Caleb

I planted carrots, corn, cucumbers, and peppers. Decided to go for broccoli, too, though I was a little late in planting it. With global warming wreaking havoc on everything, who even knew if winter would come. I resolved that tomorrow I would plant pumpkins. It was the right time to plant them if I wanted them by Halloween.

Last spring, I’d been in no position to plant or plan anything. I’d been two months out of rehab, and I would just sit on the porch of my grandfather’s old house, wrapped in a blanket, and stare at the barren earth that had once been a working farm. I tried to read, but was too distracted, too shaky. I tried to play, but fumbled all the notes. I tried to watch movies on my computer, but nothing held my attention. The only thing I could do was listen to music, and watch the land thaw.

I watched the first sproutlings push themselves through the hard earth, bursting into bloom at the touch of the sun. I watched the leaves unfurl, each morning lusher and fuller than the last. I watched the grass shade from brown to yellow to a taunting absinthe-green, as the snow melted and the rotting leaves sank into the soil. I watched the light gather itself, muscle itself from weak diffusion to insistent heat, coaxing every living thing back to life.

And I tried hard not to write songs that used what I saw as metaphors for my own rebirth. I tried not to identify too strongly with the weak, twisted things slumbering underground, that burst into slow and glorious bloom as they awoke. Not because I didn’t hope desperately to be tickled awake gently by the sun, or because I hadn’t been a weak and twisted thing. But because I knew the danger of waiting for some outside force to bend a gentle knee and change my life. I knew that if anything was going to bring me back to life, it would have to be me.

This was no natural circle of life, but a desperate resurrection. I had to put one self to death before it could kill the one I hoped to create.

I had checked myself into rehab for the fourth time, with no magical sense that anything was different than it had been the three times before. Nothing except, maybe, a little more fear. A little less energy. And a sense of shame so strong it threatened to consume me. The difference that time hadn’t come before; it had come in what I did after.

I didn’t go back to music. Didn’t book more tour dates, arrange more studio time, or call my manager to discuss next career plans. Because it seemed like the only way. I knew my triggers, knew the way the road seeped into my veins as surely as a needle, opening me up, making patterns I couldn’t claw my way clear of.

It wasn’t the music, not really. It was everything that surrounded it. It was the way a city where no one knew me made me feel like I could do anything and then leave it there. The way the aftermath of each show felt like a party, so I acted like I was at one. How being watched onstage made me feel, somehow, like I was safe. Like I couldn’t possibly make a mistake so huge I couldn’t take it back.

No, it wasn’t the music, but I didn’t know any other way to do music than with the people I’d always done it with, in the places I’d toured for years. It felt safer to make a clean break. To create a world without music and everything that went along with it. To remove the temptation and all that reminded me of it.

I didn’t go home to my apartment in the city, or meet up with friends. I left everything behind, and moved to my grandfather’s old farmhouse in Stormville, an hour and a half from the city. Seventy miles from where I’d called home when I wasn’t on the road the last ten years.

I didn’t tell anyone I was leaving, didn’t tell them where I was going, didn’t even tell them I was out of rehab. I just disappeared from one place and reappeared in another, like a magic trick.

I showed up with only what I’d had in rehab: a few sets of clothes, my guitar, and my iPod. Then I set about the business of learning what being lonely felt like. Because being lonely was what being sober felt like. Trapped, forever, in the real world.

That was a little over a year ago. I’d gone into the gardening store out of desperation to do something, anything with my still shaking hands. It was March, the air so dry my skin was crawling, and I wandered the aisle of seed packets in a haze, knowing nothing of times to plant or times to harvest, but determined I would walk out with the promise of something to care about.

The weather-beaten old man who owned the shop watched me stumble around for a while and stare at signs without processing their meanings, then he ambled over and tucked a packet of radish seeds in my pocket. Told me that I could plant them now, and I would be able to see them grow in only three weeks. I wasn’t sure I’d ever even eaten radishes, but he had understood what I needed: to see that my actions had consequences. To see that I could support myself, sustain myself. To see that I could create something again.

