The mornings had been bitter in recent weeks. They had a faint, chemical bitter ness, he couldn’t say whether it was taste or smell. Like the lemons that grew on those public trees they watered with sewage. He’d seen them in desert cities on tour—Tucson, maybe Phoenix. They looked like lemons, but they weren’t for eating. Could the birds tell? Don’t peck those lemons, friend. But maybe birds didn’t like lemons anyway. Or maybe some birds were shit-eating birds.
He’d woken up into that bitterness every morning, at once vague and sharp. This was its culmination, like he’d known of the coming death and his mood had been soured by the foreknowledge. Come autumn maybe he’d get free of the city for a weekend, drive up into the trees in the Sierras—maybe that would do it. Or down into the oak scrublands in the hill country east of San Diego. He’d go there to mourn, and a chill would sweep in and clean out the ill taint.
He didn’t know anyone at the service well. Lordy hadn’t come, no surprise. Probably sitting at home in an unlit room, singing. That was Lordy’s ritual when he was threatened by chaos of mind: he’d sit singing into the dimness for hours on end. Ry’d heard the dark singing one time and it sounded high and eerie as a boy soprano—a warbling falsetto sung by a baritone, the keening of a hurt beast. After he sang himself out, his voice was rough and scratchy for days. You’d suspect he was deeply disturbed unless you knew him, in which case you were sure he was deeply disturbed. But you also reckoned there were coping strategies behind it. Lordy was a lunatic who came bearing gifts. High-functioning.
When you brought that level of value, a label executive had said of Lordy’s music, there was no sane and no insane. There was nothing but product.
That was the story of the market, the guy from the label had bloviated. And the story of the market was the greatest story ever told.
He’d pronounced that sanctimonious shit and all Ry could think of was how he himself was only a neurotic, he had a minor-league anxiety compared to Lordy’s full-fledged bipolarity and a minor-league talent to go with it. For genius, either ruthlessness or real insanity was needed. It was both a stupid myth and a stupid truth. The sane, in the end, were only the workhorses of music.
It saddened him to contemplate his relative mental stability. Not a damn thing he could do about it, either.
Distraction. He didn’t want to be here. From his seat at the end of the pew he scanned other pews for a familiar face, but the rows were dark-clothed bodies and goose-fleshed skin in the artificial chill, the faces pale half-moons. Most of the crowd was young, Lynn’s students from the high school—clearly he’d been popular. He’d kept teaching even once they started recording, took his sick days when he was needed in the studio.
No one knew Ry and he knew no one. No one he could see, anyway. Only the solidity of grief saved him from panic at being hemmed in—at any other time, when he wasn’t weighed down, the crowds would have been his cue for a fast exit. Onstage and in the studio he’d learned to deal, but outside those spaces, with people around and no instrument to shield him, it wasn’t always clear where he should put his body. He often felt extra, unneeded in a scene. He had no lines. He had no role. How did you hold yourself so as to not feel spare?
He kept getting mental pictures of the accident, though he hadn’t seen it. The cops said a jacked-up truck had clipped the Fat Boy, passing illegally on the right and crossing into the lane at 90 or 95, and bumped it into the air—a bump he couldn’t stop his brain from trying to frame. The bike crashed into a concrete barrier, they said. Lynn’s neck had snapped.
He’d been on his way to a session so they’d been waiting for him when it happened. He didn’t show up and didn’t show up, and didn’t answer any calls or texts, and it was so out of character that finally Ry drove Lordy to his house and used the key he kept under an empty plant pot to get in. They’d only been there a couple of minutes when the cops came to the door, two cops, a young one who talked and an older one who stood behind him. Lordy’d nodded slowly during their rigid announce ment—the young policeman had delivered the news nervously, like maybe he’d never done that duty before. But after the cops left he started shaking so rapidly and mechanically it looked like some kind of seizure. Ry’d just stood there repeating: “Why did he take the freeway? Why did he take the freeway? He always took surface streets. Why did he take the freeway?”
After a bit Lordy had stopped shaking and left. He’d stumbled out of the house while Ry was in shock, just wandering around the rooms thinking Lynn won’t be here again.
