Epilogue
Six Months Later
Rocco
On a cool day in March I drive across the desert. Mesas and mountains. Long roads in the middle of nowhere. The Place of Dead Roads.
I stop and step out of the car, just for a moment, just to breathe in the silence and the solitude. I’m accountable to nobody but myself out here. And I could die here, quite easily. Not as easily as Mallory on Everest, but easily enough to be scary. This parched air yields nothing, and excites me. I think that was what always set my heart pumping about the desert, from the very first time I saw it. Not just the jagged, rocky beauty, but also the close proximity to death. It felt like an edge I wanted to walk, a fuck you to the man-made grid of Philly that had formed the mesh of my teenage cage. In Italy I admired roads perched on the edges of cliffs and the wide yellow Tiber where they tossed what was left of the bodies the mob had done with. And Naples, a colorful, messy seethe of road rage and peeling paint, the people absorbed in everyday life and indifferent to the smoking monster of a mountain, long overdue for a boom bigger than the one that wiped out Pompeii and Herculaneum.
“Fuck it,” said a taxi driver. “Could be tomorrow, could be another hundred years. What can I do about it?”
Europeans handle death and disaster a lot different to us. They have to. They live their day to day lives side by side with the ruins of fallen empires, of places rebuilt from the ground up because they were flattened in wars. Americans like to pretend we were here forever, especially those of us from the original Thirteen Colonies. We borrow our place names from Europe and antiquity, borrow boulevards from Paris and classical columns from Greece and Rome, but it’s nothing but Disney bullshit compared to the real thing. When you’re in a city thousands of years old you learn to let go of self-regard to a certain extent, because you’re just a gnat in the slip-stream of millenia. And when you strip away the city entirely and stand alone in the middle of the desert, you know who you are.
And you know that you don’t matter. Not really.
It can be liberating, knowing you’re nothing in the grand scheme of things. Like the taxi driver said – what can I do about it? – so you may as well breathe deeper, look higher into the sky and squint into the sun, and seek love in the warm bodies of the people who delight you. It’s like that sometimes, when Daniel’s breath breaks in a sigh and he pours hot into my hand. We’re nothing in those moments. Nothing and everything, so small and so pointless, but to each other we’re huge. Universes unto ourselves.
The things my love has taught me.
I get back into the car and drive on, to the Crescent Moon Ranch, where this time last year I was the one getting my shit together and taking those last few silent desert-night breaths before bracing myself and getting ready to step back into the stream of real life once more. It’s Matt’s turn, this time, and I have faith in this place, and in the weird healing power of knowing your own fragility and smallness. ‘Fragile’ and ‘small’ are not things that come easily to rock gods.
It’s been weird seeing him through Daniel’s eyes. The big brother, up on a pedestal that not even rock stars can reach. Daniel doesn’t know Matt the way I do. He doesn’t know that before every show – booze or no booze, cocaine or none – Matt used to puke with nerves before he stepped on stage. What it took him to get up there and scream and snarl and snake his hips around in that way that drove the ladies so nuts. I’d hold my guitar in front of me like a shield – that’s why I always favored my full-figured Gibson Les Paul. More to hide behind, but you don’t get that with a microphone stand. The thing’s no wider than an exclamation point and draws just about the same amount of attention to you. I used to have this theory that on some level Steve Tyler used to decorate his mic with scarves to make the thing look bigger. Wider. Something to hide behind.
What Matt used to do – I couldn’t do it. Too naked. Too exposed. All he had was his voice and the bulldozer force of his personality. So I always had a firebucket or a basin on hand, because I knew it would be the same thing before those first chords rang out. Head in the bucket, guts squeezed, my hand on his back. And when he’d finished spitting and rinsing his mouth, always the same thing.
“Ready?” I’d say, and he’d plaster on that badass grin.
“Ready. Let’s go rock and roll.”
The ranch is designed around crescents, like its name. The adobe buildings are round, so that it looks a lot like a desert version of Hobbiton. Hobbiton by way of Barcelona, I always thought, because of the gleaming ceramic mosaics that remind me of Guell Park, one of the few places I remember from all of our travels. Bigass mosaic lizards, and a busker playing a giant xylophone like some kind of crazy human octopus. He seemed to be everywhere at once. Where are you from? I asked him, in my obviously American high school Spanish. “Me?” he said, and grinned, baring a wide gap between his front teeth. “I’m from the moon.”
