ADRIFTICA
by Maria Dahvana Headley
“You’re an ass, Heck Limmer!” my wife shouts out the upstairs window, and I watch my favorite leather jacket spontaneously combust on its way out into the snow. Just one of the many things Tania knows how to do. Some of them were nicer, back before she ran out of patience with me.
Tania used to sing a note that could make me come. I know how that sounds, but I’m not kidding. She could sing some other notes too, that did some other things. There are fuckups one can make, and I made them. I got scared of the woman I’d married. I blamed her for my fear, and I knew I couldn’t come close to what she could do. I was jealous, is the bottom line of what it was, and she knew it, but she hoped I was better, and I wasn’t.
Most people will tell you that writing about rock & roll in the middle of the heat death of the universe is questionable work in itself, especially if that gig means you wander the world, leaving your wife and kid alone to deal with the collapse of everything, but rock & roller is a personality type, whether I’m covering the End of Days tours or not. I’m a rotten husband. Tania knew it getting in, and so did I, but I convinced myself I was different, and she convinced herself I could change, and together we managed to raise a six-year-old who is maybe the only kid on Earth who actually likes music at all these days.
I’m back to my full-time cash circuit, the guy who follows the heroes of rock & roll from failing town to failing town writing down their dickwad deeds.
The climate’s been deep-fucked for a few years, and the trees are starting to crack down the centers. Fields are flooded and livestock is dying, and elsewhere on Earth, the sun has started to get too close. Frost on the roses and nobody can tell the seasons apart anymore. We get winter in the middle of summer, fall halfway through spring.
Still, all the old gods of rock remain on tour, their knees aching and their bones shaking. Writing about their shows, I feel like I’m writing about the encores of ghosts. The kids don’t come out for rock & roll anymore. They don’t even come outside. The sky’s a weird color, and those of us with death on the horizon don’t find it freaky, but the young have a problem with the way the air feels when it goes into your lungs, like you’re inhaling scotch. A band that can get anyone under fifty in the audience is an aberration.
Tania’s holed up in our house in Seattle now, growing her usual bower of plants that don’t exist anywhere else. Nothing stops her, not volcanic eruptions, not acid rain. Tania used to be a curly headed sweetheart and now she’s wearing a wig made out of snakes. She’s stopped trying to look like she belongs here.
I owe her money, and so about the time tsunamis and dictators are rising up and flowing over the land, I’m shambling my sorry ass to a gig at a dark club in Chicago to do a write-up on some kids with guitars. Akercock is the band. Obscure Elizabethan reference to Puck. I’ve been around long enough to find that annoying. I have no hope that Akercock will be anything better than the crap I’ve lately been covering. I’m expecting guitars and earnest singers doing the usual songs, one of them with a pretty voice, the rest with a little bit of strut and sin, none of it any real thing.
Instead—
I walk into the club and stop in my tracks, because I’m hearing a howl, a trilling sound echoing over the amps, like the song of some animal I’ve never heard of, and then a moan coming out of the mouth of the lead singer, joined by the rest of the band. Five boys, nobody wearing an air mask, none older than twenty-three. Long-haired skinny-legged cocktails of rage and despair, and like that, I’m typing in my head, writing this shit down.
Akercock’s music is a chilling cousin of every great band you’ve ever gone horizontal to—but it isn’t that, not really. It’s sexy, but also hurts the ears. And mostly, they aren’t singing words you know. They’re howling and whirring, like a flock of predatory birds over a kill, or like wind coming through a window high in a haunted hotel. All this is interspersed with electric guitar, and then the band begins to play in earnest, riffing their way across history. The band is a hard-on in song form. The kind of thing that makes you look behind you, because what’s there? Death. You’re never nineteen again, not once you’ve failed to appreciate it.
I’m hitting fifty and I don’t want to talk about my dick these days. No one else wants to talk about it either, but I have no shame when it comes to writing about bands. I’m not above diagramming my own decline.
The lead singer clings to the microphone like he’s drinking its blood. His eyes flash in the dark, and I find myself thinking about the ’10’s, that band that figured out how to phosphoresce and freaked everyone out. Nobody remembers their songs now. Only that they glowed.
Onstage at the KingKill Club in Chicago, Eron Chaos, the five-octave wailing lead singer of Akercock, looks down at the audience like he’s a rabid fox. His hands are covered in blood, and he shrugs for us all: this is the way it goes, boys. Then he licks his hands clean, a cat fixing up his paws.
That’s the on-the-record part, the part I’m going to write for the magazine. The off-the-record is that the guy’s eyes are golden and wide as a goat’s, and the muscles in his chest move like he’s full of snakes. I can see his heart beating, on both sides, and I get a pang of weirdness. He’s way too good-looking to be anyone who grew up in America. He reminds me of someone else I know, but the world is big and there are plenty of things in it.
