Every night I see that thing behind the band, and it’s not a light cue. It’s not a thing the band brings along. The rest of the band just keeps playing, and they grin at Eron, who writhes in front of a door to elsewhere. Every time I see it, I want to run to it, and every time it’s just a drum kit and a brick wall when they stop playing. Mabel dives every night, and half the time she just disappears. The crowd loves it. I don’t. Magic tricks and mirrors, but none of that appears on the bus. I miss how they do things, and no one will tell me.
“It’s only rock & roll, bro,” says the bassist, and I say, “It’s not,” and he looks at me and shakes his shoulders, and for a moment I swear I see a set of dark blue-black wings, but then they’re gone again, and he’s in the tightest pants and a shirt cut to the top of them, his skin glowing a little, like he’s been roaming in the psychedelic pastures of the PNW, like he’s been there too, and I think about asking him if I can score anything, but I don’t do the band’s drugs, and they don’t do mine.
The audiences of kids keep getting bigger.
“How did Akercock start?” I ask the drummer. Drummers are always easier than the rest. They’ll talk. Not that I even know this guy’s name. He changes his mind every time he tells me. Says he can’t really recall, and people’ve called him lots of things.
“Somebody hired us to play a gig,” he says, “and we came out to do it.”
“But how did you start? Before someone hired you, right, you were already a band?”
“Somebody hired us,” the drummer says, “to get rid of some pests. They paid us a lot of money.”
“You were that bad?”
“We were that good,” he says. “Know how hard it is to get rid of pests? This was, what, an industrial moment, sky black with soot, everyone burning coal. We got the pests and took them down.”
I look at him suspiciously, because this is the classic exaggeration of boys who think they’re cool. I’ve seen it before. Mythologizing themselves into two hundred years of history.
“Only problem was, they kept coming back. We took an entire generation of disaster makers under, trying to keep things good, but then a new generation was born, and they kept making the same mess. We can only do so much about the mess, even if it’s been our job to balance things out. Certain point, the mess is too big to balance. Now it’s maybe too late. Things happened, man. We were kids when this started. We had enough energy to fix things. Or, they did, together, before the breakup. Now? I don’t know.”
That gives me something, at least, though it’s not what I wanted.
“So you met when you were all kids?”
“We met a long time ago,” he says. “This is our last tour. We’re looking for someone out here, and once we find that someone, we can go. Old business, man, and not yours.”
“I’m going to make you stars,” I say.
The drummer just looks at me. “We’ve done that before,” he says. “It was lonely out there.”
They don’t need me. The clubs on this leg of the tour are, without notice, arenas full of worshipful teenagers.
“We just want to get done with what we’re doing,” the drummer says. “This place is shit. We’re looking for someone who took off years ago, and everything’s been a disaster since. Look at Eron. He’s so high he can’t even walk. He keeps his revels going here, and it’s fucked things up.”
“What should I call you for this quote?” I ask him.
“Call me the piper,” he says. “Old stories, right?”
“Old stories,” I say, feeling like I’ve strained a muscle in my back. I’m sick of old stories. I want all the new things at once. I want my son here on this bus, to see if he likes these songs. I want my wife, because I know she’d like them.
Every night on this tour, I dream of Tania, who I never deserved. I was a writer and she was something else entirely. I dream of the way she made my heart feel like it was going to burst, the way she and I got married in the middle of the redwoods, before the redwoods died. I remember when guitars were made out of wood. I remember when mushrooms grew out of the dirt, and not out of metal. I remember when she and I got high for fun and not for desperation, listening to records in my old place in San Francisco, before San Francisco fell off the edge of the world and dropped to the bottom of the ocean and Tania went dark. She wouldn’t come out of her room for days. She sat in the closet crying.
That was before our son started to talk. He couldn’t pass for anything other than what he was. There was no way we could put him in school, not without panicking, and she was too scared to leave him alone, so she stopped playing gigs. A couple of years into our marriage, she quit singing. She said it was no use, that everything was ending.
