No names, p.1
No Names, page 1
ALSO BY GREG HEWETT
Red Suburb
The Eros Conspiracy
darkacre
Blindsight
NO NAMES
GREG HEWETT
Copyright © 2025 by Greg Hewett
Cover design by Kelly Winton
Book design by Rachel Holscher
Author Photo © Ruby Ewing
Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to info@coffeehousepress.org.
Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Hewett, Greg, author.
Title: No names / Greg Hewett.
Description: Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2025.
Identifiers: LCCN 2024044748 (print) | LCCN 2024044749 (ebook) | ISBN 9781566897259 (paperback) | ISBN 9781566897266 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3558.E826 N66 2025 (print) | LCC PS3558.E826 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23/eng/20240924
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024044748
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024044749
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
for Tony Hainault, my lodestar
NOVEMBER 1993, MIKE
I’ve been scanning the ocean all morning long through a blind of rain. Still no sign of the weekly postal ferry. More than three hours late. Mountain after mountain of water speeds past the kitchen window. This could go on for days. The wind presses through the glass, even through the stone walls. The sound relentless, desperate, though the desperation is obviously just mine. Days like this I wonder how big a wave it would take to wipe this island that’s not even on most maps off the map. Or at least this part, the few low acres not taken up by the mountain. Living on a volcanic afterthought keeps me aware of how precarious the border between land and sea really is. The mountain’s rooted way farther down in the ocean than it reaches up into the sky. For sure, island should be a verb, meaning something like, to be of the underworld and overworld all at once.
In front of the peat stove the dogs twitch in their sleep.
Right before the storm rose yesterday, the ocean turned jade then lead, meaning winter has arrived. It’s taken basically all my fifteen years here, but I’m finally learning to read these signs. Maybe I should cut myself some slack. There’s no ocean back home.
If the ferry does come through, it will likely be the last till spring. That always puts me on edge.
Right when I’m about to call it quits and go fry up some of the sausage Abraham made, I make out a faint blip on the blurred horizon, like on a radar screen. I lay the spatula down. The ferry gradually comes into focus. In fits and starts it climbs up one steep slope only to get tossed down into the following valley. I pull on one of Daniel’s fisherman’s sweaters from the shelf by the door and some rainboots from under the bench, then push my way out into the gale. Rain’s going sideways. Alpha and Omega follow at my heels. I can barely keep upright and stagger my way down to the landing. Waves explode against the cliff, making it too difficult for the ferry to dock. A blast nearly blows me into the cauldron. The shipmate loses his balance, falling onto the deck, yet somehow manages to toss the canvas pouch. I leap up, snatching it from a gust just as the ferry pivots back out to sea. Sheer luck. The captain gives his usual salute, though fainter this time, like he feels sorry for me out here alone for the long, dark winter. I savor one last whiff of diesel as the boat spins away. Rain and salt-spray slap me hard. The dogs look up with their china-blue eyes, almost forlorn. I bend down to pat my fellow inmates, to let them know it’s alright, it’s alright, as the last people we’ll see for possibly up to six months disappear in the channel. It’s only about two miles across to the main island, Stream Island, but, as Daniel warns me every time he leaves at the end of summer, it’s as treacherous a stretch of sea as any on Earth. Even on a calm day it’s tough to row. Tomorrow morning the last passenger ship of the season departs from there for the Continent. Doesn’t make any difference to me, though. With the postal ferry gone, it might as well be on the other side of the world. I muscle my way against the wind back up to the squat stone house. The sod roof shivers in the hard wind. It should comfort me that these walls have withstood a millennium of storms, but sometimes it just doesn’t.
In the pouch there’s the sheet music I ordered from Boosey & Hawkes. That’s a relief. The Boccherini, Giuliani, Villa-Lobos, all there. Best of all, the Bach Lute Suites for Guitar. Enough to last the whole winter. Easily. Plenty of back issues of Soundboard and Classical Guitar, too. Plus, a thick manila envelope from Daniel.
