Radio Belly Read online

  Not a day goes by when I don’t think I see Paolo. He is huddling with the other refugees outside the Day Labour Office. They are buying rings, making plans, building futures. Other days I feel him. He lands on my lip, a speck, a featherweight. He is a breeze in my hair, a shiver up my back. He is winter light, the month of December cycling around and around, going out and coming back to me, weakening me every time. Or he comes to me in dreams. I dream of a dragonfly and I love that dragonfly desperately, the way you can only love something in a dream. When I wake up, he is there in the room with me. In the middle of the city, in the middle of the night, right smack-dab in the middle of my life, I have dreamt him and now he has appeared as a small green miracle bumping up against my window, wanting out. I admire his sleek pencil body, in this his insect afterlife. Then I open the window, corral him on three sides and guide him toward it. “Fly, fly away, dragonfly, my love,” I call after him. I make going sounds, helicopter sounds—puh-puh-puh-puh—to send him off into the night. I am just that big.

  Radio Belly

  WHO KNOWS WHEN or why a thing begins?

  Maybe your childhood bed sat atop the world’s most precise magnetic beam, a pinprick shooting off from the earth’s core. While you slept, the metals you’d ingested by day tore through your veins to gather in one spot. You dreamt of explosions as blood burst like flares against the dark ocean of your insides.

  Or maybe it started before that. Your dad reminds you that sadness lurks at the cellular level, that your mother was sad and her mother and the mother before that. It was always coming for you, unavoidable as runoff. After your mom passed, he used to take you to healers posing as babysitters, women who waved crystals above your sternum and criticized your aura—it was too thin, it stopped just below the knees like a torn-off skirt.

  It was at one of these women’s houses that a tomcat came banging into the house and dropped a hummingbird at your feet. Playing dead with its wings tucked in tight, it was barely thumb-sized. Before you could bend down, the cat swallowed the bird whole, smooth as a vitamin. Then, at some point on the way down, the bird came back to life. In a moment the cat was skittering, crablike across the floor. How that cat howled. How it tossed itself sideways into the furniture, like a puppet with its insides possessed.

  Or maybe it starts in your fifteenth year, the first time your body stops belonging to you. You’re asleep when your small, souring appendix—Napoleon you will call it—turns septic. You wake to find a deep gouge in your abdomen like you were hooked and dragged around by a drunken pirate.

  You cry into your dad’s flannel armpit.

  “Do you know how lovable you are?” he says and he’s crying too, the big sap.

  “So brave. I’m so proud of my girl.” In the moments when he loves you most he talks this way—about you rather than to you—and you let him. It’s just easier.

  “Someday someone will worship you and scars won’t even matter. Do you know that?” You are still his girl—studious, good, translucent.

  You nod and breathe him in—man sweat, mustard, sawdust—but you don’t believe a word. Somewhere down in the meat of you there is the slightest murmur, like an argument heard through thick walls.

  YOU ARE SIXTEEN by the time the million rebel particles have rearranged themselves into this, the hard, wallet-sized shape pushing up beneath Napoleon’s scar. You wake to the distinct crackle of transmission and some other language—Russian? Portuguese?—singing up your spine. Grikzee-grikzee-grak it goes—guttural but with pouncing Rs. Greek maybe?

  You aren’t worried. Stranger things have happened. That burrowing wart on your heel. Once, an allergy that made your lips swell up like water wings. Another time, a flea trampolining on your eardrum. There’ve been pinworms, nosebleeds, whole extra teeth nobody warned you about. And your dad’s friend with the tumour that was actually her twin. The body as bully, as boss—you get that already.

  So that morning you don’t tell. You skip breakfast and catch the early bus to school. Right away you feel different. For the first time ever, you take one of the sideways seats at the back of the bus, where all the cool, moody kids sit. The spillover from their headphones sounds like dropped cutlery. Then in biology you ask the loud, hot boy to be your partner. And later, in a third-period group presentation, you blurt something about Stalin’s moustache to cover up your zizzing abdomen and make the whole class laugh.