I’d expected to feel hope, but when I saw the first sprouts of the radishes I’d planted, I felt a surge of something like responsibility; the knowledge that these things were in the world because I’d put them there, so I had better take care of them.

Turned out that I hadn’t ever eaten radishes, and turned out that they tasted mostly like water and dirt. But I liked them. It was the right lesson for the moment.

---

After spending three days planting—three days thinking about nothing but dirt and sun, rainfall and fertilizer, deer and aphids—I couldn’t resist the urge anymore. I hauled out my little-used computer and googled Riven.

I’d recognized Theo because even living in my self-constructed isolation for the past year, I still went into the city a few times a month and stayed with Huey, ate all the foods I craved out in the country, and reminded myself there was still a world out there that I had left behind.

So I’d seen the cover articles and the midtown advertisements, heard the Top 10 countdowns and the subway swooning. But, though I’d noted Theo’s beauty—that of the whole band, really—and caught snatches of the music here and there, I hadn’t ever really listened.

I wasn’t expecting them to be so good. It wasn’t really my kind of thing, at first listen. Rock with one foot in prog and the other in industrial, an edge of glam, and a genre ranginess that was interesting but still unsettled, as of their second album. The radio edits and album tracks didn’t really do them justice. It was overproduced, commercial, all the edges sanded clean. But the videos of them live took my breath away.

Of the rest of the band, their drummer, Ethan, impressed me the most. He seamlessly integrated beats from country, blues, jazz, even big-band music into his repertoire, intricate rhythms snaking around each other. He used silence as well as he used noise, and he knew how to string out a moment until the crowd was desperate for the next hit. Ven, the bass player, held down the bottom of every song, and though he played with a cocky grin, he didn’t showboat. He watched the crowd and responded to them, his playing getting heavier as their response intensified. Coco ran and jumped and head-banged with passion through every song because she played effortlessly. Her solos were intricate and impressive, and she and Theo had great chemistry onstage.

Theo. His voice had a virtuosic resonance that let his sustained notes rip through the loudest instrumentation, but it was complex. His lower register was intimate and gravelly, his falsetto sweet and tremulous, and he sang with a raw vulnerability that made me feel like I was in bed with him all over again.

Onstage, he was sinuous and awkward by turns, as if he lost himself in the music and then suddenly slammed back into self-awareness. In one video, shot by someone standing right by the edge of the stage, Theo sang with his eyes squeezed shut, a hand outflung to the crowd, moving with the music, the final note held, a delicate crystalline thing echoing through the arena. He looked blissed out, joyous. Then the roar of the crowd began, and I could see, even in shaky video, the moment when he opened black-lined eyes, came back from wherever he went when he was singing, and became another person. He blinked owlishly, eyes wide and shocked, then seemed to register the crowd, smiled shyly for just a second, an acknowledgment that he had whipped them into this froth, then turned away from the camera as if he couldn’t bear to be seen any longer.

I knew that wide-open look. That startled look of being overwhelmed and the desperation for grounding or explosion. I had seen it from only inches away, in Theo’s bed.

---

Rhys arrived around dinnertime, which wasn’t a coincidence. Rhys was always hungry. He showed up twice a month or so, each time with something he needed to discuss or needed my help with, or the claim that he was in the mood for a drive.

“Been planting, huh?” he rumbled, jumping down from his battered blue Ford F-150, and gesturing to the freshly turned earth. He caught me up in the kind of hug that could crack a rib.

Rhys was a Viking of a man, even taller than me, with the kind of breadth that had him constantly pulling in his shoulders to avoid banging into things. His dark-blond hair was raked away from his face carelessly, and his eyes were the clear ice-blue of mountain glaciers. He wasn’t exactly handsome, but he had a confidence that was more galvanizing than beauty.

He followed me inside and hoisted himself up to sit on the counter as I cooked. It groaned beneath his weight, but he seemed unconcerned.