No word since.
He blinked, lashes wet feathers on his cheeks. Wiped the back of his sleeve over them. Up at the front some guy was talking, a mass of words, forgotten almost as soon as they were said.
Ry’d always liked words but they were flat without music. Dry.
The Fat Boy never had loud pipes. It ran quiet, not obnoxious. Lynn’s father had rebuilt it with his own hands, before he lost the use of them. Parkinson’s. Lynn was attached to it for that reason. And for the feel of movement, he’d told Ry and Lordy, not just through space but time. Lynn was about rhythm, not speed—had never sped when he rode. Never sped when he drummed, either. Everything at the right tempo.
The driver of the jacked-up truck just kept going. Kept right on moving down the 10. Never looked back. All the way to the Mojave Desert, likely. Over the Colorado into Arizona, New Mexico, Texas. The Eastern Seaboard. Who knew. They had a partial plate from a witness: two digits, California. That was it.
Unfair. Unfair. Fucking unfair. But to cling to it was so useless it was borderline stupid. Unfair was what kids whined when they didn’t get what they wanted. When they made that complaint—his six-year-old niece said it constantly—you told them some lazy shit like, Well, life isn’t always fair. Lazy shit sure, but true as dirt. You also taught them to believe it should be fair, so they could grow up and be confused forever by the tension between what was and what should be. He wasn’t a father, small mercies. Hoped never to be. He’d seen firsthand how raw it made you. Might as well strip your clothes off and run naked down High Street in a hail of gunfire.
That was being a parent.
The truck driver kept on driving. People who drove too fast for the hell of it were the worst kind of bastards, the kind who believed the world belonged to them.
And they were right. It did.
Someone wept raggedly in the front pew—one of Lynn’s sisters, he thought, peering over while trying to seem like he wasn’t. She began to hyperventilate, or that was how it looked to him—trouble breathing, shaking her head—and was led out through a door near the altar. Was the girlfriend here? Nina? She must be, lost in the gathering. From the outside Nina and Lynn had seemed like an odd couple, since he was a six-foot-five black man and she was a five-foot-four white woman, but soon after they met they’d been together whenever they could.
He’d only been to services for old people before, solemn but still within the natural order—his grandfather, grandmother, a great-aunt. Oh, except for one: when he was a junior in high school, soon after the move from Brisbane to L.A., a senior had died in the middle of a baseball game. Hit hard in the chest by a ball and fell down dead—a massive coronary. Ry remembered thinking: Is this what happens in America? Back in Australia, no kid in his small world had died. The senior’s parents said he’d had a heart condition since birth. “He always knew it was a risk. He wanted to play the sports he enjoyed.” The whole school had attended the memorial, standing room only. The dead boy, though a sporty type, had also been a fan of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. They all were back then—at least, most of the kids he knew. It was back in the early eighties, when fans dressed up and went to the midnight shows. He remembered clearly because at the memorial they played the theme song, “Science Fiction, Double Feature.”
Back then they went to watch a film about transvestite aliens, humanoid scientists in drag who made beautiful Frankenstein monsters in silver Speedos and ate the body of Meatloaf out of a coffin. They dressed in drag and wore towering black wigs with white stripes in them; they sang along to songs about unbridled lust and the joys of heroin. Later they turned into claims adjusters and bank tellers, gas station attendants and divorce lawyers.
He hadn’t known the dead boy. Everyone went so he went—it would be more remarkable to avoid the service than attend it—but once there he felt like an impostor.
But how much better to feel that way than this.
Now he hung back as they all filed out. He stayed sitting for so long that everyone had to leave from the other end of the pew. He couldn’t mobilize. The crowds disappeared through the tall double doors at the back and he was left alone with the portrait at the front. Got up finally and walked over.
Closed casket; the photograph on its brass stand was all there was to see. And the picture was formal, Lynn posed in a jacket and tie. It looked like Lynn had posed for a shot he didn’t have much interest in. But you could still make out the modesty of the smile, its humility.