She started wearing snakes on her skull. I noticed that everything was basically invented by the ancient Greeks, and that we were right back there again, rains of frogs and seas full of monsters. The music was the same, I knew it, and when I heard it, I figured I was still part of a long tradition. I got obsessed with Robert Johnson, and with celestial harmonies, with the kinds of mold you could take to make sure you saw God. I mashed that all up with music and magic and wrote a book, won a prize, stood on a stage, and saw my wife in the back of the room with her middle fingers in the air as I made a speech in which I thanked every man in rock, but not her.
Four weeks into the tour I’m no further ahead than I was when I started, sitting in my seat on Akercock’s bus.
No one would blame you, if you weren’t at these concerts, for wondering where the party is, wondering if there’s a party on Earth anywhere now, wondering if everyone’s died and we just keep rolling on. That could happen. But this band plays, and you’re reminded of something older, of the kind of music you heard in the next room when you were a little kid, record player, parents dancing barefoot in the dark.
I call Tania a few more times, and get no one. I take a sip of a beer, and write. I’m losing my rules for what I’ll put on the page. Now it’s the crazy along with the regular road stuff.
One night Mabel scratches a song into the side of a car with her fingernails, and Eron Chaos sings a song so beautiful and poisonous that the back wall of the club shakes and starts to fall, brick by brick, backward, until all we can see is a field of flowers behind the band, and in that field, a whole new audience waiting to listen. Everywhere Akercock tours, there are moments of summer while they play, frosting over as we drive away, and I remember what summer used to be like in America, the way bees orbited drunkenly around the flowers, the way honey dripped from hives.
The only place like that is Tania’s garden now. I call her again, and it just rings, but at least it rings. The country is air masks and plague, and I’m still covering the history of rock, and I don’t know why, because there’s nowhere to roll to.
“Daddy?” says my kid, answering at last. “We ate a cake for your birthday. Mommy made it.”
I remember that it’s my birthday. I look down at my jeans and wonder what the hell I’m doing. This is supposed to be the right way to do it, fifty years old and still cool, and instead my family is celebrating me while I’m celebrating Akercock.
In the background I can hear Tania singing under her breath, some notes that aren’t notes. They remind me of the band, suddenly, and that makes me feel—
“Where are you today?” I ask my kid. “Can you put your mom on the phone?”
“Daddy,” says my son. “I made a tree grow out of the middle of a lake.”
“What?”
“I made a star be born,” my kid insists. “Mommy taught me how.”
I cover the phone with my hand. “Where are we right now?” I ask the drummer.
“Putting a belt around the belly of the world,” he says. “You wanna get off the bus? We’re getting to the point we have a big thing to do. Last show, we’re going to have some special effects.”
The band’s singing a little, working out a melody, and I hold the phone up so that my son can hear it.
“Listen,” I say.
“Simon,” says my wife. The sound of her voice saying my name makes my ears hurt. I’ve been running since the last day I saw her, and I haven’t managed to stop calling. I wasn’t good for her, and I wasn’t good for him. This isn’t her usual voice, though. This isn’t rage. This is confusion.
“Hi there,” I say back to her, like this is normal.
I hold my phone out from my ear, expecting a stream of curses. There’ve been bad effects in the past. I should just hang up. My wife has a serious temper. Once I woke up knee-deep in ice, my feet blue inside blocks, and another time I was covered in fur, not just my ears, but my face, my whole body, and all I could do was wheeze. I’m allergic to fur. There are a few things I’ve been trying not to think about since the moment we met.
“Where are you?” Tania asks.
“On tour with a band called Akercock, about to be huge,” I tell her. There’s silence for a moment, and then there’s a garbled sound, a choking roar.
