Story: Like a pick in a hollow body

[tamela_j]

~Like a pick in a hollow body~

By, Tamela_J


Jake swayed along with the crowd surrounding him. Feet spread apart to hold his balance in the middle of the train, he closed his eyes and tried to get lost in the rhythm of his surroundings. There used to be a time when he could find the beat of the side to side, back and forth of the train's movements, the turns and the pivots, the clangs and the wooshing air.

It used to be that he could find music in anything.

Clutching to the pole, he could still feel the permanent calluses and grooves from the guitar's strings rub against the slick, warm metal. He tried to remember a time when his fingers had been smooth and unmolested by what he had assumed would be his life's passion; his guitar.

He couldn't. He really didn't think there was a time where creating magic with words and rhythm wasn't all he wanted out of life.

***

"Hey Dylan, whatcha writing?" the boy had said, throwing himself down opposite Jake under the maple on the far corner of the school's yard. Jake had been there since school got out, scribbling notes and lyrics in his notebook.

"Name's not Dylan," Jake mumbled, looking up for just a moment before returning to his work.

"Well, yeah. I know that. No, Dylan is because of the notebook. I figure with all the ripped denim and black turtlenecks that you are either a musician or a poet."

"Yeah? What's that got to do with anything?"

"Well, Dylan. Either Bob if you're writing lyrics or Thomas if you're writing poetry. Which one is it?"

"Bob."

"Hey Bob, my name's Drew."

"Drew, you know my name's not really Bob, dontcha?"

"Of course. But you'll always be a Bob to me."

Jake studied the boy who had inexplicably plopped himself into Jake's life. Jake had moved to Brooklyn that summer from Chicago and he had yet to make any friends, not that he was really looking; he had been too busy being miserable and letting that feed his songwriting. Like most emo-freshman songwriters, his main concern was finding words to rhyme with suicide and destruction. It was hard enough being fifteen, but being fifteen and moving thousands of miles away would fuel his angst-ridden notes for years.

"What sort of stuff are you writing?" Drew asked.

"You're not to bright, are you? Didn't we just establish that I was writing lyrics?"

"What sort of lyrics, numbnuts?"

Jake looked back down to his notebook. He hadn't had a regular conversation with anyone in a while and he wasn't sure if he remembered the rules of it. He wondered if he ignored the guy if he would just go away. But did he really want him to? Truth was, he was tired of being so pathetically lonely, even if it did make good ballad material.

"Are they moody and deep; tragic and beautiful like Vedder? Or atmospheric and metaphorical like, well like Dylan? Do you write the lyrics with an idea of a beat or does that come after?"

Jake looked up. "You a musician?"

"I play a bit. None of my own stuff. Not yet. How about you?"

"I've written a few and put them to music, but mostly just have them here in this book. What instrument?"

"I've been taking guitar lessons since I was five, but I'm more excited about the bass right now. You?"

"I sing, play a bit of guitar," Jake answered.

"You in a band?"

"Nah, I just moved here."

"Yeah? Where from?"

"Chicago."

"You didn't have a band there?"

"Didn't know anyone else who played. What about you? You in a band?"

Drew shrugged. "Not really. I mean, there are some guys who expressed interest, but then they discovered tits."

Jake laughed nervously.

"Bunch of losers," Drew went on. "What about you? You fascinated with tits?"

Jake felt something drop in his stomach, a sudden shift in conversation, or more? He didn't know. He played it safe; he'd gotten good at playing things safe, of hiding his true feelings behind metaphor and vocabulary. "Not enough to give up on music."

Drew laughed and Jake watched him. He yearned to ask him that question in return. To ask him if he liked girls, but he couldn't find a way that sounded like he really didn't care about the answer. Plus, he felt like he had gotten a bit of the answer when Drew had excluded himself from the other lecherous teenage boys.

"So, you going to let me read what you got or what?" Drew asked, as if they had already discussed this.

"What? No." Jake answered, shielding the pages even more with his arm. "I don't even know you."

Drew shrugged. "Fine. But you know, they're not lyrics until you've said them out loud. They're just words on paper. Like little love letters to your wounded soul. But when you share them, then they become poetry, then they become about more than you, they become universal."

Jake just stared at him. Finally, with a dry throat, he swallowed, and then nodded. "Yeah. Everyone knows that."

"So?"

