Luminous Beings
Sanya Dimova
Sanya Dimova is a Bulgarian witch roaming the City of Lights with her husband and two canine familiars. She draws as much inspiration from her Slavic roots as from her frequent transatlantic broom flights to the only part of the U.S. that still carries her ancestors' magic - New England. When not busy casting curses on French frogs, you can find her fighting the forces of evil (poorly documented legacy code) at her muggle tech job. Her work is published or forthcoming in Crepuscular Magazine, and you can keep up with her shenanigans on Twitter at @sanyadimova.
“It’s not dead.” Kneeling on the linoleum floor, Jamie scoops the remains of my Walkman while I sob into his Monster Jam bed sheets. He smashed the thing to pieces, along with the Psychedelic Jungle album that was inside. We’d barely started the A-side when he began punching it into the wall. Jamie hates punk rock.
It was a brand new Walkman too, with auto-reverse and all. My mom’s boyfriends always buy me the nicest things when they want to get rid of me. Every-Other-Wednesday-Jeff from AA got me a skateboard. An actual skateboard! Mom would’ve never let me have one in a million years if it wasn’t for the two awful weeks I agreed to spend in YMCA summer camp.
Gary-Works-in-Finance-Can-You-Believe-It didn’t strike me as the fun type, but he bought me a Game & Watch (he probably thought it was a fancy calculator). The best part was that my mom didn’t even send me away that time. The console’s disposable battery stuck around for longer than Gary.
And now there’s Michael. Did-I-Tell-Ya-How-I-Once-Met-Debbie-Harry-Backstage-Michael, to be precise. He gave me the cassette tape along with the Walkman. “The Cramps are pretty niche, but they’ve been all over the NYC club scene,” he said with an air of authority. “Show ‘em to your friends and I guarantee ya, before long you’ll be the coolest kid in all of Hartford.”
Here I am two weeks later, trapped in the midsummer heat of a lonely trailer far off the interstate. Showing The Cramps to my “friend”. The coolest kid in all of Hartford, my ass. Jamie and I would normally barely acknowledge each other in the halls of junior high, but a sort of understanding grew between us over the last semester. On Wednesday afternoons, I’d call his landline and dictate the answers to our math homework. In return, every day after lunch, he’d let me pretend to smoke a single cigarette with him under the bleachers. Being seen hanging out with a rough kid from the wrong side of the tracks is like insect repellent for bullies.
That’s how my mom knew what number to reach Jamie’s old man at. Without asking me, she arranged for me to stay with them for the rest of the summer, while she and Michael travel across the country with a bunch of Deadheads.
The image of my mother bent over a crack pipe in the back of a hippie van, combined with that of the sad pile of plastic shards and bunched up tape in Jamie’s hands, make me start bawling again.
“Shhhh, don’t cry,” Jamie whisper-shouts. His voice sounds urgent, pleading. He glances at the open hinged window, then draws closer to the foot of the bed. “Look, Sam, I swear I can fix it, okay? You’ll see, it’ll be better than before. But you have to trust me and be quiet.”
I wipe my eyes in my sleeve and look up at Jamie. His pupils widen at the sound of a wet cough coming from the front porch. It dawns on me that his fretting has little to do with some newfound remorse, and everything to do with fear.
When I first got here, Jamie had a split lip. He told me that his old man had thrown a “temper tantrum” the night before, when Jamie had reminded him they’d agreed to host me. He was in the crappy in-between state where he was neither sober enough to work nor bad enough to disappear into a weeks-long bender, Jamie said.
I can’t help but revel at the slight shift in the power dynamic. Jamie could break my things and make me cry, but I could cry loud enough for his piece of shit father to hear about it. I’m not going to, but I could.
“Come on, put your shoes on.” Jamie taps his foot in the narrow doorway of his sleeping compartment. Covered from floor to ceiling in posters of monster trucks, lightsabers, and Red Sox players, it almost looks like a real bedroom. Jamie has placed the Walkman’s carcass inside a shoebox and wrapped the headphones around it in a bow, like a last minute Christmas present. I have no idea how this is supposed to help fix it, but I’m too tired to argue.
