“Oh, please,” Isabel replied. “Also, I think Baby tried to call Virtual Cole.”
“I know. I know everything. Could you possibly use your skills to find me a Colebot who’s having a party in the L.A. area today? Or getting married? Or divorced? Some sort of festive occasion that might involve music?”
I watched the little boy on the deck sail his plane around the table. He was deeply content in a way that I couldn’t ever remember being. If it had been me, I would’ve flown that plane to the edge of the roof deck and jumped.
“I thought you knew everything.” Isabel sighed noisily.
“What’s in it for me?”
“My eternal admiration of your superior intellect.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Also, Baby wants to have dinner with us.”
She made a noise that I couldn’t interpret. Then she said again, “I’ll see what I can do.”
After she hung up, I noticed the boy had come to the edge of the roof deck and was staring at me.
“Hey,” I told him. “We’re twins.”
It wasn’t as creepy as it sounded. We were both wearing khaki shorts and no shirts and were tan with sun-kissed brown hair. I couldn’t decide if he was four or nine or twelve. I had no idea of the specifics of children. He was too young to drive, but old enough to be able to turn doorknobs.
“Are you a time traveler?” he called warily.
“Yes,” I replied. I was pleased that he had also noticed the similarity. Already I was shaping this into a song. “But only forward.”
“Are you me?”
“Sure,” I said.
He scratched his stomach with the plane. “What is my future?”
I said, “You’re famous, and you have a Mustang.”
We both looked at the Saturn parked behind the building.
With a frown, the boy hurled the plane at me. It careened through the shimmering air before disappearing somewhere into the roof crevices of the rental house, palms hiding it.
“Well, now you’ve done it,” I said. “You’ve probably broken it.”
The boy looked dismissive. “It’s not about the landing. It’s about the flying.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. I felt agreeably goose-bumpy, like I was creeping myself out on purpose. “Maybe you are me.
Are you real?”
On the chair behind me, my phone rang. It was Isabel, calling me back. I pointed at the boy and turned to answer it.
“I found you a wedding,” she said.
“I think I just talked to younger me from the past,” I replied.
I turned back around, but the roof deck opposite was now empty. “He was flying a plane.”
“Great. I hope you told him to not do drugs. Do you want the address or the name or what?”
I tried to see where the little plane had landed. I sort of wanted it. I made a note to break into the rental house if at all possible. “Give me the everything. Oh, tweet that. That’s something I would say.”
“I’m hanging up now.” She did.
I called T.
“Cole!” he said gladly.
“Life is about to happen,” I said, with a last glance toward where I had seen younger me. “I’m just putting on a shirt.”
He and Joan arrived so quickly that I suspected he had been lying around waiting for me to call. Together, we made the odious journey across the courtyard to Leyla’s part of the compound.
Joan and T trailed me, cameras on shoulders.
“Hey,” I said to Leyla.
She was sitting at the island in the kitchen, eating a plate of chopped-up raw vegetables, her dreads hanging around her long face. She blinked at me and then at the cameras. I had not knocked, but she didn’t say anything about it. I tried not to hate her, because it felt like a victory for Baby.
“Today is the day we make magic happen,” I said.
Leyla ate a piece of something green. She chewed. We all got older while she swallowed. “What did you have in mind?”
“Grand things. Where’s your kit?”
She just looked at me. I couldn’t tell if she was high or stupid or simply hating me back. None of those things were mutually exclusive.
“Your drums? These things?” I air-drummed. “Get them.
Put them in the Saturn. Come with me into the future.”
She put another vegetable in her mouth. She chewed.
“Since we started this conversation,” I said, “two hundred babies have been born on this planet. And what have we accomplished?
You have eaten that thing.”
Leyla swallowed. “You didn’t hurry to get over here until now. Time is continuous, Cole. It doesn’t speed up and slow down. Do not let yourself be fooled by whims. Contentment is constancy.” She drew a slow, even line in the air with something I thought was a zucchini.
I said, “Sure. Okay. But we’re on a schedule now. Drums.
Saturn. You and me, baby. Bring your garden there. You can eat it on the way. Do you have a wheelbarrow or something? I’ll chuck it in there for you while you get your kit together.”
She didn’t move. “What am I playing?”
“Music.”
“What kind of music?”
“Mine.”
“Do I know it?”
“There is this thing called jamming and it means you play a piece of music with other people even if you have never heard it before, and if you tell me you have no idea how that’s done, put down that carrot because I’m firing you.”
Leyla ate the carrot. “Music is inherent, man,” she said.
“And you don’t have to be such a hole all the time. I’ll get the drums.”
Jeremy was at band practice with people who were not me when I arrived to fetch him.
It wasn’t that I didn’t understand Jeremy getting a new band while I was missing/dead/etc. I was sure I would have done the same thing in his position. Well, I would have started one, not joined one, because I don’t really like team sports unless I’ve invented both the team and the sport. But I didn’t begrudge him for finding some new people to play music with.
It’s what we do, after all. We can’t get this out of our blood. The music.
But it didn’t make me feel any better about having to share him. Especially since I wanted better for him than this: a fairly boring band playing inside a fairly boring garage attached to a fairly boring house in a fairly boring part of L.A. I could hear their efforts as I pulled the Saturn up to the worn curb. They were clearly just a high-class cover band with an unimaginative guitarist, a drummer who had learned everything he knew from pool halls, and a singer named Chase or Chad.
That bass player was top-notch, though.
I got out and stepped over a hose snaked across the concrete drive. It was attached to a listless sprinkler that showered the small, brown yard.
That sprinkler, I thought, was a lot like Jeremy. That water wasn’t going to improve that yard any more than Jeremy was going to improve this band. What a waste.
