The Last Days Read online

Chapter 7

  I wondered how they'd come together: a junkie, a rich girl, two scruffy boys, all of them younger than me, probably too young to be serious about their music. Maybe they were all rich, and the boys had dressed down just to hire me cheap.

  That was a dirty trick if they had, and I don't play with people who trick me. But I wasn't sure yet.

  When my watch said sixteen seconds left, I picked up my duffel bags and crossed the street.

  "Hey, Alana," he said. "You made it. "

  "Alana Ray," I corrected him. "Nine o'clock on Sunday morning. "

  "Yeah. Pretty messed up, huh?" He shrugged and rolled his eyes, like the time had been someone else's idea. Someone annoying.

  "You got my eighty bucks?" I asked, still drumming two fingers against the strap of one duffel bag.

  "Sure. . . um, eighty?" His eyes narrowed a bit.

  I smiled. "Seventy-five. Just messing with you. "

  He laughed in a way that said five bucks meant something to him, and the money came out of his pockets in crumpled singles and fives, even ten dollars' worth of quarters rolled by hand.

  I relaxed a little. This boy was dirt poor. There wasn't any kind of rich person who'd go to that much trouble to trick me.

  "Those all your drums. . . um, buckets?" he asked, staring at the duffel bags.

  "Don't take up much space, do they?" I said. But really I hadn't brought everything, not for the first time. No sense hauling forty-two pounds of gear if all these kids wanted was a drum machine with dreadlocks.

  "Must be easier to carry than a real set. "

  I nodded. I've never carried a real drum set, but it seemed like it would be hard.

  He counted up to seventy-five, which seemed to clean his pockets out. I felt a little bad about my eighty-dollar trick, and my feet started tapping.

  "Um, there's one thing," he said, shouldering his guitar and screwing up his face, nervous and flickering again. He was kind of cute, all uncomfortable like this. I felt myself worrying about him, like a kid walking down the street with one shoelace untied.

  "What is it?" I said.

  "It'd be better if you didn't mention the money to Pearl. "

  "Who's Pearl?"

  "She's the. . . " He frowned. "Just don't mention it to anyone, I guess. Okay?"

  "Fine with me. " I shrugged. "Money's the same, whoever gives it to you. "

  "Yeah, I guess it is. " He nodded, his face serious like I'd said something profound instead of simply logical. That was the point of money, after all: crisp and clean or wrinkled or disintegrated into quarters - a dollar was always worth a hundred cents.

  We headed on in.

  Upstairs was like every practice room: distracting. Four walls and a ceiling of undulating foam, the pattern shimmering in the corners of my vision. The disconcerting tangle of cables on the floor. The stillness hovering around us, the air robbed of echoes.

  The small girl with eyeglasses took over, introducing me to everyone.

  "This is Zahler. He plays guitar. " The big burly dog-boy smiled broadly. He hadn't wanted to pay me, I remembered.

  "And Minerva. It's her first time too. She's going to sing for us. "

  The junkie girl took off her dark glasses for two seconds, squinting in the fluorescent lights, and smiled at me. She was wearing a long black velvet dress, as shiny as the streets after it rains, a tangle of necklaces, and dangling earrings. Her long black nails glistened, dazzling me like the undulating ceiling.

  "She's a singer?" I asked. "Huh. . . I'd have figured she was a roadie. "

  They all laughed at my joke, except for Minerva, whose smile curled tighter. Her teeth sent a little shiver toward me. I touched my forehead three times, blinked one eye, then the other to still the air.

  "And I'm Pearl: keyboards," the other girl said. "You're Alana, right?"

  "Alana Ray. One name," I said, my voice tremulous from Minerva's stare.

  "Cool," she said. "Hyphenated?"

  I grinned. I'd known the little rich girl was going to ask that. It bugs some people, me having two first names that are invisibly stuck together.

  "No. Carbonated. Just a little bubble of air. "

  No one laughed, but no one ever does. That joke was just for me.

  Setup was quick. The boys just had to plug in and tune, and Pearl had only one small keyboard. She balanced it on the room's mixing console, where she could control everyone else's sound. The junkie girl adjusted her microphone stand higher, then fiddled with the light switches, her movements still jerky and insectlike. Even though she was still wearing those dark glasses, she turned down the lights till I could hardly see.