My wife starts to sing. Out from my phone it goes, a crazy twine of verse, no words I know, no words I want to know. Not how she usually does it, not a naming of elements and evildoers, not a list of hopes and of insects. Not rhyme and not staccato, but a song I know from listening to it every night on the road. On the bus, the band looks up, their eyes glittering.
Mabel’s over to me in a moment. “Who’re you on with?”
The bassist is next to me faster than I expected, and so are Eron and the drummer, all of their languid selves suddenly mercury, their skin shining, their hair standing up like stalagmites.
“Who’s singing?”
Eron is beside me, breathing into my ear. He says a name into the phone, and it’s a name like his own.
“Not anymore,” Tania says, very clearly, in tones I know all too well. “Let him go. You won’t get me that way. I won’t come home. I have my son and I have my life, and I’m over you. Don’t you have Mab now? Have her! Fuck my sister! I live here now, and I’m not coming back.”
“You’re breaking the world,” Eron says. “This is your fault.”
“I’m allowed to leave our marriage without you ending the world!”
“You’re not allowed to take my son!” Eron screams. “Bring me my child, or all the children come with me!”
She hangs up. I’m left with only the sound of wherever she is, the echo of it over the air.
“Fuck,” says Eron, turning to me, and everything about him is different than it was. All his cool is gone. He’s crackling, like ball lightning. “Who are you? Why would she? With you?”
“Heck Limmer,” I say, because there I am, standing in front of a guy half my age, whose muscles seem to exist without intentions. “That’s my wife,” I say. “On the phone.”
The drummer has a set of pipes, and he’s playing some kind of weird tune on them. He stops, and looks at me, and a bark of laughter comes out of his mouth.
“Of course,” he says. “My mistress with a monster is in love. Of course she is.”
“Was it you?” Eron says, and moves through space faster than he should, to the drummer’s side.
“Not me, man,” says the drummer. “You’re the one who cheated on her. You thought that was a plan? You thought she wouldn’t find someone new?”
“What’s the deal with you and my wife?” I ask, finally, though I’m pretty deep in knowing too much right now.
Eron Chaos looks at me with unexpected misery all over his face. “We had a son. She took him when she left, and—”
“She stole him,” Mabel says. “They got divorced six years ago, and she wasn’t supposed to take the child, but you know, man, she took the child.”
She says this in a way that is obviously relief. I’m not relieved. Certain things are dawning on me.
“It was the kind of breakup that makes you hate the songs you used to sing,” says the drummer, whose name I’ll probably never know. “The kind of breakup that makes everyone hate all the songs anyone ever sang. The kind of breakup that makes the leaves fall from the trees and the ground go gray, and the seasons go crazy, frost on the roses, floods over the cornfields, plague in the population. There aren’t any divorces where we’re from. It’s not done.”
“She left the band, and on her way out, she tipped the world over. There’s no option but starting from scratch now,” says Eron.
“You’ve been here, man,” says the drummer to me. “This place is broken.”
It seems very clear to me that I should’ve known who my wife was for a long time already.
“Let me off the bus,” I say, and Eron looks at me for a moment.
“You’ve seen my son?” he asks. “You’ve held him?”
“He’s mine,” I manage. “Adopted. I’ve been raising him.”
He gives me a haughty look. “He’s the prince of Adriftica,” Eron says. “And I’m the king.”
“How old are you?”
“Older than I look,” he says, and gazes at me, his long, slender form, the tips of his ears pointed, and his face too handsome for human use.
“Keep the old man,” says Mabel, and I feel lethargy come over me like an allergy to air. My knees are too weak to support me.
“It’s time to come off tour,” the drummer says. “It’s time to start over clean.”
“We can’t leave the queen here,” Eron says.
“She won’t come with us,” says the bassist. “She’s never been anyone’s to command.”
“I won’t leave my son,” Eron says.
“She won’t let us take them,” says the drummer. “Tania’ll come, and she’ll bring the boy.”
They leave me alone to panic, writing reflexively, half-asleep in the dead of night, stuck on a bus with the other father of my child.
