Song Without A Name
Slice of Brain #9
Sacrificed from the Grey Matter of
Lady Yate-xel
Tenna had ordered Chinese.
It only took a few dives into the old chair and the nearby lockers to get enough money to pay for it when it arrived, although the delivery guy didn’t seem too keen on being paid in miscellaneous change mixed with paper clips and chair lint. He also was not as impressed with the CD of random songs as Tenna demanded he be.
Regardless, five fairly invisible students now sat randomly draped over the furniture in an old choir office, nursing small portions of takeout Lo-Mein. Devi and Johnny poked at theirs with chopsticks, while Tenna shoveled hers with a plastic spork from the cafeteria. Jimmy stabbed idly at his with his fork, but seemed disinterested. And, sitting in front of the desk, was Edgar, with a paper plate full of donated Lo-Mein from the other members of the group, as Tenna hadn’t thought to order him any of his own despite wanting to trade him for them . He felt completely horrible about the whole thing; not only had he not paid for it, but the group as a whole really hadn’t either. Unless paper clips were now accepted currency, of course.
After several minutes of silent chewing, Tenna finished inhaling her noodles and threw single packaged fortune cookies at everyone. Everyone, that is, except Edgar, who was left without one for being added to the group a little too late.
“Read ‘em out loud with ‘in bed’ on the end!’ she commanded.
No one else had actually finished eating, but since Tenna was already well into tearing the wrapper off of her cookie, the others opened theirs, too.
“You have a true friendly spirit in bed!” Tenna read proudly.
Devi blinked at her, but took a glance at her own slip of paper and read it aloud too. “You are great at influencing people,” she said. Tenna glared at her. “In bed,” Devi muttered, rolling her eyes.
Jimmy was next, as Tenna stared at him, unblinking.
“Your sense of justice is great in bed,” he recited, grinning. She seemed to be satisfied with that, as her gaze turned next to Johnny.
“Bad luck and extreme misfortune will infest your pathetic soul for all eternity …in bed,” he said flatly.
They stared at him. Tenna’s blinks were almost audible.
“You will soon embark on a great journey in bed,” Johnny said after several seconds of silence, tossing the fortune aside and sounding bored and seemingly disappointed that no one had found his alternative fortune more amusing. He returned to his Lo-Mein, pulling stray noodles back into the container.
Edgar sighed. He didn’t mind not having a cookie, really. He had enough fortunes at home on his coffee table. Plus, now he didn’t have to read anything with ‘in bed’ tacked on the end of it. He continued eating in hopes of looking unfazed and thus avoiding Jimmy’s occasional glares.
No one asked him to read anything, just as they didn’t bother to ask him to do anything at all. Time went by and he sat there feeling as though he were completely alien to Johnny’s world behind the choir room; the solitary human in a room where the others were already glowing and green. There were talks of how often Johnny was able to remember Tenna’s name (Johnny maintained that it came and it went, that it was easily confused with Tonya or Terra or any of the other zillion things he’d called her in addition to her real name. Devi told him he was lazy or losing his mind. Tenna, for her part, didn’t seem to care about the entire thing.), and discussions of how valid Jimmy’s tally of beaten up seventh graders was (‘You can’t count the same kid twice, Jimmy.’ ‘It was two separate classes!’ ‘He was still mangled from the previous hour! It doesn’t count!’).
Edgar glanced at his surroundings as the argument raged half-heartedly around him. As much as Johnny talked about not liking Jimmy, Edgar saw that the group was close anyway. If not by the way they teased, then certainly by the look of the room around them. He’d seen polaroids of the group on the wall the last time he’d been here, but had never had a chance to really look closely. Every picture was a random candid shot, except for one that had been stuck to the door frame. That shot was the group, plus part of Devi’s finger in the upper corner, sitting happily on the desk Edgar was now situated in front of. They looked so normal in that one image, while all the others reminded Edgar of how not normal his new acquaintances were.
