Chapter Text
I started to hear the invisible musician when I was six years old.
“Dana, can you turn off the radio?”
“The radio isn’t on, honey.”
“What’s that music, then?”
“Maybe you’re hearing the neighbors. Focus on your homework, m’kay?”
I didn’t like to focus on my homework. It was repetitive and too easy, and after a few minutes, the words on the page would slide off my brain like bars of soap. I snuck a copy of The Lord of the Rings into class and read it while my teacher was busy controlling the trouble kids. I read it during recess, too, when everyone else was playing with their friends. I liked the languages of Middle-Earth: Elvish, Quenya, Sindarin. I thought how nice it would be to speak a language all my own.
I started to play a game with the invisible musician. I would say a word, and he would respond. “One.” ♫♪ “Two.” ♪♪ He spoke in notes, not letters, so I invented a new alphabet to write them down. I kept a dictionary in the back of my diary and hummed private words to myself on the walk home. Sometimes the invisible musician hummed back.
Dana and Bob’s house was in Bernal Heights. It had a tiny, weedy backyard, blanketed in the white noise of the nearby highway. I liked to walk around back there and turn over bricks, looking for bugs. If I found a roly-poly, I would make a little house for it out of leaves and sticks. The roly-poly always left the house eventually, but at least I got to have it for a little while. And the invisible musician kept me company. We talked, sometimes, now that the dictionary had grown long enough for me to understand his music.
One day, I asked him what he looked like.
I not look like you. I have five arm.
“Oh, like a starfish?”
New word, question?
“Oh!” This was my favorite part of having an imaginary friend. I could tell him about all the cool things I’d learned. The invisible musician didn’t seem to know much about the world, maybe because he had spent so much time learning to play music. “Starfish live in the sea. They have ra-di-al sym-me-try. That means they’re the same all around. They have five arms and their mouth is in the middle, on their belly.”
Amaze! This very similar to ♬♪♬♫♪!
“What does the last word mean?”
Is name me species.
“Do you live under the ocean?”
No. No no no. Live on land.
“Which land?”
♬♫♪.
“Is that a country?”
Is name me planet.
“Oh!” I jumped up and clapped my hands. “You’re an alien!”
But I not green, not slimy. Not like alien cartoon.
“That’s okay, you can still be an alien!” I reassured him. “...If you’re not green or slimy, what’s your skin like?”
Not know skin color. But skin similar… hmm. Earth rock. Hard. Many flat sides.
“Wow. That’s really cool. I wish I had skin like Earth rocks. Then I could be strong and no one could hurt me.”
The invisible musician sang louder. Do not worry. I will not let any thing any person hurt you.
“Oh. Okay.” I dug around in the dirt until I found a chunky brown rock. “Can I call you Rocky?”
Yes. What I call you?
I thought a bit. “Everyone calls me Ryland, but… I don’t like it.”
Why not?
“I don’t know. It’s a boy’s name.”
You not boy, question? Before you tell me you boy.
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. You can call me Grace.”
What this name mean, question?
That stumped me. “Hmm… I don’t know. I think it is a word… But I only know it from the song.” I began to sing. “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me…”
Pretty pretty pretty! Rocky repeated the melody that I had used for the words “amazing grace.” It was faster than I had sung it—the length of a name. You like this name, question?
The melody started low, twirled in the middle, and ended high. It brought a tight feeling to my chest, but not a scared feeling. “I love it.”
And from then on, like a stupid kid, I trusted him.
It was second grade, and Dana told me she was concerned that I wasn’t making more friends.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I have a friend. His name is Rocky.”
As soon as the words left my mouth, I realized that I wasn’t actually sure if Rocky was my friend. I hoped, if he was listening, that he wouldn’t be offended over my assumption.
“Is Rocky a friend at school?” Dana asked.
“No, he’s an alien.”
“Oh, I see. Well, I’m glad you’re friends with Rocky, but it’s important to have friends that aren’t aliens, m’kay?”
I wasn’t convinced. I went out into the backyard to look for bugs and talk to Rocky. I called his name, and he greeted me. Hello, soft-shelled one.
He’d started calling me that, as a sort of nickname, ever since I told him what humans looked like. I was pretty sure it was a nice kind of nickname, not a mean one.
