The Five (54 page)

“I’m thinking of a career in management,” he said.

Kate dared not ask what that meant. But she thought she’d go ahead and get up and take him to the IHOP out by the airport for one of his favorite meals: the syrupy pancakes, crumbled-up bacon and yellow-drippy eggs all mixed together.

She decided she was going to stop worrying so much about his heart.

At least, for one day.

< >

Nomad and Ariel were on the road. She had left her car at their last stop, a place to watch freshly-baked doughnuts ride along a conveyor belt, becoming sprinkled with sugar or cinammon or sparkling with fresh glaze at the end of the line. They had climbed into his Focus, which was a blood brother to the Scumbucket with its crumpled front fender, its scrapes along the passenger’s side, its dents and dings and bangs and bumps. He’d bought it cheap from another musician, with some of these imperfections already there, but he’d added a lot himself too. He realized now, as they followed the crooked headlights along a Texas road with the windows down and the pre-dawn air sweetened by night, that he probably could afford a new set of wheels.

It had been a full night, for sure. A mug of black coffee, not so bitter, and a cup of silver needle tea at a little downtown place called Selma’s, which had about a dozen tables and served great chocolate brownies, though Ariel declined to order one. They’d started talking there, about the song. Then Nomad had decided he was really hungry, so they’d met again at the Magnolia Café, and this time Ariel had ordered a veggie Reuben when Nomad asked for a hamburger, and please make sure there’s no cheese on it, and could the waitress make it, like, medium rare so it’s a little pink in the middle?

And the waitress had said, “You got it.”

They had continued talking about the song.

“So,” Nomad had said, as the late-night crowd ate and drank and the waitresses buzzed around, “what happened, then?”

“I don’t know that anything happened.” They’d been over this ground at Selma’s, but Ariel knew it was important for him to backtrack and go over it again, looking for what he might have missed.

“Something
had
to have happened. Really.” He put his elbows on the table and looked her square in her mystic eyes. His ankle was sore from standing and sore from driving, but if the day ever came that he couldn’t take a little pain, he would be ready to kick out of this strange old world. Which was definitely not new. Or was it? He didn’t know. According to Ariel’s belief, they’d been given the task of writing a song by a girl who was something other than human. They hadn’t asked for it, but there it was. Then, according to Ariel’s belief, Jeremy Pett had been given the task of stopping the song from being finished, by something he called ‘Gunny’. Or was Pett just totally insane? What about Connor Addison, and the nutbag in the trailer park?

Nomad wondered about that trailer, parked in the flat hot desert on the ‘angel line’ radiating from the north side of Stone Church, or Apache Leap as it used to be called. That dumb fuck, the so-called Navy electronics expert, couldn’t tell his angels from his demons. Nomad wondered if someone who—and this sounded like Ariel thinking—was able to pick up vibes and shit could stand in that trailer, in the room the nutbag had used as his comm central, and listen, or feel, or
sense
, or whatever, a quiet in the wires. Maybe a few scattered mutterings passed, like distant voices heard from a pirate radio station through a wallplug, just faintly there, or maybe a squeal of static that was not static at all but an ungodly voice raised in anger, and then drifting away in a whimper like a whipped dog. And maybe chatterings passed, like teeth being ground down to nubs, or a sudden “
You
!” jumping out, all fucked-up sounding and muddy, as if in recrimination for a battleplan defeated.

But, most of all, a quiet in the wires.

Maybe an ominous quiet. One that said there were other battleplans to be made, because it was a forever war.

It had been a bitch writing that song. Ariel had been adamant that he needed to write a verse. He wanted nothing to do with it. He feared that when it was done, and played as their last song, the whole of Vista Futura would be sucked down a cosmic drain—
gurgle, gurgle, gurgle
—to Hell, to Heaven, or to some dimension in between, and they’d have to be fighting off crows in the eternal blackberry brambles when they weren’t filling baskets for Jesus. He just had no idea what was about to happen.