  At the end of the day, you stand before the mirror in the pale green light of the third-floor washroom and make up your mind. This noise is the best thing that’s ever happened to you. You feel seen for the first time.

  You stop off at the mall on the way home from school and blow all your babysitting money. You buy clicky shoes—the kind with the hard plastic soles. You buy fat wooden bracelets that clunk up and down your wrists. You buy huge, gong-shaped earrings and another pair, shaped like tiny mallets. You will wear these things all at once and walk—click, clunk, gong—down the school halls.

  Lying in bed at night you decide the women in your family weren’t sad but misunderstood. Like you, their insides sizzled. Those stories about your grandma who, after a bottle of red wine, would stand up in the middle of a dinner party and sing “Stormy Weather” or “God Bless the Child” out of time and tune, stomping and swaying before her captive audience—maybe she wasn’t singing so much as trying to cover up the noise. It could be her voice humming up through your bones now. You imagine all the women of your family crowded into a tiny room of the afterworld—pale ghosts huddled around a transmitter, sending dispatches from beyond.

  A ROUND OF layoffs, and your dad is one of the lucky ones. He is switched to nights—asleep when you wake up and gone by the time you get home from school. You leave big cakey muffins on the counter for him with notes tucked underneath: Passed biology and Miss you too.

  By now it sounds like talk radio—all those bright-big personalities, the noise of too much opinion, only in a language you don’t understand.

  There are times, while conjugating verbs or staring down Xs and Ys in a quiet classroom, when your belly yelps. Times when your abdomen resembles the angry guy on the bus—spitting mad. These outbursts only ever happen at school of course. People swivel, looking for the source. Señorita Estarr’s eyes change shape. Lo siento, those eyes say. You clutch your stomach, screech your desk across the floor, feigning cramps, kidney stones, chemical spills.

  By the time you learn to clench down on all that noise, it’s too late. Your name has been added to a list.

  Now your free periods must be spent with a woman who makes everyone call her Gert. Gert wears socks with skirts and clothes that look like old curtains. Her hair is mostly fuzz, but the picture on her desk indicates she wasn’t always this way. She was someone once.

  Gert has a theory: Everything is something else. Anger is really disappointment and disappointment is really grief and grief is really loneliness. She says feelings are ladders, that each step down brings you closer to the source.

  “So what’s at the bottom?” you ask.

  “Of the ladder?”

  “Yeah.”

  That stops her for a moment. A drifty smile floats across her face. Then she becomes very serious and says, “Peace.”

  YOU DIP INTO your college savings. Your dad keeps the bankcard and PIN in his top drawer under the box of condoms—the one place he thought you’d never look. You buy all kinds of belts—wide leather ones, thick fabric ones that you wrap around your bickering abdomen. The retail girls at the mall see you coming and wink to each other across the bright aisles—here comes one. They know your type.

  You buy a belly-dancing scarf with little brass bells that jangle. Then, because every girl needs a gimmick, you decide to change your name to Belle. You sew little bells to the hems of your pants, onto cuffs and the ends of shoelaces.

  You experience a sudden, violent surge in popularity
. It has nothing to do with you, everything to do with the other stuff. You have friends now—hordes of girls with high-tight ponytails. You all dye your hair the same shade of brown and apply tanning lotion to make your skin match. You all cover over freckles and other distinguishing marks with foundation and head to the mall, faces matte as Band-Aids. You shoplift and take rides from boys who think you’re a band of sisters. You end up lying under playground slides, drinking Southern Comfort straight from the bottle. The boys paw your clothing, press wet-cold noses to your skin. “It’s a pacemaker,” you say. “It’s a tracking device” or “It’s an artificial organ.” But they don’t care. They are discovering you and seeing past you all at once.

  Insatiable, Mr. Holmes writes on the chalkboard: “A kind of hunger that can’t be satisfied.” When he says the word he licks his lips and quivers, not unlike a teenage boy.

