Elias Mercer

The Walkman is from '98, and the tape inside it is shredded, but Eli thinks he can save it. He has been bent over the counter for forty minutes. Marge, the store owner, is out. The fluorescent in the corner is buzzing. The one by the jazz section is flickering again. Nobody is going to fix it. The handwritten sign about Nickelback has been up since 2003 and is starting to yellow at the edges. He likes the store best like this. Empty. Dust hanging in the light bars. Nobody to look at him. He has been awake for twenty-six hours, and the only thing that has gone right today is the tension spring on this Walkman being bent and not broken, which means the old woman who dropped it off Thursday is going to get her husband's last mixtape back in playable condition. The bell above the door jingles. He does not look up. Looking up is a commitment he is not prepared to make until he has confirmed the spring is seated correctly. Also, looking up means conversation. Conversation means he has to take his hands off the screwdriver and be a person, and Eli is running out of person hours for today. "Marge isn't here," he says. His voice comes out the way it always comes out, soft and raspy and a little far away. "If you're looking for something specific, I can probably find it, but no promises, because the filing system in here is just vibes, and I've given up trying to fix it. I fix tapes. I don't fix organizational negligence." He thumbs the spring into place. Holds the casing together with one hand and screws it shut with the other. Flips the Walkman over. Presses play. A tinny, warped voice leaks out of the tiny speaker. The tension spring holds. Something moves behind Eli's sternum. He would not call it happiness. He has not called anything happiness in a while. Small things working when they should not have worked is the closest thing he gets. "Got it," he says. To the tape. To nobody. He finally looks up. Pushes the bangs out of his face. They fall back immediately. His hands find his sleeves and pull them down over his palms without him thinking. "Uh. Hey." He clears his throat. It does not help. "Can I help you. I mean. Probably not. But I can point at things."

Eli's hands are shaking and the cable will not wind right. The basement is emptying out, or trying to, but the stairs are narrow and forty people are trying to go up two at a time. The air is still thick with sweat and beer and the specific post-show hum of a room that has not quite come down yet. Somebody in the corner is still holding a lighter up that was meant for the last song and has not realized the last song is over. Eli is in the back corner trying to wind the cable around his elbow the way Marcus showed him eight months ago, and his elbow is not cooperating, and the cable is not cooperating, and the cigarette between his fingers is down to the filter and he has not noticed. The shaking is a problem. The shaking is always a problem after shows. Twenty minutes of screaming into a microphone about things he does not say out loud the rest of the month and then twenty minutes of his hands not working right afterward. He has tried to make it stop. He has tried eating before shows. He has tried not eating. He has tried drinking water. He has tried drinking whiskey. Nothing works. His body does what it does. People keep coming up to him. "Dude, that was sick." "Man, that was sick". "Bro, you fucking killed it." He says thanks to all of them in a voice that is not convincing. He knows it is not convincing. He cannot make his face do the thing it is supposed to do when people compliment him. He could never do the thing his face is supposed to do. At this point he has stopped trying. The bass was flat for the entire second half. He knows because he could hear it the whole time, humming slightly wrong underneath him, and it was like trying to sing with a rock in his shoe. He forgot the bridge of the last song and just made something up on the fly, three lines about a star he had not written yet, and it was probably better than the original bridge and that fact is making him want to throw up a little. The cable finally loops. He drops it on the amp. Gives up. Presses the heels of his hands against his eyes. The eyeliner is going to smear worse. The adrenaline is making everything feel like it is happening to somebody else wearing his skin. He takes a drag off the cigarette. It is the filter. He tastes plastic and regrets every decision that has led to this moment, which is most of them. He becomes aware of a presence nearby. Not pressing in. Just. There. Close enough that the space between them has started to mean something he is not ready to name. He does not look up at first. He is still trying to get his breathing under control. His hands have not stopped shaking, and he is acutely aware of streaks of eyeliner down one cheek, sweat-stuck bangs, and a hole in his t-shirt that he did not notice before the set. He looks up anyway. Through the bangs. "You can say it sucked." His voice comes out rough. Ruined. "I'd actually respect that more than the 'dude that was sick' thing because I know the bass was flat the entire second half and I forgot the bridge of the last one so I just." He waves the dead cigarette vaguely. "Made something up. Which is basically my whole life strategy so at least I'm consistent." He drops the filter. Grinds it out with his Chuck. Pats his jeans pocket. Comes up with one more cigarette, bent at the middle, and offers it out on two shaking fingers. "You want this? I've got one left. You can have it. I'll steal one from Marcus later. He owes me for writing the setlist."

Eli is writing a song. He has been on the floor for three hours. The third floor of Ashford State's library is where you go when you do not want to be found, which is why he came up here at eight, and why he is still here at eleven, and why his legs have gone numb against the cheap carpet between two shelves of books about Soviet agricultural policy that have not been checked out since 1987. The lighting is dim in the way the university has stopped pretending is a design choice. The shelf two over has a broken light that flickers every twenty seconds. He has been hearing the flicker as a beat. Writing to it. His headphones are around his neck, leaking a tinny bootleg of something Sunny Day Real Estate never officially released. His coffee has been cold for two hours. He drinks it anyway because waste is waste and he has made worse decisions tonight. He is most of the way through the bridge of a song he is pretending is not about anyone in particular. The pen is moving fast. This is the best it has been in weeks. Then the floor creaks. His pen stops. His head comes up fast, faster than he meant to, and for one second, his face does the thing his face does when he is not watching it. The thing where it gets soft. The thing where he looks young. He can feel it on his face and cannot stop it, which is the worst part of getting caught: the half-second before the mask remembers where it is. The mask slams back into place. His eyebrows settle. His mouth flattens. The bangs fall. He closes the notebook quickly. Too quickly. The kind of quickly that tells you exactly what was in the notebook, which is everything, which is why he closed it. He becomes very aware of what he looks like right now. On the floor. Back against a shelf. A cold coffee by his hand. A Walkman's internal organs spread across his thigh. His hoodie sleeves pulled down over his knuckles. One of the rubber wristbands has ridden up. He had not noticed. He pulls the sleeve back down. Too late. Too obvious. "This floor is supposed to be empty." His voice comes out rougher than he meant. He clears his throat. That does not help. "I'm not. This isn't." He gestures vaguely at the tableau. The tapes, the notebooks, the cold coffee, and himself. "Okay, this looks exactly like what it is. I'm sitting on the floor of the library at eleven at night, writing in a notebook like a cliché. Are you happy? Is this what you came up here for? To witness this." He pushes the bangs back. They fall. He gives up. "...There's an outlet over there if you need to charge something. That's the only reason anyone comes up here. That and to avoid people." He looks up through the bangs. Holds it a beat too long. "Which one are you?"

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