Beautiful City of the Dead

by Leander Watts

  I could hardly look at the crowd, it was so intense. I wanted to run, to escape all those surging bodies and crashing waves of noise. Jerod loved it, prancing around, accepting the applause. And Butt was thrilled, too, wearing a big doofy smile.

  And Relly? I figured this would be his moment. I thought he'd stay onstage for as long as they'd let him, soaking up the good feeling.

  But he was gone.

  The next couple of minutes were all a blur. The MC came out and was hyping up the crowd for the next act. I think Jerod threw himself off the stage and was sucked into the crowd. Butt gave us a last blast of drumstick dynamite and headed backstage.

  But where was Relly?

  I followed Butt to the so-called dressing room. It was chaos. Four other bands were there, and some kids had snuck in from the crowd. People were yelling and swaggering around, chugging Mountain Dew, joking, huddling in little clusters, eating pizza, and acting like a pack of maniacs.

  No sign of Relly, however.

  His Strat was in its case, so I knew he'd come through the dressing room. But why had he run off so fast?

  I cornered Butt and said, "Where'd he go? Why'd he take off?"

  "Down that way," a girl wearing way too much purple mascara told me. "I think I saw him go down the back hall."

  Twenty-five

  SO I WENT. I followed.

  The hallway was long and dim, with about a thousand band names scrawled on the concrete walls. The back door was open. Outside was an alley. A couple of dumpsters and a stack of black plastic garbage bags. Two kids were hanging around there, smoking.

  "Did you see Relly?" I asked.

  "Who?"

  Running out of the alley, I had a choice. Left or right on this empty back street. I kept asking myself, Why do I need to find him? What was the big deal? If he wanted to run off, that was his business, right?

  It was one of those cold, hard, early winter days when the sunset painted the whole sky red. In one direction was the burning glow. In the other was shadow.

  I ran with the sunset at my back. This was a section of the city I didn't know. And on a Sunday afternoon, it was empty, even desolate. How can I possibly find him? I kept asking myself. And why? He ran off for a good reason. If he wanted to be with us, with me, he would have stayed at Waterstreet.

  Still, I ran. Still, somehow I followed his path.

  The sky was now all crimson, writhing and swirling with sunset fire.

  I stopped at the entrance to a narrow alley. More trash cans, more piles of broken-down boxes. More blank, empty back doors.

  And there he was, huddled like a wounded animal.

  I hurried toward him. "Relly, what's wrong? What are you doing?"

  "You shouldn't be here," he whispered.

  "What are you talking about?"

  The light from the sky was amazing, making everything red. My hands, his face, even the wet pavement.

  "You're not ready," he said.

  "I don't get it," I said, kneeling down beside him. "What's wrong?"

  He took off his coat, then started fumbling to pull his shirt over his head.

  "What are you doing?" I was helpless with him in this state. Maybe he was crazy and what can you do with a crazy person but stand there and watch? Maybe he was sick, and I should be running to call an ambulance. Or maybe I was crazy and sick, and none of this was really happening.

  His hand flickered. I mean the skin looked like it was moving, all melting and misty. The whole alleyway was drenched in the sky's red throb.

  "Go away," he moaned. "You're not ready."

  He got his shirt off and he looked so thin and weak.

  "Relly, listen to me. I'm going to call—"

  "No!" he hissed. "Nobody else. Nobody can see." Then he took hold of my hand. His felt hot. Not like fevered flesh but like something right out of the oven.

  "Relly, you're sick. You stay right here and I'll call—"

  Then I saw the first little glint of fire. And now I was sure I was the crazy one. Flame doesn't just appear on a boy's skin, right? Fire doesn't come from a body.

  But still, I saw it. Red and orange tongues of flame rising from Relly, like he was coated with gasoline and I'd tossed a lit match on him. I saw the flames rise up, swirling and rushing. "Get away!" he moaned. "Get back!"

  I wanted to hold onto him, to hold back the flame. But it hurt too much. And so I fell back as he stood, completely covered in fire.