  I didn't complain, though. Her glare had made me shiver once already.

  I set up in one corner, two walls of foam padding at my back, twenty-one paint buckets arranged before me, the stacks growing taller from right to left, one to six buckets high. (S6 = 21)

  I pulled out six contact microphones, my own mixer and effects boxes, and went to work. I don't like rehearsal spaces or recording studios as much as the open air - but at least I can bring my own echoes.

  Pearl watched me clip the mikes to my stacks of plastic, run their cables into the mixer, then route them out through the effects.

  "Paint cans, huh?" she asked.

  "Paint buckets," I corrected, and saw Moz smile for the first time.

  "Uh, sure. How many channels you need?" she asked, fingering the sliders on the mixing board. "Six? Twelve?"

  "Just two. Left and right. " I handed her the cables.

  Pearl frowned as I turned away from her. This way, she couldn't control my mix from her board. It was like she wanted me to give her my eggs, my cheese, and my chives all in separate bowls. But instead I was handing her the whole omelet, cooked just the way I liked it.

  She didn't argue, though, and I saw that Moz was still grinning.

  "Everybody ready?" Pearl asked. Everyone was.

  Minerva swallowed and walked up to grasp her mike with one pale hand. The other held a notebook, which I could see was open to a page of chaos, like the handwriting of the unluckiest kids back at my special school.

  Moz just nodded, not looking up at Pearl, flicking his cords around on the floor with one toe.

  The burly boy (whose name I'd already forgotten; should have written it down) was the only one who smiled. He leaned his head down to stare closely at his strings, setting his fingers carefully. Then, concentrating hard, he began to play. It was a simple riff, thick and dirty.

  Pearl did something on the board, and the sound softened.

  I listened for a moment, then tuned my echoes to ninety-two beats per minute. Moz started playing, high and fast. I thought it was a strange way to start, too complicated, like a guitar solo bursting out of nowhere. But then Pearl entered, playing a gossamer melody that wrapped a shape around what he was doing.

  I listened for a while, not sure what to do. I had a lot of choices. Something simple and lazy, to give the music more backbone? Or should I swing the beat, a little off-kilter, to loosen it up? Or follow Moz's superquick fluttering, like rain against the roof?

  I always relished this moment, right before starting to play. It was the one time my fingers didn't tremble or drum against my knees, when I could hold my hands out steady. No reason to hurry.

  Also, I didn't want to make a mistake. There was something fragile about this music, as if it would fly apart if pushed in the wrong direction. Pearl, Moz, and the other boy thought they knew one another already, but they didn't yet.

  I began carefully, only a downbeat at first, building the pattern one stroke at a time - simple to complicated, less to more. Then, just before it got too crowded, I slipped sideways, subtracting one stroke for each I added, gradually shifting the music around us, but leaving it still tenuous, directionless.

  For a moment I thought I'd made a mistake. These were just kids. Maybe they needed to be pushed in one direction or another, or maybe they'
d wanted a drum machine, after all.

  But then the junkie girl came in.

  There were no words, though she held one of the notebooks open in front of her. With the microphone pressed close to her lips, she was humming, but the melody emerged from the speakers sharp-edged and keening, cutting through the mass of intricacies we'd built.

  Suddenly the music had focus, a beating heart. She wrapped the rest of us around herself, piercing my gradual shadows with a single ray of light.

  I smiled, having a rare moment of absolute comfort in my own skin, every compulsion satisfied, the clockwork of the whole world clicking into place around my drumming. Even if they were young and flawed, these four had something. Maybe a happy accident was happening here, like the first time I'd ever noticed the echoes from the street matching my footsteps. . .

  Then the strangeness began, something I hadn't seen since I was little. The air started to glitter wildly, my eyelids fluttering. This was more than ripples of heat from summer asphalt, or the shimmers I saw when someone was angry at me.

  Shapes were forming on the cable-strewn floor, and faces materialized in the patterns of the soundproofing: I glimpsed expressions of hurt and fear and fury at the edges of my vision, as if my medication was failing.

