The Flower Bowl Spell (14 page)

“What about what Cleo said? About it being
dangerous here?”

Her vocabulary is limited, but she means
well. If you believe in fate, it’s real.
She steps behind the
shower curtain. I think she has left, but her head pops back
around.
The locket. It’s not the only one out there.

“There’s the one Viveka has.”

Elsewhere are others. A part of the past. A
beacon. Remember, be careful.

“Are you sure you aren’t speaking in riddles?
That sounds rather riddleish to me!”

She disappears again. The curtain rustles for
a moment before going still.

I look in the mirror. Smarter Memphis is
right—I am pale. I could easily curl up on the tile floor and take
a nap. But sleep, like food, will have to wait.

****

The concert is on the UC Santa Barbara campus
in a large auditorium. I’ve got my notebook, my press kits (I have
one on Yeah Right, too), my microcassette recorder, a bajillion
blank tapes, extra batteries, and pens. My press pass dangles from
my neck on a soft cotton cord with the logo of a local radio
station emblazoned all over it. Rock and roll!

I call Cooper before we go, but there’s no
answer. I leave a message, bland and rambling and
uncharacteristically sentimental.

It’s much chillier in Santa Barbara than I
would have expected, as if Indian summer has already made its merry
way down the coast and moved on. I’m bundled up in a gray cashmere
turtleneck and jeans. The girls wear their nightclothes, per
Tyson’s suggestion, but I’ve made them wear jeans too, and tucked
in their flannel granny nighties decorated with old-fashioned
prints of forget-me-nots and roses. The collars of their nightgowns
are high and ruffled, peeking out atop their coats. Cleo holds a
porcelain baby doll with a chipped nose.

A rotund, goateed security dude lets us
through the back door of the auditorium. I’m prepared to explain my
charges, but he barely glances at the girls. He points us down the
long hallway, which is just as it is at other concert venues I’ve
attended—crowded with people. They lounge against the walls, drinks
and cigarettes clutched in their hands. All kinds of junk is piled
up in the corridor, which just makes it more crowded—folded-up
tables, stacks of dried-out water-cooler bottles, cardboard boxes
of toilet paper. Here and there, the stacks of crap break off to
allow room for doorways. Most are open. Some are closed, vibrating
with bottled-up noise. These are labeled with hand-lettered signs
declaring the names of people or things: guitars, foam cores,
gus.

Cleo has wrapped one of her arms around my
leg, her doll smashed to her chest, and Romola holds my hand as I
pause in front of each room to inspect its sign and peer
inside.

Someone calls out, “Yo, Memphis!” from down
the hall. It’s Tyson, hanging onto a doorjamb with one hand and
waving with the other. He’s wearing sunglasses. These are much
darker than the ones he had on in San Luis Obispo.

“It’s him! It’s him!” Cleo cries and detaches
from me, burrowing through the crowd of adult legs like a mole
through dirt. I’m afraid, for a second there, that she’s going to
jump into his arms and that I’ll feel something sappy in my heart,
but when she stops, she simply hops up and down in front of him,
her curls bouncing. He stands with his hands in his pockets and
bends forward a little to talk to her. Romola drags on my hand and
I give some hipsters a good shove with each of my shoulders,
apologizing under my breath.

As we approach, Ty straightens up and grins.
“All right.” He holds out his hand for Romola and she slaps him
five. He holds it out to me and I oblige. “You made it.”

“We made it.”

“Come on.”

We follow him into one of the rooms. Along
one wall are mirrors banked by a low counter, which holds trays of
cheeses, crackers, and fruit, as well as juice boxes. The sockets
for the light bulbs are empty. There are two couches, one against
one wall, one in the middle of the room next to it, and a
not-very-clean-looking shag carpet in front of them. In between the
couches is a coffee table piled with games, books, pens, crayons,
construction paper, glue, glitter, and a big bowl of candy. There’s
a TV against one wall and a loveseat on the other side of the door.
At the back of the room, several cots are lined up with sleeping
bags laid out on top.

