Asimov's SF, December 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I was. But it was warranted. I hurried back inside and up into the rock and roll room and I took out my acoustic guitar. I strummed a D major chord. Its sound was so flat I had a second of disorientation, wondering if I'd touched the wrong strings. Or if my hands were even mine.

  I strummed carefully and heard the same sound.

  “Xanax,” I said.

  I didn't even need to pull the white sock out of the guitar to know it was half-empty.

  * * * *

  I called Rick on my cell.

  “Twelve thousand years old, dude!” he answered.

  “What? Where are you?”

  “In the Antiquities museum. It's got this Earth Mother figurine, big tits and all. Neolithic! Can't imagine her eating at KFC or Quizno's. Can you say unglobalized?”

  “Rick, are you high?”

  “On life! Wait—Shayla wants to say something.”

  “Hello, Mr. Dennis,” Shayla said. “We are perfectly safe. There are fewer alcohols than to be found at my father's villa. And there are no mafia to ogle me as Ali fumes.”

  “Is Rick using? Is he stoned?”

  “He has taken a couple bars. He is coherent.”

  “He stole my secret stash!”

  “He is not wild. You need to let him be an adult. You need to stop being co-dependant.”

  She must have spent time at Betty Ford, to learn crap jargon like that. “I'm the band leader. He's my responsibility. We're playing the Narghile tonight! We don't want him to do what he did at the Boston show.”

  Some static, then Rick: “I'm not Keith Moon.”

  “How many bars do you have on you?”

  “I'm in control. Shayla's not going to let me get myself shit-faced. And you know it's withdrawals, not using, that gives you a seizure.”

  “It's withdrawing after overdosing that seizes you.”

  “Shayla's watching me.”

  “Like Courtney watched Kurt!”

  “Dude, I can't believe you'd even say that.”

  “Sorry, man.” I breathed. This was madness. The city hummed with traffic; I imagined spores of Amanita dispersed like bleeding-edge pollution from the tailpipes of cars. Madness. I breathed again. “I'm worried. We have a concert to play tonight, and you're not here.”

  “We'll be there. Unless you've chickened out and you mean the Bachus.”

  “No. I mean the Narghile. Just get here, back to Stravlos, by four PM. Deal?”

  “Ten-four, sir,” Rick said, with a giggle.

  For Rick, a giggle is as good as a lie.

  * * * *

  Vlad and Ali and the mafia-dude were watching the big screen TV when I came back downstairs.

  Shots of protesters throwing rocks at riot police. A voice-over in Greek, then screencut to a hospital interior, which had to be in Turkish Nicosia, judging by the 1940s-style ward with its tall windows and its beds separated by curtains. On each bed there lay a man or woman mottled with bright colors, green, yellow, blue. For some the mottles had turned to welts; for others, into long extrusions, straw-shaped, at the top of which puffs of organic matter, laden with spores, were being gently snipped off by nurses, then deposited into biohazard bags. Flowers, I thought. The most colorfully-beflowered patients were in oxygen tents.

  The oxygen tents glowed: the puffy things were luminescent.

  I realized the man we'd seen in St. Nicolas had been a man on his way toward death.

  I told them Rick and Shayla had gone to the museum.

  “Safe until the Submission Faction pours the Amanita spores into the ventilation systems.”

  “That's crap,” Vlad said. “They haven't said anything about this side of the Green Line.”

  Ali laughed. “They do not want the airport closed yet. They want the Americans to fly home while there is still the possibility.”

  “We're not flying home, not today,” I said. “We have a concert to play.”

  “The concert,” Ali said. He finished his whiskey and poured himself another. “It will not happen. Shayla and Rick will find a hotel room in which to die. When I finish my drink, I shall call Omar and cancel our performance.”

  “You will do no such thing,” I said. “We're playing.”

  “This is not a video game,” Ali said. “I cannot see your Aunt Martha advocating such a foolish course of action.”

  “We're contracted.”

  “Neither is Omar a fool. He will change the date if must be.”

  “To when? A year from now, after all this Amanita shit has blown over?”

  “If God wills.”

  “If God wills,” I said.

  Ali raised his eyebrow. I realized my mistake. It didn't matter that his command of English was shaky; he had caught my sarcastic tone. I was here to heal the rift between West and East, not widen it. “I apologize. I'm on edge. I'm worried about my Rickster.”