The room isn’t empty anymore. Little flocks of groupies wearing one-eighth of nothing, raddled girls who’ve been wandering down the road in need of ecstasy and some kind of sainting. Where did they come from? They showed up without any noise, or maybe I’m just that into the music.
The air’s thick with a smell one part civet cat and one part flooded forest, and Eron Chaos stands shirtless in front of a room now packed full of fans, people throwing themselves at him, parking their cars in the middle of the road and running in. A girl perches on top of the bar and swan dives. The crowd carries her to him.
Immortal, I think, and then shake my head. A trite thought to have about a girl with long hair and a tight white dress standing in front of a boy in leather. The whole thing reminds me of my marriage, that same sense of things I don’t know and never will. It makes my heart feel like it’s leaking lava.
Thinking of Tania, I assume, is what cues up my vision of batshit.
The girl onstage turns around, looks out into the crowd, and starts to sing. Faint form after faint form climbs out of her mouth, all with tails and hooves, all with thin wings. The creatures flutter into the crowd and whisper in the ears of the kids dancing on the floor. There are maybe fifty of them. Maybe a hundred. I see, for a moment, a rift behind the band, a golden and green doorway, opening into some other place. I blink. No, it’s gone.
Back up to say: I have no small history with hallucinogens. Seriously, fuck those mushrooms I foraged in the PNW with Tania back when I was clueless and didn’t know that mushrooms absorbed radiation.
I’ve seen groupies before, but never like Akercock’s. These girls are the old-fashioned kind, dancing in the front row, their fingers clacking over their heads like tiny jaws, their nipples pointing out of their T-shirts like thorns. And plenty aren’t wearing shirts at all. When they cheer, they cheer like owls diving at prey. They dance like little kids in a sprinkler, but the kind of little kids you won’t mess with because they might be Satan in girl form.
I relax a little, watching them. If the band has groupies, it can’t be that weird. Whatever I just saw can easily be blamed on my own wrongful history. The main weird thing here is that the whole audience, I mean all of it, is in their twenties or younger.
As in, the audience is made up of kids.
I Lazarus up, phone Rolling Stone, and shout that they’d better send me to cover this for real.
The idiot on the phone gives a whine translating into O ancient tragedy of a writer, you won a Pulitzer like-that-even-matters so I’m supposed to let you slide and give you expenses. FINE.
I’m set. I insinuate myself backstage, flashing credentials and giving the journalist swagger that theoretically compensates for the gray in my beard and the undeniable hair in my ears.
“Bro,” I say to Eron Chaos, trying to keep my old man situation in check. “I’m Heck Limmer from Rolling Stone.”
The kid looks at me. “I’m not your brother, and that’s not your real name,” he says.
Of course it’s not. No one’s named Heck, unless they named themselves after a country-western misunderstanding in the eighties and it stuck, because they were the only Heck.
“Simon,” I say. “Originally.”
“I know who you are. You wrote that book, right? The one about bacchanals causing God hallucinations, heart attacks caused by bass, and whether you can deal with the devil or summon the dead if you play the right kind of song? I liked that book.”
It’s unclear whether he’s full of shit. I did write that book. It was famous. But it was before he was born. Also, this isn’t how it’s normally described. Normally people say it’s a book about Bowie.
“My name’s not my real name either,” he tells me, like I don’t know. You don’t get named Chaos by your parents. I don’t know anything about his parents, though. There’s no story on this guy.
“Wanna give me the real version?” I ask him. “For the record?”
He inhales, and sings a note, and the note goes on way the fuck too long, a tangled string of syllables that don’t sound like language, or at least, not like any language I know.
“Mind if I record that?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I mind. You don’t get to record that. It’s my name and it’s precious.”
They’re all eccentrics, but there’s something about the tone he uses, and I leave it alone for the moment. I tell the rest of the band I’m coming on the road with them, feature story, big deal. They just look at me, with their animal eyes. Not in a bad way. In a way that says I’m an asshole king of rock, motherfucker, and you’re going to listen to me sing. In a way that says You’d better listen to me sing, because I’m not gonna talk.
I glance toward the couch where Eron Chaos is making out with the girl from the stage. The two of them are a knot of leather and lethargy.
“Who’s that?” I asked the drummer.
“Mabel,” he says, and rolls his eyes. “He’s hers, she’s his, don’t mess with Mother Nature. Eron had a shit divorce, and everything’s been fucked since, all over hill and dale. That’s why we’re touring.”
Hill and dale. Please.
I let myself have one long look at Mabel with her long tangled hair and her white dress, and that’s all, because Mabel, if anything, is about a million years too young for me, and not only that, she reminds me, in a shitload too many ways, of Tania. Mabel’s teeth look like they belong to an animal, all of them pointy, in stark contrast to her painted lips. I look away as Chaos tears the front of her dress open. Poser, I think, reflexively, but then it feels realer than that. This isn’t a motel-room-wrecking band. This is something else. Something that calls me in.