  I imagined dropping my sticks, reaching into my pocket, and spilling out my pills to count them. But I was positive I'd taken one that morning, and the labels always warned that they built up slowly in the bloodstream: weeks to take effect, weeks to fade away. Never stop, even if you think you don't need them anymore.

  Minerva was glowing, her pale skin luminous in the darkness. Her movements had smoothed out, no longer insectlike. She was singing now, teeth jammed close to the microphone, her incomprehensible song sputtering for a moment as she turned a page of the notebook.

  The practice room was seething, phantasms filling up the spaces between objects, demons with long tails riding the sound waves in the air.

  I was afraid, but I couldn't stop. I couldn't bring my drumming to a halt any more than I could smother the tapping of my foot or the twitches in my face. I was trapped here, caught in the pattern I'd helped shape.

  Then reality shifted once more, like the sprockets of a film finally catching, and I saw something I'd almost forgotten. . . what music looked like.

  Moz's guitar notes were scattered like Christmas lights across the ceiling, shimmering in and out, Pearl's sinuous melody linking and electrifying them. The dog-boy's riff spread out underneath, solid and steady, and my drumming was the scaffolding that held it aloft, all of it pulsating at ninety-two beats per minute, alive and connecting us.

  I stared at the apparition, awestruck. This was the way I'd been born to see music, before the doctors had taught me to separate my senses, to grab objects and faces and hold them in place. Before they'd cured me of these visions with therapy and pills.

  How had this other reality returned? Every sense conjoined, complete and undivided. . .

  But then my eyes dropped to the floor, and I saw Minerva's song.

  It was tangled around our feet, twisting its way through cords and cables, plunging in and out of the floor, like loops of Loch Ness monster in the water. It was a worm, blind and horned, its rippling segments pushing it through the earth, rearing up a hungry maw teethed with a ring of knives.

  And suddenly I knew that Minerva's curse was something a thousand years older than heroin or crack.

  I let out a gasp, and she turned her head toward me, saw me seeing it. She dropped the notebook and pulled off her glasses in one brittle motion, her song dissipating into a long, furious hiss. The architecture of the music shattered overhead, my drumsticks spinning from my hands.

  The rest of them stumbled to a halt. Pearl was staring at her friend, alarmed. Moz was staring at Minerva too, and for a moment his expression was unmistakable: the boy was dripping with desire.

  "Why'd you two stop, man?" the burly dog-boy cried. "That shit was paranormal!"

  I blinked, looking down at empty hands. No trembling, just like after any good session. I felt no need to tap my feet or touch my forehead. There was nothing in the air but the hiss of amplifiers, a barely visible ripple in the corners of my eyes.

  But I still felt it in the soles of my feet, the beast we'd been playing. Something was rumbling in the earth, deeper than six stories below. Answering Minerva's song.

  "You can smell it too, can't you?" she whispered to me.

  "No. . . not smell. But sometimes I see things I shouldn't. " I swallowed, clutching at my pill bottle through my jeans, by reflex spilling out the speech they made us memorize at school, in case the police ever thought we were on drugs: "I have a neurological condition that may cause compulsive behavior, loss of motor control, or hallucinations. "

  Minerva raised an eyebrow, then curled back her lips in a sneer that showed too many pointed teeth. "Spasticus. . . autisticus. "

  I nodded. That was more or less me.

  But what the hell was she?

  12. THE TEMPTATIONS

  - MOZ-

  Her uncovered face was radiant, shining with a brilliance that liquefied me.

  She'd worn her shades until that moment - a total poser, I'd figured. But I could see now that she had to wear them, not for her protection, but for ours, to shield us from her eyes.

  What she had wasn't beauty, it was something a thousand times scarier, something that gnawed at my edges. I'd already heard it in the music, felt it in the way she'd wrenched us all into her wake - the whole band sucked up and totaled by her magnetism, or whatever you'd call it. Something charisma was too small a word for.

  Something overriding, bottomless.

  Suddenly, this was her band, not mine or Pearl's. And just as suddenly, I didn't mind.

  Minerva put her sunglasses back on.

  I picked up her notebook from where it had fluttered to the floor.

