The Prom Goer's Interstellar Excursion (9 page)

It seemed strange that Cad kept bringing up Skark's drinking, considering he himself had also been steadily sipping wine for the past few hours.

“I'm going to help you figure this out,” said Cad. “Nothing is going to happen to your girl. Let's go to the bar in back and talk. I'm sure you have a bunch of questions.”

“Yeah, the first is, how do I help Sophie?”

“You
can't
help her right now. That's what I'm trying to tell you. We will come up with a solution, but right now you need to relax. You drink?”

“As of a few hours ago, apparently.”

“Good. It looks like you could use something to steady your nerves. The weirder you allow yourself to get up here, the better you'll fit in.”

In an attempt to keep my mind off Sophie, Cad told me about the Perfectly Reasonable's bus, which the band had named the Interstellar Libertine.

During the 1970s, the bus had been owned by Led
Zeppelin, which was how Skark had become interested in it, his rationale being that if it was able to stand up to the hardest-partying band in Earth's history—hence the “Libertine” moniker—it would most likely be able to endure the difficulties of touring deep space.

After purchasing the bus at an auction house in London, Skark had had its exterior retrofitted with compound silica-fiber ceramic tiles and the floor redone with a gravity-producing surface. Air was produced by something called a True-Atmosphere Atmosphering Apparatus—I don't know why the name was so redundant, maybe the manufacturers were trying to distinguish it from a rival product—which was the box to which Cad had attached his pull-up bar. Skark had installed the unit so musicians from a variety of alien species could ride along.

Cad explained that the True-Atmosphere Atmosphering Apparatus had been designed by a superior race—boringly called the Millers—to produce air that all carbon-based life-forms could breathe, though the air it created was deeply poisonous to silicon-based life-forms. That was fine with Skark, who considered most silicon-based life-forms to be both tone-deaf and poor technical musicians and therefore made a point of never having them in his band.

The functions of the True-Atmosphere Atmosphering Apparatus were easier for Cad to explain than the mechanics of the bus's engine and the means by which we were speeding through space. When the bus was really
moving
, it looked like space was simply folding around us as we traveled, one astonishing vista
of distant stars or brushstrokes of color giving way to the next, almost like flipping through a book of photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope. Each time my eyes would focus on a cluster of periwinkle planets blanketed with neon green clouds or a supernova throwing out pulses of nuclear white light, the image would swiftly melt out of existence and be replaced by an equally incomprehensible panorama. It was a little jarring, never quite knowing where you were or what you were going to see next, the only guarantee being that it would be something spectacular.

Cad—doing his best to explain concepts clearly beyond him—likened the way the bus moved to passing through a series of little doors, one after the other, which is why it felt like we were jumping from place to place. The leaping required great speed, and while more technologically up-to-date engines allowed ships, buses, sedans, and whatever else aliens were driving to simply leap from one place to their exact destinations, the Interstellar Libertine was old and hadn't been built for this purpose in the first place and could only make its journey in lurching increments. In a final effort, Cad told me to picture it as a smaller, crappier starship
Enterprise
that had to keep taking breaks as it stumbled its way through space.

“It's why it takes us forever to get anywhere,” said Cad. “If we had money, we'd be able to get a new engine, but the band has barely paid this one off.”

“How did you end up in the band?” I asked.

“Have you ever been to Atlantic City?” he said.

“Before today, I'd barely been out of southeastern New Mexico.”

Cad told me his story. After high school, he had managed to get a job playing bass in a lounge band at the Tropicana Casino in Atlantic City, backing an awful lead singer—bouffant hair, cheap suit, heavy cologne—on cheesy soft-rock ballads from the seventies and eighties: “Mandy” by Barry Manilow, “I Want to Know What Love Is” by Foreigner.

The lounge act had been between sets when Cad first saw Skark. Cad was eating some peanuts when all of a sudden he heard a roar from the craps table in the high-roller section of the casino. He peeked his head out of the lounge, and there was Skark, standing at a table surrounded by a huge crowd of gamblers, with the tallest pile of chips Cad had ever seen in front of him. The fact that Skark was an alien drew little attention—he looked human
enough
to pass as a giant with odd bone structure who was at the tail end of a bender. Atlantic City was used to eccentrics, and as long as he had money to bet, no casino would ever kick him out.

Skark jerked his arm back and threw the dice. The dealer yelled “Seven!” and there was a cheer, followed by the dealer pushing another stack of chips in front of Skark. Cad had never seen so much money in his life. And that's when Skark looked at him across the room.

“You with the bass guitar,”
said Skark.
“You need a job? My bassist is in jail for getting high and trying to ride the roulette wheel, so I need a new one. You have six seconds to decide.”

Skark started counting down:
“Six…five…four…three…”
At that point, Cad figured that
whatever
Skark was doing to have that much money was better than what he was doing, so he joined. Ten years later, he was still in the band.

“Are you happy about that decision?” I said.

“I'd be happier if I got to play one of my own songs one of these days,” said Cad. “But Skark won't allow it. He says he writes all the songs…even though he hasn't actually written a song in years.”

“Do you ever see your family back home?”

“I don't have a family back home,” said Cad. “My mom passed away when I was young, and my dad has been living with a wife and kid he cares about much more than me for as long as I can remember.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I've had a long time to get over it,” said Cad. “For better or worse, this band has
been
my family for a decade. It's just dysfunctional as all get-out.”

“Attention, ingrates,”
said Driver over the bus intercom. “It's showtime. Remember: we're playing Berdan Major Arena tonight. Write the name on your hand so you don't forget. Audiences don't appreciate it when they realize you don't know what planet you're on.”

Cad picked up a pen and wrote
Berdan Major Arena
on his palm.

