Justin Tussing - Vexation Lullaby

Respectfully,

Doctor Axe

(My heart almost stops. Is Dr. Silver writing to me? If he read my old newsgroup posts, he must have been a teenager.)

Dear Doctor Axe,

I know better than to look a gift horse in the mouth, but maybe you would be willing to share some more. If you’ve been following me as long as you say, then you know I never reveal my sources.

In the spirit of reciprocity, I have a question for you: What does Silver mean to you?

In good faith,

Arthur

In the morning, Peter put on shorts and a T-shirt and followed the signs to the hotel’s gym. If he didn’t burn some energy, he was fairly certain he’d drive himself crazy.

Near the back of the room, Cross and Cyril jogged side by side on a bank of treadmills. The bodyguard wasn’t wearing shoes — he ran in a pair of black, ankle-length socks. The treadmill was cranked up at an angle and he ran fast. Cross had on basketball sneakers and he stayed up on his toes, like a boxer. Next to the men, two women who might have been Peter’s age, in yoga pants and light cotton jackets, took long strides, as though walking on railroad ties — they worked on their butts while, three feet away, one of the most iconic entertainers on the planet shuffled in oversized sneakers.

Peter claimed a recumbent bicycle in the corner. He flipped through a celebrity magazine while a jagged red LED landscape scrolled across the bicycle’s display.

“You know these machines are terrible for your knees.” Cyril stood next to Peter, his crotch a foot from the doctor’s head. “It’s not a natural motion for a biped.”

Leaning away from the bodyguard, Peter shook the magazine. “Just doing a little multitasking.”

“You read anything in there about a doctor winding up on a rock tour?”

Maybe it was only the power of suggestion, but Peter’s left knee started to ache. “I don’t think so.”

“Wait. They’re already talking about you on the fan sites.” Cyril didn’t appear to be joking.

People were talking about him. But he was boring; he knew that about himself. “What about me?”

Cyril looked toward Cross — the singer had moved to the exercise mats, where he did push-ups off his knees. “Word is the Big Man’s got a doctor with him, and they’re extrapolating from there.”

Even when people were talking about him, Cross was their true subject. “What should I do?”

Cyril wiped his brow with the ham he called his forearm. “Don’t go thinking you can steer the conversation. On those boards, we’re the tail and they’re the dog.”

Peter decided there was a lot he needed to learn about this organism everyone called the Tour.

“You know we’re meeting in the lobby at one?”

“At one?” How could he fill five empty hours?

Cyril reached down and poked the button that increased the bicycle’s resistance. “One-thirty at the latest, doc.” Peter watched Cross follow the bodyguard out of the gym.

The women on the treadmill looked like they could keep it up all day.

Peter’s phone beeped. Judith had sent him an email with the subject line: “Rock Star.”

Do you remember the letters I wrote while you were at science camp? The camp director had told all the parents that writing would help ward off homesickness, but when I picked you up you said the letters made things worse. You told me, “Most moms sent care packages, but you only sent words.” It seems we really are doomed to repeat history.

You asked me what I thought about you going on tour with him. In part, it feels like you’ve discovered a time machine. I imagine you turning a corner and running into the person I was at twenty — I suppose that the fear of running into one’s mother must be among the chief deterrents to time travel. The bottom line: you have as good a chance of running into the person I used to be as you do of running into the person Cross was back then. He wasn’t a musician when I knew him — he’d been a musician, but it was as if he and music had had a falling-out.

I was as shocked as anyone when he released that album. Suddenly he was nowhere and everywhere.

He gave us the money to open Natural Wonders. It was sort of like a settlement. I planned to repay him, but when I wrote him to set up a payment schedule one of his attorneys told me the money should go into an account for your education. I probably should have told you that before, but he’s always had too much money to care about it and I never cared to have any.

I may have given you the impression that I don’t like Cross’s music. That’s not the case. The first time I heard “Pleiades for Breakfast,” it spoke to me on a molecular level — I wanted to pretend he’d written it for me (he didn’t!). He always seemed more interested in you.

All of Peter’s friends had the same complaint: their mothers had no idea how to write a proper hundred-word email. A bunch of inveterate letter writers, their mothers composed essays. Reading her message on his phone was like viewing a mural through a loupe.

Judith’s mention of a time machine seemed prophetic: her email had taken him back. When had he last thought about science camp? He remembered shaving a plantar wart off a kid’s heel with a plastic-handled scalpel; he’d performed the surgery for the same reason the patient agreed to it — to attract the attention of a home-schooled Amazonian named Lauren Platz, the only girl at the camp.

This email had shocked him. Why would she have let Cross loan her money? Loans produced debt. Peter’s sense of Judith’s untarnished self-sufficiency took a hit. Plus, he felt retroactively wounded — he’d always imagined that he and Judith were equal partners in the store.

When Cross first called, Peter had wondered if he wasn’t trying to collect a debt. Was it possible that his instinct had been correct?

I refuse to let myself be dragged down by a few anonymous voices on the Internet, and certainly not while driving to a great American city to see a great American performer, Live and In Person.

Is Pittsburgh 28a great American city? I suppose some people still think of it as Steel Town, USA, but it’s remade itself into a great technological city, a great medical research city, as well as a cultural hub. Is anything more American than our right to reinvent ourselves? A collection of colonies became an independent country. We ended slavery and gave women the vote. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Norma Jeane Mortenson, and Caryn Elaine Johnson became Mark Twain, Marilyn Monroe, and Whoopi Goldberg. The folk-song/protest singer became the rock rebel, became the born-again prophet, became the rockabilly/two-step/western/world musician. A by-the-books small-business owner, husband, and father walked away from everything in order to chronicle something larger than his lawn. Look what happens to those people and places that don’t reinvent themselves: Detroit. Buffalo Springfield. People like my ex-wife.

IT SHOULD HAVE occurred to me that Gabby lived near Bowling Green. It’s strange that I didn’t notice while I was planning my itinerary. For the most part, I’m very thorough, but our minds will play tricks on us. At this point, nothing I can say will convince Gabby that my oversight wasn’t intentional.

Once, when Gabby was sixteen, she surprised me by showing up at the MCI Center (now the Verizon Center) in Washington, D.C. I was watching the show when she clapped her hands over my eyes and said, “Guess who?” Finally, I thought, we could see a concert together.

It wasn’t until after the show that she told me Patricia didn’t know where she was; she’d run away from home!

We went back to my hotel, and while I got the sofa bed set up she called her mother. Then Gabby handed the phone to me so Patricia could explain how our daughter had put herself at risk because of me, and that if I hadn’t made a habit of running away from my problems, then Gabby. . But I didn’t feel that bad because I had my daughter with me and, on top of that, Cross had given a really solid show.