Wild Awake (29 page)

On Friday morning, I go to the print shop to make posters for our show. I copy the design from the card for Sukey’s show at razzle!dazzle!space:

Daffodiliad
this saturday 10:00 p.m. at the train room,
e. cordova @ carrall st.
feat. new works by PHIL COSWELL of BIRDSEYE
and kiri byrd of sonic drift

I highlight Skunk’s name and the word
Birdseye
to make it extra clear that this is really his show. When the posters are ready, I go out on my bike and tape them up all around the city until my roll of duct tape has dwindled to a cardboard skeleton, my sheaf of posters has thinned out to a few slippery rectangles, and there’s no lamppost or bus stop in the whole city that isn’t adorned with Daffodiliad signs.

Skunk calls twenty times to see where I am. I give him an assortment of cheerful, reassuring answers.

Oh, I am at the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory eating a marshmallow-peanut candy apple.

Oh, I am at Kim Fong Sushi House playing mah-jongg with old men.

Oh, I am at the harbor investigating cruises to Japan.

Oh, I am at the beach smoking hash with a sea tortoise.

He can’t know that what I am really doing is announcing Phil Coswell’s glorious comeback to the world. Skunk, my modest Skunk, my humble and secretive Bicycle Boy, would never agree to such a plan. I half wonder if TV crews will show up to film the show tomorrow night. I wouldn’t be surprised if we were offered a record deal on the spot.

I scuttle up and down Granville Street, making sure I haven’t missed a posterable place. A record store owner yells at me for taping a poster on his window without permission, but when I explain the situation, he asks for three more posters to put up inside the store.

“Phil Coswell,” he keeps saying. “From Birdseye?”

I nod.

“God,” he says. “I was at that show.”

My last stop before going home is the Train Room itself. I sidle up to the coat check. When the manager comes over, I slide the last poster across the counter.

“Whatcha got there?” he says, picking it up and skimming the hand-lettered text.

“It’s for tomorrow night.”

“Daff-o-dilly-ad. I thought your band was called Sonic Drift.”

I cast him a conspiratorial glance, lean close, and whisper, “There’s been a slight change in the lineup.”

The manager looks back down at the poster and whistles. “Phil Coswell. No kidding. Didn’t know he was even around. I’ll get Hal to throw up an announcement on the website tonight.”

I favor him with my most gracious smile.

“That would be lovely.”

“Oh no.”

Skunk stops on the sidewalk outside the Train Room, his bass in one hand and the amp in his other. His face goes pale.

“Kiri. You didn’t.”

I beam at him. I am wearing my favorite black-and pink-striped dress, paired of course with Sukey’s silver shoes. On the ride here in Skunk’s van, I had to distract him every time we passed a bus stop or lamppost where I’d taped a poster. This, of course, turned out to be futile: There’s a bright yellow Daffodiliad poster taped to door of the Train Room with the words
PHIL COSWELL RETURNS!!!
scrawled across it in permanent marker. I’m so excited I can’t help but peek my head in. When I open the door a crack, we can hear a loud, low rumble at the top of the stairs. It must be packed in there. You can practically smell the crush of bodies all the way down on the street.

“I can’t go in there,” says Skunk.

He turns around sharply and heads back to the van as fast as he can with the amp and the bass. I hop along beside him with my synth under my arm.

“You can, Skunk. Yes, you can. Oh, Bicycle Boy. We’re going to be famous. It’s going to be great.”

He doesn’t slow down.

“It’s not going to be great,” he says. “It’s going to be a freak show. Come see Phil Coswell, the psychotic gorilla, live onstage for one night only.”

We get to the van. He plunks down the amp and pulls open the door. When he lifts his bass inside, his hands shake. For the first time, I realize he’s angry.

I put down my synth and clamber all over him, nuzzling his neck and kissing his ears and squeezing him.

“It’s going to be okay, Skunk. It’s going to be okay. They love you. There’s this record store owner, he says he was at your last show, and he told me everyone who was really there agrees that—”

“I’m not going in there.”

Skunk’s face has frozen over like a pond. He shrugs off my arms, walks around the van, unlocks the driver’s-side door, and gets in.

“Skunk.”

I knock on the passenger-side window.

“Skunk. Let me in. Come on, Skunk. Please.”

