Margo

Margo

It killed Philip “Philly” Watson how little passerbys talked about headphones. Like umbilical scars or nipples, everyone had headphones in their possession. You weren’t likely to leave the house without a pair stuffed into your front pocket (speaking about headphones, of course: leaving home without your wobbly milk plugs would be plain obscene); headphones were holy totems, after all, something a creature like Philly wouldn't have to mention. Just look around your day and count the dull receivers transplanted in the ones who float past you on the sidewalk. There’s power planted between their ears, see?

Or so Phillip “Philly” Watson would tell you once his attention was averted your way. You’ve seen him, I’m sure, rumbling up and down the gravel strips painted to the side of every no-name-street you’ve driven. Philly’s there, shuffling his Keds down the road, his head held down to the beat of the music, eyes glued to endless streams of navy and mute pebbles scattered about the pavement.

“Hey, buddy,” you may even say, slowing the family wagon down (but not completely to a stop, gosh no, not in this no-name part of town where even stray dogs find cold solace in the dirt). “Hey, buddy, you feeling okay?”

You want Philly to turn his attention your way, I know you do. But you’ll have to do the introductions. Park the wagon; pop the latch; put that medallion around your neck to tangible practice.

Tap, tap, tap.

“Hey, buddy.” Tap, tap, tap. “Can you hear me?”

That’s when it happens: Philly’s eyes break partnership with the gravel. Eyelashes made from carnival tightropes beat against red-rimmed pupils. A strong scent of floor cleaner and skunk piss snaps through the air like a towel swung in the shower from a gym class bully.

“Oiya,” Phillip “Philly” Watson sputters coffee colored spit into the few whiskers making up his face; you can see more dried up curdalge from past spit-ups left forgotten, dried to a stain, rubbed into his foundation like blood on a talismanic stone. “Didn’t hear you, nu-uh, not with my Escapes.”

Philly gestures at the dangling headphones stashed on either side of his neck; the headphones, burnt orange like candy corn, bounce up and down against Philly as if attempting to burrow into the man’s skin for safe protection.

Fear comes, sure, just as snow follows an evening of burning leaves, but first Philly tells you about the wonders of his Sony Escapes. At first, you find no reason to fear the pieces of candy corn rubbing against his neck.

Philly explains how he plugged the twin Sony Escapes into his ears (the color editions, obviously–Philly was fine as freshly cut cigars when it came to earbud accessories) and walked the grassy median of Ridge Lane for miles at a time. Cars colored every bar of the rainbow lumbered past Philly; trucks towing trailers and tractors and wagons to their bumpers pushed past the man. With headphones, though, the gas-guzzling dinosaurs on the road were as silent as the day after the meteor had crash landed all those million years before, wiping away the Earth’s first inhabitants in a swirling ball of fire and ice.

You see, Philly was listening for a much metallic voice; a voice carved by processional notes.

The drummer strikes–

And strikes again.

“Take what happened on the night of Halloween back in 2002,” Philly says in a voice caked with age; it's as if the twenty years separating his memory from now is clogged somewhere down his diaphragm. “That was the night my headphones finally spoke to me. It was them. The Headphone Reaper. Sure as indigestion following undercooked catfish, the Headphone Reaper told me how my mother was going to die.”

Margo.

*

Philly Watson left his house with a mustard yellow pillow case draping from his hands. He planned returning home a number of hours later with only candy collected from the night; Halloween of 2002 gave him more than Snickers bars. You could say the night gearing up to greet Philly had an entire bag of tricks and treats in store for the thirteen year old boy. Philly didn’t know any of this, of course; he was thirteen. At thirteen, the only wealth of knowledge prudent to a boy consists of things that seem so important at the time, but later hardly seem real at all. It’s like finding the drawings your mother once clipped to the refrigerator door–sure, it’s your name scrawled on the drawing’s base, yet did those brown swirls of fart clouds really issue from your hand?