One picture was of Jimmy with a giant welt on his head, with Johnny standing beside him, showing off a baseball bat and a giant grin. Another of Johnny and Jimmy showed them shoving full pieces of pizza in their mouths. From the expression on their faces, Edgar gathered that the pizza had been for some class party that Johnny and Jimmy were not a part of.
A slightly faded shot of Devi that was taped onto a stack of records showed her spray painting a strange looking doodle of a girl on a bathroom stall. Devi looked a few years younger in that one as she hadn’t yet gotten a hold of purple hair dye. Other pictures of Devi were harder to come by, as it seemed she did all of the shooting. One that actually did feature Devi confused Edgar and was partially covered by a poster. It showed Devi looking over her shoulder angrily and showing the camera a very blurry middle finger. Someone, Edgar suspected Johnny, was there with her, but he was obscured by the poster.
Three pictures sat in a line on the side of an old cassette organizer, each of a building of some type. The school, a worn down old building, and a dingy old trailer. Their homes, it seemed. Edgar didn't understand why they needed photos, but he didn't see any reason to ask. He'd never understand the answer.
The room had gotten quiet aside from the soft rhythm of Johnny tapping on the desk behind Edgar’s head.
“So…,” Johnny started casually. “I talked to the crazy neighbor man the other day.”
Devi sounded just as casually bored in her interest, or lack thereof. “Oh, yeah? What did he have to offer you this time? Pizza?”
Johnny stopped tapping to rub some random spot on the desk. He inspected his finger as though checking for dust. “Cookies, actually. Ginger snaps.”
“Poisoned?”
“Most likely.”
“Typical.”
Jimmy looked up from tossing his Lo-Mein around in its container, and shot a curious look at Johnny, but not before stopping to make a face at Edgar. “What did that guy want? Didn’t just give you cookies…,” Jimmy prodded, as though hoping to peg ‘Neighbor Guy’ as another threat to his territory. Territory that Johnny had made it clear to Edgar that Jimmy didn’t have, but territory he defended nonetheless.
“He said some stuff about my keys,” Johnny said with a shrug. “He had some other guy over with him; I didn’t really want to bother them.”
Edgar sat up a little straighter at the mention of the keys. He was sure that regardless of what Johnny was currently saying, he did want to bother them, and quite badly, in fact. Edgar, for his part, really wanted to push about what Johnny had learned, what the key guy had said, if it had any connection at all to Edgar’s book, but thought it best not to discuss in front of the others if Johnny hadn’t.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Devi chimed in, waving her hands. “Did you stop in to see him?”
Johnny shrugged again. “Yeah,” he replied. He had an air of nonchalance that Edgar suspected was fake. “I thought I’d stop in and ask him if he knew what all the keys went to, since I haven’t figured them all out. But, like I said, company.”
Devi appeared skeptical, but went back to a side conversation with Tenna about painting something after only a quick look of doubt in Johnny’s direction. Edgar sat nervously rubbing his arm, desperately looking for something in the room he could feign a giant interest in. All he wanted was something to distract himself from wanting to talk about the entire thing. Those pictures on the wall sure were funny. Yep.
He took a breath to say something that he hoped would be neutral, boring and generally normal conversation before Tenna sprung to her feet, clapped her hands together, and announced that she absolutely had to go to the sewing class today.
“I’m makin’ something NEAT,” she whispered dramatically when pressed for why. With little warning but a smile and the widening of her eyes, she tore out of the room and down the hallway.
Edgar blinked, and tilted his head to one side, staring at the door Tenna had left wide open. “You actually have classes to go to?” he asked.
“You don’t?” Jimmy replied as he stretched a leg over to kick the door closed.
“I did once,” Edgar said. “I‘d just been going to the same ones every year. Sometimes I talked to the teachers, you know, got them to notice me, and they’d ask me to run errands or something. But they didn’t seem to see me there unless looking for someone to run things to the opposite end of the school… After a while, I liked it down here, so I stayed to play and listen to the music from in here. I had no idea who I was, so couldn’t get a new schedule. Not that it would have mattered anyway…”
Edgar heard Johnny shift position behind him before he leaned over Edgar’s shoulder, looking at him curiously. “Did you want somewhere to be? Some classes, I mean? We can fix that for you.” Johnny held up his keys, a trace of a grin on his face.
