He’s skinny – so skinny – that he looks like he’s going to shatter if someone just touches him.
But his frail frame is in direct contrast to his fervent intensity. The world around him seems to go away, and all that is there is my father, clad in black leather, the slight stubble of his light brown beard peeking out beneath the ringlets of hair that are slowly becoming drenched with sweat.
My mother is there, and she touches his fingers softly as he slides his hand frantically down the neck of the bass. She wants to make sure he’s there, too.
Are you there, Jordan? I’m here, Jordan.
I can hear her saying these words in her mind, too, though like with Ivan/Jamie, those words never leave her lips, either. But she feels them. And I hear them.
And just before my father looks up and sees me – just before I can glance upon the face of Jordan Barker, my father, the legendary bassist of a rock’n’roll band from a time so long ago – the music stops, my eyes open, and I am back in my room.
Alone.
I never could understand how, or why, the music does this to me.
And I could never understand why I could never see my father’s face.
Chapter Four
Jamie
I’m awake, now.
I don’t sleep much these days.
Because I’m haunted by her. My Angelique.
I see her every time I close my eyes, even if it’s just to drift off to a stilted, ragged sleep.
We are at CBGB’s, again. The stage is beneath my feet, again.
And I can see her eyes – blue tourmalines set against her pale skin. Gemstones against salt pillar – the contrast between her eyes and her skin paralyzing me with a fervent passion that I feel for her to this day.
But this time, the world is falling around us. The stage crumbles beneath my feet, and my bandmates – one by one – perish behind me.
And I can see someone – him – grabbing her, violently, by the arm and forcing her to her knees.
In the dream, as in life, I couldn’t stop what comes next.
The gun pointed at her forehead.
Angelique, crying, begging for her life…and the life of the child she was carrying.
Her baby – my baby – our baby.
But she wanted to live on her terms – with me, and our son, in the old New York City.
And if she couldn’t have that, she informed the man who would be her killer, then she preferred not to live at all.
I can still hear her words echoing across the room as Mathieu Sherman, the Cabal officer who was training under me not long before, refused to yield to her request.
“Long live the Uprising! Long live New York City! Long live the Uprising! Long live New York City!”
And as she raised her fist in the air, the Cabal officer – Mathieu Sherman, a name I will remember for the rest of my days, because it is my personal mission to find him and handle him, once and for all – pointed the barrel between her eyes and applied constant, increasing reward pressure until the trigger fired.
I didn’t even have time to react before the bullet left the chamber and lodged, firmly and squarely, into her head.
I awoke, again, with a start.
“Had the dream again, did you?” came a drawling accent, booming with bass, from across the room.
I didn’t even need to look up to see who it was.
My friend – my compatriot – my new brother-in-arms in the new New York – my fellow disgraced Cabal soldier and fugitive from the long arm of Emperor’s law – Basile Perrinault.
I shook my head and ran my fingers through my cropped jet-black hair, now flecked with a few shades of grey and betraying the fact that a little more than 20 years had passed since I’d graced the stage with my presence. One would never know, by looking at me now, that I once had wild, tousling black curls that flared out from behind my head like a lion’s mane – I look, today, more like a military cadet than a rock star – but I prefer it that way, since all of who I am, and all of what has mattered to me, is gone.
“I did, man,” I said. “Basile, I’m sorry to have woke you. I keep thinking the dream is real, and then…”
“You wake up, and you realize it isn’t,” he finished, shaking his head and lifting himself from the bed. “You didn’t wake me, Jamie. But I worry for you. I worry about you. You cannot keep going on like this. You cannot keep blaming yourself for…her…”
His voice drifted off, afraid to speak Angelique’s name, as though speaking her into existence would somehow make her real and would force me to play out the events of all those years ago, not realizing I played out that scene every day of my life, with every breathing moment, and would for the rest of my days.
“For years, you have carried around the weight of her death,” he continued as he drew back the long, black, heavy curtain of the space we’d shared with Kanoa Shinomura, our fellow disgraced Cabal soldier who, in his prime, was a five-star general and second-in-command to Emperor.
