Ballroom Blitz: a Tor.com Original

by Veronica Schanoes

  Ballroom Blitz

  By

  Veronica Schanoes

  illustration by Anna and Elena Balbusso

  “Ballroom Blitz” copyright © 2015 by Veronica Schanoes

  Art copyright © 2015 by Anna and Elena Balbusso

  Publication Date: Wed Apr 01 2015 09:00am

  A Tor Original

  Introduction

  “Ballroom Blitz” by Veronica Schanoes is a contemporary fairy tale about a young man, who with his eleven brothers, have been cursed to remain in a rock club for their bad behavior. Their only shot at freedom might be the twelve sisters who one day enter the club.

  This novelette was acquired and edited for Tor.com by consulting editor Ellen Datlow.

  Well I’ve seen so many

  And I’ve known so many

  Ashtray sunshines, make you swallow up your mind . . .

  I got the days, you got the nights

  We could turn the tide, it’s gonna be alright

  And I was spinning, dancing around with women,

  Talking loud into the crowd,

  I can’t remember what happened next then . . .

  I got the days, you got the days, we got the days,

  It’s gonna be alright.

  —“We Got the Days,” The So So Glos

  I remember when the very air pulsed with music, raucous shouts and double-time beats mixing with the eerie wailing of tortured guitars. We were all of us young and wild; my brothers and I wore tight black jeans and ripped T-shirts and stood around looking tough and combing our hair till it was slicked back just right to show off our sideburns. The girls wore short skirts and strong boots, ripped fishnet stockings ending inches below their hemlines. We all wore boots, come to that, engineering boots or motorcycle boots or combat boots or Doc Martens, as though we had to be ready for a forced march. And we may have been under a curse, but I remember us always laughing. The air was gray with smoke and our heads spun—not a full glass but we emptied it, not a pill but we popped it, not a leaf but we smoked it, and we laughed even when we were on our knees. The air was drenched with beer and whiskey, and we danced those boots so thin we could feel the floor through our socks.

  We were young, I said, but of course my brothers and I couldn’t age, could we? We were bound, and that kept the twelve of us from growing any older no matter how much time passed. We couldn’t set foot outside the club, but inside we couldn’t grow old, couldn’t die. Bands appeared and disappeared, DJs spun in and out, and we were always there, game for anything, hopped up on speed and lack of sleep, dancing our boots thin and shouting our voices hoarse. We’d been there for years before we found the girls, or before the girls found us.

  I remember the rest of it, too, waking up wanting to die, the hacking coughs, the bleak despair driving me—driving us—to drown ourselves in the neon darkness, the impossible wish to see sunshine just once more, the imprisonment. But when I look back, everything glows with false freedom, and I remember us always laughing.

  The music never stopped, even when your head was screaming, when the beats that had blasted you off your feet drilled behind your eyes, and it felt like your head would break open from the pain. The air never cleared, and the smoke that had sustained us and cushioned us like amniotic fluid turned harsh—bitter and sticky like tar with sharp teeth, extending tendrils to wrap around our limbs and keep us moving but stop us escaping. And the dancing which had transported us became a cage of knives, spitting electrodes forcing us to move, even when our very bones were splintering in agony.

  Each morning I woke up shaking, my vision blurred and doubled. I was begging Cynthia for a drink before my eyes were even fully open, but she just stood behind the bar with her arms folded, black hair tightly braided back, and shook her head.

  Even picking my head up off the bar made my guts flip over. I’d forgotten what it felt like to sleep in a bed, to wake up without pain and nausea. Staggering a little, I would wake up my brothers.

  We all woke up like that: black eyes, broken jaws, teeth missing, sick, spitting blood. I woke up shattered and begging like the rest, but I was oldest, the one in charge, the one who looks after his brothers, cleans them up, gets them out of trouble, gets them in trouble. And it was my fault. My hands shook, my whole body trembled, and I could feel blood trickling out my ears, my ribs cracking and shattering every time I tried to draw a breath.

