Fiction by Jon Udelson
I had found him that way, the band manager, that look of blue vinyl crusting his lips and his skin like a crinkled tarp. We were in the fourth week of the tour, give or take, with more shows left than I could recall. I refused to check for a pulse, so I shook him a few times instead. Having run out of ideas, I snuck away from his bedside, crunching bits of broken glass deeper into the carpet of the motel room floor, and woke up our equipment guy Dime from a thick and violent sleep and told him we had to leave. “Bammer coming with us?” he asked.
“No, he’s dead.”
“Funny,” Dime said. “That’s exactly what I was dreaming.”
Before all this I might have been a roadie or merch seller or backup bass player, or maybe I hung around the band because I had nowhere else to go. But since I helped put together the tour, I assumed the position of manager fell on me. An inheritance through abandonment, though that was nothing I had the capacity in me to think at the time. Instead I thought about that one chamber of my heart which sang praises for those horse-sized pills Bammer gulped, of all the ways he could never remember my name.
So later that morning it fell on me to oversee Dime. He was going nutso atop this tiny, two-step stage, looking for the right parts for what he called the hookup, but what the right parts were he wouldn’t say. He’d move in flashes and bangs among the equipment, black and oily machinery piled up in a disastrous heap, grabbing this first, that next, so fast translucent multiples of himself streaked everywhere at once. Then Dime would stop suddenly, precisely, the many vectors of his body in motion merging back into the one when he found what needed finding.
“Does it usually take this long?” I asked him from the floor. But something had gone wrong, real wrong—some piece he needed missing.
“Had it in my hands,” Dime said. “Then poof! Like some kind of sorcery.” Which for us, our chemicaled minds back then, it might as well have been.
I yelled to Dime that he ought to check his hands again, because sometimes that’s the way it was with him. He shimmied all sheepish out from behind the mound of electrifiable metal and raised both his arms high, even spread his fingers, hoping something would drop out from the spaces between. I asked him if he could make do.
“Make do?” Dime said, this look on his face like his second favorite hamster just ate its way to number one. “Oh geez, oh boy,” he went on. “Oh god, oh god, oh god.” He squatted and interlaced his fingers behind his head and jerked them down hard in an attempt to fold himself out of this dimension. “What is this place, man?”
Where we were that day was all floor-length bar and broken lights, a thin dim despite the full façade of east facing windows, a scatter of bodies set to ignite in a communion of metal and moshing. But the truth was the venue seemed comprised more from elements of every place like it than it did itself. Cash only signs and nothing but well bottles, an old-timey register with deep bill pits, inked skin on every bouncer and bartender but all straight from some book. The signed and framed photos of bands hanging on the wall looked fine enough but were more like a plea than a brag. We were anywhere. And beyond the roof, we were somewhere underneath a sky like mottled blue skin, barely keeping in the upper atmosphere’s guts.
Sometimes I’d look up and see a giant body pushing through, fusing our futures into one.
I left Dime to his work and sat down with the bar manager at a high-top tucked away in the corner and watched as this man’s face sweated off into a work schedule. Even sitting, he looked tall and bloated. He wore a nametag, though he was the only one. It had the opposite effect from what you’d think—I never looked at it, never said his name out loud, referred to him only as dude or bud. Though looking back, I think he had found the perfect cover.
The manager looked up at me. “Is that guy setting up the equipment again?”
“What do you mean again?” I said.
“This is the third time he’s built it up and broken it down. Haven’t you noticed?”
I had not.
“You know these creative types,” I said, managing.
“What’s creative about plugging a bunch of shit into outlets?”
I found Dime again behind all that equipment. He had gone full jelly, abruptly believed himself to be a puddle. “What happened to all of my arms?” he slurred from the stage floor. Sure, Dime was long back then, lean, but he did truly seem to be everywhere at once. The still-missing part was what must have been causing him this harm.
“Dime!” I shouted. I stooped over to slap him. “How much did you dose?”
“And how did you get all the way down that well?” he retorted.
