Wonderland (4 page)

The flicker flickers provocatively. Shadow of a flame, of a sound. I don’t turn my head this time, trying, and failing, to snare it in the corner of my eye.

Gitte wafts in. “It’s time,” she says, smiling, like Glinda the Good Witch.

We all stand up—me, Boone, Zach, Tom, and Alicia—and take hands. Boone’s hand in my left is light; Zach’s hand in my right is heavy, gripping, already sweating. He gives off a subliminal hum of energy, like a power line. “Okay,” I say. “You guys are the best, I’m so lucky.” I squeeze the hand in my left, the hand in my right. “Here we go. Good show.”

“Good show,” they echo, and we hug, we kiss, we walk out, me in the lead. The light hits my eyes.

And then here is what happens at the Bee Palace: shivering, even in my armor and the fingerless gloves I have borrowed from the borrowed apartment, I take a few breaths and spiral into the opening notes of “The Orchids.” I am there. I blow the song through the back of the rickety concert hall and out into the night, folded, gleaming, fast, faster, unbroken, alive, whirling inside the secret chamber, rose and gold, unstoppable, irresistible, straight into the veins, hair-raising. I take another breath. I am the train, I am the tracks, I am the whistle on the train. I am speeding down the prairie. I heat up. Almost, almost, the train breaks in half this time. I get very close. Very close. I take another breath. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Boone, eyes closed, face uplifted to the choppy, eerie, syncopated sound I make. I take another breath. “Waiting for a Sign.”

There are many things—most things, really—that I can’t do. But I can do this. It is far too much, and not nearly enough.

An hour and a half later, we reach “Wonderland.” The song has reindeer in it, great sadness, a city, an atonal bridge, whispering, buzzing, searching, crying, more questions than answers. As I bow, drenched in sweat, in my shirtsleeves, I glimpse Mads toward the back, standing with a tall woman in dark braids who I immediately know is his wife. At first glance I think Mads is Simon, that he’s come to Christiania for the opening concert of the tour. But Simon’s wife isn’t tall, doesn’t wear braids, and she wouldn’t be here, of course. Nor would Simon. Though Mads’s wife can’t see it, I wink at her, at what we both know Mads hides under his shirt. But if those letters weren’t written for her, or for anyone, what were they for? I’ll never know. She must know. Even so, what must that be for her, to see those letters every day and know they aren’t for her, that they never will be, no matter how many times she sucks his cock, no matter the children, no matter the shit and the tears and the endless worries about money, no matter all the bicycles he fixes and doesn’t fix, no matter the ruined future they believed in and still believe in, no matter that she’ll probably bury him one day. Bury him and his
AMOR:
a letter read by many, but never sent.

Mads is standing up, clapping heartily. He is standing on Simon’s feet, Simon’s feet are there, inside his shoes. Where is the rest of him? Everyone is standing up. Boone, in the wings, is smiling, his hands still folded under his armpits, rocking gently from side to side. Zach, Tom, and Alicia are laughing, glistening. I am damp, flushed, blissed. Mads’s wife is looking down at a cell phone in her hand, a small square of light. We do the encore, Ezra’s most famous song, “Burning Horse.” My private tribute to him. Though Mads’s wife is looking straight at me, the position of the lights in my eyes renders her face obscure, a dark, attentive curve. Flicker, rustle: as if an animal had darted across the wings. But when I subtly turn my head, there’s nothing there.

T
HE WALLS WERE
green; the bathroom tiles were Moorish. It was morning in Arezzo. Outside the window, the swifts were darting above the church in crazy arcs and uneven parabolas—I couldn’t find a pattern in their motion. We were grainy from the night before; Simon pawed through the minibar, found a lemon soda, popped the tab, came back to bed. I pressed my mouth to his belly, just above the hairline. He put his hand on my head.

“I don’t know,” I said. “The room was flat, didn’t you think? Cold.” It was the
Bang Bang
tour, and everything was opposite. All that had happened for
Whale
now unhappened, in reverse, undoing all that had been done. Pretty soon we would probably all be children, playing toy instruments in a rec room somewhere.

“No. You were fine. I’d like to see the Vasari house. We have time, don’t we?” His glasses, narrow-lensed with heavy black frames, arms folded, on the bedside table. The lines between his eyes. His impatience was beginning; his clock was ticking faster. Most likely his stomach was beginning to hurt. It was the last day. We were always fractious on the last day.

