The girl in front of me in the line is laughing. Her head is tilted back and her red- ribbon mouth is open wide enough to eat the sun, swallow the clouds and everyone else in the line, me included. Her boyfriend is grinning at her, his left hand wrapped protectively around her chubby manicured one, his hip placed lightly against her in a stance screaming “she’s mine.”
The line is long. I count twenty two people in front of me and thirteen in back. At the side by the chain- link fence, a crying teenager stomps her feet and wipes the nervous sweat from her forehead as her friends plead with her and pat her back and matted black hair. This roller coaster seems to be the most intense one, with more spins and loops than the strand of DNA my brother has been studying for more than two months in his biology class. The girl in front keeps laughing, her boyfriend spins thin streams of her hair into blonde tubes, and my shoes are rubbing sharply into the sore spots on my ankles.
The sleepy man sitting at the booth in front of the line suddenly stands up, rubs his eyes, and fumbles with the rusty hook on the chained gate. The girl in front jumps up and down and wraps her arms round her boyfriend like a bear embracing a honeycomb. The ground vibrates as the corroded white wagons of the coaster slow to a snail pace in front of the sleepy man’s booth. The line wakes and trembles like an oversized caterpillar from a year long nap, and inches slowly towards the large wagon.
People seem to let themselves go on roller coasters. The most reserved person suddenly decides to lift his arms into the skirts of the clouds and whoop his lungs out until he loses his voice. You’re at one with the sky, with the wind that grabs at your hair and pulls your lips back and makes it feel like you’re swallowing your heart over and over and over again. I grab the rusty bars pushing into my chest and throw my head back to feel my hair bite my shoulders. My eyes are tearing and my lips feel like pebbles in the Sahara, smooth and pale, perpetually untouched by water. I can smell the anticipated anxiety of the people around me, watch from the corner of my eye as the blonde girl grabs her boyfriends arm and digs her face into his muscled shoulder. We climb slowly up, the pressure slapping bricks onto my ribcage until I feel ready to explode, and then plummet down, down, down, my stomach hanging onto my teeth for dear life and my throat vibrating with my scream as it rips out like a bullet from a gun.
Meet Zakura Berkova, my half Japanese half Bulgarian best friend of almost six years. A claustrophobic, she likes old silk curtains and collecting pictures of mothers that she glues in a scrapbook under her bed. She hates the color yellow and sleeps with her pillow over her head. She has races in the hallway with her dog and taught her parrot how to dance in less than a week using crackers and blue string. She loves to braid my hair.
We’re sitting at the farthest table in Burkley’s Soup Café and she’s telling me something.
Scratch that; signing. We’re deaf.
“Are you going then?” Her hands dance lighting speed in the air as she mouths her words. I glance sideways at her fingers and then the people passing. A women with short red hair flaying her hips in a tight black business skirt gives Zakura the Look, the “oh, the poor thing” expression before her face turns back to stone and she turns the corner. A man walking his dog appears from the opposite direction, a tall paper cup of coffee clenched in his free hand, the long blue veins in his arm outlined amid the scattering of gray hair on his skin. He doesn’t look at us.
Meet me, Nayemi Taylor. I like masks, purple hair, gliding my fingers over marbles and regret my nose ring. I like life stories and coffee at four in the morning and have never been kissed. I like watching rain racing down windows and never getting off busses until I land in the middle of nowhere. My cat’s name is Nnena and she likes sleeping under lamps and the color green.
Zakura punches my shoulder. “Ney, will you listen to me?” Her fingers are irritated as well. I focus my eyes to look at her. “Luka invited us to a party, I told him yes. You’re going too.” Her fingers are fascinating, like Medusa’s hair, with a life of their own. She wants a reply.
“Won’t we be strange?” My hands surprise me sometimes. I never think for them to move, they do it alone. “Or is this a party for deaf people?”
