Or it was like swimming in the sea at night, under a million stars, and swimming further and further out from the lights of shore until a current takes you and you can’t get back, and you swim and swim against the current until you’re tired, but you have to rest for a while, have to tread water and get your strength back, and then in that night-black water something massive and covered with the scars of time slides along under your feet, and it just keeps sliding on and on, an entity too awesome to look at, and you know the leviathan has either come to eat you or give you a place to stand with your head just above the waves.
What Ariel had told him, and her thoughts about that girl and the song, about George seeing her in his hospital room and calling her an angel of life, about crows flying from the mouth of Jeremy Pett in the blackberry bramble battleground…it was too much for even a believer. It was too much for even someone who had heard his name spoken by a stranger in a church far from home.
“I don’t know,” he told her, sitting on the park bench in the fragrant shade of the eucalyptus tree. She had just asked him if he thought they should talk this over with John and Berke. He could tell that she wanted to, but she needed him to agree. “I’m not sure they’re ready for this.”
“You mean, you’re not ready.”
“Ariel…listen… I’m trying to make sense of this, okay?” Terry felt himself floundering, like that swimmer in the night far from shore. “You saying this song is…like…divinely inspired, right? By that girl, and she was something other than an ordinary girl? But John had the idea for all of us to write the song before we got to that place.”
“No, he had the idea for all of us to write a song before we got there. He came up with the idea, but she…” Ariel hesitated, as lost as she’d been in her dream. What exactly was she trying to get at? “…is refining it,” she said, for want of a better term.
“Is refining it? Is? Ariel, here are the lines of the song, right here on this page. In this notebook. Your notebook. And you came up with this line about figuring what to keep and what to leave behind, didn’t you? You did, not…her. So how can she be refining the song? How can she have anything to do with it? Okay, maybe George had a dream about her in the hospital, just like you did last night, but I don’t see—”
“Why would George have had a dream about her? He hardly spoke to her that day.”
“That’s the way dreams work. Things pop in and out. Look, I haven’t had any dreams about her. As far as I know, neither have John or Berke. If she was like…some kind of supernatural force or something, then why wouldn’t she speak to all of us at the same time?”
Ariel almost said it, but she didn’t: Maybe she spoke to the one who would listen, and maybe she trusted that listener to carry the message forward.
“What would be the reason for it?” Terry had his hand on her shoulder, like someone might do to calm a deranged person. “Honestly, now. Are we supposed to write a song that brings about whirled peas? Come on! Are we supposed to write a song that makes us…like…a huge success and suddenly we’re the great big music stars? If you’ve noticed, we’re all over the news right now, and you know who made that possible? It wasn’t that girl.” He leaned in closer, as if confiding a secret, but Ariel already knew what he was going to say. “It was Jeremy Pett. It was Mike’s murder, and George getting shot. It was some nut with a .25 at Stone Church. Yeah, I believe there’s a God, and I believe there’s a Satan too. I believe in a Heaven and a Hell, and all the stuff that a lot of people laugh at. But this is just a few lines of a song.”
“A .25?” Ariel asked. That was the first she’d heard of it. “True didn’t say what kind of gun it was.”
“It sounded like a .25 to me. A small gun. My dad’s a collector. Handguns, not rifles. He took me out to a pistol range a few times.” Terry shrugged. “It’s one of the man things he was pushing on me.” He reached out for the notebook and the pen. “Can I show you something?”
She gave the two items up.
Terry sat for a while looking at the lines, and then beneath the last line he wrote in the purple ink Won’t you move my hand, please tell me what to write.
Then he waited, pen poised.
“Okay already,” Ariel said. “I get it.”
Terry’s hand moved, and he began to write.
I’m sitting here like a candle on the darkest night.
I’ve got my hot flame, got my flicker on, but where am I when my light is gone?
I wish you safe travel, courage, you’re gonna need it.
Terry looked up and handed her back the pen. “Second verse. Did that girl write it, or did I?”
Ariel took the pen and also the notebook. She closed it.
