Rock On (42 page)

Then he passed the joint over, as if he knew Cobb would need it.

“It was cancer,” he went on. “Bet you never thought of that, did you? No one has. No one can imagine why happy old Matty Matthew would suddenly up and blow his brains out, not even you. Am I right?”

“Fucker, you know you are.”

Matty acknowledged this with a nod. “Well, no one knows happy old Matty had about three months to live, either. With a prognosis of drooling dementia followed by coma followed by death. I decided not to
let
them know. There’s no dignity in it, you see. Better to go out as a tortured artist.”

“What about the autopsy?”

Matty got one of his looks. Cobb hadn’t seen that look for twenty years, but he remembered it perfectly. “The
autopsy,
Terry, consisted of a pathologist inking my fingertips and snapping a few Polaroids. How much d’you suppose those will fetch on the collector’s market?”

“Hard to say. If the reports were right, they could be pictures of just anyone who’d blown his brains out.”

“That’s true.” Matty grimaced. “But I had to do it that way. That’s where the cancer was.”

“In your brain?”

“Right in the center. Inoperable. I saw it on the X-ray, as big as a plum, and I had to have my files stolen from the hospital, and the X-rays too—”

Now be sounded as if he were bragging, and Cobb interrupted him. “What do you mean, you died in this bed?”

Matty went right on. “The doctor may leak it to the press anyway, but there’ll be no proof, and he’ll look as if he’s just trying to make a buck—”

Cobb said it again, more loudly.

“Oh.” Matty blinked. “Well, so that I could be here when you came. I didn’t know if it would work. Looks like it did.”

“How did you know I’d come?” Cobb asked, and got the look again for his trouble.

“Actually,” Matty said, “I thought you’d be here sooner.”

“You
thought
?”

“I suppose . . . I
hoped.
”

“Why?”

“Because it’s quite lonely,” Matty whispered, and that was all they could say for a while.

“I arranged to have someone come to the house after I did it,” Matty continued later. “To transport my body to New York and make it look good, make it look like I’d died there, so no one would know about this place.”

“Then one person knows about it.”

“Knew.”

Cobb decided not to pursue this. His own cynicism was a point of pride, but somehow he had never wanted to know just how cold-blooded his partner could be.

He thought of something else. “No one could have gathered up all the mess you must have made.”

“Ever heard of a rubber sheet, genius? I didn’t want the bed to reek when you got here. Although I imagine you’re used to reeking beds by now.”

“I’ve seen a fair bit of the world,” Cobb conceded.

“And some unfair bits too. I mean, Terry,
Gabon
? What kept you there?”

“Good weed, cheap beer, people left me alone. And really, Matty, how can you talk . . . I mean,
North Carolina
?”

They laughed, and it felt better than anything had in twenty years.

Cobb woke up alone. The sheets were twined around his body like an old lover. He looked over at the rolling tray and saw that the half-joint was gone. He experienced an instant of total mind-silence, and then tunes burst into his head like a psychedelic waterfall. Hooks, bridges, bass lines, lyrics, a clawing cascade of music, more than he could process. He scrambled for his guitars, grabbed one at random, switched on the stereo’s directional mike and hit
Record.
There was already a tape in the machine. Of course.

Hours later, he rewound the tapes and listened to them in dismay. His guitar playing was terribly rusty, his voice out of practice, but through all that he could hear that this was easily the best music he and Matty had ever made. The only catch: they were both supposed to be dead, so what the hell was he going to do with it? Cobb addressed the problem in his habitual manner, by curling up in bed and going to sleep.

Matty was there. “You’re going to release it,” he said.

“Under what name?”

“Matthew and Cobb, of course.” Matty said this patiently, as if Cobb were a slow child. God, he hated it when Matty talked to him like that. Only now . . . now it felt kind of good, too.

He even knew his next line. “Why not Cobb and Matthew?”

“Because I wrote more of it.”

“How do you figure that?”

Matty rolled his eyes. “
You’re
just getting started again. I’ve been saving this stuff up!”

“And the other little matter?”

“Well, obviously you can prove you’re you. You can tell the whole story of how you faked your death and went traveling around the world, it’s a great yarn, and you can say I left these tapes behind when I died, and you’ve reworked them, and I know some musicians you can use, and a terrific studio—”

“Fuck, Matty, that’s what I died to get away from.”

Matty’s eyes narrowed. Cobb thought of daggers ripping through velvet. “No you didn’t,” Matty said. “You died because you couldn’t do it anymore. With me, you can.”