After saying hey to some old friends I take directions and follow the curved hallway around, on the way to one of the crescent shaped gardens. The pale yellow wall is covered in graffiti – names. Everyone writes their names here when they leave. It’s a sort of farewell ritual, to say that you were here, you learned, you figured some shit out. Some people write their names more than once. Some people never return for more than one reason.
I find my name, written in chunky blue pen almost a year ago. I wrote the whole thing – the whole big, dumb Italian flourish of it – Rocco Giacomo Salvatore Pontecorvo, because that was who I was now. Not Rocco Ponti, but me. Myself. And I had no idea how to be that person, but I was learning. Figuring shit out.
Matt is outside, sucking on a cigarette and admiring the view of the mountains. For a second it’s weird, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so still. Even at rest, Matt exudes energy, and seeing him so steady is weird. And immediately familiar. It’s like an echo of Daniel’s beautiful wild stillness.
Matt sees me and looks up. “Holy shit,” he says, his voice a couple of tones deeper from smoking too much. It happens in rehab. “Look at you.” He puts his arms around me, touches my face. “You look pale.”
Figures. He’s been used to looking at sunbaked complexions, not rain-drenched people from Washington. “And you look tan,” I say. “How are you?”
“I’m good.”
“Really?”
“Really. I think I am.” Again, I’m reminded of Daniel. That’s how he talks – ‘I think’ or ‘I feel’ – analysing the world as he goes. How unlike Matt, who hardly ever stops to think.
We perch on the bench facing the mountains. “You didn’t have to come all the way down here,” he says.
“No, I know, but I wanted to. And I saw this vacation place to rent and couldn’t resist it. It’s a little like someone took my place in LA and set it down in the desert, only better. No light pollution. Crazy stars.”
He smiles and looks up, even though it’s light now. “I saw meteor showers,” he says. “In the winter. Geminids or Perseids – can’t remember which.”
“Geminids, I think. I’m sure the Perseids are in August.”
“Never seen a falling star before.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. Except in the mirror, of course.” He takes out another cigarette. “There was this girl, Robin, and she was like ‘How have you never seen that before? Did you live under a rock your whole life?’ And I said ‘No, but I was in a touring rock and roll band,’…”
“…and you may as well be under a rock. Yeah, I know.”
“One long round of airport security, soundchecks and diarrhea.”
“Diarrhea?”
“God, yeah,” he says. “Travelling used to play hell with my fucking colon. I was working up to a serious Imodium habit at one point.”
“Shit, don’t do that. You know you can actually die from an Imodium overdose?”
“I know, right? I thought it was funny. Like, how do you die from taking diarrhea pills? You take so many you back yourself up like Elvis and die of a heart attack while trying to take a dump?”
“No. You take bucketloads of laxatives with it. I heard of people taking up to six hundred of the pills a day just to get a kind of poor-man’s opioid high out of it, and if you’re on opioids or heroin the chances are you’re already constipated as hell anyway.” I have to laugh at the turn this conversation has taken. “One of the most underrated moments of getting clean? They all talk about the peace that comes when you know you don’t have to go out to score anymore, and reconnecting with people on a level that doesn’t involve needles, but oh my God – there’s that one mundane moment that’s like the unsung hero of heroin rehab. That first truly satisfying shit.”
He laughs. “Yeah, but that’s not going to look cute on the inspirational literature, is it? It’s all pastels and smiling people and birds – like Jonathan Livingston Seagull or some such shit. You can’t show addicts a picture of a poo and say ‘You could crap like this if you join our rehab program.’”
I forgot how funny he is when he’s himself. Oh my God, I’m crying. “If they did I would have cleaned up sooner. There were times I would have sold my soul for a decent fucking shit. I had dreams about being able to poop normally.”
Matt splutters around a lungful of cigarette smoke. “They show you pictures of poop and you’re like ‘Yeeees – I want that!’”
“Totally. Like ‘Holy shit – that’s a four on the Bristol Stool Chart. It’s the perfect poo! Pass the fucking naxolone already. Let’s get down to business here.’”
He goes into a long coughing fit. We sit back, wipe our eyes and giggle. “I hope you know this is an incredibly middle-aged conversation,” he says. “We’re sliding closer towards turning into a couple of old farts who spend all day bitching about our bowels.”