  Ali nodded. “You are the good friend.”

  “Thanks. But don't you see, we need to do the concert?”

  “You are also the fool.”

  I strummed an imaginary guitar. No, more: I smashed a power chord on an air guitar that once belonged to Jimi Hendrix. Now the mafia-dude looked alarmed. Good for him. “We need this concert, Ali. We got to take a stand. We got to let the Submission Faction know we're not going to be intimidated into crawling into bunkers and eating canned rations like there's been a nuclear war or something. We got to let people know that life goes on. We got to get our message out. And if we can't get it tonight, we might as well just say the terrorists have won.”

  Ali examined the rainbows the ice cubes in his drink made as they caught a ray of sunshine. Then he said, “You will drive me to the drinking. We will try, inshallah, to go to the show. But you must bring back Rick. And I must confirm that Omar has not been the wise man and canceled the concert himself.”

  “Cool,” I said.

  It had been easier than I'd expected.

  I'd thought he'd at least want to double his commission.

  * * * *

  I called Rick. “Are you still at the museum?”

  “Flying high, my friend” he sang.

  “Seriously. Where are you? Can you drive back here?”

  “We're in the land of the Lotus Eaters!”

  “Can you put Shayla on?”

  Rick giggled. “She's tuning her guitar!”

  * * * *

  Rick was wasted. He couldn't have downed half the contents of the sock—that would have knocked him out—but I was sure he'd done at least ten bars. I remembered that Aunt Martha could track my cell phone through its GPS chip. I called her, interrupting her during a meeting, but that wasn't what pissed her off. “Dennis, you have got to fly out today. The airport will be closed tomorrow.”

  I explained about Rick.

  “He never learns, does he?”

  “The thing is, if I give you his cell number, can you call him and track him like you track me?”

  “Negative.” Then she sighed. “Give it. I'll call you back. But just act responsibly for once.”

  * * * *

  Rick and Shayla were at Ataturk's villa. I drove the Fiat there, Ali beside me, giving directions in English, talking over the Greek GPS voice, which we could not figure out how to silence, Vlad in the back seat reading Gandhi's biography. I don't know how he could read like that. The whiskey evaporating off Ali and the winding roads were making me nauseated, and I was at the wheel.

  Ali had left the mafia-dudes at the Strovlos house. “Mr. Ataturk does not approve of the protection.”

  We could have used some of the protection, I thought. Plumes of smoke rose from Turkish Nicosia, but I also saw smoke coming from old Nicosia, this side of the Green Line. “See, Islam and the Christianity are united, by the flame!” Ali said. He waved his glass flask in a toast, then took a swig. “You will drink, Mr. Dennis?”

  “No, thanks, I'm driving.”

  Whoo-whoo European sirens made their sound a few blocks distant.

  “Tell me, Mr
. Dennis. Why the beer, but not whiskey? Why Omar's special Coke, but not cocaine?”

  We passed a U.N. Humvee driving up the Strovlos hill. I thought of my koi pond. “I saw my best friend almost die. I stopped all the rock star crap I'd been doing. I decided to become an adult.”

  “Rick and Dennis went to rehab together,” Vlad said. “Dennis found Zen. Rick found that as long as we watched his every move, he wasn't likely to overdose.”

  “And you, Vlad? You are the perfect one?”

  “I was more into chicks. Drinking I could handle.”

  Ali laughed. “To the chicks!” Then he drank deeply.

  We heard the rat-a-tat-tat of machine gun fire as we reached the bottom of the hill. Here Ali directed us away from the Old City. As we reached an onramp to a highway, U.N. soldiers stopped us at a checkpoint. “Where are you going?” one, with an Indian accent, asked us.

  Ali said: “We have an appointment with Mr. Felix Ataturk, in the Lakatamia neighborhood.”

  The soldier looked at me. “Sir, do you feel unwell?”

  “Huh?”

  “You are pale. Is your throat sore? Do you have a cough?”

  “No,” I said. “Just nervous.” Then lamely, “Namaste.”

  The soldier stared at me. Shit, I thought, he thinks I'm mocking him. Then he motioned impatiently. “Go on. Drive safely.”

