Name Your Sound

Teddy Burns

In Dana’s room, there is a jade plant in a small ceramic pot, given to Dana by Mom on Dana’s twelfth birthday. They painted the pot that same afternoon, illustrating together an infinite loop of countryside through which a little girl led a parade of animals consisting of a panda, a parrot, an octopus, a pig, the family cat, Ginger, and the family dog, Pup, as an anthropomorphized sun and clouds smiled approvingly down upon on the procession. Uniting the scene was a speech bubble to which all the characters besides the little girl contributed; they say, “Happy Birthday Dana!”

It is Dana’s way to nurture the small and fertile. She cares for her jade plant how she cares for all her loved ones: with natural diligence. Dana knows all the places Pup likes to be scratched best and applies this knowledge generously, prioritizing Pup’s pleasure right up there with food and water. On the other hand, Dana knows how Ginger mostly likes to be left alone to wander the neighborhood, but if before going to sleep she leaves a saucer of milk near the sliding glass door that leads to the backyard, it will certainly be empty, appreciated, when Dana wakes up.

Now, because the jade plant feels so safe with Dana, it has allowed her to understand what it’s saying when it speaks to her. She knows what it means by the slight squeaks emitted when she rubs one of its chubby leaves between her fingers, empathizes with its relieved sigh when a summer breeze gusts through her open window and sings along with its funny, gurgling melody when it slurps up water. The grammar of their language is based on this exchange of mutual gratification, but for Dana, the satisfaction she feels extends past companionship. For as long as Dana can remember, her jade plant’s contributions to their ongoing conversation have triggered a singular physical response.

What Dana feels is a tingling sensation that starts at the nape of her neck and cascades down her back, soothing and settling her like a warm beverage does. Dana first became aware of this phenomenon at five or six years old, feeling the tingles when Mom read to her while lightly scratching her arm at the same time, or when Mom played the classic pantomime with her wherein an egg (Mom’s loose fist) got cracked on the back of Dana’s head and the yolk (Mom’s fluttery fingers) ran down her back.

Some sounds are harvested by Dana; others she finds embedded in nature(s) like veins of gold, making her a happy prospector, indeed: The hiss-and-snap that announces an open can of seltzer; the drink’s own chorus of carbonated whispers; the click-clacking of the librarian’s keyboard trickling through the air like the onset of rain; the sound of fingertips sticking and unsticking from a book sleeve or the plastic cover of a DVD case; the thrum of the sewing machine at Dana’s aunt’s dress shop where Dana picks up shifts in the summer (where she falls asleep if she tries to read on her lunch break).

The exact ‘why’ of the tingles is a pleasant mystery to Dana. “You get what you give, my love!” Mom says, and blows in Dana’s ear.

So a sound sometimes is not just a sound.

In the mirror at thirty-five, Maggie is the spitting image of her mother. Out of the mirror, she is not. Maggie’s face is Mom’s face flipped and vice-versa. Their hooded lids and brown eyes, their pert nose resting atop thin purple lips huddled together so as to avoid attention, their jet-black hair laying down long to rest on skinny little shoulders. So Maggie sees Mom every day, but rarely herself. Dad couldn’t bear the likeness and so fled the country when Maggie fled home for college in the city, tracing his steps back across the Atlantic for the motherland, irony lost on him along the way. The popular reaction to this is to cuss out Dad, call him a poor excuse for a father and a coward. Maggie allows this because no one could understand why she forgave him, reading his letter on her first Christmas away from home, the only mail she would receive in four years on campus. Too many days, too many nights, too many mirrors in the house that had always been too small. Maggie making a sandwich in the kitchen at sixteen, looking up into the mirror above the sink and seeing Dad behind her in the doorway, expression as blank as a sleepwalker but still colored lovelorn blue, eyes clasped on Maggie’s image that was Mom. Unseeing Maggie to see Mom, going back to bed, nothing personal. This is before, technically. For Maggie, now, thanks to her artistry, it is forever. She is reflecting the past upon the present, flipping it, totally the same and unrecognizable, transmorphing events until they are not the past anymore; they are her past. A mother, a death, failures of amorousness–essential building bricks for any woman’s lauded career. Tragedies are but hyphenates in Maggie’s ever-growing title, currently standing tall at Songwriter-AuthorScreenwriter, VOAG (voiceofageneration), SA (seminalartist), STW (someonetowatch), CL (culturalleader). Maggie is seen so much now, face flipped and reflected every which way. But