The truth was I had been off dosing for a while myself, though now I woke up with headaches and was tired all the time. Every action I took felt like something I remembered doing instead of doing. I dared not tell the band. They all believed we were on a transcendental quest to summon with our songs a new and burnt god, the doses themselves that which created the conduit from Her world to our own.
“They’re going to be here soon,” I told Dime. “Can you finish before the sound check?”
The way his chest moved up and down, he looked more bubbling than breathing. “Roger, roger,” he said. “Just waiting for my bones to come back to me.”
An hour later Scout stomped through, her screamo glory trailing in a hazy mist behind. I can’t help but describe her as if she were reborn with each arrival. Though what’s left for me to say? She stood there as if inside a prism, her hair so black it absorbed all light. Every feature stared back, made you blink.
Blood streaked from down from her ear to her neck. I grabbed a towel from an empty barstool and pressed it against her cheek, not knowing what I hoped to accomplish.
And if time ended in this moment, with my hand so close to her face? The two of us crystallized in the void? What then?
“You finally punched her!” Dime shouted from the stage. “I knew you would.” He had re-corporealized not too long before.
“What?” I shrieked. “What!”
“It was Peter,” Scout explained. “I thought we had finished our rock fight, but when I turned to get back in the van—BLAMO! Right in my temple.”
“Where’s the rest of the band?” I asked.
“Unloading. Peter said I should go ahead and take a nap or something. Sounds great to me, I’m pretty woozy.”
“Is that the sort of thing you should do after getting hit in the head with a rock?”
“What am I… a documentarian?” Scout said.
“Is that the word you meant to use?” But she told me to ask my question again.
“Slower this time,” she said. “Mouth your words with greater exaggeration.”
“And why?” I asked.
“I can’t hear you,” she said, tapping her ear.
“Have you been reading our lips this whole time?” I began having a heart attack, but only a very small one.
“I am a documentarian,” she slurred out, then laughed airily. That’s when her eyes slot-machined to white and she leaned into a fall.
I held Scout up by the armpits but didn’t know what else to do. So I told Dime to grab the bar manager and a bucket of ice from one of the bartenders. If I ordered people around enough, maybe everyone would think I did what I could, even if we had to cancel the show, or, god forbid, leave Scout behind. I looked over to see Dime speaking with the manager in pantomime. He twirled his fingers in the air, threw jazz hands, finally made the signal for a gigantic explosion by cupping his palms downward at his knees and slowly lifting them up as he pulled his arms farther from his chest. He pointed to us. The manager shook his head and rose up from his stool and lumbered our way, wearing the look of the perpetually besieged. He surveyed the scene—Scout twitching at every gesture, Dime seeing all the worlds but this one, and myself, unfortunate.
I asked him if he had any ideas.
“About a bleeding ear?” he said.
“What did you call me?” Scout yelled in my arms with what small energy she could. She grabbed for the knife she kept hidden in her belt but couldn’t get the hand-eye coordination right.
“We’ve pulled shows together with less,” he said.
The rest of the band arrived through the front entrance and set down their gear at the foot of the stage. “Peter,” I called out to our lead guitarist from the other side of the room and waved him over. “Quick!”
“Nuh-uh,” he said, wagging his finger.
“Fine, fine. Sorry,” I said. “P-Squad—over here.”
“Thank you for using the name I’ve named myself,” he said.
I gathered P-Squad, the manager, and the rest of the band members in a circle while a wiry bartender kept Scout awake with shot after shot of an energy drink we mouthed at her was a new Dutch liquor. I explained to them the situation as best I could. Scout’s head wound, her hopefully temporary deafness, the equipment setup malfunction. All of it. It was the purest moment of professional honesty I ever pushed myself through.
“Where’s our actual manager?” P-Squad asked me. But I couldn’t go back now. I told him instead I never heard of this man, or that maybe he died a long time ago far away from here. Somehow I knew that would work, and it did. The rest of the band members, dosed up to heaven, looked perplexed for a moment but then made room in their histories for the lie. Calliope, our new electric tambourinist even got teary, said she remembered slapping jingles at the funeral. All those children crying their eye sockets useless.
