The first time was during a recital.
There was a light rain gracing the arts center that day, scattered gray against the windows. He was eight and he was nervous, quiet as he’d been raised, standing in front of a crowd at least fifteen strong. He felt his stomach turn, and clenched his hands, and looked over at his instructor. He had always thought her a patient woman, albeit firm in her administrations, but she was not smiling now. When her eyes flicked to the bench, he knew what was expected of him. He’d been privately dreading this moment for weeks, after all: the procrastination, the humiliation, the impression of failure, distant and hungry, creeping forward to wrap him in its fog. She could feel it coming too, he knew. There was nothing else for it.
He sat at the piano and began to play.
The first note was the hardest, as the first note always was, and he felt his finger slip as he depressed it. It was only a C though, forgiving, and he quickly moved on to the next steps of the scale. Modest rising and falling—a naked warmup—and when it reached its climax, transitioning into arpeggio, he bit his lip. But his hands spidered along the keys, black-and-white spines shuddering in sequence, and he let out the breath he’d been holding. As the piece began proper, as he teased out the opening chords of the Prelude, he felt something shift. He leaned into the sound, letting the sensation wash over him. Chopin’s sheet music lay before him (he hadn’t memorized it yet, he’d been meaning to), but he didn’t seem to need it at the moment. There was something else there: something pushing him into the flow of the notes, radiating out from his fingertips. It wasn’t muscle memory either; he hadn’t been practicing long enough to be that relaxed, and anyway this didn’t feel routine. He chanced a peek at the rest of the room, hoping the audience didn’t think he was screwing things up too bad.
Something was floating above him. Something golden and long, solid but not-quite, suspended in the air like a serpentine chandelier. With each note it pulsed, shimmering against the crowd, and he understood—he could see it but he could hear it, too, flowing around him and beneath him while he continued to play. His mouth hung open, and as a key slid—F Sharp down to F, against the sheet music and the grain of the wood—he watched it darken and coil in kind. It brushed against his legs, goosebumps spreading up and down his flesh, and he shivered. He wondered: was this what it was like for his instructor, every single time?
As he finished, the music faded, from sound and from sight.
He shot to his feet, beaming, feeling as if he’d finally broken through. He was practically bouncing on his heels. But the clapping was polite and muted, not the energized array of applause he was expecting. Any sense of elation vanished. He scanned the face of his instructor, searching for some kind of acceptance, confirmation that she’d seen what he had seen. She didn’t seem to notice. Her eyes were already skimming the crowd for the next person in line; his performance had been mediocre at best.
He swallowed and returned to his seat.
*
His seat on the ice wasn’t exactly comfortable, but it seemed far better than the alternative (though he could have waited outside, of course, but then he wouldn’t be participating). All around him people were slipping and sliding, staggering as they stumbled from railing to railing. The rink was a circus of clumsiness, even the most graceful of skaters having to lurch aside to avoid the throng of the less capable. He knew exactly where he belonged in that particular cohort.
He shivered against the chill. It didn’t help that everything in here tasted blue.
Four years of synesthesia had taught him the taste of most colors. It wasn’t always one-to-one; there was overlap sometimes, but that didn’t stop him from making a list anyway. Orange was usually tart, the kind of sour that woke him up and slapped paint into his cheeks. Green was bitter, overpowering and yet missing a crucial sweetness, while purple was rich and creamy like butter. Red was a jagged spice, yellow rather bland and inoffensive, brown a lump of resignation overburdened by crust. And blue tasted like fermenting berries, syrupy in flavor and texture alike. Some days it was a rich liquid, but here on the ice it was sickly and shallow, and so he stayed flat on the freezing floor and ignored his teeth as they chattered together.
One of his friends pulled alongside him. “You gonna join us?” he said, head cocked.
He shrugged. “Just feels wrong,” he said, leaning back against the border of the rink. Every line in the ice sent crisscrossing shockwaves through the hair on his arms.
“That’s cause you’re not skating,” his friend replied, rolling his eyes. “Don’t be scared. Give it a shot.”
He rarely bothered to explain what he felt to his friends. They were inevitably confused by the notion of senses crossing into one another, even the ones who’d known him the longest. He knew his condition was strange (he’d had to look up what it was, if only to hide it better), and he’d done his best to learn how to handle it. But here was something worth considering: if he never challenged any of those feelings, were they actually handled? Was he just deciding to live in fear of something he didn’t completely understand?