Kanoa continued to snore, loudly, as the dusk entered the window and glistened off Basile’s onyx-colored skin. He ran his long, calloused fingers through his cropped salt-and-pepper Afro as he sighed and continued. “But there’s nothing you could have done. Nothing any of us could have done. And all you can do is keep her memory alive as we stay – we, who choose to stay – and fight. Fight to get back that old New York you’ve lost.”
I shook my head, eyes closed tight. “Basile,” I snapped, “I don’t know why you choose to fight for this city. This isn’t your city. This isn’t your history. Why do you stay and fight?”
I immediately regretted the tone of my voice as Basile shuddered, sighed, and stared at me intently. “Because it matters to you,” he answered, sincerely. “And because I don’t have anything else to fight for.”
I swallowed, hard, trying desperately to dislodge the lump that suddenly formed in my throat. Like me, Basile had lost his family – a wife, Charmaine; his young son, Etienne – at the hands of Emperor, and I would do well to remember that his pain was just as real as mine.
Just as time did nothing to dull the pain of Angelique’s loss, time did nothing but to remind Basile that everything he’d ever loved – his home, his restaurant, his family – were washed away in Emperor’s Hurricane, a man-made natural disaster in New Orleans, Louisiana, that happened just about twenty years ago, and had all the same devastating effects as its more infamous predecessor, Hurricane Katrina.
It wasn’t something that Basile liked to talk about much – I never knew the details of how he lost his wife and child, nor did I know how he managed to survive without them, especially for all these years. And, in a way, I didn’t want to know – for all that mattered was that Basile, like me, was a man who once had everything but lost it all to cater to the whims of a madman. He was robbed of the right to be a father to his beloved son – but he was luckier than me, because he had a chance to be a father to a child, to hold the child in his arms for the first time, to give him a name and teach him to walk and show him the wonders of life…
But what’s worse?
I could hear Basile’s thoughts, now. Stupid Cabal training.
What’s worse, Jamie – to know and love a child, only to lose him, or to never know a child at all, because he never had a chance to exist? Or are they not both a father’s pain – a real pain that will, forever, be carried in our hearts forever?
Kanoa, hearing Basile’s thoughts as clearly as I did, began to stir from his slumber. He rubbed his eyes and slowly began to rise from the bed. “You two on this shit again?” he asked. “Bunch of fuckin’ women, the both of you. Talking about your damn feelings all the time.”
“Hey, Kanoa?” Basile asked as he grabbed a pillow from his bed and tossed it at Kanoa’s face. “Shut the fuck up, alright? No one asked you. And you don’t understand, anyway.”
Kanoa caught the pillow and laid back down, his sinewy chest heaving with dark, sardonic laughter. “I actually do understand
, Basile,” he said. “But you need to use those feelings to drive you to be better – to strive for something bigger than yourselves. Ourselves. It’s us against everyone else, and this city – or whatever’s left of it – is counting on us.” He tossed the pillow back at Basile and sprung up off the bed, exposing his completely naked and hairless body. “And that’s why we go out at night, right? That’s why we fight these Cabal bastards and try to reclaim this city for ourselves, right? Because there have to be other people like us out there…”
I turned my face to the side, looking out the window, and rolled my eyes. “Kanoa, man, can you put some clothes on? I don’t need to see your dick in my face every time we gotta get ready to fight these fuckers. Shit,” I exclaimed. “It’s not exactly an inspiration, you know.”
Kanoa laughed again. “Careful, Jamie, your jealousy is showing.” He skipped around in a Cossack-style dance, then spun around and took a bow. “You know women can’t handle all of this.”
Basile narrowed his eyes, unimpressed. “Handle what, now?” he retorted.
Kanoa rolled his eyes, still laughing, and grabbed a black towel off a nearby shelf. He wrapped it around his narrow waist and headed towards the bathroom, humming a tune I couldn’t recognize as he slammed the door and started the shower.