Edgar arched an eyebrow. “I don’t see how keys could-”
“There’s one for the main computer,” Devi interrupted. “You just open the program, add classes, grades, whatever you want. You can be anyone you want on the school’s computer. Not that it really matters, but we did it. Just in case.”
“In case…,” Edgar repeated.
“Of emergency, please break glass,” Johnny finished for him, cutting him off and pocketing the keys once again. “We’ll set it up for you later.”
Edgar nodded, despite being fairly confused. He had no idea what school records would help him with in the future if his life was going to be dictated by some guys hanging out in clouds and filling his basement with cardboard. Surely he wouldn’t need to attend some university as a divinely protected experimental man. Hell, prior to meeting Johnny’s crew, the ‘powers that be’ didn’t seem to think his current learning to be of much importance, let alone future plans of any sort.
For a moment, it seemed to Edgar that Johnny and his friends were better off than he himself felt, and he couldn’t pinpoint why. It was as though he was trying to look at everything from two points of view; his own, and those of someone who had never encountered these people - a real outsider. Anyone else would look at Edgar more favorably; he, after all, had a house and everything taken care of. Why would these people living off what the local high school had to offer be better off? Edgar knew the answer, really he did, he just seemed to like confusing and contradicting himself. He knew to anyone outside his situation that he would surely seem to be the one better off, but in reality, when he looked at it though his own eyes, this group had gotten everything for themselves, and Johnny and his friends were actually happier than Edgar had ever been.
Not including this past weekend, that is.
It turned out that Edgar was quite honestly surprised for the rest of the day. All in all, the little group was close, and for the most part did average things, if just a little strangely. They met for lunch, which was always a turn-based ‘steal from the cafeteria’ venture. Anytime it was Devi’s turn, Edgar learned, she grabbed a salad for herself and Nny and generally ignored Jimmy. Tenna usually ate something in the sewing room, as it also doubled as the ‘Home Ec’ classroom. Cookies and various other foods suited her just fine for a meal, but if she did show up to the choir room then Devi grabbed a bag of cookies for her.
They all made vicious fun of each other, and sat around looking bored while listening to music. Occasionally, a song would spark a memory in one of them, and they’d all laugh at the injuries Jimmy seemed to have sustained during a past playing of every one of them. Something involving a baseball bat apparently happened the previous summer and Edgar guessed this particular incident was what the picture on the wall was from. There had also been some sort of foot injury linked to, and involving, a song about the price of fish. Everything was so normal, so daily. He’d expected them to have deep philosophical conversations, or talk about their Swiss Cheese memories, but there was no focus on it at all, not even a mention.
It had seemed that memories and his lack of them were all that was on Johnny’s mind over the weekend, and his friends here knew about the situation to some degree. If Edgar was here, and could fill in some holes for them, why was there simply no mention of it? Edgar thought, once, that he would bring it up himself, but he, like the rest of the group, fell prey to Johnny’s unspoken role as leader, and had changed the subject to something random and as far away from the concept of ‘remembering’ as possible when Johnny so much as moved funny. What he really needed was a half a minute alone with Johnny, to figure out what he was thinking.
The more Edgar pondered what Johnny was doing by keeping everything to himself, the more he felt like Johnny was staring at him all day. When the last bell rang, Edgar felt a bit relieved to escape from what felt like constant surveillance. He did find it funny that the whole group felt the need to stay together until the rest of the school let out, despite the fact that they could be anywhere they wanted to be and no one would say otherwise. He did it just to…
Right.
The bell rang, and he reached to pack everything up. He had taken a few notebooks out when Tenna, fresh from sewing class, had requested a game of hang man (The word had been ‘salami’ for reasons that only she seemed to find hilarious.), so he spent a little while trying to gather them back up. Devi made some remark about getting back to a painting on her walls now that she was sure it was dry, and Jimmy muttered something about cleaning, though Edgar doubted he’d actually be doing that from what he'd seen of Jimmy's trailer. Notebooks stashed, Edgar moved to leave the room, and turned to give Johnny a ‘See you tomorrow’ or something similar as Johnny waved to the others who had said their goodbyes already. He turned to stare at Edgar.