We could hear Dime still working the equipment, disassembled again and spread like a miniature ghost town across the stage. Amplifiers set yards apart, each humming faintly and only to themselves. Cables coiling up like tumbleweed caught mid roll. Mics rising from stands at awkward angles, waiting through silence for the sound, and stacks of monitors displaying only dust. All that sonic potential, which right then felt only like some bit of post-apocalyptic peace. Dime whistled a tune, oblivious to anything but the wires, boxes, and pedals around his feet. “He’s only getting to the stack now?” P-Squad said. I told him it was the fifth or sixth time. “Aren’t you going to stop him at some point?”
“Hey, hey,” I said. “Hey! Right now I have some pretty big accounts to worry about myself.” The truth was I didn’t know anything about the equipment, how electricity worked when plugged in, or what an ampere even was.
On top of it all, no one had any ideas about Scout’s hearing yet alone all that blood. Fluids poured from out of her head the way they would after hearing the celestial song and stained her tank a color so deep that it wouldn’t come out even with fire. The manager asked if we wanted the barback to take a look. She had begun studying reiki on weeknights and could manipulate the chi in Scout’s ears. I had no idea what he was talking about. But after we found the barback, we couldn’t find Scout. Dime came over, telling us he finished up the stack, that the band was all set for the night. I asked him if he had seen Scout.
“The singer?” he asked.
“Yeah, that one,” I said.
“She waved goodbye to me, then went out the side,” he told us. “Don’t worry. I waved back.”
“When was this?” I asked. The oddest sense of panic I ever felt, my tongue thinning to the dimensions of a snake’s.
“C’mon,” he said. “You know time is tough for me.”
Sometimes it’s hard to remember the present. You think you’re on your way from a gig, but really you’re traveling there. We were somewhere over state lines, on the next leg of a tour I hadn’t the fuzziest of helping put together, even if I knew the grand plan. To go and stop and go again atop a telling cross-section of American country, spreading through blast beats and epiphanic atonalities the gospel of metal according to Scout. The band would ready us all for the Redeemer and the new world following in Her underswell, set to replace this world like one conflagration consuming the air of another. Where else could we be but here? At what higher stakes could any of us ever wish to play? If this was not our calling, what strength had any of us left to live without one?
“I heard this roller coaster has a front flip, but I’m not sure I’m tall enough.” Dime said all of this from behind the steering wheel, his mind elsewhere. He and I had taken the van to look for Scout while the band set up to run sound checks before the gig. I hadn’t seen him dose again. “I didn’t know we found the physics for that yet,” he went on.
We zigzagged down stretches of melting asphalt, behind us the hollowed-out hull of the emptied van a specter we couldn’t shake. Twilight stranged the world, and for a moment I couldn’t tell in which direction the day moved.
“Want to get a milkshake?” Dime said. “I heard about a place around here.”
“Let’s get one after we find Scout,” I promised him. I imagined her having crossed against a light and gotten hit by a car for not hearing it. The crash obliterating her body, turning it to thunder. Those poor motorists of my mind with no idea what Scout would do to them next.
“Remember being a kid and getting so happy for your milkshake until someone slapped it out of your hands and you remembered the rest of your life?” Dime said.
“Maybe we should go to the police, have them do a sketch of her we can pass around,” I suggested.
“Can’t imagine what they could draw from one of your descriptions of her,” Dime told me, his sudden level of cogency terrifying.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
My stomach twisted with hunches. I’d tell Dime to stop the van so I could check out this burrito place or that tattoo parlor, but each time I was wrong. Finding Scout should’ve been easy. You’d usually follow the signs of her storm—the gathered crowds, the bubble of belonging you’d feel in her vicinity, the flashing current zapping through the air of whatever place she had just left. Not this time. Not a single trace.