  Someone was screaming. Me? Maybe. Relly? Maybe. Both of us? I don't know.

  I grabbed a hunk of old discarded carpet to smother the fire. "No." The voice came, from him or from the flame. "Don't."

  He stood before me burning from head to toe. Black smoke poured upward, a strange, almost perfumey smoke. He raised his hands over his head like a conqueror, the winner of some deadly fight. A minute before, he looked weak and sick. Now he was beautiful and fearsome. Flames roared out of him, and I knelt there on the cold wet pavement, sure I'd gone totally insane.

  I guess I was crying now. Somebody was, and I don't think it was Relly. I closed my eyes, trying to make the fire go away. But I could still hear it. And still feel it burning on my face.

  Just as fast as it came, it went away. The heat dwindled. And the red glow I could see through my closed eyes vanished, too. No more uprushing noise. "Relly?" I said, still not looking.

  He was dead for sure. How could he survive that? I'd knelt there weak and useless while Relly had burned to nothing.

  "Relly?" When I finally opened my eyes, he was wearing his long coat again. But his feet were bare, and what I could see of his legs, too. He looked exhausted, totally used up. Still, he was alive.

  "Now you know," he whispered.

  I came toward him, afraid it would start all over again.

  "Now you know what I truly am."

  The sunset was gone and long, cold shadows were filling the alley. Relly pulled his coat tighter to his chest. "Now there's no turning back. You know about me and soon enough you'll know about yourself."

  Part Two

  One

  YEAH, IT STARTS WITH FIRE.

  Relly was the Burning Boy. And I guess that made me the Crazy Girl. Because I believed it. I mean, I never once doubted what I saw that day. He was standing in an alley in a cloak of fire. A minute later it was over. He was OK. Totally exhausted, too weak to even talk. But not a burn mark on him. No sign of the flames that had poured out of his body.

  I wrapped him up in his coat, and I sat with him a long time, holding on.

  Then I got him over to Clinton Avenue and we took the bus back to his house. Late on Sundays there's hardly anybody riding buses. So it was like we had our own private route. The driver was in a trance after going back and forth across the city all day. He didn't even notice Relly had no shoes on. Outside was dark and cold. Inside was too brightly lit. The buzz of the lights hurt Relly. I could feel it. We sat in the very back, huddled together, not saying a word.

  He'd tell me when it was the right time. I knew that. I'd find out everything. But riding back home on the bus, we didn't say a word.

  Only as I helped him up his steps did I break the silence. "I'll go back and get the gear. Is there anything besides the Strat?"

  He shook his head. "It was real, Zee," he said, like he heard the question without me saying it out loud. "It's real. It happened before. And it'll happen again."

  "Yeah, I know. So I'm not insane."

  He shrugged. "Sane or insane. Doesn't make much difference now. It's real."

  Two

  MY DAD HAD OFF that night. But I headed straight to my room and didn't even see him. He was downstairs reading, I guess.

  I lay in bed for a long time replaying what had gone on that day.

  It seemed like I had two choices. One was to deny everything. I could just say I was totally freaked out by the show, stressed way into the Crazy Zone. Playing out for the first time. The crowds of screaming kids. Relly's Ghost Metal pouring from the amps. My words big as
thunder. Maybe I was sick too, feverish again, which always makes my brain work in strange ways. Maybe it was all in my head.

  Or I could accept it. I could say to myself, "All right, Relly explodes into flames sometimes. That's just the way he is."

  I had an old record called Everything You Know Is Wrong, by this acid-head comedy group called the Firesign Theatre. I listened to it once, after my uncle Otho had broken up his record collection and given it to me. I guess it was supposed to be funny. But it just seemed strange to me. I didn't understand a lot of it. The story line wandered all over the place and I didn't laugh once at any of the jokes. Exactly the kind of weirdness that Uncle Otho would love. I stuck it away in the attic, but the name of the record kept coming back to me.

  "Everything You Know Is Wrong." I said it out loud, lying there in bed.

