Wonderland (24 page)

“Wonderland.”

I can’t describe the next part. But however many times we do that song in the future, that’s the one we’ll be hearing in our heads, the one we’ll be trying to get back to.

O
N THAT LONG
, hot afternoon in Berlin between sound check and the show, just before my father died in another country, without me, I walked past the catering room with its trays of pepperballs and catfish, the sun and the moon playing cards next to an open computer on whose screen men in green chased men in purple on a soccer field, down a corridor, up a back staircase, through an enormous, empty room that seemed to me like purgatory, and out to a wooden deck that looked over an abandoned train track on the left and, on the right, a collection of circus tents. On the deck it was extraordinarily quiet, save for the sound of the wind and the irregular clang of metal hitting metal somewhere. The heat seemed to have pressed all sound down to a sliver, to be bending light itself into a color that was almost purple. I felt buoyant in the heat, as if I could breathe underwater. The tiny muttonchop man hadn’t appeared yet, so my face was bare, my hair was up in a plastic jaw-clip. I was wearing an old skirt, a tank top, sandals I bought once upon a time in Taormina. The leather strap on the left one was irretrievably loose. I walked to the deck rail on the right and looked over the circus. One big tent was striped, another was whitish gray, and a third, blue one appeared to be falling down on one side. On the roof of the striped tent was written
Circus Alberto.
A camper sat next to the whitish-gray tent along with a six-wheeled truck. In a round, cleared space in front of the whitish-gray tent was a two-story structure that looked partly like a cell phone tower and partly like the kind of diving board in a cartoon from which a donkey dives, ears flying, teeth bared, into a bucket of water. I was thinking about that circle Billy Q and I walked together earlier in the day, what its meaning could be, what powers it might possess, what his movie could possibly be about. I took my left foot out of the flapping sandal and drew a circle with my toe. The heat surrounded me, breathed me.

Down below, the sound of a door closing. A woman in a black leotard to the ankles, carrying a harness as big as a saddle, approached the tower and began, rung by rung, to climb it. When she reached the top, she threaded ropes around herself. I saw the glint of buckles as she tugged, pulled, leaned out perilously, then let go, turning over and over in the air, landing lightly on one pointed foot on the ground. For a second she turned there, pirouetting en pointe. Flatfooted, she went back to the tower and climbed to the top again. This time, instead of the harness contraption, she wound a rope around her waist, through her legs, back around her waist. She dove, swung out, hung for a moment, trussed, upside down, and then unraveled slowly, arms and legs spread wide, starfishing down point by point. When she reached the ground, she pranced, then tumbled backward and up, twining one leg in the hanging rope and swinging there for a minute, her ponytail brushing the ground. Like a woman in a swimming pool doing a flip-turn, she rolled right-side up, unwound the rope from her body, and went back to the tower, began climbing, hands and feet making of her a hieroglyph moving over the metal’s geometry.

Leaning over the rail, I clapped, but she either didn’t hear me or didn’t want to be interrupted, her slender black form, like the itsy-bitsy spider, climbing steadily, undaunted, back up the tower. When I went inside, the tiny muttonchop man was waiting, armed with hairspray, brushes, bobby pins, false eyelashes, and all manner of creams and colors.

I
MISS HIM
, too. I’m back out here on the road with a suitcase full of clothes that are either too clean from hotel laundries or not clean enough because they should be dry-cleaned. (Why did I bring them?) I wash my bras in shampoo once a week, more for ritual purposes than anything that might produce actual cleanliness. They do smell nice, anyway. I thought I saw him limping down the street in Switzerland. I followed him for two blocks, just to see the face of a man who walked like him, but the man went into a store, so I turned around. I always thought he’d be back, didn’t you? I mean: I thought he’d find it again, what got lost, his heart, his nerve, his honesty—I don’t have a word for it, really. And maybe the payment was just. Lila, I know how brave you are. You planted a flag in Wyoming, evidence, trump card, immutable: thousands of acres of rock-solid, earthy, four-legged, muddy, pockmarked, furred and feathered and toddling proof of exigency. Countering everything our parents believed in—the dirty diapers, the animals that needed to be fed, the school year, the poverty everywhere, the diabetic cowboys, the winters, the unregenerate localness. In my seven years with the hundred little girls holding hammers, I felt that they were on your side, that they had, in some sense, been sent by you. Lila, I was true, too. I was. I stayed put for those seven years. I didn’t complain. But now. Lila, now. Isn’t it strange that neither of us ever truly imagined that he could die? It was as if, after he came back to life in Rome, he had been granted immunity to mortality. We were always mad at him and that was as if he could never die, too. You took Dad’s glasses from Vermont. Ruthless, as much as it was intimate. You blinded him. But now. He isn’t coming back. It was all sand. I don’t blame the prison. Lila, didn’t we both always know that? We’re free.

