The Prom Goer's Interstellar Excursion (10 page)

One of the band's roadies—an anthropoid in a black T-shirt who resembled a lowland gorilla and had the musky scent of a bag of decaying leaves—lumbered up next to me and surveyed the food.

“Decent spread,” he said. “Better than the reheated crud they've
been serving us lately. I've lost three hundred pounds since the start of this awful tour, if you can believe it.”

“I'm overwhelmed,” I said. “I've never seen a buffet like this.”

“You should have seen the food at the places we used to play. I've seen eyeballs pop out of roadies' heads while they were looking over the selections. Then I've seen
other
crew members accidentally eat those eyeballs because they thought they were exotic delicacies. You ever eat an eyeball?”

“No.”

“Fatty, but delicious. After you've had a couple, you want to hit the gym to work off the guilt.”

“If the band is out of money, how do they afford roadies?” I said.

“They have no choice,” said the roadie. “Without us, there's no show. You think these clowns could set up their own equipment? Skark couldn't figure out how to plug in a blender these days. He's a washed-up drunk.”

I had learned from Cad that the Perfectly Reasonable's roadies traveled in a brigade of trucks separate from the Interstellar Libertine because Skark found them slovenly in appearance and crass in behavior. He refused to even
see
the roadies until the day of a show, which meant the equipment caravan was forced to travel different routes to the band's gigs, often through dangerous space. As a result, Skark was not popular among his crew.

“By the way, since you're human, I'd stay away from the
crayborps,” said the roadie. “Your species can't digest them. They'll crawl up your backbone and eat your brain.”

“Good to know.”

“Enjoy the show—if Skark can get through it without passing out or storming off. These gigs have been touch and go recently.”

The roadie grabbed a Coca-Cola—which seemed to be as common in the rest of the universe as it was on Earth—and trotted off toward the stage to help with the setup.

I went exploring backstage.

Skark, Driver, and Cad each had their own dressing rooms, which I knew was a bad sign. Throughout high school, I had spent countless weekends in my room watching music documentaries, and from those docs I had learned that whenever the band members stopped preparing for gigs together in the same room, it meant that there wasn't much time left before a breakup.

Cad popped out of his dressing room. “Bennett, come here,” he said, waving me over. I had been trying to avoid getting in his way prior to the gig, but now he was lifting the embargo. “I want to show you something.”

I walked into his dressing room, which was a bit like what I imagined the presidential suite at a high-end boutique hotel would look like. Chandelier. Canopied bed. Beer bottles chilling in champagne buckets. A pair of vaguely human-looking girls were lounging on a red suede couch, bored.

The band might be broke, but they seemed to still have excellent backstage perks.

“
Stenya, Delya, this is Bennett,” said Cad, introducing me to the girls. “He and I are from the same planet, but he's a little young to handle the two of you, so I'm going to need you to leave him alone.”

The girls pouted.

“Aww,” said the one I guessed was Stenya. “But he is so
cute.
”

“And we are
bored
,” said Delya.

“Where are they from?” I whispered.

“I have absolutely no idea,” said Cad. “They were here when I showed up, which happens sometimes. Such is the life of even a fading star. But they're not what I wanted to show you.”

Cad pressed a button on a remote control, and an entire wall lit up with images. As he began flipping through the channels, he explained that television was intense in the rest of the universe because there was no censorship. What was fine on one planet—for instance, a cooking show featuring a chef preparing clams—might be offensive to a culture that regarded clams as gods. Since the universe had a near-infinite number of worlds, it meant that
everything
would be offensive to somebody, so nobody knew
what
to censor. As a result, the networks would put absolutely anything on the air, and they just let different cultures react how they saw fit. Occasionally this policy led to wars or to different species exterminating each other entirely, but from the networks' perspective, there was no other way to deal with such a vast audience. Ratings were ratings.

As Cad flipped through the stations, I caught glimpses of
some of these alien programs—a show devoted to gelatinous blobs wrestling above a pit of salt, a program featuring clouds striking each other with lightning, a half dozen channels playing music videos starring familiar-looking female pop stars dressed in scanty neon outfits.

“Wherever you go in the universe, pop stars are exactly the same,” said Cad. “Here, this is what I was looking for…the All-Universe Nature Channel.”

But what Cad showed me didn't seem nature-ish at all. Instead, it resembled the inside of a mall. There was an Adidas. There was an Orange Julius. There was a Starbucks across an atrium from another Starbucks, with a third Starbucks just down a corridor and a fourth Starbucks being remodeled nearby.

“How is that nature?” I said.

“That's what the Jyfos think Earth looks like,” said Cad. “Correction—it's what they think America looks like, because America is where they get most of their specimens.”

“Why?”

“It's a nation of slow-moving people, filled with wide-open spaces where the Jyfos can land without attracting attention. Seems like a no-brainer to me.”

The camera panned over the mall, and for the first time I saw that it was
packed
with agitated-looking men and women. They were sitting on benches drinking Big Gulps, smearing sauerkraut on hot dogs at food kiosks, trying on cheap pants at Old Navy, all constantly sizing each other up with their tiny eyes. The residents of the enclosure seemed to be the type of
individuals you always heard about aliens abducting—obese truck drivers, flannel-wearing lumberjacks, dead-eyed mental patients shuffling around muttering to themselves.

The Internet was right—alien abductors definitely had a specific type they targeted.

Some of the residents of the enclosure were holding baseball bats and wearing protective sporting gear—catchers' chest protectors, Rollerblading kneepads, bicycle helmets—while others were outfitted in camouflage cargo pants and heavy boots. Some were traveling in groups, some were walking alone, some were limping, some had visible wounds on their arms or legs. Nobody seemed relaxed, except for those individuals who were sucking back Spine Wine. The hooch didn't seem to be as high quality as Skark's beverage of choice—instead of Skark's small-batch, individually labeled bottles of the liquor, the residents of the enclosure were guzzling generically packaged boxes of the stuff straight from the spout, snapping at each other when fellow drinkers hogged them for too long.