“Right then,” Edgar started awkwardly, “well, I guess I’ll be off. Still have some cleaning to do, you know.” He could still hear the other three making their way down the hallway, still discussing Jimmy’s long list of head wounds.
Johnny continued to stare, but Edgar could no longer say for certain if Johnny was staring at him. He looked at the wall behind him nervously, before he made a move for the door, attempting to say a decent farewell. Johnny held up a finger, and Edgar stood still, waited. He then realized that Johnny was listening, not staring. The sounds from the hall faded, and the familiar empty of the hallways returned.
Johnny’s attention slowly drew from the sounds in the walls, and Edgar felt the focus return to him. Johnny pulled his keys from his pocket, and threw them on the floor between himself and Edgar. Edgar raised an eyebrow and shifted his grip on his bag, unsure of what Johnny was getting at. Johnny nodded towards the keys, and Edgar pointedly stared at them. Johnny coughed once, then glared down at the keys.
“Johnny,” he told them.
The keys jerked towards Johnny, crashing into the front of his boot.
Edgar looked up slowly at Johnny’s face, trying to read his expression. “What the hell was that?” he whispered.
Johnny half-bit his lip, and shook his head, picking up the keys. “No idea.”
“When did you find that out?” Edgar set his bag down on the beanbag chair and held his hand out for the keys. Johnny tossed them over.
“Yesterday, when I visited the guy next door. Pepito.”
“What did he tell you?” So Johnny really had found more information than he let everyone think he had. Edgar turned the keys over in his hands.
Johnny shook his head slightly, and looked down at the toe of his boot. “Nothing, really. One of the keys is ‘special’ he says. The guy he was with, this … ‘Squee’ guy, said something about me killing people, but they wouldn’t tell me anything…”
Johnny was still talking, but Edgar couldn’t hear a word of it through the pain in his stomach. The moment Johnny had said ‘killing’ Edgar felt as though someone had kicked him, and hard.
“…was talking about security before, so I’m sure he- What?” Johnny had stopped mid-story to see Edgar having difficulty breathing. Edgar gasped and coughed a few times, held his hand to his chest for a moment, then shook his head.
“I’m fine, I’m fine. Just … swallowed a bug or something.”
Johnny wasn’t convinced. “You know things too, then. And what he said was true, right? You aren’t going to tell me.”
Edgar bit his lip. “Nny… I can’t. I promised.”
“You promised to keep me happy, right, right. And what if knowing whether I had killed people would make me happy? What then?”
Edgar sighed. “Still. You answered this for yourself already. Then you worry about becoming someone else. I’m not risking it either way. Forget what he said, alright? Let’s focus on the keys. We can figure out why they do… well, that.”
Johnny rubbed his shoulder. He had been doing that frequently during the course of the day, and had complained of sleeping on it funny.
“Alright,” Johnny answered after a small silence, “let’s figure this out, at least. Here,” he said, taking the keys back from Edgar, “let me try something.”
He held the keys up in front of him, far enough away from the both of them that there wasn’t going to be any movement from anything either of them did. “Say my name.”
Edgar looked at the keys, and spoke as though doing some introductions. Johnny, meet Keys. Keys, this is Johnny.
“Johnny.”
Nothing.
They stood still, waiting to see if perhaps the reaction was delayed, but still, nothing happened. Edgar was ready to ask if they should try ‘Nny’ when Johnny raised his arm and threw the keys through the doorway and out into the main choir room.
“Again,” Johnny commanded.
“J-Johnny.”
“Like you mean it, dammit, come on.”
“Johnny.”
Still nothing. Johnny stood with his arms crossed, staring out into the room.
“Johnny,” he said angrily.
