by Z. Rider
He closed his eyes, letting the noise from outside the bathroom—voices, feet, traffic—settle and slip away. The buzzing at the base of his skull was so soft he had to settle into himself to hear it. Staying inside himself, he rested his back against the wall. He wished the bus were moving so he could have that rocking feel, that vibration under his boots.
He stayed there until Carey gave a quick knock and a “Dan? Almost time.”
He was ready. He took a leak, then went out and played. All the tension and frustration and the sound of his own thoughts plowed down his arms, through his fingers, and out into the noise he was making. He attacked the bass with his eyes closed, with a pick pinched between his fingers, with his lips bumping the mic as he sang words without having to think them first.
After the show, they talked with fans behind the venue, stood for pictures. He dropped an arm around a girl’s shoulders, and the bees swarmed and buzzed. His arm tightened. He dragged it off her—it felt filled with lead until contact was broken and the bees died back a little.
“You all right?” Stick asked, passing by with a crate of t-shirts.
Dan gave a short nod. The next photo, he just stood near the guy. Their shoulders bumped. He shook his head to clear the bees when the guy moved away. It was dark behind the club, just a security light and a standard bulb at the back entrance. A flash went off in his face, and he thought he saw grains in it. He needed something solid to grab on to—solid and inanimate. He shoved his hands in his jacket pockets and blinked through another flash.
“Sorry to break it up,” Carey said, “but we’ve got a schedule.”
Josh had a couple bottles of water in his hands. He flipped one toward Dan. Dan caught it against his chest. The fans drew back a little, disappointed but understanding, and he thanked them as he backed toward the bus, turning around to make real headway toward it while Carey said, “You too,” as he grabbed Ray in the middle of a laugh, dragging him away from a small crowd.
As the bus started away from the sidewalk, Josh grabbed a can of beer from the fridge. Jamie was sober. Everyone seemed to be feeling decent. They pulled through a twenty-four-hour Taco Bell for something to eat.
“You feeling okay?” Stick asked again from the couch in the front lounge.
“I’m gonna go lie down.” In the bunk area, he shucked everything but his shorts and crawled into bed with a Michael Connelly novel he’d gotten halfway through last month and forgotten about until it resurfaced in his bag earlier today. He half expected the others to turn in early too, but it sounded pretty lively out there. Maybe a card game going on. The laughter sounded good; it was enough just to hear everyone getting along—no snarking, no short fuses. He laid the book on his chest. After a minute, he turned off the reading light.
He was still awake when people dragged themselves to their bunks. It sounded like Moss had been the big winner, but that was about usual.
With the bunk area full, the bees vibrated inside him. He pressed his hands over his eyes.
He was still awake when the only noise was the road passing under the bus’s tires.
He was still awake—and pacing the front lounge with a bottle of orange juice—when sunlight made its way through the cracks between the blinds.
Standing in front of the window in only his shorts, he watched flat acres of land spool by like a film reel.
CHAPTER FIVE
By the time the others stirred, he was back in his bunk, his head under the pillow. He’d swallowed three ibuprofens. The headache thrummed under the surface of his skull—more tension than anything. But he was tired of it, not to mention just plain tired. Tired and wired. His brain wouldn’t shut up and let him drift off.
The bus slowed. In a few minutes they’d be gassing up, and Ray would be sucking down smokes, a sight so familiar by now it was almost iconic. Freshman year in high school, Dan had been in the marching band and Ray on the football team—smoking even then. Dan didn’t bother with marching band sophomore year, and Ray wasn’t any good at football, but during that first autumn of high school, when they’d both spent time on the field, Ray had singled him out somehow, calling him names with the kind of lazy smile that made you not take it too hard. They jabbed each other through the fall semester, passing in the hallways, the cafeteria, out on the field.
He had no idea why. Even Ray shrugged if you asked him about it: “You looked like you knew what you were doing.” On the field, he’d meant, in the marching band. How it looked like he knew what he was doing with a fucking tuba, Dan had no idea.
“And you had that Stooges shirt,” Ray would add.
One day, in line at the cafeteria, Ray’d said, “If you want to hear some real music instead of that marching band shit…”
Real music turned out to be Ray and a pockmarked kid named Steve, one on guitar and vocals, one on drums, making nothing but noise. Painful, set-your-teeth-on-edge noise. Loud noise. The noise drew Dan, though, and there was something else there too, if you ignored Steve’s dropping the beat to push his glasses up and Ray’s inability to decide whether he’d rather be Jimi Hendrix or Greg Ginn. There was something about what Ray was trying to do when he wasn’t trying to be someone else, and it clicked with Dan.
Around the same time, Dan happened to see an old Global bass at a flea market. Cost him twenty bucks. Getting an amp to go with it cleaned out the cash in his sock drawer.
Bass turned out to be a lot more fun than tuba.
They went at it every day—after school, weekends, school holidays. Steve got tired of their relentless practices, the hours of jamming and writing—especially the writing, Dan and Ray with their heads together, talking in half-sentences they didn’t need to finish, and Steve bored, flipping drumsticks. He’d been uncomfortable with original music, stuff he couldn’t pop into a CD player and mimic. After a while, he’d begun complaining about being the third wheel.