You need to write a verse, Ariel had told him with fire in her voice. It came from you
first
, do you understand that? Mike started it, but it came from you first. You have to write a verse.

In the Albuquerque hospital where they were waiting for True’s wife to arrive, he’d looked at what she’d written, at the title she’d given it, and he’d asked, “What’s this about?”

“Don’t you know yet?”

He did, really.

It was about acceptance, he realized. Accepting who you are, within the limitations of a hard old world. It was realizing that sometimes things in the tough old world squeezed you, and crushed you, and drove you down into the dirt. But to survive, to keep going, you had to lighten yourself. To cast off things that no longer mattered, things that wore you down or weighed heavy on you. You needed courage to keep going, and sometimes you found it in yourself and sometimes in others. And it might seem hopeless, it might seem a fool’s path, and it was never safe travel even though an angel might wish it were so for you, and some things never changed, they never would, but nothing ever changed unless you believed they could.

And it was still the same old world as it had been yesterday. It was still a hard old world, a tough old world. It would always remain so. But it was a world that could not be described in just four minutes, with all its universe of good and evil, strong and weak, light and dark. It was the world, as it would ever be.

People lived and people died, and the lives of people were precious; their time to create and exist, live and love, was also precious. The song said, keep trying, keep
living
in the fullness of life, keep growing and creating, because no one here gets out alive. It was not a cry of fear; it was a declaration. You are here today, said the song. One tomorrow you will not be.

The song asked: Between those days, what will you do? Who will you become?

Could it be a new world, in this old one?

It could be.

Might
it be a new world, in this old one?

That was for each person to decide. Travelling there was an inward journey, across an often fearsome land. The world within each person, the private world held deeply within. That was where the change happened, where a world could be made new in the midst of the old.

And that journey took all the courage you had.

< >

But for certain, Nomad thought as he sat with Ariel’s notebook in his lap, for himself it was not and would never again be the same old world.

That’s what it was about.

In the end, he’d repeated Mike’s opening with a variation, and added what he thought suited the song. He didn’t think his part was very good. He had listened to Ariel’s ideas about the music, the intro, the chord structure and the chorus. He’d given suggestions that he thought worked, but Berke didn’t like his idea about speeding up the beat, and Ariel thought he was wrong about some of the chord changes. He was deadset on throwing a B-sharp in there at a particular point, but she didn’t like that at all.

“Are we writing a fucking church song?” he’d asked in frustration. “We’re a rock band, guys!”

“It’ll come out well,” Ariel had told him. “When it’s finished. It will.”

“Okay,
you
finish it, then! Shit! I’m going out to get a smoke!”

But the deal was, he feared the song.

“What was supposed to happen?” he asked Ariel again, at their table in the Magnolia Café.

She shook her head.

“Do you have any
opinion
? I mean, what was it for? Yeah, I know what it’s about. Or at least I think I know what it’s about, but we don’t really know, do we? We’re not sure, are we?”

“No,” Ariel said, “we’re not sure. How could we
be
sure?”

“Maybe it was for Gina Fayne. Maybe it was for that guy to hear, and for him to ask Berke to help keep Gina Fayne from overdosing on smack. Does that make sense?”

She could tell he didn’t believe what he’d just said, but she answered, “Maybe it was.”

“Uh huh. Tell me, then: You think the angels are that bent out of shape about Gina Fayne’s heroin habit? You think they set up this whole thing to save Gina Fayne’s life, so she could go on and be the next Janis Joplin? And you think whatever wanted to stop us—to fucking
kill
us—wanted to make sure Gina Fayne never became the next Janis Joplin?” Nomad almost pounded his fist on the table. He held himself back. “No way!” He was getting worked up, he had to eat his hamburger and ease down again. “I don’t see the point,” he said. “I wish somebody would tell me what it is. Or
was
. How come that girl, that…whatever she was…just didn’t tell us what she wanted? What we were supposed to do. She could speak English. I mean, Jesus, I guess she could speak every language in the world, if she was what you think she was! So how come she didn’t just
tell
us?”