"So what?"

"So, are you going to let me see the songs or what?"

Jake swallowed again. Who was this guy? he asked himself, but held out the book regardless. He forced his hands to steady, but his heart was beating loud and fast in his chest. He'd never let anyone read his lyrics before and he'd known this guy for less then five minutes. He was a little terrified of the boy. But as he watched Drew's eyes move over the page, firstly lazily scanning and then, about halfway through the second page, Jake saw where Drew's interest was caught. When Drew finally handed it back he had a gleam in his eye.

"Fuckin' deep, man."

"Yeah?" Jake asked despite himself.

"Definitely. That clinches it."

"Clinches what?"

"We need to be in a band."

***

The train's doors slid open and brought him back to the present as people shoved and pushed against him. He became fluid. Slipping and maneuvering his way around and through the crowd. As soon as he broke from one throng, he found himself enveloped in yet another. This one was of people standing still, watching something in the center. Standing on the outskirts, he couldn't see the attraction, but he could hear it. A tune vibrated through the tile walls and up the stairs he had been heading for. He tried to block it out, as he tried to block out all things beautiful and melodious, but he had forgotten how amplifying the acoustics of the underground tunnels could be; had forgotten how miraculous one man and a guitar could sound. He felt the chords reverberate all around him as he made his way to the surface and to his daily grind.

He'd come back to New York six months before with his soul crushed and he'd wanted nothing more than burrow into a quiet life where no one remembered that he had belligerently dumped all of them when he thought he had made it. When his rock and roll dream looked as if it had come true.

He remembered with horror his last night in Brooklyn. He had come back, drunk on his own bravado, to say good bye to his dad and what few friends he had left. Only that wasn't true, he hadn't come to say good bye, he had come back to say, See, I told you I'd be something. I told you I'd make it. So long fuckers!

He had cast off his friends almost before the cap and gown had been removed. He had moved into Manhattan to find his way as a serious musician, unlike the friends he had played with in his first band, The Glass Menagerie. For them, the school's Battle of the Bands was as far as they were ever going to go; not him. They all had talent, he wouldn't deny that. They just didn't have the drive. Brian had gotten a scholarship to some school in California and had packed up his drum kit, sold it on Ebay and probably used the money for a surf board. Mark, their lead singer, had moved to Long Island with his girlfriend.

Drew, who switched up with Jake between guitar and bass, had been the only one that Jake had missed in all this time. He had been convinced that together, they could move to Manhattan, start a new band, just as they had started this one. It hadn't seemed like that hard of a move, it was literally a subway ride away.

Jake had convinced himself that they shared the same dream for the future. The dream of fortune and fame. It had hurt Jake more than he'd like to admit when Drew had turned away from it.


***

"I can't do it, man," Drew had said, looking down at his bass, pretending to tune it. He'd been tweaking with the tensions pretty much through the entire night, as if hiding his nerves at starting this conversation.

"What the fuck? Why not?" Jake had asked, his confusion reverberating through the angry note on his guitar.

"It's my dad. He needs me to work in the shop, to help him out with the mortgage."

"Goddamn it, Drew! When are you going to live for yourself for once?" he said. Pushing his guitar behind him on its strap, he stepped in front of Drew, staring at the top of his head as he refused to look at Jake.

This had been an old argument that had flared up every time Drew had to miss practice to work at the store or whenever they talked of getting gigs that were more than high school parties. The other times Drew would have shrugged his shoulders and mumbled. That was why Jake was completely caught off-guard when instead, after a long silence, Drew looked at him with a glare and spat, "This isn't about me. This is about you and what you want."

"You don't want to get out of this neighborhood? Away from all the stupid people we went to school with, away from the fuckin' hardware store? Don't you want to do this--" he pointed back and forth between the instruments and each other, "for real? See if we have it, see if we can make it?"

Drew shrugged. "It doesn't mean the same thing to me. You think that means you care more about the music, but I think it means the opposite. I can't walk away from my life and all my responsibilities to go and try to be rich and famous. I can, however, do what's right by my family and all that count on me, and still have my music."

Jake wasnt sure if it was the shrug or what he had said, but his hands were a painfully tight fist and his words came out around a clinched shut jaw. "So, you're going to stay here and work nine to five, Monday through Friday at a job you hate, strum your instrument whenever you have a spare moment and if you're lucky, if you're damn lucky, maybe get picked up by one of those fuckin' cover bands that play locally, spend your weekends singing 'Living on a Fuckin' Prayer'? That's your dream now?"

