“The BA flight to London is now boarding.”
Whirlwind takes her hand, gently. “You can’t change the world, Spit,” she says. “You can’t even change yourself.”
“He changed it,” Spit says, helplessly. “Vomacht. With that machine. He changed us.”
But Whirlwind leads her, gently but insistently, away. “You think so?” she says. “You really do? The war still happened, people still died, babies are still being born. We don’t matter, Spit, not me, not you, not even the Medicus. Leave him to the Israelis. They’ll get him, sooner or later; they always do. You and I can’t be responsible for everyone, we can’t change the world. The best we can do is try to get paid.”
Spit nods. On the plane, she plugs in the oversized earphones, while Whirlwind fills in their expenses form. Spit keeps turning the twisty little dial in the armrest, trying to find something, anything other than “Heroes.” Tinned music spins round and round until she turns it almost all the way down; until it could be anything, like the sound of the surf on some unimaginably distant shore.
Lavie Tidhar is the author of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize winning and Premio Roma nominee A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), the World Fantasy Award winning Osama (2011) and of the critically-acclaimed The Violent Century (2013). His latest novel is Central Station (2016). He is the author of many other novels, novellas and short stories.
Madjack
Nathan Crowder
Her father died during the second verse of “River to Home,” right as Omar hit the flourish that served as a preview for his post bridge solo. She felt it like a sudden swelling in her heart, an explosion of emotion that she almost choked on before instinct directed it out, into the audience. By the time they reached the chorus, everyone within thirty feet of the stage was sobbing.
Atlas McVittie, seasoned rock musician that she was at the ripe age of thirty, didn’t drop a note.
The band knew something was wrong. They’d been with her through thick and thin, from the shit clubs and storage unit rehearsal space to the contract with Goblin Records. Eight years of broken promises, collapse, and hopefully a phoenix-like rebirth.
They thundered through the rest of the set and only did one encore, though everyone agreed the crowd deserved two. But Atlas was the linchpin in the band. She was the one people came to see; the tempestuous daughter of the self-styled glam rock “god who fell to earth,” the Madjack. If Atlas was off, the band was off. It helped that Frankie, their road manager, was waiting in the wings prior to the encore with the phone call confirming what Atlas McVittie already knew.
Atlas was in a daze post-show. The rest of the band had a few drinks in the green room then went off to an after-hours place that Cleveland, the drummer, knew about. Frankie bundled Atlas up under her heavy wool topcoat, the vintage Russian army thing she’d picked up in a flea market when she was still in high school, back when she and Frankie had met. Atlas let herself be herded out the back and into her friend’s toy-like car, shiny and blue like an Easter egg. They drove in silence around the late-night Cobalt City streets, aimlessly, no direction in mind.
When they drifted from the corridors of steel and glass towers in downtown, north toward Moriston, Atlas finally spoke up. “Head up toward Clown Liquor,” she said, impulsively but clearly.
Frankie raised one perfectly plucked eyebrow and shot Atlas a curious look from beneath her spider-like bangs. “Where are we going?”
“The Olive.”
Frankie said nothing but continued on where Atlas directed, and minutes later they pulled into the lot of a generic Cup-o-Chino coffeehouse where the Olive used to be. Atlas leaned forward in the seat, as if heightened scrutiny would turn back time. Finally, defeated, she sank back in her seat. “Do you remember this place?”
“I remember you,” Frankie said. A wistful smile appeared then vanished. “You had never sung for anyone but me. And I convinced you to do karaoke. First time you sang for strangers.”
“Ever,” Atlas said quietly.
“Ever,” Frankie agreed. “And you never stopped. You started writing music and formed the band within a year.”
“My dad . . .” Atlas started. Her voice caught in her throat, and sadness filled the car like an invisible wave of force.
Frankie gasped, breath stuck in her chest, a sensation like she was drowning in emotion. She gripped Atlas’s arm hard through the coat and the waves of emotion calmed. “Jesus, Atlas.”