no one knows a fucking thing, Maggie whispers into the mirror just to see Mom say it, a promise as much as a lamentation. Her publicist, Trish Childs, argues otherwise online and in print, spreading a plague of rhetoric that assures consumers that Maggie’s product, Maggie, is as transparent and vulnerable to them as when she looks in the mirror, not quite alone.

6:00 am is the earliest Dana is allowed to wake up to play computer. Even though it is summer and school is out, the same rules regarding computer play are enforced: On weekdays, it’s a one-hour cap, evenings only. On weekends it’s a three-hour cap, mornings and afternoons allowed. There are many little laws like this that rule Dana’s life and test her patience, but such laws can reflexively accrue fun anticipation for the duration of her wait.

At 6:07 am, it will be thirty-eight minutes until Mom wakes up for the opening shift at the beauty parlor. She will walk Pup around the block before walking herself to work, leaving at 7:28 am but not before asking Dana at the computer if she would like Mariel to come over to babysit today. Perks of being twelve include two allowances, a monetary one and a disciplinary one, the latter giving Dana a novel amount of sayso where certain little laws of the house are concerned, such as the necessity of being babysat on any given day. Dana loves Mariel, has known her as long as she can remember, but will say no for today.

Today Dana will prefer being solitary, not as a result of dejection, but as an inspiration for contentment. She will wake up with an innate desire to know the insides of every moment before they all bumble through June, July, August, into Unsettled September. This summer, Dana is often preoccupied by the passage of time in a way she has not been in summers past. She thinks a lot about how her hours are used, developing opinions on how to walk the most satisfying path through every day’s swath of daylight, implementing routines and mindful pastimes, every decision a single square of Dana’s quilt of comfort and satiation.

The first square of the day’s quilt is not stitched exactly when Dana awakes at 5:51 am–that moment is subsumed by the shock of re-consciousness. Dana wakes up always all at once, her membrane of sleep as thin as the thread of a cocoon, and while a quick rise from bed is a boon during the busy school season, the jarring rush and tumble from nothing to everything are otherwise unnecessary, especially today, where Dana is on her on own clock. So it’s the second moment after waking up that is devoted to saying grace for the promise of leisure.

Grace is soundtracked by bird calls and other

accouterments of Morning. Somewhere in the neighborhood, Ginger is stalking a mourning dove. This dove will be left for Dana outside the sliding glass door that leads to the backyard, right next to the empty saucer. Cool night sheds its blue and black robes for the warm grays and yellows of mellow dawn. Dana can feel the newborn light pawing at her eyelids but keeps them shut still for a bit longer, to inhale through the nose…exhale through the mouth…inhale through the nose… exhale through the mouth, to take in the scent of Outside Morning that drifts in through her open window, riding on the breeze of Dana’s fan to mingle with the aroma of Inside Morning. These smells are of Dana’s life, they are embedded into her environment, and they ground Dana within her place and time more poignantly than anything else she’s known.

Dana opens her eyes.