“I have to get ready,” said Cad. “If you have more questions, I'll answer them after the gig.”

“One more and I'll leave you alone,” I said. “How am I able
to understand what everybody is saying if I only speak English and the band is from all over the universe?”

“It's because of the Spine Wine. You know how when you're buzzed, you feel like you can completely understand everything people are saying because you're on the same cosmic level?”

“I guess. I'm pretty new to it.”

“Drinking the wine follows a principle similar to sitting around with your friends on a Friday night—sip a little bit of that stuff and you get
just
mellow enough to understand what any creature, animal, or inanimate object in the universe is saying. You just
understand.
”

“So I was drugged, is what you're saying.”

“Technically, you were drugged, but I wouldn't worry about it. On tour you could get dosed at any time.”

“Does that mean I have to keep drinking it to know what everybody is saying?”

“Nah, it stays in the body for years,” said Cad. “It's like LSD in the way it changes the brain so you can never
totally
go back, but at some point your translation skills will start to fade. Now I have to get ready. I suggest checking out the view. Just don't bother Skark—he's a nightmare to deal with before gigs.”

I didn't care that there was an embargo on talking to Skark before shows, or that the band had an engagement, or that if they were to kick me off the bus, I would be in a
deep
amount of trouble. I needed to help Sophie,
now.

I found Skark standing in front of the bathroom mirror,
painting a blue rectangle over his eyes with granular makeup. He was naked except for a pair of white leather jeans, and he was so thin I could see his ribs under the skin of his torso, which he had powdered to match his pants.

I lingered near him for a moment. He sighed, then spoke before I even had a chance to start the conversation.

“Good God, man, I hope you're not going to ask me again about stopping the tour for your girl,” he said, pressing his eyelashes with a delicate metal curler. “If I'd known you had selfish reasons for joining us, I would have never invited you on board.”

“I'm not asking for you to stop the tour. I'm asking if we can get her before something
bad
happens. I know it's a pain in the—”

“Truer words have never been spoken. Whatever part of the anatomy you were about to reference, it is a pain in that particular place. Let me ask—did I or either of my bandmates kidnap your prom date?”

“No.”

“So you agree that we are not
responsible
for the kidnapping of your prom date, yes? Please say that for me if it's true.”

“You're not responsible for her kidnapping.”

“And did we bring you aboard with the
promise
that we would help you in this heroic quest? That I would interrupt our tour for a lovesick member of a doomed race who happened to stumble onto my bus because he was too dumb to locate a cheeseburger on his own, and chose to beg for scraps like an underfed animal?”

“I'm not sure if insults are called for,” I said. “I'd think you could maybe try to be sympathetic to my position here.”

“After the Dondoozle Festival we will either reevaluate your situation or safely return you to your planet, but until then you will mind yourself and you will stay out of my way and you
will not
ask me to help you again, do you understand that? Now
go.
”

Skark slammed the bathroom door in my face.

“Don't worry about him,” grumbled Driver, looking back at me over his shoulder. “These days he's always irritable before shows, because the crowds aren't as big as they used to be.”

“Considering there are trillions of planets in the universe, being the billionth biggest band still seems like it could be lucrative,” I said.

“We're one billion sixteenth,” said Driver. “But people only want the top bands, so I guess we're lucky to still be playing at all. I don't know. Sometimes I think I should have stuck with fashion.”

“You were a fashion designer?”

“Aspiring designer,” said Driver. “When I was younger, it was always difficult to find clothes that fit, so I started making my own.”

I glanced at Driver's stained shirt and stonewashed jeans. He caught me looking.

“I've put those dreams on hold,” he said. “I don't know. Maybe someday I'll make an outfit I'm proud of, and the creative spark will return. I'm in a little bit of a personal and professional lull at the moment.”

“
Is Driver your real name?”

“Of course not. But everybody has a tough time remembering Queckburt Hodabink, so I make it easy for them.”

“That is tough.”

“In my language, it means ‘energy-efficient heater,' ” sighed Driver. “I'm not sure if my parents ever loved me. But enough about the past. Come look at this—it might take your mind off your girl for a moment.”

I joined Driver at the wheel, and what I saw seemed impossible. In front of the bus was a stadium hollowed out of an entire
planet
, and it was on
fire.
There were thousands of seats. As we got closer, I saw a scoreboard the size of a
continent
blaring a message:

BERDAN MAJOR ARENA WELCOMES THE PERFECTLY REASONABLE

“I've never seen anything like it,” I said.

“It's not even one of the good stadiums,” said Driver. “This is the musical boondocks, whether or not Skark wants to admit it. To be honest, we didn't sell enough tickets to even justify being here.”

“There are better places than this?”

“Wait until you see the Dondoozle Festival,” said Driver. “I swear, it's like heaven without the halos.”

Driver thought about this.

“Actually, that's not true,” he said. “Last time I was there, I saw a creature who
was
a halo. Just this golden disk, floating through the air, minding its business. I followed it for hours,
trying to find a way to put it on my head, thinking it would give me some divine powers or something. I was pretty blasted at the time.”

“Did you get it?”

“No, it ended up biting me,” said Driver. “Wouldn't have even thought it had jaws.”

Driver looked at a C-shaped scar on his arm. He rubbed it with his thick fingers, recalling the pain.

“I realize that's not a great representation of the festival,” he said. “Trust me, Dondoozle is better than I'm making it sound.”

“All I care about is getting to Sophie.”

“Patience,” said Driver. “Cad and I have your back. But Skark calls the shots, which means that for the moment he's got every other part of you.”

I was terrified to eat the snacks backstage at Berdan Major Arena. The tables were packed with finger sandwiches stuffed with slices of strange glowing meats, fist-sized snails hanging limply from their spiky shells, and edible flower buds that blossomed when you picked them up.