Outside, the crowd’s dispersing, and I make my way with them. I get to my hotel and write a chunk of profile. I’m high as a drone on some powder I bought off a groupie. Akercock. I could’ve chosen a different name for the late-night radio hosts to say, but late-night radio doesn’t exist anymore. Nothing exists anymore. I could talk about pop eating itself. I could talk about punk rock and Sid, and the Ramones, all of whom I knew, in that fanboy drugswap way, before they fell down. I could talk about disasters. I don’t know the angle yet on this band, but I have a few ideas.
I’ve been around. I was there when grunge was born, midwifing that poor howling thing, screaming on the floor of some crap room in Seattle. I was there when it died, Cobain on the same floor, bleeding it out like he was killing a religion. I was there for part of punk rock, for Fugazi and King Missile, for Bad Religion, I was there for Public Enemy, I was there for clubs in places like Boise, Idaho, where all the kids had shaved their jack-Mormon mullets into Mohawks. I’ve been writing these pages for years, in a state of despair, feeling like a biologist diagramming a decline. Rock is dead, I’ve been writing, like God is dead, like love is dead, like butterflies are dead. Like polar bears are dead. Like the Great Barrier Reef is dead. Like all the dead things are dead.
I wasn’t expecting a band like Akercock.
I’m going on record now, readers, saying fuck that. I was wrong. I thought rock & roll was rotting. I thought it was so dead it was a bone sculpture in the desert, and then?
Then there was Akercock. People of America, I take it back, all the things I said about burying the dead.
Rock & roll is resurrected.
I’m so wired, so on, that I dial Tania. Is she even my wife anymore? My son picks up and calls me Daddy, and I remember better days before we all went crazy. I’m picturing him, looking at me, his strange, feral little face. I’m trying to tell him I love him, when Tania picks up and asks me if I know what time it is.
“No,” I tell her, and make an attempt at humor. “Later than you think?”
I met Tania at her own show, when she appeared onstage in a bright red dress, this brown-skinned woman with a twisted tangle of hair, eyes the color of an oil spill, and a mouth full of curses. She didn’t sing rock. She sang a twisted rhyming course like the rapids of a river, spitting it out syllable by syllable, a skittering indictment of everyone who’d ruined the corners of the earth, a history of America in geologic time, and then in leaders of fools. She named them all in a frenzy that scanned, from Pilgrims to preachers to power-mongers.
“You can be saved,” she sang, and called each person in the audience by name. Some kind of crazy trick, but it was a beautiful one.
Standing in the crowd, unnamed, apparently I wanted her to name me, too, and name me as her man.
I proceeded to fall at her feet and tell her I’d do anything to help her, and she looked down at me, put a boot on my back, and said sure, she’d stick around awhile, she’d just left a band anyway and had time to kill.
“Yes,” I said.
“Just so you know, I have a kid,” she said.
“Are you married?”
“Divorced. His dad’s not in the picture,” she told me, turned around, and I saw my son for the first time, in a sling on her back. He was sleeping there like his mother hadn’t been singing loud enough to wake the dead. He opened iridescent eyes and smiled a toothless smile at me, and I was done for. I adopted him the moment we got married.
That was right before the world fell apart.
Now, I tell Tania I’m heading off on tour, and Tania tells me to fuck right off. I sympathize with her, I do. She’s a rocker too. You can’t have two of those in a marriage, and she’s more than I am.
Before this band, Tania was the only thing I ever saw that made me wonder if the world was bigger than I thought.
“Should we go back?” I said once. “For a visit? Don’t you miss your family?”
“You can’t go back,” she told me. “Not once you come here. They don’t let you go if you’re from where I’m from. I made a big mess when I left. I wasn’t supposed to go, and there was a price.”
This was the only time I ever saw her sad. I assumed some things about where she’d come from. I figured it was another continent, judging by her accent from everywhere at once, but when I asked, she looked at me, told me I was an asshole, and said, “There are countries there, you know, and they’re not the same country. It’s not just one big heap of same.”
“Is that where you’re from?” I asked, offended that she assumed my whiteness meant I didn’t know anything about anything. “I know what Africa is.”
“No,” she said. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a work shirt, and she looked almost—I caught myself thinking the word “human,” which was the wrong word. She didn’t look human. She looked like the queen of the coast.
She was breastfeeding our son, and he was singing to himself as he nursed. I could see plants growing in my peripheral vision.
“Adriftica, maybe,” she said. “Call it that. Call it somewhere you can’t get to unless they want you to get to it. I left my band, and I left my country, and I don’t want you to try to fix it. It was a bloody breakup. Now I’m trying to clean up the mess it made. I thought I could fix it, but no one wants to listen. You’ve never been married before. You don’t know what it’s like when you leave. You don’t know how it feels.”
She looked up at me, and the tears in her eyes reflected light in a way I’ve never seen any other tears reflect. She was like a prism.