He doesn’t unlock the door. He puts the key in the ignition and turns it one notch, then pushes the volume dial to turn on the radio.

I stand on the sidewalk, my heart jittering like a wind-up toy and breaking like an egg, and watch as my dear beautiful love-bison puts his face against the steering wheel and cries.

I dance and knock and plead. Skunk doesn’t move and he doesn’t look up. I can hear the radio through the van window, some awful party station playing pop songs and ads for discount furniture stores while my love-bison sits there with his head on the wheel. More and more people are arriving for the show. Soon, there’s a long line stretching all the way down the stairs and out the door. I can see our fans standing against the wall in their miniskirts and vintage jackets, smoking cigarettes and chatting and texting and complaining about the line. Every time I look over, the line has gotten longer, until suddenly it’s gone. Everyone who’s going in has gotten in. All they’re waiting for is us.

Denny texts me.

WHERE R U GUYS?!

He’s inside selling our CDs, and people are getting impatient.

I leave Skunk in the van, walk to the Train Room door, and rip down the yellow poster. I scrawl a note on the back of it, go back to the van, and stick the note facedown on the windshield, where Skunk will see it if he ever looks up.

I knock on the window one last time, wishing he would lift his shaggy head just once so he would see how much I love him.

No response.

I pick up my synth and the amp and hurry up to the Train Room alone.

If there was ever a situation that called for the services of a professional monomaniac, it’s tonight. I blaze into the Train Room, proud and twinkling as a star, an hour late but gorgeous, charming, ever so interesting. I do a quick promenade around the room, shaking hands and giving hugs to my many fans. I air-kiss the snack booth tender and the ninth-grade girls from East Van High. I trade ironies with all the hipsters at the corner table. I breeze past Motorcycle Man, cool and distant as a rare white bird, and he stares after me, sulking, his long hands laced in front of him. I swing by the merch table to explain the situation to Denny, but it’s too crowded with people buying CDs.

The room is packed and restless. Everyone’s ready for the show. I do my best to entertain the crowd while they wait, keeping up a constant stream of banter as I hurry around setting up the amp and microphones and running a long and elaborate sound check. I make jokes and puns and dark insinuations, and when the stage is set up and Skunk still hasn’t come, I play through my classical repertoire on my synth, Bach and Beethoven rendered in warbling square waves with a heavy, stonerrific delay.

People clap, but I know what they’re thinking:
Where’s Phil? Where’s Phil? Where’s Phil?

I finish playing my last classical piece and bend down to adjust the buckle on my shoe. While I’m down there, rubbing my ankle and desperately plotting my next move, I hear a low roar. It starts at the back of the room and sweeps forward like a wave. When I look up, every head in the crowd has turned to look at the door, where Skunk, Philippe, Bicycle Boy, my brontosaurus of love has just appeared with his apple-green bass in his hand.

It takes him a long time to make it all the way to the stage because so many people want to touch him, talk to him, fold his big wounded body into their arms like a best friend come back from the dead. At first I think they’re asking for his autograph. I expect the cameras to start flashing at any moment.

But no. These people touching Skunk’s shoulders, his arms, are welcoming him back.
It was just a thing
, their faces seem to say.
Just an awful thing and we’re so, so glad you’re okay
.

Finally he makes it to the stage. When he plugs in his bass, the crowd cheers. Before we start to play, he leans over and whispers, “Thanks, Crazy Girl.”

I whisper back, “The Way cannot be cut, knotted, dimmed or stilled.”

It’s from the note I left on the windshield.

Our favorite line from the
Tao
.

We play one song, two songs, three songs, five. The crowd goes silent and hushed. People put down their drinks and sit cross-legged on the floor, staring up at us like kindergarteners at story time. My hands float over the keys and my voice melds and tangles with Skunk’s, singing the ancient riddles we wrote down in my basement, the ones that came to me in my waking and Skunk in his sleep. There’s a golden force field thrumming between us, a space the universe has rushed in to fill. Up on that stage, I feel more exposed than I ever have before, like I’m climbing a rock face with only a strand of dental floss for a harness. I gaze at the assembled faces.

And I realize that Skunk is the bravest person I know.