  In astronomy you’re learning about black holes, event horizons, points of no return. Every time Mr. Karger says “collapsed star” his gaze lands on your left shoulder.

  Dissection day, and the first time you cut into flesh it squeaks. Your insides squeak back. You pocket the small dry organs and arrange them on the shelf in your room, hoping they might transmit.

  Gert says feelings are onions. Feelings are oranges. Feelings are elevators.

  It grows louder. Even your friends think you’re whispering behind their backs. Even Gert says, “Is that your phone buzzing?”

  It’s necessary to develop a new loud personality, one that everyone will like, but this keeps you so busy planning what to say next, you can’t hear anyone else. “Are you even listening to me?” your friends ask. Gert is on to you too. Sometimes, at random, she’ll say, “Can you repeat back what I just said?” She calls this new trick “Keeping the Mind on a Leash.”

  It’s necessary to develop a new high-pitched laugh. Your laugh goes forth and steals other, smaller laughs. Infectious, adults call it, but you know the truth. Your laugh is not a giver. It takes and takes.

  You buy perfume that smells exactly like chemical pears. It stings your eyes and makes the back of your throat tingle, but it keeps people away. This perfume is your roar.

  Some Sunday afternoons when you’re home together, your dad tiptoes as if there were a giant or a baby sleeping nearby. Or a giant baby. You’ve noticed he doesn’t ask for hugs anymore, that his love has a little bit of fear mixed in.

  Late at night you can hear the women of your family gathered in that small room. They are agitated now, singing on top of one another. They want you to know you’re being stalked by something. It’s black and panting and the worst kind of loyal.

  You learn to sleep with the TV on channel 100—nothing but static turned up all the way.

  IT GETS LOUDER, vibrating from your belly up your throat. It rattles your teeth like teacups on a train.

  You want to go out but the noise won’t let you. Messages zip up the spine to arrive fully formed in the brain and you don’t stand a chance. The command is given—Stop! Sit! Cry!—not in words but in blips and blaps, in some secret mother tongue, and your body obeys every time. You are the cat that swallowed the hummingbird.

  You graduate, just barely, and all your friends head off to college. You can’t face any more quiet classrooms though, so you stay behind. You start serving at the noisiest pub you can find. Friday nights and Football Sundays, the noisier the better.

  Your dad, back on days, has girlfriends now—women who hang around the house smoking cigarettes in his oversized shirts, planning your future. You could work on a cruise ship! they say. You could be a model or a dealer at the casino! and then they discourage you from drinking coffee, soda, booze.

  “What’s that noise?” your dad says when he’s alone with you. He looks under the table, inside the cupboards, behind the fridge. “You hear that? Something grinding?”

  You slink from the room.

  EVERY SOCIAL ENCOUNTER is a threat, something to avoid or smother. You ask short, sharp questions and surround yourself with girls who love to talk about themselves, girls who are always performing for someone on the other side of the room.

  Somehow you meet a boy, Jocko. He’s in a band, drives a van with no seatbelts and isn’t afraid of perfume. He has mastered self-deprecation, a tricky kind of vanity. He has a controlled aloofness, as if he’s always measuring himself out in small doses. Best of all, he’s preoccupied, trapped inside a bubble of his own private noise. He conquers you with compliments and soon you’re moving in together. It might be love.

  WHENEVER YOUR DAD invites you for dinner, he wants to know how you’re doing, whether you’re really happy and, if by chance you’re troubled, what he can do to help. He wants to know when you’ll go back to school, whether you have a “life plan.”

  When you answer, he winces like the bottoms of his feet are sunburnt. His love has a bit of pain mixed in. His hair has a bit of grey. The shadow of another, better you darkens the air. This other you—who he wants you to be—is in school, reads books for fun and rides her bike everywhere. She’s dating someone wholesome, maybe a poet, someone allergic to perfume. On a good day you can feel her—who you could be—screaming inside a glass jar, dangling down the deep well of yourself. If only she could get out.