“The world isn’t ending because of you,” I told her.
“He’s tipping it over,” she said. “But I had to leave him. You don’t know.”
The last time I heard any band play like Akercock, it was Tania alone in front of a half-empty room, wearing a torn red dress, with thorns in her hair, looking like she was in the middle of running away from something. A baby on her back, bare feet, singing something that made the room shake. People were looking at her like she was magic, but no one was doing anything about what she was singing. She was trying to get people to stop doing all the things that make money for millionaires, and make water dry up in towns where no millionaires live. She was a revolutionary, I guess, and that’s what made me crazy for her, but then things took a steep slide, and everyone put their hands over their eyes and ears. The world went wooden roller coaster.
Tania told me over and over, those first years, that she was trying to save the world, and sometimes she told me it was her fault the world was collapsing. I talked her down. Obviously not her fault, one, and who could save the world, two? I never felt like I could. I felt like I’d be better off getting stoned, and so I got stoned.
In fact, that’s my plan right now. I get high, pass out, dream of wings.
The next day, I’m fucking off onto the Akercock tour bus, rolling a wheelie bag full of what I need, prescriptions and notebooks, condoms and vitamins. Air mask.
Normally, I do the whole tour with the band. I write in my notebook, record the band’s shit-talking as we drive up the coast, or down the coast, or deep into the Midwest. It’s not the old days, but touring’s the one thing that’s not too different. Upholstered seats. Driver. Video games. Everybody on the bus sending texts to the girl they kind of remember and plan to fuck in the next town. I remember when it was all pay phones and hope. Now it’s easier to get laid. Not that most of these bands even want to. Mostly, they want to nap. Not this one.
This band doesn’t sleep, literally.
Mabel says “Touch Eron and get a shock” and she’s not kidding. She’s bleeding a little bit, from one of her ears, and I feel old even telling her. There he is, wearing radioactive pants all day and night, not giving a fuck. First gig of the tour, I’m in the front row with the groupies, and they’re crying, and he’s lighting them up. Their fingers on the front of the stage. I can see their skeletons through their skin. It’s a show. We all know it. But it’s a damn good one.
Onstage, Eron Chaos is twenty-two years old, six foot three, a look about him like he’s never been loved. Offstage, he has an elderly dignity punctuated by obscenity.
Eron won’t generally talk to me. I interview a girl at the back of a gig, who says he gives it all up when he sings, “so listen to him sing, stupid. He isn’t safe onstage. He scares me, and I’m not just scared for him. I’m scared for myself. But it feels good. I’d follow him anywhere.”
She gives me a smile that still has baby teeth. It’s surreal. I haven’t seen a fan this young in years. I feel like I’m dead and walking through an imaginary world, one that conforms to my dreams. These are the sixties I didn’t live through.
A couple tours lately, there’ve been accordions on board, and fiddles. Somebody singing “Hard Times,” which I never appreciate. No matter how hard the times are, rock bands are supposed to be playing songs about screwing in the bathroom, driving too fast, and breaking the world apart. Yeah, times are hard. Yeah, times are bleak. Yeah, you want to talk about the things going on?
I want to talk about the music. The music is always the guts of the revolution. The music scene these days is nostalgia trying to mash up with science fiction, because people stopped wanting to imagine the future but still liked the costumes.
Akercock, on the other hand, is an orgy, akin to watching the gods of rock in bed together, straight boys in glitter eyeliner dancing with their pants tight enough to tourniquet, but some kind of other element alongside all that too-
I stop there because I know what that element is, but I don’t know how to write it. It’s something I’ve been craving like a drug since things fell apart with Tania. Adriftica, I think, trying to imagine the boundaries of that country.
Every night I see that thing behind the band, and it’s not a light cue. It’s not a thing the band brings along. The rest of the band just keeps playing, and they grin at Eron, who writhes in front of a door to elsewhere. Every time I see it, I want to run to it, and every time it’s just a drum kit and a brick wall when they stop playing. Mabel dives every night, and half the time she just disappears. The crowd loves it. I don’t. Magic tricks and mirrors, but none of that appears on the bus. I miss how they do things, and no one will tell me.
“It’s only rock & roll, bro,” says the bassist, and I say, “It’s not,” and he looks at me and shakes his shoulders, and for a moment I swear I see a set of dark blue-black wings, but then they’re gone again, and he’s in the tightest pants and a shirt cut to the top of them, his skin glowing a little, like he’s been roaming in the psychedelic pastures of the PNW, like he’s been there too, and I think about asking him if I can score anything, but I don’t do the band’s drugs, and they don’t do mine.
The audiences of kids keep getting bigger.
“How did Akercock start?” I ask the drummer. Drummers are always easier than the rest. They’ll talk. Not that I even know this guy’s name. He changes his mind every time he tells me. Says he can’t really recall, and people’ve called him lots of things.
