Yok (24 page)

“I don't remember, did you write anything on the last record?” Lemur asked.

The producer had asked that question many times the past few weeks, but he wasn't interested in the answer; he wasn't interested in anyone other than himself.

“ ‘Moon over Lanceheim,'” Mike answered. “It opened the last record. That one was mine.”

Lemur shrugged his narrow shoulders.

“You know,” he said gravely. “If Gavin wants, we'll put in one of your songs. I can transform any kind of shit into shit that will top every list in this city. It's a gift I've got.”

The demon producer took a puff on the cigarette, picked a few flakes of tobacco off his lip, and sampled the espresso without appreciating it.

“Not that I'm calling your songs shit,” he added. “But you get what I mean? Give me a little time, and I'm magic.”

“This song I'm writing now, about freedom, it's magic, too,” said Mike, regretting it at once.

It made him sound like a little cub.

“Cool,” Lemur answered, rocking his whole body to reinforce his ironic, contemplative nods.

“It's important to me,” the chimp explained. “I have to be able to stand by what I do.”

“Great, great.” Lancelot nodded, leaning over the board to correct a drum sound at the end of the song they hadn't listened to. “Personally, you know, I could care less where I stand. But cash is cash. Well, nothing personal, you get what I mean?”

J
ust as the sun was rapidly sinking into the horizon and the Evening Weather was cooling down the city with its darkness, Mike Chimpanzee slipped away. The checkered Nils Gull—more than twice as old as the ape, he'd played with Owl, Bill & Trash in the early days of rock and roll—was adding guitar licks to “It's Not Over ('Cause It Never Happened).” The gull was a perfectionist, and as he was rejecting the eighth retake, Mike picked up a wide-brimmed hat and took the elevator down to the lobby. During the Evening Weather was Mike's best chance to take a walk undisturbed. For one thing, there were fewer stuffed animals out on the streets in the evening, and the shadow of the wide brim kept him from being easily recognizable.

He opened the heavy outside door, put on the hat, stepped out onto the sidewalk, and started walking east, along the imposing stone facade of the National Bank. Right on schedule the genie showed up at his side. He, too, was wearing a hat.

“Sir, don't get mad now, I don't intend to say anything,” said Fredrik. “I only intend to walk here beside you, trying to keep from noticing that you haven't tucked in your shirt and from reminding you that everything you wish for you can have.”

On the other side of the street was Parc Clemeaux, with its pruned boxwood bushes and artfully shaped arborvitae and cypresses. When Mike discovered the garden a few years earlier he had been astonished and spent hours along the labyrinthine pathways. But the pleasure of novelty soon faded, and now he hardly cast a glance across the street.

He should have.

Somehow the rumor had spread. It might have been someone up in the office at Brown Brothers, or one of the musicians in the studio. It might have been pure chance, a stuffed animal who had seen him use the door a few hours earlier, or the kind of cunning espionage the tabloids excelled in. But whatever the cause the fact remained: There were two dozen stuffed animals behind the boxwood bushes in the park opposite, following Mike's and Fredrik's every step.

It was the genie who discovered them first.

“Goodness,” he said.

The next moment he was gone.

This caused Mike in turn to stop and look around, and just then the horde of stuffed animals on the other side decided to attack. They ran right out into the street, cars honking and swerving with screeching tires, but this did not stop them.

Mike reacted instantly. He took to his heels. The big hat went flying.

“We love you!” his fans screamed, running after him.

“We want you!” they shouted after him.

“Mike, stop!” they screamed.

But Mike managed to throw himself into the entryway out of which he had just come, right before the devoted fans caught up. He ran up the stairs and pounded on the door to the studio. Listened for steps in the stairwell, but heard none. Lemur opened with a raised eyebrow.

“When did you leave?” he asked. “Why are you out of breath?”

Mike didn't answer. He dragged himself across the threshold with rainwater dripping from his body. There was a large drying cabinet in the bathroom behind the sauna, and that was where he headed.