Now Drew swung his bass behind his back too, almost smacking Jake in the process. "I'm going to work eight to six on a job that puts food on the table and keeps my sisters in school. I'm going to spend every spare minute I have improving myself and my music and fuck you if you think I won't. And the day I play Bon Jovi covers at Lucky's is the day you can come back and shoot me dead. My dream is not your dream, it never has been."

Jake was so angry he was breathing out of his nose in short puffs. He shoved hard against Drew's chest. "Fuck you!"

Jake waited for a moment. Waited for Drew to shove him back, for him to shout back for him to do anything. But he just stood there, crossed arms to brace himself from the shove and looked so angry, so hurt. The moment stretched on and Jake didn't know what else to say so he just walked away.

It was the last time he saw Drew.

***

The melody of the subway tunnel faded into the chaotic den of the East Village as he made his way to across the street to the music store. Some might consider it irony that he had come back to town bitter with a loathing of all things musical and beautiful and got himself a job at a music store, but he saw it more like an alcoholic getting a job at a bar. He didn't want anything to do with music anymore, but deep down, it was a part of him and he would never be able to truly walk away. Plus, like a recovering alcoholic, it was sort of therapeutic to surround yourself with the assholes you used to be; to observe their behavior from a detached distance.

"Hey Superstar," Mike called from behind the counter when Jake walked in.

Jake groaned. He tried so hard to avoid shifts with Mike, but somehow the little prick always seemed to be there. It was Mike and his smug attitude that had convinced Jake to not even try to reconnect with anyone after he came back. The needling he got from Mike, someone he had barely known before he had made it big, was enough to tell him what every other reunion would be like. Mike's favorite taunt was to blare the band Jake had been fired from, Today’s Follies’ latest album throughout the store's massive sound system. It took everything in Jake to not bash the little puke's skull in.

By the time the first single made it to the radio, though, he gave up being angry. There was no way of avoiding it. No way of pushing from his consciousness his driving guitar riffs on a album he'd never see a penny from, never get to play for a crowd, listen to the fan's chants as they sang along. When the second song came out, the one that he fuckin' WROTE, he felt a bit better; he was, after all, going to see a bit of scratch from that song, if he was ever desperate enough to contact any of them for his residuals. He wasn't ready to stoop, not yet. He'd rather sell overpriced accessories and jacked up equipment to boys who wanted what he had wanted, to girls who were fierce and had something to prove. One day maybe he'd go to collect what was his, but it just wasn't in him now.

"Catchy tune, isn't it?" Mike shouted over the song blaring from the speakers.

Jake flipped him off, not even looking up from his project.

"I especially like this part," Mike said, just as Jake's riff zinged through the song.

Jake really liked that part too. He remembered what it felt like in the studio, a real legitimate studio, with sound proofed walls and the window where the engineers sat tweaking the knobs and playing with the vibe and verb. Sometimes it was just Jake in there by himself, trying to lay down tracks over the others. Other times the whole band was in there, cramped into the space, trying to capture what it was to be a rockstar, to be surrounded by the cheers and the sound of hundreds of voices singing along.

He remembered also what it was like to be on stage, one foot on the monitor, guitar resting low, head thrown back in full rock-out stance, just eating up the screams and the adoration reverberating all around him, trickling down his neck into his skin like the sheen of sweat dripping off him. He remembered the look on the faces of the girls down in the pit, their eyes never leaving him, telling him all he needed to know. Sometimes, he remembered as the riff melted into the song, the times where Jeff the bassist would push his sweat soaked and damp back against Jake and they would push against each other, their heads thrown back on each other's shoulders, caught up in their own badassness and the knowledge that there wasn't one person in the auditorium that wouldn't give themselves to the two of them. There wasn't a single night were Jake slept alone if he didn't want to, he just had to catch a guy's eye, cock his head towards the back stage and he was set.

Yes, Jake really liked the being a Rock God part.