The music died as I approached. The only sound was the cha-cha-cha of the sprinkler. The dim interior of the garage reminded me how much I wanted the Mustang. The smell of it reminded me how much I missed Victor. Our garage practices had been works of art.
“I’m here for Jeremy,” I announced. “Jeremy Shutt. In the case that there are two Jeremys here.”
The humans in the garage simply stared at me, so I explained a few self-evident facts. (1) A band practice is moveable, while a wedding is not, and (2) no amount of practice was going to make this band interesting enough to get a label on board, so (3) really I was just saving them all a lot of time.
The singer, who looked even more like a Chad or a Chase up close, didn’t seem to appreciate my insight. The drummer and guitarist just sort of waved. It turned out I knew both of them, even though I couldn’t remember either of their names.
The drummer used to play for a band called ChristCheese, which had been more successful than you might imagine, and the guitarist had been with Pursuit Ten until their percussion guy had OD’d in a bathtub in Oklahoma, which is a sad story no matter how you look at it.
To the singer, I said, “In conclusion, it will make no difference in the relative scheme of things if Jeremy comes with me now.”
The singer was clearly trying to behave himself in front of my cameras, but his voice was a little strained. “You can’t just disappear and then expect to come back and find all your toys where you left them.”
I said, “Don’t be like that. I will not break Jeremy. He’s clearly too valuable for that. You’ll have him back, and you can continue on this grand old path to playing high school proms.
We all have to share.”
“Don’t play all, whatever, high and mighty now,” the singer said. “You can’t act as if you’re being gracious while you diss my music.”
“Diss!” I replied. “If you want to hear a proper diss, I can prepare some words for you. But no, my friend. I was merely placing things in perspective for you. You are doing that, in there. And I am doing this, with them.” I gestured to T and Joan.
Even with the dimming presence of the Saturn, it seemed quite obvious to me that Cole > Chase.
The ChristCheese drummer and Pursuit Ten’s ex-guitarist both looked at singer Chad/Chase to see what his next move would be.
“Yeah, I know what you’re doing. I know about the show,”
he told me. “You think you’re all that because of who you were.
But no one cares if you were big once, dude. Your singles are so old that grandmas are humming them. You’re only famous now because you’re a total loser.”
Very evenly, I said, “Also because of those three multiplatinum albums. Let’s be comprehensive.”
“Oh, come on! Don’t pretend you don’t know why people are watching the show. You know I’m right,” the singer scoffed.
“Or you would be with a label instead of Baby North. Come on, man. Don’t even pretend it’s about the music.”
His words wedged their way into my heart. Once upon a time, I had written the soundtrack for everyone’s summer. Once upon a time, my face had been on the cover of magazines. Once upon a time, all of these guys in this garage would be shitting themselves to hear my voice in person. What was I doing now?
Just get the show over with. Make the album. Disappear into the Los Angeles sunset with Isabel. But that didn’t feel quite right, or true. I asked, “Don’t you have an Eagles cover to be practicing, or something?”
ChristCheese drummer rattled a cymbal. Pursuit Ten guitarist looked at him sharply, as if warning him not to get ugly.
I kind of hoped it got ugly. I wanted to hit something, or to get hit.
The singer said, “I’m not going to take that kind of shit from you.”
“You just did. Now, if you don’t mind, I have to go do a real job now. Jeremy, what’s the verdict?”
I turned to him. It wasn’t a challenge. It was just a question.
There was no point gaming Jeremy. Did you game Gandhi? No.
“Jeremy, if you go with this joker,” the singer said, “don’t bother coming back.”
“Chad,” Jeremy said gently.
I knew it.
“I’m serious,” said the guy. The Chad. I knew it.
I said, “Don’t make Lassie choose, Chad.”
“You, shut up. Pick, Jeremy.”
Years ago, I’d dated Victor’s sister, Angie. Pretty seriously.
Our breakup after my first tour had been ugly and nasty and entirely because I had slept with anything that took its shirt off in my presence. It was the first time I’d really realized I’d lost my soul and that the beauty of not having a soul was that you couldn’t seem to care that you no longer had one. Even though the band had just gotten back, we already had studio time booked for the next album. Angie had wanted Victor to quit. I had wanted Victor and his magic hands to come with me and never return to Phoenix, New York.
I made him choose between us.
I didn’t think it would kill him.
I didn’t think at all.
Dirt kept falling over the wolf’s muzzle. Somewhere, Victor’s grave was always being filled in.
My day was approaching ruination.
“Jeremy,” repeated Chad. “What’s it going to be?”
Jeremy tucked a bit of hair behind his ear. He sighed. His eyes were on his bass and on my car.
I interrupted. “Stay here.” I hadn’t even realized I was going to say it until I said it. And then even after I said it, I couldn’t believe that I had. It didn’t sound like something I would say.
Every face in the garage turned to me.
I plunged on. “I’m not going to screw you over, Jeremy. If this toolbag won’t take you back just because I need you now, I’ll figure something out today without you. I’ll catch you on the next one. No big deal.”
I felt so virtuous and so awful. If this was the right way, I didn’t like it. I needed to make a note to never do it again.
Jeremy nodded. He didn’t say anything for a moment.
Neither did Chad. He didn’t seem to understand what had just happened.
Cole St. Clair had failed to be an ass**le — that was what had just happened.
It continued to feel terrible. It felt exactly like that first night, when Isabel had told me to drop dead, and when I had realized that I wanted desperately to become a wolf and could not anymore. No, would not anymore.
I told myself now that I’d feel great later. Noble.
Then Jeremy said, slow and serene and Southern, “Sorry, Chad, but I think I’m going to go with Cole. I might come back, if you ask me, but I would have to give a lot of thought to the emotional manipulation you brought into the conversation today. You know that’s not how I like to work. Give me a moment, Cole. I need to get my sandals.”