The Squeaky Wheel

The Squeaky Wheel
There’s my suitor, struggling to find his footing
Lost, awoken, alone, after sleeping off inebriation
I forget that I’ve been holding my tongue for so long
Cause we had a run, so don your Sunday best and wake up

You went missing, never mind the life I was wishing for
Cause you’d had enough – but at least you got enough to fake it
I’ll keep smiling, optimistically denying what I feared the most
That you disappeared and leave me wondering

Was I just a playful pawn, a trophy you had won?
Someone who could lift you when you’re low?
Innocence to prey upon, or allies in the sun?
Heaven sent, or just hell bent on love?

Darling liar, always running through the brier
What, the cuts aren’t enough? Just an aggravation you’d forget
Like promised patience, politic alleviations of
What I should’ve known was a sign of future expiration

Was I just a playful pawn, a trophy you had won?
Someone who could lift you when you’re low?
Innocence to prey upon, or allies in the sun?
Heaven sent, or just hell bent on love?

So will I marry a myth?
Or is there room for second chances?
The lust lives in the dark and may never show

Well, the battle ended years ago
Now this is how you say hello
Well where’d you take your leave?
Or would you rather keep another trick up your sleeve?
Do you remember love?
How you said you really never could feel enough?
Well, did you give it a try?
Why don’t you open your eyes and let me know?

Was I just a playful pawn, or a trophy you had won?
Someone who could lift you when you’re low?
Innocence to prey upon, or allies in the sun?
Heaven sent, or just hell bent on love?

What will happen to us?
Do you think we’ll make the cut?
Should we give it a try?
Give an eye for an eye?
Give ourselves to the lie?

🌲🌲🌲

What happens?
The Son’s Fiance comes upon Hunter, who is still rather hungover. She gives him a hiding for disappearing on her and divulges a ton of problems her and the Son’s relationship has had, but comes to realise Hunter isn’t the Son. All the same, she and Hunter agree to continue the relationship on the off-chance they can make something of it. She takes Hunter to Church for its Sunday service.

What’s in a name?
‘The Squeaky Wheel’ — hard to see this and not think, ‘stopped by the squeaky wheel, a smiling swine’. It does mirror Smiling Swine in that SS is where Hunter’s relationship with Ms Leading is established, and in this one Hunter hooks up with the Fiance, but the relation on that alone feels kinda wobbly. Since it’s from the fiance’s point of view it might be more singling out Hunter as the Squeaky Wheel, alluding to how she realises Hunter isn’t actually the Son.

Have seen people mention the Squeaky Wheel as the name of the bar where Hunter got drunk (so in it or around it is where the Fiance finds him), but not sure on the source of that.

Whose viewpoint?
The Fiance.

🌲🌲🌲

>There’s my suitor, struggling to find his footing / Lost, awoken, alone, after sleeping off inebriation
So here’s the Fiance’s voice and world, and wow is this a really clear description of the situation we’re in and the things she’s seeing. She strikes me as a very direct, intelligent, observant, and matter-of-fact kind of person, but also one who is fine with just doing things by routine without expectations of personally getting much good out of it, who will tolerate a lot of nonsense.

So anyway, probably after being told by the Friends that the ‘Son’ is back in town and exists, and from extension of that where they were last night, the Fiance of the Son goes to pick him up and confront him about where on earth he has been the past few years. As expected, she finds him doddering around outside the bar, left there by himself and plainly still hungover. She is not surprised to find him like this, and rather seems somehow accustomed to it, being empathetic yet practical at the same time — the first of many hints, and outright statements we’ll get, toward the idea that the Son was kind of a slimeball, or at least the kind of person who would drink himself stupid after a night with his friends on a semi-regular basis.

As we’ll see, the Fiance has a lot of contentious things to say about the Son. Just as much as this reveals more points of the Son’s character to us, the audience, it will reveal this information to Hunter — telling him that this ‘higher hand’ he idolised was maybe kinda inferior from the outset, and not as hard to match up to as he thought.

>I forget that I’ve been holding my tongue for so long / Cause we had a run, so don your Sunday best and wake up
The Fiance is fundamentally angry with the Son. She has a lot of discontents with their relationship that she has always opted not to confront him with, and this time now that he’s ghosted her for several years and counting after the war, she reckoned that the first thing she would’ve done upon finding him was dress him down and chew him out. Upon actually seeing him, though, she momentarily forgets about this plan to instead focus on getting Hunter in shape to be out in public and specifically in shape to attend today’s Church service. Despite the gap, she fundamentally doesn’t consider them to have broken up and does still basically care about the Son even though he apparently neglects her and engages in terrible dumb antics.

>0:28 – 0:40 Instrumental
The Fiance brings Hunter back to her house to get him sobered up, cleaned up, and with a change of clothes.

>You went missing, never mind the life I was wishing for / Cause you’d had enough – but at least you got enough to fake it
Now that they’re in a more private environment, the Fiance begins voicing her discontents with the relationship to Hunter, questioning his disappearance among other things.

