From sometimes thought of being slowly crushed to death, a fear that might've even circled some kind of fascination: prolongation, too much time, a drawn-out last surge.
Poe knew what it meant: life is dying, but some of us don't see it, and Buddhists think it's funny. She did too, in a way, but she couldn't cry or laugh at that truth, or find any available emotions quite right.
"Life's a parody of death," she spoke into the white Pearl snare drum. That was better. She could almost giggle. The metal snare wires on the bottom head rang and hummed with her voice, echoing the "th" of death as their bouncing trailed off.
From pulled her long black hair off her neck and into a pony tail. Her fifth gig with her new band was tomorrow at a new local place named Zinx. The set was ready: oiled, polished, tightened like a new machine. She began to tear it down.
Springfield would be bleak and dirty during rush hour: overcast, summer at its August height, humid, state workers rushing out of state buildings flying on waves of cocaine. From put on a blue tshirt and cut off jeans shorts and walked to Washington Park. Her new band wasn't exactly her creation, but her small fist had come down on choosing themes or goals or politics.
Their guitarist Fleeting had run a performance art piece at a local skater/punk hang-out the year before. The piece, titled "Anality", featured Fleeting lecturing, twirling in a green strobe light, penetrating himself with a nine-inch dildo—both he and it wearing condoms.
From wandered over the hills of the park in the sinking humidity. Bikes passed her; ducks straggled over the land bridge running the length of the lagoon; people threw popcorn and pointed at the hungry birds. From wouldn't have to work at the gas station until ten. The evening was hers. Preparation for the gig.
Their bassist Cloud was a transsexual, male to female, more beautiful than From, who'd gained a bit of weight since turning twenty-six. Cloud knew where she was at all times. Confident. She'd acted in Chicago for a year after the operation and drugs turned the "him" into what the "she" wanted to be. Cloud'd never had qualms about exposing her surgical creations during plays: they were her symbols, she said: rebuild, recreate, research. Cloud and From had been lovers for six months.
She neared the north side of the lake. Police were dredging a bloated male body from the algae. The officers dropped it on the bank, shook their hands and heads; everyone produced phones. From realized that the bank was the site of her second acid trip: in a fall night she was alone, fourteen, she'd put her hands into the lake water and felt an electricity: the roots of the trees below the lake, the unicellular swimmers, neither plant nor animal, divisions ending, the first time From thought she saw something.
She saw knife wounds on the man's back before turning out of the park and setting herself towards home.
From's answering machine was blinking with a message from Cloud: "I had a dream about a river last night. The three of us were naked waist-deep in the water, but we weren't cold. Fleeting was singing his own harmonies, like two voices, and minnows were circling his legs in spirals. You and I were looking at the sky. The moon was spinning and moving above us. We could see it move and could see the other side of it, the side that you never see." She paused, faint music in the background. "I don't remember the rest, though. Call me, or come over before work."
When From walked in, Fleeting was sitting with his lover Abraham on Cloud's floor, a game of Pente between them. The red and yellow glass beads tended to roll on the crooked cardboard as if trying to escape. From kissed them both and went to the fridge for a beer.
"Okay," Abraham allowed, "but how are we rivers?"
"The water in our bodies shifts with moon phases."
From could hear them from the small kitchen. "Where's Cloud?"
Fleeting answered her: "Went to some pawn shop."
"She told you about her dream."
"Yeah."
Abe continued: "You're writing a song about it."
"Yeah, but—"
"When do you play tomorrow?"
"At ten. Jam sessions. Did you ever notice that they're kinda like flings?"
"No, how?"
"You get together with some people you don't know, alright, or if you do know them you don't know them very well."
From went to the tape deck and browsed for music. Cloud's apartment, six blocks from hers and closer to the park, was a hundred years old and still had an air of Victorianism to it: wood walls and floors, ornamented doorways and window frames, gaudy door knobs. Abe looked puzzled: his brow was crinkling."
"But you can have flings with someone you know real well," he said."
"But you've never known them in a sexual way."
"What about ongoing flings?"
"Wouldn't that be a relationship?"
"Oh. Not if—"
"Maybe those would be ongoing jams: no commitment: you get together with some people you don't know in this way—in a musical way, to stay with our metaphor—and you kind of improvise. Things are sloppy at first, awkward because nobody really has any experience playing together. So you improvise, and there's no commitment, no attempt to even name the band. You don't define it with a band name as a permanent thing, as a relationship."
"And if you get together again things will be a little bit tighter that time."
"That's where the metaphor really comes to life."
Abe looked into his beer. "And you're committed with this one."
"Sort of."
From saw her chance to interrupt: "Don't listen to his philosophical male shit, Abe."
Abraham sipped his beer and smoked his cigarette. "It's kinda complicated," he said."
Fleeting's lover was more than adorable. He was young—twenty—with long blue hair, thin, effeminate without easily falling into a male or female category of good looks. A pink scar divided his left cheek, the afterwards of a bullet trail. Fleeting's lumerjackness—his short red hair, his stocky build and theories—had set the stage for Abraham's submissive entrance. Abe fell somewhere near the middle of that gradient between hetero and not. From had found him at a local club one night when she was out with Cloud. The three spent four days together at Cloud's apartment, fucking, painting, watching tapes of The Simpsons, cheering for Grandpa Simpson and his regressions into transsexuality. Fleeting arrived on the fourth day with his proposition for a band. He and Abe were connected before he could finish his ideas. Abe was like a roadie: carrying amps, finding and finishing drinks, collecting money. His mother would call him on weekends to lecture him on lifestyles before offering to buy him groceries. Abe knew a little guitar but for some reason had opted out of joining the band.