Cobb wrenched himself awake.

Matty was still there.

“
Praise the Lord, I’ll have a new body!
” he sang in a passable Hank Williams voice. “Hey, Terry, look what I can do now! The longer you’re here, the better I get! Oh Terry, old mate,
it’s so damn good to see you
 . . . ”

He leaned over and kissed Cobb on the lips, open-mouthed, hungrily. Cobb could not make himself pull back, even when he felt a bitter liquid flowing from Matty’s mouth into his own. After a while, he began to like the taste.

The studio was top of the line, the musicians crackerjack one and all: of course. Cobb finished the album in just under a month, living in Matty’s New York apartment and laying down tracks every day. When it was done, everyone wanted to take him out on the town, throw him a party, get him laid, show him the time of his life. Everyone was astounded that he had a life. The world was giddy with the news of Terry Cobb’s resurrection from the dead and his posthumous collaboration with Matty. It was as good as a new Kydds album. It was rock and roll history.

“You gonna spend some time in the city?” the soundman asked him on his last night in the studio. He’d come in to do some last-minute tweaking on a couple of tracks, perfectionist shit, the kind of stuff he’d never bothered with in the past because Matty always took care of it.

“No,” Cobb answered. “Got to get back out to my house in the country. Lots more writing to do.”

“Man, you’re on fire, huh? Bein’ dead for awhile must really get the old creative juices flowing.”

Cobb gave the man a sharp look. Then he took a step backward, throwing his eyes into shadow. When he smiled, his gaunt face took on a skullish look that made the soundman shudder.

“It’s like having a whole new life,” Cobb said.

Poppy Z. Brite
—who is the author of eight novels, four short story collections, and much miscellanea—lives in New Orleans with a motley krewe of cats and reptiles. Read more at www.poppyzbrite.com.

Brite’s debut novel,
Lost Souls
—now considered a cult classic—featured the two-man band Lost Souls? (yes, the question mark is part of the band’s name): vocalist Ghost and guitarist Steve. The characters later appeared in several short stories. The author’s stand-alone novella,
Plastic Jesus
(2000), portrays a considerably different ideation of The Kydds, the Beatlesque band who first appear in the story “Arise.” And, although seldom mentioned these days—but the editor will since we
are
talking rock here—the biography
Courtney Love: The Real Story
(1997) was also authored by Brite.

Wunderkindergarten

Marc Laidlaw

The One and Only Entry in Shendy’s Journal

Dabney spits his food when he’s had too much to think. Likki spins in circles till her pigtails stick out sideways from her blue face, and she starts choking and coughing and eventually swallows her tongue and passes out, falling over and hitting me and cracking the seals on my GeneKraft kit and letting chimerae out of ZZZ-level quarantine on to the
bare linoleum floor
! Nexter reads pornography—De Sade, Bataille, and Apollinaire his special favorites, and thumbs antique copies of
Hustler
which really is rather sweet when you consider that he’s light-years from puberty, and those women he gloats and drools over would be more than likely to coo over him and chuck his chin and maybe volunteer to push his stroller, though I’m exaggerating now (for effect) because all of us can walk quite well; and anyway, Nex is capable of a cute little boner, even if it is good for nothing except making the girls laugh. Well, except for me. I don’t laugh at
that
because it’s more or less involuntary, and the only really funny things to me are the things people do deliberately, like giving planarian shots to a bunch of babies for instance, as if the raw injection of a liter of old braintree sap can make us model citizens and great world leaders when we finally Come of Age. As you might have guessed by now, when I get a learning overload I have to
write.
It is my particular pornography, my spinning-around-and-passing-out, my food-spitting response to too much knowledge absorbed too fast; it is in effect a sort of pH-buffering liver in my brain. (I am informed by Dr. Nightwake, who unfairly reads over my shoulder from time to time—always when, in my ecstatic haste, I have just made some minor error—that “
pH in blood is buffered by kidneys, not liver,
” which may be so, but then what was the real purpose behind those sinister and misleading experiments of last March involving the beakers full of minced, blended, and boiled calf’s liver into which we introduced quantities of hydrochloric acid, while stirring the thick soup with litmus rods? In any event, I refuse to admit nasty diaper-drench kidneys into my skull; the liver is a nobler organ far more suited to simmering amid the steamy smell of buttery onions in my brain pan—O! Well-named seat of my soul!) In short, writing is the only way I have of assimilating all this shit that means nothing to me otherwise, all the garbage that comes not from my shortshort life but from some old blender-brained geek whose experiential and neural myomolecular gnoso-procedural pathways have a wee bit of trouble jibing with
my
Master Plan.