Before her new wealth, all the spaces Maggie ever inhabited were stretched too thin. Rooms with books and makeup and half-empty soda bottles messily stacked on stools and bedside tables, socks and hairpins and underwear overflowing out of drawers or strewn across the floor, Mom and Maggie sleeping ass-to-ass on the twin bed while Dad slept on his back on the carpet, a position he said he preferred, anyway. In her memoir, Stern Young Womyn (2019), Maggie writes: “Is there anything the child of immigrants craves more than to be the master of space? Space between people, continents. Time we long for later” (68). In her song, “Through the Wall,” Maggie sings: “How are there more than four walls in this room?/Nothing is growing inside this cocoon.” Prestigious profiler Sam Cohen of NPR noticed the thematic consistency and so wrote for the site’s new monthly feature, the Up-and-Coming Artist Spotlight:

“If there is a single idea synthesizing the breadth of Cass’s work across all the mediums she has voraciously explored (with stunning success, in this writer’s opinion), it is her efforts to deconstruct popular second-generation immigrant narratives as they exist in the United States today. Cass deconstructs to reconstruct, reconstructs to reclaim, reclaims to rearticulate, and radically rearticulates suffering into the common language of love. She may be our most important working artist.”

Why always ‘our’?

Trish had texted Maggie ‘congratulations’ for ‘arriving,’ saying she was a ‘champ and a half’ for politely acquiescing to Sam Cohen’s request to suck her toes after the interview. Her sex act pushed the feature’s publication up a year.

Sisyphus I Am Your Daughter ([2016] [8.9] [Best New Music])

“Despite conforming to the sonic trappings of indie rock, SIAYD is nonetheless a stunning accomplishment in storytelling and emotional catharsis. Inspired by the death of her mother, Cass maps the path pain must take to reach redemption. It is not an easy listen, but perhaps the most essential of 2016.”

Apologies 3000: Sycophants Never Say Never! ([2017] [9.7] [Best New Music]) “During all my time on Earth, I’ve never heard anything like it. The critical, writerly part of me has already set about assigning Apologies 3000 in its rightful place in The Canon; the human part of me is still weeping in thanks to Cass for giving birth to these nine songs. Oh! The beauty! To assign a genre to it is childish. A comet screams across the night sky. A baby bird breaks out of its egg. Cass’s A3SNSN is a miracle of nature. A human woman made this record! Popular music has never sounded quite like it and never will again.”

Insane.

Maggie rarely suffers imposter syndrome (she’s told herself she’s ‘our greatest songwriter’ long before The New Yorker announced it), but still feels keenly dissociated from her product’s narrative and its surrounding discourse. THE DISCOURSE!!! Maggie’s fascination with ‘it,’ the fans, ‘(yrs.1735),’ and their weird conversations about her divine genius, her family, her tits, her ass, her influences, her interviews, is sickly and resentful because of her empathy. The empathy Maggie has for them is debilitating. She, too, has only ever worshiped artists, but the turned tables are really weird. Indierock Reddit podcast hosts using Maggie’s first name way too much, tweets calling her ‘bestie;’ fanfiction, even–all these assumptions of familiarity give Maggie the spins.

Dana is as completely still as she completely awake in bed, staring at the ceiling and noticing the worn sheets, patterned with bed flowers, tangled betwixt her legs like a tail, noticing the blue comforter spread atop her body like sediment, rubble of dreamless hours, noticing these things but remaining still as stone, sensing all her stuffed animals in all their assigned positions, some crammed into the space between the mattress and the posey-pink wall, some pressed between Dana’s armpits or thighs, some held to her heart for the duration of the night, like Leo the Lion who was present at birth, or Gregory the Bear, who was a Christmas present from Aunt Edith and is now as proximate to Dana’s head as her primary pillow.