“It’s thirty-five, I swear. It’s like a cursed age for your colon. Daniel hasn’t hit it yet. He goes to the bathroom at the same time every day and comes out completely chilled. No drama. No pain.”
“Natch. I’d expect nothing less from the golden child.”
“You know he always said the same thing about you?”
“Me?” says Matt.
“You got rich. And famous.”
“Yeah, and look where that got me.” He shakes his head. “Nah – I figure you know my brother well enough by now to know he’s kind of a breed apart.”
“He is, yeah.” I picture Daniel, standing where I left him in the kitchen of our vacation rental. He was chewing his lip and trying to look as though he didn’t want me to leave.
“How is he?”
“He’s good. Looking forward to seeing you. Needed a vacation, I think.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. He’s kind of a workaholic, isn’t he?”
Matt laughs. “Self-starter. That’s my baby brother.”
“I know. He was getting that squirrelly look in his eye again – the one where he has something he needs to be working on but he’s just too polite to tell me to fuck off.”
“Shows how much he loves you,” he says. “He just tells me to fuck off.”
He smiles and I wonder if he remembers. Or if he even saw it. There we all were, four teenage morons, poured into our leather pants and posing our asses off for our first photoshoot in Matt’s garage. Matt pouted and Kevin flexed, but I turned my head at the crucial moment. Click. Rock and roll history right there. For years everyone asked me so often what I’d been looking at that I got bored with the question and started inventing stupid answers. Oh, I said, that was the moment I realized the amp was on fire. Or that I’d turned my head to the side and it had locked up, so that I couldn’t turn it back without pain.
And it got so even I forgot what I’d been looking at, but it came back to me recently. It was Daniel. He’d opened the garage door and peeked in. He must have been about thirteen or fourteen at the time, but even then he had that cat-who-walked-by-himself vibe, so that when he looked in it was as though a leopard had walked by and stuck its head around the door. He saw what was going down and disappeared just as quickly, and to this day I have no idea if he knows I saw him there.
“He’d get that same look even when he was a kid,” says Matt. “Like ‘Are you still here? Because I’ve had too much social interaction right now and I need to go off and build a model of a Roman arena out of popsicle sticks or something.’” He laughs. “He was such a weird little kid. Such a loner, and so comfortable with it. Total opposite of me – King Attention Whore.”
I run my fingers along the mosaic edge of the bench, thinking of Gaudi and Guell and the man who said he was from the moon. “It damages you, doesn’t it?” I say. “Seeing yourself reflected in other people’s eyes all the time.”
That’s when I know the Crescent Moon has worked its magic on him, because the old Matt would have narrowed his eyes and asked me what the fuck I was burbling about now. This Matt gets it. He nods. “Yeah. It does.” He exhales. “We were so young, Rocco. When we made it. Just babies really.”
“Yep.”
“Booze, broads, coke, private planes, sold out fucking stadiums. Thousands of people screaming your name. You would have thought that gave you a sense of self, but…I don’t know. It doesn’t. Instead it’s like your name, your self…you’re, like…” He holds out his hands, palm down, and makes a delicate scattering gesture with his fingertips. “Dispersed, I guess. Little bits of yourself spread too thinly over too big an area. I don’t know. It’s hard to describe.”
“No, I get it.”
“And then one day you wake up and you’re thirty-five and you have no fucking idea who you are, because you’ve spent your whole adult life being this…this artificial version of yourself. The one you thought you could stand to spread thin without going crazy. Only it turns out you were wrong about that, too.”
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Matt Lawless is sitting around talking about his feelings. I want to tell him how proud I am of him right now, in this moment, but I think that might have to wait. In his own way Matt is as much like a wild thing as his brother. Don’t want to jump the gun and startle him.
He runs his hands through his thick blond hair. “I don’t know, Rocky,” he says. “Maybe I’m not cut out for this shit.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean I’ve been here for six months, and I still have no idea who I am.”
I shake my head. “You want to know the truth? Neither did I, when I was where you are now.”
“No?”
“Uh uh. When I wrote my name on the wall, I didn’t have any kind of real certainty. Just a little glimmer of something like it, way back in the back of my head, saying ‘Okay, here you are. You’re somewhere, at least. At a place where you could start to figure it out, if you just give yourself the chance.’”