“Somebody hired us to play a gig,” he says, “and we came out to do it.”
“But how did you start? Before someone hired you, right, you were already a band?”
“Somebody hired us,” the drummer says, “to get rid of some pests. They paid us a lot of money.”
“You were that bad?”
“We were that good,” he says. “Know how hard it is to get rid of pests? This was, what, an industrial moment, sky black with soot, everyone burning coal. We got the pests and took them down.”
I look at him suspiciously, because this is the classic exaggeration of boys who think they’re cool. I’ve seen it before. Mythologizing themselves into two hundred years of history.
“Only problem was, they kept coming back. We took an entire generation of disaster makers under, trying to keep things good, but then a new generation was born, and they kept making the same mess. We can only do so much about the mess, even if it’s been our job to balance things out. Certain point, the mess is too big to balance. Now it’s maybe too late. Things happened, man. We were kids when this started. We had enough energy to fix things. Or, they did, together, before the breakup. Now? I don’t know.”
That gives me something, at least, though it’s not what I wanted.
“So you met when you were all kids?”
“We met a long time ago,” he says. “This is our last tour. We’re looking for someone out here, and once we find that someone, we can go. Old business, man, and not yours.”
“I’m going to make you stars,” I say.
The drummer just looks at me. “We’ve done that before,” he says. “It was lonely out there.”
They don’t need me. The clubs on this leg of the tour are, without notice, arenas full of worshipful teenagers.
“We just want to get done with what we’re doing,” the drummer says. “This place is shit. We’re looking for someone who took off years ago, and everything’s been a disaster since. Look at Eron. He’s so high he can’t even walk. He keeps his revels going here, and it’s fucked things up.”
“What should I call you for this quote?” I ask him.
“Call me the piper,” he says. “Old stories, right?”
“Old stories,” I say, feeling like I’ve strained a muscle in my back. I’m sick of old stories. I want all the new things at once. I want my son here on this bus, to see if he likes these songs. I want my wife, because I know she’d like them.
Every night on this tour, I dream of Tania, who I never deserved. I was a writer and she was something else entirely. I dream of the way she made my heart feel like it was going to burst, the way she and I got married in the middle of the redwoods, before the redwoods died. I remember when guitars were made out of wood. I remember when mushrooms grew out of the dirt, and not out of metal. I remember when she and I got high for fun and not for desperation, listening to records in my old place in San Francisco, before San Francisco fell off the edge of the world and dropped to the bottom of the ocean and Tania went dark. She wouldn’t come out of her room for days. She sat in the closet crying.
That was before our son started to talk. He couldn’t pass for anything other than what he was. There was no way we could put him in school, not without panicking, and she was too scared to leave him alone, so she stopped playing gigs. A couple of years into our marriage, she quit singing. She said it was no use, that everything was ending.
She started wearing snakes on her skull. I noticed that everything was basically invented by the ancient Greeks, and that we were right back there again, rains of frogs and seas full of monsters. The music was the same, I knew it, and when I heard it, I figured I was still part of a long tradition. I got obsessed with Robert Johnson, and with celestial harmonies, with the kinds of mold you could take to make sure you saw God. I mashed that all up with music and magic and wrote a book, won a prize, stood on a stage, and saw my wife in the back of the room with her middle fingers in the air as I made a speech in which I thanked every man in rock, but not her.
Four weeks into the tour I’m no further ahead than I was when I started, sitting in my seat on Akercock’s bus.
No one would blame you, if you weren’t at these concerts, for wondering where the party is, wondering if there’s a party on Earth anywhere now, wondering if everyone’s died and we just keep rolling on. That could happen. But this band plays, and you’re reminded of something older, of the kind of music you heard in the next room when you were a little kid, record player, parents dancing barefoot in the dark.
I call Tania a few more times, and get no one. I take a sip of a beer, and write. I’m losing my rules for what I’ll put on the page. Now it’s the crazy along with the regular road stuff.
One night Mabel scratches a song into the side of a car with her fingernails, and Eron Chaos sings a song so beautiful and poisonous that the back wall of the club shakes and starts to fall, brick by brick, backward, until all we can see is a field of flowers behind the band, and in that field, a whole new audience waiting to listen. Everywhere Akercock tours, there are moments of summer while they play, frosting over as we drive away, and I remember what summer used to be like in America, the way bees orbited drunkenly around the flowers, the way honey dripped from hives.
The only place like that is Tania’s garden now. I call her again, and it just rings, but at least it rings. The country is air masks and plague, and I’m still covering the history of rock, and I don’t know why, because there’s nowhere to roll to.
“Daddy?” says my kid, answering at last. “We ate a cake for your birthday. Mommy made it.”
I remember that it’s my birthday. I look down at my jeans and wonder what the hell I’m doing. This is supposed to be the right way to do it, fifty years old and still cool, and instead my family is celebrating me while I’m celebrating Akercock.