“Enough for two?” he asked, winking at me.

“Why don’t you get your husband to cook for you,” I muttered.

“Aw, come on, now, don’t be like that. You know I love you both.” He tried to wrap his legs around me as I reached past him for a wooden spoon.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, what is it this time? Got an email you need help composing? A story you want to tell me that wouldn’t be the same over the phone?”

My voice sounded sour even to me and I dropped my chin, hands on my thighs. Rhys was my oldest friend. We’d played music together since we were twenty years old, and he knew me better than almost anyone. He was quick to anger, quick to forgive, and loyal to a fault. He’d stayed my friend even when I was a fucked-up mess, and he’d forced his way back into my life after, when I’d isolated myself from everyone, pushing firmly and steadily, like a knee between the thighs, until I let him settle there.

“Hey, now.”

He set a heavy hand on each of my shoulders and tugged me around to look at him.

“What’s got you all messed?”

The wariness in his eyes killed me. It was a wariness I was familiar with—of course it was. You couldn’t disappoint people over and over again without being very fucking familiar with that expression.

I patted his hand and tried to smile.

“Sorry, bro,” I said. “Just in a mood. I’m glad to see you.”

Rhys’s grin was bright and immediate.

“Great, ’cause I need your help. Not”—he cut me off—“with an email, no. With a song. Well, a couple songs.”

He fumbled with his phone as I dumped the food onto two plates and herded him to the kitchen table.

“What…is this, exactly?” he asked, poking at the food with a thick finger.

“Eggs.” He raised an eyebrow. “With stuff in them.”

It wasn’t as if Rhys wasn’t fully aware that I was a shit cook. He squinted at his plate for a minute, then shrugged, dowsed it with hot sauce, and started shoveling in the food with one hand while pawing at his phone with the other.

He finished eating in the time it took me to take about five bites, so I let him explain as I ate.

He was working on a new album—his first solo album—and he wanted me to co-write and record four of the songs with him.

No, was my first thought. A strident, uncompromising no that left no room for error or regret. My addiction was a slippery slope, and music had always been inextricable from the initial nudge that sent me careening down it.

But I’d helped Theo with his song the other night, and all I’d felt was a kind of tickle in the places where the music had always lived, like the first tingle of waking up. Besides, this was Rhys. Chances were he was more likely to mother-hen me to death than expose me to anything that wasn’t squeaky clean.

I stayed silent long enough without dismissing his request that Rhys saw his opening.

“You’ll be perfect, man. I want to play you some of the stuff I’ve got so far, okay? But this stupid thing—” He banged his iPhone on the table. “Shit doesn’t work.”

I grabbed the phone from him before he broke it. Rhys’s electronics—well, most of his possessions, actually—were forever falling victim to his accidental brutalities.

“It’s not your phone, it’s that we’re in the middle of farm country and there’s not a good cell signal out here. Use my computer.”

“Oh, right.”

He woke the computer up and I cleared the dishes while he found whatever he was going to play me.

“Uhhhhh, you know I don’t like to judge, bro, but your newest obsession is a little…different?”

“My what now?”

He tilted the computer to show me the embarrassing number of tabs open to Riven videos and articles.

“I—that’s not—I don’t have obsessions.”

Rhys’s laugh was the deep one where he threw his head back and rested his palms on his belly.

“That’s so ridiculous,” he wheezed. “Of course you do. You find a new band and you pick them apart to learn everything about them, then you strip them for usable parts and throw the rest to the sharks. It’s what you do. You’re the most obsessive motherfucker I’ve ever met. Well, except for Matty.”

I frowned at his characterization.

“You found Matte Black Disco, and you got that cool thing where they layer a minor chord under every bridge in major. Pickle Barrel, it was the accordion as the percussion beat on ‘Limelight.’ From Divisadero you picked up the steel guitar. Oh, and that steel guitar player—he was something, huh?” He shook his head. “Nothing wrong with it, bro, I’m just saying, you like to dig in.”