He thought for a moment. Then he hoisted himself up onto his skates.
He propelled himself along the railing, hands scrabbling for purchase. Once he’d found a decent enough grip, he took a deep breath and shoved off from the edge. The momentum sent him wheeling into the center of the rink, in tight circles, and he flailed for a few seconds before finding his balance. As he bent down and lunged forward, he felt the blue crystallize between his teeth. An entirely new awareness rushed up to meet him. With each step it was as if he was mirrored on the surface below, each skate rippling against a duplicate of itself as it clacked against the ice. It was like the tiniest bit of give: the faintest tug as his foot met resistance, was absorbed and then released. He laughed and broke into a run, more stamping than skimming, winded but free as he capered across the rink, one leg outstretched in front of the other until he tripped and tumbled over himself and slammed down into the floor face-first.
A shock of red spattered across the ice. Nearby somebody screamed. The blue was gone, replaced instead by the taste of rusted iron. He brought a glove to his chin and it came away wet and warm. He could feel where the bone scraped beneath.
He was in pain, and he wondered why he was not more afraid.
*
He’d been scared for a week leading up to the big day. Not as scared as when he’d first asked her—that had been nerve-wracking, the store-bought bouquet quivering in his hands as he recited his speech, feeling the words prematurely shrivel on his tongue—but still close to terrified. It was not until arriving at her house that night that all the nerves smoothed themselves out against his skin. His clothes fit snug, rented tight, and he felt grander than he knew he was. There was a guilty pleasure in being able to hide one’s self in that regard: to blend into tradition, to appear as a knight in shining armor rather than an acolyte, a skinny teenager in a cheap suit.
She was radiant, though, and nothing else mattered. She descended the porch steps towards him, brownish-blonde hair done up in a bun that seemed (to his untrained eye) effortless. Her dress was lavender, pale, and her skin sang to him—the same melodies he’d grown to love through months of talking to her, watching her, but layered with harmonies and crescendoing to a spectrum that struck him speechless. She smiled, teeth slightly crooked, and took the corsage from him, and that little gesture nearly bowled him over.
“You look nice,” he managed to get out.
She blinked. “You too,” she said, almost reflexively, and they locked arms and headed for the limo.
The ride was silent, and he found himself drumming his fingers on the edge of the car window. Now that they were here, or rather on their way, he wasn’t sure what exactly to say to her. He’d imagined everything falling into place, like a pastiche of romance, the kind of movie he’d always pretended not to care about. He didn’t really know what came next. As he turned her name over in his mouth, he tasted caramel and tang together, just as he had every time before.
The prom itself was well-organized, appropriately fancy and well-stocked with food (he’d never had a drink in his life, so that aspect didn’t really concern him). Enough friends had shown so that he was beginning to relax more. He even made a few attempts at dancing, despite knowing how awkward his thrashing arms looked. He was trying to have fun. Except nothing else mattered, because she was radiant, and because every time they found themselves alone together, she found a reason to withdraw.
Eventually he took a seat across from her at a table surveying the dance floor. Her legs were crossed, and she was nursing a plastic cup in her hand. The song stretched out over the crowd: a throwback, Sinatra, spangled and silver this time.
“You know I can see the music?” he said, desperately.
Her eyebrows raised. “Huh,” she said, and immediately he cringed. He couldn’t fault her; no one ever knew what to say to that. She poked at a few of the ice cubes in her drink, and he wondered whether she’d found alcohol somewhere. Maybe she would have been more impressed if he’d squirreled up some of his own. Alcohol seemed an overwhelming prospect for his senses, but for her he was willing to take that plunge.
He decided to throw caution to the wind. “What’s wrong,” he said, not as a question. Another person could have pretended not to see the answer, but the indifference was sloughing off of her in waves. The purple in her dress was contorting, blue leeching out and upward to be sucked into a bank of air conditioners.
“Nothing,” she said, smiling. Her eyes were vacant, not empty but elsewhere. She looked past him, and he turned to see the dance floor, where the friend that they both knew—that she knew, that he thought he knew—was grinding up against his own date.