Two boys and a girl, who range in age from a
little older than Romola to a little older than Cleo, occupy the
room along with a hefty tattooed woman. She reminds me of Dragon
Pearl, a Mendocino Wiccan and friend of Gru. The woman salutes as
we enter. The boys are engaged in some horrible, noisy video game
on the TV, and don’t even glance our way, but the girl, who looks
like she’s the oldest, gazes at us with some curiosity from where
she sits on the shag. She’s busy putting together a collage of
eyes, snipping them from old magazines.

Tyson introduces everyone—the boys are Baltie
and Seamus, and the girl is Saville. “And Zanna here is the woman
of the hour,” he says, pointing to the babysitter. She grabs Tyson
and bear-hugs him to her bosom, laughing a hearty smoker’s laugh
that ends with a kiss on the top of his head. She’s got at least
fifty pounds on him.

“Want to meet the kids’ dad?” Tyson gives me
a nudge. I smile a little. Rob Duffy!

“Give me a sec.” I turn to the girls. “I’ll
be right back to check on you, okay?”

They’re standing next to Saville, watching
her with the same attention they gave to Hillary. It’s all very
normal, but I wonder about their isolation from other children,
especially older girls.

“Hey, Romola, look at these cool books.” I
crouch down on the other side of the coffee table and pick up what
appears to be a brand new copy of
Are You There God? It’s Me,
Margaret
. I wonder if Viveka would approve.

“Um, excuse me,” Saville says. “But I can’t
see the television.”

The television. The television with that
violent excuse for a game on it.

“Sorry.” I move out of her way. I turn to see
what the boys are playing. Something with monsters and soldiers,
and I recognize the helmet of a Buer demon from my magickal history
lessons of days gone by. As he raises his sword to slay a human
fighter, he turns for a moment towards the room and says, “This is
for you, Memphis!” before plunging the weapon into the soldier’s
eye.

I check on the girls, but they are busy
scoping out some coloring books. Saville and her brothers don’t
seem to have noticed anything unusual. They have already forsaken
their child-magick and given in to letting others do the imagining
for them.

“Don’t worry, Lady of the Ancients,” the Buer
demon shouts over his shoulder as he runs up a rocky hill towards a
moth dragon. “Young Misses will be just fine under my watch.”

I heard about this a while back, before I
left the craft: demons and fairies that have found a way to convert
their matter into electrons—or is it protons?—to make some kind of
tiny energy wave that can enter an electric stream. They’ve been
messing around with online role-playing games and video games,
wreaking all kinds of mischief. They only do it every so often when
they’re bored—or when there’s a need.

I hope this Buer demon is simply bored.

He swings his sword around and decapitates
another soldier. I look at the boys. They don’t look happy about
the Buer demon’s progress.

“Okay,” I say to Tyson. “Lead on, my
liege.”

****

We wend our way back up the hall. I
immediately notice the stares Tyson gets, especially from women.
It’s like the Red Sea parting for Moses as we make our way through
the crowd. It doesn’t seem to faze him at all. Then again, he’s
wearing his rock-star sunnies. I find this slightly annoying. Just
slightly. How can he see? The fluorescent lights are hardly
stunners. I hate to think of him kowtowing to
image
. And
yes, the fawning women are annoying too.

“So, those’re Rob Duffy’s kids,” Ty says, as
if it needs to be said.

“They seem too old to be his.”

“That’s what happens when you’re sixteen and
you don’t use a condom.”

“And then you don’t use a condom two more
times?”

The corners of his mouth turn up like he
wants to laugh but won’t. We stop two doors up from the
“nursery.”

“By the way,” he says. “You look
awesome.”

Do I? I touch my hair. “Thanks. I was going
for the rock concert reporter look. That or a Beat poet.”

“No, I mean…” He pauses and a door with a
giant gold star on it opens. The noise blasting out of the room is
so intense all else is lost for the moment, including whatever it
is he was going to say about my awesomeness. It’s as if Tyson has
opened the door onto a distant planet. The room is about the same
size as the nursery, but someone has painted the walls a deep,
cabernet red and adorned them with curlicues of black, gold, and
silver paint that coil into points of fleurs-de-lys. A disco ball
hanging from the ceiling spirals prisms across the surface of
everything and everyone. The floor is carpeted wall to wall in a
plush, black faux fur, thick enough for a girl to lose her kitten
heels in. Couches all along the walls in the same material are
chockablock with throw pillows spilling onto the floor.