As it turns out, Daniel’s letter is only two sheets of his gray stationery. Inside the manila envelope is a white business-sized one, addressed to me at Daniel’s studio in Copenhagen. The return address I don’t recognize, but it’s from back home. Doesn’t make sense. Who even knows that I know Daniel? Who even knows me anymore? To say the least, this freaks me out.
2 November 1993
Dear Michael,
Yesterday I returned from the two concerts in Paris that were still up in the air due to a musicians’ strike. Well, the strike ended in the nick of time. Paris is always great money and an intelligent audience, but frankly, I would not have minded the cancellations as I am simply drained. Since leaving you 30 August, I have had only fifteen days without performing, including the four days sailing back. The appearances don’t let up until Christmastime, then pick up again after the New Year through the entire spring. Next year is already scheduled, but I have got to scale back for ’95. I am going to insist the agency give me one full month on the Island when they start talking schedule again.
I have arranged for Abraham to row over and resod the barn roof before the rains come and the sea turns too rough. I only hope that it’s not too late. If you would like to help him, you are of course welcome to. He said your work on the farmhouse roof last year was excellent!
I am relieved to hear that all the winter supplies arrived. Judging from what I saw before I left, the potato harvest should be somewhat better this year, so hopefully you’ll not have to resort to the instant, though I did send a few boxes just in case. So glad to hear you are enjoying the salt licorice. I almost forgot to pack it!
Now to more important matters: your new songs. They have stayed with me, haunted me, really. I have tried them out on the piano as I pondered your question about how exactly, in a technical sense, they work. Pardon me if I sound like the Village Explainer, but here goes. All the songs have at least one unconventional chord progression. Often there is more than one, and sometimes they come close to destroying the song’s musical comprehensibility. However, that is what makes them so exciting. You have maintained a harmonic structure beneath these unruly chords that prevents their collapse. In addition, each song has a tight relationship between the cluster of chords and the semantics of the lyrics, a quality any songwriter would envy. As the meaning of the words changes with each verse, the chords offer a flexible way of shifting the emotional meanings. These songs are impressive, to say the least. They seem to tune in to an otherwise inaccessible and universal undersong in which the ordinary becomes strange or almost taboo. What Haydn said of his own work seems to be true of yours as well: “There was no one near to confuse me so I was forced to become original.”
That said, I do hope you will consider coming here for Easter. I will be home, giving only one recital at the cathedral. I know it is a lot to ask of you to leave the Island, but I think it would be good to finally have a change. Maundy Thursday falls on 8 April this coming year.
I, perhaps more than most, understand the importance of solitude. It is, I believe, nearly as much a religion for me as it is for you. The hundreds of hours I spend alone at the piano every year are not only rewarding but constitute my very being. The same is certainly true for you and the guitar. And yet, I cannot help wondering if being too devoted—being too rigid in one’s orthodoxy—has the potential of making a fetish out of solitude. I feel as though I did exactly that my final year at conservatory, as well as the year after my parents died. I suspect that coming out of your hermitage will make it all the sweeter when you return. Please don’t take offense at my suggestion. If you choose not to come, I will of course respect your decision. You have said that I am all the society you need, which flatters me, truly, but that may not be the wisest thing! Your companionship is not only a great privilege for me but a necessity as well.
I am enclosing a letter from the States that, oddly enough, came to the studio here, addressed to you. The return address is from your hometown.
With Love,
Daniel
The rain has finally stopped, though the wind continues even stronger. Overhead, the pair of usually confident sea eagles are getting tossed and battered around like plastic trash bags as they try to reach their aerie on the mountaintop. The sun flashes on and off as slate clouds pass over, startling huge stretches of ocean and mountainside to bright shades of green and then, just as suddenly, returning them to black. Wind shoots over the sod roofs in short bursts at warp speed, rippling the green gra
The past has arrived in an envelope I never expected, never wanted. Hard but also not so hard to believe it’s the only letter to arrive for me in all these years, not counting the regular ones from Daniel. From someone I don’t even know. A writer, he says. His questions confront me with things I’ve tried to forget. Remembering is like untangling the waves in the ocean. As much as I wish it were possible, a letter can’t be unread.
