If You Weren’t You
TOM ROTH
Nate slipped the camera on his hand and rode his bike to the water tower. The other houses looked similar to the duplex he and his mother had just moved into: one-story, no space between the yards, no dogs. A spot in the neighborhood where people were only temporary, just waiting around for a better place. For people like you. He took long, slow shots of the road. A rent sign. Weedy yards. The parking lot and the apartment complex.
The water tower stood on a hill above his neighborhood. The only hill around here, the land so flat and unchanging. Easy for biking, he thought, except there’s nowhere high up. He was used to hills, rowhouses, so many bridges and so many high-up sights of the city. He liked finding a good view after a ride. So he decided on the water tower.
When he got there, he stepped through the hole in the fence. He’d been here before (he had used bolt cutters on the fence), but he had only walked to the foot of the tower. It was white and old, a little rust on the beams and tank, and it was so quiet he thought it might be empty, he heard no hum of machinery, no rush of water, nothing. He shot the fence and the gravel, and he caught the brutal glare of the sun peering just behind the head of the tower. Wow, a water tower, fucking awesome! He pushed away that other side of his mind’s voice and wondered about the last person to come here, how long it had been, who it was, why. The thought made the whole place look forgotten as he stood there alone, the grass brown and dry, already dead.
No lock on the hatch to the ladder. He slung the camera over his neck, climbed up, and soon he was sweating, his palms very wet around the rungs. The squeak of his shoes and the slightest creak forced him to stop. Too far up to go back, he thought. His feet shook and his chest brimmed with fear and thrill, but he kept his nerves and focused only on his hands. He smelled rust and steel.
At the top, he sat in the shade of the tank and caught his breath and filmed. Shapeless clouds hung in the sky. There were taller, nicer houses just past his side of the neighborhood. Farther in the distance, a shopping center rose against the horizon, a grand shrine of consumerism. A view of nothing, he thought. Just suburbs. You’re not as special as you think. He was waiting for something else to appear beyond the nothing-paradise. Something from home—a bridge, a river, a funicular riding up a green mount.
Still recording, he filmed the rusted beams of the tank and the ground. A close-up of the hole in the fence. A long shot of the railroad on the other side of the tower. Slowly, he panned the camera and followed the length of the railroad that led near the power grid and then the nicer houses. He stopped and sat there with his feet dangling over the edge, hoping for a train. He hadn’t seen or heard one yet, and the railroad looked out of place so close to the better-looking homes, the horn and rumble of a train sounded more fit for a smaller and simpler town, where his camera might find something distinct to depict. Except for the distant rush of a car or the song of a bird or the chorus of cicadas, there was almost no sound. He kept still and waited, wished for trains and faces, then just anything at all that might make him want to watch what he had on his camera. His face took on the clenched restraint of his mother’s, the unbreakable reserve he had learned from her. He waited so long he felt out of himself. His eyes followed the railroad the other way, toward the flat stretch of woods, and he imagined the tracks led east where the land would rise into hills. When he finally broke out of the grip, he shut his eyes and let out a long slow breath and looked again.
If this was a movie, right now he’d find someone else behind the fence coming to the water tank to kill away the boredom of summer, like him, and he’d zoom in on their face until they’d look up and shout what the hell he was doing up there. Nothing, he thought. If this was a movie, something big was about to happen. He’d find a dead body, meet a pretty girl, or maybe jump. He imagined that last one—leaping, camera in hand, the earth suddenly close. What a scene. Did you hear about that new kid on the water tank? It’d wake this place up, he thought. It’d change everything. It’d be something.
At fourteen, he was already having trouble getting along with himself, and being alone didn’t help. A bike ride or a walk could keep loneliness away, could silence that other side of him. The second he entered the duplex, loneliness landed on his shoulders again, a sick blackbird, feathers brushing his neck. There was the kitchen, the living room, and the short hall to the beds. The window blinds left lifeless bars of light and shadow on the walls and floors. He’d be the only thing in motion until his mother returned from her job at a retail store. He seemed in the center of an odd stillness he couldn’t break on his own, a stillness so dense it made him afraid of the next moment, the next thing he’d do with no one else there.
None of this shit matters. To anyone. What are you supposed to do when there’s nothing or no one else around? He knew part of what he thought sounded foolish, even irrational. Yet it was what he had felt ever since he and his mother moved, and it seemed it wasn’t going away, a second shadow following him.
He sat at the bar that separated the kitchen from the living room. The landline telephone was on the counter. His father might be home right now. He pictured him in the apartment in Pittsburgh, still asleep. His dad worked nights at a hospital taking out trash bags and mopping floors. Nate picked up the phone and dialed his number anyway.