  We felt like that every morning, and we’d heal by nightfall.

  So I’d go to wake up my brothers, and for me that was the worst of it. My second brother, who’s always been an asshole, woke up spitting with rage, calling me names and blaming me for our troubles, which was fair enough, I suppose, and my eleventh brother, my youngest brother, just wept silently at every waking, tears running down his face like rain against a window. At least one of us would wake up choking on vomit. Sometimes it was me.

  We had to wash the place down, and the bar was like us; no matter how well we’d scrubbed the toilets, the bar, the floor, the basement, by the next morning they’d be covered in puke and grime and shit again. And with joints cracking, doubled over and hunched up like old men, we had to shine it up again. We had to take care of that hellhole like it was our baby, and afterward, if we’d done it well enough, Cynthia would order us some food from the diner down the street. Never enough, though. I remember always being hungry. Also dirty. There was a small sink in the men’s room where I rinsed out my shirt every so often and tried to splash myself clean, but there wasn’t much in the way of soap, and I lived in a cocoon of sweat and bile and dried blood.

  I had to make sure my youngest brother didn’t get ahold of my pocketknife. He’d cut himself if he did—maybe he still does, I don’t know anymore—and the cuts wouldn’t heal by evening. He’s got scars up and down his arms and legs. One of the cuts got infected once and he ran a fever like I’d never seen before. I pleaded with Cynthia to bring in a doctor, promised her I’d do anything, but as she pointed out, I had nothing to bargain with. Eventually she tossed me some antibiotics, but the fever singed his brain. He hasn’t been the same since, and none of this is his fault. He just fell in with the wrong crowd. Me.

  Even when he didn’t have my knife, I had to keep an eye on him. Sometimes he swiped the knife Cynthia used to cut up lemons and limes.

  My sixth brother killed himself once.

  I found him hanging from the light fixture in the men’s room by his belt, and he was stone dead. I remember how heavy his body was when I brought it down, how mottled his face was, his tongue lolling obscenely out of his mouth. And I remember him waking up the next morning, whimpering like a puppy, with purple bruises around his throat. He’s held his neck funny ever since.

  My second brother, that asshole, he just pummels the wall when it gets to be too much for him. It fucks up his knuckles, leaves blood smears on the walls that we have to scrub off again, but I doubt he’s thinking about that when he does it. I think he likes the pain it brings.

  And me? I drink. We had plenty of money when we first got here, and I drank it away. Not by myself, of course. We ran out a long time ago, so I do my drinking at night. At night we don’t pay, I don’t know why, except I think Cynthia’s giving us the chance to do the night over, to do something right. I see myself in the mirror and I can tell the alcohol is wrecking me, but that’s better than the alternative. I feel the liquor corroding my body from the inside out, breaking me down into dust and poison. Or maybe just releasing the poison that had been there all along.

  My hands still shake, if I don’t concentrate on keeping them still.

  Those were the days of living death. But the nights were something else entirely. In the years before
the girls showed up, at night we felt okay again and okay was so much better than we’d felt during the day that we went wild. But by the time the girls got there, there was damn little of that left. By the time the girls got there, we were spending the nights slumped at the bar, bleak hopelessness etched into our faces.

  The girls were obviously slumming, but then, so were we, or we had been at first, pretty boys down from the big house to mix it up with the squatters. Now we have the broken noses and rotten teeth of real diehards, but we hadn’t started out like that. I carried a switchblade, but I never pulled it. Anyway, the girls were clearly coming from Daddy’s mansion to rock out with the real punks. Twelve of them with ratted hair and liquid black eyeliner making cat eyes an inch long, black leather bustiers and Doc Martens. They might have been meant for us, and I swear, I could see our salvation in their eyes. We all could, I think.

  But we played it cool, leaning up against the bar and downing beer and eyeing the girls when they weren’t looking, while they were still blinking in the dark, trying to get their bearings among the pounding beats and flaring matches.