N
ils Gull was sitting on a bar stool at the closest kitchen island, skimming a newspaper absentmindedly when Mike Chimpanzee came out again, warm and dry. The checkered old guitarist was drinking whiskey with a straw. From the studio, a technician was heard putting in the sound from a cymbal, and through the skylights Mike could see in the night sky that the Storm was approaching. Lemur was not to be seen.

“Lancelot?” Mike asked.

“He split,” Gull answered. “Went to some meeting. Back in a couple hours, he said. You want some?” he asked, gesturing to his glass.

“A meeting? Now?”

Gull aired his feathers to explain that he didn't know more than that, and held up the whiskey bottle. Mike nodded and sat down on the other side of the island. They didn't know each other very well, had only met a few times before, and yet not many minutes had passed before Mike started telling about his songwriting. How dependent he was on inspiration, how authentic his sources of inspiration were, how different his process looked. It was in creation, Mike Chimpanzee said to the checkered gull, that he became whole; it was his only way to put together the fragments of a life that was constantly cracking.

Nils Gull listened attentively. He had met hundreds of performers like Mike Chimpanzee, good-looking types who earned piles of money but still whined about artistic integrity; they all thought they were geniuses. At the same time, Nils was a professional musician and knew who paid the bills.

“You need something like Nikki Lee's guitar pick,” he said.

“Nikki Lee's guitar pick?”

“Now I feel old.” Gull sighed. “You mean you've never heard of Nikki Lee's guitar pick?”

“Do tell,” Mike asked.

“Nikki Lee . . . you know who that is?”

Now Mike blushed with shame and fury.

“I haven't heard the story about the guitar pick,” Mike repeated. “But Nikki Lee and the Suspects is the reason I started playing. She's my role model. In many ways.”

His voice quivered with indignation. Gull nodded indulgently.

“When Nikki Lee was fifteen she was already, you know, something out of the ordinary,” the guitarist said. “She had a voice like . . . well, you know what I'm talking about. Today everyone knows what I'm talking about. But at that time she only sang a little. Not very often. It hurt too much. It cut like knives in her throat. She told her parents, but they thought it had something to do with her vocal cords. She was scratchy and rough even then. It wasn't strange, they thought, that it hurt. At the same time it was a shame, because she sang so amazingly.”

“Amazingly.” Mike nodded in agreement; Nikki Lee's voice had always been one of his guiding lights.

“Everyone who heard her sing loved her,” Gull continued after a sip from his straw, “and encouraged her in every way. She learned to play guitar unwillingly, and tried writing songs, but it was a no-go. Not because she couldn't. And, as I said, she sang like a goddess. But it was . . . mediocre. Half-baked. Nothing that stuck out.”

“I know what you're talking about,” Mike admitted, sipping the strong booze. “Hell, I know exactly what you're talking about.”

“Besides, her throat only got worse and worse. She tried whispering her lyrics, whistling the melodies, but that didn't work. Finally she went up to the record company to do her big audition. Halfway through the song her throat hurt so much that tears welled up in her eyes and she fainted.”

“Is that true?” Mike whispered.

“She woke up in the hospital,” Gull continued. “In comes the doctor who did the operation, and in his claws he's holding a little piece of plastic.”

“A guitar pick?”

“A small piece of plastic, which had been in Nikki Lee's throat the whole time, probably ever since she was manufactured. A piece of someone else's nose, or someone else's claws. She goes home after a few days in the hospital, and takes the piece of plastic with her as a memento. When she feels good enough, she sits down with the guitar. She remembers the piece of plastic, gets it, and uses it as a guitar pick. It's not just that her voice holds; after the operation she can sing without feeling pain. More important yet, with her new guitar pick she writes the songs that you and I and everyone else have loved since then. The classics.”

“Unbelievable.” Mike sighed.

“You need something like that.” Nils Gull nodded. “Something that makes it happen.”

“Makes what happen?” asked Lancelot Lemur, who had just come in the door.

“Nothing,” Mike hurried to say.

He had no desire to take the role of a wretch once again, even if he felt like one.