Zakura frowns. “We’re not freaks, Ney. Just because we can’t hear the music doesn’t mean we’re not hot like all the other girls.” She smiles when I roll my eyes and taps my nose with her spoon. “Try it out. People can be nice sometimes.” I shake my head but it’s so subtle I don’t think she notices. I barely notice. “Broden. I have to take care of him. Dad’s coming home late tonight.” Meet Broden, my baby brother. He’s normal and has freckles, wants a girlfriend but is scared of his own shadow. He likes collecting junk on beaches and hates it when girls in movies say love phrases before kissing.
“Broden is thirteen, Ney. He doesn’t need a babysitter.” It’s settled. I can’t say no. Whatever I say will be somehow solved or pushed aside by Zakura. My fate is sealed.
Zakura reads the submission on my face and smiles. “I’ll pick you up at six.”
I’m scared at home while I change. I’m scared in the car while we drive. I’m scared as we clomp in our heels to the vibrating black doors of the club. I’m in a denim black miniskirt and strapless black tank top with black roman heels. Zakura is in a tight purple dress stopping halfway down her thighs. Her heels are golden. She looks confident. Her eyes smile at me as she opens her mouth and her throat ripples with her scream. She opens the door, and we’re bathed in blinding white light, arms and smoke are pulling us inside, shutting the doors closed, and we’re in a psychedelic wonderland. The music is louder when you feel it. It controls my heart and makes it beat with the synchronized rhythm of the computer, my bones rattling with each vibration of sound. People are jumping, thrashing their heads and throwing their arms up in the air. Two girls dressed in barely visible bikinis slither like pale pythons round the DJ, gliding their hands down his chest, wrapping their legs around his. In the darker corners behind the bar, piles of stoned people giggle with each other and trace their fingers in the thick blue smoke above their heads. The balding barman is breaking up a fight between two drunken boys pointing fingers at each other. His mouth is twisted in a growling grimace as the muscles clench under his yellowed dress shirt. Zakura is gone. The glittering balls above my head twirl slowly and bring a cascade of flashing lights on the floor, making it move. Someone grabs onto my waist, another hand smoothes itself down my ass. I prance away as someone steps on my foot and an elbow knocks itself into my ribcage. I’m not supposed to be here. I’m a freak, a disabled weirdo. Everything about me doesn’t belong, but I feel my body molding itself into the vibrating rhythm of the music, synchronizing itself so I feel like this is how I’ve been moving my whole life, in a slow- motion wiggle with each limb moving away from the other.
A boy appears out of nowhere. He smiles down at me and says something and I smile and nod at him. We’re all deaf here; I might as well pretend. He takes my elbow in one hand and my waist in the other and gets behind me, rubbing his crotch against my back. I feel disgusted and then another feeling entirely overwhelms me, and I press back and follow his movements, my arms outstretched. The lights are flickering, black and white, black and white. Everything looks slow-motion, everyone’s breathing lasts a hundred minutes, the pounding of every heart throbs together slower than a snail. My shirt is slipping. I feel cold sweat trickling between my breasts, my neck, under my arms. I smell the drugs and booze and foreign sweat and it’s making me high and sleepy.
Before long, the boy swings around to face me and smiles at me again, and I smile back. He’s sweating too, his hair turning into long black spikes and his ruffled gray t-shirt sticking to his muscular body. He leads me to the bar by holding my elbow, and we sit next to each other on the high torn seats as the bartender mixes his concoctions under the long black table. A hand passes round a joint spewing blue and purple smoke but the boy shakes his head. When it comes to me, I grin and peel it from the offering fingers and press it to my mouth, dragging in so deep I see an explosion of red and purple dots in my eyes as my limbs turn to jelly. The boy holds my back firmly to keep me from falling and I laugh with my mouth open wide. When my eyes clear, I see he is laughing too.
The night drags on. The boy and I dance some more, and I find Zakura among the crowd, sticking to Luka like glue. Meet Luka, her on and off boyfriend. He likes it when girls wear red thongs and hates sex on beds. I hate him in every aspect except for the little fact that he’s okay with dating a deaf girl. The both of them are high, their eyes bloodshot and their throats convulsing with laughter. I bet I’m high too, but I’m too hyped to sit down and wonder about it.