At thirteen, Philly was interested in catching the Wizards play; yeah, yeah, yeah, M.J. was sniffing the hill of forty, but it was still The Man out there putting buckets to sleep each night. At thirteen, Philly followed the plights of Bruce Banner and Bruce Wayne much more closely than he did the death of Daniel Pearle; he’d eagerly detail to you the happenings of Racoon City, just don’t consider asking his take on the Iraqi Resolution. You can’t form an opinion of words that hadn’t ever crossed your path before.

Prior to Halloween night of 2002, Philly Watson was a boy not yet shuttled down the cattle line toward slaughter–death would come later, that’s certainly one premise even the most conservative of types would agree to with Philly–but for now he was uninhibited by the sharp blades promised in adulthood. He left the house that night swinging an empty old pillowcase. An Incredible Hulk costume clung to his body; the green spandex legs didn’t even make it past Philly’s knees. Instead of bulging overly muscular, Philly resembled a man swollen with tumors. The left bicep of the costume had deflated since last year’s use. Even his rubber mask had sustained major casualties; as if it had been laying in a plank of sun in the attic during the past year, purple dye from the mask’s hair had seeped down into its green skin: the mask jumping off the Watson’s front porch that night did not scream superhero. It was certainly a scream, no argument could be made there, but Philly Watson wouldn’t be stopped by a gaggle of first graders seeking protection while walking past the cemetery out on Hillbourne Avenue. Nope, Philly would stir the night alone.

Except that wasn’t true. You weren’t alone when headphones caressed your front pocket. If you had headphones, Philly reasoned, you had a friend, as well. You could be joined by other voices. Everyone needs a safe place to hold their trusts and fears–some people aren’t allotted the luxury of placing their most valued ideas in the strongholds of another person. Sometimes electric boxes were all that remained. Was that so wrong?

Philly turned down the road on Halloween night and began his trek towards town. His headphones, plugged into a Nextar C.D. Revolver, fit snugly into the holes of his ears. A blank c.d. cover sat behind the Nextar’s see-through plastic. Philly’s cousin Marco had visited the Watson residence during his fall break from college; he was the first in the family to make it past Harlow High School. Marco had given the boy a silver c.d. on the last day of his visit before returning to the university.

“Give it a slap, little man,” Marco told Philly. They’d been standing on the house’s front porch. The sun was perched in what was called an optical illusion (Philly studied magic during his times spent huffing around the house), and it appeared Marco had trained the boiling ball of gas to rest atop his shoulder, like a parrot on Long John Silver’s large frame.

“Listen to it, Philly,” Marco said. “I promise you, man, that shit’s going to change your diapers into jockstraps. No shit, little dude, give it a drop.”

“Oh, Marco, don’t go filling our little Phillip’s head with your big college songs,” Margo said to them that day.

Philly had forgotten about the c.d. until tonight when he had swiped his Nextar from the living room table. His cousin Marco’s blank disc was stashed under the music player as if patiently awaiting its turn at the punch bowl. He hadn’t even given the disc a second thought, simply picked it off the table and slotted it into his Nextar. With his flapping old pillowcase, Philly was set to go.

He trotted toward civilization. Off in the distance was the orange fuzz of city lights. The Watson’s were country dwellers in a world that steadily grew more metallic each day. Pea-gravel crunched under the boy’s feet. The sun had fallen asleep; a fat moon scrambled atop the flag pole and spat darkness on its victims like an ill tempered theater guest shooting popcorn at the heads in front of him.

Philly clicked on the first track of Marco’s c.d..

Nothing played.

“What the…?” Philly stopped waddling for civilization (already the tight spandex had massed into his undercarriage like a wet bathing suit) and hit the fast forward button on the side of his Nextar. There was a plastic panel readout in the middle of the player; usually the readout would tell you how long a track lasted, and how much time had already elapsed from said track. Now, however, the plastic panel didn’t display numbers. A single black word flashed in the window:

Margo-Margo-Margo-Margo

Over and over again the name repeated. It was a name not unfamiliar to Phillip “Philly” Watson. Heck, he heard its utterance every Sunday morning on the trip out of St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church at least a thousand times.