On my way out from a strip club, I spotted Dime half a block from the van, its side door slid open so you saw right through into its emptiness, which at the time suggested to me a disemboweled torso. He stood in front of a clinic, held the door as a man about our age but with terrible skin lurched out. He continued to hold it open for no one. “What if I went in?” Dime said when I reached him. “You know, as like a gag?”
“And Scout?” I asked. “You’re not suggesting that we leave her out here?” I had reached a decision that I would try to be the best manager I could. Dime shook off whatever feeling he was having. It was the sort of shake that sticks with the person seeing it, the kind that acknowledges the truth that would be denied. As if our safety relied only on successfully proselytizing ourselves to the doctrine of own delusions. He took a while to blink again, then loaded himself back into the van.
My truest friend, my complement! Together we made one capable person. Where have you gone now, all these years later? I refuse the knowledge as best I can and force myself to wonder why I can no longer find you.
The sky separated from itself, floated up there all fossilized in amber. They call that time of day magic hour, but I never believed. Before I could turn the ignition, I spotted a woman at the corner of two buildings, her face hidden. She touched her hands to convulsions of graffiti on the brick walls surrounding her, then moved down the alleyway as if following a map. Her clothes scattered across her body in a confetti of shredded fabric, their edges blackened. She looked, really, as if she had jumped out of a burning building, though there was not a single fire around us. Maybe not Scout, I thought, but Scout enough to follow.
Dime and I got lost. The alleyway’s geometrical appearance belied its winding arrangement. It carried us along and connected us to other curved outlets on the way, swayed us left and right as we rocked farther and farther on. Streetlamps hunching like old and blinded sentinels hunched all the harder when we approached. A bulb shattered above us as we passed, showering down a soft sharpness upon our shoulders. Dime became nervous. “Oh god, oh god, oh god,” he started in again like earlier in the day and began to interlace his fingers. “How are the streets doing this?” But I pressed on and soon heard Dime’s footsteps falling behind me.
Later we stood in front of what looked like a huge shipping container built into a wall—hinges, a locking bar, the whole deal. “Finally a discovery!” Dime cried out.
A large and muscular man sat on a stool beside the door, a wad of cash in hand. “In or away?” he said.
“Don’t they traffic people in these things?” Dime asked me. “Are we really prepared for all of that?”
I checked my wallet but only had a few small bills in the fold. “Fine,” the man said to me when he saw what I could offer. I handed over everything. “But you better remember I did this for you.”
I pulled the handle hard and the door peeled open with a low cinematic creek, and I had one of those moments. You’ve had them too, right? The ones where we say to ourselves, this is not how I die. I can’t be the only one. And we didn’t die because it turned out the shipping container opened up like a cavern, holding within it a pop-up symphony quartet. We walked past the cases and equipment and the wooden seats. A small audience of maybe only a few dozen had already sat down, and in front of them the quartet played so hard their strings smoked, though how odd we couldn’t hear anything from outside.
We listened to this strange music for a while, Dime and I. It was a sound to remember the rest of world by, forget summoning another. You are one heartbeat closer to that motel room, and for now there is no place but here. We imagined being the ones who set up the chairs and stands, placed the sheet music and set down the baton for the conductor. If only we were, our job would now be done.
An usher snuck up on us, whispered if we had tickets. She was the most vogue woman I had ever seen—her suit like extraterrestrial architecture around her body, makeup that lay somehow beyond her face, all of her angles, including the ends of her hair, sharp as spears. I told her I already paid the bouncer outside. “What bouncer?” she said, and I filed away that man’s scam to use myself another time.
“We’re looking for our bandmate,” I told her.
“Is she in the quartet?”
“Not that I know of,” I said, truthfully.
“Does she like classical music at least?” I shook my head, and she said, “Then why would she be here?”