In the background I can hear Tania singing under her breath, some notes that aren’t notes. They remind me of the band, suddenly, and that makes me feel—
“Where are you today?” I ask my kid. “Can you put your mom on the phone?”
“Daddy,” says my son. “I made a tree grow out of the middle of a lake.”
“What?”
“I made a star be born,” my kid insists. “Mommy taught me how.”
I cover the phone with my hand. “Where are we right now?” I ask the drummer.
“Putting a belt around the belly of the world,” he says. “You wanna get off the bus? We’re getting to the point we have a big thing to do. Last show, we’re going to have some special effects.”
The band’s singing a little, working out a melody, and I hold the phone up so that my son can hear it.
“Listen,” I say.
“Simon,” says my wife. The sound of her voice saying my name makes my ears hurt. I’ve been running since the last day I saw her, and I haven’t managed to stop calling. I wasn’t good for her, and I wasn’t good for him. This isn’t her usual voice, though. This isn’t rage. This is confusion.
“Hi there,” I say back to her, like this is normal.
I hold my phone out from my ear, expecting a stream of curses. There’ve been bad effects in the past. I should just hang up. My wife has a serious temper. Once I woke up knee-deep in ice, my feet blue inside blocks, and another time I was covered in fur, not just my ears, but my face, my whole body, and all I could do was wheeze. I’m allergic to fur. There are a few things I’ve been trying not to think about since the moment we met.
“Where are you?” Tania asks.
“On tour with a band called Akercock, about to be huge,” I tell her. There’s silence for a moment, and then there’s a garbled sound, a choking roar.
My wife starts to sing. Out from my phone it goes, a crazy twine of verse, no words I know, no words I want to know. Not how she usually does it, not a naming of elements and evildoers, not a list of hopes and of insects. Not rhyme and not staccato, but a song I know from listening to it every night on the road. On the bus, the band looks up, their eyes glittering.
Mabel’s over to me in a moment. “Who’re you on with?”
The bassist is next to me faster than I expected, and so are Eron and the drummer, all of their languid selves suddenly mercury, their skin shining, their hair standing up like stalagmites.
“Who’s singing?”
Eron is beside me, breathing into my ear. He says a name into the phone, and it’s a name like his own.
“Not anymore,” Tania says, very clearly, in tones I know all too well. “Let him go. You won’t get me that way. I won’t come home. I have my son and I have my life, and I’m over you. Don’t you have Mab now? Have her! Fuck my sister! I live here now, and I’m not coming back.”
“You’re breaking the world,” Eron says. “This is your fault.”
“I’m allowed to leave our marriage without you ending the world!”
“You’re not allowed to take my son!” Eron screams. “Bring me my child, or all the children come with me!”
She hangs up. I’m left with only the sound of wherever she is, the echo of it over the air.
“Fuck,” says Eron, turning to me, and everything about him is different than it was. All his cool is gone. He’s crackling, like ball lightning. “Who are you? Why would she? With you?”
“Heck Limmer,” I say, because there I am, standing in front of a guy half my age, whose muscles seem to exist without intentions. “That’s my wife,” I say. “On the phone.”
The drummer has a set of pipes, and he’s playing some kind of weird tune on them. He stops, and looks at me, and a bark of laughter comes out of his mouth.
“Of course,” he says. “My mistress with a monster is in love. Of course she is.”
“Was it you?” Eron says, and moves through space faster than he should, to the drummer’s side.
“Not me, man,” says the drummer. “You’re the one who cheated on her. You thought that was a plan? You thought she wouldn’t find someone new?”
“What’s the deal with you and my wife?” I ask, finally, though I’m pretty deep in knowing too much right now.
Eron Chaos looks at me with unexpected misery all over his face. “We had a son. She took him when she left, and—”
“She stole him,” Mabel says. “They got divorced six years ago, and she wasn’t supposed to take the child, but you know, man, she took the child.”
She says this in a way that is obviously relief. I’m not relieved. Certain things are dawning on me.
“It was the kind of breakup that makes you hate the songs you used to sing,” says the drummer, whose name I’ll probably never know. “The kind of breakup that makes everyone hate all the songs anyone ever sang. The kind of breakup that makes the leaves fall from the trees and the ground go gray, and the seasons go crazy, frost on the roses, floods over the cornfields, plague in the population. There aren’t any divorces where we’re from. It’s not done.”
“She left the band, and on her way out, she tipped the world over. There’s no option but starting from scratch now,” says Eron.
“You’ve been here, man,” says the drummer to me. “This place is broken.”
It seems very clear to me that I should’ve known who my wife was for a long time already.
“Let me off the bus,” I say, and Eron looks at me for a moment.
“You’ve seen my son?” he asks. “You’ve held him?”
“He’s mine,” I manage. “Adopted. I’ve been raising him.”
