Blue Canary
[Part 1 of 2]
When the pizza delivery guy somehow gets his head trapped in a forked branch in the small tree on the lawn, and then the firefighters accidentally saw into his carotid artery and cause blood to splash out all sparkling and scarlet across the green grass, it’s the single most beautiful and chaotic thing that’s ever happened on Kiriko’s street. She thinks of a haiku but never writes it down.
Soon the ambulance guys stanch the pizza guy’s gashed throat and take him away. All bystanders disperse without any further comment. Nobody even bothers to inform Kiriko what became of him. The pizza, however, is left on the lawn, unstained by the gush. Kiriko leaves a cash payment on the driving seat of the pizza guy’s van, even though she never ordered it. In a little while both the van and the money are gone.
After waiting dutifully on a team of crime scene investigators who never come, she passes a hose over the congealing spill in the late afternoon sunlight. She watches transparent droplets glisten in the golden rays of the sun and considers how different it looks from arterial spray. The rainbow diffusion of prismatic color rather than the heavy ruby viscosity of blood.
She doesn’t tell her husband Hengist anything about what happened to the pizza guy when he comes home from work. Her feelings are not so easily explained to him and she knows he might not really try to understand them. She can’t. Her feelings are... horror… yes, sure. But something altogether more exciting also, a soft flutter at the base of her throat. It’s as though she’s just looked up for the first time in a decade and realized she can’t recognize a single thing.
The streets in this suburb are so tidy, so ordered. There’s not a leaf or bird out of place. It makes Kiriko happy, but it also makes her so sad. Everything she’s ever experienced in her life is like that: organized, neat, each thing in its correct place. It’s so tidy, down to the bordered hedgerows and her sweaters in her closet ordered in ranks by color and knit gauge.
But it’s also the emptiest thing she’s ever imagined, this life of theirs. Flat and lusterless, like a dry lawn with no glisten of aortal gush to give it sustenance. Hengist chomps on the reheated pizza while watching the football game and has little idea of the sacrifice that was involved in its delivery. He accepts it just as he accepts all his things: as though he deserves it.
Hengist and their son Michael bring Kiriko so much theoretical joy that she has trouble comprehending it. Hard to comprehend too the gulf between that theoretical joy and the quotidian realities of laundry and cookery magazines and occasional lovemaking.
The pizza’s gone cold by the time their teenage son Michael arrives home, when the sun is only a smoldering last light over the neat grid of houses, tossing shadows and umber detail with the hint of something fantastical which fades all too quickly.
There’s a smell that follows Michael into their modest, simple home, an earthy smell that Kiriko feels she should be able to identify but cannot. Michael, at fifteen, has only just been offered the privilege of leaving the house on his own and has taken to it with a fervor. Always home by sundown, but not a single moment sooner, and with little to share - or rather, much to withhold from his mother.
He’s a beautiful young man and already so far gone from her. As he comes through the front door she calls out to him from the couch, but even she can hear the desperation slipping from beneath her tongue. The home cringes for her, damping out the last of the daylight. Michael is gone up the stairs without a response.
Hengist wields the remote: he turns up the television to quiet Kiriko’s loneliness, as if she can’t quiet it all on her own. She’ll take on another household chore, that of finding a drawer somewhere to store away herself. Fold the laundry, tuck away the tears, iron the trousers, press on a grin.
Upstairs, Michael’s door closes hard and his room begins to emit the sound of a garbage truck being crushed into a cube, though he opts to call this ‘music.’ Hengist gives her half a sideways look which is all he can muster.
“Yes,” Kiriko says. “I’ll speak to him.” She smoothes her skirt and rises. The sound of the stairs beneath her feet is smothered by the dueling men and their dueling loud interests. Kiriko can’t be heard at all. She knocks lightly on Michael’s door and then louder to be heard over the crashing guitars and the reckless drums of some horde of angry men. They all sound the same to her.
Michael only cracks the door. “What,” he says. Challenge, not question.
Kiriko sees nothing of herself in her son. She recognizes neither of them. “Your father cannot hear the game,” she states softly.
Michael tosses his eyes like the tumble of the washing machine and closes the door.
The volume of the loud men increases. Blood swims behind her eyes. She finds herself wishing that the pizza man had bled inside these walls, that something of him might linger cracked and drying within the crevices of the door joints or adorn the crown molding.
Kiriko grins for no one in particular and then sets off to the computer room, smoothing her skirt once again to sit. The landline crackles and thrums with hostility, as if murmuring a warning. Finally she has a connection with the world.
She types in: Music Fun For Family. The search engine creaks and worries itself for a few seconds and then delivers what she seeks, a community announcement posted on the town’s public bulletin-board:
WONDER KARAOKE CLUB!
Fun-der-land for all the family
Want to Sing and Make Friends with enjoyable fun times?