After a while, Dime and I found the van again. We continued to crisscross through the small city and widened our search for Scout. Later, I squeezed down my heart’s thump, halted its applause as the strip malls and small office buildings, the cracked traffic lights and contortion of streets like the throats of ancient human-devouring beasts gave way to something more rural. Longer roads and rising mountains with trees like lush and spiky hair, flat fields and distant hay rolls mirroring the spirals of the galaxy. In the dusky glow you could look at it all forever, a scene you’d trade the rest of your existence for. And all those infinite people, the ones who never had the chance to be born at all, I heard each of them out there calling out.
“We’re not going to find her,” I said.
Dime slowed the van to a halt and idled it in front of a farm fence that shot through to the horizon. He squirmed in his seat and reached underneath him. After a while he produced a small black box, its dimensions and many angles seeming to shift as he rotated it in his hand.
“Is this what I think it is?” he asked.
“You’re asking me?” I said.
After a pause, I asked Dime if that was the missing piece he needed for the hookup. And it was. “I really need to get back to that stack,” he told me.
“P-Squad is going to crush in your skull,” I said. I should have been afraid in that moment, but I wasn’t. I told myself then I’d never be afraid of anything again, but none of it was true. “You told him you already fixed it up.”
“Yes,” he said. Then in the most measured utterance I ever heard escape him: “But I lied.”
“Then why did you keep setting up and tearing down the stack?” I asked.
“I thought it would appear if I kept trying” is what he told me. It might have been the one difference between me and him.
“What’s that thing do anyway?”
“This?” Dime said, spinning the piece in his palm. “Oh boy, what doesn’t it?”
We pushed the needle to the end of the speedometer. The many roads of the world all pathed back to the venue, though who is left to say we needed to follow them, even if we did? The van moved like a sealed-up marvel of aerodynamic ingenuity, and maybe even of fate. Each stretch of asphalt emptied itself for us, and all the speed cameras on the way malfunctioned. No moon rose, and we listened at the other side of our windows and heard only the silence of a trillion insects all shutting up at once. Dime and I said nothing to each other for a long while, each of us cautious of breaking the spell and eager to solve at least one problem of our own making.
We arrived through the side entrance only minutes before the front doors would open, and who should be the first person we saw but Scout. Makeup caked her face, thick and ghoulish, and her hair floated like a billow of smoke. The tattoos on her arms glowed like ancient glyphs from the first humans trying to never forget the aliens who visited them. A reddened bandage sagged loosely around her head. “I walked to the ER,” she said before we could ask. I didn’t understand how this could have possibly been the solution.
“And your hearing?” I asked.
“Worked itself out,” she said. “One of those things.” But I told her I had never known, couldn’t even imagine—not once in all my life—those sorts of things.
P-Squad led the band as they were finishing the sound check. Dime walked over to the stack, excited in a way I’ve never seen him to be something to someone in his life. I couldn’t hear the words exchanged, but almost immediately I saw P-Squad slap the piece from Dime’s hands. Then for the third time that day, Dime interlaced his fingers, pressed down on his head, and tried to disappear himself from this world. Only this time it worked, in some strange way anyway, which made of that moment the last I ever fully saw of him. Dime’s body would still be here for years, he was still corporeal. But every time he saw me after this night, it was as if my presence only reminded him of me. And I remembered thinking then, at that venue, in that moment before the rest of the future began, how there might be no difference between a scream and a cheer. Or how caught in the incendiary middle space of a fire lit around our feet, there could be no telling whether we’d be burned or warmed.
“But the hookup.” I looked back to Scout, who only shrugged. “Never mind,” I said. I told her that she didn’t need to say it again.
“Did you boys at least have some fun on your little adventure?” she asked.
Then the shrieking fans, the righteous pit. The light show like a hazard of fireworks exploding into every pair of believing eyes. The band, with Scout in front, recreating with each measured beat the very concept of metal, and in volley after volley, discharging their dream upon the world. Maybe another Dime and another me had been there this whole time, I thought, did everything our responsibility to do. Or more likely, it was us who did it all and the ride out looking for Scout had been the hallucination. However it happened, the stack stood as a great gapless miracle, ready as ever and humming electric. And the band—barely clad, sweat-sheened, and loose booted—they whirled around the stage like the imperfect dance they were, the art themselves and not the performance of the art. P-Squad’s fingers moving at a nature defying speed. Calliope’s tambourine pulling time out from the physics of the universe, keeping it there for the band to mold. And Scout’s growls, inhuman and beautiful, reminding us of the first strange sounds to menace us from the tree line. I raised up my arms and jumped and waved to the band from the crush, toward the back and near the bar, so I could survey the scene. Several of them saw me, but no one waved back.
