by Ben Langdon
“Miranda Brody’s concert, you know? The Human Tour.”
He moved past the kid and walked towards the booth, noticing how she hadn’t really changed much in the years he’d been in the city. Her hair was a little drier than usual, and her arms were bony, but he couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t thin and brittle. Handle with care, they always used to say.
Dan sat down but kept his hands in his lap.
“I didn’t think you were really coming,” he said.
She smiled, awkwardly, and looked down at her hands, rubbing each finger, easing the aches. The flecked blue skin was dry, like her wiry hair and chipped nails. When she noticed Dan watching her, she pulled her sleeves even longer and cupped the hands away out of sight. Her body seemed to shrink from the harsh lights, the straw hat giving her some refuge from stares and open-mouthed looks. Over at the counter, the new kid took orders in between glances at the freakish blue-skinned woman.
“I’m your mother,” she said in a raspy voice. “Of course I would come.”
“Seriously?” Dan said.
She pulled her hands out of sight into her own lap, her shoulders dropping. She turned her head and looked out of the window, which gave Dan a glimpse of her profile. Hawkish nose, old tortoise-shell shades, cracked lips.
“It’s been…” she stalled.
“Three years,” Dan finished for her.
“Difficult,” she said, not looking back. “When your … father died, I … well, I didn’t cope very well, Danny.”
She hadn’t coped very well her entire life. At sixteen her skin blistered and peeled, revealing a bluish hue underneath that never washed away no matter how hard she scrubbed, no matter how many lotions she applied. Dan’s father, the less than impressive Nico, knocked her up in the first few weeks of courting and then managed to get himself arrested for a half-assed bank robbery. So, no, Theresa Galkin hadn’t coped very well at all with life.
“I guess not,” Dan said.
“You are doing well,” she said softly. He couldn’t tell whether it was a question or an opinion. He pulled off his Birdie’s cap and tossed it on the table. His mother’s head turned back from the window and looked at the cap.
“I’m not dead, I guess,” he said.
She swallowed, her neck bird-like as she tried to compose herself.
“It’s been difficult,” she said again, rehearsing her lines.
A group of school kids took up a second booth near Dan and he heard them chattering about their lives, about music and boys and girls and homework and holidays.
“Your grandfather is back,” she said.
Dan watched her lips. They were pressed tightly together, not quite hiding the hate she must have been tasting.
His grandfather had returned. From the dead.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t believe what she said. People like his grandfather never really took death seriously. Dan just didn’t know how he felt about the development. Five years before, his grandfather had been everything to him. He had been the stand-in father when the real one was locked in prison. He had been the only calm influence the night Dan’s body started sucking up all the electricity in the house. He had become the confidant, the teacher. And eventually the betrayer.
“Great,” Dan said, grabbing his cap and standing up. “Can’t wait for the happy reunion.”
He walked back to the counter, blinking hard against the flashes of light in his eyes. Sometimes when he was stressed, the electrical charges his body generated would try to burst out of him, to unleash themselves on the world and cause havoc and destruction. Sometimes his body wanted to become the weapon his grandfather trained him for. But Dan didn’t have to do what anyone said anymore. He wasn’t a pawn in the old man’s game; it had already been played out. And Dan had lost.
“Next?” he asked, a little too fiercely, as he checked into the console next to the new kid.
A couple slipped into line and started to discuss the menu. Dan felt the console humming beneath his fingertips. He followed the couple’s discussion, bringing up their orders, revising them, adding all sorts of extras as they casually changed their minds. His fingers didn’t move but the orders entered directly from minuscule surges from his mind.
“Take your time,” Dan said, forcing a smile. They didn’t even hear him.
And suddenly Dan’s mother was at the counter again, her bony blue fingers splayed against the shiny white plastic surface. She wasn’t tall, but she leaned across so that she was directly in Dan’s space. Her eyes were bare now, the shades discarded. The whites were yellowish, bloodshot.
“You have a choice,” she hissed. Her breath was stale. How long had she been locked up inside, he wondered; his thoughts leaving the console and harking back to when he lived with her in the beach house. “You don’t have to live like me.”
She turned on the young couple, whipping her hat off and tossing it away to her right. She leered at them, her frizzy dead hair and her flaky blue face too much to ignore. In a second she swept her head towards the school kids and snarled at them, her dark blue lips pulled back to reveal the jagged yellow teeth. She played the wicked witch, the crazy blue skinned woman, the insane uberhuman freak.
Dan stepped back, away from the whirling confrontation. The people in lines scuttled to each side and his mother swayed a little more before retreating to the sliding doors. She looked back at him, teeth still bared, but there was sadness there in her eyes. She pointed a finger at him.
“You have been chosen,” she said. “You can be more… so much more.”
And then she was gone, pushing through the automatic doors when they didn’t open quickly enough, and out into the street.
“Man,” the new kid said. “That is weird shit.”
Dan just shrugged.
Customers shook themselves back into line and some of the workers from out the back came into the front wondering what the crazy customer had done. The manager was on a cigarette break, but later she would curse herself for missing the action. Not much exciting ever happened at Birdie’s.