In her blurry periphery, Dana sees the digital clock on her nightstand change time from 5:51 to 5:52, eleven red toothpicks swapping for fourteen as the colon dividing minutes from hours blinks diligently every single time a second passes. When the 1 turns 2, Dana starts counting the blinks, ignoring the offbeat tapping of her fluttering heart, which accelerates and accelerates as Dana ‘charges up.’ Dana will ‘charge up’ for fifty-nine blinks and launch on the sixtieth, 5:53. To ‘charge up,’ Dana instigates friction between her body and mind, pouring an intention of action into the former while pouring a contradictory intention of stillness into the latter. Shake, rattle, roll! Dana cheers to her limbs and digits. Resist temptation! Dana warns her mind. Electricity whirs through Dana’s bones, which she pictures as light and hollow as a bird’s, bouncing between the polar tips of her fingers and toes, energy pleading to be exerted, but Dana still says no, counting the blinks, enduring, the outside silence contrasting against her interior clamor, blood beating between her ears, fifty-five, fifty-six, excruciating, fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine: Dana blinks rapturously into 5:53.

[SXSW/2014] “Anyone sitting here? You mind? And I’m sorry, but you’re Maggie Cass, you just played? Ugh, fucking fantastic set Maggie, so great to meet you. [...] Gawd, not rude at all! I’m Trish Childs, ‘atrealchildish,’ talent scout for Cover Charge. You’ve heard of us? [...] Via Rally Cry, of course, fantastic, love those guys, real sweethearts, just like they say. So good. But not my favorite. Who’s your favorite right now Maggie? [...] Ha ha. Understood. Let me buy you a round. [...] A proposition. [...] Great. Excuse…thank you, could you get me another one of these. Thank you so much. Okay, Maggie, babe, I already know the answer, but who represents you? [...] Yes, that’s your label. [...] My point is no one is representing you, Maggie. For the whiskey sour, let me tell you a story: It’s 2010. I’m on the floor of my dorm room at Bard, a single, laying on my stomach on my rug I still own, on my computer and thinking about offing myself in the real way, like with a plan and an intention to execute, door locked, goodbyes written, makeup on, pills in the bottle. [...] Yes, thank you, it was bad, poor girl. Am I making you uncomfortable? [...] Great, because the threat of suicide is essential to what I’m trying to impart. [...] Truer words. Anyway, I’m laying there listening to music and trying not to cry so my makeup doesn’t run, which was a fucking Herculean task as you can imagine because of course I’ve got on my Suicide Playlist that I’ve meticulously curated to make me feel as awful as possible, to send me to the breaking point. [...] HA! Love that you ask; you know the deal. Um, I’m pretty sure ‘This Woman’s Work’ was on there, also ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack,’ ‘Candy Says,’ ‘The Anchor Song.’ [...] Flattered! So there I am in the interim, killing time before killing myself, har, cycling between the same music message boards and music websites over and over because, duh, I’m a huge music nerd, but somewhere in that mess, I wish I could remember where I saw it exactly but so much is blurry, but I saw the cover art for First Kiss Was A Suckoff–[...] No way. It’s legendary. It will be. [...] Absolutely, but–[...] Right, so moving

on; I saw the art for First Kiss Was A Suckoff, the beautiful blue with the red right in the center, the woman…You know how fucking difficult it is to get yourself to listen to new music? Just like in general? Well, it’s probably like a thousand times more difficult when on the verge of suicide, but still I saw it, got that sting in the brain, and for one last time I wanted to listen to new music. So I go to your Bandcamp, I pull up the album… and I turn off my Suicide Playlist to listen to First Kiss Was A Suckoff. I’ll never forget. ‘Busy Sunday’ is playing and I’m reading the gorgeous, fucking heartbreaking liner notes–I’m reading all the liner notes for all your projects, then I’m listening to all your projects. The story of it, your mother, the meaning. My God. Next thing I know, the sun is up and I don’t want to die. What I want is for the world to know Maggie Cass’s music, her narrative, her genius. Maggie, straight up: You’re a Kate Bush Bitch. You’re a fucking woman. Your songs are songs only a woman could write. Women’s lives will be saved by your music. And men will want to fuck you bad. [...] Oh, please. They’ll be in your inbox, in your comments, fighting for approval and attention, trying to save you, marry you, compare favorite poets with you, mansplain Bob Dylan to you. If a man likes your music, he will be seen as the emotionally sophisticated guy about campus. Or gay. But the best thing… the best goddamn thing…is that you’re not…fucking… white! [...] Korean? [...] Japanese? [...] Apologies. [...] Yes. [...] Absolutely. [...] Absolutely. [...] Abso-fucking-lutely. Progress requires a certain amount of cynicism. Let me do it so you don’t have to.”

