one of three men whose beliefs about her logistics she can no longer keep straight. The phone rings on. She has no answering machine. Who would use a device that leaves you responsible for calling someone back? She counts the rings, a kind of meditation. A dozen summons, while she blows two fat puffs of hash cloud into the frozen outdoors. The crazed persistence narrows down the caller, until she knows. It can only be her ex checking in, hoping to mark the occasion with one last loving brawl.
. . .
THE PSYCHO-SOCIO-SEXUAL AWAKENING of little Olivia: so much more education than she signed on for when she came to town. She arrived on campus three years before with a teddy bear, a hair dryer, a hot-air popper, and a high school varsity letter in volleyball. She means to leave next spring with a crater-strewn transcript, two tongue studs, a florid tattoo on her scapula, and a scrapbook of mental travels she could never have imagined.
She’s still a good girl, of sorts. The plan is simply to be a semi-bad girl for a few more months. Then she’ll straighten up, fly right, and head westerly, where all good fuck-ups always head. Once out there—wherever there is—there’ll be plenty of time to figure out how to salvage her bungled degree. She can be ingenious, when required. And she knows how to make herself more than cute, with a little application. Things are happening; the world is cracking open. She might check out Berlin, now that the future is headed that way. Vilnius. Warsaw. Someplace where the rules are being hammered out from scratch.
The music pelts her deltoids and takes her brain out for a lazy adult swim. Spiders set up a colony under her skin. When she places a palm on her thigh, the push of it keeps gliding all the way out to the idea horizon. Soon the beautiful brainstorms come, the ones that link up in front of her eyes and make the whole mess of human history so lovely and self-evident. The universe is big, and she’s allowed to fly around through the nearby galaxies for a while, zapping things for fun, if she doesn’t abuse her powers or hurt anyone. She does so love this ride.
Then the tunes start up, the inner ones. She shuts off the disc player and tries to figure out how to cross the ocean of room. When she stands, her head keeps rising, straight up, into a whole new layer of being. Her laugh propels her, helps her balance, and she sails off across the floorboards, her tits glowing like precious pearls. After a while, she gets to where she was going and holds still for a minute, trying to recall why she needed to get there. Hard to hear anything, over the magic melodies of her own devising.
She sits at her chipboard student desk and fishes out her song notebook. Real musical notation reads to her like so much secret writing, but she has devised her own system for preserving the tunes that come to her while stepping out. Line color, thickness, and location all encode a record of the gift melodies. And the next day, after her buzz wears off, she can look at these scribbles and hear the music all over again. Like copping a contact buzz, for free.
Tonight’s tune pushes her back into the chair as a band of unknown instruments play the song the angels will play for God on the night He decides to bring everybody home. It’s the best inner sound track she has ever managed, perhaps the best thing she’s done with her entire life. She starts crying and wants to call her parents. She wants to go back down into the rooming house and embrace her housemates, this time for real. The music says: You don’t know how brilliantly you shine. It says: Something is waiting for you, the clean, perfect thing you’ve wanted since childhood. Then that hallowed bliss turns ridiculous, and she laughs, a little wildly, at her own wasted soul.
But the tune and the bliss leave her tingling all over. The idea of a hot shower takes on religious urgency. Her rigged-up bathroom—carved out of the same attic as her bedroom—sports a skin of frost on the inside of its north wall. The secret is to run the hot water before disrobing. By the time she gets into the do-it-yourself shower, she’s faint from hunger and the bathroom air is a