“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.
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.
I sing as loudly as I can sing, a lullaby of Earth and all its dirty concerns. Prayers that switched over to poems when Cohen died, when Bowie died, when Prince died. Funk and rock turned religion. Sinatra-styled stun-gun supernatural soul. I sing Kurt Cobain and will the world not to shift into a full-on disaster. I sing a chorus of the purple one's grind, and three bars of Patti Smith, and Joan Jett and a bar or two of Elvis and some notes made famous by the Rolling Stones because there is no satisfaction, but you stay on Earth anyway. I'm singing like I'm actually a singer, when really I'm a journalist who's spent his life following the boys in the band around and writing them down like I was the scribe to the Apocalypse.
I shift the song and sing the rest of what I know, the song I learned from Tania, which is a song of names. All the names of Earth and elsewhere. The city moves around the van, and the band is barely playing now, because the song of their queen shuts them up, even if she's not here to sing it.
Even if she doesn't want to sing it with me.
Even if I fucked everything up too badly, and even if I can't save the world. I start to close the rift with my song, shaking the edges of the boundary between fairyland and here.
Eron Chaos is a blinding light of fury and guitar, and he's standing above me suddenly, looking down on my poor mortal self. I'm like a garter snake beneath a shovel.
It's only now that I see my wife, standing in the street in her red dress with my son holding her hand. She's wearing my old leather jacket, the one I thought she burned to ashes, and she's watching me, her eyes glowing.
She nods, and in her nod is forgiveness for my failures. In her nod are the redwoods and the coast of California, the logs with the mushrooms under them in the woods in Washington, the way we lay on our backs looking up at the meteor shower one August in the desert, the way she told me she loved me at four in the morning, and then made me scream, the way she said she was no longer a tourist but a resident, the way she let me put my ring on her finger and put hers on mine, and the way we held hands as we slept.
I'll take this dream, if it means I get to hear Tania naming the world all over again, and beside her, my kid, naming too, rhyming back to her, singing the words for grass and leaves, singing the words for dropping out of a band and staying dropped, singing the words for love and for choosing to stay where you live instead of running back into a place made of light and drift. They're singing the words for saving this place.
Eron Chaos is before Tania, standing in his electric suit, his teeth clenched, black tears running down his face. My wife stands in front of him. I'm terrified she's on her way back to Adriftica, but if I was born for anything I was born to run lucky in the world of rock. Maybe I was born to lose her. It was worth the loss, the love.
“Titania,” he whispers.
“Oberon,” she replies. She takes his hands in hers. She looks into his eyes.
“I lay no claim on you,” Tania says. “Release yours on me.”
My son is beside her, and I see him reach for his father. Eron picks him up, this child whose voice — I know from experience — can call down bald eagles, whose laughter can make banks of flowers bloom in the dark, whose first steps made a ridgeline in our backyard, whose first meal caused every field in a hundred miles to fill with food ready to harvest. He holds my son, and my son laughs.
In spite of myself, I see the resemblance, my child too handsome for humans and too strange for kindergarten. I see how he might, one day, strut across a stage singing, strumming a guitar and bringing a revelation. I see how he might be exactly what his other father is, but better.
“He's my child,” Eron says. “All I want is time.”
I know the expression on Tania's face. We've had enough arguments over the years. My love has a temper. She is also fair, when she feels fair.
“Summers,” she tells him. “Let him camp in the bower. Take him spinning with the spiders and singing with the songbirds.”
He looks at her for a long moment. Then, at last, he nods to his band. To Mabel, whose fingers twist into his. To the drummer, who vibrates with a rhythm only he can feel. To the bassist and to the van, which shakes itself like a horse ready to gallop.
“Summers,” he says, and kisses his child. “That means you must bring summer back.”
Tania moves her hands and trees begin to bloom.
Eron Chaos does a slide on his knees with his guitar, and then he's gone into the green. One by one, the rest of the band disappears, ending with the drummer, whose wings are spread fully as he departs.
The city is all kids, all around me.
Here she is, this woman I'm still married to, naming the pain, singing the words for fixing the things that are broken. Here she is, standing in the center of nowhere, this rock & roll queen who came from under the hill. My wife and son are stamping their feet and spitting syllables, and around them, all around them, the children look up and start to learn the words for fixing the bright and broken world.
There was a concert here, in the snowy dead of the night. After it was finished, the children who came to it walked out across the country, and as they walked, they sang the melody beneath their breath, shifting water into ice and smog into air, a song that called to the ghosts of bees and the bones of birds, a song that brought back summer and winter to the world, a song that sang the seasons back into balance.
You know, and I know, if there's rock, there's gotta be roll. If there's a place beneath, this must be the place above, where we stand in an audience listening together, where we sing along to the songs we know.
