Later on, at another party where neither of us were drinking, just before we left for good, I casually introduced you to some-one as my wife, equally without thinking, at a college party for fuck’s sake, but as if I’d been doing so for years, and in some way, by this forgetting where things stood, these two gestures—the gone brother, the taking of one family for the other—were the same reversal of history.
*
We go to a show, one show. It’s farther downtown, at one of those venues that claim the origins of punk in this city, a place that by virtue of the pedigree graffitied onto the basement walls is supposedly different than the others, than its regional variants like the Hoosier Dome or Villa Scum in Indiana. It isn’t any different. From the instant we descend the stairs, it’s copies of people we’ve known before—Crass vests, hairstyles like wilting plants, street kids and their giant backpacks, someone’s dog, figures huddled in the corner, smell of yeast and rot; every once in a while, a spiked leather jacket out of 1977. As we walk in, I tilt my head toward the crowd abutting the stage, maybe sixty strong, all frantic movement. The show is two or three bands in. I shout at you: “Do you see the poison?”
“I see it.”
I always keep a wall to one side of me, and at first we hang back in the corner, straddling the line of backpacks shoved against the wall, but there’s a particular hum to the atmosphere tonight, a frictive pull to the center, and when the next band comes on we’re drawn forward, and are quickly separated. The room is densely packed enough for me to lose sight of you almost instantly, and the narrow walls cause all sound to bend inward, filling the air above us and quaking the bodies below, making of everyone rooted to the ground a bell, a conduit for vibration. The music is indiscriminate noise—I have the sense that the band onstage isn’t actually playing their instruments, but just thwacking at them beneath some louder, all-encompassing sound. Unhooked from that sensory anchor, the experience suddenly feels alien from what I remember: a scrum of bodies pressed together, compacted but still full of frantic movement, digging into me at every angle, ceaseless contact like always, but this time it feels purposeful rather than casual, I feel surrounded, like the blows are directed specifically against me, shoulders, elbows, heads, and hands, a mix of camaraderie and revenge. The air is thick, particulate warmth; it coats my skin like a spray. I am insanely hot. I feel a pair of hands—an actual pair of hands, with serious fingernails, the act of identifying them is strangely enraging—push me forward. I stagger in the crush, an elbow hits me squarely in the ear, and my head rockets to one side—my falling body clears a few feet of space, I leave an after-image of me behind. As I steady myself—which I have to do by using someone’s naked shoulder as an anchor (the flesh is warm and sweaty beneath, like it’s just come from a shower)—my left ear is ringing like the filmic equivalent of bad news. I turn to find you, but it’s impossible in the flurry of movement and the physical smell and the smoke and the awful lights, which have started, or have always been, or merely appear to be strobing. My arm is still stretched out in front of me, hasn’t been there for more than a few seconds, but as I draw my hand back from the human shoulder, with the ringing, I have consciously forgotten that I put it there, that it’s even my arm at all rather than some hackable limb in a forest that’s standing in my way, and from there, everything goes to shit.
It was another show like this on a different scale, watching from the middle distance and shouting along, to which I traced back the planting of this idea: that we could leave Indiana, Ohio—not just leave, but sever completely, our world and everything in it replaced with something new and unfamiliar, people without history, without our history. This show was later on, outside Richmond (after the Richmond scene had splintered apart), somewhere indisputably Business where you could buy tickets online; the band didn’t matter. Initially I’d thought it was us both mishearing the lyrics, shouting the wrong thing at the same time, until I realized that in fact we were addressing each other through the noise, screaming from opposite ends of the couch: we were claiming space, we were testing how loud we could be without assigning the words meaning. We didn’t know the lyrics but pretended we did, and our worst assumption was that they mattered at all. The music, or the energy behind it, or the fact that this kind of sound existed, however it was brought into being, this was the primal motivation: one of us was suggesting something, and the other was agreeing, the other agreeing. We were already making plans. We’d been together ten months at that point.
A pit breaks open in the front of the crowd, close to where I’ve moved up, its circumference dictated by about twenty people slamming into each other and repelling, a radius constantly re-defined, its outliers shoved away from the stage, forming an arced human barricade. I’m hit with a sudden swoop of nausea, sharp and overwhelming, as if I’ve just inhaled something foul. My vision pitches to the left like a mishandled reel of film, jumping abruptly forward, unaccountably shifting its elements. A guy at the center of the pit, naked except for his oversized sneakers and comically tall, like someone took his torso and just stretched it as far as they could, windmills across the open space thrashing people out of the way like he’s felling trees. His face reads like an anthropomorphized slur, cartoonishly real. To my right, someone slips and goes down, and I don’t see them pulled back up. I shove my fists into my pockets—which is how I always stabilize in moments like this—reassuring myself that there’s nothing in them, nothing at all, but this negatively affects my balance, and when I’m hit again I do fall forward (everyone falls forward) and my face cracks into someone else’s shoulder. My hands shoot out as a reflex—independent, still—and I feel leather beneath them, stupid leather, in this heat. I’m transfixed for a moment, as if I’ve stumbled upon something for which I’ve been desperately searching, and then the guy wearing it throws himself backward to get me off. The back of his jacket sports the white face of a playing card, ace of hearts. I shove back. He loses his footing, and slips into the ring. The instigator behind me has the same idea, and there I go, too. The guy in the jacket stumbles about three feet before he’s rammed by the sweating naked tree-man, cock flapping, who knocks him aside like it’s nothing. A girl about half as tall comes loping across the pit, head down, dancing in huge, hopping strides as if she’s repeatedly trying to vault a parking meter, and it strikes me as hilarious, the absurdity of this flailing and dexterous figure, like the untouchable fiddler in a mob scene as the city burns in outline. I’m jostled forward again, or move forward in some way, and my hands graze the tree-man’s hips like we’re tender dancing partners and I’m thinking that I seem so relatively short and he is so awkwardly tall and unclothed and half-hard that it would be just so convenient to suck him off right here, that I’m close enough to detect the sweating fruit smell from the deep crevices of his body, even over everything else, and this, too, is hilarious, so I am probably cackling when he punches me in the face, probably cackling.
I don’t go all the way down—doubled over, I raise my arms like a luxurious bird and taste copper while my feet do an unintended grape-vine to keep upright. When I finally drag myself back to eye-level, absurdly weighty, I see the moshing crowd again through some kind of tint, from the perspective of the stage, and every single one of them looks like Casey, dead Casey, or Candace (dead Candace, for all I know), or predatory August with his scribbled-on arms, or you, the version of you I mistakenly followed, like another self I’m drawn back to in counter-point to current you, somewhere beyond. I grab the guy in the leather done up with band patches that stop strictly at 1988, who I notice is wearing giant safety pins as earrings, symbols that no longer mean anything, I seize his studded lapels and scream “WHAT YEAR IS IT?” into his face. I throw him away, I spit blood on the tree-man’s flawless burnished chest, and I fall away. I have no idea what the band is doing.
*
When the show ends, the violence spills out of the building and into the street. On my way to the basement steps, behind it, I pick up an olive-colored backpack from where it rests against the wall, one that feels hefty but doesn’t clank with bottleweight when I lift it, like it could still have something useful inside. In the anonymity and rush of the aftermath, I see no consequences in taking it.