  What covered the open pages wasn't writing, more like the scroll from a lie detector, or one of those machines that inscribes the shapes of earthquakes. Ragged black lines undulated in impenetrable columns, smeared and spattered with drops of water. A few smudges were rusty brown, like old blood.

  I offered it to her, but Minerva was still staring at Alana Ray - glaring, her gaze dangerous even through dark glasses. I felt like I should say something to calm her down, since I'd brought Alana Ray here and Minerva was angry at her about. . . something.

  Because Alana Ray had dropped her sticks? But Minerva had freaked out before the Big Riff had broken down. I opened my mouth but found myself silenced by the memory of Minerva's naked eyes.

  "Min?" Pearl said.

  I closed my mouth. Let Pearl handle this.

  "You okay, Min?"

  "Yeah, sure. " Minerva leaned across to take the notebook from my hand, pressed it close against her chest. "Sorry about that. Didn't mean to have a hissy fit. I was just kind of. . . into that song. "

  "I'm sorry too," Alana Ray said quietly. "My condition sometimes leads to performance complications. "

  I swallowed, trying to remember what Alana Ray had confessed about herself. . . something wrong with her brain? All of a sudden, she was talking funny, with microscopic pauses between her words. Little twitches traveled across her body as she stared back at Minerva, as if her nervous system was unraveling inside. I opened my mouth again to say something.

  "Hey, no problem," Zahler said first. "You were fawesome. We were all totally paranormal!" He turned to Pearl. "Right?"

  "Yeah," Pearl said softly. "We were. " She gave me a questioning look.

  I held her gaze, something I hadn't done in two weeks.

  It had all clicked - our music, this band. Pearl's strange, electric friend had pulled us together and forged us into something as brilliant as she was.

  "That was great," I said, nodding at Pearl. "Good going. "

  Her face brightened in the dark practice room. "Well, okay, then. " She turned to Alana Ray. "You need to t
ake a break?"

  Alana Ray blinked one eye, then the other, then shook her head like she had water in her ear. "No. I'd rather keep playing. I think my. . . complication is over. But maybe a different song? Sometimes the same stimulus can provoke the same reaction. "

  "Uh, sure," Pearl said, then shrugged. "How about Piece Two?"

  Zahler and I just nodded, but Minerva smiled, pulling the microphone closer to her mouth. Low, soft laughter, touched with reverb, scattered about the room.

  "No problem, Alana Ray," she whispered, opening her notebook. "I've got about a million stimuli to go. "

  Nobody freaked out for the rest of rehearsal.

  We played Piece Two, a long jam wrapped around a looped sample from an old vinyl record of Pearl's, then our third song, which didn't even have a working title yet. Alana Ray never stumbled again, just accompanied us with psychic comprehension. With every new section she'd follow along for a while, then slowly start to build us up, adding structure and form, staring at invisible sheet music hovering in the air, somehow seeing what we needed her to do.

  I didn't catch a single word Minerva sang, but every time she opened her mouth, she injected us with brilliance. Her voice had an uncanny magnitude, as if her notebooks were full of incantations for making the ground beneath us rumble. I couldn't take my eyes off her, except when I closed them and listened hard.

  Between songs, I kicked myself for not having gone out to Brooklyn that morning. I finally saw how stupid the struggle between Pearl and me had been. Neither of us were rock stars - we were backups, sidekicks, allies. Good musicians, maybe, but Minerva was luminous.

  The anger that had been dogging me the last two weeks was spent, leaving nothing but contentment. I had an awesome band, a place to rehearse with no one yelling, "Turn it down!" and a 1975 Strat with gold pickups in my hands. I'd even cracked the money thing and was saving a few bucks for myself every day. I couldn't remember why being miserable had seemed so important.

  Minerva had changed everything.

  After an hour and a half, we'd played every song we knew as many times as we could and ground to a reluctant halt.

  "Hey," Zahler said. "We need some new tunes, don't we?"

  "Yeah. " I looked at Pearl. "We should get together soon. Work on some more stuff for next Sunday. " Suddenly I had fragments of a million songs in my head.

  Pearl smiled happily. "More tunes? No problemo. "

  Minerva frowned. "Problema. Pero masculino. "

  "Huh?" I said, glancing at Pearl.