Justin Tussing - Vexation Lullaby

“Maybe.”

He kicks me a little harder. “You look like you’re falling asleep.”

I force myself to sit up straight. “I was relaxing.”

He sips from his glass, but it’s empty. “Let’s play a prank.”

“On Cory?”

He shakes his head and the cigar’s ember leaves a zigzag trail in the air. “You’re not allowed to say her name again. Get your laptop.”

•••

I believe in proper manners. Manners represent a contract between the individual and society. They shouldn’t be ignored for the sake of convenience. So I set my cigar on the edge of the table, walk into the apartment, turn the lights on, stare at the bed, then grab my computer and go back outside.

“We’re going to put together an ultimate setlist.”

“Okay.” Anyone who has ever loved a band has played this game. The obvious solution is to list your fifteen favorite songs in ascending order, so that each number is slightly better than the one preceding it.

“‘Queen of Kansas’ has to be on it, right?” Gene said.

While poking fun at Cross’s voice is something of a competitive sport (Willie Nelson said he had a voice like “a yard-sale caulk gun”), the truth is that Cross is a fine singer but he hardly ever sings (on the albums or on stage). For whatever reason, “Queen of Kansas” is one of the songs he trusts enough to let his real voice emerge, deep and vulnerable and pure.

“‘Grease Fire’?”

“You’re two for two,” I said.

“Crank your little computer up and write them down.”

“You want to see my dream set?”

I see Gene’s white teeth. “You son of a bitch, of course you’ve already got one.”

When I first joined the tour, I would compose a setlist before each show. Like catching a fly with chopsticks, I figured if I kept trying, then one day I’d get it right. I’d carry my setlist inside — throughout the show, I’d worry the paper with my thumb, as though it were a lottery ticket. Once, in East Lansing, Michigan, my list paced Cross for the first five songs, until he played “Whistle Hound” instead of “Toast and Sorrow.”

“Are you going to let me see it or not?” Gene asks.

I tell him how, while stopped in gridlock outside Little Rock, a list came to me that I recognized immediately as perfect.

“Enough stalling. Give it to the old Gene Machine.”

It takes a second for me to locate the file. I double-click and it pops open on the screen.

Gene lifts the computer out of my hands. He squints at the list. Looks down at the keyboard to figure out how to scroll. “This is your list?”

“That’s it.”

He reaches over and lifts my cigar off the table and places it beside his own in his mouth. He draws on both and they pulse like brake lights.

Finally, he says, “I guess it’s okay. There’s nothing recent on here. You have to have ‘The Lake Song,’ or ‘Fifth of April.’”

I explain that the dream setlist is fifteen years old.

“So it’s time for a new one.”

I take the laptop back from him and look at it again. It still seems perfect to me.

Gene flips one of the cigars over the railing; it falls in a long arc, down to his yard. “He has to close with ‘Purple River Serenade.’”

When Cross released Midnight at the Bazaar there were eleven cuts on the album, but the liner notes on the first printing listed a twelfth track, titled “Purple River Serenade.” Some of Cross’s fans claim that song — the theoretical song, since Cross has never played anything called “Purple River Serenade”—represents some Platonic ideal of music. They regard “P.R.S.” as a masterpiece.

“It’s time for me to hit the hay.”

“We’re not done yet,” Gene says. He splashes two more fingers of scotch into his glass.

When he reaches the decanter toward me, I cover the glass with my free hand, but he pours the booze so it runs through my fingers.

“Post the list,” Gene says. “Say he played a private show. It’ll drive people nuts.”

“I don’t do that sort of thing. JCC is the site of record.”

“That’s what makes it’s a prank !” He says this loud enough that I’m afraid his neighbors will hear.

I open my laptop and press a few keys.

“You do it?”

I shake my head.

Gene snatches the computer from me. “Where is it?”

“Sorry.”

He grabs the collar of my coat. I feel his hand at my neck. “Where’d you put it, Arthur?”

“I erased it.”

Now he’s shaking his head. “Why would you erase it?”

“I’m going to go to sleep now.” I hold my hand out toward him.

“You’re a sociopath, Arthur, seriously.”

Carefully, I put both hands on the laptop. He releases it to me.

“Do you remember what was on there?”

“You were probably right. It was dated.”

Gene is raking the top of his head with his fingers, scratching furrows into his scalp. “You’re a fucking loon.”

I thank him for dinner.

“I wanted to hit you in the worst way.”

“Because I wouldn’t go along with some asinine prank?”

Gene grabs the decanter and lurches toward the stairs.

I see him start to fall forward, but he seizes the railing with both hands, catching himself. There’s a high and final noise as the vessel detonates on the garage’s cement apron.

“You okay?”

He looks over his shoulder at me. “I didn’t mean I wanted to hit you tonight. I wanted to hit you when we first met.”

How can anyone understand another person? I go into the apartment, locking the door behind me. I fill a glass with water that smells like rubber cement, then I lay on top of the bed, feeling horrible, and knowing I’ll feel much worse.

Peter had almost reached home when he received a text from Martin Vinoray inviting him to get a burger near the hospital.

The economic shift that eliminated so many of Rochester’s working-class jobs had failed to shutter the working-class bars. In their humble design, those squat brick structures seemed the perfect counterpoint to the gothic churches that were their ubiquitous neighbors. The bars had names like Oasis, the Wet Lounge, and Mitch’s Tap. Whenever Peter ventured into these places, he felt like he was going undercover.

Inside, half the TVs showed the Yankees battling Tampa Bay, while on the other sets stone-faced college dropouts in sunglasses and Ed Hardy shirts sat around a poker table bluffing away millions. The green of the infield and the green of the felt were indistinguishable.

Martin sat at the end of the bar. He wore blue scrubs. With his index finger he stirred a highball glass while with his other hand he picked over a plate of calamari. The key fob to his ninety-thousand-dollar Mercedes glittered on top of a stack of small bills. The only clue that he played rock and roll: the midnight-black ponytail that nearly reached his belt.

Peter mounted the adjacent stool.

“Hail the conqueror.”

“It was a big misunderstanding, that’s all.”

“Well, that was a neat little trick you pulled this morning. I wish I could have been in the room.”

Peter said, “What trick?”

“First Ogata crawled up the administration’s ass. Then, when they squirmed, Cross’s attorney threw a haymaker—”

“Kopp is my attorney.”

“You don’t have the juice to put that homunculus on a plane.” Vinoray made an upside-down V with his fingers and staked them to the bar, signaling the bartender to deliver two more drinks.

“‘Homunculus’?”

“That’s what Cooper called him. He said sitting across from that midget made his balls retract so far he had to stick a finger in his navel to scratch them.”