Scale Read online

  this is a genuine barnacle book

  the original imprint of rare bird books

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 302

  Los Angeles, Calif. 90013

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  Copyright © 2015 by Keith Buckley

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio,

  and electronic. For more information, address:

  A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department

  453 South Spring Street • Suite 302 • Los Angeles, Calif. 90013

  Distributed by Publishers Group West,

  a division of the Perseus Books Group

  ePub ISBN: 978-1-942600-31-2

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Names: Buckley, Keith, author.

  Title: Scale: a novel / by Keith Buckley.

  Description: First trade paperback original edition. | A Barnacle Book. |

  New York ; Los Angeles : Rare Bird Books, 2015.

  Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-940207-99-5

  Subjects: Musicians—Fiction. | Bands (Music)—Fiction. | Rock music—Fiction. | Family—Fiction. | BISAC : FICTION / Literary. |

  Classification: LCC PS3602.U2624 S33 2015 | DDC 813.6—dc23

  Book Design by Robert Schlofferman

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER ONE

  COINCIDENTALLY, I HAPPENED UPON a bead of light. After prematurely returning home from Australia where nothing moved me—where I found no inexplicable splendor on mountain or sand; where words cowered in dry corners rather than being rendered insufficient by rampant awe—there was a droplet of illumination left for me in a brochure outside of our building, blown up against the fence that followed the sidewalk to the door. Though neither my name nor address were on it, it was written in a language that spoke to a very specific and personal looming darkness. That darkness—the one this surreptitious letter acknowledged—had recently discovered me again holed up in my hotel room where I was too weak and too broken in too many places to refuse it entry. To find this piece of paper just days later was a welcomed rope dropped by unfamiliar hands from the top of my empty well, and though typically a staunch empirical skeptic, I could not help but wonder as I scanned the pamphlet that cold morning—What if…?

  It was a simple enough question, but one I had never dared to ask myself, most likely due to the paralyzing uncertainty it promised to bring with it. Yet, standing in my front yard, an antennae snapped in half along with my rib, my jaw still stinging, my tooth cracked, and the ring around my left eye gradually shifting colors from deep purples and reds to light yellows and greens like the feathers of some exotic bird deep into a mating dance, I knew that a drastic and thorough overhaul was absolutely necessary if I hoped to continue forward. The field could not be razed as long as I was still dumbly tending to the infected crops. Asking myself What if…? as I skimmed the testimonials meant first admitting to myself that I was wrong about myself, which was a feeling not unlike coming to consciousness after talking in your sleep to someone who lays next to you and shares not the same dream. Your self-assuredness in issues pertinent to the entire underworld that you bring to the surface with proud Herculean strength eventually dwindles down to a drowsy relationship with a personal sphere of cloudy hints, and as logic arrives and attempts to quiet your enthusiastic candor, the knowingness eventually vanishes completely, your awakening leaving you to feel lonely, distant, confused, and ashamed as the very real place you just traveled from retreats into mist like an indifferent city bus keeping to its own schedule while you run desperately after it until you can run no more and stand defeated in the street.

  To make matters more difficult, how does one convince themself that they are not the things that define them? It’s like using language in order to express the idea that language does not exist or painting a picture of nothingness given only the colors that something-ness has afforded you. We are not wont to accept such an absurdity in the presence of overwhelming evidence to the contrary or to suffer an affront to our identity from a voice infinitely tinier than our elephantine selves, but then again, I repeated to myself, What if…?

  After three decades of life with the support of two happily married parents, the unconditional, though never vocally confessed love of a younger sister, and few friends that remained virtually unchanged since high school—not to mention a system of beliefs heard, understood, entertained, and adopted throughout my formative years which were now reinforced daily both on stage and in interviews in my adulthood—I was not eager to admit that the results I had recently come upon might not support the theory I originally posited. I was too deep undercover to casually reemerge as the man I was before I went down in; had worked far too hard to lock up the lab because of a hypothetical. However, I felt—or rather some small part of me signaled at feeling—that there was a molecular lie being told that had fooled even the greatest chemist.

  I clutched the paper and mindfully went inside having made a decision that felt like the first decision I had ever made. It was one that began as a ripple in a stagnant pond of old energy and registered in something greater than my brain, moving through scaffoldings sturdier than my bones. There was a child in me who needed to walk for no other reason than it was his instinct to finally live upright.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE MOTHER—OR THE QUEEN or whatever name you choose to call her—has many children. All she has ever done is bear children and her desire reaches no further than guiding one to replace its elder in a transcendent state of pure bliss. The mother (or the queen) has sat pinnacled above a whispering black stream since before there was time. As has always been and always will be, when an unwitting piece of misfit glory drifts obliviously below, she ceases to be, she plucks it from the current in her divine hands and shapes it carefully and purposefully under her maternal third eye to resemble something of herself. Then, the mother allows the child one last drink from the water that has carried it so that it in turn may now be the vessel that possesses the spring, and she places it gently down atop the same endless peak she inhabits. When she returns her attention to being, all of her children bask in the radiance that emanates from her. Being and creating are all she can do. The truly wise know nothing but selflessness.