“Hello.” It was not his dad, but Gregg. “Hello,” Gregg said again.
Nate didn’t hang up. He held the phone, said nothing.
“Someone there?”
Gregg hung up. Nate listened to the dial tone. He couldn’t see a clear view of Gregg’s face, only the glasses. He had met him once. Six weeks ago, he was sitting on a couch in Pittsburgh. Everyone else—his mom, dad, and Gregg—stood around him. His father introduced him to Gregg and he shook the man’s hand and then his father gave him his birthday present, the camcorder. He had just turned fourteen.
The memory of meeting his father’s lover still shocked him. He met a new reflection of his life in the mirror, he imagined the other kind of life his father had led in secret with Gregg. All the change happened so fast it broke his trust in others, it broke his faith in what he once believed in, and he felt abandoned, alone, gone from the world and people he had known.
His parents were never married. It was rare for his dad to spend more than one night, and if it occurred, Nate would crawl in bed and sleep between his parents when he was little. Nate felt a spark any time he met his dad’s eyes. His dad ignited creativity and muse and chance within him with just a look. He remembered the guitar his dad played, and some nights, he’d sit with him and learn parts of songs. He imagined growing his hair out and writing his own music like his dad had done. They never had much, but they had music, and music, Nate understood, was limitless.
Blues music called him to guitar. His ear found an early love for the sounds of the blues: the twangy licks and walkdown riffs, the swinging shuffles and the sprinkle of flat notes. The lyrics were simple and short, often repetitive, yet the voice of hurt and pain transported him, placed him in a story of the blues. His father told him the blues came out of the Deep South after slavery. Nate listened to songs from Robert Johnson and B.B. King, Lead Belly and Ma Rainey, Buddy Guy and Howlin’ Wolf. Without the blues, he learned, there was no rock and roll.
As Nate got older, he and his father spent less time together with the guitar. His father would take him out for sandwiches at a café and give him gifts and ask about his mom. His father cut his hair and looked less like a musician, his shirt tucked into his jeans, his spark now a flickering candle. It took him time to accept his dad. When he’d think of him with Gregg, he’d sometimes reduce and simplify his image to tighter clothes, effeminate gestures, maybe an earring. But none of that defined his dad, and he felt ashamed and guilty for how he saw him. He’s still your dad, he thought, and he’s still there for you. Those meals at the café had shown him his father hadn’t given up on him or his mom. He learned his dad was alone and he simply needed something else than what he’d had at first. His dad, in a way, was like someone in a blues song.
In August, just before the start of the school year, he and his mom visited the graves of his grandparents. The cemetery was behind a small church in a part of town where the box centers and strip districts had given way to what fields and farms and older neighborhoods were left of his mother’s childhood. During the car rides to his grandmother’s house, he’d see long sections of land plowed over, big yellow earthmovers, and men in hard hats starting new houses. His grandmother would be on the porch or out in the garden, a gray cat beside her, and she’d want to know when his mom was moving back to Glenwood. His grandfather died before he was born.
“We’re here now,” his mom said.
Her face gave him nothing, no tear, not the slightest twinge of sorrow. Clenched. He couldn’t think of a time when she looked shaken or overwhelmed. When he was with her, everything felt in place. Even now, in a new home without his father, she could restore some of his faith just by her unyielding silence. He wanted to thank her for that, but he hadn’t yet; he was unsure and not as confident as his mom. She touched the side of her face and brushed back her dark hair. No crack in her skin. A bright alacrity burning under the surface of her restraint. Maybe that was why she looked so clenched. She kept something clamped down, something she didn’t want him to see. Suddenly, he realized for the first time how young she looked, how people sometimes had mistaken them to be siblings. Other men would notice her calm look, her hair and height, and Nate would watch them watch her.
“Have you heard anything from Scott?” Nate asked.
His mom shook her head. Scott, his uncle, lived in town and helped his mother with money troubles, and that was as far as his uncle would go. Nate only met his uncle a handful of times at funerals or a rare appearance at his grandmother’s house. He never got the full story on why his mother and his uncle hated each other, only bits: his uncle’s selfish ego, his mother’s inability to fend for herself.
“Are you okay,” she asked him now, “with being here?”
Of course not. But you won’t say it, you won’t, you won’t, you won’t.
She had asked the same question during the trip here. They had just crossed the state border at sunrise. The Allegheny hills were falling away, flattening to tracts. He saw more fields than trees and he waited for a last green wave to break the red sore growing on the horizon. So much of the land had looked the same to him, just a long stretch of nothing, the lay of Ohio.