He nods. “And how’d that work out? Do you know who you are, now?”
“Does anyone? Socrates said ‘Know thyself’ and apparently some people thought that prescription was so dangerous they made the poor prick drink hemlock. No, I don’t know myself completely, but he also said that the unexamined life is not worth living, so I examined a few things and…yeah. Turns out I’m a lot different from the person I thought I was.”
“Gayer, for a start,” says Matt, turning flippant in an attempt to evade philosophy.
“Well, yeah. Kind of gay. And kind of shy.”
He snorts. “You? Shy?”
“I knew you’d laugh. Why do you think I loved cocaine so much, back in the day? Couple of snootfuls of Bogota’s best and I was in great shape. I was a rock god, not that prissy, perfectionist kid who gave himself carpal tunnel and bloody fingers trying to get it right.” I still remember the heat from the lights, the roars of the crowd, the sweat streaming between my shoulder blades. None of it felt real, not like the way little things feel real. Like when I woke up the other day to find Daniel shivering beside the steaming pool with his tongue held out like a child, trying to taste the scant snowflakes falling from the sky. You never told me it snowed in Santa Fe.
“When I look back on the life I used to have,” I say. “It gives me palpitations. Having so many people’s eyes on me all at once. I don’t think I could ever go back to that, even if my hands would let me.”
“So, what? You’re giving it all up?”
“No. I can’t, but I know I’ll never be able to play a touring schedule again. Not without the kind of pain prescriptions that no doctor should ever write for me, because I can’t be trusted with those kind of substances. I’ve played some intimate little gigs over in Portland. Still made me nervous, but it was a nice way to test out some new material.”
Matt gives me an approving look. “So you’re writing again?”
“Yep. I think that might be the way things are going. Easier on the hands, easier on my anxiety, and you can make a substantial chunk of change. Just…behind the scenes, which – as it turns out – is much more my thing. I’m not leaving the biz, Matt. I’m just…shifting gears, as Daniel likes to say.”
It’s turning chilly again. I never noticed it before, but Matt has the exact same upper lip as Daniel. It flares out from the top points of the cupid’s bow, curving upwards before it comes down to join the corners of the lips. On Daniel it gives him a fey, kind of Puckish look, but on Matt it looks brooding. It’s weird to see it. Weirder still how it makes me feel, like a ghostly image of desire, projected on the wrong person.
“So,” I say, because I have to. “You ready to shift gears on out of here?”
Matt’s breath comes out in a cloud. “I don’t know.”
“Not that I’m pressuring you, by the way. You do this in your own time.”
“Sure, sure,” he says. “I know you’re not. And I did say I was ready. It’s just…I don’t know. Give me a little more time. I want to say goodbye to some people.”
Robin, perhaps, whoever she is. “Okay,” I say, and resist the urge to pry. Just. “Take all the time you need. I can always extend the vacation.”
“Thanks. I’ll call you, okay?”
“You bet.”
I head back to the house. It’s quiet and feels empty, and I roam from room to room for a while before I realise Daniel is outside in the pool.
He lies flat, limbs outstretched, face up in the water. I can make out the tip of his nose, his toes, his knees. When he breathes a soft cloud joins the steam drifting from the surface of the pool.
I don’t think he sees me. Sometimes watching Daniel is like watching a rare, solitary animal. I was always in awe of the way he seemed to exist in his own quiet universe, the baby of the family who resisting pampering because he had his own thing going on and didn’t care to be disturbed all the time. It’s just one of the things he’s taught me, the way he’s so unafraid of being alone. I’m not sure when or how I learned the lesson, by some osmosis or by way of the things we’ve passed back and forth between us, all that sweat and spit and jizz, but he drew it out of me from somewhere, so that one day I could clearly say to myself in my head I will never play another stadium and face that thought without fear.
Reluctant to startle him, I slip out of my clothes and into the pool. He hears me and turns his head, righting himself in a soft swoosh of water. His hair is plastered wet to his head, his lashes damp spikes. I swim up to him and take him in my arms. “Hey, waterbaby.” He’s closer to the deep end than me and smiles at the way he finds himself weightless in my embrace. His kiss tastes of chlorine and cool air.
“Where’s Matt?” he asks.
