by Del Howison
He smiled down at her. “This one,” he answered. She laughed and smacked his arm.
“It’s actually five-twenty p.m.” he said.
“Ghod, what did you do to me? I’ll never fuck again.”
“Don’t tell me I’ve ruined you,” he said with mock dismay.
“I’m afraid so,” she responded. She looked at the television. Nick was watching some sort of science channel. There was a commercial on for a video, one of those wonders-of-nature things with footage of bears catching fish in their mouths in midair. Sparkle and Nick watched as a large fish swam by a rock, which turned out to be a fish itself. A large mouth suddenly materialized, swallowed the fish whole, and settled down into rock shape again.
“That,” Nick said, “is what I am going to do to you.”
Sparkle laughed. “I think you already have,” she smiled.
“No,” he said, “not yet. Not quite yet.”
They both laughed and he kissed her and then helped her out of bed. He led her into the shower—where, under an endless stream of needles of water, they began swallowing and soaping body parts and entering orifices until Sparkle thought her bones had turned to rubber. Nick carried her out of the shower and laid her on the bed, draping a towel over her. He called room service and ordered a light supper for the both of them, which got to the room just as they finished dressing. They ate quietly: steak and steamed potatoes and vegetables and bottled water. They sat on the bed and fed each other, watching the sun set.
Sparkle was halfway through dessert—a large piece of banana cream pie—when she turned to Nick and said, “I don’t know how to say this, but I’m going to have to go home at some point.”
“I know,” he said, “and I have to earn my keep as well.” He walked over to a suitcase and opened it, taking out a plastic bag. There were seven capsules inside.
“The band is working on something, a new type of music delivery system, if you will.”
If you will, she thought. She loved his accent, his eyes, his body, the way he treated her, everything about him. She could almost feel tendrils, ley lines, snaking their way across the space between them, connecting them invisibly.
He held the bag up to her. “These are not drugs. I swear to you. But take one each day and you will hear a different Starlets and Spaceboys track in your head. It may take two or three days, but it will be like nothing you have ever experienced.”
Nick took her hand and placed the bag, the capsules inside, on her palm. Then he gently closed her hand around the bag and kissed her. “Endings,” he said, “and beginnings.”
The words were out of her mouth before she even knew it. “Will I see you again?”
Nick looked her directly in the eye. “Oh yes,” he said. “And before the concert. We’ll hook up before Saturday.
“But now”—he stood up, offering her his hand to raise her gently off the bed—“we both have to go.”
They caught a bus back to Balloon Festival Park, and they held each other and kissed under a sky full of balloons and stars.
“I’ll see you out there,” Nick said, pointing to the Sandia Mountains. He squeezed her hand one more time, looked into her eyes, turned, and became one with the horde. Sparkle, for her part, felt like she could have died right there.
* * *
By Monday, Sparkle couldn’t get the music out of her head.
It wasn’t so intrusive at first. She took her first capsule late Sunday morning. When she had come in on Saturday night, her mother had been passed out in the living room of their shotgun double-wide, an empty liquor bottle on the floor next to her. There had been no evidence of the Rodster in sight; apparently, he hadn’t had the nerve to show up after trying to pick up his girlfriend’s daughter. Sparkle wasn’t sure whether she would tell her mom or not, thinking, wait and see, keep it in reserve for an argument. There was no point in waking her mom up in any event. She was snoring to beat the band; she always did after a bout of heavy drinking, and Mom liked that Captain Morgan Spiced Rum. Tonight, Sparkle had thought, she’d been the one with the Captain in her, oh dear ghod yes. Sparkle had gone to bed and enjoyed the sleep of the well-fucked and satiated.
When she woke up on Sunday morning, the sun was high in the sky and the air was warm. There was a message on her cell phone; Sparkle hoped that it was from Nick, even though she hadn’t given him her number. It was not from him at all, of course; it was from Marie, asking if Sparkle wanted to go to the Fiesta today. Fat fucking chance of that, Sparkle thought, though she couldn’t really be mad at getting left high and dry. Well, high anyway, she laughed to herself.