He didn’t give her the honest answer then. He almost told her how he felt on the water tower. It’s like I’m waiting for something to happen, he thought, instead of making it happen myself. Nothing is going to happen. He almost told her he wished she was home during the day so he could have someone there in the duplex. Like a film, the scene played out in his head, his face in tears, his mother taking his hand, a shot of the graves in the grass.
And there’s no going back now, not after what happened.
This time, he agreed with the other side of him. The shock of his father now had given way to shame. How would his friends back home think of his father, of him? What would they say to him? He wondered if that was why his mom decided to take him to Ohio—a way of protecting him with a fresh start somewhere else.
He said yes, then told her he was excited for school and ready to make friends. It was a nice day. Not too hot. Sunny and some wind. A plane flew across the clear sky.
“Will you promise me one thing?” she said. For a moment, it looked like she was going to let her guard down and break apart there beside him, standing over her parents’ graves. But her eyes kept still and collected, and she shook her head again. “Just don’t go leaving me.” She even grinned a little, like what she had just said wasn’t a big deal.
Nate knew something was wrong the second Mr. Frank hung up the phone and told his eighth-grade algebra class to quiet down. His teacher stood below the television in the front corner of the classroom and flipped through channels until he found a black tail of smoke rising out of New York City. Students erupted with questions and noise again. Mr. Frank repeated himself and tried to explain what he couldn’t when a second plane crashed into the World Trade Center and forced everyone in the room to watch in a silence that burned eyes and filled lungs and smoldered, for years, like a sky of smoke. Nate never forgot how his math teacher, a tall man in his fifties, brought both palms to his bearded cheeks and opened his mouth. He was staring at Mr. Frank’s face when someone tapped his shoulder.
“Nate, hey,” the kid whispered. “Aren’t you from New York?”
Nate was still learning names. Dominic, he thought. It was only the third week of school. The kid wore a white shell necklace, his hair was spiked up, and his shoes were very white. Rich, Nate thought.
“I’m from Pittsburgh,” Nate said.
“Oh, I thought you were,” Dominic said. “Because this is just—”
Nate turned around before Dominic could finish.
The sprawling campus of the school stood out among the strip centers and districts along the main road. He had never seen so many other students at once, walking down one hall or eating in the cafeteria. He had never seen so many kids hop into BMWs, Audis, and Cadillac SUVs instead of just taking the fucking bus. Don’t these people work? he thought. You don’t know shit. True, what did he really know in a new place? So he kept his head down and his mouth shut, tried not to stand out too much during the day.
His first few weeks of school had proven to him that people around here pretended like everyone had the same house, the same car, the same amount of money, and if you couldn’t blend in, then you were a subject of great interest and gossip and ridicule, because this place had nothing better to do than to play make-believe with their neighbors. Saying Pittsburgh out loud had made him miss his old school. He wasn’t forced to blend in as much while there. But once he had brought on his own ridicule when he thought of himself similar to the Black characters in “The Bourgeois Blues” by Lead Belly. Stupid. It was, in fact, stupid to think, he had learned when he tried explaining the song to his friends one day at lunch (back then you couldn’t just look up music on YouTube). “Dayyum whiiite folkx!” they laughed and cocked their heads and popped their collars and cupped their dicks, acting out their idea of being Black. It didn’t take long for them to start dropping slurs. What did it matter, though—everyone there at the table was white anyway, right? Fucking stupid. He didn’t want to do or say something stupid again, especially not here.
His mind returned to what was unfolding that day. The country was under attack. Parents quickly picked up their children after first bell. Nate stood in the hallway and watched his classmates pack their bags, group together in fear, or, like him, just stand there not knowing what to do. His next class was gym. He had a hard time seeing himself getting through the rest of the day, but he knew his mom wasn’t coming, so he started for the locker room. Then Dominic called his name.
“You’re not going to gym, are you?” Dominic asked.
Nate just waited, looking at him. After the first week of school, he likened Dominic to a chameleon or a lizard, an expert in blending, the kind of kid who flowed from clique to clique in a people-pleaser effort to stroke every existing ego in Glenwood Middle School. The epitome of suburbs, Nate thought. He couldn’t understand why anyone would want to play as much make-believe as Dominic. He didn’t trust him.
“Because my mom can take you home right now,” Dominic continued. “You live in our neighborhood, right? In fact, I’ve seen you on your bike. With that camera.”
His face began to burn. It’d be embarrassing if others in the school had seen him on his bike, recording. He wasn’t sure why, though. Easy target for bullies and corny nicknames, he thought. Hey Spielberg! But something else had confused him too. He had always assumed no one had seen him, so alone he might’ve been invisible, he might’ve been inside another world of his own design, just him and his camera and his bike, and for anything to wreck or dismiss that could kill what he was trying to make on-screen.