The address for the reception was on his phone. Near Lynn’s place at Lordy’s uncle’s house, though Lordy was almost certain to be absent. Ry hadn’t wanted to drive, had called up an Uber—now another, and he didn’t register much as they floated along. The streets were a scene from other people’s lives. Today more than most days. Ugly city, except where the rich lived. Los Angeles was stark like that. Ugly where money wasn’t, beautiful where it was. Well, not always. Along the beach even the rich lived in ugly buildings.
You did what you knew how to do. Was there anything else?
He’d been here a couple of times before, once for a quinceañera, once for a Super Bowl party, both times as Lordy’s chaperone. And driver: Lordy was afraid of driving, had an actual phobia and no license, so he’d bought the biggest and thickest-walled car on the market and made Ry or sometimes Lynn drive it. Ry had a stipend from Lordy to be his chauffeur. Lordy’s idea, but he’d said yes. Gratefully. Bass player/chauffeur, his job description. Sometimes he feared the chauffeur job was his real one. Shit, he had more income from it. Far more.
The house wasn’t big, just a ranch-style on a working-class street, but the backyard was surprisingly vast, green as a jungle, and that was where the fiestas were held. There were avocado trees, grapefruit, magnolia, all with delicate lights strung through them; there was one of those concrete triple-decker fountains that looked like a cake stand in a bakery. Moving beneath the trees, he flicked his eyes around for someone to give his condolences to: once that was done, he would be free. He could go.
He knew the sister, and the brother who’d been in jail, but he didn’t see either of them yet. Lynn’s parents were long gone.
But wait: Nina. She stood in a corner of the yard under a trellis with some white-flowered vine, a small, beaded purse over one shoulder and a glass held out in front of her. It was connected to her but also separate, less drink than personal shield. Her face was void, like someone had poured it out. She was a realtor; Lynn had met her while they were shopping for a house for Lordy. It had been a disaster, since Lordy decided, out of sight of any of them, to plunge into the house’s deep lap pool. They found him just in time. Lynn had to give him CPR.
No idea what to say, but he got his own drink from a table. Then he was walking along a pebbled path to where she stood staring, absentminded.
“Nina.”
“Oh. Ry.”
They stiffly embraced, separated, then stood there with their drinks. Sipping, maybe, more often than they strictly needed to. He wasn’t sure whether he should offer condolences—the loss was both of theirs. Were you supposed to measure the losses against each other, give condolences according to whose loss was greatest? He’d known Lynn for longer, and worked with him and spent more time, but she was the girlfriend. Position of privilege. Always implicit: friendship was secondary. The world of couples was one that you were in or out of, and he was out. Always had been.
Even when he was seeing someone, a rare event, he never entered that enclosed world. Couples established themselves with lines you couldn’t cross. They were each other’s barricades.
She and Lynn, though, had been good company together. No private jokes to show how intimate they were. Attentive to the third wheel, both of them. She was tough in some ways, at times a little paranoid, but smart. And devoted to Lynn. He would’ve liked her for that devotion alone.
But she was crying now, her nose and eye makeup running, so he took her arm and led her to a stone bench under a tree. They faced away from everyone—people were beginning to trickle in, emerge slowly through the back door, speaking in low voices. She fished around in her bag. Tissue. Off to their right the fountain made its sound, but it wasn’t like nature or streams. It made him think something was leaking. Somewhere a pipe had broken under the surface, and slowly, unseen, dark waters were rising.
“Sorry. I thought I’d keep it together in public,” she said, shaking her head. “Sorry. Embarrassing.”
It was easier to be with someone who didn’t expect him to act at ease, less lonely to stand beside someone sunk into their own well. His well wasn’t far off, and from the bottom of one you couldn’t see into the other, but at least you knew it was there.
Usually after ten minutes he would have slipped away to a private space, a bathroom or bedroom. In such places his custom was to look at himself steadily in whatever mirror he could find. It calmed him down to see his reflection, because it could be anyone’s. You’re not so different, you’re just a guy—a quiet guy who plays bass. They can’t see through your skin to the alarm you feel when their eyes rest on you. See? Fear is invisible.
“I had a win,” she said, when she finished dabbing at her face. She was mumbling.
“Uh. Pardon?”
“I had a way in.”
Still he could barely hear her.
