Music for Desks: "The Sound of Nerves Strummed" by Christopher Notarnicola
The morning sun had not yet crept through the blinds, and I felt what I could not see: sand ferried by overnight air through door seams and window seals, sand collected on wall lockers, lampshades, and nightstands, sand thrown like a rug across the floor. A small problem for another time. I dressed and slung my rifle.
Muted strings carried down the walkway between the trailers. I drifted after the music. Peppered applause called from behind a familiar door. Inside, I found most of my platoon gathered around a bed, sitting with knees in their hands, rocking, nodding hello. Hurry, let’s go, close the door. The musician struck another chord, his studied fingers bridged across the neck of an acoustic guitar. Who sent out your six-string? The room went quiet for a moment. Then we sang.
From the halls of Montezuma
To the shores of Tripoli
We fight our country's battles
In the air, on land, and sea.
What began as a near-faithful rendition of “The Marine’s Hymn” soon devolved into a chorus of snickers. We’re really doing this, aren’t we? Some sang in dreamy falsetto or gutted vocal fry while others mouthed the lyrics the way they might mime participation in a birthday song for a distant relative. All of us had learned this hymn, even belted out the first verse at our graduation ceremonies, but none of us remembered every word or would admit to having access to such a fanatical memory. We stumbled toward the final lines.
If the Army and the Navy
Ever look on heaven’s scenes
They will find the streets are guarded
By United States Marines.
A round of big laughs gave way to admissions of poor timekeeping, to improvisations, interpretations, scathing lyrical deviations, and finally to a critical analysis of the hymn. Why would we agree to stand guard at the gates of heaven? Everyone else gets eternal paradise and The Marines get stuck with guard duty.
If we all end up in heaven
And they put our butts to work
We’ll say no thanks and head for hell
Because God’s a goddamn jerk.
We turned to barroom chants and sailor songs, criticisms in green, irreverent tales of unknown marines. We celebrated our hypocrisies, idiosyncrasies, and tics discovered while spending meal after meal, mile upon foreign mile, watching and watching out for each other, working around and for one another, distracting constantly and reciprocally from the unbearable keeping of time.
You’re so fat / Our truck’s going flat.
Counting sheep / You can’t even sleep.
Smell so bad / I can’t even rhyme.
And maybe it was this act of rewriting that has brought me to write about this moment. Maybe I've always remixed the sacred to try to say something true. Yet the writer I’m recalling, the rewriter of the hymn, is not myself but us, not I but we. Maybe I’m still working from a place of collective composition toward a singular voice, trying to derive one true chord from that old cacophony.
The musician contorted his fingers, picking and pressing chords from the strings, as precise as hands that select and pull wires from live ordnance at the roadside. Some of us sought our own instruments. One thrashed broom quills in lieu of an electric guitar. Another feigned saxophone with his lips over the barrel of his rifle. Yet another drummed the beat on a metal wall locker, the snare out near the corners, toms on the hollow sides, the open door a crash cymbal, loose handles like tambourines. Then the deepest bass came bounding in, but it was too fast and way off rhythm. Listen.
Staff Sergeant was beating against the outer wall. We jumped up and dropped our instruments as he barked about other marines. Think about it, asleep right across the way, just back from their convoy and wanting quiet like you want quiet when you lay your head, now let’s tighten up and keep it down and remember no one’s on their own program out here. We stood in the silence, absence, stillness of the room, arms locked around our rifles, pressing them to our knotted chests. As Staff Sergeant’s tired grumbles faded, our rifles slid down the faces of our uniforms, finding the floor once again.
We huffed, sucked our teeth, cursed. One leaned the broom handle against the wall on his way out, and as the door closed with a stutter, the broom fell to the floor between twin beds. I sat on one bed, the musician on the other, and I asked why our song never got around to me. The musician used his sleeve to buff scuffs from the heel, neck, and curve in the guitar’s body. He plucked a high string and sent it low, down-tuning the slender knobs, releasing the tension held along the neck. The steel strings went slack. The fretboard would bow if left in tune — too much tension over too much time — causing the strings to sit farther from the frets, making the notes harder to feel and hold. He would tune them again before the next singalong.
I tightened my fists and sang.
Expertise / still fucked up your knees.
You’re so smart / but no purple heart.
I kicked at the broom. The musician stood and smoothed a wrinkle from the sheets at the edge of his bed, laying the guitar head against his pillow. He told me I would never have to ask. What’s mine is yours. Then he knelt, pushing aside sand as he reached beneath the bed for his rifle.
Christopher Notarnicola is a veteran of the US Marine Corps and an MFA graduate of Florida Atlantic University. His work has been published with American Short Fiction, Bellevue Literary Review, Best American Essays, Consequence, Image, North American Review, The Southampton Review, and elsewhere. Find him in Pompano Beach, Florida, and at christophernotarnicola.com.