He had a lot of time to think of things in the back room, going through the inventory, preparing the equipment for the storefront. It was the only thing he truly liked to do in the store. Alone in a room of parts, he liked to spread them out, sort them and meticulously put them together; stringing the guitars and basses, tuning them to perfection, assembling the drum kits, hitting the snare just right. If it had been up to him, he'd be back in the stock room all day. But that's not why he was given the job. He was to interact with the public, share his know-how, sell the shit out of things people didn't need to foster talents they didn't have. He was hired for his expertise, and also for the off chance that someone would recognize him, want to buy their mic stands and guitar picks from a former Rock God. The boss man wanted Jake to give lessons. He wanted to put out flyers and run an ad in the Village Voice and get the word out. Jake was Back!

Jake had panicked, threatened to quit and promised the man that the moment he was ready, he'd start taking on students. As if. The day he started sitting down with brace-faced twerps who would come to lessons lying about practicing at home and clumsily asking him for autographs in liner notes from the one and only album he'd probably ever make; the day he sold his soul on that level just to keep a job he despised would be the day that he went to the Brooklyn Bridge and hurled himself off of it.

These days he flinched whenever he heard the bell on the door chime, he sighed every day he made it out of there without being humiliated or called out as the sellout or the failure he just knows knew he had become in their eyes. Surviving unscathed felt like a miracle of sorts sometimes.

The last thing he wanted to think about was music, how it used to move him, how it used to heal. So when he again heard the guitarist's notes resonate through the tiled walls of the train station like he had that morning, he pushed and pulled against the crowds to get away, to get to the train before it left the platform. He cursed when its doors closed in his face, left him there. He stubbornly kept his back to the player, instead choosing to stare at the back wall, at the ad for some mindless movie that was deemed by the marketing hive to tempt the commuter set. As the minutes dragged on, he tried to focus on the half-dressed actress on the poster and not on the melody ringing through the air, begging him for some words to fulfill its meaning. He was so intent on pushing the story out of his head, the lyrics from rising up inside him, that he didn't notice that his fingers were flicking the bars of the song on his hip. Not until there was an unpleasant twang from behind him and Jake moaned with longing for that perfect bit of music, that perfect bit of life back. He turned despite himself and saw the man, his hooded head bent over his guitar, pulling a busted low E string off the instrument.

Just then the next train pulled in and screeched to a stop in front of him. The doors opened and Jake was hit with the onslaught of people getting off and still he stood there, feeling a sadness like a hollow drumming in his chest. As the doors were about to close yet again with him on the outside, he jumped on, snapping himself out of the melancholy funk he couldn't name.

That night, for the first time since he'd been back, Jake pulled out his notebook and his favorite pen. At first he tried not to associate the music in the tunnel with the words coming out on the page, but that only lasted for a minute before the self-deception was too much. He was humming the bars of the song as if they were right outside his room. There was a story just dying to get out in those chords. He wondered if the man in the station had created this melody himself or if he was merely playing someone else's song. Did the song already have words? No. Jake was certain that his were the only words that fit this collection of notes perfectly. He almost picked up his own guitar but stopped short. He wasn't ready for that level of involvement, it was ludicrous. What was he going to do with it anyway? Steal a homeless street performer's music? Record a demo? Become a solo sensation? Land on top again, this time all on his own, this time where no one could kick him out, citing creative differences--whatever the hell that meant?

He put down his pen. What was the point?

***

The next morning he was actually, despite himself, looking forward to hearing the man and his guitar again. He only realized this when he felt a deep disappointment when he wasn't there. He wondered about the man all day while he sat in the back room stringing guitars and winding them tighter and tighter, testing each string's pitch against its tensions. He wondered if the man had other strings to replace the ones that got broken. Wondered if those were his priority over food, shelter and the comforts of whatever bottle he preferred. He'd imagine so. He played too beautifully to not have it be his first thought. Jake imagined that a busted string played havoc on his pay day.

On the way home, a guitar string wrapped around his hand, he wondered what the hell he was doing. What was he going to do, just walk up to him and hand the man the low E? Did people do that? What if he wasn't there? But as he walked down the stairs he knew that he was, knew that he was playing regardless of the missing string. The crowd around him was a bit smaller, but very few even noticed that his music was in any way deficient.

Jake forced himself to stand there, lost in the crowd, and listen. He couldn't see the man, but he imagined him, like he had seen him yesterday, hunched over his guitar intent on nothing but the tune. He didn't seem to miss the busted string all to much, but Jake really did. So, when he heard his train approach, he hunched his own shoulders, made his way through the crowd, and quietly and hopefully unnoticed, dropped the string into the man's open guitar case before making his way to the train. It wasn't until he'd grasped the pole in the middle of the train and braced himself for the lurch of movement that he realized his palms were sweaty and his heart was beating faster than it had for a very long time.