A horrible clanging and jingling erupted from the room as all of Johnny’s many keys attempted to reach him and slammed into the chairs they had fallen among.
“Fuck,” he spat when the clanging stopped.
“Somehow I don’t think they’ll respond to that, too,” Edgar muttered.
Johnny looked at him as though daring him to say that again and Edgar immediately regretted not paying more attention to what he was saying. Regretted it, that is, until he saw a trace of a grin on Johnny’s face.
“That would be a much cooler password,” Johnny said, smiling. “I’d much rather be yelling ‘fuck’ at my keys than my own name.”
Edgar smiled back, grateful his comment had turned out that way.
Johnny cracked a few knuckles, then walked into the main room to fish his keys out of the chairs. When he found them, he sat cross-legged on the chair they had fallen under, and tried the experiment again.
“Johnny,” he said with the same tone usually reserved for ‘fuck.’
The keys pulled toward the office where Edgar was still standing, then resumed normal behavior.
“What did they do?” Edgar asked, sticking his head out of the door.
“They tugged towards you that time…”
Edgar left the office and made his way through the chairs to take the keys again. He took them, tossed them on an open spot on the floor, and assumed a spot beside Johnny on the chairs.
“Try it again,” Edgar said.
“Johnny.”
The keys slid some distance toward the office once again.
Edgar scratched at his chin as he stared at the keys. Something was leading them in that direction, and it wasn’t him or Johnny.
“What did they do at Pepito’s?” he asked, still looking at the keys.
There wasn’t a response.
“Nny?” He turned to see Johnny staring at him as though he’d grown a second head.
“You used to have…” Johnny started, pointing at Edgar.
“Have what?”
“A little goatee thing,” Johnny finished, poking Edgar’s chin, “there.”
“Oh? Heh… I don’t really remember much about myself at all… but… you… I remember that you’d have blue hair pretty often. Dark, but kinda blue. ” Hoped his face didn’t look as warm as it felt.
Johnny grinned, and leaned back on the chair, hands holding onto his ankles. “Blue, huh? I’ll have to try that. Nice memories there, Goatee Guy.”
“I expect to see that blue now.”
“As I expect the goatee.” With a nod.
“Yes, mother.”
“Fuck you.”
Laughing felt really good. The past weekend had felt amazing and refreshing and free because of how often he had laughed. And though they were sitting, currently trying to discover the secrets of some haunted keys, they’d managed to laugh over something as dumb as hair. As difficult as all of this was going to prove to be, Edgar was grateful for the entire situation.
Or maybe just for Johnny. But he’d say ‘entire situation’ to sound less creepy. Yes.
“Anyway, now that we know you’ve got voice recognition on your keys, tell me what they did at Pepito’s,” Edgar said, when finished with his share of the laughing.
“The same thing they did here, they just pulled toward…” Johnny trailed off, and looked wide-eyed into the office. He suddenly leapt off the chair and dashed out of the choir room and down the hall. Edgar was stunned momentarily, but hopped off the chairs himself, picked up the keys on his way, and chased after Johnny.
Johnny was standing in one of the entrances to the school, in between two sets of doors, essentially in room made of glass. Edgar opened the door, and stepped in himself. Johnny’s face was plastered to the outer door.
“What?” Edgar asked.
Johnny peeled his face from the glass to look at Edgar.
“This doorway, it’s practically right beside the office in the building plans. Come here.” Johnny motioned for Edgar to stand closer to the spot where Johnny had left a forehead mark. When Edgar obeyed, Johnny stood behind him, chin on Edgar’s shoulder, and pointed out the window at a house with a weathered old porch.
“He lives right there,” Johnny said, jamming his finger tip on the glass. “When we first tested the keys, my back would have been toward that house. While I was there, on that porch, the keys pulled toward the living room window. The keys react to his house.”
“They react… with your name… to his house…” Edgar attempted to process everything into meaning something, but nothing came. He thought it might have been easier if he could breathe, but his heart was busy pounding the air, and all coherent thought, out of him.
Johnny stepped back, and Edgar’s breath had a fighting chance once again.