Basile turned back to me. “I can’t understand him,” he said. “How can he be so upbeat in these crazy times?”
“He’s confident in his abilities. And ours,” I replied. “Besides, unlike us, he still has his real family.”
And it was true.
I never had much in the way of a blood family – I was the sole product of my father’s second marriage, and both of my parents were long dead. I had a half-brother somewhere in England, the sole product of my father’s first marriage, but I never knew he existed until recently, and I never bothered with finding out what happened to him. It didn’t seem to matter, at this point, because if he wanted to find me, he’d have found me a long time ago.
And Basile – well, Basile lost the only family that mattered to him in Emperor’s Hurricane.
But Kanoa – he had a family. Shortly after Emperor abolished the Electoral College, but before he began his totalitarian rise to power, Kanoa’s Japanese-born father, his Hawaiian-born mother, his younger sister, and the family dog Yoshi all had the wherewithal to return to the small prefecture outside Tokyo where Kanoa’s father, Hideko, was born. As a result, they escaped it all – psi, the purges, everything – and made a decent life for themselves.
His sister Leilani, in fact, is engaged to be married to a very nice young man – a son of a Japanese rice farmer, Kanoa told me – and she seems to enjoy the peace that living abroad provides.
Though they didn’t stick around to see Kanoa’s rise, and fall, in the ranks of the Cabal, it was doubtful that they wanted to, anyway, because Hideko despised Emperor and everything he stood for. He felt that his son was better off dead than joining the Cabal, because to serve Emperor was to serve without honor.
And while I could see Hideko’s point, Kanoa also did what he had to do to survive. And now that he’d fallen from grace in Emperor’s eyes, Kanoa had a family to fight for, unlike the rest of us.
“Lucky bastard,” replied Basile aloud, again reading my thoughts, while looking out the window onto the street.
The Bowery.
Faust’s old stomping grounds.
The old home of CBGB, the Amato Opera, and the ever-changing mural – once the heartbeat of all that was artistic and vibrant in New York City – had now become a ghost town.
Nothing but rows of buildings that all looked the same, for as far as the eye could see in any direction. No life on the streets. No culture in the air. No art in the buildings. No music on the stages.
No hope.
What a shitty fucking existence.
“Do you remember these streets in their prime, Jamie?” asked Basile as he absently traced his fingertips across the window frame.
I smirked, slightly. “Oh man, Basile,” I said, my voice swelling with pride. “Of course, I do. It wasn’t perfect – God, nothing ever is – but it was better than this. Shit, anything is better than this.”
He sighed, then walked over to the Pullman-style kitchen area that had fallen into a state of extreme disrepair. We had a barely functioning stove that could only be ignited with matches, a rickety refrigerator that barely kept anything cool (though, thankfully, New York City is cold for six months out of the year, so preventing spoilage was easy), and a steel countertop that had certainly seen better days. But it’s enough, Basile would frequently remind us, for it is the chef that makes the kitchen, not the kitchen that makes the chef. And for what it was worth, Basile more than did his part to make sure we – myself, himself, and Kanoa – ate fresh, nutritive food, no matter how sparse or abundant it was in quantity.
Funny how the chef made sure we never went hungry.
He was, indeed, a brother of mine in more ways than one.
“Tell me about it,” he said as he began shelling the white beans he’d nicked from a Cabal surplus store. As he shelled the beans, he gestured towards a small bag of okra – again, unceremoniously swiped from a Cabal surplus store – with his left hand and nodded slightly in my direction, giving me a cue to start cleaning and cutting the vegetables while telling my tale of rock’n’roll lore. “I want to know what this city was, before it all.”
And even though I know he’d heard these stories dozens of times before, I smiled and began one of my favorite ones again. It was just as much a tradition as it was a ritual. “Oh, man, Basile,” I said, beaming with pride as my eyes lit up. “Let me tell you about our homecoming show.”