“I wouldn’t stay,” Dominic said. The crowds in the hallway lessened. Second bell was about to ring. “We can take you home right now.” It was funny hearing that. Home right now. He wondered if his dad was awake, if he knew about today, if Gregg was telling him to get up and to listen very carefully because something terrible had just happened.
“You coming?”
He thought he should’ve said no, because when he saw a truck in the driveway behind his mother’s Accord, he knew right away there was a man with her. If he had stayed at school, there’d be no truck, not even his mom’s car. Her shift didn’t start until noon.
They were eating omelets and drinking coffee at the bar between the kitchen and living room. The man beside her was well-built, clean-shaven, tough look in his eyes. He didn’t have a shirt, just sitting inboxers. His mom had on a very long shirt that reached past her thighs.
“What are you doing here?” she said. The man had rushed down the hall, mumbling “oh god,” and then he closed the door to his mother’s bedroom. “It’s a school day, Nathan.”
The calm in her faltered. Her stare couldn’t keep still and cool, shifting around his face. Something broke in her, something shook and loosed her calm. The moment felt cut off, interrupted, as if this scene had stopped the second he saw her face, the first time she looked afraid to him.
“Nathan?” she said.
He glanced at the eggs on their plates and the dead television in the living room. The only light came from the windows. He sensed a different stillness than what he had known, one that was shared between people, and he realized there was no sign of the day’s terror. The man came back dressed in jeans and a T-shirt.
“You don’t even know what’s going on right now,” Nate said.
“What do you mean?” she said.
His camcorder was on the coffee table in the living room. He grabbed the camera and the remote to the television.
“Nathan, what is it?” she said when he gave her the remote.
She was becoming someone else to him and he was unsure of who she’d be and it was scary to think that it only took a few moments to see another side of someone, and he began to fear what he’d be to her, but he sized up the man one more time and tried to keep his voice from shaking.
“You don’t watch a lot of news, do you?” he said to him.
The good thing was this—that car ride had given Nate a friend. He and Dominic shared a hobby of making short movies. After school, they’d bike around the neighborhood in search of a good place to film. Nate always wanted dialogue and narrative, action and conflict, while Dominic’s interests involved random stunts and dares and pranks on strangers. The differences in their visions often resulted in never finishing a full video. He put up with Dominic’s inane and childish ideas anyway. You’re no artist. But there was something different about Dominic than the rest of the school, something in him that Nate might trust, maybe how his face crystallized the second he held the camera, eyes and mouth set in focus, hands held still, a good touch and an eye for things. He needed a friend here, even if the one he was making right now felt more like a bad sidekick.
“I don’t get you sometimes,” Dominic said. “You went all the way up there just for this?”
They just finished a scene at the water tower. Nate had climbed the ladder despite Dominic’s fear of getting caught or hurt. Once he reached the top and Dominic chilled out, he told Dominic to lean on the fence and keep his back to the tower. Nate took a long shot of Glenwood before he focused on Dominic. The shadow of the tower had darkened his figure. Then he returned to his opening shot of the town and held it for a while. He thought it was good, and maybe he could put music to the scene.
“It shows a lot,” Nate said. “Without any action or talking.”
“What the hell’s it showing?”
“You’re in here and you’re looking out and everything else looks so nice,” Nate said. “It’s isolated and simple. A little lonely.”
They were standing outside the fence now.
“Lonely,” Dominic laughed. “You’re a faggot sometimes, you know that.”
“What?”
“I said you’re a faggot.”
“I heard what you said.”
“It’s a fucking joke.”
Dominic still held the camera, rewatching the video on the small side-screen.
“It’s a stupid joke,” Nate replied.
“You’re not actually a fag,” Dominic said. “Unless you really like sucking dick.”
Nate shoved him into the fence and held his neck.
“Say it one more time,” he said.
“Calm down,” Dominic said.
He tightened his grip, shoved him again, and took the camera. Dominic said his name, but Nate hopped on his bike and began pedaling toward the road. He was wrong about Dominic. “I was just kidding. I didn’t mean it.” He wondered what he would’ve looked like from the water tower. He tried seeing himself from that angle, but soon he thought of his dad and he pedaled harder.
Back at the duplex, he set the camcorder on the counter and sat down in the same seat the man had been in a month ago and stared at the telephone. The first time his mother ever brought another man around he had blamed his father for it. He’d dream up little movie scenes in his head of how he’d tell his dad he was a coward. They’d be out for lunch at the café and he’d hardly touch his food. Sometimes, he still wanted to say it, and he had even thought of using the same word Dominic had just used on him. He picked up the phone and then put it back down. He imagined how the call might’ve unfolded.