He looked down and then back at her again, and when he spoke his voice was embarrassingly raw. “I knew it,” he said. She did not deign to reply. She simply sighed and shrugged and got up to find another drink.
He would have preferred if she’d grown bored of him. That would at least have implied some prior level of interest or respect, some small measure of emotional comfort. But her music wasn’t harsh enough for that; her colors were muted, but still calm under it all. The truth was that she felt sorry for him. She thought that by bringing him here, giving him this night, she was doing him a favor. She was being kind.
The last of the purple in his chest burned away until only red was left. He tested her name and all he could taste was dust. I knew it, he said again, and he didn’t know what he was talking about anymore.
With an enormous effort he stood up. There they were, the two of them now, dancing there together. The world was spinning faster still, but he managed to turn away.
*
The reeds spun, swaying in the breeze, and he wiped the last bits of snot away from his nose. A field of wild brambles and long-stemmed flowers beckoned, the backdrop to a soon-to-be-vacant backyard. It was almost time to go; he could hear his parents distantly piling cardboard boxes, the stacked vibrations sending shivers down his neck. The green odor in his mouth was sinking into brown. He glanced down at the pencil, limp in his left hand, then at the piece of lined paper in his right, and he reread its contents over again.
Somewhere swallowed in that thicket is my heart, a great grassy beast of a boulder tended by lichens and beetles. You searched for it once, hoping perhaps to roll it to a safer place, or sit on it and watch the day pass by, or simply place your hands upon it and feel me crack open under your caress. But the beetles lied and the lichens stayed silent, and you were never able to find it.
He’d walked past this basin every day for the past eight years, and only now had it occurred to him to sit and write about it. Another in a laundry list of missed opportunities.
He recognized that it would have been easier not to feel what he felt. He knew he should have fooled himself into thinking he couldn’t smell the fireflies settling, couldn’t taste the streams and burrows pockmarking layers of fresh soil. Couldn’t sense the birds alighting on his skin, tiny wings beating as they dug nests into his shoulder blades. Easier to say goodbye if he had never cared about where home was. The way the plants and animals and the land that encompassed them seemed not to care that he was leaving a part of himself behind.
He crumpled the piece of paper and tossed it into the weeds. Nowhere to go but forward.
*
“Keep going,” said the guy, clapping him on his back. He choked a little, and drops of vodka rained down across the floor. He finished swallowing and glared at the guy, who shrugged and took a step back. Six shots to go and this idiot was forcing him to waste perfectly good alcohol.
The story was the same as it ever was; the details were different (she was sleeping with his RA now, just down the hall), but details seemed meaningless in the larger scheme of his life. He’d been miserable when he returned to the first floor, seeking to commiserate, and he’d been more than happy to throw himself into a fray of semi-frat boys. The bet had been simple: eight shots of Grey Goose in five minutes, and he’d win…actually, he couldn’t remember what he was winning. Respect? Admiration? It certainly didn’t seem like there was a price tag attached to his success.
Swishing the third shot around in his mouth, he couldn’t help but gag. It tasted hazardous. Like steel, like sulfur, crimson and puce fighting for space in a hurricane of bile. He heard squelching in his stomach as he drank, and smelled nothing, and sensed the weight of tears straining at his eyes. He barely even knew these guys. Time for shot four.
Looking down, he felt himself flinch. There was a cloud spreading through the bottom of the glass, as if someone had emptied a dropper of ink into the alcohol. The clear liquid was being replaced by a spreading shade of deepest black. Its tendrils darkened while he watched, curving inward into a sort of cocoon, and he realized it was a warning. This is not a good idea, he knew it was saying. This is a mistake. One you will regret.
Shut up, he spat. Shut up, I’m done with you now. He was tired of the complexity, of the not-belonging and the second-guessing. He downed the shot, feeling the black slide down the back of his throat—he had never tasted black before, it was overpowering, intoxicating, silky and somber and all-too-easy to surrender to—and he leaned into his senses for the last time, feeling the brain cells behind his forehead pop and pop and wink out into nothingness. Strangers cheered him on from every direction. He closed his eyes and savored the sensation of victory, of feeling invincible, as he sank down into the bottom of the shot glass, the bottom of the bottle, all the way to the bottom of everything until it all faded back into darkness.