That night he reached for his notebook without even thinking about it. He still didn't see the point of adding words and stories to its pages. Instead, he thumbed through some of the scribbles and lines of notes from so long ago and tried to decipher what it was he was trying to say back then.

***

"Whatcha doin' Bob?" Drew had asked, like he did almost every day that he found Jake outside on his stoop with his guitar.

"Just contemplating global nuclear war."

Drew bobbed his head. "Nice. So, can I join you?"

Jake scooted over a bit on the step to answer.

"That a new song?" Drew asked as he pulled out his own guitar.

"It hopes to be, one day. Right now it's just a bunch of words on a page."

"Same old song and dance," Drew sighed, dramatically.

Jake looked at him out of the corner of his eye. "Fuck off."

"Always with the being mean to me. You're lucky I like you so much."

Drew began tuning his guitar as he looked over the words on the page. "You got any rhythms yet?"

"Not really."

"Mind if I take a look?"

"Like you haven't been already without asking."

"Just a little. I would never play around with it without asking."

Jake nudged him. "You'll make some lovely woman a good husband."

"You know it," Drew answered, pushing back into Jake.

Sliding the notebook closer to Drew, Jake said, "Go ahead. Show me what you got."

Drew strummed a few notes and hummed a few bars. "Why are your songs all so sad?"

"You think it's sad?"

Drew was quiet for a minute, as if reading it again and again trying to see it in any other way. "Yeah. A little bit. Don't you? I mean, there's definitely a sense of longing, of wanting, you know?"

Jake shrugged. "Yeah. I guess. I don't know. I guess that's where my mind is right now."

"Who treats you this way? Tell me, I'll straighten her out."

"Aww, you'd do that for me?"

Drew looked at him. "For you? Anything."

Jake looked down at the page quickly, hiding his flushed cheeks. He cleared his throat and starting humming the tune that Drew had been humming moments before.

"So you're thinking a bit slow and melancholy?" Jake asked.

"Fuck no. The words tell that story, let's have the music tell a different story, yeah? I mean, there's only so much morose I can take. If you throw in some thrashing chords and some chaos on the drums then it will only heighten the whole thing. Don't you think?"

Jake studied the words some more. His humming became faster, louder and more confident. Drew found some chords to accompany them. They wordlessly played off each other getting louder and more enthusiastic, as if feeding off each other's energies; until someone opened their window and shouted at them to shut the fuck up.

"You want to go to the shop?" Drew asked.

"Yeah, let's go," Jake answered, closing his notebook and standing up. They had just started playing in the back of Drew's Pop's hardware store while they worked on getting other members for the band.

They put their guitars back into their cases and slung them over their shoulders and began walking down the sidewalk. They talked about music and about all the guys who had auditioned for the gig of drummer and singer for the band and who was a maybe and laughed at those that were a definite no.

"Can you believe he played fuckin' You Give Love a Bad Name?" Jake asked.

"Don't you think he was trying to be ironic? Or satirical? Or whatever it is when you're not serious?"

"I hope so. That would be his only saving grace. But you think he would have told us it was just a joke or something."

"You're such a snob," Drew accused with a laugh. "How did we ever even become friends? How did I make the cut?"

"You? Well, you taught me everything I know, obviously. How else would I put up with your constant needling? Your constant defamation of my character?"

"How will I ever be worthy of your friendship?" Drew asked.

"Help me come up with some tunes to go with these heart wrenching songs of morose angst."

Drew sighed. "I guess I can see what I can do. Only if you promise that eventually you'll write something that doesn't make me want to cut my wrists."

Jake tried to hide his smile. "I'll see what I can do."

***


The notebook he had now of course wasn't the same one he had back then, but he flipped through the pages and wondered if those long forgotten first attempts were better or worse than what he had been writing while he was on the road, being waited on, having sweaty, meaningless sex with strangers. He imagined that his drive and motivation might have shifted when he had finally made it, but he tried to hold on to the emotions and longing that had always been so vivid in his songs, had always defined him.