Chapter 2
Miranda
There wasn’t anything actually wrong with the hotel, but Miranda Brody found herself crying her eyes out in the bathroom, with her back against the door and the balls of her palms crushed against her eyes. On the other side of the door her retainers hovered and checked the time, read and returned texts, and generally waited for Miranda to recover from what they assumed were regular pop diva antics.
But it wasn’t a tantrum. She wasn’t pouting because of hotel management. She hadn’t broken up with her high profile boyfriend, or just got out of a five star rehab program. When it came down to it, although Miranda Brody was a teenage pop sensation on both sides of the Pacific and throughout most of Europe, she just wasn’t particularly stuck up or demanding.
She didn’t even have a boyfriend anymore. Or a drug problem. Or overbearing parents or jealous siblings. Miranda was weirdly sane, almost normal. After coming third in an American music reality show, Miranda had been snatched up and signed by a music company to cash in on her national profile. At first it had been exciting. It had been all her dreams, and more. But now her music wasn’t even her music, and when she saw posters of herself in magazines or on billboards she felt like she was looking at someone completely different.
There was a knock on the door, the third in ten minutes, perfectly choreographed in even intervals. It was Evie, probably, and Miranda shifted the palms of her hands from her eyes to her ears, trying to block out the woman’s voice.
“I don’t need anyone,” Miranda said, but it came out too low for the crowd on the other side of the door to hear. She sniffed and blew out her tremulous breath. She did it again, tried to center herself. “Just go away. Go away until Sully gets here.”
Without waiting to hear whether Evie and the others understood, Miranda pulled herself together and stood up in the bathroom. She rubbed at her eyes, drying away the wetness there, and then
tugged at her dark hair, capturing it into a ponytail. She caught her reflection in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors but forced her attention away. She had seen enough of this other Miranda during the three months of touring, first in the States, then across to Japan and down to…
Jakarta.
Miranda knew she wasn’t going to be able to forget about Jakarta. She could smile at the cameras, look serious and then flighty during interviews, but she couldn’t get the image of the boy out of her mind. He burnt so brightly, so hot that she felt the flames on her skin, could smell the gasoline blowing off of him. His arms were akimbo, relaxed and dying.
Like a star, the reporters had written.
But Miranda only remembered the face blackening, being pulled away from her by security, the relaxed boy slipping away into nothing, smothered into death.
She breathed out again, twice; like she had been taught.
Jakarta was behind her now. The last leg of her Human Tour was in Melbourne, Australia – somewhere out past those hotel walls. Her ride from the airport had been swift. She hadn’t looked up and most of the time her eyes were closed behind her large shades. She didn’t know these people who met her, who smiled at her, touched her, wanted to make her so happy. Her regular crew were still in Jakarta, except for Evie and a couple of the dancers. It had all been so rushed, like an evacuation.
And Sully was still back in Indonesia, cleaning up her mess, as usual. He was her constant throughout the Tour. The backup singers, the dancers, the audio and light crew were all replaceable, and had been changed several times through the last three months, but Sully was her rock. He was her family when she was on the road, and probably most importantly, he was her friend.
He was the only one who made her feel safe.
Normally.
But now she was in Australia and alone amongst the industry vultures. She was nineteen, of course, and an adult who could handle the pressures, but she didn’t want to handle them alone. She’d been doing the music thing for four years, but the past two had been insane with her face recognized across most of the Western world.
There was another knock on the door. Miranda looked at her phone next to the basin. Three minutes had passed, another scheduled reminder that she was needed somewhere.
She ran the taps and splashed cool water on her face, reaching for the hand towel as she walked to the door. She opened it with another practiced exhale and looked out into one of her rooms. Evie was standing there with her skinny arms crossed. Behind her were two hotel workers fussing about near the bed, but they didn’t look up. For a second Miranda thought of her mom and felt like she was going to cry again.
“You look awful,” Evie said.
“Thanks,” Miranda said, sniffing. “Is Sully here?”
The backup singer shook her head, and then thrust a pamphlet into Miranda’s hands. It was a press release for the record company’s welcome party. Apart from the venue and the Australian flag tucked up in the corner, there wasn’t anything especially different about it.
“It looks fine,” she said and handed it back to Evie, but Evie shook her head.
“Read it,” she snapped.
Miranda looked at the sheet again, her eyes glazing over as she read about sales figures, reviews and the tendency for these parties to ‘absolutely rock!’ She shrugged and handed the pamphlet back again.
“I don’t get it.”
“You are hopeless,” Evie said and snatched the sheet, stepping back into the room and turning around twice, letting her short dress lift slightly. The girl was energized. Miranda shot a glance around the room as the hotel workers left, wondering how much coffee or energy drinks Evie had downed since they had arrived. The place looked spotless.
Evie had been singing with Miranda for a month, picked up in Seattle just before the trip to Japan. At first Miranda found her annoying. She was too loud for such a slender person: big pouty mouth, short styled blonde hair and a turned up nose. It wasn’t her original nose.
