Dusk was still far away. I had hours to use up before seeing Anna Z again. I thought about going to the fair anyway, to wander around and spend my money and try to burn up the time with not-very-amusing amusements. I was sure, however, that this would just make the wait seem even longer.
So I went to Luigi’s record shop, figuring I could poke around in the bins, and maybe soak up a little Anna Z vibe. She’d told me the night before that she used to go to Luigi’s, but she’d been staying away lately. When I asked her why, she’d avoided the question, starting in with another of her talk-talk-talking spiels.
The kid from the day before was there again: the one with the wild shag, blue-green jumpsuit, and platforms. This time he was looking through the Django bins, muttering like a street crazy. He wasn’t exactly hostile, and he didn’t have the strung-out look of a kid on fly-spell. But there was definitely something wrong with him. “Lord of the Fleas, Keeper of the Keys.” He turned to look at me. “Kingdom Come, Deaf and Dumb.”
“What?” I asked him. “Is that from a song?”
His voice went way up, higher and louder. “Lord of the Fleas!”
Luigi told him to cool it. So he backed away, giving me a sputtery snarl and whispering something about bad vibes. Did he feel something coming off of me, I wondered. Real vibes, radiation, the alien x-rays that were supposedly passing through? Or maybe he was just a little bent in the brain, not a real glister kid but sort of insano, dressing that way in the middle of the day, all by himself.
There was a big poster on the wall, a blown-up version of the cover for the Witch-Babies’ new album. It showed an ancient ruined castle. The light was all blurry and throbbing, like one of those infrared shots that show what the naked eye can’t see. In the middle, facing the castle, was a pure white man totally naked, holding a pure white little kid above his head like he was giving her up as a sacrifice.
Anna Z hadn’t mentioned the Witch-Babies last night. I didn’t know if she thought they were part of the mutation too. I was sure, though, that the new album’s art pointed in that direction. I went over to the Witch-Babies bin, luckily far from the freak-brain kid, and found there were ten copies of the record. Most of the song titles didn’t mean much. But the last cut on the second side was called “Aurora Borealis Uber Alles.” I had a blurry idea that the northern lights were some kind of magnetic radiation. Was this connected to the Alien Drift too? I didn’t know. But I could buy the album and find out.