  We got onto the highway. It was slow going—there were a lot of people fleeing central Nicosia in their little cars—but gradually we got away from the Stalinist-looking apartments, then past little neighborhoods of white stucco houses with bright blue doors. Finally Vlad asked: “Did he think Dennis has Amanita?”

  Ali laughed so hard he sprayed droplets of whiskey across the windshield. “Not just Americans are the fools. Exit here.”

  We were waved through another U.N. checkpoint, then drove down a straight road lined with palm trees and big houses with manicured lawns. It felt like a nice neighborhood in L.A. Some places were even watering their lawn though it was the middle of the day. No global warming here, apparently. Ali had me turn onto a long gated driveway. There was a guard who stopped us and to whom Ali handed a silver-plated pistol. We passed through the opened gate and parked.

  “You want to see Ataturk?” I asked Ali.

  “He will extend to me the courtesies of the host.”

  Stone steps, pillars, a heavy door opened by a gray-haired tuxedoed man who could have been Ataturk's brother. Then I felt goose-pimples: after the heat outside, the AC indoors seemed as frigid as the Quizno's cold-storage unit. I thought Orange County McMansion, but then I got a look around. It was heavy on the old-world ambience. Checkerboard marble floors, a grand piano with a bust of Chopin, glass-doored bookshelves, half-size statues of Greek gods, on one wall a painting of people in black flying hand-in-hand over the rooftops of some Russian-looking city. An ostentatious Koran, huge and gilt-edged, opened on a lectern. The smell of flowers and tobacco. No electronics in sight.

  “This way, please, gentlemen,” said the tuxedo. He had a posh British accent. I wondered if Ataturk had sent him to England to butler-training school.

  He led us down a hallway to a game room.

  Ataturk and Shayla were playing pool while Rick was playing a video game, a vintage arcade Missile Command.

  “Nuclear annihilation!” Rick giggled.

  “Dennis, Vlad, Ali,” Ataturk said, shooting without looking at us. He missed. (Lots of red balls, a few colored balls; I think they were playing snooker.)

  “Mr. Ataturk,” Ali said, “inshallah.”

  “God be with you,” Ataturk said.

  “You smell of drink,” Shayla said. Ali pursed his lips; I breathed and thought of my koi pond. Then Shayla came around the pool table for her shot, and I saw she was wearing a Guns ‘n Roses T-shirt. Was she that clueless, or was she trying to provoke me? Didn't she know about Nirvana's feud with G & R? The Kurt would have said something biting; but I kept counting my breaths.

  Shayla shot, sinking her ball effortlessly.

  Ataturk was unperturbed by her shooting. “The last flight out of Nicosia is at eight PM. I can obtain tickets for you.”

  “Do you think they will let them on the plane, Papa? They have quarantine rules.”

  “Dr. Ahmet will provide the necessary paperwork attesting to their health,” Ataturk said.

  “They insist on playing their concert, sir,” Ali said.

  “At the Narghile?”

  “They are the fools. But I am their manager, and Omar has not cancelled.”

  Ataturk shot. He missed badly. “Why this suicide-loving with the rock stars? Tell me, the Jim Morrisons and the John Lennons and the Kurt Cobains? Why?”

  “It is a fundamentalism,” Shayla said. I wondered why she didn't correct him about Lennon. “There is honor in being a rock martyr.”

  “In Paradise, we get seventy-two virgin groupies!” Rick giggled.

  “That's offensive, sweetie,” Shayla said.

  Ali coughed for several seconds, then drank from his whiskey flask. Shayla glared at him, alcohol rather than blasphemy apparently the worst of the two sins.

  “We're not going to be martyrs,” I said. “We're going to play a concert, and give people hope, and maybe help calm things down.”

  “Do you not say, pride goeth before the fall?” Ataturk said.

  “We're not much into quoting Jesus,” Vlad said.

  “Rick started to sing the Sunday school ditty, “'Jesus Loves Me'!”

  I cut Rick off. “Thanks for your concern, Mr. Ataturk, but we're doing the concert. Rick, are you coming with us?”

  “Did Eric Clapton sing ‘Cocaine'?”

  Ataturk said, “Perhaps I should inform the U.N. about the tunnel between the Quizno's restaurant and the St. Nicolas church.”