“New freaks,” Evie said. “It says we get new freaks.”
Miranda wasn’t following. It wasn’t unusual for Evie to carry on one-sided conversations, but Miranda took back the pamphlet and read it again, trying to work out what Evie was so excited about. At the bottom of the release, beyond the drone of statistics and promises, there was a paragraph on new ‘freaks’ being on display for the final concert. It was the first Miranda had heard of it.
“I didn’t authorize this,” she said.
Evie just grinned. “New freaks,” she said again.
Freak Chic was one of Miranda’s top selling songs and The Human Tour was basically built around the song’s success. It was all about embracing the weird and she showcased ubers as dancers in her shows. Her company had hired eight of them over the course of the tour, although she didn’t really know them apart from choreography and the actual performances. Evie, on the other hand, made it her business to get to know them intimately.
“Do you think we’ll get a koala one?” Evie asked.
“I have no idea.”
She wondered what happened to the other freaks and whether they were still back in Jakarta. Maybe they were angry with her. Maybe they blamed her for the boy’s death. Maybe they were just tired of being looked at and exploited.
There hadn’t been many protestors in Jakarta, at least. The moral outrage against the concert might have stopped in the States. Her manager had told her not to worry about it, to forget about the radicals and the haters, but Miranda had seen the anger in the eyes of the protestors, placards damning her and her treatment of the ubers. It was just another spin in the whirlwind of her music career.
Miranda wanted to get off.
“You’ve got to go,” Miranda said to Evie.
“I know!”
“No, seriously, you have to go now. Leave my room. Go see Melbourne and buy things. I need to be by myself for a while.”
Evie shook her head, disgusted.
“You are not going to miss this party,” she said. “I will seriously hunt you down and kill you if you dare miss this party.”
Miranda looked at the press release for the last time and then back at Evie. There was something compelling about the girl, and she smiled and nodded.
“I’ll be there.”
And then she bundled Evie out of the room and locked the door.
She was in Melbourne for four nights. One concert, one record company party and a half dozen interviews. Moving to the balcony she parted the curtains and looked out into the afternoon. It was like any other city she’d been to. There was steel and glass and people far below criss-crossing the streets.
There were no protestors, no shaking signs and shouts of rage. It was quiet. She looked back to the door, to possibilities.
Back home, in Riverside, her family were asleep.
She needed to get out of the hotel.
Chapter 3
Dan
Dan pulled off his helmet after kicking his bike stand into place on the curb. He looked across to the hotel and adjusted his pizza satchel. The street was packed with teenagers, milling around, and he saw a lot of bored older people sitting in cars up and down the street. Parents, he figured. Outside the double doors of the hotel, he checked the address again. It was one of the expensive ones. He pushed through to the lobby, ignored the frown at reception, and reeled off his customer name and room number while looking at the ceiling. He was waved through to the elevator and sighed as the lobby disappeared from view.
Dan wasn’t having a good night. Even without his mother’s performance at work, the afternoon and now evening wasn’t turning out well either. No tips, lots of attitude, a bit of indiscriminate nudity and two ‘no answers’ which meant cold pizza and no pay.
The elevator stopped and a long stretch of rooms extended in both directions, equally beige. He checked the number, heaved his satchel straps up to his shoulder again and walked out. It was strange that no one was walking around. When he found the number he knocked
twice and checked his phone. He was within the time limit. No chance of the customer declaring the pizza free on this one.
The door was pulled open by a girl wearing glasses, and she squinted at him with her head tilted. Behind her, Dan saw the room was dark apart from a couple of free-standing lamps. A peal of laughter came from within, but the girl with the glasses guarded the entrance, pulling the door back.
“Are you the pizza guy?” she asked.
Dan looked at the two pizza boxes in his hand and then back at the girl without saying anything. She looked closer at his chest, at the logo for Birdie’s, and eventually pulled her neck back and seemed satisfied. He reeled off the order, announced the price and then had to wait while she slipped back inside the room and started collecting the money from her friends.
When she reappeared the girl was flanked by a taller blonde girl with long hanging earrings. Dan figured they were both in their early-teens and considering the hotel wasn’t the cheapest in town he wondered how they’d managed to scrounge the money together for a room when they seemed so hard-pressed coming up with the money for their pepperoni and supreme pizzas.
“So you’re having a party?” Dan asked.
“Totally,” the new girl said. “I’m Donna and this’s Asi. What’s your name?”
“No we’re not, not really,” the dark-haired girl said, making angry eyes at Donna. “Just a few friends.”
“Oh yeah, right,” the blonde corrected herself. “It’s not a party.”
“But you’ve got supervision, right?” Dan asked.
“Totally,” Donna said, nodding vigorously. “Asi’s sister, is like, supervising us, yeah.”
“She’s eighteen,” said the girl with glasses, pushing them back up her nose, looking impressed.
Dan smiled and craned his neck a little as they took the pizza boxes. He could see another couple of girls with their faces up against the window looking out into the main street. And then there was a mess of arms and legs and bodies wrestling on the bed. Dan grinned and pulled back his head.