DANA EXPLODES WITH GREAT HYPERBOLE, freeing herself of potential energy, finally all kinetic. She kicks blankets and sheets off her body like dead leaves, slaps the mattress with her palms, twists her head this way and that while an elated eeee! sprouts from the back of her throat and ricochets against her posey-pink walls until it escapes through the open window, one more morning song to feed the cacophony. Dana rocks, knees to chest, back and forth, back, then forth, jutting her legs out straight and using the momentum to launch up and out of bed, landing on her pile carpet with perfect form. Dana makes her multi-colored toes kneed the raggedy threads a few times before standing on their tips to stretch her hands to the ceiling, craning her neck back and quivering with the intensity of her streeeetttccccchhhh, another eeee! punctuating the peak of the pose.

You’re perfectly perpendicular to Earth, sundial girl! A yolkyellow sleep-shirt that usually ends at the knees is raised to the thigh. Light and air fill the bedroom to caress Dana, make her warm to the touch. Dana’s jade plant sits on her pink and white desk, an attentive companion, and together they soak up the sun just the same. At night in August in Brooklyn in bed in the sopping heat Maggie lies faceup, staring at the ceiling and not sleeping on her bed dressed with nothing but covers for the pillow and mattress, never sleeping through the summer and sweating bullets in the dark, mouthbreathing and submerged in the mire of mental noise that makes her famous. She’s thinking about this:

“Maggie is a consummate artist. Even the way she answers questions is saturated with art. I aspire to be so filled with focus, and yet so at ease with the chaos that she can weave so much with every fiber life gives her, making every instant another lovely braid. This short 3-minute video is an 8-part seminar to a class I need to learn how to pass.”

It’s a Youtube comment by user ‘Joey00,’ found on a clip from an interview Maggie did while on tour, screen capped and sent to her by her girlfriend Gabby with the accompanying text, ‘fuck dude.’ Maggie is obsessed with the pathology behind comments like Joey00’s. Would they say it to her face? Do they think she would like that? Maggie herself is unsure how much she’d like or dislike that. She wouldn’t have made it this far if she wasn’t one to enjoy some attention and reverie, but it also doesn’t sit well with her that Joey00 could write this post and really believe it, as in, Maggie just feels that such a sweet sentiment deserves to be delivered to a more tactile destination, as in, to someone who could actually reciprocate it. And maybe to someone for which the statement might actually be true! Maggie does struggle these days to lay claim to who ‘Maggie Cass’ is in reality, but no way she’s out here weaving life’s fibers into lovely instants. At least not off-record. How much these parasocial quandaries make Maggie spiral depends on the day. Some nights her brain goes too fast and accelerates past mercy, begging into the dark over and over to be left alone as multi-colored shadows flicker across her bedroom wall like a ghostly chorus that hums and chants her own words back to her. Maggie begs for her sake and for the sake of Joey00, who seems lonely, and she wonders if making different art with different lyrics and different moods would attract an audience who could appreciate her just as much without stressing her out to the same extent, but Maggie knows simultaneously it would be impossible to betray herself that way; not even out of principal, but just physically, it couldn’t be done, Maggie wouldn’t know how to start to express herself dishonestly. She’s told her disposition is for the best because it’s so valorous, but to care not at all and still go about business sometimes seems so ideal sometimes. Maggie went on a whole drunken rant about this to Gabbi and Frank Ocean in her apartment after the MET Gala, and the next morning she woke to find that she’d tweeted out a link to ‘Comfortably Numb’ with the caption ‘please pink floyd in hell but the stones in heaven,’ which in turn had created a discourse in her replies so vehement that the whole thread

was ‘trending’ by the time the sun rose, the unwelcome online spotlight ignited almost singularly by a reply from ‘sophie23ISTANDAGAINSTIZIONISTS’ that read, ‘your going to heaven obvi bestie but can we stop putting old white men on a pedestal plsssss+thank u,’ a sentiment which attracted an uneven ratio of mockery, support, and grandiose critique.

