Read Online A Thousand Miles from Nowhere by John Gregory Brown - Free Book Online Page A

shown him the routes that music took as it spread through the centuries from one continent to another, from one region to the next, from city to city and town to town, transforming each time into something new that nevertheless contained vestiges of what it had once been. Henry had been too young—he had always been too young—to really follow what he was saying, to even care enough to try to understand. But he did understand, when his father spoke, that this subject mattered to him more than anything else in the world. It mattered in a way that was unsettling, even frightening, to Henry, as if his father were a swimmer kept afloat in the ocean not by his body’s natural buoyancy or by the careful movement of his arms and legs but by something much more mysterious and terrifying—something just like the painting he’d once seen that depicted beautiful Sirens perched on jagged rocks, sharks and stingrays and other deadly fish swirling around them, the Sirens calling out in strange, piercing cries that Henry imagined he could hear just from the way the Sirens were drawn, their heads thrown back, their mouths wide open.
    “Music speaks what otherwise cannot be spoken,” his father liked to declare when someone asked him why he studied what he did. “Each melody, each song, is like a dream,” he’d say, and though Henry knew his father was just speaking the way professors spoke, he somehow also sensed that there was desperation as well as comfort in this pronouncement.
    Yes, Henry understood that songs were like dreams—even though throughout his childhood, throughout his whole life, in fact, up until his father’s ghost appeared at the foot of his bed, Henry didn’t dream.
    Everyone, of course, insisted that Henry did dream, that he simply didn’t remember these dreams. Amy had told him that he was lucky. She’d often felt besieged by her dreams, which were so astonishingly vivid, so rich with detail, that Henry once joked that she spent more time recounting them than she’d spent sleeping.
    What Amy could not do, though—and what Henry, oddly enough, did quite well—was interpret these dreams. Henry seemed to unravel their mysteries with such effortless confidence that Amy would not, even when Henry begged her to, stop telling him every detail. She did not understand that his skill was simply the result of his having loved her, of having watched her so closely for so many years, of sensing that her life was somehow decidedly more real than his own, as if her every footstep left a permanent mark while his were far too ephemeral to leave even the slightest trace. He remembered everything Amy had ever told him about her life—the boys and books and college classes and pets she had adored, the places she and her brother had visited with their globe-trotting parents, all of them floating down the Nile on a wooden raft, riding leathery, mud-caked elephants in India, climbing the trash-strewn path to Machu Picchu, sailing to England on the QE2, kneeling in a bamboo cage above the scorpion-infested floor of a Buddhist temple on an island in the East China Sea. He remembered every meal she had cooked, every outfit she had worn, every present she had given him. He was certain he could remember, if he tried, every time they’d had sex—or not remember, exactly, because he did not need to remember, his body imprinted with her touch. Amy was so calm and rational in her commerce with the world that he had been shocked and embarrassed by how imaginative and daring and vocal she became in bed, her hair unleashed from the complicated knot into which she wound it each morning, like the demure librarian who, in the final pages of a romance novel, abandons her painfully prim demeanor and whispers Take me now into her hero’s ear. Henry, though, was the one who always felt taken.
    He hated his silence, his inability to announce his own desire, to tell her what he wanted to do to her, what he wanted done. With his high-school