The bar manager appeared next me, slapped a modest roll of cash into my hand, said something a few inches away from my ear and laughed joyfully. For all that sound I could only guess. “Thanks,” I shouted back. “We got it together in the end.”
He leaned closer into my ear, yelled, “Brother you didn’t do shit.” He laughed again, even more joyfully this time, and then he shook my shoulders and pushed his way through the crowd to check on the inventory.
But I haven’t told you yet about the one stop Dime and I made on the way back to the venue. There was a man, once in possession of a life he had felt as deeply as you do yours, who lay dead in a motel room bed. Had you forgotten, just as I have forgotten so many times since? Dime had been driving us through a black black enough to be new in, when, as if shot through a particle collider, the surrounding atmosphere conjured us into that parking lot. The first thing I noticed was the grease-stained asphalt, the reflecting blazes of those whirling red and blue lights.
To me this has always been the story of what Dime did in that moment of our return.
A police officer tapped the driver’s side window with the end of her flashlight.
“You must be wondering where we’re coming from” is what Dime said.
“And where are you two coming from?” she asked. Dime turned to me and winked.
“That guy in there still dead?” Dime said. At gunpoint we were led out of the van, asked, more politely than you’d think, to sit on our hands on the curb. Stars stabbed through the sky. One at first, then more, outlining that body pressing against the dark from the other side. Each of them felt like a pinprick in a different muscle of my own body, but I wasn’t scared. I nodded my head upward to the phenomenon, trying to draw attention to it, but not even Dime was looking at me then. So from the vantage of that body, up there and living in a math we could never know, it must have seemed like I was saying, “Hey, I know you.”
The policewoman ran our licenses and phoned the venue to make sure we were who we said. “So you knew him?” She had pulled her flashlight, which was better than her gun, but the light in our faces made it hard to answer.
“Hey, have you seen our lead singer Scout?” I said. I tried to describe her, but my words couldn’t make any sense of Scout’s presence. She had too many faces, hair styles, tattoos that moved about her body, a voice you’d never expect. The policewoman decided to not talk to me anymore.
“How about you?” she turned to ask Dime, who nodded his head. Her light flashed off for a moment, and then immediately back on.
“Why didn’t you report it?” she asked. The flashlight did the same again, so she knocked it in her palm a few times, which seemed to work.
“I thought it was illegal to disturb a dead body,” he said.
“That’s not what that means,” the officer told us. When Dime didn’t respond, she asked, “So why are you back here?”
“I hate to say it,” Dime said.
“You better, otherwise it’s lock-up for the two of you.” This time her flashlight flickered hard, strobing Dime’s face.
“Ma’am,” Dime wailed, “please stop!”
But she didn’t let up, and after a few more seconds he added, “You’re going to give me a seizure!”
“Then you better answer me soon,” she snapped, her free hand now at her waist.
It was then that Dime pulled his hands out from underneath him and reached out at her in a frantic, angular gesture—a plea of sorts. I truly thought he was another dead man. But Dime, he said, “I can fix about anything.”
Jon Udelson’s fiction has appeared in Red Branch Review, Muleskinner, Action-Spectacle, Juked, Ampersand Review, Baltimore Review, and Fiction Magazine, among others. He is the author of Arabic Tattoos (Mark Batty Publisher) and co-editor of Seeking Our Places (Peter Lang, forthcoming), a collection on creative writing research. Jon is an Associate Professor of English at Shenandoah University and lives in Winchester, VA with his wife, cat, and greyhound.
Photo by Tahamie Farooqui on Unsplash
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