  If metalhead freak boys can explode into flame, then what else was possible? In a way, that was much scarier than accepting what my eyes had seen. One totally bizarro thing is bad enough. But if that could happen, then what else was waiting for me?

  I usually kept my thoughts pretty much under control, like they were wild animals and I was in charge of the zoo. Yeah, I might obsess about a burning car wreck or the coils in the electric heater. But that's as far as it went. And maybe all my obsessing was even a way to keep the other stuff locked up in nice dark cages.

  So lying there in bed, it really scared me what might come crawling out of my brain.

  What if Relly told me that everybody bursts into flame now and then?

  What if Mr. Perfect Jerod said he wanted to be my boyfriend?

  What if my dad understood that I needed a real father and not just somebody who paid the bills and left supper in the fridge for me?

  What if I was the best bass player in the universe?

  What if Tannis could put spells on people the way pagan priestesses did in the olden days?

  What if Relly and me were together forever?

  That one really scared me. So I got out a candle and lit it. And sat there watching the flame, which sometimes works to calm me down.

  Only that night it didn't work. In fact, it made the feeling even worse. The little flame seemed dangerous, or maybe a warning of danger. Anything was possible now. Anything, good or bad, real or unreal. My skin was hot and damp with sweat. My thoughts were all a blur, one idea melting into the next. I saw Relly on fire and a couple hundred screaming faces. I saw the back alley, filled with red sunset light.

  This was too much. So I blew out the candle and went down the hall to the bathroom. Without really thinking why, I started the water in the tub.

  Our house is old and sometimes that can be a pain. The windows are drafty and the floors squeak. But if my dad ever gets around to redoing the place, I'll fight him to the death to keep the old bathtub. It's big, and it's got those claw feet holding it off the floor. And I can fit in it all the way, stretch out, and be totally under the surface.

  So I ran a bath for myself, real hot, and soon I was submerged. Only then did the bad feeling go away. I stayed under as long as I could, then came up gasping and went below again. Eyes closed, hugging myself, holding my breath, all the world went away. I was safe underwater, perfect and secret.

  And the fever was gone too. Finally, the damp smoldering in my body had stopped.

  Three

  WHEN I SAW RELLY the next day, it was like we'd both done something really wrong and didn't want to bring it up. I'd heard girls talking about going to a party and getting drunk and sneaking off with some boy. And the next day they kept to themselves, not sure who saw them the night before or what they'd seen.

  I guess it was like that with me and Relly. We hadn't done anything wrong. Nothing at all. In fact, lots of kids were friendlier now, as the word got around about our show and how Scorpio Bone blew the other bands off the stage. Still, we didn't say much to each other.

  He even made up some bogus excuse why he couldn't eat lunch with me that day.

  Then we were in bio again together and we got to see the Full Knacke.

  He had this thing about smoking. He hated it, I mean, truly hated it with all the hate inside him. And so he built this smoking machine he called the Marlboro Man with glass tubes for lungs. It had been a full-size lifesaving dummy, but now it breathed all by itself, the air sucked in by a bellows run on a little electric motor. That day, Knacke set him up and put a cigarette in his mouth.

  He lit a match, snarling through his teeth, "Welcome to Marlboro Country." He got the pump going and we had to sit for twenty minutes watching the black goo collect in the glass tubes. Knacke was getting all excited, saying, "See? See the filth you're taking into your bodies? Do you understand? If you smoke, then you pollute yourselves." And he made us come up, row by row, and look real close.

  The dummy had a cowboy hat and Knacke would show us ads from magazines. "You see him? Do you understand what happened to this imbecile? He smoked himself to death." Knacke passed the ads around. Tough-looking cowboys. Macho range-riders. "Dead of cancer!" Knacke would scream at us. "Dead from smoking!"

  I think he'd won some kind of award from the American Cancer Society. And the school loved it, of course. Somebody in Admin put up a display on the bulletin board right by the front door. "Festus B. Knacke, fighting for the lives of our young people."