When Cloud arrived at her apartment the three of them were writing chords for the new song. Cloud bent down and kissed From on the cheek. "Someone's been in the sun."
"I had a flashback in the park."
"Scary?"
"Not too bad."
"I've got a surprise."
Cloud walked back to the door, brushing Abe and Fleeting's heads lightly with a hand as she passed them. It was almost nine and From would have to leave soon.
She was flipping over a tape when Cloud came back carrying a large television through the door, the muscles in her arms taut and obvious. She set it down on the floor. An old Zenith, large, maybe a twenty-one inch.
From wiped some kind of grease off the screen. "For gigs?"
"Wait'll you see the tape I had my friends in Carbondale mail me."
"Where'd you get this?" Fleeting asked."
"The pawn shop on eleventh. They've got vibrators there, too. Radar detectors. Automatic weapons. An accordion. I gave the guy a blow job for it. Made him wear a blueberry condom. I wanted to tell him."
From felt herself smile. "You probably wouldn't have gotten the TV."
From walked to the small stage that hid in a south corner of Zinx. It was still an hour till show time. Cloud was running late. From's white drum set stood at the back of the stage behind Fleeting's purple guitar and the band's taped-together microphones, idle, waiting. Her reflection was thin off her kick drum's plastic front head: a tall torso, straight black hair longer than hers, a curious face bending with a slight bulge in the drum head. REM's Fables of the Reconstruction, on the jewel box Reconstruction of the Fables, was playing through the sound system. Cloud's reflection appeared behind From's in the plastic.
"I'm late."
From turned around. "We still have an hour."
"Put new strings on my bass today. What're you wearing tonight?" Cloud looked back across the bar at Fleeting and Abe. She was in a long white sleeveless dress that quit near her ankles and sandals; her brown hair looked ratty from sleeping. She was still holding her bass guitar.
"Probably what I am now. I didn't bring much else, just stuff to tear down in. You look like you miss something."
"I'll tell you later."
Spinning a drumstick in her hand like a baton. "What're we opening up with?"
"'Are We Are Out of Tune We'". Perfect stuff on the tape for it." Cloud was rubbing her large hands on her thighs."
Zinx contained a dozen people as the band was almost ready to begin, a large crowd for the small wood venue. The place had been a sewing shop until 1970, a Grateful Dead bar until a month before. Drawers, some tiny, some wide and shallow, lined the wall. The poster on the door announcing the occasion—the date, time, and band—was beginning to curl. Fleeting and Abe were in the bathroom smoking pot when From walked in. Fleeting was wearing black tights under a skirt patterned with fractals. His eyes were red with blood. "Want a hit?" he asked."
"Yes, and it's time to go on."
"You're so authoritarian."
"Talk to my parents." From took the pipe and pulled air through it and into her lungs."
Cloud entered, watched Abraham blow smoke through his nostrils. "You set, darling? Abe's our media man tonight."
"I've got the remote in my pocket." Feeling his breasts. "Somewhere."
From exhaled. "This video gonna match the songs?"
Her lover bit down on a slice of lemon and winced with pleasure. "Hopefully."
...thirty people now, slow, waves crashing on the screen, almost to the ping of the ride cymbal, almost with the flow of Fleeting's C Major Seventh chord, the soft delay of his guitar, the strumming, Cloud and Fleeting echoing each other's vocals, harmony, a deep sadness, then a lifting with the pull of the chorus, the dream, the moon spinning closer to the earth, a billion years ago, trilobite hovering in an alien water, the dream, eyeless fish in a black fathom, the bridge and splashing cymbals, From rolling across three drums, cave paintings, circles broken by lines, an earthquake finds its city and dust spills to an orange horizon, Fleeting holds a magnet to his strings, vibrating, long notes, a fourth flats to the major third, a bird tosses on a violent wind somewhere near the sea, Cloud spins on an axis, trees falling, four measures left, a city in a spiraling rain storm, lightning, time lapses, one measure, swamps reaching, creeping into corn fields, a blank screen, the music dies...
From pulled her legs up inside her tshirt. She and Cloud were sitting on a cliff in Carpenter Park, on a sandstone ledge over-looking the polluted Sangamon River. Two in the morning, chilly, the sky was clearing for the stars. Fleeting and Abraham were skipping rocks somewhere below. "I saw you crying on-stage."
Cloud shifted a little. "I felt sad for some reason. The people liked us. We got another gig out of it." Tossing a twig out into the air. "You've been thinking about death."
"Suicide."
"It worries me."
"You think about it."
"I wouldn't do it, though."
"I wouldn't either." From brushed sand off her tennis shoes. A horse was galloping somewhere across the river. "You wanted to before you changed."
"But you aren't depressed. It's some kind of philosophical thing, isn't it?"
"Why does it worry you?"
A rock skipped over the water and hit the far side. A laugh from below. "I just don't want it to become more important than life. And don't tell me that it is life."
From felt silenced. "What do you want me to say?"
"Just tell me you won't slip away like some people do."
"To where?"
"To whatever that other side is. Madness. I don't know. Just don't give up." Cloud stood. The bottom of her white dress was brown with dirt.
From pulled her legs out of her shirt and found Scorpius to the south. Antares was a glowing red dot, flickering: the scorpion's heart. "We won't."