An identical makeup counter to the one in the
nursery is covered in silver paper, and there’s a spread of hors
d’oeuvres. Crackers and cheese seem appropriate, but the raw
oysters and thumb-sized prawns are a little swank for this crowd.
In the corner, a bartender pours drinks and appears to have every
brand of tequila under the sun. A huge glass bowl the size of a
small bathtub holds sangria, wine glasses lined up next to it. From
the press kit I know that sangria is Cheradon Badler’s drink of
choice, and this special bowl shows up at every party. Orange rinds
litter the carpet.

Ty follows my gaze and shakes his head.
“Don’t drink it. It’ll floor you like that.” He snaps his
fingers.

I nod and look around some more. The Party
People have crossed over with the Beautiful People. I recognize a
few from my hallway journey, or maybe it’s just that everyone looks
the same, stunningly cool, put-together, and blasé, as if such
stylishness is above every philosophy or cause and shouldn’t be
given a second thought—and isn’t. There are about twenty people in
the room, which makes it cozy, and I realize that along with the
blast of noise comes a heavy, ovenlike heat.

Ty takes my hand and leads me through the
multitude. His grip is firm, and a little thrill in my belly takes
me by surprise. We weave through conversations and blank stares and
the lighting of clove cigarettes. A man exchanges nods with Tyson,
and I realize it’s Rob Duffy. We say hello and move along too
quickly. I feel a thumping in my chest. It’s not my heart, but the
bass coming out of speakers next to a DJ, who is stationed opposite
the bartender. They’re like two pillars of Atlas holding up the
room. I don’t recognize what’s playing: some mix of techno, a
forgettable anthem.

What is unforgettable is the smell of vanilla
mingling with the orange rinds, a ribbon underneath all the sweat,
smoke, and perfume pummeling my nostrils. I raise my head and
follow the ribbon like a dog will hunt. It leads, unsurprisingly,
to Cheradon Badler.

PART THREE: THE ROCK STARS

Chapter Thirteen

She’s sitting on a couch all by herself, her
bare feet tucked up underneath her, the quintessential queen bee
among the drones. They are at her feet, draped on throw pillows,
worshippers and loyal subjects, slavish. They stand at a distance
and steal what they hope are discreet glances. Occasionally,
someone calls to her from a nether couch—hers is like an extra-wide
throne—and she answers with a smile and a wink.

Cheradon’s hair is long and platinum with
clipped peacock feathers woven in here and there. It’s an elaborate
‘do. The tips are dyed in a matching green and accentuate her eye
shadow. Her slender, muscled arms are bronzy—like her aura—against
the black wife-beater she’s wearing, which fades against her hot
pink satin jeans. It’s possible that she and I are the only two
people in the room without any visible tattoos. Even Ty has some
sort of headless snake circling his bicep. She does, however, sport
the tiniest diamond pierced in her nose. You could almost miss
it.

We stand before her and she raises her hands
and Ty slaps her a high ten, as if they were brother and sister.
She’s not wearing any rings, certainly not the alleged engagement
ring Ty gave her.

“So, this is your girl,” she says and clasps
her hands together, gazing into my eyes in that way I’ve heard
certain charismatics do, so that I feel as if I’m the only
important person in the whole wide world. I know it’s all an
illusion, but there’s comfort in it. Not the illusion, but in
knowing that Cheradon Badler is, in her own way, a sorceress.

Of course she is. Why else would I, along
with millions of music-buying fans of all ages all over the world,
adore her so? She pats the cushion next to her. I sit and pull out
my notebook.

“Oh, goody,” she says. “Take charge.”

“You don’t mind, do you?” I ask.

“I like it.” She pretends to peer into my
bag. “No tape recorder? Ty said you have a tape recorder.”

“Oh, I do. It’s just that it’s kind of noisy
in here. Maybe we can go somewhere more quiet?”

“After the show.” She looks away. Guess we
know who is the true take-charger.

Ty perches on the couch’s armrest, and I
watch his face. He radiates a deep rose. Cheradon has gone from
bronze to a faint peach seeped with silver. The silver reminds me
of someone but I can’t place who, and I find myself wishing that
when I gave up magick I had remembered to recharge my photographic
memory charm now and then. And then I realize that the silvery bits
are a lot like Gru’s aura, when she was relaxed.