Page 2 of Fade into You
“I am not a fucking child! You hate me and that’s why. Controlling asshole!!”
Mack is manic and likely on her way to a spiral. I spot her bike in the front yard and pick it up off its side, then wheel it to the backyard and hide it under a tarp near the abandoned sandbox of our youth. (We only used it two weeks before worms took over.) Maybe it’ll slow her down, maybe it’ll be pointless, but if she stays home, she stays safer.
I turn back to the house, where I can hear from a distance the slow rumble of my father’s voice, just starting to pitch up into a storm as he goes from trying to frustrated. I take a deep breath and head in.
Mom is already gone, likely hidden in the bedroom, throwing up her hands and crying that Mack wasjust too much, orhurting her feelings.Mack hurts all our feelings, but how much can you blame a fucked-up brain for its actions? Mom can blame it 100 percent, she’s good at that.
In the kitchen, Mack and Dad are squared off; she’s got wild, red-rimmed eyes and her hair is frizzed out and definitely unwashed. Glaring red lipstick like a bloody smile.
“I can’t fucking believe you!” she shrieks, waving her arms. Dad’s stopped telling her to watch her language. I’m just happy they’re a clear six feet apart so she’s not yet throwing punches.
“Heyyyyy,” I say, trying to be cool, even though this is starting to be a weekly thing. Inside I feel like the sandbox worms are going to town on all my soft bits. “What’s up, guys?”
“He won’t fucking give me freedom!”
I look to Dad and he shakes his head. “She wants the keys to the Daewoo.”
“Need a ride, Mack? My car’s still warm, I can get you where you want to go.”
I don’t like the thought of her being out while manic, but I also know she’s probably going to swing at Dad in a few and that makes for a really shitty evening for everyone. She seems to consider it for a second of quiet and then her face turns—this expression she gets, all determined and crazed, and I hate that look because it isn’t my big sister right now, but that brain being cruel and nasty as she opens her blood-colored mouth.
“If I wanted a fucking chauffeur, I would have called a cab.I’m a goddamn adult, you little fetus, get the hell out of this. It’s between me and Dad.”
The teensy bit of hope Dad had in my offer evaporates and he puts on his stone face, and I am no longer useful in any way, so I take Mack’s advice and go to my room.
I think Mom and Dad gave me my own room so that Mack’s problems wouldn’t spread to me like a catching disease. I wish they’d realize you can’t catch crazy, but I’m not telling them shit because when Dad spent three weeks this summer turning our attic into a short-ceilinged but livable bedroom, I finally got to be a whole floor away from Mack and her constant garbage.
Up two flights of stairs, the entire kitchen and living room between the hall to her room and my little cove, the noise still travels, but not as bad as it used to. Blast some Liz Phair and you can even pretend she’s somewhere else, or I’m somewhere else—or we are on different worlds in different atmospheres and whatever mood she’s in for once doesn’t matter.
I crack my window and grab a joint I rolled earlier in the day. Using my weed chimney, an ingenious build of a paper towel tube filled with dryer sheets my best friend Dade and I came up with, I take a deep drag, cough down the smoke, then shoot it through the tube to the outside. Downy fresh. Liz is working her way through her half monotones ofExile in Guyvilleand the steady buzz of her music complements the warm gentleness of my encroaching high. Dad still thinks I’m burning incense… thank god for stinky incense. He’s probably aware, I mean he lived through Woodstock… I think in this house if you get any peace from anything, no one tries to fuck with it.
Clinical name for what Mack has is bipolar, but sometimes I think it should be called fucking asshole disease. Mack will emerge from her room after an entire week of simmering in her own BO and sadness, suddenly jazzed and planning to take on the world. She and Dad usually get into it and then Mack will hit Dad until he gets outta the way, and then she runs off for three to twelve days until we get a call from a hospital or the cops or she shows back up skinnier and depressed again. Long as she isn’t trying to kill herself, Mom’s all celebration and denial, and Dad just wants her to behave like less of a wild animal… but I guess when your brain is fucked, you can’t help being a giant bitch who ruins almost every night whether we’re creeping past a closed door or wondering if we should be calling hospitals.
The song ends and I can hear the higher pitch of Mack screaming about the car keys and how Dad isn’t giving them to her, which is a good idea. Then I hear Dad using her full name, Mackenzie Annette Papadopoulos, which is a bad idea, and thank fucking god Liz is back with “Mesmerizing” and giving me a whole different world of frustration in her lyrics.