He was right. Of course he was right. But she couldn’t help thinking that if she hadn’t been sitting out here on this bench, saving a seat just for Terry, and if she hadn’t told him what was on her mind, this second verse would not have been born today.
“What a way to earn a living.” Terry was looking at the two FBI agents who were still scanning the street, the houses and the hills. When he spoke again, his tone was a little wistful. “I’m so sorry about Mike and George. But the awful thing—the thing that makes you really sick—is that the media attention has already made us a success, if you want to use that word for it. It’s already sold thousands of CDs that we wouldn’t have sold just going on like we were. No telling what doors are about to open. And we’re just doing exactly what we were doing before.” He gave a small bitter smile. “Because before all this press and shit, where were we going? Around in a circle.” He didn’t have to remind her of what they’d shared for the last three years: the grinding road trips, the gigs where you hoped to sell enough T-shirts to pay for a motel room, the indignity of opening for bands—some younger and much less experienced—who got the lucky break of a record deal early on, and you never saw your own break coming, no matter how hard you worked or what you did. “That just wears you down,” Terry said. “You know? It wore me down. Way down. And before that I was there with the Venomaires, watching that death battle between John and Kevin Keeler over who was going to run the band, and then Kevin having his nervous breakdown on stage in Atlanta. With all that, and then Julia and the pain pills.”
When he sighed, it was the sound of a man whose joy has become a burden. “I don’t know what you guys are planning to do, whether or not you’ll keep the name and soldier on with some new faces. I’m leaving because I want to do the vintage keyboards thing, sure, but the other part is…where am I when my light is gone? What have I done? What am I going to do? Have I mattered to anybody?” He paused for a moment, and he straightened his glasses on his face as if to be able to see a little more clearly. “I need some time and space, all my own. I need to get off the bus and find out where I am.”
Ariel said, “The man in the church. The voice. About music being your life.”
“I’ll always play, if just for myself. I’ll always write songs. Maybe I’ll kick in with another band someday. Maybe I’ll record at home. I’m not doubting what he told me. I just want to know why he took the time to speak to me, if that’s all there is.” Terry sat staring at the ground, where the edge of the eucalyptus shade met the promise of the California sun. “Well,” he said at last, and he stood up a bit creakily, like an old codger artfully disguised in a young skin. “That stew smelled pretty good in there. I’m starving.”
Ariel also got to her feet, holding the notebook close to her side. “Let’s get at it,” she suggested. She took his hand and they walked into the house together, and behind them the FBI agents returned to their Yukon.
In the kitchen, the two lovely birds of morning had emerged from their slumber nests and had already been served with bowls of veggie stew. One bird had touselled, curly black hair and dark hollows under her equally dark eyes, she wore a loose-fitting T-shirt and a pair of camo-print men’s boxer shorts and she was sullenly nursing a cup of coffee that may or may not have been spiked like momma’s own. T
he other, wearing the Five tee and the gray PJ bottoms in which he’d slept, had an even more wildly cockscrewed bedhead of long black hair and—
“Christ, what an eye!” Terry said, not without admiration.
“Thanks, and go eff yourself,” Nomad replied, being a gentleman in front of the older lady.
The first thing that had jumped into Terry’s mind upon seeing that eye was the title of King Crimson’s 1974 album Starless and Bible Black. Except the swollen-shut lump of head-butted flesh wasn’t completely black, it contained splotches and streaks of green in maybe four different sick shades. It had been bad last night but today…whoa! It was time for the phantom to put his mask back on.
“Are you going to be able to do the gig?” Ariel asked.
“Yes, I am.” Nomad’s voice was huskier than usual. His good eye looked bloodshot. “Don’t worry about me.” He kept eating his stew, though his spoon seemed to have trouble finding his mouth.
