The Sound of a Name |
Issue 19
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The taxi smelled of pine air freshener and yesterday’s cigarettes—that peculiar combination of artificial forest and human resignation that seems to define every cab in New York. I was coming back from my friends’ place on Tenth Street, where we’d spent another evening pretending that our lives were going somewhere, when her voice came through the radio.
“Voyage, voyage.” The driver, a heavyset man from Odessa with a plastic saint dangling from his dashboard, tapped his thick fingers against the steering wheel. “Canadian girl. My daughter listens. Very serious for her age.” I asked him to turn it up. She had the kind of voice that made you remember things you hadn’t thought about in twenty years—the kind that belonged to someone who had already left before you arrived, who existed in a different time zone of the heart. I was still sleeping on a mattress on the floor, the kind with springs that had given up, like everything else in my life. My wife had been gone six months, and the apartment still smelled faintly of her perfume, a ghost that refused to leave. The translations weren’t coming through—the publishers in Boston had stopped returning my calls, and the money I’d been promised had evaporated like morning fog over the East River. I spent my days at the 108th Street market, watching the women argue about the freshness of fish, and my nights trying to write something that didn’t sound like a man drowning in his own regrets. Her name, the driver said, was Charlotte Cardin. I wrote it on a napkin—the only piece of paper I could find in the pockets of my worn-out coat. Cardin. Like the designer. Like something expensive you couldn’t afford. I folded the napkin carefully, as if it were a letter from someone I’d been waiting for my whole life. That night I played the song on my phone, the old one with the cracked screen, which my daughter had given me before she stopped calling. She sang about love like it was a room she couldn’t find her way out of, a space with too many doors and no windows. She sang about Montréal like it was a city built on top of another city, like there were still old streets underneath the new ones, cobblestones that remembered the horses, the carriages, the footsteps of people who had loved and lost long before we were born. I started to imagine her. The way you do when you’re lonely and the world has become a series of closed doors. Dark hair, maybe, or red—the kind of red that catches the light in a certain way and makes men want to be good or, at the very least, less bad. She was thirty-one—or so the driver had said. Young enough to still believe in the future, old enough to have been disappointed a few times. A voice that had been through something but hadn’t let it destroy her. For a week, I listened to nothing else. I walked down the street with her in my ears, and suddenly the street was less mean. The bodega owner, Pedro, a man from the Dominican Republic who had been in New York longer than I had, asked me why I was smiling. I told him it was the music. He gave me a free orange, the kind with the thick skin that you have to work to get into. Then, on a Tuesday, I heard an interview with her on some podcast that my neighbor, a graduate student in comparative literature, had recommended. She was smart. Not the kind of smart that comes from reading too many books, but the kind that comes from watching closely, from paying attention. She talked about loneliness as a kind of instrument. “You learn to play it,” she said, “even if you don’t want to. It’s a skill, like any other. The question is whether you can make it sound beautiful.” I never met her. I never even tried to find out where she was playing next. But she became, for me, something like the memory of a woman I had once known, or maybe invented. A woman who wore the same coat in the winter and never complained about the cold. A woman who spoke with an accent that made you feel like you were speaking your own language for the first time—that the words you’d been using all your life had been waiting for this voice to make them sound true. In the hospital, when they gave me the news—the kind of news you get when you’re alone and the doctor’s face has that particular look of professional pity—I asked the nurse if she knew any Canadian music. She looked at me as if I were already gone, as if I were speaking from a place where music was just another thing that had stopped making sense. But she said yes. She said she listened to it in the car on the way to work, over the bridge and through the tunnel, through the city that was always trying to swallow her up. She said it helped her remember that there was still somewhere else, somewhere quieter. Somewhere worth going to. She left the room. The blinds hadn’t moved in days. This is what I remember now, in this room where the light comes through the blinds at a particular angle that tells me it’s almost evening: the taxi, the pine air freshener, the sound of a woman who understood that the heart is just a muscle that sometimes keeps time to songs it cannot explain. She is still there, on a stage somewhere, singing to strangers. And I am still here, in this room, writing this down, trying to make something out of the small details, the small moments that add up to a life. We are all looking for a voice that sounds like home. For some of us, it’s the voice of a woman who will never know our names. For others, it’s the voice of a city, a place, a memory we carry with us like a folded napkin in a worn-out coat. For me, it was both—the sound of a name that meant nothing and everything, a song that played at the exact moment I needed to hear it, a reminder that the world is still full of voices worth listening to. I never met her. I never sent her a letter or tried to find her on the internet. But she became, for me, a kind of companion in the long nights when the only sound was the radiator and the faraway traffic and the slow, steady beating of my own heart. She became the voice I heard when I couldn’t hear my own. That was enough. That was everything. |
Barys Paulau is a writer whose work explores the quiet intersections of memory, loss, and the search for meaning in ordinary life. He holds an MA in Cultural Studies. His fiction has appeared in iExile. He is currently at work on a collection of short stories.
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