If it was just humans here, I didn't know
why
they would need the Spine Wine, unless it was to facilitate discussion between residents who were abducted from different countries—though from my cursory analysis of the inhabitants, it didn't seem like a whole lot of intellectual discussion was probably taking place.

The camera pushed in on the window of a Starbucks.

“What's happening?” I said.

“The documentary crew always does that zoom thing when
they see something interesting,” said Cad. “The cinematography is incredibly predictable, which is one of my problems with the show.”

Through the windows of the Starbucks, I could discern the faint outline of a girl. The image was blurry, so at first I couldn't be sure it was Sophie. She had her hands cupped around her eyes and was looking outside, sweaty bangs hanging down over her fingers.

Then the girl took a step back and in one definitive motion pressed her middle finger against the glass, flipping off whoever was looking at her from outside the coffee shop.

Yep, it was definitely Sophie.

Seeing that she was still alive—not necessarily
safe
, but living—caused relief to ripple through my body. I pushed as close to the television as I could without the high-resolution image burning my eyes, straining to see whether or not she was injured. All I wanted was to know that she was okay.

Sophie moved to the front entrance of the Starbucks. She had barricaded herself inside the coffee shop with tables, chairs, and other pieces of furniture, which she started rapidly moving away from the door one piece at a time.

“So she really is bait,” I said.

“Is that her?” said Cad.

“That's her.”

The camera panned over the mall, revealing hordes of weirdos—drooling women, limping men—all lumbering toward the Starbucks, alerted by the sound of Sophie moving
inside. The camera zoomed in for another close-up through the glass, focusing on Sophie's eyes as she looked back and forth.

“So that's really her?” said Cad.

“That's her,” I said.

“She's hot,” said Cad. “In a crazed kind of way, you know.”

Sophie dragged the final chair out of the way and flung open the door. Her hair was matted to her forehead and her clothes were sticking to her skin. She chucked an espresso machine at the pack of goons approaching her, which was the wrong move. Seeing that she was now unarmed, the mob pushed forward, and Sophie took off running.

The throng chased her, but none of them could get within a hundred yards. She zipped past a Hugo Boss, accelerated down the tile floor in front of a See's Candies, and was gone from the camera's view.

“Poor girl…,” said Cad. “She's fast, but she's not going to be able to run from that mob forever.”

“We need to
help
her.”

“I know we do. But unfortunately, we also need to play a show, and at least it looks like your girl has a head start on those idiots. She's pretty nimble.”

“She does mud runs.”

“That makes sense. We'll figure this out after the gig.”

Driver pounded on the dressing room door.

“Get ready, we're on in two minutes,” he said.

I heard the voice of the stadium announcer through
the walls of the dressing room:
“Ladies and gentlemen and lady-gentlemen, please stand on your hands and clap your feet for one of the Greatest Bands You Will Ever See—as long as you don't see one of the billion or so bands generally considered to be better than them….”

“I
hate
it when the announcers mention we're ranked out of the top billion,” I heard Skark complain as he stood outside his dressing room. “It needs to
stop.
Next show, I want that specifically written in the concert rider.”

Cad walked out into the hall, holding his bass. There were no smiles between him and the rest of the Perfectly Reasonable, no nods hello, no joy. Playing this gig was business, and that's all. They walked onstage.

“So please give a head-shattering welcome to your gods made flesh…the three…the only…THE PERFECTLY REASONABLE.”

Skark strummed a guitar chord—
BARRUMPH
—and I saw blood trickle from the left ear of the roadie I had been speaking with earlier. He noticed me staring.

“My eardrum explodes a couple times a week,” said the roadie. “I'd get it fixed, but the band can't afford to pay the crew's health insurance anymore.”

“They're that poor?”

“Unless something happens to put them back in the spotlight, soon they'll be playing weddings, though even that career would probably last about ten minutes.”

“Why?”

“
No man in his right mind would trust Cad around his bride. The man is a
fiend.
You know bassists.”

“What about them?”

“Chicks love a man with good hands. Do yourself a favor. Never bring a woman around Cad.”

Every time Driver hit his snare drum, he wrenched my spine out of place; every time he hit a cymbal, he split my skull.

On bass, Cad could do anything—bossa nova, Philadelphia soul, gypsy rumba—his hands moving so quickly they gave the visual effect of being at rest, draped over the fret board, shuddering every now and then before snapping back to their home position.

And soaring above the fray were the sounds of both Skark's guitar and his
voice
, which left no doubt in my mind that he was more alien than human.

His range was stunning—one moment his voice was a crisp, pitch-perfect tenor, and the next it would rise to hit notes so high I couldn't hear them at all, climbing upward and then disappearing from my auditory range altogether, even though I could see that his mouth was still open. If he fell silent, the audience did the same, waiting for him to speak. If he motioned for them to clap, they continued unprompted until he cut them off with a slash across his throat with the neck of his guitar. If he put his hand to the side of his temple to hear them sing his lyrics, they did so at full throat, or whatever parts of their bodies they used to make noise. When he asked if they wanted to
go home with him, their affirmative response echoed through the stadium.

The crowd was surprisingly noisy, considering there was barely anybody present. The stadium itself was massive—if you told me a hundred thousand people could have sat comfortably, I wouldn't have been surprised—but it looked like there were only a couple hundred fans in attendance, most of whom had crammed themselves into the first five rows. The rest of the arena was a ghost town, with the fans in the back having entire sections of bleachers all to themselves. I saw wisps of smoke rising above these nomads, who were altering their consciousness for the show, no doubt.