It’s going to be all right, his dad said, yet the voice came from his other side. Things will get better soon. Give it some time.
Time? he said back. It’s like all I do is wait and wait.
I never meant any harm. You’ve got to know I never wanted to put you through anything.
You don’t know what it’s like.
What what’s like?
To wait around all the time for something.
Just listen to me.
None of this would be happening if you weren’t you.
And the call might’ve ended there, his hand slamming the phone back down. Then he covered his ears and closed his eyes and breathed very deeply. It seemed he might drift out of himself and land in some other person he could be for a while before he had to face the stillness around him. It was almost in form, a new outline and script of his life, a second movie fading in. If you weren’t you, he thought, none of this would be happening.
Her perfume and her black dress told him she had a date that night. He was sitting on the couch with an acoustic guitar. He had just written the verse to his own blues riff, his first time writing lyrics.
Been lookin’ for a kind soul
I been lookin’ for a kind soul
Been lookin’ all over this town
Ain’t nothin’ but trouble
His mother met him in the living room.
“I’ll be back a little later,” she said.
He said okay and glanced out the window. It was October and the night was falling early, already dusk. Soon she’d be out there in the cool air, under the autumn leaves. And he’d be in the duplex with just himself. You’re the one that’s leaving, he thought at first. But when he turned back, he watched her look in a mirror on the wall. He knew she wasn’t nervous about the date. She was nervous about him there in the room with her as she got ready to see Austin, the man he had met in September.
“You look nice,” Nate said.
She stopped playing with her hair.
“Thanks,” she said, then turned to him. “I need my own life, too. You understand?”
He said he did. Your own life, he thought. He had heard once how everyone was the protagonist of their own little movie. And right now, his mom had just proved it was true—there was a film and you played the main role, but there was no script to follow, no lines to recite, and you just had to figure shit out as you go and be you before it was all over, because if you didn’t, then what was the fucking point of anything?
She looked down and thanked him again and turned to the window. Outside, the headlights of a truck appeared in the driveway. Nate stayed on the couch, waiting to greet Austin, ready for the next scene.
Dominic’s apology was followed by an idea for a new scene: the railroad behind the water tower. He suggested they film something connected to what they had done the last time together. “I could hop on the train,” he had said. “It’d be like I was leaving.” Nate realized this was how Dominic made up. He agreed.
The railroad ran in a long track. It came out through woods and curled around the back of the neighborhood. On the other side was just a field and an ugly power grid with high transmission towers. As he walked upon the tracks, Nate felt a forgotten and lonely pulse, as if the rails were loving the touch of his shoes, the feel of someone’s steps for the first time in years. Fallen leaves lay in the gravel of the bed, a few tumbling across the rails.
“Right here,” Nate said after walking a while.
The shot showed the water tower in the background. It took a few days for a train to come, and they killed time chatting, throwing rocks in the field, or just sitting on the tracks, waiting. It quickly occurred to Nate that Dominic had no real friends. Dominic could only blend in with the others at school, but at the railroad Nate found out that his stupidity was just an act when Dominic suggested they experiment with camera angles and sound effects. Nate liked the company of someone else. It made the silent nothing of the railroad less dense.
There was a clear sky and a low amber sun the day a train arrived. They had almost given up when a faint horn blared in the distance. A train soon bustled out of the woods and rattled past them. Nate filmed the front of the train and the graffitied boxcars rushing by.
“Go,” Nate yelled.
“Fuck that,” Dominic said. He looked at the train. “It’s way too fast.”
The train rumbled on the tracks and sounded its horn. Nate was still filming, watching the train curl toward the neighborhood. In the camera screen, the front of the train thundered away in the distance. The noise nearly deafened him. He looked at the wheels and the rails, the handlebars and the ladders on the ends of the boxcars. You won’t. Then he handed the camera to Dominic and told him to shut up.
He ran along the train as boxcars passed him. His image grew smaller, farther away in the camera. He was fading from the screen, running away, and he’d be gone soon, riding somewhere else. The train turned and blocked the low sun and left a long shadow. He stepped closer, he ran harder. His legs kicked near the rails and his hands were ready. He was heading for another place, running toward some other part of himself he had been waiting to meet, and when he got there, something would happen.
TOM ROTH teaches creative writing in Cincinnati, Ohio. His most recent publications are in Litbreak, Mania Magazine, and Miracle Monocle. He earned an MFA from Chatham University.