Dan wondered if Jamie was also a third wheel. If he was, he had been—for like a decade now.
Unlike Steve, Jamie was usually happy to let them do their thing. Not to take anything away from him; he could play his ass off, and he had no problem working with all-new songs. It was just…it was the way they worked, he and Ray holed up for days or weeks, a month or two even, with or without Jamie over in the corner, building tiny cities out of stubbed-out cigarette butts. Then they’d bring Jamie in on it. Jamie’d put his touches on what they told him they wanted, and they’d be ready to go.
It worked really fucking well, actually…when he wasn’t wanting to wrap his hands around Jamie’s neck and shake his eyeballs out of their sockets.
But if the band could get by without a drummer, he’d be all for it. After all these years, he couldn’t conceive of finding a third member for the band who gelled the way he and Ray did. If they thought of themselves as brothers, Jamie was the one who’d come along too late to be coming at things from the same point of view Ray and Dan had.
† † †
When Dan finally wandered out of his bunk, rain was pelting the bus’s roof, fast and hard. What light came through the windows was bleak and dismal. The weather subdued the whole crew: Stick and Josh stared slack-jawed at the TV, with Jamie between them snoring softly, his head tipped back. Carey hunched over the table, going through papers and receipts, checking his calendar, answering emails. Moss read; Greg played a game on his Nintendo 3DS.
Scrubbing the back of his hair with his hand, yawning, Dan headed to the back lounge.
Ray had his head hung back, his eyes closed, his hands laid one over the other on his stomach. He cracked open an eye as Dan pushed the door shut. “It lives.”
Dan dropped onto the couch cross-legged, as far from Ray as possible. “Just fucking barely.” He propped his elbows on his knees and massaged his temples.
“Another headache?”
“Yeah,” Dan said. “You got anything stronger than ibuprofen?”
“I like Excedrin. Mostly for the caffeine hit. Want some?”
“Yeah, I’ll try that.”
As Ray got to his feet, Dan said, “You want to play for a while?”
“Are you up to it?”
“It beats sitting here doing fucking nothing.”
During the few minutes it took for Ray to come back, Dan stared at the thin carpet, the bits of grit in it. He rubbed circles into his skull, and straightened when Ray walked in with a bottle of water and a couple pills.
He held the pills over Dan’s palm. Dan thought they were going to drop right in, but Ray’s hand dipped. Skin touched skin. An electric zap shot up Dan’s neck. He clutched the pills, jerking his hand away.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Ray asked.
“Yeah.” He popped them in his mouth—“Get my guitar”—and chased them with a swig of water as Ray opened the cabinet over the couch.
Dan squeezed his eyes shut, rubbing one with the heel of the hand that still held the bottle cap. Trying to get the slight graininess in his vision to go away. When Ray stood in front of him, holding out the guitar, he looked a little blurry from the eye rubbing. Dan pulled the acoustic into his lap with one hand and took another long pull off the bottle.
CHAPTER SIX
Pacing the bunk area, Dan rubbed his hands to distract himself from the queasiness rising in him.
Something is wrong with me.
Step, step, turn.
Something is seriously fucking wrong. By the end of jamming with Ray, he’d had to get out of there, shut himself in the bathroom, and pull at his hair to get a hold on the bees.
He was losing it.
Step, step turn. The curtains along the empty bunks brushed his arms.
Stick leaned in the doorway from the front lounge, bracing his hands on either side of the frame. “Hey, you all right?”
“Yeah. Edgy. I’ll be fine. Just one of those nights when I can’t wait for the show to start.” Step, turn.
“Burn off some of that agitation, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Won’t be too much longer. Plasticine Stars’ll be finishing up their set soon.”
“Thanks.”
Stick headed back through the lounge toward the exit, Dan turned and pushed his hands against his face. Fuuuuuck.
When they finally got on stage, Dan snapped two strings in the middle of a breakdown. He kept going, his fingers racing to keep up with fretting the whole thing on the bass’s remaining strings. Anything to keep his mind off the buzz at the back of his neck, like a black cloud growing expectant with electricity. He stayed away from the edge of the stage, out of reach of grasping hands. Their fans were used to having the chance to get a hand around his ankle, touch his guitar. But he was too off-kilter as it was, too overwhelmed. Too drowning in whatever the fuck was wrong with his head.
He changed basses between songs, grabbing the new one from Moss without letting Moss come in contact with him.
He fielded a glance from Ray, nothing from Jamie, who kept up but had a vacant look on his face. Vacant enough that Ray strolled over to the drum kit between songs, standing there to get his attention, making eye contact, making sure Jamie was aware he was still on stage, in the middle of a show. It worked, babysitting him. All the songs kicked off the way they were supposed to. But man, what a pain in the ass.
During an intro where the bass line didn’t come in for the first forty-two seconds, Dan crouched on one knee, head bowed over his pedals, eyes closed. Teeth gritted. The legs of a thousand bees crawled over each other at the base of his skull. When it was time for him to come in, he shot to his feet, turning his back to the audience. He attacked the strings with everything he had.