“Sure.” I didn’t know yet that this was, in fact, our truly last day, that he had decided two cities ago to end it. The swifts flew up, up, up, endlessly. They looked like shadows of some larger, stranger creature invisible to the human eye, or like cursive, exploded, electric. Below his hairline, movement. The shift inside me, like a shovel emptying. How is it that those two motions could cross, enfold each other, what could one know about the other—anything? everything? nothing? Is that always the question? And how that could have happened. I almost told him that day about the baby, about what had happened, that I was sorry, because I loved him, now I would have kept it, I would have taken that leap. I thought I might tell him then, as the swifts traced their wild, unchartable trajectories over the church.

I didn’t. And anyway, something else had already happened, and I hadn’t known it at all. It had happened within him, silently, in Düsseldorf, which doesn’t have any swifts, any famous church, not much of anything, really, except an aquarium. It was already happening. Not during the fucking. The fucking, as it turned out, was aftermath. Maybe that’s always the case. That day, I thought that if I truly loved him, I would tell him what had happened. And what would he have told me if he truly loved me?

Say it, I thought, as he rose and fell inside me, say it, say it, say it, say it, say it.

F
ROM THE WINDOW
of the train to Göteborg, peak-roofed wooden houses that look miniature, as if miniature horses live inside. Didn’t Pippi Longstocking live in a miniature house like that? The sun is bright on the little roofs. Another one of my lives, the one where I live with a little horse in a little wooden house, ticks by. Out the window, the trees look folded, coming to neat green points on top. The bulk of our equipment and luggage is piled up in the bay at the end of the car, but there are bits left over. My feet rest on one of my guitar cases, which is on top of Zach’s guitar case. He tends my three guitars and his bass guitar meticulously, his small team of precious creatures. Boone, next to me, is looking at the singing-man figurine; to it he has added another, a porcelain drummer with a red hat. When did he have time to get that? How much did it cost? Is he putting together a band of figurines as well? We all have our totems, I suppose. Mine is the big, cashmere, green and black scarf I bought near the Copenhagen train station which I can’t afford and is now wrapped around my head and throat as if I were trying to disguise plastic surgery or some sort of hair disaster. I have to protect my voice; Jim would have made me vats of ginger tea by now. I took the fingerless gloves with me and am wearing them, too; they are connected in my mind to Mads and his loveless love. It doesn’t make sense, it wasn’t his house. Maybe they’re just a trophy, or a wish. Warm me up.

Zach, Tom, and Alicia are across the aisle, tired and dressed in clashing, random layers. Things went late last night; Gitte took us to a bar somewhere across Copenhagen, near a bridge. Alicia is eating chocolates, thumbing her iPhone, earbuds in. Tom, in his fisherman’s hat, his Purell sticking out of his pocket, is doing a sudoku. Zach, serious as a Talmud scholar, is bent over a Danish newspaper, trying to translate via Google. His head is perfectly smooth; does he shave it every day? I’m not sure why he’s bothering to puzzle out the newspaper. Denmark is already behind us, already gone; we won’t be back. The Bee Palace whirls away, broken corner over broken corner. Mads, with his bicycle wrench, grows smaller and disappears. Boone strokes his figurines. He winks at me; he is happy about last night; we’re all happy, hung over from schnapps. I am hungry. I have given up the badly translated mystery—who cares whodunit?—for Colette,
The Vagabond.
That coquette’s problems seem so easy, no mystery there. Marry him, don’t marry him, whatever. I close Colette and open my tour journal, a black-and-white composition book on the front of which is written, in ballpoint pen,
Wonderland.
I’ve kept a journal for all my tours.
Wonderland
will join
Whale
and
Bang Bang
and
The Pillars
on my bookshelf at home. I put scraps of local newspapers in them, write down my dreams, tape in photos, stolen menus, smear swaths of lipstick. To remember. Because the minute it’s over, it’s so hard to remember exactly what happened, and where and when and how. The moments collapse into a shiny heap. Tom’s head drops onto his chest as he gives up on sudoku and falls asleep. But I find I don’t feel like writing in my journal now; I close it and stow it back in my bag.

As the train chugs on past neat Scandinavian towns, I try to make sense of the facts of my life. Fact: I was once a certain kind of famous for what was, in reality, not a very long time in most lives—perhaps four years, before I crashed, flamed, disappeared, walked away from Rome feeling like Godzilla, defeated by buzzing forces no one else could see, a squadron of tiny, blinding airplanes of paralyzing doubt. It felt much longer than four years. Though in music time that’s more than long enough to leave an impression, a stain, on the airwaves. A ghost. I may well be chasing not Simon’s ghost—the ghost of who he once was to me, since the man is still alive, I’m pretty sure—but my own around these grab bag of European cities, trying to frame some sort of question. What is my question? Was that my ghost, my former incarnation, last night, flickering in the corners of my gaze?