“Have question,” I said, as I paced along the stone planter that ran along one side of the yard. I held a stick in one hand and let it trail along the planter. It made a satisfying thwapping sound as it hit each outcropping stone.
Ask ask ask.
“Are you my friend?”
There was a brief silence, during which a hole was drilled through the Earth, and my stomach dropped out of my body and fell through the hole, and then dropped back toward me because of gravity, and then oscillated back and forth, losing momentum to air resistance, until it came to a stop at the center of the Earth and melted. This was something that I had read about in my What If? book, but I had never experienced it before. Not until I considered the possibility that Rocky wasn't my friend.
Then Rocky’s voice came back. Of course Grace is Rocky friend. Stupid question, statement.
Thwap! My stomach unmelted and flew back into my belly. “You mean it?”
Yes yes yes. Grace is funny, kind, curious, brave, smart. Make many houses for roly-poly insects. Learn Rocky language and give Rocky name. Tell Rocky everything about interesting books.
I sat down hard in the dirt and tilted my head back to watch the clouds inch across the blue, blue sky. “I wanna be your friend too, Rocky.” I didn’t even care that he said my question was stupid. I was glad it was a stupid question. That meant the answer was easy.
Happy happy happy.
“But Dana says I need friends who aren’t aliens.” I used my stick to trace a circle in the dirt. “Do you have any friends that aren’t aliens?”
There was a longer silence this time. When Rocky spoke again, his voice was so much lower that it was hard to understand. Rocky not have other friends.
“Why not?”
Another pause. My planet in trouble. My species send spaceship to visit other star. I go on spaceship. I leave my friends.
“You not have friends on you spaceship, question?” Sometimes I talked like Rocky. It made it feel like I was closer to him, even though I knew that he was very far away.
…Yes. Before. They… died. I not know why.
“Oh.” I pulled my knees to my chest and looked down at my shoes. They were pink. Dana let me buy pick them out at the store for my seventh birthday. I’d never gotten to pick out my own shoes before. When we got home, she and Bob got into a fight about it. They decided I wasn’t allowed to wear the shoes to school, because they were afraid other kids would be mean about them being pink. So I wore them in the yard.
Your friends died also, question?
“No. I mean… My parents are dead. I guess they were kind of my friends. But they weren’t as nice as you.”
Bad bad bad.
“It’s okay.”
Happy Rocky not alone.
Tears welled up in my eyes. I wiped them away quickly, even though I was pretty sure Rocky couldn’t see.
I started having nightmares. In my dream, I walked through a big, empty spaceship full of dead bodies. Sometimes the dead bodies were shaped like Rocky. Sometimes they were shaped like my parents, or Dana and Bob, or my first-grade teacher who always let me sit inside during recess. But the spaceship was always the same: strange, complex and angular, painted in tones of black and gray. Ghostly voices echoed through it like the tell-tale ocean in a sea shell.
After a few months of this, Dana took me to see a therapist. She had big, curly hair and big, curly earrings that tinkled when she tilted her head. She tilted her head a lot.
She asked me a lot of questions about myself, which was nice. I told her I wanted to become an astronaut when I grew up, so I could go save Rocky. She asked me what Rocky looked like. With reverence, I took out the small, brown rock that I kept in my pocket and showed it to her. She asked me to draw where Rocky was now. I sat a long time, thinking about it.
I drew a house in the center of the paper. Then I drew a circle around it, and a stick-figure on the edge of the circle, like a planet in an orbit. Then I drew a bigger circle around both, with Rocky on top of that.
“Look,” I said, pointing to the house. “That’s the center of the galaxy.” I pointed to me. “That’s me, in my solar system.” I pointed to Rocky. “That’s Rocky, in his solar system.”
When Dana came to pick me up, she pointed at the picture I’d made. “Nice spiral.”
“It’s not a spiral,” I said. “It’s circles. They’re concentric.”
“‘Concentric,’” she said, laughing. “That’s a big word. Concentric, spiral, it’s the same thing, isn’t it?”
It wasn’t the same thing, I thought to myself, as I looked out the car window at the starless city sky. Concentric circles could never touch.