Hunter spent several years living in seclusion with the Mother after the war. From the Fiance’s perspective, though, he just disappeared without any notice or word — even though she and the Son had plans for him to move in with her after the war, or to find a house together, start a family and so on. Since Hunter didn’t know about the Fiance, we can figure she didn’t show up in any of the Son’s postcards, but the Fiance naturally interpreted this period of radio silence as the Son trying to escape from a future with her.

‘Cause you’d had enough’ -> There was tension in their relationship even before the war. The Fiance had some level of expectation that the Son would want to ditch her.

‘But at least you got enough to fake it’ -> Despite that tension, the relationship still offered enough positives to the Son that he made an effort to keep it going and stay with the Fiance. He pretended to love her, at the very least. (‘We couldn’t fake it, so why even try?’)

>I’ll keep smiling, optimistically denying what I feared the most / That you disappeared and leave me wondering
The Fiance could never be sure of whether the Son actually loved her or not. Despite that, she tried to keep a positive outlook that said ‘sure he did, I might not know where he is right now, but when he shows up again it’ll probably turn out he got himself into some weird business again and he just couldn’t reach me or didn’t want to get me involved in it’, or something in that vein where the possibility of him loving her was still open, over the period of Hunter’s absence.

Realistically, she knew he had probably just ran off and dumped her, but she was never able to confirm that because she didn’t know where he went or what happened to him. Further, she was massively fearing that he had simply died in the war, and so she would never get an answer to her doubts about his intentions.

>Was I just a playful pawn, a trophy you had won? / Someone who could lift you when you’re low?
The core contention of the relationship for the Fiance — she was not certain that the Son truly loved her. She couldn’t help but suspect that he only gravitated to her as a romantic date friend and trophy wife, and that he enjoyed the thrill of having conquered someone with her beauty, wealth, status, or difficulty (we can figure she has at least one of these) that he could brag about to his buddies.

Further, he leaned on her significantly as an emotional support, and though she consistently gave that support, she also had to wonder whether that was all he really liked her for. Points to the Son as a far more troubled person than Hunter initially suspected.

>Innocence to prey upon, or allies in the sun?
Was the Son an exploitative predator who took advantage of the Fiance’s affection for him and used her, or were their feelings both honest attempts at mutual support with no secret hostile motives or underbelly?

>Heaven sent, or just hell bent on love?
Really nice line. The Son was someone who desired love profusely — in that way, he sounds a lot like Hunter.

Let’s pause on that thought for a moment. Going to the ‘Hunter and the Son are Twins’ idea, these parallels would be intentional. What’s the major difference between how Hunter and the Son would’ve approached love, though? Well, Hunter was taught how to love by Ms Terri, while the Son’s role model was the General. Poetically it would make sense that the Son’s relationship prospects would be uncertain on whether the Son really loved them, if he doesn’t have that basic sense of what love’s like, while Hunter does know what love is and beelined to it in Ms Leading.

>Darling liar, always running through the brier / What, the cuts aren’t enough? Just an aggravation you’d forget / Like promised patience, politic alleviations of / What I should’ve known was a sign of future expiration
‘Darling liar’ -> The Son had a tendency to lie and be dishonest with the Fiance. The Fiance’s sureness in saying this suggests she has caught him in unambiguous lies before.

‘Always running through the brier’ -> The Son tended to resolve his problems by taking the most difficult and protracted route, the thorny path, as it were. He could never seem to just address an issue or solve a problem in a straightforward and simple way; it always had to become some pointlessly roundabout or dramatic thing.

‘What, the cuts aren’t enough? Just an aggravation you’d forget’ -> The Fiance pressures Hunter again, challenging why he would do all this stupid stuff and make choices that would just make the core problem more difficult to resolve. Furthermore, when the Son did have discontents, he would typically suppress them and not address them straightforwardly.

‘You’d forget like promised patience, politic alleviations of what I should’ve known was a sign of future expiration’ -> The Son promised he would marry the Fiance after he returned from the war, though she strongly wanted to get married and start a family before it. In retrospect, she should’ve have figured his hesitance to commit himself to her or give her a child before going into such a serious and life-threatening situation meant he wasn’t really serious about staying with her, and would’ve broken up with or divorced her eventually.

>2:35 – 2:47 AAAAaaaAAAaaaAAAAA
A bit revelatory? The Fiance figures out that Hunter isn’t the Son? Yeah, that’s it. I think she sees how Hunter genuinely doesn’t know about this promise to get married, and that’s what twigs her to it.

>So will I marry a myth? / Or is there room for second chances? / The lust lives in the dark and may never show
The Fiance considers her prospects.