When he put it that way, I supposed Rhys was right. Matte Black Disco had opened for me when I toured behind my third album and I had found myself tweaking my songs at the bridge because the combination of chords just lit up my ear.

It was one of the reasons I’d loved touring so much, keeping the songs living, shifting things. Yes, there was the version of them that was on the album, but that was just the way I’d laid it down that day. Onstage, on tour, in different cities, the songs came alive. It was a dance, a call and response, an ongoing conversation. And every song, every band, every sound I encountered had the potential to transform a song, give it another version of itself.

“I wouldn’t have thought they were quite your thing, though,” Rhys said, pointing at the computer screen. “Although…” He leaned closer and I felt the irritation creep under my skin. “Ohhh, I get it. Okay. I see. Sorry, never mind. Wow. He is…beautiful, damn. And totally your type.”

“Okay, okay.” I grabbed the laptop out of Rhys’s hands and closed all the tabs. “Show me what you’re gonna show me. And I don’t have a type,” I grumbled.

He held up his palms in a peacemaking gesture, and clicked over to his email to play me the MP3s.

They were good, just like everything of Rhys’s. He’d spent most of his time playing with other bands, or writing songs for others. But it seemed like it was time for his own album. He was more settled, since he’d married Matt, and his songwriting had matured. I could imagine this album just from the three songs he played me—one-third smoky and wistful, one-third playful and teasing, and one-third classic and gritty. It would work. It would definitely work.

He could see in my face that I wanted to do it, and he leaned close, a brother-in-arms.

“I don’t want you to do this if it feels risky to you. I want you with me on this, of course. But it’s not worth it if—”

“Thanks. I know. I…want to. But I’m not sure I’m ready. I need to think about it, okay?”

Rhys nodded, steady as always.

“It’s not you, Rhys, it’s…”

I didn’t know how to explain the way certain thoughts—certain ways of thinking—sparked other thoughts, like a match touched to a line of gasoline. How I was still learning what they were, and how terrifying it was, wandering around with a lit match all the time.

“I think, soon. But I need a little time. When I’m ready, it will be you. Okay?”

There was that impulsive grin. Rhys excitedly talked logistics and timelines, studio musicians and producers, and around ten I sent him home to Matt.

I was giddy with energy, thinking about Rhys’s offer, cleaning everything in sight to keep myself from calling him and saying that I’d changed my mind. That I was ready now. When I couldn’t clean anymore, I went and sat on the porch to have a cigarette and stare out into the dark. I remembered how Theo had canted his head backward and looked at the sky, like he could will the stars to show themselves. Here, they were lavish.

Theo was beautiful, as Rhys had pointed out. But it wasn’t just that. Something about him had…touched me. Something subtle and intoxicating had pulled me to him. The feel of him—in my arms, in my mouth, around me—awoke something in me I didn’t recognize. It was a bone-deep yearning that had only been oriented to one thing for as long as I could remember. And now that that thing was gone, everything in me had reached out tendrils to plant in something new.

Which was why I had left before Theo awoke that morning. Left him sex-open and sleeping like a fantasy come to life, sinewy arms clutching the pillow he’d stolen from me at some point in the night, thin legs akimbo. His black hair had been a cloud of ink against the white sheets and I hadn’t been able to resist pushing some of it aside to expose the black slash of his eyebrow, sweep of dark lashes, cut of cheekbone, and blade of nose. And that luscious mouth, softened in sleep to a pout.

I’d left him with a kiss to his eyebrow that he’d never know about and a curse that I would never see him again. Because that part of my life—the part where I got to simply want—was over now.

I lit a second cigarette off my first and blew smoke in front of me so the sky might as well have been the one over New York City that night. Then I told myself all the reasons that I couldn’t be with Theo. I told them to myself again and again, until they were a mantra.

Then I did what I had done so many thousands of times over the last year, and would likely do forever. I took the thing I wanted and put it in a box. Then I dug a hole and buried the box inside.