The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  “You can be saved,” she sang, and called each person in the audience by name. Some kind of crazy trick, but it was a beautiful one.

  Standing in the crowd, unnamed, apparently I wanted her to name me, too, and name me as her man.

  I proceeded to fall at her feet and tell her I'd do anything to help her, and she looked down at me, put a boot on my back, and said sure, she'd stick around awhile, she'd just left a band anyway and had time to kill.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Just so you know, I have a kid,” she said.

  “Are you married?”

  “Divorced. His dad's not in the picture,” she told me, turned around, and I saw my son for the first time, in a sling on her back. He was sleeping there like his mother hadn't been singing loud enough to wake the dead. He opened iridescent eyes and smiled a toothless smile at me, and I was done for. I adopted him the moment we got married.

  That was right before the world fell apart.

  Now, I tell Tania I'm heading off on tour, and Tania tells me to fuck right off. I sympathize with her, I do. She's a rocker too. You can't have two of those in a marriage, and she's more than I am.

  Before this band, Tania was the only thing I ever saw that made me wonder if the world was bigger than I thought.

  “Should we go back?” I said once. “For a visit? Don't you miss your family?”

  “You can't go back,” she told me. “Not once you come here. They don't let you go if you're from where I'm from. I made a big mess when I left. I wasn't supposed to go, and there was a price.”

  This was the only time I ever saw her sad. I assumed some things about where she'd come from. I figured it was another continent, judging by her accent from everywhere at once, but when I asked, she looked at me, told me I was an asshole, and said, “There are countries there, you know, and they're not the same country. It's not just one big heap of same.”

  “Is that where you're from?” I asked, offended that she assumed my whiteness meant I didn't know anything about anything. “I know what Africa is.”

  “No,” she said. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a work shirt, and she looked almost — I caught myself thinking the word “human,” which was the wrong word. She didn't look human. She looked like the queen of the coast.

  She was breastfeeding our son, and he was singing to himself as he nursed. I could see plants growing in my peripheral vision.

  “Adriftica, maybe,” she said. “Call it that. Call it somewhere you can't get to unless they want you to get to it. I left my band, and I left my country, and I don't want you to try to fix it. It was a bloody breakup. Now I'm trying to clean up the mess it made. I thought I could fix it, but no one wants to listen. You've never been married before. You don't know what it's like when you leave. You don't know how it feels.”

  She looked up at me, and the tears in her eyes reflected light in a way I've never seen any other tears reflect. She was like a prism.

  “The world isn't ending because of you,” I told her.

  “He's tipping it over,” she said. “But I had to leave him. You don't know.”

  The last time I heard any band play like Akercock, it was Tania alone in front of a half-empty room, wearing a torn red dress, with thorns in her hair, looking like she was in the middle of running away from something. A baby on her back, bare feet, singing something that made the room shake. People were looking at her like she was magic, but no one was doing anything about what she was singing. She was trying to get people to stop doing all the things that make money for millionaires, and make water dry up in towns where no millionaires live. She was a revolutionary, I guess, and that's what made me crazy for her, but then things took a steep slide, and everyone put their hands over their eyes and ears. The world went wooden roller coaster.

  Tania told me over and over, those first years, that she was trying to save the world, and sometimes she told me it was her fault the world was collapsing. I talked her down. Obviously not her fault, one, and who could save the world, two? I never felt like I could. I felt like I'd be better off getting stoned, and so I got stoned.

  In fact, that's my plan right now. I get high, pass out, dream of wings.

  The next day, I'm fucking off onto the Akercock tour bus, rolling a wheelie bag full of what I need, prescriptions and notebooks, condoms and vitamins. Air mask.

  Normally, I do the whole tour with the band. I write in my notebook, record the band's shit-talking as we drive up the coast, or down the coast, or deep into the Midwest. It's not the old days, but touring's the one thing that's not too different. Upholstered seats. Driver. Video games. Everybody on the bus sending texts to the girl they kind of remember and plan to fuck in the next town. I remember when it was all pay phones and hope. Now it's easier to get laid. Not that most of these bands even want to. Mostly, they want to nap. Not this one.

  This band doesn't sleep, literally.

  Mabel says “Touch Eron and get a shock” and she's not kidding. She's bleeding a little bit, from one of her ears, and I feel old even telling her. There he is, wearing radioactive pants all day and night, not giving a fuck. First gig of the tour, I'm in the front row with the groupies, and they're crying, and he's lighting them up. Their fingers on the front of the stage. I can see their skeletons through their skin. It's a show. We all know it. But it's a damn good one.

  Onstage, Eron Chaos is twenty-two years old, six foot three, a look about him like he's never been loved. Offstage, he has an elderly dignity punctuated by obscenity.

  Eron won't generally talk to me. I interview a girl at the back of a gig, who says he gives it all up when he sings, “so listen to him sing, stupid. He isn't safe onstage. He scares me, and I'm not just scared for him. I'm scared for myself. But it feels good. I'd follow him anywhere.”

  She gives me a smile that still has baby teeth. It's surreal. I haven't seen a fan this young in years. I feel like I'm dead and walking through an imaginary world, one that conforms to my dreams. These are the sixties I didn't live through.

  A couple tours lately, there've been accordions on board, and fiddles. Somebody singing “Hard Times,” which I never appreciate. No matter how hard the times are, rock bands are supposed to be playing songs about screwing in the bathroom, driving too fast, and breaking the world apart. Yeah, times are hard. Yeah, times are bleak. Yeah, you want to talk about the things going on?

  I want to talk about the music. The music is always the guts of the revolution. The music scene these days is nostalgia trying to mash up with science fiction, because people stopped wanting to imagine the future but still liked the costumes.

  Akercock, on the other hand, is an orgy, akin to watching the gods of rock in bed together, straight boys in glitter eyeliner dancing with their pants tight enough to tourniquet, but some kind of other element alongside all that too-

  I stop there because I know what that element is, but I don't know how to write it. It's something I've been craving like a drug since things fell apart with Tania. Adriftica, I think, trying to imagine the boundaries of that country.

  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 do
n'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.