I look back at the big bare walls, coated in an off-yellow paint that Dad thought was “cheerful.” I haven’t dealt with this “cheer” yet, and it’s long coming. This week was just taking my shit up here and getting some crap bookcases from the Goodwill to hold all my stuff. It was weird, since the room is big even if it’s short, and even with my stuff spread out, I didn’t have enough to fill it. The freedom of it was overwhelming, and some cavewoman part of me missed the smaller space of my old room. With a few curses, and a lot of safety pins and duct tape, I get the curtainshung. The pilled sheets dangle from the rods, creating a sloppy separation in the room: a boundary. Once she sees them, my mom will ask if I’d like her to bring out her Singer to do a quick stitch job. She doesn’t get it, the safety pins are me, the chaos of my CD collection is me, the fact that I didn’t pick actual curtains is abso-fucking-lutely me.
But she doesn’t likeme. She likes her children sewn up into neat little designs—and we like to rip ourselves apart. I think maybe the mess and chaos and me-ness makes her worry I’m gonna get a year further down the line and lose my shit just like Mack. She thinks the big basket of worry she carries around for my delinquent sibling will suddenly be doubled, and god forbid we both lose it at once. She thinks if my seams are machine-sewn and perfectly straight, maybe I can avoid the hell my bipolar sister lives in.
I don’t ever tell her how much I worry about going crazy too.
Right now I feel inside me this giant black hole that just keeps sucking, taking in all the light and warmth and leaving me with this huge empty feeling. I wasn’t really hurt by Mack calling me a fetus—it’s an old insult and has lost its bite. But something else, some atmospheric element, has me feeling dark and sapped and I can see for a minute how Mack can lie down and just not get back up. I can understand her… and that’s what scares me, that I have a year, maybe, before whatever is in her happens to me, too.
I lean back and thump down on my bed. Dad got me a new one since he said an adult room needed an adult bed, so I got upgraded to a full that’s so tight it bounces me like a trampoline if I hit it too hard. I’d asked for black bedsheets, which was amistake ’cause I can see every last hair Falstaff left on my bed after he snuck up here earlier and rolled around.
So far, the wall has a big poster of the Green DayDookiealbum cover, a full-length mirror, and aDark Side of the Moonblack-light poster I’d spotted in my dad’s old stuff. I had let go of my childish crap that had just mainly been hanging around in my old room ’cause I was too lazy to take it down. The Care Bears andCaptain Planetposters were dutifully recycled (gonna bring pollution down to zero), and I finally convinced Mom to Goodwill the princess canopy bed she’d forced on me at a young age—no one wanted that abomination hanging over them.
Looking around, I still need more to fill the gaps… something that will take up a wall, a space. Liz finishes her song and I cut it off, not quite ready for the next track, “Fuck and Run.” Downstairs a door slams… hard.
I lean forward to sift through some of the jewel cases on my bed. It’s important to get the right music to fit the right mood at all times. No matter where you are, if you’re having a good time or a bad time, if some garbage discordant and inappropriate music turns on, then it’s gonna make everything worse. It breaks the fourth wall of life, making you stop and thinkwhat the hell, when really you should be thinking about what’s going on…. I feel this is incredibly important, and no one has ever convinced me otherwise. In my life goals, up toward the top, is that I’d like to soundtrack my daily existence by the time I get my shit together. Let’s say thirty. I think in thirteen years the technology might catch up.
But for now, I get to sift through stacks of hard-earned orat times hard-shoplifted CDs. All my summer job money went toward the discs. Tower Records at the mall never paid employees enough for them to give a shit when I stuffed a couple of discs in my jacket each time I visited; in fact, I think the dude with the bowl cut saw me pinch the tool that pops them out of the big plastic anti-theft cases.
Mack must have found her bicycle or called one of her “less desirable” friends, ’cause the house is quiet and no one is yelling and Mom and Dad are likely making a pot of tea and pulling out the crossword puzzle to do together. I’m here on my brick of a bed, and I just need the right song to inspire my wall. We’re all ignoring whatever Mack is going to do.
In my lap is a selection of alternative, punk, metal, and even some old fifties stuff that jams, but none of it is right. None of it is the perfect soundtrack. Maybe a bit from the Tool album, a hint of the oldies, a couple of chords from Whitesnake, and the tinny sound of Kurt Cobain (RIP). But alone, none of them fit. None of them can fill this huge, sunny, overwhelming room.
For once, silence itself spurs an idea. I’m not sure if it’s ever really been this quiet for me. Picking up the jewel cases, I start opening them, pulling out the liner notes one by one, laying them flat, the cover art and lyrics telling a half story of what those shining discs contain. Grabbing the heavy green stapler I may have freed from my algebra teacher last year, I hold up the Whitesnake liner notes andcha-chunk, cha-chunk, it’s on the wall. Overlapping a corner, I get Tool up there, then Nirvana, STP, Alanis, Liz, every single one of those uniform square cases bringing forth a tiny slim poster of words and art as unique as the music inside.Coming together to create a mural of words and artists and art that is still framed by that yellowed silence and emptiness. Which now seems less cheerful.