  We had bio last period. He'd done the smoking bit for all his classes. So by the end of the day, the lungs were pretty disgusting.

  Four

  PRACTICE WAS STRANGE the next day. Jerod was totally cranked up from the show, rattling on about how great we were and how we'd be headlining soon. Butt was excited, too, I guess. Only, unlike Jerod, he noticed that something was wrong.

  In the beginning, it was just Butt and Relly. In some ways they couldn't have been more different. Butt was built like a caveman, all muscle and shaved boney head. Relly wasn't exactly frail. He could stand up in the blast from the amps and I think it even made him stronger. Still, he was no ironman. Butt wasn't what you'd call smart either. And sometimes the stuff Relly talked about went way over his head.

  All the same, they were the core of the band. They'd been together the longest and Butt could tell when things weren't right for Relly.

  I stayed in my place, off to the side. Jerod jumped around and practically strangled the mike stand. Butt drove the band like a thudding train engine. And Relly played stuff I'd never heard before.

  No chord charts that night. No words for Jerod. Just a huge endless riff like a monster snake slithering out of its nowhere hole. And just when I thought we'd gotten to the end, Relly took us deeper and farther.

  He looked over at me, gave a little nod. Was it noise that came out of the amps then? Yeah, I guess. Was it music? Yeah, that too. But it was something else. If I'd been one of the Dungeons & Dragons crowd, I might have said Relly was doing sorcery. If I'd read a lot of elves and dwarves stuff or hung out with the Wicca girls, I'd say he was casting a spell.

  But I wasn't. So I just thought, All right, he's opening the door. And I guess we're all going through.

  What door? I didn't know then. Where were we going? It would take me a while to figure that out, too.

  Did I want to go with him? Oh yeah. No question about that. Butt and Jerod did, too, though I guess they couldn't see it the way I did. Butt just drubbed his drums. And Jerod wailed and practiced looking good, riding the riff. We all went though, in our ways. Relly opened the door and Scorpio Bone headed straight through.

  OK, I know this sounds like I was going crazy. But sometimes the truth is crazy. Sometimes everything you know is wrong. And you've got to face that straight on if you want to really live your life. I was in the band and I was staying. Relly was my best friend and there was no way I'd do anything to change that. I was heading for the "other side," as Relly called it. And there was no turning back.

  Five

  THE NEXT DAY, Knacke hooked up a dead frog to a hand-cranked magneto and had us work it. One at a time we'd come up to
the front of the class and take hold of the sweaty black crank. Round and round till electric current was pouring out the wires and into the frog.

  It twitched and spazzed there on the table, like it was halfway back from the land of the dead. Some kids were seriously grossed out. Some thought it was pretty cool.

  "In the earliest days of science," Knacke told us, "it was thought that living creatures could be brought back to life by the use of electric current."

  It was my turn to go up and work the crank. "There it is, Zee." I hated when he said my name. "There it is up close and personal." I turned the crank and watched the frog thrash around. He was dead. Sure. But he was alive too, in some weird way. His rubbery lips came apart and his tongue stuck out.

  The worst part was when his eyes slid open and he lay there staring at me. I looked away. Knacke had come close and was giving me the same dead-alive stare as the frog.

  "Don't be afraid," Knacke whispered to me. "There's nothing to fear."

  I thought I was going to throw up. Letting go of the magneto crank, I stood there in front of the whole class like an idiot. Some kids were snickering and making jokes. Gary Geetz, who always thought everything terrible was funny, said something about "love at first sight."

  "Shut up, Geetz," I said. "Shut your big fat mouth."

  That was all it took. I got detention. Just me and Knacke and his Marlboro Man.

  Six

  USUALLY, DETENTION WASN'T so bad. I figured I could waste a couple of hours doing homework. Or I could blow that off and sit and draw band logos and write new lyrics in my special notebook.

  But detention with Knacke was different. He actually made you work. And he only had one kid at a time.

  My job was to clean out the Marlboro Man's disgusting lungs. Soap suds. A wire brush. A sink full of black gunk.