  But one day her children will become aware there are other children, and at that moment they can be a child of the mother’s no longer. They will, if they are true to their new reason
, separate from her and venture bravely down from the crest and outward through the eons to seek what it means to be young no more, carrying with them a new vision of fate and a vague memory of the essence of that first eternal stream. You, however, are a dawdling relic idling grotesquely in the fertile soil of forever readying seeds. You are without vision and oblivious to the new will of the fellow child. You are without language and, therefore, without song. You sleep often but dream irreverently and provide evidence in favor of the claim made by those in motion that we are not all descended from great things. Your very presence is an affront to her mastery, for when she is undone with joy and unified with absolute rapture, your meaninglessness casts an indolent beam of shade. You bring rumors and you challenge her efficiency, and so you must leave. You are owed nothing. Go earn love.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The HYPNOTHERAPISTS OFFICE WAS UNDER a dental practice in a plaza by the college about twenty minutes north of my house. When I arrived, I parked outside of the building and tried to collect any remaining familiar pieces of myself in order to better understand which ones no longer fit and must be either altered or eradicated completely. Like a temperamental schoolboy who was faced with an impending curfew, my identity was in a snarling fit of rage. It was aware that its time was limited and it longed violently to stay in the presence of the things that strengthened it. It brought forth shame by reminding me of how foolish hypnotism seemed, how weak I was giving my time and money to someone I once would have deemed a charlatan, and how stupid I would look to my fans if they found me here or knew of what I was doing. It threatened me with a loss of creativity once all cynicism was vanquished, and promised loneliness at the onset of a venture down roads without companions that did something far more hopeless than dead end: they went on forever. It mocked my complete lack of a real understanding of who I had ever been and my outlandishly unreal hopes of ever changing, and it spit and hissed at the inchoate need for tranquility that I placed in its cage. It would not go humbly into the past, that was for certain. But what too was certain—and what was made even clearer by the elaborate protest that I watched flare up—was that all I had to do, all anything inside of me or out was asking that I do in a language of coincidences and vague signaling, was to close the curtain, shut out my own internal voice, and tend—finally—to the condition of my patient but estranged heart.

  I walked through the front of the complex and found a directory which informed me that the hypnosis clinic was set apart from the other offices in a basement hallway, which didn’t necessarily comfort me but seemed appropriate given its questionable status as an effective psychological procedure in my old eyes. From what little I knew about people who claimed to be hypnotists, I, too, would have opted to put them in a damp basement. As I descended the steps I distinctly heard a woman’s voice and followed it into an office in which three televisions were playing three different testimonial videos. The receptionist looked up at me as I entered in disbelief that someone had entered, I told her that I was there to get an assessment like the one I had read about in the ad.

  “To quit smoking?”

  “No, I’m still gonna do that. I need help…” And in a pause that felt like years, I realized that I had no specific idea of what I was there to receive. I had not actually sounded it out with words that would convey a message to another human being. I began to dream up multiple ways in which I could be saved. I was in the bathroom of a bar at 2:30 in the morning buying drugs with rent money and trying to explain to her that if the house of alcohol was destroyed all the sins it sheltered would be destroyed as well. I was alone in a hotel room off the map masturbating to an old flame’s Facebook profile and asking for help controlling a maniacal longing for physical contact. I was onstage, at a loss for words, the whole world spinning and unclear and I pleaded with her to help me find the confidence required to stop dismantling myself for the sake of applause. I was towering over Frank this time, whisking his brain and skull into a thick broth with a rusty iron rod in front of a throng of cheering onlookers and begging her to convince me that his blood will not bring back the things he stole. But in one last surge of sheer force, honor unleashed a thunderous howl and I cowered. I would be no one without the things that helped me forget me.