I
TAKE THE
little twisted, pitted slug out of my pocket, feel its weight in my palm. The plane’s oval window frames the powder-blue sky with metronomic regularity, recurrent beats of an ongoing wave. You, and you, and you, and you. The woman in the veil, Mads, Daisy and Vikram, William, little bird, and you, and you. Which mountain? Which field? Which music room? Which train? I run from door to door, window to window, some tiny, some huge, looking for you, and you, and you.

L
ATVIA IS LIGHT
filtered through trees. Just beyond the trees is the Baltic Sea. The sound of Portuguese rap music comes through the trees. Boone, God help us, is driving the rented van that we picked up at the frantic, hot little airport in Riga, jouncing over the dirt road to the entrance gate of the festival. Every time he has to shift gears, his hand flutters for a moment, with uncharacteristic indecision, over the gear stick before landing rather hard. I am leaning out the window, face to the sun, like a happy dog. In the back, Tom, Alicia, and Zach look frayed, a triptych of fatigue. Tom is wearing an Ace bandage on his wrist, because he slipped while climbing onstage in Basel. He’s been playing through the injury, packing his wrist in ice after each show. Alicia has unbuttoned the top button of her jeans. Zach, eyes closed, is working out chords on an imaginary guitar. Since Hamburg, the air among us has changed. Basel was more hospitable, which salved our egos; after the show, I treated them to a spectacular meal on my straining credit card, composed of elements none of us could identify, not even Boone—tree bark seemed to be a major ingredient, and sage, and something squid-like, and maybe some brick dust; but that’s not what did it. What seems to have happened is more like a collective surrender, the tender openness of a long morning-after, or of sailors who now know for sure that they are lost at sea. Tom does sudoku. Alicia gazes out the window at the forest.

“There’s a beach just through there,” says Boone at the wheel, who has momentarily become our father. “We can swim.”

“That would be a
ma
zing,” says Alicia.

Zach shrugs, plucking at invisible chords with his long fingers.

We bump along. Latvia is soft, with soft, short trees, thin golden light. The festival is made of thin tents, a small stage. Boone pilots the van ever so slowly along a dirt road crowded with people. It looks something like 1968 here, warped and folded, colored-in slightly wrong. Low-slung, faded jeans, dreamy expressions, face paint. A young woman in a bikini top and tie-dyed cutoffs, wearing an orange lei around her neck, skips down the dirt road, arms extended. What does she think she’s doing? Boone stops the van at the open gate of a chain-link fence. A burly, freckled man sits on a folding chair, holding a clipboard. On his black T-shirt in white letters is a phrase full of
b
’s and
l
’s and
v
’s. Boone leans out the window. “Brundage band.” The back of Boone’s neck is slightly sunburned; when did that happen?

“What does that mean, on that guy’s shirt?” I ask Zach, who quickly types the phrase into his phone.

“Looks like it’s Latvian for ‘Behave well and everything will be fine.’”

The burly, freckled man, squinting, waves us in.

“Not bloody likely,” says Tom, gamely giving Latvia the finger. The Portuguese rap music grows stronger. Boone downshifts into second, to nose delicately into the backstage area, a cluster of small red tents and tarp pavilions and two large white tents. He parks us next to a double-decker red-and-black tour bus. Standing outside the bus is a young man, shirtless, smooth-chested, muscular, blond, wearing what look like a baseball player’s pegged white pants and flip-flops. A silver ring pierces his left nipple. He is lifting dumbbells, curling first one arm, then the other, his pectorals swelling each time. Next to him on the grass, on a little blue blanket, is a baby, perhaps eight months old, chewing on a ring of colored rings. Next to the baby is an African-American man with a serious expression, in chinos and a pressed white shirt, talking on a cell phone.

Boone leans out the window. “Hey, you bastards.”