“I’m sorry. I thought I knew the limits on the emotion thing, but it’s like the training wheels blew off tonight. I’m finding that what I thought was ten is more like two or three.”
“So that was how you knew?”
“And I saw him,” she started. She replayed the memory, the sun behind her father, Brian McVittie, making a halo of his white hair. His hand stretched down to her, and he was speaking. An indistinct, alien garble. Emphasis, quite possibly, on the alien part. “It’s pretty confusing.”
“Do you want to take some time off? I can shuffle some of the practice gigs. We can bump them back a week or two and no one will mind.”
“I never sang to strangers before singing here,” Atlas said, tear-rimmed eyes wide, reflecting the streetlights. “I was afraid. I was afraid of how I’d measure up to my dad. Afraid to step in his footprints because I didn’t think I’d ever get out of his shadow. And I was afraid that I had his . . . gifts. I was afraid I would be different like him, and I didn’t want to be different. For the longest time, I couldn’t tell if people liked me, liked my music, or if I was making them like it. Sometimes, I still wonder.”
Frankie nodded. They’d had parts of this conversation before. Her dad had been a looming but distant figure in her life, all but absent for the last decade. And Atlas went to Jaipur to see her mom on holidays at best. Atlas had lived virtually on her own since the age of sixteen, overseen by a series of executors and housekeepers until she turned twenty-one, and then left to her own devices after that.
It was hard to make friends when everyone believed your father to be an alien.
And when all was said and done, even Atlas couldn’t be sure if it were true or not.
“Put the shows on hold for a week.” Atlas said. “I’ll tell the band myself. They’ll understand.”
“Of course. Whatever you want to do.”
“I want to see my mom,” Atlas said. “I want to put my father to rest. And I want to get some answers.”
“About the whole alien thing?”
“And why someone killed him,” Atlas said. She closed her eyes. There in the darkness, it replayed on a loop. Her father’s outstretched hand, a garbled, alien language, a halo of hair backlit by the sun. Then a perfect circle punched through the middle of his head followed by blackness.
• • •
Even in the mountains of Rajasthan, the heat was a living thing. When Atlas stepped off the plane, the wave of heat was an angry fire spirit caressing the fine hairs on the back of her bare arms. At least it was a dry heat, unlike the humid swelter of a Cobalt City heat wave, and her embroidered blue tank top flapped freely in the hot breeze as she disembarked the small jet. She had packed light, just a kit bag with a few changes of clothes, a repurposed Tyvek envelope full of her writing gear, and her trusty acoustic guitar. Customs took its time with her, apparently expecting a certain degree of lawlessness from rock musicians. Her American passport probably didn’t help much either. But the exhaustive search of her luggage came up clean.
Atlas didn’t waste time or money on drugs. She didn’t even enjoy alcohol. One more gift from her father’s physiology was a Herculean resistance to chemical substances. She could go through a brick of heroin like it was mashed potatoes if she truly wanted to, and it would have just as much of an effect on her. Once the customs agents were satisfied, they turned her loose into the chaotic swirl of the Jaipur airport where she found a small gentleman in a suit holding a sign reading “McVittie” over his head.
“I didn’t ask for a car,�
� she said in out-of-practice Dhundhari.
“Your mother sent one anyway,” the driver said. “And if you prefer, I am also fluent in Hindi and English.”
She was unsurprised. It seemed it was only English-speaking countries where people were more likely to be monolingual. She’d met so-called primitive musicians in Mali who spoke ten languages and used most of them regularly. “Dhundhari is fine. I need the practice. What’s your name?”
“Jasper. Allow me to carry your bags?”
“Bag yes, guitar no.” She relinquished the kit bag, which the smaller man slung over his shoulder, crinkling his black suit. “Thank you, Jasper. Lead the way.”
Minutes later, as they crawled through the streets of Jaipur in the dusty white sedan, Jasper cleared his throat. “I am very sorry to hear about your father. It is a great loss.”
“Were you a fan?” she asked, choosing to direct the conversation toward Jasper rather than her own complicated relationship with the man who was the Madjack.