 

7.

T
he tears welled up in Cocker Spaniel's eyes, gathering as heavy drops on her long eyelashes. If she were to blink now, they would roll down over her cheeks.

“Don't be sad,” Mike pleaded.

He regretted it bitterly, and it felt like someone was squeezing his heart into a hard little ball.

“I thought it would be so . . . special,” Cocker Spaniel said quietly.

“But isn't it obvious that it's special?”

“But I thought you wanted to have a chain, too.”

“Darling, of course I want a chain. It's just Gavin who—oh, forget about him. Of course we'll buy matching chains.”

A devout stillness prevailed inside Vulgaeri. Voices were naturally subdued by dark blue wall-to-wall carpet under the many beautifully illuminated counters of brushed steel and glass. For security reasons the store had no windows. The walls were clad with red velvet wallpaper, and the classical music was playing so faintly that it was felt more than heard. The well-known jewelry store was on sand white Glöckleinsgasse, one of the more out-of-the-way streets in Lanceheim, and Mike and Cocker Spaniel were sitting in front of the counter with wedding chains. Not all stuffed animals had necks, but they all had a head, and the chains could be made as long or short as you wanted.

“I don't want to force you into anything,” Cocker Spaniel sniffed. “I guess it was stupid of me to think that—”

Mike realized that this moment would follow him throughout the marriage. Due to some unguarded words, equally sincere and thoughtless.

“Darling, forget that now,” he repeated. “That was just silly. Do you like the one with diamonds better?”

But she had lost the desire to choose and shook her head.

“We'll take the simple one. It's more truthful.”

On the glass counter there were three chains that remained after an hour of deliberation and testing: a narrow one in white gold, another equally narrow chain but strewn with diamonds, and finally a thicker variation in red gold with a beautiful silver clasp. Mike had thought out loud, and stated that onstage Gavin Toad wouldn't allow him to wear any of them: The chains weren't rock and roll.

“But you preferred the diamonds, didn't you?” he insisted.

“We can't afford it.”

“We'll be able to afford it when the record comes out.”

“You don't know that.”

“It's the sort of thing you feel.”

But that was a lie, of course. The work on the record was in a phase when he felt less certain than ever about Lancelot Lemur's genius. Last night he had continued working on the song about freedom; that was his method, working over and over again, and he thought he'd made a bit more progress. To surprise himself, after a number of genie-cigarettes, he had unexpectedly chosen F minor, a key he never used. This freed him. Suddenly it became possible to exchange the most obvious chord progressions for alternative suspended and diminished chords, to mix keys and not get stuck in stolen riffs. With his guitar in his lap he felt smarter than he had in a long time.

With these thoughts a powerful urge came over him, and he wanted nothing better than to leave this store and return to the black notebook and the melodies.

“Besides, your dad isn't going to like it if it's too simple,” he said. “We'll take the one with diamonds.”

But Cocker Spaniel Rozenblatt was not in the mood for gibes about her father, and because he—Dad—was going to pay for it anyway, she bought the simplest variation. They left the store in silence, and went to wait outside on the sidewalk. A coworker would come and pick up Cocker Spaniel and drive her directly to work. She was a real estate agent in Tourquai, and reasonably free to arrange her time as she wanted.

When she turned toward him with tears in her eyes and fell into his embrace, Mike realized in shame that he had already forgotten their conflict; instead in his thoughts he was in an intro that might work with the verse.

“Mike,” she wept. “Forgive me?”

“Yes, no, that is, I was the one who was stupid,” he answered.

Her soft body against his, the tears absorbed by his shoulder, the scent of fabric softener, her breath that smelled of cotton and mint . . . He was back, again fully and mentally present on the sidewalk on Glöckleinsgasse.

“My darling,” he said, “you know you're going to have to forgive me again and again when we're married, don't you? I'm that type. That has to be forgiven.”

And she wept and laughed in turn, nodding at the same time.

“I know,” she said. “I'm sure it's because I love you so much, which I am never going to admit again.”