Murder of Angels

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Alex nods his head, scratches himself a moment, then turns around and disappears into the darkness.

  “And turn on a light,” she shouts after him, “before you trip over something and break your neck.”

  A few seconds later, she hears him pulling the drapes open, and he curses as the bright midday sun floods the room. Daria looks back at the mirror, at her pale face and matted, bleach-stripped hair. Her face that looks like it’s aged ten years in the last five, and she wishes she could go back to bed, back to Alex, and forget about the signing and the show and everything else.

  She stands up and turns on the tap, icy water gushing into the marble sink, and sets her cigarette down on the edge of the counter. Daria splashes her face and the back of her neck, gasping as the cold stings her skin, dragging her the rest of the way awake. She bends over and dunks her head into the basin, sloshing water out onto the floor. The gurgle from the tap is so loud that she can’t hear anything else, and she holds her breath and keeps her head in the sink as long as she can stand it.

  The white hotel towel smells too clean, like detergent and fabric softener, but it feels good against her face, against her scalp, and when she’s done, most of her hair is standing straight up.

  “They have muffins,” Alex shouts. “You want blueberry or bran?”

  “Blueberry,” she shouts back, reaching for her cigarette. It’s a little damp, but she hardly notices, the nicotine just about her best friend in the world right now.

  “They say they’re out of blueberry,” Alex yells.

  Daria frowns and drops the wet towel on the tile at her feet. “You just asked me which I wanted.”

  “I didn’t know they were out. He just fuckin’ told me.”

  “I fucking hate bran muffins. Everyone hates bran muffins.”

  And she hears him ordering her toast.

  “You want blueberry or strawberry jam?” he shouts.

  “Surprise me,” she mutters, just loud enough that she won’t have to repeat herself, no longer interested in trying to eat. She turns off the water and flicks the butt of her cigarette into the toilet. It drowns with a faint hiss. She steps out of the bathroom, and the sunlight through the balcony doors is disorienting and hurts her eyes.

  “He didn’t tell me they were out of blueberry,” Alex says again, stepping into a pair of boxers. “I don’t know why he didn’t tell me that to start with.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m not hungry, anyway. If I tried to eat right now I’d probably just throw it up. I need a drink.”

  Alex stops rummaging through a navy-blue backpack and glances at the pint of Seagram’s still sitting on the floor near the foot of the bed. “Try to eat some of the toast first, Dar,” he says. “Just a few bites? Maybe a cup of coffee, yeah?”

  “Let’s not start in with that right now, Alex. I’m not in the mood for mothering. My head hurts, and I’m cold, and my stomach’s killing me, and I want a drink, not a lecture on nutrition.”

  “Put on some clothes if you’re cold.”

  “Just lay off, okay?”

  He sighs and goes back to digging through the backpack. “It’s your funeral, love. Just don’t expect me to hang around for the service, if you get my drift.”

  “I get your fucking drift,” she says and sits down beside his guitar case. “No one’s asking you to hold my hand. I need a lover, not a nursemaid.”

  “That, dear, is a matter of opinion.”

  While Alex dresses, Daria sits on the floor drinking bourbon and staring at the city and the gray-blue sky beyond the balcony doors. For a moment, she can’t remember what month it is, what season, summer or spring or autumn, but the confusion passes, the way it always does. She never loses her way for very long. This is where I am, this is when I am.

  “Maybe you better turn the ringer back on,” Alex says, and she looks at the phone on the end table beside the bed. The red-orange message light is blinking urgently. “I bet your cell’s off, too. I bet you had it off all night.”

  “As a matter of fact,” she replies and watches the blinking light as she takes a drink of bourbon. It hits her empty stomach like a small grenade, and she closes her eyes until the pain passes.

  “If you’re gonna puke, aim away from the guitar.”

  “I’m not going to puke,” Daria whispers, though she might. It’s always a possibility. She opens her eyes again and stares at the phone.

  “There’s a message. It might be important,” Alex says.

  “It’s always important. When was it ever not fucking important?”

  “Would you rather talk to Jarod or have him pounding on the door?”