It is 6:00 am now. Dana pads softly, respectfully, past Mom’s ajar door, exhilarated by this rare power to turn a blind eye to the deep, pregnant slumber of adults that usually holds so much sway over Dana’s daily trajectories. She shuffles down the hall to the bathroom, eager to freshen and relieve, hurrying through the motions so as to get to the computer ASAP. Once Dana’s purple toothbrush is back in its holder and her hands are washed with the soap that lightly scents them eucalyptus, she prances, still diligently light on her feet, into the living room. The kitchen is to Dana’s left, near the front door; on the right are the couch and CRTV; past that is the sliding glass door that opens to the backyard, and dead ahead, on the other side of the dinner table, is the office nook, notable for: the computer and Pup, wiggling fitfully within the confines of his bed under the desk, yearning for clearance to launch, which Dana gives:

‘Yep!’

She goes through the familiar motions of pouring out Pup’s dry food as he inserts himself underfoot and whines like he’s never been fed before. Dana explains to Pup that his behavior doesn’t help, but hinders the efficacy with which she can deliver him lamb and rice kibble. Pup never listens. Pup believes he makes food happen, and soon Pup is tucking in, loudly scarfing, and Dana is hopping into the leather swivel chair in front of the computer, sitting criss-crossapplesauce and gripping the edge of the faux-hardwood desk to pull herself forward, chest to keyboard. Dana presses the computer’s power button, turning it orange to green, and watches the machine wake up all at once like she does, humming in spurts and giving off staticky beeps.

While the computer warms up, Dana goes over to the fridge for a cup of orange juice. When she returns to the desk, Dana opens one of its drawers and pulls out, from amongst uncapped pens, nubby pencils, rolls of scotch tape, sticky notes and highlighters, her beloved Discman and headphones tidily intertwined. Dana places them on the desk, then slides the drawer closed before opening the one under it, inside of which is the family library of books-on-disc. Dana retrieves The Hobbit as read by Rob Inglis, pulling out of its warped box the package of discs, all in pristine condition despite years of use. A piece of folded notebook paper, the dedicated record of timestamps, is also in the box, and Dana uses it to confirm that she is on Disc Five, 02:06:37. Five is already loaded in the Discman, so she puts on her headphones and sets about bringing herself back up to speed.

Soon enough, Dana’s computer game is booted up and she has resumed her third listen-through of The Hobbit as read by Rob Inglis. She listens again and again because of how much she loves Tolkien’s story and because of how good it feels to hear Inglis’s reading, immediately blissing Dana out, the tingles gently cloaking her neck and shoulders like a cloak. A key comfort is granted by the mode of Inglis’s reading, a recording, which asks no commitments from Dana as the listener, unlike Mom, who gets tired and asks every so often whether Dana is still paying attention, and at her third listen, Dana’s enjoyment of The Hobbit is not gained by comprehension, it is gained by exposure to Inglis’s magical oration, an imprecise and generous alchemy always casting a spell on Dana, who knows she loves so much more than just a sound.

Teddy Burns is a writer from Brunswick, Maine. He graduated from Bates College with an English major in 2019. His day job is working in a local coffee roastery, but he uses any free time he has to pursue his passions of fiction and songwriting. He has published his work on his personal website, which doubles as his portfolio. You can visit his social media accounts “@tedburns97” on Twitter and “@tedburnsssss” on Instagram.

80 | NEW READER MAGAZINE RM