As soon as the concert is over, Skunk has to go straight home. Aunt Martine has promised terrible things if he isn’t back by midnight. She will torture his bicycle. She will put an alarm on his sliding glass door. She will murder his radios one by one.

We lean against his van and kiss like avalanche survivors until his phone starts beeping and beeping, and it’s his fifteen-minute warning alarm going off like a bird with its nest on fire.

“I’d better go,” says Skunk, but his big brown Skunk-eyes are shining like birthday candles.

“Oh, Bicycle Boy,” I say. “Oh, Phil. Oh, Skunk. Did you see their faces? Did you hear them clap? There must have been a hundred people in there, and I think some of them were in bands. Did you see that guy at the back, from the radio station?”

His smile is a jar full of fireflies.

“Crazy Girl,” he says. “All I saw was you.”

I stand on the sidewalk waving, blowing kisses, and turning a lopsided cartwheel as Skunk drives away. The Train Room is spilling out people, who roll away into the night in twos and threes. I feel like how Sukey must have felt on the night of her art show, a feather in her hair. The moon is up. The sky is clear. The world feels big and bright and possible.

“Yo, Kiri.”

I spin around on Sukey’s silver heels and smile at Denny, who has just come out of the Train Room with an envelope full of money from selling our CDs.

“Denny!” I skip over and pluck the envelope out of his hands. “Are you hungry? Do you think there’s a place we could get Mongolian food this time of night?”

“I just got off the phone with Mom and Dad,” he says.

I shimmy around him distractedly, dancing to the music in my head. “I’m sure it was fascinating. Hey, you have ID, right? Can we buy champagne?”

Denny stares at me. “You do realize they’re coming back tomorrow morning.”

I stop dancing and stare back at him, stunned. As the news sinks in, I start to babble. “What? Why? They’re not coming home for a week. I still have a week!”

“Don’t you check your email? They changed their tickets, like, four days ago.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I handed you the phone when they called about it, didn’t I? It’s not my fault you wouldn’t talk to them.”

I remember the day I filled the phone with sine waves, and my nerves thrum with foreboding. “What’s going on? Why’d they cancel?”

Denny plays with his cell phone, flipping it open and snapping it shut. “Mom has this weird flu,” he says.

I cross my arms. “So? How is flying home any better than being sick on the cruise ship?”

Flip, snap. Denny gazes after a bus driving past. “And Dad has some business crisis he needs to deal with.”

“You’re kidding me. They’re on freaking vacation.”

“And—”

There’s something about that last
And
that makes me think the first two reasons are fake, and the real reason is something I don’t want to hear. I narrow my eyes.

“And what, Denny?”

Flip, snap, flip, snap
. I swear I’m going to break that thing in two.

“And what, Denny?”

He still won’t look at me. He’s watching that bus like he’s never seen one before. “And, so, remember last Saturday when you stayed out all night, then came home all cracked out and started practicing piano?”

I blaze with indignation. “But I explained—”

“Yeah, well, Lukas’s mom called them and said you were having a nervous breakdown.”
Flip, snap
. “And, um, I sort of sent them this email the other day, back when you were still really—”

“Still really what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Still what? What did you tell them?”

“Nothing.”

“Uh-huh. And they decided to cut their whole trip short and—”

The bus turns a corner. Denny finally looks me in the eye. “I swear I didn’t tell them to come home. They were thinking about changing their tickets anyway because of Dad’s work thing.”

The moon, whose radiance was so lovely a moment ago, glares down at me now like a searchlight. The city is nothing but right angles and dead ends; I can feel it contracting around me, shutting off my escapes.

“Yeah, right. You’ve been trying to ruin my life ever since you came home from Victoria. You’ve always hated my music, and now that I’m finally starting to get somewhere, you’ll do anything to stop me.”

Denny throws up his hands in disbelief. “Listen to yourself. Would you listen to yourself? You sound just like Sukey. ‘You’re not really trying to help me, you’re just standing in the way of my art.’”

“Sukey was
right
!” I scream.

“Sukey had a
problem
!” shouts Denny. “It’s not about your music. Your music’s great. It’s amazing. Nobody’s trying to take that away from you. But Christ, Kiri, you’ve been so high-strung—you say you’re not on anything, but I know you are; I just
know
it. I was afraid to go back to Victoria in case—”