Meeting in the Lounge Bar of this town’s Holderlin Hotel every Friday
Our musicfun starts at 7pm and never ever stops!
After she parks her Datsun in the lot of the Holderlin Hotel, Kiriko has a wobble or two of fluttering doubt. She’d tried to persuade Hengist to come along, to suggest to Michael that Friday night spent singing in a group might be better than Friday night spent listening to noise and watching people being cut in half on VHS tapes. The victims’ screams were enough at last to drive her out of the house. She hopes at least that they are actually horror films, and not the real thing they sound so much like.
Although she’s made a soft determination to go along to the karaoke night at the Holderlin, it hasn’t hardened into a commitment until she looks up into the night sky and sees the glimmer of the first star of evening.
Starlight, starbright, first star I see tonight… something something. She’d never fully learned that lullaby or whatever you call it. When she was a little girl her mother tried to teach it to her, along with whatever shreds of English she still remembered, but she hadn’t known this rhyme either. That chain had been broken somewhere.
Now the first star of night guides her steps across the lot and into the hotel lobby. The tinkle-tankle of muzak Joni Mitchell is playing on hidden speakers, and the reception desk is uncrewed. To the right there’s a sign pointing to the Lounge Bar with a little hand-drawn poster, spangled cut-out colored-paper shooting stars and glitter.
FUN NIGHT OF KARAOKE BLISS
Come sing with us tonite and evry Friday night forrever!
The bar is soaked in whisky light, the air thick and vaguely smoky though she doesn’t see anything lit. There are folding chairs arranged AA style around a barely raised platform where a projector hanging from the ceiling is just warming up for the night. The chairs are unoccupied and a group of a half-dozen people is convening by the crude and decrepit-looking karaoke machine.
A large man is toggling with something or the other on its face while the others talk and nod and share concealed smiles over frothy beer. Besides them, there is the bartender leaning tiredly on the counter with earplugs nestled in his earholes.
Kiriko clasps her hands across her stomach and swallows. If only Hengist were here. He always knows how to approach a new group, even if he maybe is off putting in his insistence upon belonging wherever he steps foot. At least he knows how to start. Michael, too, in his quiet and reclusive demeanor practically beckons social attraction if only for his youth and unkempt, tousle-worthy hair. Kiriko on her own feels invisible. Or ignorable. A dust mote drifting by in the stale air.
The man fiddling with the karaoke machine turns then, and his eyes fall right on Kiriko as though he’d been awaiting her arrival. In those eyes, across the hazy, dimly-lit space, Kiriko exhales. A sense of safety fills the new space in her lungs. The man waves her over and the whole group turns to receive this small woman with soft sedated grins and hands tucked into deep denim pockets.
“Welcome,” three of the five speak at the same time and in the same tone. Such precision of synchronicity, as though they’d had a rehearsal session but not everyone could make it.
The large man stretches a thick arm across the divide of space and envelops her hand in his. “My name is Bryan. I am president and chief operating officer of the Wonder Karaoke Club. Won’t you stay awhile?”
He never asks her name. He grins wide so his cheeks swell into handsome apples and Kiriko finds herself nodding politely, then enthusiastically under the insistence of his tender gaze. “Yes,” she says. “I will.”
They babble and bubble through a selection of the classics while she sits and sips a Seven-Up. You Are My Sunshine. Love Me Tender. Anarchy in the UK. It’s all quite delightful. Like being in school on a rainy afternoon when her friends entertained themselves with saucy poems and pop hits from the radio.
Bryan sits beside her and as each one of the singers steps up to take the mic he introduces them to her in a soft whisper: Renata Holm, Justin MacIlvanney, Roz Rescinda, “Stumpy” Jom Wissenfeld, who lost a finger or three while handling explosives in the army. As a retiree called Elder Barber takes the mic to belt out New York New York, Bryan takes her hand.
There’s nothing weird in it, nothing untoward. He’s just showing their connection and it’s as natural as the boots on her feet. She feels that touch like nothing she’s felt in all the last weeks and months, not even those mornings when Hengist nuzzles up to her in the gray light of dawn with his soured furnace breath.
Bryan’s love is universal and electric: He’s not making a play. He’s just sharing what he is. With her, with Renata, with Stumpy Jom, with all the others. She’s just been brought inside that circle of love and she feels it like a soft scarf wrapped tight around her neck.
“Let me get you another Seven-Up,” says Bryan as Elder Barber leaves it up to you, New York, New York, and all the gang applaud and hoot and the disco ball sparkles blue and radiant green above them.
“Have you thought about what you’d like to sing?” Bryan asks.
There isn’t even any doubt. Kiriko will sing, and she will sing her Kiriko the Klown song from so long ago. Bryan checks for her in the plastic laminate catalog they bring along with the Karaoke machine. Of course they have it. It’s listed as Kabaret Klassik, #286.
