On the porch, Link tuned his guitar along with Cap on banjo, Maxwell on stand-up bass, and Eliza on mandolin. Cap, for the past year, had been playing in a couple of bluegrass bands in Nashville, easily the youngest member by decades. In the audience, Izzy saw Carmen and Kenny, who lived right across the street from Izzy and Preston, as well as Julie and Link, who lived in the same neighborhood in East Nashville and who Izzy saw at least weekly. And there were Benjamin, Alyssa, and Ally, who lived in Franklin, Tennessee, both Benjamin and Alyssa working for a computer company, and who came frequently into town. She was also happy to see Asean, Nikisha, and Jackie, plus their baby son, Desean, in town for the weekend, now living in Memphis, where Nikisha had just been appointed library director at Rhodes College. David, Susan, and Irene and their newest daughter, Michelle, only a few months old, were also in town for the day, David now a high school teacher in Murfreesboro.
Preston, who had married Izzy as soon as the project ended, had been worryingly adrift, spending day after day sitting around the house, waiting anxiously for Cap and Izzy to return. He spent hours at night creating elaborate bento boxes for Cap’s lunch, became really interested in composting, and spent a lot of time on eBay buying rare punk rock records from Europe. He continued to wear his uniform from the Infinite Family, his tie now tucked into the middle of his dress shirt to avoid stains, his sneakers replaced with slippers. Izzy found his leather pouch in the back of their closet. He had of course told her about his scars, his process, before they married, and he had vowed to quit. She forced him into the car, placed the pouch in his lap, and they drove twenty miles to a Hardee’s fast food restaurant, and she made him shove the pouch into a trash can just outside the entrance. “Nothing is changing for you,” she said, and he agreed, the rest of the ride back home in total silence.
And then, one evening, he received an e-mail from a man who had been raised using the Constant Friction Method. The man said that he had never quite recovered from the experience, had been in therapy since adolescence, rarely if ever saw his parents, and, when he did, it ended in screaming and arguments. He could barely hold down a job. The man, Charlie, who also happened to live in Nashville, wanted to know if Preston could give him some advice, since Preston had gone through the same experience and seemed to have managed to live a life without incident. “All I’m asking for is a few tips about how you deal with that weird buzzing in your head, that moment where it seems like clairvoyance, that you know something bad is about to happen and you can’t stop it from happening,” Charlie had written, which Preston had read to Izzy that same night.
“Buzzing?” Izzy asked.
“It’s not untrue,” Preston admitted. “It’s a kind of malfunctioning spidey sense that you can’t rely on. I haven’t thought about it in some time.”
“There’s a buzzing in your head?” she asked Preston.
“A kind of buzzing,” he admitted, his voice just above a whisper, his attention entirely focused on the e-mail, reading and rereading it.