“Not at first,” he said. “When I was in medical school in London, a friend had an extra ticket to one of the Royal Albert Hall shows in ’83, so I went with him. I became a fan overnight. It changed my life.”
“He had that effect. You went to medical school?”
“Yes indeed. I did my residency at Maidstone Hospital in Kent.”
Atlas shifted uncomfortably in the back seat.
Jasper noticed her discomfort and chuckled. “You ask, what is a doctor doing driving a car?”
“The thought occurred to me.”
“Your mother leaves the house so infrequently, she felt it was wasteful to employ a driver. I’m her doctor, and I volunteered so she would not try and make the drive herself.”
“Her health . . . ?”
“It has been better,” Jasper said. “But it has also been much worse. She has not taken your father’s passing well. You’ll see in a few minutes.” He turned the car down the familiar gravel drive of her mother’s house, the intermittent shadows of thin fir trees across their path like the dark spaces between cells of a film strip, light then flicker of dark then light again.
The house had been modern once, built in the seventies by a once-famous actor, but now it looked like the abandoned set of a sci-fi movie. Overlapping concrete circles above glass walls, it was like an improbable forest of stone mushrooms about to fall, or a cluster of UFOs in a traffic jam. She supposed that had been the appeal when her parents bought it some time in the late eighties. Atlas had never lived there, though there was a room ostensibly set aside as hers. She had yet to spend more than a few weeks in Jaipur. She loved her mother, but even five days could be difficult in the best of times.
The McVittie family, broken and dysfunctional almost by design. Like the very concept of a functional family was alien to them. And maybe it was.
The small cluster of dusty news vans and ghoulish fans near the gate was new, though not unexpected. Atlas was thankful that the local police moved people back to let Jasper squeeze the cream-colored sedan through the crowd. “How long have they been there?” Atlas asked.
“The first one showed up less than an hour after the news broke. They’ve been multiplying since then.”
“Has mom talked to them?”
“Just the first,” Jasper said with an uncomfortable grimace. “She was still shocked. The phone had been ringing nonstop. She answered the door thinking it was her friend Judith coming to sit with her. The reporter was, honestly, less aggressive than I’d feared. I knew they were coming. We both did. He was bright, eager, polite. A big fan, apparently. And very respectful. He just happened to be in the area when he heard and seemed almost as stricken as your mother. But after that reporter, we stopped answering the door. The police have been most generous with their time.”
They exited the car in the shaded carport. From beyond the gate, the flash and click of cameras joined shouted requests for interviews or comments, like a localized storm. “And Mom?”
“She’s busy writing a statement for the press.” They paused, and he watched her reaction to the media frenzy. “Did you have this in Cobalt City before you left?”
“If it was there, I was still in too much of a shock. I didn’t notice. Thankful for that, I suppose.”
Jasper motioned toward the door at the back of the carport. “Shall we?”
“Give me a minute?”
“Of course,” Jasper said. He took her bag and left her with her guitar, leaving the door open a crack.
Atlas approached the gate and felt the complicated swirl of emotions radiating off the crowd like a heat shimmer off Nevada blacktop. She found her own inner calm and let it radiate from her, bringing the forty or so people beyond the security fence to a dull whisper. “We’re all very saddened by the unexpected loss of my father, Brian McVittie,” she said, her voice carrying cleanly and crisply. “And we’re touched that he has meant so much to all of you, as well. We ask that you give us some time, and privacy, to process this as a family. Thank you.”
She left them calm and placated, and retreated before they realized the interview was over.
Once inside, Atlas followed the strident tak-tak-tak of a typewriter through the cool interior to find her mother where she always did, hunched in a floral house dress over her keys. The position was so adopted, Atlas couldn’t be certain her mother could even stand fully erect if she wanted to at this point. An empty cigarette holder dangled out of one corner of her mouth, proof that while the doctor had eliminated cigarettes from her mother’s life, he hadn’t eliminated the oral fixation.
“How are you feeling, Mom?”