“A way into the world. For the first time. He was my only way in.”
He wasn’t sure what she meant. This gray area, this stretching grayness that was the unspeakable quality of feeling, could only be captured by rhythm and melody.
“People say, you know, time will help heal it,” she went on. “It won’t be so acute. That could be true. It has to be. No one can live like this.”
She was in her well and thought she’d never get out. And he had to admit, it was distinctly possible. A nurturing-type person would probably cluck like a chook and reassure her, but he didn’t have that in him. He could barely say regular things.
He’d rather tell her the truth, anyway: a well was deep and true and had its own cylindrical perfection. It gave good shelter because its walls weren’t thin; they were as thick as the earth was round. When you were in a well the walls went on forever.
From the solitude of a well, if you were fortunate, you could look up now and then and see a circle of sky. That circle might as well be the world, or the span of a life in it—clouds passed in the blink of an eye, no matter how immense they were. Stars greater than the sun shone down, as small as pins, from infinite remove.
Course, you couldn’t say hard things, not when times were already hard. He knew that much. Only music could cross the divide. The brain’s hard wiring, probably, how music resonated—said everything while saying nothing at all. But he preferred to think of it in less scientific terms. Music, the hard currency of the soul.
“I should go talk to his family,” she said. “He made me his executor. We were going to—we hadn’t told anyone yet, but we had agreed to get married.”
“Oh,” he said. He almost added Congratulations. Stopped himself. Lynn hadn’t mentioned it, but it made sense.
“It wasn’t going to be a big thing, just a small ceremony,” she said. “But he wanted to be organized. He had a will. I don’t. I don’t own much, so what’s the point.”
“He had the house,” said Ry, nodding. His father had left it to him. House, bike and gold record.
“He wants—wanted the house to go to his siblings,” she said. “To sell. I guess none of them wants to live in it. I’ll be—it’s going to be my job to sell it for them.”
“You don’t have to,” he offered. “It might be easier—someone who’s not—”
“I know. But I want to. To look out for them. You know? They don’t know much about real estate.”
The phrase real estate made the conversation everyday. They were two people talking about real estate.
She felt it too, he thought. Almost ashamed. Or maybe he was reading too much into it. She dabbed at her eyes with the tissue.
“OK,” she said. “I’ll go. Do I look—?”
“Fine,” he said, though there were still faint eye-makeup tracks.
She smiled at him, small smile. Reached out and squeezed his hand. Then walked away, purse over one shoulder, holding the drink.
Missed Connections, he thought. It was a section in Craigslist. People who saw each other on the bus. Or at a restaurant. As far as he could tell all connections were missed.
Or all his, anyway. He’d read an email recently, he shouldn’t have but it was over his sister’s shoulder, half by accident while he was helping her troubleshoot on her computer. She was divorced and dating some guy—she constantly had to hire babysitters so she could go out with him. When she ran low on cash Ry was the babysitter. All Ry knew about him was that when they first met he liked her for her English accent. She had to break it to him that the accent was Australian. She said he seemed kind of disappointed.
The email was from the guy. “Thanks for the hours of deep connection,” it said. Did that ring true to her?
It didn’t ring true to him.
Was it enough to think you had a “deep connection”?
Maybe it was. Maybe that was all that counted, in the end. Maybe illusion was everything.
Unexpected sight at the back door: a fake leopard-skin hat. Beneath it, Lordy, facing the floor. He rarely looked up, in public. Now he was shuffling along in a black suit and shoes Ry had never seen before—glossy loafers. Tassels. He usually wore tailored shoes in some vegan fabric, slip-ons. No laces. He didn’t like laces; he claimed he couldn’t tie a bow. He never learned, he said. These couldn’t be leather—impossible. Even in his expensive SUV, whose high-end package came with all-leather upholstery, he had insisted on vinyl seats. The day they’d picked up the car from the dealership, after a long wait, it turned out the steering wheel had leather trim on it.
But since Lordy would never touch the wheel himself they’d been able to conceal it from him. Lynn went so far as to complain about the texture of the grip, grumbling to Lordy that when his hands sweated the vinyl was slippery beneath them.
