Songs for the End of the World

by Saleema Nawaz

  It was supposed to be a joke, but Stu’s face had clouded over. “Don’t say things like that. There’s nothing funny about not respecting women.”

  Emma thought her eyes might roll right out of her head. “God, you’re such a Boy Scout. It’s crazy that people think you’re some kind of rock god, when deep down you’re completely conventional.”

  Stu scowled and threw down the book he’d been reading. “As if tattoos weren’t the most conventional thing possible for someone in a band. Careful you don’t become a cliché yourself.”

  Emma’s cheeks felt as though she’d been slapped. “How about the cliché of running your mouth off to any reporter willing to sit down and listen? You’re such a…a…a blabbermouth,” she finished, feeling lame.

  “And you’re selfish and completely wrapped up in yourself.” His tone was calm and diagnostic as he stood up and pushed in his stool. Then, seeing her face collapse, he softened. “Em, why can’t you understand that the choices you make affect me, too?”

  The argument had continued, but Emma had let it peter out, nervous at how far they’d coasted from the familiar shores of their relationship and out into some uncharted sea of cruelty.

  Now Emma tried to keep her voice light, avoiding any of the Republican comparisons she’d resorted to last time. “You know it’s my decision, right? You actually can’t tell me not to.”

  “Just wait a few months, until the baby’s born,” said Stu, wrapping his arms around her waist. Emma wondered if he was being affectionate because the others were there or if he really was less rattled by their last fight than she was. He leaned in and smelled her hair. “And who knows? You might change your mind by then.”

  “When have you ever known me to change my mind?”

  He laughed. “You’re right. You’re an abominably obstinate woman.”

  “Thank you.” When Emma glanced up at the TVS again, the news was airing another story about New York City’s so-called ARAMIS Girl. “Oh, I want to see this,” she said. Stu patted her hand as they listened to pundits speculate about how many people ARAMIS Girl might have infected.

  “She’s an example of a broken public health authority,” an analyst from a Washington think tank was saying. Emma stared at the now-familiar photo of the smiling girl, frozen in time before her face and life got blown up out of all proportion.

  “I feel so bad for her,” she said, watching the rabid discussion of ARAMIS Girl’s possible movements. Emma tried to imagine the downsides of sudden fame without any of the perks. “She must be scared stiff.”

  “If she’s even still alive,” said Stu. The program switched to a conversation about infection avoidance and an interview with one of the station’s new commentators, the writer of a bestselling pandemic novel. He appeared onscreen via a low-quality video feed. “Oh my God,” said Stu, sounding oddly vehement. “This guy. Can’t they find an actual expert? Or is real science taboo now?”

  Emma squinted at the TV. “Why is he so grainy?”

  “Because he’s Skyping in from home. He’s saying we should all stay inside, too.”

  “Easier said than done.” A few months earlier, Emma had read the writer’s novel, in which all of the world’s children caught a deadly virus and died. At the time, it had seemed preposterous. The baby began a fury of kicking.

  “Maybe we ought to call someone,” said Stu. He rested his hand on her belly again, his eyes watching the ticker at the bottom of the news program as it tracked the confirmed number cases of ARAMIS worldwide. “Let them know we want in on the special secret bunker for the rich and famous. Ha.”

  “Don’t worry about ARAMIS,” said Emma. “Believe me, I’m not going to.”

  * * *

  Emma had met Stu at a concert—a story she had vowed to stop telling after it appeared in a sidebar in Rolling Stone. It was the first Philadelphia show of a band that had two decent college radio hits at the time, but who were now more well-known for having played the show where Stu Jenkins met Emma Aslet.

  The story was that Emma had been knocked down by a falling crowd surfer and Stu had helped her to her feet. Then they had squeezed their way out of the scrum, bought six shots of Jäger, and found their way up to the roof, where they stargazed and more or less immediately fell in love. Somewhere in there, they had sung the song “Victoria” by the Kinks at the tops of their lungs, which was a detail Emma regretted revealing after people began requesting it during the encore. That was when she realized there were some things they needed to keep for themselves.