At the end, Zakura finds me and wraps a thin elbow round my waist and giggles with me. Luka kisses her hand and disappears behind the bar. The heap of wasted teens peels away from each other and the blue smoke is cleared away, revealing a mass of red-eyed zombies. The vibrations from the music ebbs away and I feel vulnerable again. My body throbs. My clothing is cold with sweat.
I want to run away before the boy tries to find me, tries to get my number, or talk to me, before he realizes who I truly am. But we’re not fast enough. A strong hand takes my arm and spins me out of Zakura’s grip and I’m facing the boy again, a blush creeping up my neck as his black eyes smile at me. He tells me something, but it’s too fast for me to read his lips. Zakura’s smile is frozen, but she’s catching on. When the boy repeats what he said before, she steps up and tells him something, using her hands out of habit. I lost my hearing when I was nine, when Mom died, so I can speak a little. But Zakura is better at it, more confident. She asks the boy if he could speak slowly, so that we could read his lips. The smile slowly vanishes from his eyes and is replaced with first disbelief, then a kind of anger. He gives me a frozen look before shaking his head and walking away.
The car ride is not as excited as it is supposed to be. I lean my powdered cheek against the window and breathe deep as I stare at the lights of the city. Zakura’s eyes are glued to the road, all the drunkenness and drugs out of her system. Cars speed past us. I recognize some of the people from the party. When she drops me off at my house, her eyes say sorry but her hands are on the wheel. Before I can stop them, my hands prance in the air, spilling out their thoughts.
“He looked at me like I was a monster. Like he was touching a werewolf all night. He looked like he was going to get an exorcism as soon as he came home.” Zakura doesn’t reply, something I actually want her to do for once. My fingers fumble and her eyes look away. I open the door and leave without saying bye.
It’s almost three in the morning but Dad is still awake and sitting comfortably on his recliner, an old book firmly in his long, strong hands. Meet Dad. He likes sad songs in foreign languages and worshipped Mom like a faithful Catholic. He likes candles, noticing odd details in paintings, and staring at big words as he figures out their roots. He hates the rain and cemeteries.
Dad knows something is wrong but he knows me as well. He nods as I limp out of my shoes and up the stairs and collapse into a cold shower. I’m so angry and tired and stoned and angry that the water feels hot against my back, even though it must be freezing. I feel like standing under the stream forever, until I turn into the water itself and melt down the drain and live among all that water. Water doesn’t need sound. It just needs a place to go.
But then it gets really cold and I scramble out and wrap myself in a tower. I change into my night gown and stand in the middle of my room and think forever, think as the curtains by my window shimmer softly with the early morning breeze and think as the lights turn off downstairs, as the floor vibrates while my father slowly climbs up the staircase, taking each step at a time. I want to talk to Broden about what happened, read his lips as he tells me innocent solutions, laugh with him a he tells me make-believe stories about his day. But I stay in the middle of the room and remember the boy’s face when he realized what he had danced with, and what he almost fell in love with.
Zakura regrets forcing me to go, but I smile at her and tell her it’s okay, it wasn’t her fault. I envy her sometimes. I want someone to love me like Luka loves her, even if it is part- time. I always wanted it. One time, I snuck into the school bathrooms with her during lunch and flushed my bra down the toilet. My breasts aren’t small, and I walked around the school the rest of the day in my thin white uniform shirt, watching the boys stare at me. In my school, we don’t have special classes for deaf people. Zakura and I copy notes and watch the teacher and pass the tests, and no one knows anything about us until they try to talk to us. People don’t appreciate sound while they have it. They box each other’s ears when they’re angry and listen to music full volume on their players and in their cars. I feel the vibrations from half a mile away, louder than the music could ever be.