“So now,” Johnny said, completely unaffected by what had nearly suffocated Edgar, “the suspicion lies more on him than it does on me. The keys lead to him. The people in your Heaven book want to investigate the keys. I wonder if it’s not me, but him that they don’t trust.”
Edgar continued staring out the window. The house was so unassuming, yet frightening and intriguing at the same time. Inside it lived people who seemed to remember who Johnny used to be… maybe, if Edgar visited, he could get more information out of them, information they wouldn’t tell Johnny. Then he could-
Thoughts were interrupted by the startled cries of two people slammed violently into each other, and Edgar whirled around to see Johnny and some bespectacled guy in a trench coat lying on the floor and both partly wedged in the door.
Edgar blinked at them for a moment, and watched them sit up. He was about to ask if they were alright when Johnny spoke up.
“YOU AGAIN?! What the hell is your problem?!”
Trenchcoat Guy fixed his glasses, and blinked up at Johnny, who had managed a sitting position. He looked stunned, as though he just noticed he was on the floor, then sat up quickly. He shook his head, and ruffled already crazily spiked hair, then stood up fully, brushing some dust from his pants.
“You saw nothing,” he said quietly, before spinning around and dashing down the hallway.
Edgar moved to help Johnny off the floor, but he was already standing up and brushing some dirt from his side.
“What the fuck is with that kid? That’s the second time I’ve seen him around, and the second accident he’s had in the process.”
Edgar held his hands up in case Johnny fell over or something, but Johnny seemed stable, so he let them fall to his sides again. “When did you see him before this?”
Johnny seemed fixated on a spot on his shirt. “Yesterday,” he said, rubbing the spot with his thumb, “he was standing outside that house, just staring at it. When he tried to run away he fell over. Weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. Or, close to it, anyway.”
“What… what happened anyway?” Edgar still wasn’t sure how they’d managed to get stuck in the door.
“I started walking out backwards. He… I don’t know, was stupid and didn’t see me or something.”
Edgar started out the door himself, and held it open for Johnny to follow him. “Because walking backwards isn’t stupid or anything.”
“Quiet.”
They returned to the office and Edgar picked up his bag. He assumed that now that he wasn’t important to tell things to that maybe Johnny would want him out of his home. It didn’t seem so.
Johnny jumped up onto the desk, slid on his knees across it and poked a complicated combination of buttons on the stereo above him. Radio at first.
“Give yourself to me
You hold the key...”
‘Are you in the market for a new home?’
“Is it that time again?
Wasn’t it already then?”
‘NOW FOR ONLY 3 PAYMENTS’
Finally, Johnny got something working, and a strange accordion tune started to fill the room. Johnny sat down on the desk, and turned back to Edgar, who shivered a little.
“Above all the silence, can you hear, can you hear
Above all the silence
laughing, laughing aa~ah
It’s so difficult to breathe, so difficult to bre~eathe
So difficult...”
Johnny smiled happily to the song, but something about it rather frightened Edgar. Maybe because it wasn’t hard at all to see the old Johnny laughing to music that sounded so … insane. Was that the word? Maybe.
“Weird isn’t it? It used to be part of a musical about a town that was forever on fire. I imagine someone laughing while lost in the coal mines for some reason, and it makes me smile.” Johnny closed his eyes as he spoke.
Edgar shivered again.
He was still creepy. No matter how much insanity was gone, Johnny was still a little strange and very weird in places. Edgar still felt captivated, still felt drawn to him, still was sure they were and could still be best friends. Happy visions of people laughing while they burn to death or not, Johnny was still…
There was that word again.
Still couldn’t say it. It was hard enough to realize he’d thought it.
“Hey, are you leaving?”
Edgar blinked, and refocused on actually looking at Johnny. “I… Oh, I don’t know. I wasn’t sure if you wanted me to stay any longer or not, I just-”
“You should stay,” Johnny said through a grin.
“Alright…”
“Besides, at night, when the school is cold and dark, is the best time to try out keys.”
“Oh can you hear... the laughing?”