“Not here. Not yet. He says he wants another night or two. To say goodbye to friends.”
“Oh. Is that something we should worry about?”
“I don’t know. On one hand I’m worried that he’s nervous, and on the other hand I’m relieved that he is. Shows he’s taking it seriously.”
Daniel sighs and floats backwards, his long legs stretching out in the water. “True,” he says. “It’s better than the last time we were in this situation, when we were begging him to go back in.”
I follow him deeper into the water. He dives under and I chase him through the blue, his body white and lithe. There’s not a mark on his skin, besides that one line of ink he surprised me with in Oregon. Bubbles stream from his lips as I catch him underwater and kiss him. We bob back up together and I coax him back into the shallows so that I can stand and hold him once more.
He breathes hard against my ear and pulls me close, stiff again and good to go. I love his appetite. From the beginning it blew me away, because everything about him seems so gentle. Soft skin, that soft, soothing voice that always sounded so innocent until I discovered how much he loves dirty talk, little sizzling whispers that pop back into your head when you least expect it, and make your toes curl so tight that the bones crack.
“This is nice and all,” he says, nibbling at my earlobe. “But are you sure Matt’s okay?”
“He’s great. Look at this way,” I say. “This means we have at least another night together. Just us. Alone. Naked.”
“Yeah,” he says, with a small frown. “That’s kind of a worry, actually.”
“How so?”
“I think I might have gone feral. Like, I might have forgotten how to wear clothes. If you showed me a pair of pants right now I might not remember how they work.”
I laugh and kiss him. “Good.”
He returns my kiss with this slow burning tenderness that crept up out of pain. The first times we made love after Matt’s suicide attempt put me in mind of that old joke – How do porcupines fuck? Carefully. We talked a lot and cried a lot, handling each other very gently, then one night he finally sighed and said, “Goddamn it, Rocco – quit treating me like I’m made of blown glass and fuck me.”
Looking in his eyes now I know he remembers that night. It felt like a beginning and an end. Another resurrection.
We bob down in the water to keep warm. “Do you want me?” he asks, with that soft, shyness that I find so hard to resist, because I know he’s anything but shy in bed.
“Very much.”
“Now?” he says, and I would, if it were warmer.
“Yes, but I think I’ll wait.”
Daniel arches a wet eyebrow. “Delayed gratification? We’re back on that?”
“Why not? Remember how hot the sex was?”
I see that light in his eye. God, we fucked in the bathroom of my psychiatrist’s office, with Daniel’s bare ass in the sink and my hand over his mouth.
“The parking lot escapade,” he says, with a knowing, smutty little smile.
“Right? Hot as fuck.”
“I came so hard I thought I was going to pass out.” He giggles and kisses me again. “You’re not going to make us go back into therapy are you? Just so we can have really bugfuck crazy sex?”
“Tempting,” I say. “But I think I’ve had enough head shrinkage for now.”
“And bugfuck crazy sex?”
“Well, obviously I’m never going to have enough of that…”
Daniel pounces. “So let’s go to bed.”
“Later. I have plans.”
“Oh?”
“First things first,” I say. “We’re going to take a long hot shower. I want to wash your hair, scrub your back…give you a massage, maybe.”
He licks the tip of my nose, teasing my lips with his tongue. “I’m listening.”
“Then,” I say. “I want to snuggle you up in a warm robe and have you follow me into the kitchen, so you can talk to me and make me laugh while I make us something to eat. And then after dinner we can talk some more, or look at the stars, or just curl up together and see where our hands go wandering…how’s that for a plan?”
“I like,” he says. “But I thought you didn’t make plans?”
“I didn’t,” I say, and realise that maybe I can now. “But I’m eighteen months clean, and I think maybe it’s time for us to bite the bullet and start making them.”
“Us?”
“Us.” I’ve never been sure of anything of my life. “Big plans. Scary plans. Happily ever after plans. What do you say, sweet thing?”
Stupid question. His smile says it. “Yes,” he says. “Oh my God, yes. I love you. I love you so much.”
“I know. I love you, too. I can’t believe how completely you stole my heart, but here we are, and we’re happy, aren’t we?”
He nods eagerly and kisses me again. He’s shivering.
“So happy,” he says.
“And cold.”
Daniel laughs. “A little, yeah.”
“Come on. Let’s go in.”