He wondered when he had stopped thinking about what it was he wanted and needed from the words on the page. Was it when his life long dream had been fulfilled? When he had lived all his fantasies and found them lacking? Now what was he supposed to do? Change his dream? To what? Try to get out of the tedious, morose nightmare he was in now? How?

Suddenly, he realized he had things he wanted to say, things he needed to get down on paper. He hunched over his notebook and began to scribble frantically, tongue peeking out between his lips in concentration.

Halfway through and he knew it was all shit, but he didn't stop, didn't read it over and scratch out the bad, highlight the good, he just kept going. He was out of his conscious mind and into a place he'd missed so much it hurt.

Hours later he threw the filled pages away from him and discovered that he was panting and sweaty. He was alive.

For some reason his mind turned to the man in the tunnel, to his music, to his piece of shit guitar. He wondered what the guy could do with a real guitar. His eyes flitted to the place in the corner where his own guitar rested.

No, he wasn't ready for that yet.

***

The next morning, as the doors opened and the mad dash to get out of the train crashed all around him, all he heard was the melody reverberating off the tiled walls. He sighed. The man had used the string Jake had given him and all was right with the world. At least for the five minutes he allowed himself to linger with the crowd around the musician before climbing the stairs and starting his soul-crushing day. That feeling lasted for about two seconds after he'd walked in the door of the store.

" Jake fuckin' Coulson, is it really you?"

Jake froze. He had been expecting more of Mike's taunts, had prepared himself for his brand of torment. But he hadn't prepared himself for Mark, lead singer of The Glass Menagerie who Jake hadn’t seen since they broke up, to be standing there at the counter waiting for him. Inwardly he groaned as he approached, but he hid it with a grin as he took Mark's hand in his and allowed himself to be pulled into a hug.

"Mark, how've you been?"

"Good, good. How long you been working here?" Mark asked.

"Just a few months. Who told you I was here, Drew?"

"Drew? Man. I haven't seen him for years. I think he might have died or something."

"What?" Jake asked, feeling the blood in his veins turn to ice.

"A few years back. There was a tragedy, his dad's shop closed, its all a fuzzy memory."

Jake just stared at him. He'd always been a bit of a self-centered douchebag, but how could he not remember if one of their band members had died? Of course Jake tried to ignore the fact that he should have kept in touch with enough people that if one of his very best friends had died somebody would have gotten a hold of him.

"So tell me," Mark started, pulling Jake back to the present. "What was it like?"

"Like?"

"Yeah, out there. What was it like to be in the show?"

Jake smiled. "You know all those dreams we had, the fantasy we conjured about all the ass we'd get, all the fame, all the glory?"

Mark's eyes lit up. "Of course I remember."

"Well, it's about a million times better than that," Jake lied.

Mark moaned and pretended to swoon. "Man! I knew it." He stood up and looked around the store. "Doesn't it sort of blow being back? Being here of all fuckin' places?"

"More than you'll ever know."

"But you're still playing right? Still writing? Tell me you're searching for another band. You can't get that close to the fuckin' prize and give up, yeah?"

Jake forced himself to look into Mark's eyes, to smile, to lie. "I got a few things in the works."

Mark laughed and bounced on the balls of his feet. "Of course you do! You always did. Hey, let's go out tonight, get a drink."

Jake wondered if he could keep the lie up for the length of the night, he also wondered if he really wanted to.

"Oh man, I wish I could. Maybe another night?"

Mark stopped his hyperactive movements and looked like a little hurt boy. "Yeah. Sure. Of course. I understand."

"No, it's just that I have to take care of something."

"I get it. I know how it is. You're too good for us stupid fuckers that only got you to where you are! Screw you, fucking sell out!"

Jake stood there dumbfounded for a moment before rallying enough to say, "Jesus Mark, take it down a fuckin' notch. You come in here after not seeing each other in six years and you're throwing a fit because I can't go out tonight? Like without even seeing what I was doing to-fuckin-morrow? I'm supposed to drop everything for you because why?"

Jake knew he had him, Mark knew he was had and there was nothing to do except either admit to being an asshole, or being an even bigger asshole. Jake really wasn't surprised that Mark chose option two.

"Fuck you."

Jake watched him walk away and shook his head. What the hell?

For a moment he tried to imagine how that could have went down worse, but all his mind could focus on was that one statement: I think he might have died or something.


Part Two