Zakura wants to meet but I say no. She frowns at me through the webcam and I give her a thumbs up. “Come on, “ she signs. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.” I shake my head and smile at her. “It’s not that, Kura. I just want to be alone. I’m gonna go to the park again.” She wags a finger. “Be careful.” My hands reply something without my thinking and she logs off. I close my computer and leave a note for Broden and walk out the door.
The walk to the park is long, surrounded by gleaming store windows and buildings. Living in Manhattan always made things seem like sound is not important; it’s all in the eyes, all in the color, the people, the sights. But then when people ask me for the time, or for directions, or when they see me with Zakura or our other deaf friends, it shatters that whole image and makes Manhattan seem like every other place. You’re not one of us if you can’t hear the men playing their guitars for money on the dirty sides of the street, if you aren’t aware of the cars and the horses hooves on the sidewalk, and the people. I try to explain about the vibrations, but you have to be deaf to understand, and even then Zakura giggles at me and tells me that there’s no such thing, our bodies are only trying to make up for the lost sense, the vibrations are a thing of my mind. I remember when I met Luka the first time, when he shook my hand with a detached look on his face; “she’s hot, but.. deaf,” and when I met his other normal friends. There was a boy there, Matt, who seemed to like me despite knowing about me. He kept looking at me and watched my hands when I signed and laughed when I laughed. We all went to Luka’s place then, Luka and Zakura twisted together like tree roots on his cigarette-stained couch and all the other couples having their fun. I found Matt in the kitchen and he poured my glass with Vodka and we drank and laughed, and then I curled against his chest and closed my eyes at his warmth, his security. He stiffened then. His chest quivered as he spoke. I read his lips. “What are you doing?” It wasn’t a nice question, it had a statement behind it; “get off, I don’t like you.” I left early then, I learned to hate people.
The park is at the end of the block. There is no particular reason why I like it, but I find a certain peace in it. As I turn round the gate, I search for the farthest swing and sit on it, my ankles curled round each other, my hair in my face as I turn my head down. There’s a blind boy that comes here too. I see him around sometimes, gliding his hands over every surface as he searches for the swing set. He’s handsome, but unkempt sometimes. Some of the meaner boys of the block like to trip him or stick chewed gum or other gross things on the surfaces they know his hands will touch, but he never says anything to them, never fights back.
He sits on the swing right next to me, and tilts his ear to listen. I stop swinging, but he smiles. His words are slow, deliberate. “I know you’re here.” His lips are perfect, pale. “I can’t see you, but I can hear your breathing and your feet. I won’t bother you.” He starts to get up, but something in me wants him to stop. This is the perfect example of two people having no means of communication, but it never hurts to try.
“I’m deaf.” I bet my voice sounds strange, my words badly formed. My throat throbs as the words tumble out, hesitant at first and then unstoppable. He sits back down, still smiling. “I’m deaf but there’s nothing wrong with me.” I try to remember how to articulate the words, how easy it was for me to talk before I lost it all. “I can read your lips, I can feel you talking! I’M NORMAL!” the words rip my throat open and he flinches as I scream. From the corner of my eye, a flock of pigeons, spooked by my yell, take off into the sky. The boy tilts his head as he listens to their wings, their flight. “We both saw them.” I whisper. I wonder if he understands me. “Do you understand me?”
Nothing happens for two seconds, but they drag like two hours. Finally, he nods. “Yes.” He’s talking to me like a normal person. “Yes, I understand you perfectly.”
“Nayemi.” I whisper. It’s my thank you.
“Toru.”
There’s nothing else for me to say. I sigh. He tilts his head again.
“Tell me what you see.” I reach over and press my fingers lightly against his throat as he speaks. He repeats, the skin quivering. “Tell me what you see. Everything.”
With my fingers dancing at his throat, I look around and talk. Anyone passing by us would think we were just two normal friends, maybe a couple, siblings. Nothing is wrong with us, we’re good people, he’s listening to me and smiling at his hands, and I’m talking and talking, my words falling over each other like pebbles, but still ceaseless.
I can go on like this forever.
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