He gives me a haughty look. “He’s the prince of Adriftica,” Eron says. “And I’m the king.”
“How old are you?”
“Older than I look,” he says, and gazes at me, his long, slender form, the tips of his ears pointed, and his face too handsome for human use.
“Keep the old man,” says Mabel, and I feel lethargy come over me like an allergy to air. My knees are too weak to support me.
“It’s time to come off tour,” the drummer says. “It’s time to start over clean.”
“We can’t leave the queen here,” Eron says.
“She won’t come with us,” says the bassist. “She’s never been anyone’s to command.”
“I won’t leave my son,” Eron says.
“She won’t let us take them,” says the drummer. “Tania’ll come, and she’ll bring the boy.”
They leave me alone to panic, writing reflexively, half-asleep in the dead of night, stuck on a bus with the other father of my child.
In the middle of the night, someone’s playing acoustic guitar, and I wake from a dream of that high school fantasy of being part of the band, two chords and windows down, singing out into the highway. Everyone becomes a music journalist for that dream. This time, though, it’s nothing benign. Akercock is playing a summoning, and I don’t know if I want to be here for it.
I can hear Eron’s voice, singing a call in a language I don’t know.
We’re driving through a city and like that, there are kids all around us, out of nowhere. I see them running at the bus, like they’ve been waiting for us, straight out of the dark. They’re all bright-eyed and looking lost, and most of them are in their pajamas and underwear.
Some kind of mob planned for publicity? The bus pulls over with a lurch. I get my jacket on and get out. The group outside isn’t just girls. It’s teenagers of all sorts, but that’s what Akercock lives to play for, whatever they are, kids from everywhere.
There are kids for miles. No way for them to have just arrived. They’ve either been here, or they’ve run out into the night and come to this spot on the highway, but whatever happened, there are teenagers as far as the eye can see.
“What’s going on?” I ask Mabel, and she looks at me, her eyes glowing.
“Last concert,” she says. “She takes the child; we take the children.”
Eron Chaos wriggles his way out the roof of the van until he’s standing on top of it. Then he’s playing a song just for them.
This isn’t the normal rock song, though it’s got the usual moaning and wailing. This song fills my head with a kind of strange vision. I find myself kneeling on the sidewalk, but my mind is full of marching, of people in bright cloaks and armfuls of flowers, kids not in their T-shirts, but dressed to kill, leather and sequins and electric pants to match Eron’s.
The rift is there behind him again, a bright gold and green place, and it opens out of the night, the stars making way for it.
“Come on, children,” sings Eron Chaos, and his voice is a hymn. His voice is caustic harmonic spite mixed with soul, and he dances on the roof of the van, his fingers opening up and fire hanging from each one. His eyes are gold and his hair is moving without any wind.
I watch the children start to move toward him. I watch them begin to enter the rift, walking one by one into it. I feel like I can’t move, my muscles full of tar and honey. It’s the song. I try to stand, but I can’t get up. Old man, I think. I don’t have any business here, but here I am.
“What’ll happen to them?” I ask Mabel, who is standing on the roof of the van, looking ready to dive and disappear.
She shrugs. “Something,” she says. “What do you care? The world is ending, buddy.”
The band is playing fully now, and I look up and out into the city. I can see children of Earth coming to us, from everywhere, out of their houses for the first time in some of their lives, walking into something that is either fairyland or something else entirely. There are hundreds of them. Thousands.
They’re blank-faced and slack-jawed, and they are going to their doom, maybe, or to salvation, and I can’t tell. The drummer is playing those pipes again, and drumming a beat that can only be made with eight arms. Eron Chaos is shining with a light that’s coming up out of the rift, and on his head I can see a crown.
I know one thing. It’s all I’ve got.
It’s a lullaby. I made it for the son I adopted, the child born of the fairy queen and her husband, the baby I met and loved and chose.
Our son was trouble. He had to be held tightly, night after night, because when he slept, he shifted from a baby into other things. Some of them were beautiful, and some were terrible. Hummingbird, polar bear, burning brand, starfish, electric eel, brick, straw, rat. Once he became a cloud filled with acid rain and poured down onto the sidewalk, and another time he became a lump of coal.
Tania could sing a note that could make me sleep, and a note that could make me wake, but she had no notes that could make our child stop screaming.
He isn’t my biological son, but I raised him. The moment I saw him, I knew what kind of thing he was. Our baby was a rock & roller, and he wanted rock & roll.
I swallow hard. I try to breathe. I’m not a singer. I’m a writer. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I start to sing that lullaby anyway, over the noise of the best band on Earth, over the magic they’re doing, over the piper summoning the last hopes of salvation into a cave underground.