She steps up with no self-consciousness at all, bringing with her Bryan’s gift of confidence and joy. She cradles the microphone to her face, a cherished child, and she sings just like she sang it at her eighth birthday party, that time all her uncles and aunts held her tight when she cried.
Blue canary, she feels so blue She cries and sighs, she waits for you Blue canary, the whole day long She cries and tries to sing a song
Birds chirp and chitter on the soundtrack and she isn’t even there in that room any more. She’s closed her eyes and she’s in a grove in a magic forest, a–what are they called?--a glade. She’s a chirpy-cheep-cheep and her song is so happy and she is ready to take wing and fly away into the big blue sky with her friends, who are all become birdies like her.
Blue canary, don't feel so blue For I know just what to do It won't take too long to sing this song And then fly home with you
The canary is blue, which means he’s sad. But she’s not sad. She’s glad. She’s full of the tweet-tweet-tweet of the canary’s heartsong. My heart is a little songbird and can fly so high into the highest treetops.
Now her eyes open and she finds she’s swaying gently and smiling wide as she sings. Has she ever smiled while singing? Not that she can remember. Her eyes graze over the smilers sitting before her, and fix themselves on Bryan’s eyes. He sees into her soul, and she sees into his.
When it’s over, they all come together in a huddle and hug her, as she knew somehow they would. They say how much they loved her singing, how it moved them, and in fact she can see tears welling in the eyes of Roz Rescinda. His eyes? Her eyes? How do you say?
It’s very much unlike how it went down on the afternoon of her eighth birthday. That day did not go well.
“Blue Canary” sung by Frank Chickens (1987)
She arrives home later than she’d intended and slightly more tipsy behind the wheel than she would ever have expected herself to allow. The risk is a thrill.
Hengist is on the couch with a beer bottle in hand, nestled phallically between his beflanneled thighs. Kiriko surprises herself once more by draping her arms over him from behind and kissing the rough, porous skin on his cheek, and she lingers there. The moment hangs in the present like a garland of possibility saying Welcome Home.
In the parking lot outside the bar, Bryan had kissed her on the cheek as well with a hand on her elbow, thumb tucked into the fold of her arm, and he’d said lightly to her ear, “You are welcome here, Kiriko. And your family too. We’d like to have all of you with us.” And when he’d bitten her earlobe as casually as he might pop a grape into his mouth, she’d only blinked over his shoulder where the rest of the group watched and smiled.
Hengist by comparison only pats her wrist semi-affectionately and shies away from the kiss after a moment. She’s never noticed how small his hands are.
“Have fun?” he asks without turning to her.
“It was…elation,” she says, looking hard at her husband’s profile. “You have to come next time. You have to.”
“Sure, hon.” One last squeeze of her wrist and she is urged away.
Upstairs, she knocks on Michael’s door and enters without waiting for a response. She’d wanted to sweep in and wrap him up in a hug he would not be able to fight but his window is thrown wide open, the cold evening breeze stirring the listless wrappers and densely scribbled pages on his desk into a flutter and Michael is not there.
Kiriko closes the window and sits at her son’s desk, the seat of the old chair worn down into the shape of his bony teenage ass. The pages all across the desk are loose and nonsensical. Hasty drawings in thick black ink: nuclear warheads stamped with the visage of some anime bimbo girl with big pigtails defying physics; men fellating one another under the archway stiletto of a big-breasted woman; a head ripped open with the neck of a guitar rising through the torn hole. Snatches of legible writing amongst the chicken scratch: the rupture of the night; blood in the drinking water; severed cocks; The Pentagon burning to the sound of the organ’s droning.
Kiriko can’t make heads or tails of it but she understands that it is happening in her home and she is to blame. It is a failure she must approach and defy. She will not let her family slip away from her. She will not be passive. She must bring the two of them to karaoke. By any and all means.
“Say after me: I'm not my sadsack past self with its whiny me-me needs, that poor grumbler stewing in drama.”
The attendees repeat Bryan’s words in a joyous unified chant, perched on the edges of their foldaway chairs. Bare plaster walls, hung with motivating posters of kittens hanging on branches and sunrises on mountain pastures, resonate with their vibrant enthusiasm, sound washing off tinny and clangorous.
“I’m just me! The glee-me who shares love and fellowship in song!”
They chorus their me-ness as one. Kiriko wonders if Hengist and Michael can hear from their shared bedroom above the meeting hall. Maybe they’ll come down when the music starts and have some fun with them all.
“I’m just trying to chase my blues away, in any way I can!”
I’M JUST TRYING TO CHASE MY BLUES AWAY, IN ANY WAY I CAN!
Kiriko persuaded her menfolk to come along with her on the Sing-Song Wonder Weekend. Bryan had offered for them to attend free of charge. But it had been a struggle to get them to The Budget Dry Falls Travel Lodge, and for some reason the induction that morning hadn’t gone so smoothly.