Sparkle had wandered into the kitchen looking for something to eat. There was no cereal, no Pop-Tarts, only some toast that looked like it had been found during an Anasazi dig. She remembered the capsules in the plastic bag in her pocket and got a glass of water from the faucet, thought for a moment about taking all of them, then remembered what Nick had said. Jesus, she thought, hugging herself for a second at the memory. What a great fuck he had been. She unclenched herself and swallowed a capsule. And a nice guy, too.
Sparkle had believed Nick, but she was still surprised when the music started in her head. It began not so much as a melody but as a discordant series of notes heard from afar, like a car radio heard from the distance of a couple of blocks that never gets any closer or farther away. The sound didn’t interfere with her thoughts; it was more like background music that almost wasn’t there. She spent her Sunday afternoon hanging out at a Starbucks and then surfing the net in her bedroom, all of it with the music, some sort of ambient rhythm with deep thumping bass and drums, faintly playing in the background of her mind.
Nick hadn’t told her about the video. Sparkle didn’t see it until she closed her eyes, but then, all of a sudden, there it was, synced to the music that she could barely hear. A bunch of guys who looked like Vikings—long beards, homed helmets, swinging axes and swords—were in a pitched battle with these things that looked like women, except that they were … off, in a way that Sparkle couldn’t quite put her finger on. The Vikings were getting their asses kicked royally, literally being eaten whole, the almost-women screaming and laughing with blood smeared around their mouths, biting the heads off the Viking guys in one chomp. It was vivid, yet repetitive after a fashion: a Viking would lose his head and his body would jump around for a few seconds, blood spurting out of his neck, and then fall over.
The music in the dream video got louder and Sparkle suddenly recognized the song. It was a cover of a song her mom had played for her once, had told her that she played in the birthing room when Sparkle was born, something called “Thursday” by Morphine. Nick was in the video as well, standing off to the side, laughing at the carnage, urging the women-things on at the top of his lungs.
Sparkle sat straight up in bed, wide awake. The Vikings, the carnage, the women bitches … were all gone. The music still echoed in her ears, and for just a second she saw Nick standing in the comer, smiling at her. He disappeared, but the music played on, loud and proud, inside her head.
Sparkle lay in bed for a moment before she realized it was Monday, a school day. She looked at the clock and reluctantly rolled out of bed. She stripped, applied her sparkle glitter, then quickly rooted through a pile of clothes on the floor of her closet until she found something reasonably clean and got dressed. She stopped in the kitchen, but there was still nothing there for breakfast; she hesitated a second, then filled a glass from the faucet and took a second capsule.
By Monday afternoon chemistry class, the music was drowning everything else out. Marie had come up to her in the cafeteria at lunch, wanting to talk, but hearing Marie talk was like listening to some garbled radio station from a foreign country: it made no sense to her at all. What she wanted to hear was the music. It was like she had an iPod in her head set on Repeat, and it wasn’t playing the quietly creepy Morphine song anymore. It was a track she’d never heard, faintly like “The Four of Us Are Dying” by Nine Inch Nails
but more sinister. She loved every note; she found herself bopping along to it. Her lab partner, a Native kid named Cristos, kept looking at her, and he raised his eyebrows at her once in question, as if asking her if she was okay. She just nodded her head yes. She had never felt better in her life. She couldn’t wait until Tuesday morning so she could take another capsule.
* * *
Sparkle was dream-free Monday night, but taking another capsule on Tuesday seemed to open a part of her brain that she hadn’t known existed. It was like she was split into three parts. The song in her head could have been an unreleased Puscifer track, while off to the side—there was no other way to describe it—the battle scenes from 300 seemed to be playing in silhouette. And in front of her was this world.
Then, of course, there was Nick, always Nick, who seemed to be whispering to her. She didn’t even think about how she looked to the other kids at school—Marie tried to talk with her a couple of times, but Sparkle blew her off without even knowing it—until Cristos blocked her way in the hall after chem class on Tuesday and got in her face. She could barely hear him over the music, sensing rather than understanding what he saying.