  And Stu. In those days he used to make her forearm the neck of his guitar, closing his eyes while she lounged in his lap and let him press their songs into her, one chord progression at a time. Her skin would tingle under the rough calluses of his left hand as she closed her eyes, too, feeling her way to the sweetest harmonies. He told her he had never sung without his guitar in front of anyone but her.

  When they met, Stu was working in a bike shop, writing music at night. He’d done a philosophy degree at a liberal arts college in Western Massachusetts before moving back to Philadelphia with the idea of putting together a band, though he hadn’t actually talked to anyone about it yet. A year later they were married, and Emma had dropped out of Bryn Mawr and moved into Stu’s studio apartment in Fishtown, where she started them on a schedule of writing songs and recording demos. It was Emma who found Ben and Jesse at a party full of students from the Curtis Institute of Music. Both studied classical guitar, but Ben had played drums in high school jazz band and missed it. Jesse landed on bass. The four of them fell to work on the band as though it was the thing that mattered most. Before long they had an easy rapport in which the thousands of tiny decisions that took forever to explain to other people became simple, silent, subsumed into the music itself.

  Emma booked shows for them at all the clubs within a day’s drive, hawking their self-titled EP and keeping track of how much money was left on the inside back cover of their road atlas. And then, just before she had to figure out whether they could afford to fix the air conditioning in the van, they got picked up by Matador, released a full-length record, and watched as, one after another, the big music mags dubbed it the album of the year. Before they’d even started their first national tour with a real bus, MOJO had declared that Dove Suite might save rock and roll. No pressure.

  Emma used to think she liked the pressure, the way it sharpened her nerves and reflexes. The focus it seemed to bring to all her decisions. The drive it gave her to write better songs, give more intense performances, and build the life she wanted from the ground up—brick by brick if she had to. But once she got pregnant, the pressure felt like it had no outlet, no purpose. She was like a kettle set to boil, forgotten on the element, just whistling Dixie until she burned dry.

  Even before she’d started to show, Stu had summoned everyone to a band meeting to announce the pregnancy. Then he’d gone ahead and called off the tour indefinitely. Time was when he’d never make a decision about the band without checking with her first.

  “You don’t know how you’re going to feel, Em,” he’d said, and Ben and Jesse had sat around and nodded, and nobody had sided with her when she’d said that maybe, just maybe, they would be fine figuring it out on tour. Being the only woman in the band was something more profound than just a drag. It was a dive, a drop. It was like falling down a well into a world where she was half her normal size. After so many years of keeping the band’s wheels turning on her own, maybe she should have been happy that Stu was finally making decisions by himself. Instead, she felt like telling him to play to his strengths and stick to the music.

  But the baby had kicked her in the side and insisted she do the right thing, which she understood to be giving in without a fight. Forget about what she wanted. Forget whisky. Forget beer. Forget touring. Forget sleep, for that matter. Every night since they’d cancelled the tour, Emma had lain awake for hours, staring ar
ound their bedroom that felt cavernously large and nondescript in the dusky light filtering in through the blinds. It was only after she’d reached out to her Canadian promoter cousins and set things in motion for the benefit concert that she’d managed to get some rest at night. Her bandmates had been caught off guard by her sudden commitment to the charitable fundraiser, but they’d followed her lead. As usual. And for a few days she almost felt like things were back to normal. But then Stu had to go blabbing to reporters about the baby.

  The pregnancy had made Emma feel as though she were preparing for a journey—lift-off was how she thought of it—a launch into the great beyond, where time moved differently. And yes, Stu would meet her there, on the space station or something, looking clean and well rested and wearing, for some unaccountable reason, an immaculately pressed beige suit. But he would get to teleport there unchanged, whereas she was supposed to be conditioning herself to exit the Earth’s atmosphere with the pressure of a hundred rockets. Blast off. The least he could do was wait for her to announce the pregnancy herself, when they were both ready. Preferably after the child’s safe delivery.