I used to start
talking
right after an injection, when everyone else was sitting around addled and drowsily sipping warm milk from cartons and the aides were unfolding our luxurious padded mats for nap-time. The words would start pouring out of me in a froth, quite beyond my control, as significant to me as they were meaningless to the others; I was aware of a pleasant warmth growing in my jaws and pharynx, a certain dryness in the back of my throat, and a distant chatter like jungle birds in jungle boughs singing and flitting about through a long equatorial afternoon, ignoring the sound of chainsaws ripping to life in the humid depths at the rainforest floor. Rainforest, jungle, I haven’t seen either one, they no longer exist, but they shared certain descriptive characteristics and as far as I can tell, they could have been no more mighty than our own little practice garden just inside the compound walls, where slightly gene-altered juicy red Big Boy radishes (my design, thank you very much) grow to depths of sixteen feet, their bulbous shoulders shoving up through the asphalt of the foursquare court, their bushy leaves fanning us gently and offering shade even to adults on those rare afternoons when the sun tops the walls of our institution and burns away enough of the phototropic haze to actually
cast a shadow
! And there I sat, dreaming that I was a parrot or a toucan or macaw, that my words were as harmonious as flights of birds—while in actuality the apparent beauty of my speech was purely subjective, and induced in my compatriots a mixed mood of irritation, hostility and spite. Eventually, though no one acted on their resentment (for of us all, I am the pugilist, and Likki has never disturbed my experiments without feeling the pummeling wrath of my vulcanized fists), it came to be quite apparent to our supervisors, who heard the same complaints in every post-injection counseling session, that the injections themselves were unobjectionable, the ensuing fluxflood a bit overwhelming but ultimately worthwhile (as if we had a choice or hand in the outcome of these experiments), and the warm milk pleasingly soporific; but that the one thing each of the other five dreaded and none could abide were my inevitable catachrestic diatribes. The counselors eventually mounted a campaign to confront me with this boorish behavior, which at first I quite refused to credit. They took to amplifying my words and turning them back on me through earphones with slight distortion and echo effects, a technique which backfired because, given my intoxicated state, the increase in stimulus induced something like ecstasy, perhaps the closest thing I have yet experienced to match the “multiple orgasm” descriptions of women many (or at least nine) years my senior, and to which I look forward with great anticipation, when I shall have found my ideal partner—as certainly a woman with my brains should be able to pick a mate of such transcendent mental and physical powers that our thoughts will resonate like two pendulum clocks synchronizing themselves by virtue of being mounted on the same wall, though what the wall represents in this metaphor I am still uncertain. I am also unsure of why I say “mate” in the singular, when in fact I see no reason why I should not take many lovers of all sorts and species; I think Nexter would probably find in my erotic commonplace book (if I kept such a thing) pleasures more numinous and depraved than any recorded or imagined in
Justine
or
Story of the Eye.
The counselors therefore made tapes of my monologues and played them back to me the day after my injection session, so that I might consider my words in a duller state of mind and so perceive how stupid and downright irritating my flighty speculations and giddy soul-barings truthfully were. Having heard them, I became so awkward and embarrassed that I could not open my mouth for weeks, even to speak to a mechanical dictascriber, and it was not until our main Monitor—the one who received distillate from The-Original-Doctor-Twelves-Himself—suggested I study the ancient and academically approved art of writing (now appreciated only by theoreticians since the introduction of the dictascriber, much as simple multiplication and long division became lost arts when calculators grew so common and cheap) that I felt some of my modesty restored, and gradually grew capable once again of withstanding even high-dose injections and marathon sessions of forced-learning, with their staggered and staggering cycles of induced sleep and hypnagoguery, and teasing bouts of wakefulness that prove to be only lucid dreams, followed by long periods of dreaming that always turn out to be wakefulness. It was particularly these last that I needed full self-confidence to face, as during these intervals I am wont to undress in public and speak in tongues and organize archetypal feats of sexual gymnastics in which even Nexter fears to participate, though he always was the passive type and prefers his women in two dimensions, or in four—as is the case with those models who spring from literary seeds and caper full-blown in his imagination, where he commands them with nine dimensions of godlike power above and beyond those which his shadowy pornographic puppets can attain.