This Is How It Really Sounds (40 page)

In the meager light from the window she could make out the neat basket of kindling. She knelt in front of the open door of the stove and began stacking the rectangular sticks across two larger pieces. He had a knack for sizing the wood. He could split a cord in two hours and come out with three perfect sizes for fire, plus the big knotty chunks that you threw on top once things were really going.

She crumpled up a piece of newspaper and pushed it underneath, then struck a wooden match and touched it to the paper. The flame was intensely orange in the slate-colored light, like sunrise. And she was its servant.

She leaned back on her haunches and watched the lines of embers grow along the edges of the kindling. The tin sheeting of the stovepipe began to tick. This moment of the day, just when the fire was catching with its soft catlike purr—this was the moment when she had everything. Her children were asleep upstairs, her husband was in their bed, and she had all of them safe and close.

The fire had caught enough now that she could leave it and go into the kitchen. Still in the dark, she flipped the switch on the coffeemaker and it glowed red. Then she went to the back door and dug the cast-iron Dutch oven out of the snow and brought it inside. It was chicken and dumplings, still uncooked and frozen solid overnight. When she left she would put it on the stove and turn the heat on low so that it would be ready for Saturday dinner.

The window had started to turn light blue, and she could see that it had stopped snowing. The porch railing had a sharp pyramid of snow running along it, and the cars outside had been turned into pillows. For the last three days it had come down almost constantly, day and night, in a way that felt dreamlike and eternal. It covered all the details of the world, transformed all of the hard things into distant suggestions of a tree stump or an abandoned shovel. She could walk out the front door and step into her skis and go for hours in the woods, stride after stride. Up high, it would be dangerous: they'd be trying to knock down the avalanches over the main road with a howitzer. Here, though, it was perfect. All footsteps were gone. The world had been rewritten.

Her husband's weight creaked across the ceiling to the bathroom; then she heard the soft clunk of the toilet seat. He didn't need to be up for another hour, but on these kinds of mornings it seemed like the snow itself woke him up, the sound of it, or the smell of it. He'd roll around in the bed from his back to his side, like he was rolling around in a drift, and then he'd wake up in one of those moods where he was distant and in his own thoughts.

She opened the glass door of the woodstove and placed some larger pieces of wood on top, about the thickness of her wrist, then closed it. She'd built thousands of fires over the years, and every one of them was fascinating. This was the most primitive form of chemistry, a form every caveman or -woman had understood from the beginning, not as the process of oxidation giving off heat, but, more deeply, as a sure sign of all that was divine in this physical world, hiding within wood. It warmed you; it danced for you. A god that made fire had to be a god that loved humanity.

The coffeemaker was starting to gurgle. If her husband got up, she would make him some oatmeal or bacon and eggs, eat breakfast with him before she ran out.

A magazine was lying next to the stove, and she could see it in the light coming from the windows. She still had a subscription to
The New Yorker
that her husband renewed every Christmas. The last vestige of her old life. The page was open to a perfume ad. An Asian model getting out of a car someplace expensive. Someplace far away.

She'd had a bottle of that perfume once, or rather, a vial. Her son had gotten it for her at one of the tourist shops downtown for her birthday, a little tiny sample that they'd probably given to him: he was only ten. And when they went out to dinner that night, just she and her husband, they'd gone to the Gold Room at the Baranof Hotel and he'd looked so handsome in his sport jacket, and she'd been wearing a black dress and the pearls her mother had given her, and for a minute there, with the candles and the waiters in tuxedoes and the shining metal serving platters with their mirrored tops, she'd felt like they were elegant.

She heard the creaking moving across the ceiling, then his footsteps coming down the stairs. The coffee was ready and the warmth was starting to pour off the front of the stove. His feet appeared, then his legs. It was happening. Their day together was beginning.