  And just like that, all serious interest in the album and concert had been diverted into baby mania. The latest tabloid image of Emma circulating online was a paparazzi shot taken outside a drugstore in Austin, paired with an outsize zoom-in on the baby bump. In the second photo, they’d cropped off her head. The article was headlined IS THIS THE END OF DOVE SUITE?

  * * *

  On the way to the security screening, Emma placed her shoulder bag in the top basket of a metal cart already loaded with the rest of their luggage. She began pushing it down the hall as she and Stu walked through the terminal. Ben and Jesse strolled a few paces behind, each with their own cart, deep in conversation about the best noodle places in Vancouver.

  “Here,” said Stu, reaching out for the cart’s wide handle. “You shouldn’t be doing that.”

  “It’s okay,” said Emma. She was enjoying the slight exertion of keeping the unwieldy vehicle moving forward in a straight line. If a stroller complete with baby weighed less than a weekend’s worth of outfits, motherhood was going to be a cinch. “I’ve got it.”

  “Just let me do this for you,” he said. Then, taking control of the trolley, Stu propelled it at a rapid clip down the wide, empty corridor. One of the front wheels began a high-pitch squeaking. “After all, you’re going to be running around after our kids soon enough.”

  Emma slowed. “Kids? Plural?”

  Stu stopped and gave her a half-grin. “Freudian slip?”

  She caught up to him and seized the cart handle. “And why exactly am I going to be the one running around? What are you going to be doing?”

  “Dad stuff.” Stu furrowed his brow, squinting at her. “Come on, Em. It’s just a figure of speech.” He glanced over at Jesse and Ben for support.

  Ben only shook his head, a warning look in his eyes. Emma saw something pass between them and realized she’d underestimated just how traditional Stu really was. She could see the future all mapped out: Stu spending more and more time in the studio, while she’d be expected to divert her energies to the baby. The only thing standing between her and the brute slavishness of motherhood was money.

  “Just go,” she said, lifting her hands off the cart and backing away. “God.”

  As Stu went ahead, Emma pulled out her phone and texted Jenna, the terrifyingly efficient young woman she’d hired to be the band’s virtual assistant. Can you go through that list of Vancouver tattoo artists I sent you and set something up ASAP? Make sure they’re okay re: pregnancy and don’t tell Stu. It’s a surprise. Thx!

  Halfway down the corridor, Stu called to her over his shoulder. “Emma, you coming?” But he kept going without waiting for an answer.

  With nothing in her hands, she felt too unencumbered, directionless. If there was anything that had changed in her over the years, it was that her rootlessness had deepened. All the travelling they’d done as a band kept bringing Emma back to her childhood at sea: all the countries she’d visited while always feeling from nowhere, or from a place more of the mind than real—half remembered, half described—and everywhere along the way picking up a phrase, a food, a new favourite thing. Markers and souvenirs. They might have been affectations, but maybe that was all character was anyway: an accumulation of affectations. The cigarettes were long gone. The bourbon still there—until she got pregnant. Sazeracs she’d left behind somewhere en route. She had come to enjoy a certain kind of unsettled, vagabond feeling, but the trade-off was always needing to know who you were. Otherwise, it was too easy to start drifting. If you stopped paying attention, there was no telling where you could end up, especially in the music business. That’s what the tattoo was about. A kind of badge to show what she had been through. How far they had come and how much she had endured.

  The baby was a badge, too, she supposed, though her foremost experience of the pregnancy to date was as a kind of weather. A fog of tiredness and uneasy sentimentality that veiled the fixed stars of her life. She was reluctant to complain to Stu. From what she could tell, her experience was normal. And though she’d wasted so many hours as a kid in pursuit of “normal,” she had come to realize that her lack of that particular quality was what made her special. Special was the anti-normal. But having a baby was about as normal as you could get. Emma imagined their future child slip-sliding around in its uterine paradise, enlarging week by week through a progression of supermarket fruit benchmarks by feeding on precisely whatever it was inside Emma that used to make her different and unique. Since the onset of the baby weather, she had written three songs, all of them terrible. More than drifting, these days she worried she was actually lost. She wished she was at least carrying her purse.