‘Will I marry a myth?’ -> Basically, ‘are we ever getting married at all’? Ostensibly the Fiance questioning if the image of the Son who loves her is just something fake she made up in her head, in which case she’s attached to an outcome she’ll never get, and even if they do get married it won’t be to the person she wants to marry. Carries a lot of tenors and layers though — the Son’s literal death elevates the idea of marrying him into a myth, and to marry Hunter’s impersonation of the Son is also like marrying a myth, ‘the myth I made’. She has also realised Hunter isn’t the Son by now, and is coming to this exasperated question like, great, now what do I do!? Go marry my dead fiance?

‘Or is there room for second chances?’ -> The Fiance also questions the possibility that maybe they can go ahead and get married anyway. I mean I’m sure this isn’t the most ideal straits for the Fiance, but given how strained the relationship was already, maybe going along with Hunter will be fine. Or at least fine enough to be on par with marrying a man who didn’t love her in the first place and didn’t give her a family before ditching her and dying — supposing that is what happened — and otherwise at least could fulfil the promise that the Son wasn’t able to keep and maybe turn out kinda okay or even good as he becomes the Son for her. She hints to Hunter her openness for him to pursue her by opening the topic of ‘reconciliation’ as a prospect at all.

‘The lust lives in the dark and may never show’ -> Not sure on this. Probably her recognising that Hunter, having his own private life, probably will keep a lover, but deeming that an acceptable compromise as long as he focuses on maintaining a proper family and relationship with her at the same time and keeps the personal business to the side.

>Well, the battle ended years ago / Now this is how you say hello
The Fiance begins testing Hunter. If she is going to be entertaining the prospect of inviting this stranger into her life, she is going to want to feel him out and make sure they’re on the same wavelength first. It’s almost like a little game of 20 questions where she throws him a hardball like ‘c’mon, you need to be able to answer this,’ then signals her willingness to collaborate by instantly undermining this fair question with an ‘out’, subtly advising Hunter of how to answer such questions (and what the Son was like) if he ever were thrown such hardballs in earnest, and establishing for Hunter the foundational blocks of their relationship.

We’re hearing it as a song but it’s probably more basically structured as the Fiance first signalling she won’t probe into Hunter’s story before ‘reminiscing’ to him about how their relationship ‘used to be’ and then subtly asking Hunter if he’d be willing to collaborate with her.

>Well where’d you take your leave?
‘So you show up hungover doddering around the bar after years of no contact — where were you the whole time?’

>Or would you rather keep another trick up your sleeve?
‘Then again, it’s not like you ever tell me these things.’ Subtext being, ‘I’m willing to help you with your cover story, you don’t have to tell me everything’.

>Do you remember love? / How you said you really never could feel enough?
‘The person you’re impersonating wasn’t very loving to me.’

Shades of ‘prayers from above, never answered quite enough’.

>Well, did you give it a try?
‘Can you be loving to me?’

>Why don’t you open your eyes and let me know?
The Fiance signalling to Hunter that she knows he’s not the Son but she’s okay with that since she thinks they’ll be able to build something better. Hunter probably realises at this point that she knows, too, but is nonetheless willing to go along with him and not even backstab or out him if he says no (she has framed the whole conversation in a way that doesn’t endanger the Son persona even if he rejects her — he just has to accept her premise that the Son was unloving to her as his reasoning). She’s laying it on pretty thick that she wants him to recognise the nature of her offer as a positive one.

>Chorus Repetition
Stronger this time with the Fiance’s knowledge that the Son really is gone, she’ll never get these answers, and the guy is dead. Probably also works in reference to this weird thing she’s building with Hunter.

>What will happen to us? / Do you think we’ll make the cut?
Very blatantly asking these questions to Hunter as Hunter — he has passed her vibe check and she seems satisfied that he’s not a rotten man who will totally mistreat her, or anything, but she still has to seriously wonder if a relationship between a spurned fiance and the identity thief who waltzed into her life can really work out to become something as worthwhile, loving, and intimate as she hopes. Note the ‘we’, she’s conscious of Hunter’s prospects and satisfaction in this relationship too. She seriously does want it to be a good one, she’s not just toying around with Hunter because she wants a husband and kids.

>Should we give it a try? / Give an eye for an eye? / Give ourselves to the lie?
‘This is nuts, but should we do it?’

‘Give an eye for an eye’ -> Carries the connotation of ‘woah, we both got burned in love, maybe we can get one over on our exes by making this relationship work out’. So as much as she’s wondering if the Son loved her and thinks she might be able to build something better with Hunter, Hunter’s also contemplating the idea that a successful relationship with the Fiance will be a good answer to the Ms Leading problem. He and the Fiance do have at least some common ground on that point.

And as for the main questions, the answer is yes — Hunter and the Fiance agree to pursue a relationship. We can figure the Fiance will help Hunter adjust into his role as the Son and cover for him if he ever badly misses information the Son should know from this point.

>4:34 – 4:36 Instrumental
Such as this point: she and the Son are churchgoers. With an important service going on today, she brings Hunter with her to the Church to attend.

Is There Anybody Here? | Act IV | The Bitter Suite IV & V: The Congregation/The Sermon in the Silt