fly with this place. Or any place, really.” She crossed her legs and I tried not to look at the flash of thigh as her dress rode up her leg and she fought to pull it back down. “People don’t want stories, anymore. They want flashes, images, ideas. Something they can look at for a single second and say, ‘Yeah, that’s good, I like that.’” She shook her head. “This isn’t my art,” she said, pointing to the poem hanging behind her. She patted the black notebook resting on her knee. “This is.”

I nodded slowly and knowingly. “Can I see it?” I asked.

“No, you can’t see it! Jesus, the nerve of some people.”

“Look. I don’t exactly get this whole ‘Word Art’ thing, either. Some of it’s kind of cool, I guess. That ‘Letter Opener’ piece is pretty creative. But, honestly, I just really–”

“Yeah, but that’s also white noise. Look me in the eye and tell me what it means. Please. I am asking you to explain it to me, because I sure as hell don’t get anything from it other than a stomachache. Nothing in there means anything. Nobody in there thinks of what they are doing or the things they are saying or the culture they are completely tearing apart. Nobody in there even really looks at anything. They’re all too lost in their own lives to be aware of what is around them. Words are more than just symbols to be tinkered with. They carry a power, a weight, a meaning. They tell stories.”

I swallowed hard. “Then show me.”

She eyed me suspiciously, her breath slowing. We stayed like that for what felt like an hour, her eyes ripping through my flesh to the awkward, self-conscious little boy I never truly grew out of, until she slowly opened her notebook and began rifling through the pages. I sat down on the ground across from her and crossed my legs the way I remember doing so often in school to watch our daily lessons. Her hand plucked the pencil from behind her ear and scribbled out lines here and jotted down words there. I sat quietly and watched her softly gnaw on the eraser as she carefully thought and considered her decisions. Finally, she placed the pencil in its rightful place behind her ear, took a deep breath, and started reading.

Her story was a quiet one of loss and heartache. The characters had no impact on the world, the country, or even their own hometown. In the grand scheme of things, they meant nothing. But the decisions they made and the impact those had on their own lives meant everything. I lost myself in her imagery, her prose, her little tangents, and I remembered what it was like to hear stories as a kid, laying on my back as my mother’s voice carried my imagination off into other worlds. By the time she finished, my beer was sitting warm and forgotten by my feet and we were the only two people still outside.

She closed her notebook and hesitantly looked at me. “Well?”

I sat in silence for a few seconds, still awash in the sepia-toned, tattered images she created in my mind. I wanted to tell her what her story meant to me, what it shook up inside of me. Instead, I could only muster one thing. “What’s your name?” I asked.

She chuckled. “Rhys. A boy’s name, I know, but… it’s mine.”

“It’s nice,” I said. We sat in silence again and looked out at the night, comfortable in each other’s company. I wanted to ask her something, but I wasn’t exactly sure how. So, of course, I blurted it out.

“Can I buy it?” I asked.

Rhys stood from her chair and stretched her back. I grimaced as loud pops emanated from her spine. She let out a breath, relaxed, and looked down at me. “That’s the beauty of stories,” she said. “Once they’re out, you don’t own them, anymore.” I sighed and she rolled her eyes. “But…” She pulled her poem off of the chicken wire fence and handed it to me.

I scrambled to my feet excitedly. “How much?” I asked as I pulled out my wallet.

She shook her head and shoved the frame into my hands. “Keep it,” she said. “It’s junk, anyways. I keep telling you that.”

“That’s the beauty of stories,” I said. “You don’t get to choose.”

She laughed and knelt beside her chair. “You got me there,” she said. She started to rummage through a messenger bag laying on its side. I tried to peek over her shoulder, but the speed with which she tossed aside old receipts, food wrappers, and torn up bits of paper made it impossible to see anything, so I held back.

“My grandmother gave me my notebook when I was in high school,” Rhys said. “Real leather, hand crafted, absolutely perfect. I had never seen anything like it. It had already been years since I had seen a book, but a notebook this beautiful? Hell no. And she told me, ‘Every story starts with a good book.’” Rhys looked up from her bag and stared me dead in the eye. “She died the next day.”

“Oh god, I am so sorry. I didn’t know. I mean, of course I didn’t know, but had I known I wouldn’t have asked to see your notebook and–“

Rhys burst into laughter. “I’m kidding! She died years later in her sleep. You need to chill, man.”

I forced out some canned laughter while she proceeded to dig through her bag. “My point is,” she continued, “you can’t tell a story without the right tools.” She pulled a pen and a small brown notebook with a plastic cover from her bag and held them out to me.

I shook my head. “No, no, no. I can barely tell people what I did with my day, let alone make up a whole story.”

“Take it,” she demanded. Her eyes were beginning to shoot daggers at me again, so I took the notebook and awkwardly placed the pen behind my ear. “There you go. Now you look the part.”

“I don’t know what to say,” I told her.

“Don’t say anything. Believe me, it’s a cheap notebook and that pen will smear like no other.”

“Cheap?” I rifled through the notebook and admired the rough feel of the paper against my fingers. “Anything with real paper has to cost at least–“

“It’s fine. Now go.” She waved me away.

“What are you going to do?”

Rhys sat back down in her chair, crossed her legs, and opened her notebook to a blank page. “I have some ideas I want to jot down.”

I nodded. “Thank you.”

Her head was already down and her pencil scribbling away as she waved goodbye, her orange high tops kicking the air.

The band was busy tearing down their equipment as I walked back through the building. Artists were packing what didn’t sell and counting the money from what did. Groups of people still lingered and talked amongst themselves. I overheard passing conversations about their lives and the world and the government, and not once did anyone mention the art that surrounded them, the words that stared in at them. They were oblivious and it made me sad. Words, long ago, could inspire, could hurt, could topple regimes. Now they were simply placeholders and background noise, wallpaper in a room where people can get drunk and schmooze.

Victoria was in the same place I had left her. She stood proudly next to her sculpture, showing it off to the remaining few people in the room. I even noticed the bartender standing in front of her, nodding and scratching his head as he studied the giant wad of paper. Even from far away I could see the frayed edges where the paper was torn and the blackened corners where she had set them aflame, ever so quickly, to give them a charred, weathered look. I clutched the notebook and poem closer to my body as I left the building, V’s booming laugh following after me.

It took some time before I was comfortable enough to actually start writing in my new (old) notebook. Nothing ever seemed good enough or poignant enough to put on something as rare as paper. I slowly learned to let my mind wander, developing ideas and concepts in my mind. I would often jot down ideas on my phone or tablet before setting ink to paper, giving myself enough room to be sure that the idea deserved it. After enough time passed, I learned to simply write and let words flow. They were not always good and were often times bad, but they were mine.

I still wonder what happened to Rhys and her orange high tops. I imagine the places she’s been and the stories she’s told. But mostly I just think about her. In a world of flash and noise where people gnash and claw and howl to be noticed, she sits quietly in the corner, a notebook in hand, and shares her stories to the few who will listen.