We walk up the pool steps hand in hand, and share a long, hot shower. He likes to wash my hair, and play with it, so that sometimes I’ll wake up and find he’s braided part of it in my sleep. I talked about cutting it off at one point – a fresh start, I said – but Daniel said no. “I love your hair,” he said. “When I’m combing it I think of those descriptions of the Sacred Band of Thebes, all those men who fought side by side as lovers. I’m sure I read somewhere this thing by an observer who watched them the night before battle, polishing their shields and combing one another’s long hair.”
He combs out my hair and tries to tempt me once more, but I’m hungry. I go into the big, open plan kitchen to knead out the pizza dough I made this morning. Daniel comes slinking in on bare feet, looking like he’s already dreaming up ways to distract me.
After dinner I give into temptation and eat Daniel for dessert. He lies spread wide open in the middle of the big bed, his knees in the air, a pillow shoved under his silky little ass for easier access. I can’t get enough of the noises he makes. I still remember the first time, how I had no idea what I was doing but that selfie he sent me was seared into my head like I’d been staring into the sun, and all I wanted to do was drag my tongue up the length of his smooth, candy pink cock. And then it somehow got even hotter, because he said – no, wailed – “Oh my God, what are you do-oing?” and that was that. Right then and there he was my new baby, the way my Gibson became my baby all those years ago when I first got an earful of its perfect tone. Here was my new instrument, and what a range he had – sobs, sighs, moans, screams, dirty words whispered in undertones, howls of love. A symphony of Daniel.
He coos with pleasure as I tongue-fuck him. It’s a soft, low sound deep in the back of his throat, but the more I lick the more I can hear his impatience building. I raise my head to look at him as I enter him with a wet finger. He wants me bareback, and it still leaves me breathless both with the sensation and the trust he’s placing in me. A quick slick of lube and we’re good to go, pounding and moaning, taking him up to eleven. He comes screaming because he can, out here in the middle of nowhere. I’m almost there, listening to the harsh just-fucked noises tearing out of his dry throat, but Daniel has other plans. He rolls me over, shoves the pillow under my ass, squirts on more lube and sits on my dick.
I’m still gasping at the sensation as he reaches over and snags a glass of water from the nightstand. I watch his throat work as he swallows and it hits me in that moment, how casually we treat one another’s bodies like well-loved toys by now. “Now,” he says, his voice still wet from his drink. “I want to watch you come in me.”
Different sounds, now. He’s soft, but he’s still getting off on watching my face while he fucks me with slow rolls of his hips and deliberate clenches of his muscles. He moans low and deep, almost growling as he moves his ass in small, hot figures of eight. “Moan,” he says, riding my bucking hips. “Let me hear you. Come on.”
The moment I relax my jaw it seems to pour out of me. I cry out, grab his hips hard and let go into him. It’s hot and wet and so damn good, and this time it’s my turn to tip him onto his back, so that I can push deep inside him the way I love to do when I’ve just come and I’m so sensitive that just the feel of him can make my spine fizz all the way up to my brain.
In those precious seconds afterwards there is a peace like nothing else on earth. When I look down at him he looks like a fantasy made flesh. If I’m honest with myself he hasn’t been just ‘my best friend’s brother’ since he was eighteen and stark naked on a bed in a modernist house not unlike this one. Since then he’s always been part of my weirdest, wildest dreams and sometimes I look at him and can’t believe he’s mine. My sweet thing.
We sleep curled together, spoon-fashion, his ass pushed up against me. In the morning the phone vibrates and I look over to see it’s Matt. Daniel stirs, greedy for my touch the way he always is before his mind is fully awake and he’s all feeling, no thought. I reach for the phone over his shoulder and Daniel twists his neck, clumsily pressing his dry mouth to mine in an ecstasy of sleepy love.
“One minute, baby,” I say, and run a hand over his hip before I get up out of bed. “Hey. What’s up?”
I can hear Matt breathing on the other end of the line. Finally he speaks. One word. “Okay.”
My mouth stretches in a smile that seems to have nothing to do with me. My eyes are full, because I know what that ‘okay’ means. He’s there. He’s where he needs to be, in a place where he can start saving himself.
“Ready?” I say.
I can hear the smile in his voice. No. The grin. “Ready,” he says. “Let’s go rock and roll.”