  “…Dealing with stress,” I lied. And so began my new trip on the wrong foot with an outdated map.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  IF I HADN’T FAILED to notice that the application I sent to Syracuse University referred to Virginia Tech in the final paragraph—or if I had written an altogether separate essay rather than just lazily interchanging names despite the two presenting the same exact question on the application form— it would make sense to assume that events in my life would be drastically altered, possibly steered down a path of much less internal resistance, one walked with a more natural stride rather than this one that began by jumping nervously between only apparently reliable patches of ground shaped by circumstances of harsh mental weather, emotional eruptions, and corrosion of reason. In another universe maybe that alteration was realized, and instead of stumbling cross-eyed through throwaway classes and developing an addiction to both cigarettes and the warmth of nervous adrenaline that partnered with new girls, I was aimed true north with healthy lungs and the steady, high love of the girl I’d known since I was a kid. In dreams maybe that version of myself comes to me and here, with the things I’ve used to build the world that pertains to me, he is allowed to exist and play for some time while I do nothing more than pay slight attention to the rustling stream that only gets quieter with each step I take toward the horizon until it inevitably vanishes.

  There was no particular reason for me to leave Ithaca, New York other than to hush the goading voices that instruct all teenagers to forsake their home at the first sign that the bread is growing stale, but I refused to believe I was not unique and confessed to Aaron that living there “was like sleeping in a bed with a woman that loved me no longer” as if the quaint municipality offended me personally and Aaron, as he typically did when I told him about the disingenuous things I had written, rolled his eyes. I had little experience with women and I lived with my parents in a suburb and drove a car that my father made the payments on. I could have gone anywhere really, given that the only direction I cared about moving was out, but I chose Virginia Tech based on nothing more than the picture of the campus on the front of the catalogue that sat on a desk in the office of my guidance councilor neither aimed at nor addressed to any one student specifically.

  So, in August of 1997, I stood in front of the East Ambler-Johnson building on the cusp of one of the most important transformative phase changes a person could ever go through, and I couldn’t have been less aware. If I had really stopped to understand the scope of the moment rather than panting like an excited dog at the door to the wide-open backyard, I might have realized how difficult this all was for my mother and showed a little gratitude for her years of stern kindness by at least pretending to be sad. I didn’t. I remained stoically self-absorbed and kept my eye on the glowing brass ring as my parents hugged me goodbye.

  VT—located in Blacksburg, Virginia on the shore of a sea of timid hills that are eternally reddish orange in my memory—was an institution hidden in a womb-like valley where the single-celled nascent artist that I designed could germinate into the fully formed novelist I thought I longed to be. The campus would be my intellectual training facility where I would bolster the identity of “Poet” that I had finally chosen out of the thousand possibilities that gnashed their baby teeth at each other inside of me, lurching for the worm that I brought inward. They extended their thin necks trying to outreach each other upward and receive the sacred nutrients that would take them to the next day where they would again fight—this time amongst dead brethren—to make it to the next, the cycle repeating, their numbers dwindling, but their capabilities strengthening. When one remained, an able and concise image of myself would stand directly before me at the hill cre
st and I would remove my milky, untried skin and toil until we constellated, the old I and the eventual I, rendering ourselves eternally static. From that point on, there would be a template to which I could refer whenever doubt arose, a handbook scrawled by my genetics like commandments into the walls of the valleys of my thinking mind, an unflinching panacea immune to scrutiny that would serve me well in any intellectual or moral moment of doubt. And when the rock rolled away and I, as both the sculpture and sculptor emerged, a true artist would be loosed upon the world. Behold.

  Before I turned away for good my father unlocked the trunk of the van and handed me a guitar case.

  “Your hands are big enough now,” he said, his voice shaking, unpracticed. I thanked him with a silent nod. Then I shook his hand, separated myself from mother, kissed Lilly’s cheek as she sat wide-eyed in her wheelchair, and I went down in, vulnerable and unknown.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  OVER THE NEXT TWO months, my ninety-minute sessions with a doctor named Singer revealed two remarkable new things. Firstly, a subtle doubt was discovered that, once noticed, began quietly knocking against the wrought iron gates of my own heavily fortified certainties threatening upheaval. Secondly, I was so lost that I was willing to entertain a shocking amount of palpable bullshit. There were three sessions where the doctor had simply given me headphones and left the room while the disembodied voice of an entirely different doctor attempted to alter my thought patterns with softly spoken suggestions only to return and charge me ten dollars for the CD I had just heard. On principle alone, the old me would have been outraged, demanding a refund, and storming out of the office in a fury of curse words and violence, but on the first occurrence of this injustice (the fourth session in), I was unable to immediately detect anything inside of me that demanded retribution. In fact, when that reliable dire wolf of pride was touched by an unfamiliar hand, it stood up only begrudgingly and showed its fangs—not as if to use them, but to feebly reassure me that they were in fact still there. Though its presence was obvious enough to give me cause to take a few steps back, this time there was something in its eyes that was less convincing. It growled lowly at the doctor—and at his terribly impersonal methods and at his obvious disinterest in the betterment of a paying patient—but only briefly, before retiring to the shadow in which it had always lived. And as it turned from us, I too turned away from it, for the first time unafraid to show it my defenseless back.