  And she almost slips, then, almost says, That’s not what I’m afraid of, Alex. It might be Niki, or Marvin, but she catches herself and doesn’t say anything at all. The pain in her belly is melting as the Seagram’s warms her from the inside out, and she’s beginning to feel a little less lost, a little more in control. It isn’t Niki on the phone, and it isn’t Marvin. It’s only Jarod Parris or someone else that she has absolutely no desire to talk to. She looks away from the phone and takes another swallow of whiskey.

  “I promised you’d be sober,” Alex says and zips his backpack closed.

  “You shouldn’t make promises I can’t keep,” she tells him. “That’s pretty much the same thing as lying.”

  “You know, Dar, I bet Keith Barry used to say shit like that to you. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if you were quoting the motherfucker.”

  And for a moment she’s too stunned to reply, to tell him to shove it up his self-righteous, hypocritical ass, too stunned to do anything but sit there on the floor and stare at the morning light shining through the last couple of inches of amber liquid in the bottle.

  “You ever let yourself think about that?” Alex asks, sitting down on a corner of the bed. “You’re a smart girl. You don’t need me to connect the dots for you.”

  Daria screws the cap back on the bottle and considers hurling it at the sliding doors, wonders if she could throw it hard enough to shatter the tall sheets of plate glass.

  “That’s not fair,” she says very softly. “That’s not fair, and you know it.”

  “You think? Then tell me this—just how long’s it been since you went a whole day without getting wasted?”

  “Keith was a junky—”

  “And you’re an alcoholic. Six of one, half dozen of the other, babe.”

  “Jesus, you’ve got some fucking nerve,” she says and laughs a dry, dead sort of a laugh. “Where the hell do you get off saying something like that to me?”

  “I should have said it a year ago. I should have said it after that shit you pulled in London.”

  “I’m not a goddamn alcoholic,” and Daria wraps her right hand tightly around the neck of the Seagram’s bottle, thinking again about flinging it at the balcony doors. She imagines the satisfying explosion as the glass shatters, raining whiskey and deadly razor shards to the street twenty-seven stories below. She imagines people on the sidewalk, hearing the noise, looking up—

  “Hell, Dar. I don’t expect nobody in this fucked-up business to stay clean twenty-four/seven. They’d have to be a bloody saint or something. But you’re falling apart, and I can’t stand by and watch it happen.”

  “What are you saying, Alex?” she asks him, not wanting to hear the answer, but not strong enough to keep the question to herself, either.

  “All I’m saying is there’s some heavy shit you gotta deal with, love, and you gotta do it soon. I’m saying I can’t pretend to look the other way anymore. I’ve been doing that too long as it is.”

  “It’s your fucking bottle, asshole,” she says and holds it up. He reaches down and takes it from her.

  “Yeah, it is. Maybe that’s where we have to start.”

  Daria stares at her empty hand for a moment, the ghost of the bottle still pressed into her flesh.

  “Don’t fucking talk to me about Keith Barry, you understand? Not ever again. If it makes y
ou feel better about yourself to tell me I’m a drunk, fine, whatever, but that’s the last time I want to hear his name from your lips.”

  Alex nods, then tosses the bottle into the air, end over end, and catches it.

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about. You weren’t there and you have no idea—” and she stops, her voice too unsteady to continue. Too close to tears and the last thing she’s going to do now is let him see her cry.

  “Bugger,” he says, shrugs and tosses the bottle again, catches it again. “Fair enough. All I know is what you’ve told me. But the rest of this—”

  “Can wait,” she says and reaches for her panties lying on the carpet near the guitar case. She sniffs at them and tries to remember the last time she put on a clean pair. Not San Francisco, so it must have been Little Rock, the night Marvin called to tell her that Niki had tried to kill herself. Not even three days, but it feels like at least three weeks.

  “Yes ma’am,” Alex says. “You’re the boss,” and then there’s a loud knock at the door, three sharp raps, and Daria’s heart jumps. But it’s only room service, just the breakfast she has no interest in, the toast and jam instead of a blueberry muffin.