 

9

Zombie Apocalypse

Pete Harrington
pulled his Volkswagen shitbox in between Beth's maroon-colored Jaguar and the huge black SUV that looked like the kind of government vehicle that always got nuked by some dude with an RPG in action movies. And nuking shit with an RPG was definitely the theme for tonight, a theme that came on even stronger when he saw Bobby's 1961 Cadillac convertible parked across the driveway. He already had a plan. He was taking no bullshit and no prisoners. He was going to find out everything: who'd shadowed them in China, how they'd set it up, and why it had all been done behind his back. And then he was going to tell Charlie about it.

He crunched across the gravel and knocked extra loudly on the door, just to let them know he was pissed. The bullshit was over. No small talk, no cocktails. When that door opened, it was Go time.

He raised his fist again and brought it down hard on the wood.
Knock knock, I'm pissed!
Before he could finish the third knock, the locks clicked and the big wooden door swung open. A small teenage boy was standing in the entry. Dylan.

“Uncle Pete!”

“'Ssup, Dylan!”

The boy reached up and they bumped knuckles. Dylan took after his mother: he was small by nature, like her, and along with that he hadn't hit puberty yet. He looked like a twelve-year-old, though he was nearly fifteen. His voice hadn't changed and his face was still smooth and childish. Pete had known him since he was a baby.

Pete put his hands on both of the skinny shoulders and squeezed him. “When are you coming over to hang out, my man? I got the new City of the Dead and I dominate!”

“What's your favorite weapon?” the boy asked.

“Shottie, hands down.”

Dylan shook his head. “Meat cleaver: you never have to reload.”

“Seriously?”

The boy pointed to himself. “Level eighteen!”

“
Fuck!
” the musician said in admiration, then put his hand over his mouth and looked to the sides to see if anyone had heard. “I mean,
impressive!
I keep getting swarmed in the hallway at level six.”

“You need to go to the garage and get the can of gasoline.” The boy was about to tell him how to incinerate the swarm of zombies on level 6 when his mother appeared. “Pete! Welcome!”

“Hey, Beth.” He bent down and pecked her cheek. He remembered he was supposed to be angry, but he couldn't get it straight with Dylan standing there.

“Hey,” Dylan piped up. “I saw you in that video. You fucked that guy up!”

“Dylan!” Beth said sharply. “Is that language really necessary?”

“You know what's necessary, Mom?
Oxygen
.”

Beth rolled her eyes at Pete, and he remembered her mentioning they'd been having trouble with him lately.

“Your mom's right, Dylan. Language.”

“You
soooo
smoked that guy!”

Beth was watching him, which meant he'd better wheel out some boilerplate role-model shit. “Well … I did smoke his silly ass. But, you know, violence isn't really the way to solve problems.”

“Who cares about solving problems? That was awesome! And he deserved it, didn't he?”

“He did, but, uh…”—he pulled another one off the message boards—“a person shouldn't take it on themselves to be judge, jury, and executioner. Society can't work like that.”

The boy was at a loss, and Beth picked it up. “Dylan, I have to talk with Uncle Pete about some things in the den.”

“Text me when you're done,” her son told him. “I'll show you how to deal with the swarm on level six.”

“It's on!”

He followed Beth down the long hallway. “I'm really pissed at you, Beth, but how's Dylan doing?”

She sighed. “His grades are cratering and he's got some new friends that I do not like at all. I just wish he'd hit puberty already. He's very depressed about his size. The kids at school call him ‘shrimpie.'”

Pete felt a flash of anger. “Punks! I'm sorry to hear that.” He thought for a moment. “Maybe he could come over and hang out at my house once in a while, sit in on rehearsals and stuff. You know, the rock star thing. It might give his ego a boost. We can play some video games. Have a boys' night out.”

They'd reached the den, and she opened the doors. It was a big, low, dim room with dark furniture and a soft carpet. Bobby was sitting in an armchair and Ira was perched on the couch with a manuscript next to him. He looked up.

“Pete!”

“Hey, Ira.” Had Ira been in on this, too? He clenched up inside at the thought, then he remembered his resolve: No prisoners. No bullshit.