I head inside, sit down at the table to reread the pages I mostly skimmed but instead tear them up and toss them in the peat stove and head back to the kitchen to finally cook the sausage. I wish I could change some memories, or better yet, I wish the past wasn’t so persistently the present no matter how long and how hard I’ve tried to keep it the past. I examine my cuticles for traces of the black stain from picking walnuts. A weird, involuntary response because these islands have no trees, walnut or otherwise, and the last time I picked walnuts was over twenty years ago with Dad and John when I was a kid and happy for at least that one day a year. I laugh out loud. The dogs look over from the peat fire, cocking their heads.
With the last boat gone till spring, maybe I’m just feeling wistful. It will pass. For all these years on this roadless island, cruising down endless roads of music with my guitar and contemplating the moment-by-moment changes of ocean, sky, and mountain have been enough. World enough, this hunk of basalt stuck down in ocean as deep as imagination.
The night’s moonless, starless.
Can’t sleep thinking about the letter.
Like it slipped in from another dimension.
No, you can’t unread a letter.
I get up and pace from room to room without turning on a light. The dogs let out short whimpers before leaving their rag rug at the end of the bed to join me.
I’m angry that this letter’s having such an effect on me.
I stop my blind pacing. The dogs rub against my legs. I squat down to scratch them behind the ears, and they lick my face all over.
SEPTEMBER 1993, ISAAC
As soon as Vashti took off for work, I missed the bus downtown accidentally on purpose so I could search the attic. Need to find my birth certificate so I can get a passport. The only place I haven’t looked. For some unknown reason the attic’s always been verboten. She swore to God she’d searched absolutely everywhere. She had no idea in the world where it could have possibly gone. Right. Miss Organization doesn’t misplace shit, let alone her precious son’s birth certificate. She just doesn’t want me to leave. Simple as that. She said she’d kill me if I did. We have this sicko bond. One minute we’re screaming that we hate each other’s guts, the next she’s sobbing about how much she loves me and can’t live without me.
A few weeks ago, she put it all together: Motorcycle Adventure: Latin America and The Motorcycle Diaries on my nightstand + new bike + passport application = bad news. But seriously, who gets their spoiled-rotten kid the classic ’69 Kawasaki H1 Mach III that he’s whined and begged about forever for his eighteenth birthday and doesn’t expect trouble? Big fight about no college. She’s still in denial. Since graduation last year, it’s been Patagonia here I come! Gonna do my Che thing, except in reverse. Hop on my very own La Poderosa and ride, ride, ride, following the compass south.
Like the rest of the parents up here in the Heights, Vashti always assumed her absolutely gifted son would go to college. I’d literally cringe when she’d tell me, “Your friends all say you’re a brainiac.” Not true and not her lingo. She’s even started applying for me again this year. Ivies and the like. As if. She’s got Ivy on the brain. She marks the beginning of my downfall from the moment I bought the guitar, after which I quit Scouts (three merit badges shy of Eagle) and hockey (right when I made starting lineup). Sometimes she adds drugs and sex into the equation, but mostly she doesn’t want to think about those things.