Afterward, everyone was subdued. The weather hadn’t improved since morning, and they were all one more night road-worn than they had been. Jamie was irritable, his mood a spiral of frustration: he first couldn’t find his jacket, then couldn’t find the drink he’d set down. He went off on Josh, accusing him of throwing it away—when it was sitting right where he’d left it. He broke a cigarette trying to get it out of the pack. Someone handed him an intact one, heading off a fit.
Brittle. Everyone seemed brittle tonight.
Dan hung at the edges, his hands in his jacket pockets. Wanting to head out to the bus but not wanting to feel guilt twist like a hook in his stomach as he walked by fans with barely a nod.
“Hey.” An unlit cigarette bobbed between Ray’s teeth. “What’s going on with you?”
He clenched his fists in his pockets. “Coming down with something, I guess. Figures, right? At the end of the tour. I get to go home sick.”
Ray reached like he was going to check Dan for a fever.
Dan ducked out of the way. “I’ll be okay.”
“Drink some water. Get some sleep.”
“Do me a favor?” Dan asked.
“Sure.”
Dan nodded toward the club’s back door. “Grab Jamie so we can get out of here, and distract whoever’s out there so I can get on the bus.”
Ray’s posture relaxed: something he could do to help. Sometimes that was all he needed. “Sure. No problem.”
“Thanks.”
“I’ll do you one better, even,” Ray said. “Hold on.” He came back with Carey in tow. “Me and Jamie’ll head out first to give them someone to talk to. You guys come out after, deep in conversation. Just walk straight to the bus, talking.”
“What are you coming down with?” Carey asked.
“I don’t know. The flu. Maybe nothing. I just feel like shit tonight.”
“All right. Come on.” He started to reach for Dan’s arm, and Dan pulled ahead, saying, “Yeah, let’s go.”
He kept his head down. Carey rambled about tomorrow’s timetable: “We should be pulling in at ten. We’ve got a day room, you guys can get showers. Load-in’s at…” And up the bus steps they went.
Carey stopped at the top, one hand on the back of the driver’s seat. “All set?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Dan said. “Thanks.”
“Get some sleep.”
“Yeah.”
Actually, he was hungry. He dug a Hot Pocket out of the stash in the bus’s tiny freezer. BBQ beef. By the time the microwave dinged, the smell had soured his stomach. He forced a bite down, the pastry dry on the outside, sickeningly sweet on the in. It stuck in his throat, and he folded the rest in a paper towel and threw it away.
It was the perfect kind of night for getting blind drunk. A few years ago, he’d have been well on his way. Instead he dragged himself to his bunk—better to get in before the others boarded. The bees were not his friends tonight.
He pushed his buds in his ears and pulled up music on his phone. That too-real/unreal feeling was back, the plastic casing on the earbuds almost too smooth in his ears. He cranked up Bass Drum of Death to block out everything beyond his bunk. To block out the fucking bees. He buried himself in the noise of John Barrett’s guitar while the bus pulled out of the lot.
In the silence after the last note of “(You’ll Never Be) So Wrong” dipped out, Dan studied the darkness. He was genuinely worried—afraid he was going to snap. Afraid, too, that if he didn’t do something (what?) he was going to snap soon. (But what?)
Two more. He had to make it through two more shows—just hang on for two days and one last drive.
The road whistled beneath them, on and on.
He slipped out of his bunk. His feet hitting the floor jarred the pain in his skull. He grabbed hold of the bunk to steady himself. A dim light flickered from the front lounge—whoever was still up had a movie going. The door to the back lounge was shut. After using the bathroom, he came back through the bunk area and slid the door open.
The lights were on, music from the TV almost lost in the rush of wind coming in through the cracked-open window. Wind tousled Jamie’s hair as he passed the cigarette they were sharing toward Ray.
“Hey.” Ray took a drag, squinting at Dan. “I thought you’d crashed. Feeling any better?” He blew the stream of smoke out the side of his mout
h, toward the window.
Dan’s head, heavy as concrete, felt like someone was trying to hammer it open. The buzzing didn’t take concentration to hear anymore. It was as loud as the rush of road from the window.
Ray took a last drag before flicking the cigarette out.
Jamie got up with a stretch. “I’m hitting it.”
“’Night.” Ray pulled the window shut. The TV got louder, not having to compete with the wind. The lounge smelled like cigarettes.
The bees hovered at the base of his skull, making his teeth vibrate. He flattened his shoulders against the wall as Jamie pushed by. His head turned, like it was being pulled by a wire, his eyes pegged on Jamie as he slipped through the doorway. He didn’t know what it meant exactly. He had something building in him, something restless. He dug his fingers against the paneling behind him.
“You really don’t look good.” Ray’s voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well.
Dan dragged his head forward. His eye twitched. The restlessness crowded his chest, making it hard to breathe. His vision started to disintegrate.
Ray moved his pack of cigarettes from his thigh to the couch to get up.
It was like watching him through a TV with bad reception. Dan’s heart thudded, hard enough that he put a hand over his chest. He swallowed, trying to calm down. He didn’t know what was happening, only that he felt like he was going to explode out of his own skin.