And why was I famous, anyway? Fact: I wasn’t famous to everyone. I was famous only among certain people. The smart people, the people who pride themselves on being smart. Part of it—let’s be honest—was the glamour of my pedigree, and the history to which that pedigree alluded. Everyone knew who my father was. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that everyone who loved my music also loved who my father was. You can’t separate the dancer from the dance, and anyway, I never tried. When you don’t even have a high school diploma to your name, you need credentials. My parents were mine; they seemed to explain everything, all the jagged edges, the awkward gaps, the indeterminacy; later, the bad behavior, the drinking, the drugs, the disarray, and so on. Because there was my father, with his famous sawed-in-half train, but there also was my mother, who painted on glass. They divorced, of course, by the time I was twenty—glass derails train, it turns out—but the iconic part is the two of them together, we two little girls with wild, uncombed hair, a gypsy family floating on the strafed margins of the Reagan years, kitchens filled with poets and artists, borrowed apartments in London and Rome and Istanbul, studios, a donkey in Spain, a swing in the living room on St. Mark’s Place, Lila and me in and out of various educational institutions, haphazardly becoming slightly less than savage.

Until Lila, at thirteen, demanded to be sent away to boarding school. Our parents, half amused, half bewildered, complied, so from Morocco Lila wrote away for the application forms. Paterson-Birdcliffe in Maine, no less, took her on gratis as a special case, a darling curiosity, and she more than fulfilled their expectations, graduating at the head of her class, a sensible beauty, freshly painted in exact representational detail, hyperrealist. I stayed loyal to the family business of being outsiders, drifters; I got bored easily in any school and cut classes to go home and draw or paint or write epic novels. Uncle Matt, my mother’s brother, who’d played in bands around Portland, Oregon, for years, gave me my first guitar when I was six; I rode it constantly, obsessively. They found me guitar teachers in Spain, in Norway, even in Florida, during that miserable eight months we lived near Orlando. Everywhere we went, I followed my dark thoughts, my light thoughts, wherever. I read adventure stories, travelogues—Tintin comics, a little paperback biography of Amelia Earhart,
The Swiss Family Robinson.
I imagined that we were like them: the Brundage clan, travelers, artists, adventurers, modern saints. I couldn’t understand what Lila was doing, and I felt contempt for her, which I didn’t bother to conceal. Since I didn’t finish high school, I had no desire to go to college. When Lila enrolled at Oberlin, to me it was as if she had entered the convent. What was comparative literature? Compared to what?

And why would anyone leave us for the convent? We were our own royalty. My father’s three sisters: strange birds, all of them. My mother’s incandescent roseate beauty, the beauty of the artist’s wife. We were heroes in certain circles. Even Lila, the golden absence that reinscribed what it was to be us, how impossible, how unusual, how necessary. Timothy Greenfield-Sanders took her picture. Despite our pity, or maybe because of it, we visited Lila often; we wrote her all the time; we sent her videotapes. She and I spent the entire summer when I was nineteen and she was fifteen camped out in a half shack on the Irish Sea. We were those girls, the artist’s daughters, the mermaids, the ones with long, tangled hair who did what they wanted. Inside, always, she knew she was free.
You can’t take it back,
I want to say to her, as if we were still children.
No do-overs.

But isn’t that what I’m doing out here, chugging along on the clean regional train to Göteborg? A do-over? As one who had it, a piece of it, and then dropped it, hard. Got rid of it. Burnt it. Fact: I burnt it. But now, though it may be too late, I want it back. Instruments piled in the tidy compartment between cars, I can see them from here. Anyway. The point is that, while I wouldn’t say I was arrogant—though maybe I was arrogant, probably I was—or even more confident than most, I did have the sense that I was, in a way, expected. That there was a room where people were waiting for me, their faces blurry maybe, but definitely there, they were already there, they were listening for me, that sound just in the other room. So that when I arrived, and I did arrive, I wasn’t entirely surprised that they would say, in effect, Ah, it’s you. My parents being who they were, it was expected of me that when I opened my mouth I’d have something to say, and, astonishingly—though I didn’t know then how astonishing it was—I did.