“Mrs. Margo, you look so lovely today!”

“Oi vey, Mrs. Margo, how is that heart of yours treating you this morning?”

“I prayed every night this week for your good health, Mrs. Margo.”

It was never ‘Mrs. Watson’ or plain ‘Margo’; the people of Philly’s home city called her Mrs. Margo, like a saint or a school teacher you had a crush on back in second grade, and now every time you see them in the supermarket you can’t help but offer to carry their bags to the parked Ford outside.

The Nextar C.D. Revolver continued spitting out the name of the woman who had only just cooked Philly a steaming pile of rice and orange-soaked chorizo. His mother’s name flashed in black like the words printed on a warning label.

Margo-Margo-Margo

The screen quit flashing.

A single drumline procession bonged inside Philly’s eardrum.

Bong. Bong. Bong. Bong.

It was like listening to a toddler discover the world around him held music.

Only a single note played for Philly’s ears. Somehow, the song was soothing. There was a sense of order in the drummer’s one wail march. Philly could practically see the musician up ahead in the distance, a dark shadow outlined by an orange fuzz of city electricity, steadily raising his hand up and down in a processional pattern played only for the moon’s amusement.

Philly checked the plastic panel readout of his player. The panel was completely void of any numbers or words. It was as if the panel had collapsed in on itself like an expired star. Soon shadows and spindly cobwebs would makeup the panel’s lone eye.

All life beat under the musician’s brutal drumline.

Bong-bong-bong.

Without thinking, Philly broke into a sprint. Pea-gravel shot out like machine gun bullets; the moon leered above him like a circling crow smelling fresh carrion. The city fuzz of safety and protection winked as far as they had when he had first stepped away from home. His feet pedaled on a hamster’s exercise wheel; the ground simply refused to give way. He quit running toward a town which loomed no closer.

The drumline stopped. Silence expelled into the air like smoke from a burning kitchen.

“Here. She’s here,” a voice whispered. The voice came from Philly’s left headphone; his other ear instrument lay silent.

It was this part of the story when Philly tells you how he had almost tugged the headphones out of his ears. If you bothered listening up to this point, Philly wraps an arm around you and promises that he certainly considered chucking the Nextar and its accompanying headphones into the cornfield next to him. Oh, sure, he’d consider the thought… but he also considered the musician stationed a few clicks up the road. The man with the drumsticks was silent, but was that a guarantee Philly could have in writing once the headphones were gone from his possession? Nope. Better to hold ‘em then to fold ‘em. At least, that’s what Philly tells you. You’d have to form an opinion on the matter.

“Here,” that same voice said again, now in Philly’s right ear. “She’s here, here, here.”

It was like standing at the base of a hill and listening for the call of your partner on the opposite side. There was a tinny quality to the person’s voice. It was impossible to decipher man from woman–to Philly, it was the automated voice of a telemarketer alerting you a horrible accident had occurred to one of your family members, you must give us a valid credit card number to pay for their surgery: now-now-now!

“Hello?” Philly whispered. This was 2002, and the technological leap toward hands-free calling was still underwater, but Philly pushed both headphones into his ears as if to ensure the automated voice could hear him. He gripped the music player tighter. “Hello? Is anybody there?”

“Margo,” the voice of a drone said. Emotion wasn’t programmed in the circuits of machines: his mother’s name reached his ears like ground meat encased in slimy skin. “Margo. Margo is here. Margo is dead. Here is dead. Dead is here.”

This happened many years ago; do you realize how many memories are formed over the course of two full decades? Still, Philly tells you with absolute certainty what followed next. In a way, Philly hasn’t stopped living in 2002 on Halloween night; it’s like his headphones have kept him tethered to the same point on Time’s stream like a heavy anchor refusing to budge from oncoming waves.