When it came to Lordy, Ry was sometimes unsure how to proceed but Lynn had been confident. Lynn hadn’t been above a white lie.
Now the job of white lies would be all on him.
So vinyl loafers. And who had driven him? Maybe he’d walked. He liked to walk, and because he didn’t drive he often walked for miles.
Ry approached quickly, from the side. Best not to pop up suddenly in front of Lordy: it could make him jump.
“There’s lemonade, if you’re thirsty,” he said. Lordy didn’t touch spirits. That was how he put it, when they were offered to him. “I never touch spirits,” he’d mumble.
“Lemonade,” repeated Lordy, but at the same time shook his head. His eyes darted. That meant he had no interest in a drink. With Lordy you had to read the signs, not listen to the words.
Behind him a young kid Ry’d never seen before struggled to push a cart with equipment on it, an amp and keyboard and loops of cable.
“What’s this?” said Ry.
“Chair!” said Lordy gruffly, so Ry turned and went through the back door. At the kitchen table all the chairs were taken, but Lynn’s sister was carrying platters into the dining room and as she passed he asked if they could spare one. She tapped another woman on the shoulder, and slowly the woman stood. Ry thanked her as he picked up the chair—rickety, but it would have to serve.
Outside Lordy was watching as the kid ran the cable to an outlet on the house’s back wall. He saw Ry and the chair and pointed with an impatient hand to an area beside the triple-tiered fountain, a piece of pavement beneath a mimosa tree.
“There,” he muttered, still facing the ground.
He sat on the chair, plugged the keyboard into the speaker and played a couple of chords, testing. The sound carried well. No eye contact. He didn’t wait for an audience, either.
“Traditional version,” he said. Ry doubted anyone else heard. “English.”
Then he started playing. Even on one keyboard, it sounded like an orchestra. His voice was deep and full.
“Arise, ye workers from your slumber / Arise, ye prisoners of want,” he began.
More guests were filing out the back door, their conversations subsiding. Nina was among them; her hand trembled holding her glass. It was empty anyway so he took it from her and held it himself.
“No more deluded by reaction / On tyrants only we’ll make war / The soldiers too will take strike action / They’ll break ranks and fight no more,” sang Lordy.
Around them the crowds were so thick pushing out of the house, almost jostling, that Ry stumbled forward.
“It’s Lordy,” whispered a teenage girl.
“And the last fight let us face!” shouted Lynn’s brother, the jailbird. He had no singing voice at all.
More of them sang, not shy but lagging, since only the family really knew the words. Lynn had played recordings of the song at family gatherings, and other than the brother they all had good ears.
This wasn’t the kind of thing Lordy usually did. He’d always dismissed the song. “Commie propaganda,” he’d once said to Lynn when Lynn was picking it out on a guitar, though he’d been smiling his lopsided grin when he said it. “White-people shit.” You could never tell what that grin meant: sometimes it was intended gently, fondly; other times it was almost malicious.
And the setting was way outside Lordy’s usual comfort zone. As he sang, and the mourners went along, game for the tribute but pretty much butchering the lyrics, Ry wondered if he’d have to shepherd Lordy out afterward. Lordy was at his best before a performance and at his worst afterward, the exact opposite of Ry, who felt satisfied after he played, a task complete. But Lordy was filled with emotion and often shaky or explosive. Angry at small mistakes, mostly other people’s but sometimes his own—mistakes no one else ever noticed.
When he finished a silence fell. And held. The song had got to them. Lordy was magic.
He made you pay to be near him, though. You paid for the alchemy. No gold without a pound of flesh.
The silence went on until Lynn’s brother shouted “Encore!”
No surer way to piss Lordy off.
But he didn’t pitch a fit. Relief. He just got up and walked back toward the house through the crowd. It parted like the Red Sea.
Lordy had a strong sense of what he needed to do at any given time. Only at the swimming pool had he hesitated. He lacked some basic skills: tying shoelaces, driving, swimming. He’d never learned even a basic front crawl, but that day, he told Ry later, he just really wanted to swim. The blue water had called to him.
“I’m off,” Ry told Nina, and handed her back the empty wineglass.
And he did what he always did: followed the leader.