Puzzling obstructions filled the air as Bryan moved to embrace both Hengist and Michael. Hengist had flinched, but finally submitted to Bryan’s warm bearhug. But Michael had batted him back and retreated to the corner of the room. An embarrassing scene, put down by the adults to adolescent awkwardness.
Now Hengist has chosen to stay above with Michael, who complains of a migraine. He’s talking about driving the lad back home. The disappointment makes her throat catch and tears start into her eyes. Couldn't they all be friends like she wanted?
But she puts that out of her mind as they all stand now, folding back their chairs, and form a song-circle. The room is equipped with an old Wurlitzer organ, and Stumpy Jom takes a seat to play it. For all his missing fingers he is deft and tuneful.
Roz Rescinda goes around the group garlanding everyone with blue crepe-paper Hawaiian leis that he… that she?... that Roz has made all by themself. Now Roz sits at the electric steel Hawaiian guitar that’s been set up next to the electric organ and together Jom and Roz play the welcome tune.
The two dozen attendees have memorized the words and they all sing along:
You were wearing a blue lei The day that I first met you As we wandered on the sand By the blue, blue sea With not a cloud in the sky to distress us Not a care had you or I to suppress us...
“Blue Lei” by Roal Hawaii Singers
The blues slip away into the bending steel chords of the imagined Hawaiian sunshine and the warm sands of the beach Kiriko feels now to be engulfing her. Her friends are here–what need of the stupid men who doubt and cavil when presented with the opportunity to experience love and fellowship? Why bother with Hengist and Michael anyway?
Fuck them! she says out loud—or does she?—and her friends beam at her as they all sing together of that Honolulu day in May when you wore a blue blue lei.
After the group performances come a rousing round of solos, an enchanting series of jubilant jaunts that brings the whole room to its feet, bobbing heads and hollow hands clapping offbeat. The balls of Kiriko’s cheeks nearly swell to bursting from the neverending grin which swallows all the worry she could ever possibly possess. Still, when the long day is winding down she finds herself eager to check on her boys whose silence has brought her almost to worrying, and yet Bryan keeps her close and with every meager attempt to slip away, he drops his tremorous voice into song and she finds herself uninterested in moving. Who would want to run from the magic of music?
It’s only when Bryan is wrangled away with a sidelong look from Stumpy Jom that the worry truly and tangibly wells up and she uses the moment to slip away and upstairs.
She thinks at first that the door to the room is locked but when she pushes in with her shoulder, it appears blocked by something on the other side which she is able to move only with the full force of her body, heels digging into the hallway’s carpet. Beneath her feet already is more singing, setting the floor itself aquiver. That music, even muffled, sedates some of her worry.
When the doorway is clear, the heavy safe that had been blocking it pushed aside, she steps in and finds Hengist sitting politely on the edge of the bed staring blankly at the boxy television which is turned off, not even the warm fuzz of static lingering on its screen. His eyes are wide and dry as though he hasn’t blinked in a long while. The window is open and Michael is nowhere to be found.
“Hengy?” Kiriko queries.
His unremarkable frame is unmoving.
She crouches slightly to meet his gaze which is peering directly through her, the veins of his iris all wiry and bright red. Finally, she places a hand on his shoulder and he shudders back to life.
“Darling,” he says, dry as Thanksgiving turkey.
“Where is Mikey?” Kiriko asks. “Where were you?”
Hengist stands suddenly and closes the window. “He’s gone for a walk. I was resting.”
“Why did you block the door?”
He turns his boring face then to the safe pushed against the wall and repeats, “I was resting. For the days ahead.” His lips curl into a thin, porcelain smile. “Your singing was beautiful, honey. I heard you all around. I heard the earthly triumph. The future is ours.”
Beneath the carpeted floors, all has gone quiet. Hengist blinks and periscopes his big head all around the room as if just arriving. He says, “Where is Michael?”
For the continuation of the story click here…
And don’t forget to sing along with APM & JW’s Krazy 90s Karaoke!
Blue canary, she feels so blue.
She cries and sighs, she waits for you.
Blue canary, the whole day long
She cries and tries to sing a song.
Boy canary will sing a tango,
He will sing a sweet lullaby.
He will try to chase your blues away
So please sweetheart, don't cry!
Blue canary, don't feel so blue
For I know just what to do:
It won't take too long to sing this song
And then fly home with you!
Blue blue blue canary -
Tweet tweet tweet - the whole day long
She cries and sighs and tries
To - tweet tweet tweet - to sing a song...
A lullaby in itself.
Incantatory as it thins and thickens towards the end, trickling into a dreamlike harmonious rhythmic haze.
I have my thoughts, but will have to wait until the end to see if my hunch matches.
Beautiful and a little tragic.