The pounding drums brought by the Reverend Doctor Tom “Motherfuckin” Newman.
The howling feedback from the guitar and the bass from William Lynn and Jordan Barker, respectively.
Willie and Jordan, back to back, twin six-strings facing off against each other, yet complimenting each other at the same time.
Nothing but screams.
My back was turned to the audience as I hunched over Willie’s too-tall amp and snorted a short, thick line of cocaine up my nose. The lights were flickering blue, purple, green, and orange, and a strobe threw off the last bit of my movements, so no one could see me partake in this illicit drug use.
Not that everyone in the audience hadn’t done their fair share of blow, smack, pot, and booze prior to showing up. Not that anyone would give a fuck if I did a whole mountain of blow, Tony Montana-style, in front of their dearly beloved mothers and grandmothers. Hell, I could fuck their sisters onstage and they’d cheer me on with each thrust. That was how much power I held in my hands, at that very moment.
But still – no need to tempt the long arm of the law. After all, the NYPD had a pesky habit of dropping by when the noise got to be too much for the long-suffering residents of the Bowery.
Remember those days? When all you had to worry about was an overzealous police officer tossing you into the drunk tank for the night? Fun times, fun times.
Besides, I only needed a little pick-me-up…enough to close out this homecoming show that was all but incendiary.
Have you ever seen those neo-pagan rituals? The ones where the women are writhing around in circles, half-naked, calling out to a god that may or may not hear them as they simulate sexual acts to conjure up a spirit that only they could see, feel, hear, and believe in?
That was what was going on as I gripped the microphone – shirtless, sweating, black leather pants and Frye boots and no underwear (easy access), black eyeliner dripping down my face, wild jet-black curls flying behind me – and demanded everyone’s attention.
“What the fuck is up, New York Fucking City?” I screamed.
Cheers. Screams. Panties thrown on the stage.
God, I used to say fuck a lot. I used to fuck a lot, too, but after twenty years, who the hell remembers what to do anymore…
“We’ve traveled all over the fucking co
untry,” I continued. Bass guitar. “All over the fucking world.” Guitar riffs. Drums. Cymbal crash. “But there’s one thing we’ve always loved to fucking do.” Riffs. “And that…is…come home again!”
That was all I needed to say.
The audience beneath me cheered and stomped wildly, shaking the stage beneath me. Goddamn CBGB and this fucking stage, I thought absently, praying that four decades of piss wouldn’t cause this warped wood contraption to give out beneath me.
What was the point of pissing on the stage, anyway? Was the bathroom – not five feet away – too much of an effort to get to? (Although, given the state of the bathroom by this time, I’m not sure I could blame people who just chose to unzip and let loose wherever they stood…)
Let me finish this goddamn song and I’ll never get on this stage again, God, I offered as a silent prayer, hoping only to survive for the night.
I never realized – in that moment, at least – that this prayer would be quickly, and swiftly, answered.
Draped in the spiritual robes borrowed from the rockers that came before me – Jim Morrison, Iggy Pop, Axl Rose, Andrew Wood – I danced a serpentine dance around the stage and howled at the top of my lungs.
Your days are numbered ‘cuz I know where you’re sleeping/your time is up, I got you stuck in my head, yeah. I wanna know about the secrets you’re keeping/I’m out your window, now I’m coming to bed, yeah! I’m coming home again/I don’t know where I’ve been/I’m coming home again/with blood…on…my hands!
And there she was – my angel. Angelique.
She smiled at one point, and then, when I howled about the blood on my hands, she threw her head back and let out a long, hard laugh.
She remembered how we would rehearse this very song in the basement of a recording studio somewhere in the bowels of the Lower East Side. Sometimes, Willie would miss a note. Sometimes, my voice would crack (that was always embarrassing). One time, Tom hit the snare so hard that he tore a hole right through the drum head. Another time, Jordan had done so much smack that he nodded off in the middle of the bass solo.
The Gathering: Book One of The Uprising Series Page 3