  The oldest made her way to the bar, right where I was waiting for her. Maybe she’d seen me eying her after all. I sauntered over a few steps

  “Buy you a drink?” I asked.

  No, that’s not right. The music was shaking the floor, glasses were rattling behind the bar, and I leaned over to her and half-shouted, half-mouthed, “Buy you a drink?” close enough to her ear that she could feel my breath on her face—my breath, which smelled of smoke and beer and late nights and rotten hope and self-destruction.

  She cut her eyes at me, and her eyelids glittered with caked-on silver eyeshadow. I wanted to bend her over backward in a movie kiss right then and there, but I kept my hands to myself, took a drag off my cigarette instead while sonic fireworks exploded around us. I could see my brothers gravitating toward the other girls.

  Then she smiled, shouted, “Why not?” and mouthed, “cider.”

  I put my arm around her waist and she let me. I got her a cider and gave her a cigarette, and lit it for her. She coughed and pretended it wasn’t her first. I remembered my first, how I hadn’t coughed at all, but had sucked the coarse, harsh smoke straight down into my heart, where it wrapped around that beating machine like a protective cocoon. The smoke’s still there, but it’s been getting thinner, no matter how much I force down my throat.

  She stood with her hip pressed up against my leg. “What do you want?” she shouted in my ear.

  “I want to dance with you,” I shouted back. “Because . . .” I didn’t know how to finish that sentence, so I just let it hang in the air like an afterimage.

  She drained her glass and slammed it down on the bar, but the music was so loud that I couldn’t hear it hit. Her face lit up, flushed with drink and heat. “Let’s go, then!” She grabbed my hand and together we pushed and shoved our way to the middle of the seething mass of people—my brothers, her sisters—and we became the center of the storm and the lightning struck and we danced. We danced the band dry and the DJ sore, and still we moved like machine-gun fire, like the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and I knew that this was it, that she and her sisters were the ones.

  We danced the sun up, not that we could see the sun through the tattered walls. No, we were lit by neon and dim incandescence and the flares of cardboard matches, but the space emptied out and the music faded until finally we could hear each other speak, and there were holes worn through the soles of our boots.

  “Where d’you live?” she asked me, as we leaned against the bar sharing a bottle of whiskey.

  I gestured around the room a little unsteadily. My socks were damp with sweat and with something nasty on the floor that had seeped in through the holes in the soles of my boots. “Here,” I said. “We live here.”

  “You got nowhere you could take me?”

  “Honey,” I said, “I can’t leave.”

  She took a pull off the bottle. “Why not?”

  I ground out my cigarette and told her.

  My brothers and me, back when we were really young, not trapped in youth, but genuinely new, we heard the beats from our black disks and they pulled each of us by the balls. We knew we had to come here, that here was where our life should be, in the dark and in the noise. So we got the gear first—went down to Trash and Vaudeville with ready cash and remade ourselves.

  We swaggered in here like young Turks, chains clinking against our legs, our hair combed just right, and we tore up the dance floor, and we knocked back shots of tequila, and we hassled the girls. We were real assholes, spoiling for a fight.

  It was me who got one.

  Not even a fight. You couldn’t call it a fight. He was just a kid, barely older than my tenth brother, barely shaving. He was just a fucked-up kid. But I was always angry, and when this junkie barreled into me on his way to the men’s room and puked on my boots . . . part of it was wanting to impress Cynthia with how hardcore I was. I didn’t know about her then, didn’t know what kind of power she had, just that she was the bartender, and she was cute—long black hair pulled back in a French braid and bright red lipstick. Knotwork tattoos. But then a lot of it was pure rage. I was always seething, always about to boil over. I don’t know why. Testosterone, maybe. Or maybe just being cramped inside my skin, needing to get out, needing release.

  It doesn’t matter why, I guess, but I beat the shit out of that kid. He didn’t . . . look okay afterward.