  “Just a second,” Alex shouts, pulling on his jeans. “I’m coming.”

  When he goes to the door, Daria picks up the bottle of whiskey again and wonders if there’s enough left to get her through the next few hours.

  Excerpt from “Outside the Vicious Circle: A Conversation with Daria Parker” (Women Who Rock, March 2002; pp. 28-29):

  WWR: Is there any chance that you’ll ever record any of the songs you wrote with Stiff Kitten or, going even farther back, Yer Funeral or Ecstatic Wreck?

  DP: I don’t think so. Stiff Kitten is a place and a time I’d prefer not to revisit. It was important to me, that band and those songs, and the things I learned back then. I probably couldn’t have gotten where I am now without them. But they’re still part of the past. I’m not a very nostalgic person. I’m more interested in the songs that I haven’t written yet than the songs that I wrote when I was really still just a kid. As for Yer Funeral, I think the best thing you could say about Yer Funeral is that we didn’t last very long, and we were really fucking loud. Loud was important. I was determined to be as loud as the boys, all those punker assholes who acted like girls had no place in the scene. It was a big deal to me back then, standing my ground. And I think it was even worse, being stuck in a place like Birmingham. I was literally the only woman doing what I was doing, and so I got a lot of resentment for that. It was a boy’s club, you know, and I think I definitely threw a wrench into their dick-measuring contests.

  WWR: In the piece that Rolling Stone did last year, they describe the death of Keith Barry (guitarist for Stiff Kitten) as a turning point in your career. Do you think that’s true?

  DP: Yeah, well, Rolling Stone was talking out their ass, which is nothing new. I didn’t even have a career back then. All I had was my bass and a crappy job at a coffee shop and a junky boyfriend. After Keith died, I didn’t even have that anymore. I mean, he died and that was the end of Stiff Kitten and it was almost the end of me. It’s the sort of thing I look back on now and I don’t even begin to understand how I lived through it, or why I bothered. I think, mostly, I was too pissed at him to give up. He was really good—fucking genius good—and he just pissed it away that night in Atlanta. So yeah, I guess it was a turning point in the sense that it tore everything in the world down and forced me to start over from scratch. It forced me to find ways to stay alive when all I wanted to do was lie down and die. But I don’t like calling it a “turning point” in my career. That seems to trivialize Keith’s death, somehow. It’s what happened, and we are who we are, all of us, because of the things that happen to us.

  WWR: It’s pretty obvious that some of the songs on Exit West were an attempt to express your feelings about his death and its effect on you, and maybe your feelings on suicide in general. I’m thinking, of course, of “Seldom Seen,” but also “Bleeding Day” and “Standing Near Heaven.”

  DP: You don’t live through a suicide, no matter who you are, whether it’s accidental or intentional, without it leaving a profound mark on what you do. If you’re an artist, it comes out in your work, sooner or later, at least if you’re any sort of honest artist. If you’re a writer, how do you not write about it? Even years later, you still find yourself thinking about it, having bad dreams about it, writing about it, wondering what you didn’t do that might have prevented it, or what you did do that might have caused it. It colors the whole world. It turns everything into guilt and confusion and bitterness. When Keith died, I think my first reaction, after the shock, was anger. I was furious because I knew—I fucking knew—that he’d changed everything forever, and no matter what I did, I could never, ever make it the way it was before. Even if I somehow made it better someday, he’d taken a choice away from me and forced me into this other place for the rest of my life. He’d punched this big fucking hole in me, and there was no way it would ever go away completely. That probably sounds selfish, but so was what he did to me, and to the band, to himself. So, yeah, a lot of that anger’s in “Bleeding Day” and “Seldom Seen.” I had to put it somewhere. It’s not the sort of thing you can carry around inside you forever. It starts to eat your soul.

  WWR: You recently played a show in Birmingham, didn’t you? That must have been pretty bizarre.

  DP: No, it was just another show. I stayed focused and didn’t let it freak me out. I just went to Birmingham and did the show. It wasn’t like going home or reliving my wild punk-rock past or any of that crap. It was just a show, that’s all. We had a great turnout that night.