Pete took a leather armchair, and Beth sat down next to her husband. There was a little pause as they waited for someone to start talking.

“We might as well get right into this, Pete,” Beth started. “Bobby and I arranged for videos to be taken in Shanghai and for them to be leaked onto the Internet.”

Shit. So it was true. It was true! “Both videos? The one with the Chinese subtitles, too?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” He nodded. “What about the music video that mixes clips from the fight with performance footage and advertising stuff? The supposed Fan video.”

“That was us, too.”

“Then…” He threw his hands into the air. “This whole thing was fake!”

“Millions of views isn't fake,” Bobby said. “That's real. All we did was get it started.”

“No! All you did was take my life and turn it into a giant lie. Thanks!”

“Hold it,” Beth said in her handling-it voice. “Before we go there, let's look at where you were when all this started. Okay? Your career was at a standstill and you hadn't written a new song in years. You had no tour, no band, and you'd lost pretty much all your money in the Crossroads scheme. Do you remember that? Because I remember it well.”

He looked at the ceiling. Fucking
Beth
! “Conceded.”

She continued. “Okay, so three months ago, I was sitting with my family eating dinner, and Bobby called me. He told me you'd lost all your money and you were in a very bad way and he didn't know how to handle it. He was afraid something awful was going to happen. Right, Bobby?”

“Right.”

“Naturally, I dropped everything and rushed over to your house. And from my point of view, Pete, this is where the story really begins. Because the one thing that you articulated in those very confused hours, which included screaming ‘fuck you!' at me and firing me as your ex-wife, was that you were going to find this Peter Harrington, punch him in the face, and write a song about it. Would you say that's an accurate rendition of events?”

He spread his arms to the sides. “Conceded!” He felt like he was being set up again, that Beth was putting everything in place just the way she wanted it and he'd have no alternative but to admit that she was right. “But—”

“Hold on! Let me just tell my side; then I'll listen patiently to your side. You said you wanted to touch the untouchable, and that that was what you needed to do to save yourself. Right?”

“To get justice, yes. Not to turn it into a public-relations event.”

“I know that. Bobby knew it, too. But what does ‘saving yourself' mean, Pete? I mean,
really
? Because you can touch the untouchable, or get justice, or payback or whatever you want to call it, but eventually you're going to get back home. And if you're still broke and your career is still going nowhere, have you really saved yourself?”

Bobby leaned forward. “It's like they say, Pete: if a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it…” Bobby shrugged, as if he'd just laid down some ancient wisdom without even remembering the rest of the saying.

“
I
hear it. That's what matters.”

“You hear it.” Beth went on. “But how well are you going to hear it six months later, when you've got six new songs and nobody could care less.”

Bobby picked it up again. “Pete, we did some great stuff and had some big wins, but the last five years, frankly, sucked. I'd make calls for Pete Harrington and nobody would call me back. I'd try to book dates, and the only places interested were crap venues that paid bullshit. Which didn't matter, because, to be brutally honest, I was afraid to book them for a client that hadn't written a song in five years and was too wasted to put together a band. I didn't want to end up with a bunch of nonperformance lawsuits like we did four years ago. Now, managers are kissing my ass to try to get their bands a gig opening for you. And that's all because of Beth.”

What could he answer to that? Bobby was telling it true. “Conceded,” he said softly.

“Pete,” Beth continued, “there's a certain kind of rock star you don't want to be, and I see them all the time: guys trying to reboot their careers from nothing, or living on the vapors, looking over their shoulder hoping somebody will recognize them. They die a little every time some up-and-coming artist gets a paragraph in
Rolling Stone
because it used to be them, and it never will be again. They're bitter, sad, lost alcoholics. I didn't want to see you become one of them. That's why Bobby and I stepped in. Now you've got six new songs and your first hit in fifteen years. Millions of people want to know about you and your music: all kinds of people, not just your old demographic.”