In the middle of the night, someone’s playing acoustic guitar, and I wake from a dream of that high school fantasy of being part of the band, two chords and windows down, singing out into the highway. Everyone becomes a music journalist for that dream. This time, though, it’s nothing benign. Akercock is playing a summoning, and I don’t know if I want to be here for it.
I can hear Eron’s voice, singing a call in a language I don’t know.
We’re driving through a city and like that, there are kids all around us, out of nowhere. I see them running at the bus, like they’ve been waiting for us, straight out of the dark. They’re all bright-eyed and looking lost, and most of them are in their pajamas and underwear.
Some kind of mob planned for publicity? The bus pulls over with a lurch. I get my jacket on and get out. The group outside isn’t just girls. It’s teenagers of all sorts, but that’s what Akercock lives to play for, whatever they are, kids from everywhere.
There are kids for miles. No way for them to have just arrived. They’ve either been here, or they’ve run out into the night and come to this spot on the highway, but whatever happened, there are teenagers as far as the eye can see.
“What’s going on?” I ask Mabel, and she looks at me, her eyes glowing.
“Last concert,” she says. “She takes the child; we take the children.”
Eron Chaos wriggles his way out the roof of the van until he’s standing on top of it. Then he’s playing a song just for them.
This isn’t the normal rock song, though it’s got the usual moaning and wailing. This song fills my head with a kind of strange vision. I find myself kneeling on the sidewalk, but my mind is full of marching, of people in bright cloaks and armfuls of flowers, kids not in their T-shirts, but dressed to kill, leather and sequins and electric pants to match Eron’s.
The rift is there behind him again, a bright gold and green place, and it opens out of the night, the stars making way for it.
“Come on, children,” sings Eron Chaos, and his voice is a hymn. His voice is caustic harmonic spite mixed with soul, and he dances on the roof of the van, his fingers opening up and fire hanging from each one. His eyes are gold and his hair is moving without any wind.
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sp; I watch the children start to move toward him. I watch them begin to enter the rift, walking one by one into it. I feel like I can’t move, my muscles full of tar and honey. It’s the song. I try to stand, but I can’t get up. Old man, I think. I don’t have any business here, but here I am.
“What’ll happen to them?” I ask Mabel, who is standing on the roof of the van, looking ready to dive and disappear.
She shrugs. “Something,” she says. “What do you care? The world is ending, buddy.”
The band is playing fully now, and I look up and out into the city. I can see children of Earth coming to us, from everywhere, out of their houses for the first time in some of their lives, walking into something that is either fairyland or something else entirely. There are hundreds of them. Thousands.
They’re blank-faced and slack-jawed, and they are going to their doom, maybe, or to salvation, and I can’t tell. The drummer is playing those pipes again, and drumming a beat that can only be made with eight arms. Eron Chaos is shining with a light that’s coming up out of the rift, and on his head I can see a crown.
I know one thing. It’s all I’ve got.
It’s a lullaby. I made it for the son I adopted, the child born of the fairy queen and her husband, the baby I met and loved and chose.
Our son was trouble. He had to be held tightly, night after night, because when he slept, he shifted from a baby into other things. Some of them were beautiful, and some were terrible. Hummingbird, polar bear, burning brand, starfish, electric eel, brick, straw, rat. Once he became a cloud filled with acid rain and poured down onto the sidewalk, and another time he became a lump of coal.
Tania could sing a note that could make me sleep, and a note that could make me wake, but she had no notes that could make our child stop screaming.
He isn’t my biological son, but I raised him. The moment I saw him, I knew what kind of thing he was. Our baby was a rock & roller, and he wanted rock & roll.
I swallow hard. I try to breathe. I’m not a singer. I’m a writer. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I start to sing that lullaby anyway, over the noise of the best band on Earth, over the magic they’re doing, over the piper summoning the last hopes of salvation into a cave underground.
Robots vs. Fairies Page 30