Philly clicked the Nextar’s pause button. It was a c.d., after all, not a demonic token sold from a devilish shopkeeper. He hadn’t claimed a single candy bar, yet already he desired nothing more than to turn around for home. It was time to lose the comfort of music for once; he’d tell his cousin Marco he’d lost the c.d. before he had the chance to listen to it.

Philly clicked the pause button again. And again. Once more for good measure. His Hulk hands smashed against the button. The automated voice did not quit its demands.

“Margo, Margo is here. Margo is dead. Dead Margo. Margo is dead. Are you here too? You too are dead.”

Two things happened that altered Philly’s stance on the stability of the world’s structure.

In front of him, the electric city fuzz molted a harsh red color. A siren scuttled under the clip of Philly’s headphones; an ambulance blared by heading in the opposite direction.

Suddenly the Nextar lit up in the boy’s hands. More black licorice words trailed across the screen. Margo was gone. The name flashing in the screen’s plastic eye was so much worse:

Philly-Philly-Philly

“Philly is dead,” the alien voice stated. “Dead. Dead. Dead is here. Here is dead. Where is Philly? Dead. Where is dead? Margo. Margo is dead. Philly is Margo. Dead is dead.”

Chunks of Nextar plastic exploded around his feet. He stomped on the music player’s front for good measure. The voice stopped immediately; the outline of the musician wilted away too. Behind him, red and blue lights broke the moon’s total darkness like those fish with glowing sacs dangling in front of their eyes. A squeal of tires and a throb of tail lights told the boy the emergency team had stopped at a house that'd smell of rich chorizo.

Before making his trip back home, Philly took off the too-tight Halloween costume. He left it on the side of the road next to a pile of broken plastic. Neither item could be salvaged. He wasn’t even sure he’d want either one if they could have been saved.

Time would spell him one for two on the matter.

Philly arrived back home. Three technicians dressed in all blue darted out of the house’s front door. Margo rode the gurney with her eyes closed; her face was drained of its color. It was as if the moon had sucked away her life with an invisible straw.

“It wasn’t the moon,” Philly whispered that Halloween night of 2002. None of the technicians gave the boy a second glance. In cities like the one Philly grew up in, the job for emotional regulation was handed down the table like a platter of mashed potatoes on Thanksgiving afternoon. So what if someone didn’t get a full helping? That wasn’t your responsibility. “It was the Headphone Reaper and his damn drum. It was him, you hear me?”

None of the technicians stopped. Blue and red lights continued illuminating the Watson’s plot of land; technicians continued loading another heap of tissue into the blender of society. Margo continued playing possum.

If you stuck around this long, Philly assures you Margo has played the best damn possum this world’s ever seen. Yep, you can’t play a better dead person than the woman sleeping six feet beneath soil and worm castings. You can even visit her out on Hillbourne Avenue.

“Don’t you see?” Philly says to you. “Headphones speak in mechanical voices and single note songs. But nobody ever listens, man. Nobody listens anymore.”

Philly wraps you closer around the shoulders. You smell stale tobacco and coffee beans drifting from his tongue; after a second sniff, you realize there’s something not quite right about him. Don’t consider the stench of one tooth gone dead; think about how an entire cave of teeth would smell if left rotten for years without care. Imagine giving mouth-to-mouth to a corpse, then you’d know what Philip “Philly” Watson was hiding just out of sight.

“But I bet you would listen, right?” he whispers. Beetles crawl from Philly’s nose into the gaps of his teeth. The dead man leans forward until his lips caress your cheek: “Yeah, people like you love listening to ole Philly’s headphones. Want a turn?”

Of course you take a spin searching for the one note song. Just don’t be surprised when your name gets written in warning label black.

Margo is dead; Philly is dead.

You too are dead.

*

The drummer strikes–

And strikes again.