“Because,” Ariel said, “we would never have believed her. And how would you like to write a song knowing something we can’t understand—something
awesome
, John—is asking for a command performance? She
did
want us to write a song. We wrote the song she wanted.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Yes. And we wrote the song
we
wanted. It was as much for us, as it was for—” She stopped, because she couldn’t finish the sentence.

“Gina Fayne?” Nomad asked.

Ariel ate some of her sandwich and drank from her bottled water.

Nomad watched her. There were so many things he wanted to ask her about all this. One question was:
Why us?
Another was:
Are those things in this café right now, only we can’t see
them?
And:
Are they everywhere all the time, and when I’m sitting on the toilet I ought to be a little more modest?
And, maybe the questions he wanted to ask the most:
Do they know
everything? What don’t they know?
Do they sleep, do they eat, do they screw?
Is everything
around us a fucking illusion, the dream within the dream?

And, oh yeah, one more:
Where do they come from?

But she was eating her Reuben, really getting into it, and Nomad thought she could answer those questions no better than he could, no better than they’d been answered since the beginnings of time by scholars, priests, philosophers and thousands of others.

They were not allowed to know.

Nomad figured it was like the cosmos. You could only go so far, thinking about how many stars there were, and space going on into eternity. Where were the walls of the box?

“I just want to make music,” he said, and Ariel looked at him over her sandwich and gave him a crooked half-smile, and before he could monitor his mouth the question jumped out of him: “Do you still need me?”

“
What
?”

“Do you still need me?” he repeated, and he answered it. “You really don’t. You’re ready to go out on your own. Maybe I was hard on you in Tucson, but I was telling you the truth. You could put your own band together. The
Ariel Collier Band
.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Oh, that sucks.”

“The Ariels. The ACBs. The Blue Porkpies. That’s a good one. I like that look, it’s cool. Okay, back to naming your new band. The—”

“Two,” she said, and she gave him the mystic blast.

“I’m out of this for a while,” he told her, averting his gaze. “I need some time. Just to think.”

“I need the same thing.”

The moment had come. It felt so natural now, so right to do this. The new old world, at this table in the Magnolia.

“You’re better than I am,” he said. “You’re a better guitarist, a better singer, and I know for
sure
a better songwriter. And you’re only going to get better still. I’m a party band type of guy.”

“
‘When The Storm Breaks
’ isn’t a party band song. You’ve written plenty of songs that aren’t.”

“You wrote all the parts that really said something. You wrote the parts that touched people. Their emotions, and all. I just hung on. You know what was driving me? Anger. At a lot of things, and I’ll explain if you want to hear it. Anger’s a tame word for it. More like fucking white-hot volcanic rage, which I guess you guys saw a lot of.” He took a drink of his Pibb. “You can only go so far on that. I figured out, when we started getting the big crowds and the media attention…I started losing my anger. I started feeling like…you know…we were a
success,
which is what the lack of was making me even more angry. Without that in me, what do I have? I’m not nearly as good as I need to be. I know that. So what do I have?”

“You
are
good,” she said. “Ask the fans if you are or not.”

“I’m not good
enough
,” Nomad said.

She sighed heavily and threw him a look of exasperation. “No one’s good enough! Everybody has to push, and push, and try to break through some kind of wall. I
know
I’m not good enough. But I hope—I plan—on being better tomorrow, or the next time out. You start from where you are. You’ve broken through a lot of walls.
Yes
,” she said when he made a scoffing noise, “you have. But maybe the next wall you have to break through will be with your
talent
, not your fists.”

He thought about that, and he progressed a step further into his own new world. “Will you help me?”

“What? Like, give you
lessons
? I can see that happening!”