  Cynthia came out from behind the bar with the Louisville Slugger she keeps back there, but I didn’t even feel it hit me, I was so hopped up on adrenaline. It wasn’t until my brothers pulled me off the kid that I stopped and saw what I had done to him. Sometimes I wonder if he survived the night.

  Sometimes I wonder if I did.

  Cynthia gave twenty bucks to the kid’s friends and told them to get him to the nearest hospital—NYU, I guess. Then she turned and looked at me.

  “You,” she said. “Out. Don’t come back.”

  But the fire was still burning through my blood and the shame was starting to seep in through the cracks in my rage, so I stonewalled. “Fuck, no,” I said. “That kid owes me new boots.”

  “That kid,” she said, “owes you nothing. Get out. You’re eighty-sixed.”

  I sized her up. Cynthia’s not a tall woman. I looked around and didn’t see a bouncer. “No. I’m not done drinking.”

  “This is my bar,” she said, “and you’re done.”

  “I’m not leaving.”

  “You’re not?”

  “No,” I spat. “And neither are my brothers. We’ll fucking sit and drink and dance until we’re ready to go home. If you don’t like it, call the fucking cops.”

  “No cops in my bar, boys,” Cynthia said, kind of husky, and back then I thought it was capitulation, but now I think it was a warning. She looked around at my brothers. “He speak for all of you? Any of you leaving?”

  My brothers stood tight next to me. I . . . I’m still a little proud of that, still a little grateful. They must’ve heard the menace in her voice, but not one of them budged. Not even my second brother.

  Cynthia’s gaze lingered on my youngest brother. He’s only fourteen, and he looks it. “You sure?” she said, and she spoke kindly, for her. “You sure you want to stay with him?”

  My youngest brother looked at the door, looked at me, and didn’t say anything—but he didn’t move, either.

  Cynthia nodded. She went back behind the bar and turned the music back on and I thought I’d won. And she acted like nothing was wrong, like I hadn’t beat a kid maybe to death in front of her, like I hadn’t flung her authority back in her face. She set out rounds for us and even smiled so sweetly at me that I thought I had a shot with her.

  When I woke up that first morning and saw her behind the bar setting up for the night, I just thought I’d passed out and she’d left me there. I felt beat to shit, but I’d woken up feeling that way before, and not remembering why. Then
I tried to leave.

  As soon as I tried to set foot outside the door I curled up in agony. The air felt like knife blades skinning me alive, the rising sun seemed to pour molten metal down on my skin, and the ground, ah, the ground seemed to swarm up around me like a mountain of stinging beetles. Every inch of my body blistered and burned.

  I crawled back into the bar on my hands and knees, gulping the stinking air. I couldn’t feel anything but pain and rage.

  I woke up my brothers, and when my second brother realized what had happened to us, he actually went for Cynthia and she broke his collarbone with the Louisville Slugger. He fell down and she stood over him—she seemed to tower over all of us.

  “What did you do to us? What are you?” I asked her hoarsely.

  “I’m the bartender,” she said. “And don’t you ever fuck with me. Not in my bar.”

  Cynthia’s always here, and I don’t think she sleeps.

  So every morning, I told this girl, we wake up in the same beaten shape I put that kid in, and every day we do everything Cynthia tells us and we can’t set foot outside the bar. But it could end, I told her, Cynthia promised, if there are girls, if there’s dancing, 101 nights straight, we could leave. Maybe even go home again. If we still have a home. Maybe we could find a home.

  All the time I told her our story, she drank whiskey and nodded in the right places.

  “Home’s overrated,” she said.

  I thought about asking why, but didn’t. “Look,” I said. “I’m not like that anymore. I don’t do that. I just . . . I don’t. I mean, if somebody gives you trouble, I’ll lay him out. But I don’t . . . I don’t let the rage take over anymore.”

  She nodded. “How long has it been?”

  I shrugged. “Dunno. Years. Things don’t change here. People come and go. We don’t age, but the circles under my eyes get darker.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “First thing I noticed about you. Under your eyes, the skin looks like charcoal.”