  WWR: So you didn’t check out any of the old haunts?

  DP: Hell, no. Most of those places are long gone now, anyway. Dr. Jekyll’s and everything. Gentrification took care of that, which is really just as well. Dr. Jekyll’s was pretty much Birmingham’s one and only punk and hardcore club. Back then, of course, we all thought it was the shit, like we were headlining the Cathay or fucking CBGB’s or something. It was just this tiny hole in the wall, but we could play our music there, and most of the time no one bothered us. I think the biggest thing that ever happened was a Black Flag show, but that must have been almost a decade before I even started playing with Stiff Kitten. Mostly, though, it was all these bands that came and went, and nobody will ever know or care who they were. Someone told me that there’s a parking lot now where Dr. Jekyll’s used to be, and I was like, hell yeah and thank God.

  And this is the night that Daria Parker met Keith Barry, this muggy summer weeknight in 1993, before Dr. Jekyll’s was even Dr. Jekyll’s. It was still called the Cave back then, an all too accurate name for the dark and smoky little dive on the east end of Morris Avenue. Just past the train tracks that cut the city into north and south, tucked in snug among the empty warehouses and cobblestones, the gaslights that had long since been converted to mere electricity. A decade earlier, Morris had been littered with nightclubs and restaurants, the place to be seen until it wasn’t anymore and the parties had moved on. This night, that night, the marquee read ECSTATIC WRECK in red plastic letters; the band Daria fronted after Yer Funeral had finally disintegrated, trading grinding hardcore for something only slightly less violent, but something that gave her melodies and words enough breathing room that she didn’t suffocate in the roar of her own music.

  Through the glare of the lights, she caught glimpses of him sitting out there alone, sipping beer from a plastic cup and watching her. He was the only person in the club besides the albino kid who tended bar, and the guy at the door, and a booth full of goths who all seemed more interested in trying to hear each other above the music than listening to the band. An audience of one, and in those days, that wasn’t so unusual. It hadn’t mattered to her, one or a hundred. As long as she could play, and as long as there was someone, anyone, to listen, that was all she needed. They played their set, all the songs they had. Sometimes D
aria was singing to him, because he was there, and sometimes she was only singing for herself, only slapping the strings of her black Fender bass for her own satisfaction. Back then, the music was better than sex, better than any drug she’d ever tried, almost heaven, the words and chords and toothache, heartbeat throb of the drums behind her.

  Keith Barry clapped and wolf-whistled between the songs. She smiled and squinted through sweat and her tangled hair and the lights, trying to put a name with the hard, almost-familiar face. When the set was finished, he hooted for more, and she mumbled a thank you into the microphone. They didn’t play an encore, because they didn’t have anything else to play. As they left the stage, she realized that three of the fingers on her right hand, her thumb and index and middle finger, were bleeding. But it was nothing she couldn’t patch up with a few drops of Krazy Glue and some Band-Aids, nothing that wouldn’t heal. Three bloody fingers were a very small price to pay for the rush that would probably keep her going until the next show, whenever and wherever that might be.

  Daria followed the others down the short, smelly hallway leading back to the ten-by-four closet that passed itself off as a dressing room. She wiped the blood from her injured hand onto the front of her T-shirt, three dark smears on yellow cotton, three more stains, and she could point to them in days to come and say, “See that shit there? That was a damn good night.”

  “Pretty sweet, Dar,” Sherman James said, and then he slapped her hard on the back. Sherman wasn’t bad, but she knew he was a lot more interested in his engineering classes at UAB than his guitar. “Too bad only half a dozen people heard it.”

  “Hey, fuck ’em,” she said. “They don’t know what they’re missing, right?” and Daria put her bass down on the tattered old sofa taking up one wall of the room. She found a spot on the concrete floor where she could sit cross-legged and have a closer look at her fingers. Sherman made a dumb joke about playing to ghosts and roaches, and Donny White, who had known Sherman since high school, clacked his drumsticks loudly against the graffitied, swimming-pool-blue wall and laughed like it was actually funny.