We tiptoe across the main area as Jamie’s father snores in the folding chair outside the front door. We exit out back, and I follow Jamie through the chain link gate to the junkyard. His dad guards it at night, or at least he’s supposed to. Whenever he goes dark, Jamie takes over, by which he means that he forges his old man’s signature on the presence sheets so the checks keep coming in. It’s a bullshit job anyway, Jamie says: nobody ever dumps anything worth stealing here, and there are other junkyards near the highway that are way more fun to break into and
vandalize.
We walk down the main driveway past variously sized piles of rust and rubble, until we almost reach the outer fence. Jamie stops and crouches in one place on the side of the path, where the dirt looks softer.
“Here,” he says, drawing an X in the ground with his finger. “Here’s where we’ll bury it.”
“Bury... my Walkman? Is this your idea of an apology?”
The constellation of freckles on Jamie’s right cheek changes orbit as he flashes a smug grin. “You’ll see. Now hold the box while I go get the shovel.”
I’ve never met anyone else with such a massive concentration of freckles only on one side of their face. Jamie says it’s because the sun would always fall on his right when he was little and used to ride shotgun in his dad’s pickup truck. They’d drive up the I-84, sometimes across state, where his dad did carpentry work for some Masshole general contractor. That was before Jamie’s mom left and his dad hit the drink. At first I thought Jamie was making it up, but then I noticed his right eyebrow and the right side of his hair are also blonder than the rest, so maybe it was the sun. Luckily his eyes are both the same shade of swampy green, or else he’d look like a trucker-tanned cyborg.
Jamie comes back with the shovel and begins digging while humming “On the Road Again”. I feel like I should say something, but he looks so determined that I just stand aside and leave him to it, lest he should start punching things again.
“Should be deep enough,” he says, wiping sweat off his brow. Deep enough for what, I don’t know, but what I do know is that it’s getting dark and this is starting to creep me out. I lower the shoebox into the pet-sized grave, then help Jamie fill it in by sweeping some of the dirt with my feet.
As we walk back to the trailer in silence, I begin to wonder if he isn’t planning on replacing the broken Walkman with something else overnight, and then having me discover it in the morning. Something crappier, no doubt, but perhaps something just weird and cool enough to make me forgive him. “Sorry I broke your state-of-the-art Japanese portable cassette player. Here’s the radio my old man used in ‘Nam to hunt down commies through the jungle.” Sounds like the kind of thing Jamie would do.
We tiptoe back inside the trailer. Jamie spends a good ten minutes closing the zipper of the front porch’s mosquito net as quietly as humanly possible. He spends another fifteen soundlessly gathering all the empty beer bottles laying around his dad’s feet with the grace and focus of a tightrope acrobat, or perhaps a professional Twister player. “He gets mad if he knocks them over when he wakes up,” Jamie explains later, as we slurp instant noodles on his bedroom floor. He has an electric kettle and some provisions hidden under the bed so he doesn’t have to pass by the kitchen too often. He even has techniques and rules for how to brush your teeth silently or when not to flush the toilet.
Jamie turns the lights off, and I stare at his glowy star ceiling. Lying upside down with my feet curled next to Jamie’s pillow, I only now notice that the stars are arranged in the shape of words.
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.
I wonder if it’s a quote from the Bible or Star Wars.
“Hey, Jamie?” I whisper.
“It’s Yoda,” he says. “He said it in The Empire Strikes Back.”
“Ah... cool. Um, why’d you break my Walkman?”
Jamie raps his fingers on the headboard, exhaling loudly. “Told you I can’t stand your stupid punk music.”
“But... why?”
The mattress shifts under the weight of another deep sigh. “Cause it’s for whiny city losers. If it’s all such doom and gloom in the downtown tenements, then why don’t these punks drag their powdered asses five miles up the highway and see how real American folks live?”
He’s repeating almost word for word something I heard his father say the other day.
“I could probably get another Walkman, you know?” I say, unsure why.
“Good for you.”