  At the departure gate, their tour manager Craig was sweating after rummaging in his briefcase for their medical certificates. Four all-clears, plus a waiver from Emma about the baby. Canada had no reported cases of ARAMIS to date and wasn’t going to be held accountable for any lost babies.

  “I had them last night,” Craig was saying, glancing around as though hoping someone would chime in to say, You did. They’re in there. Keep looking. Not that long ago, Emma would have been that person. Now she ignored Craig’s public flailing.

  Her phone buzzed with a message from Dom: Freaky. But what I really want to see is a picture of your belly.

  Your wish is my command, Emma typed to her sister, then handed her phone to Stu, who had her pose sideways against a face mask dispenser.

  “This isn’t a mugshot,” he said. “Smile, babe.”

  Emma made a face.

  Then a security guard stepped out from behind him and snapped an identical pic, striding away before Emma could even blink or hold up a hand. She shivered.

  * * *

  Their first full day in Vancouver, there was a rehearsal scheduled for the afternoon. Gertie Colewick was pacing around backstage as another band played through their set, her hand jumping to her throat when one of the stage managers tapped her on the shoulder to ask for an autograph. She was wearing something that looked like a canvas mailbag, but her face was tranquil, her hair arranged into a precise and intricate wreath of braids.

  Before she’d contacted Stu, Gertie was a forgotten treasure of the folk music scene who had been in the national missing persons database since 1975. She’d gotten in touch after she read an article in NME mentioning that “Tiny Hands,” a song Stu had penned for their second album, was written about her. She’d mailed a letter to Stu, and folded within its pages were two tapes she’d recorded. Stu had called a band meeting to play them his favourites out of the thirty-odd songs that Gertie claimed were only about half of what she’d written since dropping out of the folk scene and, for all intents and purposes, off the planet.

  “If you guys aren’t behind it, I can go solo on this,” he said. “I’m just really into her sound.”
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  Emma had been surprised by the declaration. As long as she’d known him, Stu had avoided anything that required expending energy that he could be putting into his music instead. She used to joke that if she weren’t there to make a plan for dinner, he’d end up starving until breakfast.

  “I love her, too,” she’d said. “So pure and unique.” To Emma, Gertie still sounded exactly like she had in the summer of ’73, when she’d recorded her one and only album in her parents’ kitchen with the help of her younger brother. Back then, she’d seemed much older than twenty-two, singing about death and sagebrush and valley towns in California. “What if we do some orchestral arrangements?” Emma went on. “Or maybe ask her to collaborate on ‘Bless Us’ or ‘The Moon’?” They were songs she’d written for Beads that hadn’t made the cut. For the first time since they’d started making records, two-thirds of the songs on the new album were by Stu.

  “If you don’t mind, Em, I have a few ideas of my own for this one.” Stu looked sheepish, proud, and—was it possible?—a little star-struck. “She wrote to me, after all,” he said. Emma shrugged. In the first fog of the pregnancy weather, she hadn’t felt much like pushing it. But it stung all the same.

  Stu had gone on to produce the album, and Gertie had re-recorded twelve of the songs in their home studio. Her new breakthrough song was “Curious Fellow,” which was generally assumed to be about her affair with a now-legendary folk singer who’d followed her from Greenwich Village to San Francisco. Stu had procured for Gertie something resembling her old homemade harp, and with Ben and Jesse, he had practised the arrangements they’d come up with in the studio so they could play backup on a few of the songs in concert. When Emma had heard this, she’d had to bite her lip to keep from pointing out, “Gertie didn’t write to them, either.” She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear what Stu would say in response.