And then we go to the hotel together, trundle bed and a queen-size, coffee and champagne, me and my family. Our son goes to sleep with his lullaby. I hold my wife in my arms, and she holds me back, as tightly as she holds the world.
… we see
The seasons alter. Hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension.
We are their parents and original.
— William Shakespeare,
Titania, A Midsummer Night's Dream,
Act II, Scene I
You Pretend Like You Never Met Me, and I'll Pretend Like I Never Met You
The worst day of Wells the Magician's life begins pleasantly enough, with a shot of whiskey at the Lost Kingdom bar. It's a birthday party day, and as all low-rent magic men know, birthday party days begin with booze and move laterally through coffee, cake, and whichever divorcee can be convinced to unhook her bra, whether offsite or in a back bedroom. Onward from there into (dire case) helium, (better case) weed, or (best case) coke, followed by a three AM cigarette before the road gets hit.
There are protocols in place.
At nine in the morning on this Saturday, with four hours to kill before he performs magic tricks at a fifth birthday party in a gated subdivision, Wells has three bourbons, neat, and one platter of fries, messy. Mayo. Ketchup. Hot sauce. Grape jam packets. Mustard. Maple syrup. Side of nacho cheese. Like that. He takes his time, stealth-assessing the woman in the back of the bar. She's wearing a pair of too-small, heart-shaped, red plastic sunglasses, and at 10:15, Wells decides his next fifty years belong to her.
He formally signals the bartender.
“A round to woo the woe in the last row,” he says, pleased with himself.
“Not a move, bro. She's been here five days,” the bartender says. “Leaves for two hours while Jake or I clean, gets back in the booth. Stays there, staring. You know I don't judge my regulars, but something's wrong with that one. Trust me when I say there's no good version of getting her drunker.”
“Coffee, then?” says Wells, angling his head to get a better look. She's maybe thirty, dark hair cut jagged, punk rock shifted into something else. He can't tell if there's a ring, but he likes them crazy enough that his occupation tempts rather than warns. There might be time for a bang before the birthday. He does the math. Definitely, if they walk out of here by 11:30.
The bartender shakes his head. “PG Tips. She's a Brit.”
“Do it up,” Wells says, and waits for the kettle to boil, checking his bag of tricks while he does.
The tricks are in need of a dry cleaner and a few prayers, but it doesn't matter. Five-year-olds believe in magic. Balloon animals and endless scarves, bubbles, cake. Kids this age hate card tricks, so he doesn't bother. Coins, yes. Rabbits, yes, though Wells hasn't got any at present. His most recent ex-wife, Amanda, shouted “Born Free!” as she walked away with their cage. The trick bag is an inheritance from Wells's dad, who was an all-sorts magic man. Wells spent his childhood on the assis
t. An apple on his head, an arrow, a knife, Wells done up in sparkles, transformed into a sequined specialist. They drove a beat-to-shit minivan gig to gig, Wells playing the role of the magician's glitz, followed by naps beneath gambling tables.
When Wells was fourteen, his dad got stabbed in Reno, outside a casino he was fleecing. Wells should have gotten stabbed, too, but the someone doing the stabbing just glanced at him, and bent back over Wells's dad.
“Just need to fetch something for the boss,” said the stabber. “Don't mind me.”
There was no blood, just sorting, like someone rooting in a sock drawer.
“Okay,” said Wells. His spine felt frozen and his guts were roiling, and the person he was talking to had eyes without whites. If this was a magic trick, it wasn't the kind he knew the combination for, and if it was actual magic, he wanted nothing to do with it.
The stabber nodded, and continued to rummage.
Finally, they muttered, “Not there, is it? No. Bounced checks and bad bets. Selling things you don't own. Not one thing, it's another.”
They looked up at Wells again. “No kid was supposed to be here. It's your lucky day. You pretend like you never met me, I'll pretend like I never met you,” they said.
Wells caught a glimpse of claws and an additional glimpse of horns, but Wells was like that back then. He saw spectacle everywhere. When Wells nodded, the stabber disappeared without the aid of smoke and mirrors.
Wells picked his dad's tricks up off the sidewalk, stood, and walked away. Told the police he'd missed the murder. Told the casino he didn't know who did it and that he wasn't pursuing it. Told the driver who picked him up hitchhiking that he'd been traveling alone for a year, and that he was looking to get his ass to Tahoe. A few other things happened, soon after that. Wells decided to deny them, too. Pretend like you never met me, he thought, and moved on, town to town for thirty years.
Lately, he's been haunting Boise, Idaho. He's learned how to say the name of the place, the “sea” instead of “zee,” and so people think he's local enough to last.
The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods Page 71