Ariel nodded, but the fact remained that she did worry about him. She remembered apologizing for John’s behavior to the girl at the well, and telling her I just try to clean up the mess. It was her path, it seemed. She had tried to clean up the mess for many people, most of them guys she’d been involved with. Most all of them musicians, the messiest of the bunch. Like Neal Tapley, and before him Jess Vandergriff, who was one of the best acoustic guitarists on the East Coast but one of the worst in believing everything was either perfection or crap, nothing in between. And before him, others. After Neal had driven himself off a county road to his death, in the aftermath of one of the messiest drug scenes/breakups/breakdowns Ariel had ever tearfully and agonizingly witnessed, she had sworn off men of the music. There was not going to be any involvement with any guy in any band she was in ever again, no romance, not any little funky and innocent—mostly—fun fuelled by a few vodka shooters when she knew she ought to be drinking silver needle tea and getting the broom ready. Nothing.
And yet.
She had looked at the shape lying in the other bed last night, his shoulder and the wounded side of his face touched by the faintest iridescence of moonlight, and it had crossed her mind that if Terry was not lying on the floor in the sleeping bag she might have drawn aside her sheet, gotten up and gone to John, as silent as a spirit.
She might have slipped in beside him, and gently touched his forehead as if to draw from it the fever of his pain. She would bear that for him, if he would let her. She would ease the trouble in his bones and smooth the worry from his mind. She would take the fire of his anger in her hands, and make of it a candle.
He had so much potential. He was so very good, in so many ways, without knowing he was. She thought maybe that was a great part of why she admired him so much; he didn’t strut or brag, he just did. She wished she had a few embers of his flame, to heat up the sometimes too-cool hallways of her own house. She knew he could be abrasive, he could be childish, he could throw his tantrums and say things his mouth wished seconds later had never tumbled out. He could be terribly human, is what he could be. Human, cranked up to eleven. But she wished she had his ability to go full-throttle, to open up his engines and let the roar of life thunder out. If he made a mistake, the same kind of mistake that would have paralyzed her with the fear she might commit it again, he kicked it aside like an old sack full of ashes. He just kept going forward, even if he didn’t know exactly where he was going. To be honest, sometimes he played his guitar like that, too. But his passion and energy always made up for his lack of direction. At least, in her opinion.
She had asked herself if she was falling in love with him. Love. That was not a word used by members of a gigging band for each other, unless it was in the concept of I love my brother or I love my sister or I love my whole dysfunctional road-crazed family. She wasn’t sure, but she did feel for him—what would be the word used in those old Victorian novels by the Brontë sisters that she liked to read in school?—oh, yes…‘stirrings’.
But only stirrings, because she had tried—and failed, mostly—to clean up so many messes, and her own heartbreak was not a mess she was eager to tackle, her own weeping side of three o’clock had come and gone so many mornings when John had left a club with one or two girls laughing and rubbing themselves all over him, but that was the Nomad part of John, the persona, and she had tried very hard and so far successfully to sing and play ‘This Song Is A Snake’ with no hint of a hiss.
Anyway, there was not going to be any involvement with any guy in any band she was ever in again. No romance. No little funky fun.
But something Terry had said out under the eucalyptus tree had made her heart sink: I don’t know what you guys are planning to do, whether or not you’ll keep the name and soldier on with some new faces.
Three could not be Five. Changes were coming. If two new players came in, the chemistry would be altered. If it didn’t work, John might even decide to join another band. After all, this was a business. Wasn’t it? Berke might split and go her own way. A business, that’s what it was. Not really a family, after all.
She thought she should be considering what to keep and what to leave behind, because this life was never easy.
After his statement to Ariel, Nomad put down his spoon and very gingerly touched the piece of puff pastry that seemed stuck to his face with searing hot Super-Glue. “Maybe you should stretch your acoustic set out tonight. Do two or three extra songs. Since this is such an acoustic crowd.”
The Casbah, on the corner of Laurel Street and Kettner Boulevard in Little Italy, was one of their favorite venues. The music room was small and the club sat under the noisy flight path of aircraft in and out of San Diego International, but it was a fun and friendly place and in the three times they’d played there the reception had always been stellar. One thing Ariel particularly liked is that her acoustic set, usually a couple of quiet songs delivered soon after Berke’s drum solo, went over well at the Casbah. The audience really paid attention unlike at a lot of other clubs where the cry was for louder and louder. “Sure,” Ariel said, pleased at this suggestion. “I’d be glad to.”
