Teething, by Cameron MacKenzie
Photo by Juan Di Nella on Unsplash
Brian hadn’t listened to Achtung Baby in 25 years, but the baby was teething, and he'd taken to dropping the boy into the car seat and pulling up the album on his phone and driving around until the kid wore himself out, which he did almost every night right around “So Cruel.” On this night in particular, however, Brian kept on driving, past “Ultraviolet,” straight through “Acrobat,” and all the way to the end of “Love is Blindness.”
Three days before, his wife had sat him down on the sectional couch in the living room and told him she wanted to leave. She wanted to take the child with her and go but, due to their geographical isolation, due to her parents living on the other side of the country, she felt she had no other option but to stay. Brian stared at her in horror as she spoke, but it was an abstract sort of emotion. As though this wasn’t a life he was living but was something closer to a film he was watching about someone he had never met. Too bad, he thought. They seemed like a good match. There was a divide somewhere within him that left him unsettlingly serene. Perhaps something he knew had to happen now soon would, and even though his thoughts since that day had become increasingly tinged with the sort of madness brought on by imminent disaster, his life, finally, was beginning to make sense. To come into clear and undeniable focus.
The sunset was smeary and indistinct as the first chords of “Love is Blindness” glowed into life inside the cabin of the car, and as they did so Brian remembered hearing that the Edge had recorded the track as he was going through a divorce. This was doubtless something Bono had imparted with great solemnity to Tabitha Soren on MTV News, but the point was that the strings of Edge’s guitar (Edge? The Edge?) – his strings kept breaking as they recorded the solo, such was the violence and pathos of his performance.
And so as the second chorus of the song faded, Brian found himself gripping the wheel with anticipation for the solo he once knew by heart but could no longer remember. And he also found himself desperate for the truth of Bono's tawdry and exploitative admission, hoping that in the next few moments he would hear the sound of the thing that he felt, or that he should be feeling, or that he may, with The Edge's help, be able to feel again.
Cameron MacKenzie's work has appeared in Blackbird, Salmagundi, and The Michigan Quarterly Review, among other places. His novel The Beginning of His Excellent and Eventful Career, chronicling the Mexican Revolution, was published in 2018. His collection of short fiction, River Weather, appeared in 2021. His flash fiction collection, Theories of Love, is forthcoming from Alternating Current Press.