“No, I mean... I could’ve left you this one and said I lost it or something. Get Michael to buy me a new one if he’s still around when I’m back. You could’ve listened to country or whatever you like, you didn’t have to break it.”
“Whatever, Sam.” Jamie turns on his side, facing the wall. “Go to sleep.”
I wake up from the deafening roar of music blasting outside. Bright neon lights dance along the walls. They’re coming from the back-facing window.
That’s where the music’s coming from too.
You~better~duck~
The junkyard!
~When~I~show~up~
My heart drops to my stomach as I recognize the song.
~The~goo~goo~muck.
Jamie is awake next to me. He practically pushes me off the bed. “Woah,” he says, dragging me towards the window, “I didn’t think it’d be back so soon.”
He pulls up the blinds. We both stare at the impossible creature on the other side of the junkyard fence.
A mud-covered jukebox wobbles back and forth, its dome opening and closing in rhythm with the music. The fluorescent beams along its front panel flash in a frenzy of lime green and glittery pink. The whole thing looks like some twisted disco version of a Dalek from Doctor Who.
“How do you do this? I stare Jamie up and down, trying to gauge if he could be hiding a remote in the sleeves of his pajamas. Do jukeboxes even have remotes?
“It’s not me.” Jamie’s voice carries the mix of terror and awe of a boy who’s gotten exactly what he wanted. “It’s the graveyard. I mean... the junkyard.”
Before I can press him for answers, another roar rises above Poison Ivy’s guitar solo.
This time, it’s coming from inside the trailer.
“Damned trespassers! I’m coming out with a gun, you little shits, so you better get the hell out!”
It’s Jamie’s dad.
Even in the dark, I can see the color draining from Jamie’s face. “Stay here,” he says, opening the bedroom door.
Through the window, I see his dad appear in front of the fence, holding a shotgun. Across the hall, Jamie disappears through the back door.
I take a deep breath and follow him.
I’m about to exit onto the back porch when a succession of loud pops splits the sky.
Gunshots.
I cover my ears and duck behind the plastic door that’s left ajar.
“Dad, no! Stop!” Jamie screams.
I dare a glance through the tiny crack between the door and the wall where it hangs on its hinges. I catch a glimpse of the jukebox across the fence. Sparks fly and glass shatters as Jamie’s dad rains bullets on it. It makes a dying sound, like that of a scratched record, then crumbles sideways.
“Why?” Back on the porch gone dark, Jamie’s silhouette shoves his father’s. “I fixed it, why’d you have to break it again?”
“You did this?” Now his father’s silhouette is shoving him. They’re heading back inside.
“That how you treat a veteran, boy? My own son!”
“Sam, go back to my room,” Jamie mouths through gritted teeth as the two of them walk past me, Jamie’s dad forcefully dragging him by the collar.
My heart burns with guilt and shame, but the fear in my stomach prevails. I slam the bedroom door shut behind me, accidentally ripping the Han Solo poster that’s taped to it. I throw myself onto the bed, burying my head under the bunched up covers. I wait and pretend it’s not just the comforter, but the weight of the entire monster truck arsenal depicted on it that’s stacked on top of me, crushing my skull until I can no longer hear the cacophony of objects falling off shelves, of leather falling on bare skin, of Jamie’s yelps falling on deaf ears.
I don’t know if it’s been a minute or an hour when the door creaks open and I feel Jamie’s weight sink into the mattress. He jumps over me, reclaiming his spot on the side of the wall with the skill and precision of someone who knows what sleeping position works best after a beating.
He cries skillfully too, the slight shaking of the mattress his only giveaway.
“Hey, Sam?” he whispers after a while.
“Yeah?”
“You saw it, right? Your Walkman, it... came back. It wasn’t dead anymore.”
Once again I stare into Yoda’s words on the ceiling. Crossing the galaxies between us, I sit up and orient myself to lie beside Jamie. In the faint light of the bedside window, I locate the spot on his cheek where his freckles abound, and cover it with my thumb. “I saw it,” I say, smiling. “Dead, it was not.”