  Ali: “I know other ways across, Mr. Ataturk.”

  “I know those ways, too.” He shot again, successfully this time, though with a haphazard roll that seemed to bring him no pleasure. “Your British friends will not be amenable to your baksheesh.”

  Ali said something in Turkish, not offensive I think, but provocative enough that Ataturk shook his head. “Are you Brian Epstein, now?”

  The reference to the Beatles’ suicidal gay manager seemed lost on Ali. Shayla got it though, and walked to Ali. She was brandishing her pool stick and he raised his arm as if to parry a blow. But she put her arm around him instead, and told Ataturk: “I am going with them for the concert. Please, Papa, do not try to stop us. If you do, I shall sleep at Strovlos tonight.”

  Ali turned pale, and returned her hug mechanically.

  Ataturk laid his stick on the table. He straightened his tie. “I am a Western man. I will not enforce my will upon my daughter. But I ask that you—Ali, and Dennis, and Vlad—recognize the fundies care little for human life, and less for the female life. Please protect her. And you, Ali—do not bring heavy guns into Turkish Nicosia. The Russians have armed the Submission Faction heavily.”

  “It is a mad world if the Russians would support the terrorists,” Shayla said.

  Though his daughter had spoken, Ataturk looked at me. “Call your aunt if you doubt my word.” His face went sad, lines deepening as if he'd aged years in a moment's time. “I have a supply of masks that filter the spores. Please wear them. Please also do not have physical contact with anyone in the Turkish Nicosia, even concert-goers. And if any of you develop the Amanita symptoms obviously, please to call me, and I will send medical help. Then we can get you out of Cyprus even if the airport is closed.”

  Shayla let Ali go. She looked scared for the first time.

  And Rick was shaking, Missile Command flashing its grim GAME OVER message repeatedly behind him.

  * * * *

  At 4 PM, we went to Quizno's. There were a dozen people in there, but none was eating; the ones closest to the window were huddling beneath the tables. “It's him!” an American chick squealed, pointing to Ali's Mafioso, the ear-budded skinhead, quizzical-looking
as he held his AK-47.

  The chick beside her, British, said, “Chill, Marcy.” To us: “There's a sniper outside, shooting people in Western dress.” She looked at Shayla, who was in her dark fundie threads. Then: “Why do the lot of you wear surgical masks?”

  “To filter the Amanita spores,” Ali said.

  “Are those guns?” She was referring to our guitars.

  Rick giggled. “We're gonna rock!”

  “Where is the restaurant man?” asked Ali; no one was behind the counter.

  No answer.

  We found the hunchbacked proprietor of the Quizno's sitting atop a box of cabbages in the walk-in freezer. He was shivering, and pale except for the bright spots on his cheeks, colorful as freckles on a cartoon character. We all stepped away from him except Ali. “Why are you here, my friend?”

  “Hot,” the man said.

  “You'll freeze to death.” The two argued in Greek until the man fell into a coughing fit, then Ali lifted him up. He dragged him out of the freezer and into a little office, desk unruly with receipts, where he sat him on a well-worn easy chair. Then Ali called an ambulance and reported, in English, that there was a man sick with Amanita at the Quizno's. “Ohi!Ohi!” the man shouted: no! Then he said something more in Greek.

  “He complains that we will leave the door to the tunnel unlocked,” Ali said.

  “And that the Turkish Army will sneak into his restaurant,” Shayla said.

  Rick giggled.

  * * * *

  The old church smelled sickeningly sweet. People prayed in the pews, lay sleeping in the pews, sat rigidly in the pews as they stared blankly at the Crucifix. So many of them had Amanita I was reminded of the candlelit Christmas Eve services of my childhood, except here puffy-bulbed stalks and luminescent welts provided a light more colorful than that of any candles. Rick started singing “Ring of Fire.” The old priest with the ZZ Top beard studiously ignored us; he was giving last rites to a dying man. A young woman in a headscarf who was carefully pruning the stalk off a little girl's cheek stared daggers at us.

  She caught most of the spores in a plastic bag, but I saw a few flutter around the girl like gnats above a flame.

  Rick stopped singing. “Who are we fooling? These Halloween masks are about as safe as fish nets!” He raised his hand as if to pull off his mask.