Both men look up, smile. The young man puts down the dumbbells, comes up to the van, and rest his forearms on the open window. “Oh, hallelujah. What the fuck is this place,
Hogan’s Heroes
?” He gives a Nazi salute. “But the beach is great.” He sticks his face farther in the window. “I’m Terry. Hello.” He waves. It’s odd to me how much sweeter-faced he is in person than he looked on the MTV Awards last year, when his band, Little Wars, won for this and that, Terry getting up from his seat in the audience several times in a sharp suit. Onscreen he looks ravaged and ravaging, although his music is dance-ready, peaches and cream and ass. But in person his eyes are wide, his face quite smooth and open.

“Is that one yours?” asks Boone.

Terry turns his head, laughs. “No. Jesus. That’s Zelda, Kiki’s kid. She’s a total doll, we love her.” Terry pulls himself up the side of the van, balances on straight arms. His pectorals bloom. “Anna. You don’t know me, but I worship you. I just want to tell you that.” He bounces up and back as if pulled on a string, lands soundlessly a few feet away. “Come hang out later. We have everything in the bus.”

The man on the cell phone nods at us; the baby gurgles, wiggles her feet.

We wander around the festival, through the loping afternoon, because we don’t go on until ten. How accustomed I have become to our band’s particular forms, our shapes in crowds: the shine of Zach’s head, his small ears; Alicia’s way of walking on her toes; Boone attached to his iPhone by an earpiece and a cord; the roundness of Tom and his stiff-necked walk, in sunglasses, his fisherman’s hat. I navigate by them, always keeping count: shine, toes, cord, hat. Our small, five-pointed constellation moves among the festival-goers, passing by the tennis courts, the Air Baltic tent where people are getting their hair done by orange-uniformed attendants, an exercise tent with hula hoops and treadmills, the Jägermeister tent, the Coco Loco tent, a small stage on which a woman sings in a long black dress with gold stripes, a flower in her hair. I don’t know the language of the lyrics she is singing. A couple of thick, sunburned white guys play Ping-Pong under the trees. More people pass by wearing orange leis. What do these mean? Is it a cult? This festival looks as if it is made of paper, light and brightly colored.

At a smallish tent in the shade I find wooden trays of licorice set out on a long table covered in white paper: red-and-white striped, mint green, black, light purple, orange. The strands lie in slender loops like fresh pasta, dusted with—flour? cornstarch? I can’t tell. An older man with a craggy face and a black mustache dozes in a folding chair behind the long table. Zach, smelling of sweat, hovers over my shoulder. “I love licorice,” he says.

“Me, too.”

“Those colors are awesome.”

“Right? What do you think the purple is?”

The man with the black mustache raises his eyelids a fraction, closes them again.

We fill a white paper bag with multicolored strands, wake up the man with the mustache, pay in euros. He frowns at the euros but takes them anyway. We stroll on. I reach into the bag and pluck up a length of light purple: it is delicate, sweet, lavender and honey, and, unlike the waxy, tough licorice I’m used to at home—Red Vines—it is the consistency of homemade fettuccine.

“Taste this.” I hand a skein to Zach.

“Whoa. That’s some Willy Wonka shit right there.”

“Let’s try the green one.”

We chew. “Wow,” I say. “I could get addicted. Did you get the cinnamon hit?”

“How do they do that?”

“Latvian magic, I guess. What’s the Latvian currency?”

Zach says, “I don’t know. We’re only here one night. Boone says we drive back to Riga after the show. That’s going to be a bitch.” He hands me a black strand. “You’re not going to believe what this tastes like.”

“God almighty,” I say, chewing.

“Who needs infrastructure when you have this?” says Zach. “Licorice, opiate of the masses.”

“Hey, Zach.” I pause, embarrassed. “What’s happening in the world?”

“Oh, you know. Disasters and miracles. The usual.”

“Anything I need to know about?”

“Not here. Not today.”

“Let’s go to the beach.”

We walk back down the honky-tonk and past the parking area, continue on the diminishing road through the dim, shady patch of forest, toward the light beyond the trees. The beach is fairly narrow, rock-strewn. Far to the left is a hut, and inside, the edge of a bar is visible. From the hut comes dance music, now in German? It must be German. Studding the beach, not far from the waterline, are blue, metallic cutouts of horses’ heads, an orderly herd of them in two rows, the empty holes of their single eyes fixed to the right. Towels are hung on a few of them; on another, a string bag. People, towels, and umbrellas dot the beach. A few scruffy dogs scamper here and there. Zach and I, outfitted with nothing, sit down in the sand. I take off my sandals and he takes off the boots and socks he’s wearing, revealing his long, slender feet, light hairs on the knuckles of his big toes.