“Dreadful,” her mother said, scuttling around her cedar writing table like a beetle to enfold Atlas in her arms. Even that little exertion made her breath rattle in her dry, fragile lungs. “It’s like the sun’s gone out. I suppose in a way it has, really. The one star we’ve both orbited for so long certainly has.”
Atlas buried her nose in her mother’s thinning hair, still black as midnight despite her age. It smelled faintly like mint and brought a smile to her face. “The doctor had me worried.”
“Jasper? I swear. A woman blacks out once and he thinks it’s the end times.”
“Blacked out? What happened? Does he know . . . ?”
Indra McVittie stepped back and patted her daughter’s hand with a dismissive tut-tut. “Low blood pressure, low blood-oxygen levels, and exhaustion. Nothing to worry about. Come, sit with me.” She tugged Atlas to a long saffron-colored sofa that curved like a smile. Comfortable enough to sit on, but impossible if one wanted a nap.
“Have memorial arrangements been discussed?”
Her mother nodded. “Your father, ever the showman, had his memorial planned out a decade ago, if not more. He is to be cremated when he arrives here, and then packed into fireworks.”
“Is that legal?”
Her mother shrugged. She’d been studying Atlas’s face, looking for something, some sign of emotion perhaps, some signal of need. Atlas had managed to shut down since leaving her condo in Cobalt City, despite her father’s face all over the newspapers and televisions. Behind her dark glasses and zombie demeanor, she had been unassailable. She’d spent most of her life trying to rein in her emotions, and now that practice was paying off. Atlas suspected it must be frustrating for her mother. Finally, one thin hand reached up and isolated a lock of Atlas’s hair. “When did this start?”
Atlas’s heart froze. “When did what start?”
“The white in your hair.”
Atlas stood and walked to the nearest bathroom, her steps more urgent the closer she got. When she looked in the mirror, she saw what her mother was talking about. Her hair had been as dark as a raven’s wing two days ago, but now was shot through with so much white that it looked like marbled halvah. If it continued at this rate, it would be completely stark white by the memorial service.
“You didn’t know, did you?” her mother said from the doorway.
Atlas lo
oked down into the sink, not trusting herself to look at her own reflection or her mother. “He was an alien, wasn’t he, Mother? Really, really an alien.”
“Of course, sweetheart.”
“I thought it was all a gimmick.”
“As your dear father once said, in an industry built on lies and misperceptions, there is no bigger gimmick than the truth.”
The lid on Atlas’s emotions began to crack ever so slightly, releasing an aura of uncertainty and fear. “Does that mean I’m an alien, too?”
Indra’s trembling lip framed her smile. “Only half. Come. Let’s have some tea.”
• • •
“It was 1968,” her mother said. “I was making quite the decent living as a fashion photographer in London, and one summer, my flatmates and I had the wild idea to pack up and go to this big music festival outside of town. Lord, I think we must have been stoned out of our minds at the time, but I figured I might get some good photos I could sell to the newspaper or maybe a magazine or something. Or bed some flaxen-haired buck. Anyway, the three of us bundled up and pissed off to this muddy field to hear a bunch of golden gods break our minds with their music.”
“Jesus, you’re such a hippie, Mother,” Atlas said with a slight smile.
“I would remind you to respect your elders,” her mother said, then a sad smile crept into her expression. “But you’re not wrong. Anyway, there we were, several thousand of us looking to have our minds blown, and all of a sudden he showed up on stage.”
“Dad?”
“Yes. He took a guitar from, oh, Heaton Ransom, I believe, as Ransom was leaving the stage. Looked at it like he didn’t even know what it was. A few members of Heaton’s band filtered out onto stage, joined by a few members of the next band. It was all quite confusing— Mick and Ryan from Heaton’s band, Charles something and Lewton Nash from Gobsmacked. Then your father, he slung the guitar around his neck and struck a chord so pure, so true, it was like the heavens opened. The other musicians on stage stood there, dumbfounded, while the Madjack sang his first song.”
Behind the Mask Page 12