A cellphone’s ring tone burbled a couple of bars of The Clash’s ‘London Calling’. Chappie checked the incoming number, which she didn’t recognize, and then she answered, “Hello?” She listened for a few seconds, as Terry walked over to stick his nose into the crockpot’s aroma. “Any of you guys know a DJ Talk It Up?” Chappie asked with the phone at her ear. “From Rock The Net? Pardon?” She was speaking to the caller. Then, to her houseguests again: “Rock Da Net.”
“Fuck, no,” said Nomad, his gentlemanly demeanor over and done.
“He wants to talk to you.” Chappie held the phone toward Ariel.
“Me? No, I don’t want to talk to anyone.”
“She doesn’t want to talk to anyone,” Chappie told DJ Talk It Up. “That’s right. Okay, I’ll let them know. Uh huh. Listen, how did you get this number?” Evidently that question was not to be answered, because Chappie put the cell down and said, “I guess they’ve found you. Mr. Allen told me they might. Anyway, DJ says to tell you he does a podcast from Los Angeles. He says to check out his website. Rock Da Net.” She couldn’t hold back a grin. “Have you ever heard anything so fucking lame?”
“Got that right,” Nomad said, aiming his spoon in what he hoped was the vicinity of his mouth.
“Says he’ll be at sound check today and would like to do an interview. Get ready for it. That place is going to be crawling with media. But that’s what you want, right?”
No one replied. Because Nomad was the emperor, sometimes his thoughts exactly mirrored those of his subjects, and that was now the case. He was thinking, as they all were, that success—if it meant acceptance, or fame, or money, or revenge on those who looked down on you as if you’d just crawled out of a gutter—was not worth the death and injury of two bandmates. All those things would be great, the dream of every working band, but this price tag was way too steep.
“What I want,” said Berke, an
d she let that hang for a few seconds before she finished it, “is to get this over with.” She turned her haggard face toward her mother. “The boxes.”
Chappie left the kitchen and came back with an envelope. She put it down on the table next to Berke’s coffee cup. Written in block letters on the front was Berke—Open The Boxes First. The word First was underlined.
“They’re waiting for you,” Chappie said, her voice betraying no emotion.
Berke took the envelope. She stood up and headed for the back door. She was wearing her running shoes without socks. When she realized nobody was following, she said with forced and farcical cheer, “Come on! Let’s make it a party!”
It was a small free-standing garage whose contents, Berke knew, had gradually choked off enough room for a car. When Chappie unlatched the door and pulled it open, the odor that rolled out was not of old oil and grease but instead of old library stacks. Sunlight had already revealed the dozens of boxes, the precariously-leaning metal shelves jammed full of books and the layers of newspapers and magazines that stood everywhere, but Chappie switched on an overhead light to complete the illumination.
Berke looked around, with her mother at her side and her bandmates behind her. Floyd fucking Fisk had really laid his crap heavy in this hole, she thought. It was a paradise for cockroaches and silverfish, probably for mice too. That smell…she remembered that sickeningly-sweet smell of decaying bindings and newsprint from Floyd fucking Fisk’s downtown store, Second Chance Books. It had been there since before she was born; he’d bought it from the retiring owner who’d had it like since Abraham Lincoln stopped shaving.
This shit was so fucked-up. She looked high and low, at all the murder of trees. An open box to her left invited a glance. It was full of moldering magazines in plastic bags. The covers of the ones she could see were adorned with spaceships and weird alien-looking faces and had the titles Galaxy, Worlds Of If, Analog and Astounding Science Fiction. That figured, she thought. Floyd fucking Fisk probably didn’t even know what really good sci-fi was, like Star Trek and Star Wars. In other boxes and on other shelves she saw titles like Argosy, Esquire, Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock. And who the fuck ever needed so many sets of encyclopedias? They were bound up with cords and looked like weapons of mass destruction. And then there was the ancient stuff in here, the books that appeared to be bound from slabs of wood or crinkly cowhide. There had to be a book of dirty jokes written by Nero around somewhere: The One-Handed Fiddler and 101 More, Or: Pluck It Baby!