“Hey Sparkle, wassup?”
“Hey, Cristos.” She tried to walk around him, but he wasn’t having it. The Native kids always kept to themselves, unless they played sports or something. Sparkle hadn’t said two words to any of them in her entire three years of high school, and she saw no reason to break the record in her senior year. She didn’t like Cristos blocking her way; it was like she didn’t have enough brains to handle it. But he wouldn’t give way.
“Listen to me … you been swallowin’ music, haven’t you?”
“It’s none of your fuckin’ business!” She tried to pull away, but he quickly nudged her into a corner and began speaking low and quickly. The music abruptly faded away, though it was still there. She wanted it back, loud and now. Cristos was somehow interfering with the transmission.
“Listen, it’s bad shit.” He looked around, to see if anyone was listening. “I’ve got a cousin, Miguel, he worked at the Dancing Eagle out in Casa Blanca, at the restaurant?”
Sparkle didn’t say anything to him, not even a nod, so he kept talking. “He kept talking to his boss about some woman he met who was playing the slots, some Anglo who looked like she stepped out of his dreams. She was with some rock band or something, looking for a place to have a concert, and she had these fucking pills she gave him so that he could hear the band’s music. It’s some band no one ever heard of, Stardust and Spacedreams, or something—”
“That’s enough—”
“—and after just a day or two he’s bouncing around, dancing, not paying any attention to anything but this music he’s hearing in his head. So he starts wandering off into the desert, looking for this bitch, this Nikki—”
Sparkle grabbed him. “Wait a minute. Who?”
“Nikki. Miguel kept talking about this woman named Nikki. And then he just wandered off, looking for the band, and they haven’t seen him for two weeks and now you’re acting—”
“Shut up!” Sparkle pushed him away, crying, and ran up the hall and out the door. She had walked halfway home before she realized it.
The music had come back, full volume and then some, as soon as she had cleared the school doors, and now there was just the road, the music, and the video playing behind her eyes. She found that with some practice she could control the volume of the music just by thinking about it, almost like the sensor-touch volume on the Bose MP3 player she and Marie had seen at Target a couple of weeks before. She wondered how loud she could make it, and kept pumping it up, not stopping even when the blood started to drip out of her left ear. By the time she had walked to the gravel road that led to the double-wide, her T-shirt, the one that said “Your Mother Is a Bitch,” was ruined. It made it look even better. She stuck some toilet tissue in her ear to dam up the blood and went to bed.
When Sparkle woke up hours later, it was dark outside, just a faint hint of daylight peeking out from the east. She went into the bathroom and got a glass of water and swallowed all of the remaining capsules at once. The music stopped suddenly, and for just a second she felt as if she could unzip her skin and crawl out of it. She didn’t know what to do about it, not at first.
Then she walked over to the window and looked out across the city toward the horizon, where the Sandia Mountains rose from the desert and met the sky. She knew it was impossible, but she thought she could see Nick out there, standing at the base of the range, his arms crossed against his chest and smiling at her as if he was waiting for her. An electrical storm was starting up off to the west; she thought it might get to Albuquerque in an hour or two. Maybe, she thought, I can get to the desert before then.
She slipped back into her room and put on a dirty pair of jeans and a Coke Dares shirt. She felt small and helpless, but there was a comfort to it as well; she was so insignificant that the universe would never notice her, never stoop so low as to hurt her. And, she thought, who would hurt me, with Nick to protect me?
She opened her bedroom door quietly and slid out and down the hall, trying to be quiet, though her mom was snoring so loudly that Sparkle could probably have stomped out and she never would have known. Still, Sparkle padded quietly down the hallway, past her mother’s room—peeking in, she saw no sign of the Rodster—and walked into and through the living room.
It never failed to surprise her how quiet everything was at this time of night, just before dawn. And it was even more so now that the music had stopped. Or maybe it hadn’t. Sparkle seemed to hear some sort of low “thrum” interspersed between the rush of blood into her ears, and wondered if this was what snakes felt, the pulses that attracted them toward the highway where they would get run over.