I sing as loudly as I can sing, a lullaby of Earth and all its dirty concerns. Prayers that switched over to poems when Cohen died, when Bowie died, when Prince died. Funk and rock turned religion. Sinatra-styled stun-gun supernatural soul. I sing Kurt Cobain and will the world not to shift into a full-on disaster. I sing a chorus of the purple one’s grind, and three bars of Patti Smith, and Joan Jett and a bar or two of Elvis and some notes made famous by the Rolling Stones because there is no satisfaction, but you stay on Earth anyway. I’m singing like I’m actually a singer, when really I’m a journalist who’s spent his life following the boys in the band around and writing them down like I was the scribe to the Apocalypse.
I shift the song and sing the rest of what I know, the song I learned from Tania, which is a song of names. All the names of Earth and elsewhere. The city moves around the van, and the band is barely playing now, because the song of their queen shuts them up, even if she’s not here to sing it.
Even if she doesn’t want to sing it with me. Even if I fucked everything up too badly, and even if I can’t save the world. I start to close the rift with my song, shaking the edges of the boundary between fairyland and here.
Eron Chaos is a blinding light of fury and guitar, and he’s standing above me suddenly, looking down on my poor mortal self. I’m like a garter snake beneath a shovel.
It’s only now that I see my wife, standing in the street in her red dress with my son holding her hand. She’s wearing my old leather jacket, the one I thought she burned to ashes, and she’s watching me, her eyes glowing.
She nods, and in her nod is forgiveness for my failures. In her nod are the redwoods and the coast of California, the logs with the mushrooms under them in the woods in Washington, the way we lay on our backs looking up at the meteor shower one August in the desert, the way she told me she loved me at four in the morning, and then made me scream, the way she said she was no longer a tourist but a resident, the way she let me put my ring on her finger and put hers on mine, and the way we held hands as we slept.
I’ll take this dream, if it means I get to hear Tania naming the world all over again, and beside her, my kid, naming too, rhyming back to her, singing the words for grass and leaves, singing the words for dropping out of a band and staying dropped, singing the words for love and for choosing to stay where you live instead of running back into a place made of light and drift. They’re singing the words for saving this place.
Eron Chaos is before Tania, standing in his electric suit, his teeth clenched, black tears running down his face. My wife stands in front of him. I’m terrified she’s on her way back to Adriftica, but if I was born for anything I was born to run lucky in the world of rock. Maybe I was born to lose her. It was worth the loss, the love.
“Titania,” he whispers.
“Oberon,” she replies. She takes his hands in hers. She looks into his eyes.
“I lay no claim on you,” Tania says. “Release yours on me.”
My son is beside her, and I see him reach for his father. Eron picks him up, this child whose voice—I know from experience—can call down bald eagles, whose laughter can make banks of flowers bloom in the dark, whose first steps made a ridgeline in our backyard, whose first meal caused every field in a hundred miles to fill with food ready to harvest. He holds my son, and my son laughs.
In spite of myself, I see the resemblance, my child too handsome for humans and too strange for kindergarten. I see how he might, one day, strut across a stage singing, strumming a guitar and bringing a revelation. I see how he might be exactly what his other father is, but better.
“He’s my child,” Eron says. “All I want is time.”
I know the expression on Tania’s face. We’ve had enough arguments over the years. My love has a temper. She is also fair, when she feels fair.
“Summers,” she tells him. “Let him camp in the bower. Take him spinning with the spiders and singing with the songbirds.”
He looks at her for a long moment. Then, at last, he nods to his band. To Mabel, whose fingers twist into his. To the drummer, who vibrates with a rhythm only he can feel. To the bassist and to the van, which shakes itself like a horse ready to gallop.
“Summers,” he says, and kisses his child. “That means you must bring summer back.”
Tania moves her hands and trees begin to bloom.
Eron Chaos does a slide on his knees with his guitar, and then he’s gone into the green. One by one, the rest of the band disappears, ending with the drummer, whose wings are spread fully as he departs.
The city is all kids, all around me.
Here she is, this woman I’m still married to, naming the pain, singing the words for fixing the things that are broken. Here she is, standing in the center of nowhere, this rock & roll queen who came from under the hill. My wife and son are stamping their feet and spitting syllables, and around them, all around them, the children look up and start to learn the words for fixing the bright and broken world.
There was a concert here, in the snowy dead of the night. After it was finished, the children who came to it walked out across the country, and as they walked, they sang the melody beneath their breath, shifting water into ice and smog into air, a song that called to the ghosts of bees and the bones of birds, a song that brought back summer and winter to the world, a song that sang the seasons back into balance.
You know, and I know, if there’s rock, there’s gotta be roll. If there’s a place beneath, this must be the place above, where we stand in an audience listening together, where we sing along to the songs we know.
And then we go to the hotel together, trundle bed and a queen-size, coffee and champagne, me and my family. Our son goes to sleep with his lullaby. I hold my wife in my arms, and she holds me back, as tightly as she holds the world.
. . . we see
The seasons alter. Hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension.
We are their parents and original.
—William Shakespeare,
Titania, A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Act II, Scene I