I haul the aluminum ladder from the garage all the way upstairs. It’s bent from when she pulled her car in one time and rammed into it leaning there against the back wall. Classic. It starts wobbling as I’m climbing to the attic. Next thing I know, the damn thing’s falling out from under me as I push open the trapdoor. I barely keep from plummeting and somehow manage to pull myself up into the huge space. Huge but filled with stuff. And I mean stuff. Like another family’s hiding out up here. I haven’t been in the attic since I was a little kid. Most of the things date back to when I was a baby and we lived at Aunt Cindy’s before she got married and moved to Hawaii. There’s the puffy green-velvet sofa with matching recliners, some dressers, beds with perfectly good mattresses. To be honest, it feels a whole lot cozier than the Architectural Digest space we occupy below. I plop myself down on one of the recliners. On the dining table are stacked dishes from her grandma, with apples painted on them. The handles of the creamer and sugar bowl are in the shape of twigs. Cheesy, yeah, but also cheery, homey. Cheerier and homier than us, that’s for sure. And the clothes. A couple decades of female fads. Mini-, maxi-, midi-skirts, etc. Shoes galore: platform, spiked, loafers, sandals, you name it. In the center of the space sit two huge, empty aquariums, stained brown by dried algae, with my baby toys tossed inside. How symbolic. I remember crawling up to the aquariums when they were downstairs, filled with water and fish and miniature forests. She was into aquaculture back then. I’d press my face against the glass, escaping into an underwater world that seemed way more interesting than the one of air fate had trapped me in.
After nearly two hours searching through boxes of papers, still no birth certificate. I sit and stare out the window. The skyscrapers way downtown sparkle in the morning light. Even though we live in the Heights-iest part of the Heights, we don’t have a view of the skyline except from up here because another so-called executive home, pretty much identical to ours, went up right across the street. At this point, there’s no use catching a bus to the internship. Missed half the day already.
Bored, I flip through a couple of milk crates of vinyl: Crystal Gayle, Peaches and Herb, Three Dog Night, Chuck Mangione, Captain and Tennille. Barry-fucking-Manilow. No Beatles but what looks to be every McCartney and Wings release. I guess I’m supposed to go, like, Look at all this crazy ’70s shit, and think it’s kitschy-hip, but I don’t. It’s just plain sad. Billy Joel’s about as edgy as she got. I ought to haul the whole lot down to Rongo at the Vinyl Heart and get a few bucks or some weed for them.
There’s one record that’s totally unfamiliar. The jacket’s a plain brown wrapper. Like porn. It’s called Invisible City. The title’s spelt out in weirdly faint lettering, as if you’re looking through venetian blinds. The band’s called the No Names. No picture of them or names. Guess that’s the point. It’s from ’78. The label’s Dangerhouse. Never heard of it, either, and I feel like I know tons of obscure bands and labels from back then. Some of the titles sound pretty cool: “Altared Boy,” “Pissed Off!,” “Bench Press,” “All Your Finery at the Refinery,” “Strong, Silent, and Loud.”
I’ll give it a listen. With no ladder, I have to drop like a commando down through the trapdoor, mystery record in hand. My turntable’s busted, so I head down to the console in the living room. It was my grandparents’ and is the only old thing not relegated to the attic, though Vashti never uses it anymore except to play creepy Bing Crosby at Christmas. She’s all into CDs now since her ’93 Audi came with a sound system.
I lift the lid, throw the disk on, drop the needle. Within five, six measures, a phantom sensation comes over me, like my synapses stop firing and I stop breathing. The music puts me in a state of suspended animation, and I’m not even stoned or anything. It’s punk, for sure, but also not punk. It’s more than either punk or notpunk, if that makes any sense at all. I crank the volume. It’s so fucking sublime. Like nothing I’ve ever heard, yet it feels like I’ve been hearing it—or maybe always been wanting to hear it?—my whole life. It’s like entering that schizoid void when I’m daydreaming about math problems and the whole universe explodes into equations. I go down on my knees, like the stereo’s a fucking altar. September out the picture window shimmers all golden, like going to heaven or tripping. I stay in this position for the next song and the next song and the next. Chaos as order, order as chaos in every single measure. I roll onto my back, close my eyes. The two guitars fly as fast and sure and wild and high as anything by Johnny Ramone or Tom Verlaine. Who are these bastards? Why haven’t I ever heard of them? Usually when I hear something I dig, I run for the trusty Gibson Dark Fire and try imitating a few licks. Not with this, though. It’s too awesome. Awesome the way God meant it. I flip the record, put the arm on repeat, and lie there horny in what’s maybe my soul and for once not my dick. It’s a fix of something way beyond anything I’ve known. It’s escape from myself and the dull story of my life trailing after me.