At least, she thought, my ear has stopped bleeding. She felt a slick wetness between her legs, however, just as she reached the front door. Shit, she thought, pretty soon there’ll be no point to leaving. She hurried to the bathroom for a quick cleanup and a tampon insertion, and after changing her underwear she slipped quietly out the front door.
The sky was jet-black with a swirl of stars through it, kind of like the cake mix Marie’s mother had used for birthdays, Funfetti or something, where you mixed colored sprinkles in with the chocolate cake mix. Sparkle thought for a moment about Marie, who seemed more like someone out of dream than a friend she had shared things with, and then the moon went behind the cloud bank that was the source of the electrical storm that was approaching. Sparkle could still see the desert gleaming across the road, a solid black with scraggly patches of sagebrush.
She was deep into the desert within a few minutes, far enough from the highway to feel enveloped in the dark and solitude. She maneuvered around the slightly elevated mounds that bespoke of ant or spider nests and began walking toward the mountains.
What would happen, she thought, if I just kept walking and never came back? She imagined that if she did that, she would eventually die out here. Not a bad way to go, she thought. A sophomore girl at school last year had gotten into her mother’s tranks and deliberately overdosed; Sparkle also remembered a senior boy who had hung himself in the closet a couple of years ago. There were rumors, though, that the hanging had been an accident, that he had slipped while whacking off. A couple of the football players said his body had been found with gay porn, but in the end, it didn’t make any difference. Dead was dead. There was an appeal, though, to dying under the sky, falling asleep and never waking up, the last thing you felt being the sun and the heat.
Sparkle kept walking toward the mountain range off to the north. In the distance she could see Indian School Road winding off toward it, vanishing behind the mountains, which interrupted the horizon. She thought she saw a twin smudge of headlights back on Interstate 40, someone leaving this place. Land of Enchantment, my ass, she thought. She didn’t feel like going to school today.
Maybe, she thought, I’ll just stay out here until around ten o’c
lock, then start walking back home. Her mom would be at work by then. It was kind of a sweet deal. Her mom got up around 8:00 and left for work a little after 8:30, and would figure that Sparkle had gotten up and left for school. School wouldn’t call the house and report her missing until around 9:15 or so. She could erase the message from voice mail and then write a note or something. She’d figure it out later, like she always did. If I figure it out at all.
The music suddenly started up in her head again at the same time Sparkle saw Nick, smiling, standing on a pile of rocks practically next to her as if he had been waiting for her. It wouldn’t be cool to run to him, but she did smile back at him.
“I missed you,” she said—so uncool, but so true—and hugged him against herself.
He seemed to melt into her and asked her as if from a long way away, “You took all of the capsules, didn’t you?”
He wasn’t mad about it, not at all, his voice rumbling gently through his chest and into her ear. He was wearing cargo pants and a tan T-shirt that said “Starlets & Spaceboys—Millennium Tour” across it, the lettering curved over a tour bus whose front grille resembled a gaping, leering mouth.
Sparkle nodded yes into Nick’s chest, and he laughed, saying, “It’s okay, everybody does.”
A part of her brain, the little corner that was still, somehow, working properly, wondered at that, even got briefly angry over it—like this is something he does all the time, she thought—but the emotion was quickly shouted down by a hundred different voices, and she just pulled him tighter to her.
“C’mon,” Nick said, still sounding happy. “It’s time to meet the band!” He gently disengaged from Sparkle and, turning her toward the Sandias, took her by the hand and began walking with her.
The bus seemed to materialize out of the rock at the base of the mountains. One minute there was thin air; the next a sleek black bus was moving toward them. There was a flash of lightning off to their left, and a few seconds later she heard a clap of thunder that coincided with the roar of the bus engine. The bus came right at them, the blinding shine of the headlights in her face looking like a set of glaring yellow eyes, the grille looking just like it did on Nick’s shirt.