  Your dad’s judgment is a type of love—you understand that—but still you attack. You blame him for all the years he worked nights, all the ways he wasn’t there, twisting guilt into him like a screw. You wish he understood this is also a type of love, an acknowledgment of history. But you take it too far every time. This is how you begin to hate yourself.

  You finish eating in silence. The distance between you crackles.

  LIVING WITH JOCKO is great right up until he discovers he’s not the centre of your universe. Then it’s like holding your breath. At any moment he might discover what’s really at your centre—a corridor of noise, an industrial static. Fear, your four-legged friend, follows you around the house, licking your hands, the backs of your knees. You want to confess or to escape or to say Let’s try again later, but you’re afraid if you open your mouth now, your teeth will shatter—teacups turned to dust.

  YOU FINALLY DECIDE to see someone, one Dr. Palmer at a clinic near work. He was Irish once and talks like he has a mouth full of marbles.

  He moves the cold metal stethoscope around your belly. His hands are pudgy, “Peach” from the Crayola box and too young for the rest of him. He tilts his head this way, then that, listening.

  “So?” you say.

  “So,” he says, straightening up, “it’s a racket in there.” But he’s not surprised, too old for that.

  He says he’ll put you on a list for a specialist and then asks if you’re old enough to remember Lou Sealball. This Lou person once picked up spy transmissions through her fillings, he says. Driving through the desert one night and next thing she knew, Japanese spies chattering away inside her molars.

  “So this has happened before?” you ask.

  “My dear,” he says, pulling out the necessary forms, “everything has happened before.”

  At home you Google Lou Sealball and get something to do with the Macy’s parade. It will be years before you figure out he meant Lucille Ball.

  YOU SEE ONE very expensive Dr. Sitwell.

  “Do you like yourself much?” he asks.

  “Do I what?” Lick-lick goes Fear—rough-tongued, meat-smelling.

  “That’s what I thought,” he says, folding his hands in his lap. “I sense some unhelpful self-talk. In just six to eight sessions I could raise your self-love from a zero to a seven.”

  He assigns homework—“Sensory Deprivation for Self-Discovery.” You are to spend hours by yourself, transcribing all your inner self-talk and then bring it back to him for evaluation.

  You go home. You sit. You listen and write.

  “Lumping around,” Joc
ko calls it, although he scratches at the door from time to time. He has ditched the band and gone solo. He’s experimenting with sensitivity and a new shaggy hairstyle. He’s made it his mission to cheer you up. His whole new personality depends upon it.

  “Sensory deprivation,” you explain, although you think of it as something else: receiving, deep-sea diving, noise mapping. “It’s a therapy thing. I’m not supposed to be happy.”

  But Jocko is relentless. “We should get new furniture!” he says. There are couch deliveries, new dishes, something called nesting tables, something else called a multichannel amplifier. There is cardboard and newsprint. There is bubble wrap. Then everything is in its place again and there is a deadly quiet, a long life of comfort stretching out ahead.

  “IT’S ALL VAGUELY Japanese sounding,” Dr. Sitwell says, looking over your homework—pages and pages of mangled words. Then he assigns new homework—to attend church services in other languages. It’s the best practice for Compassionate Comprehension he says, which is the first step toward Decoding of the Self.

  You visit Greek Orthodox, Portuguese and Haitian churches in far-flung neighbourhoods. You sneak in late and take a pew near the back. Still, people hear you coming. They glare or move away.

  Then one day you find a Russian Church, the last beautiful thing in a rundown part of town. The inside is basic, with bare concrete showing in places, but that only makes the stained glass more impressive. It’s as if those other churches have the wrong idea, as if, after a point, beauty cancels itself out.

  A woman is kneeling up ahead. Her elbows are hooked on the pew in front of her and she’s making thick, phlegmy promises to God. You open your jacket and, for the first time, give your noise completely to the room, sending it up like prayer.