Alyzon Whitestarr (10 page)

“Is this from those dumb magazines you buy?” I snapped.

“I never buy dumb magazines,” she said slyly. “I’m just saying that Da won’t go crazy if he gets famous, because it would just have happened to him by chance. He wasn’t trying to get famous. It’s the people who
want
fame that are in trouble.”

“You think wanting fame makes people insane?” I asked, trying to figure out her logic.

“I think the reason they want fame can make a person crazy. I mean, people want it because they feel insignificant. They want everyone to know them and be interested in them. They don’t realize that being stared at so much will turn them
into actors in their own lives. Nothing will feel real anymore. They’ll feel less real when they’re famous than when they were nobody.”

“You think they kill themselves to make themselves feel real again?” I thought that was a surprisingly interesting conclusion for Mirandah. But she just rolled her eyes at me.

“I’m just saying some people can’t handle being looked at all the time. It’s not what they thought it was. But I think Da would be fine. He would still grow his own tomatoes.”

* * *

Tuesday was a blur of preparations for the looming school play. I hadn’t had much to do with it, first being in a coma for all that time and second being totally deficient in the area of artistic ability. But now that sets and costumes were being assembled and actors were working up to the dress rehearsal, anyone vaguely willing was co-opted as a gofer. I fetched and carried until the dismissal bell, then went to catch a bus. I was tired from all the running around, and I knew the bus wouldn’t be crowded because kids on a field trip that day had been dismissed early. I took a seat in the middle of the bus.

Just as the door hissed shut, an old man in a dirty suede coat reached it and knocked insistently. The bus driver hesitated, and I could tell he was thinking of ignoring the old guy. Then he relented, and the door swished open. The man got in, grumbling under his breath. The bus filled with the noxious reek of unwashed body, rancid food, alcohol, and old sweat. His hair looked like birds would reject it for a nest, unless birds have slums. The trousers and coat he wore were so
greasy that they shone like waxed wood in patches at the knees and elbows, and when he sat down, I heard the faint crackle of newspapers that told me he had wrapped them around himself under his clothes. He sat a few seats in front of me but, suddenly, without any warning, he swung round and looked at me. I was wide open, not anticipating any attention, so the savage, sour reek of him leapt at me like a tiger. I was struggling to pull up my screen when the woman in the seat between us shifted. The old man’s baleful red gaze flickered to her, and with a gasp of relief, I switched my gaze to her, too. Because I was still wide open, her smell flowed at me next: musty old carpet mixed with some sort of sickly air freshener. She was not looking at me, though, so I was able to turn away.

I was shaken, because I had begun to think I had a good amount of control. But I had been careless to sit there on a bus with my senses unprotected, and I knew I must never do it again. What would have happened if he had gone on staring at me, and I had been unable to call up a screen? Maybe I would have gone on magnifying and swallowing information until I fell into another coma just to escape.

I shuddered, realizing that my confidence and self-control were an eggshell-thin crust over a giant void of ignorance. It was not enough just to be able to create a mathematical screen in my mind. I had to understand more about what had happened to me.

The bus passed a billboard advertising a circus and a small neon monkey waved its little black paw at me. It made
me think of Wombat, with whom I definitely seemed to have established real communication. He sought me out now whenever he wanted anything, and a couple of times I had sensed he was trying to transmit something more complicated than his immediate needs.

I thought about animals and how they used their scents and body language. Maybe the old man and his unpleasant personal odor were an echo of the lion who used his urine to mark the borders of his kingdom, or the dog that peed contemptuously into the territory of another dog. Maybe the old man’s mind was so corrupted by alcohol that he had regressed into a state similar to his animal ancestors, so that consciously or unconsciously, he was using his odor to reject and lash out at other people. That brought me back to feeling that what had happened to my mind might simply be the accidental uncovering of something buried by evolution—something that might not be gone completely in us humans, even if it wasn’t being used consciously.

That afternoon when I got home, I stopped at the gate because there was an unfamiliar clacking sound coming from the house. It took a minute for me to recognize that it was the ancient typewriter Mum kept for typing stuff on cards to go with paintings at exhibitions. It’s so old Da keeps joking that it’s probably an antique and the most valuable thing in the whole house, but he can’t sell it to pay bills because Mum is a Luddite who refuses to use a computer. I grinned, walking up the path, because Mum hates naming paintings almost as much as she hates computers. She says when you name something, you pin it down like a butterfly; it doesn’t live anymore.

“Reality is elusive,” Mum told her agent Rhona once. I had liked the phrase so much that I wrote it on the front of my notebook.

I was half expecting to find Rhona inside waiting, because why else would Mum be up so early? But as I came down the hall, men’s voices were coming from the kitchen. I opened the door to find a stranger sitting at the table with Da. He was older and much bigger than Da, almost big enough to
qualify as fat, only he wasn’t. He was solid under a slippery metallic-looking suit that accentuated a chest like a barrel. His bottom lip was very full, but his upper lip so thin as to be almost nonexistent. His face was hairless and cleanly pink, and his hair was a white meringue swirl. The hair was exaggerated and odd enough that it tweaked my memory. I realized that I had seen this man the night of the Urban Dingo gig. He had been talking to the snide announcer and the man in the green sneakers.

Da noticed me. “Aaron, this is my daughter.”

The big man turned so swiftly that I barely had time to strengthen my screen before his gaze was pinioning me. Even screening hard, I was shocked to feel something like a stream of tiny invisible fish surging at me from him. Only the fact that I had plenty of practice at not reacting to unexpected things in the past few weeks kept me from yelping as I felt the man’s attention nudge and push against me as if it were trying to get inside my skin.

He turned to Da and said oddly, “This is not Serenity.”

“No. Serenity is my youngest daughter. This is Alyzon. Honey, this is Aaron Rayc,” Da said. “He helps to manage Urban Dingo.”

“Just Aaron, please, and I do not manage the band. It is merely that I take an interest in them and perhaps I have been of some small use to them from time to time in offering advice.” He had a formal voice with just a hint of something rich and foreign. He smiled at me, and it was the sort of smile people give when they have been directed to notice you by someone
whose opinion they care about. He had lost interest in me after learning that I was not Serenity, which made me wonder what Da had told him about her.

“The name is a version of Alison,” Da was explaining. “It was the name of my wife’s grandmother.”

I went over to the bench and began to make myself a mug of chocolate, because I was very curious about Aaron Rayc. When I was sure he and Da were paying no attention to me, I dropped my number screen.

I was looking at both men. I smelled the familiar coffee-grounds scent of Da mixed with tobacco and rope and a slight linseed odor. There was nothing from Aaron Rayc. Puzzled, I focused on him, leaving Da out of my vision. I smelled aftershave and deodorant, the very faint odor of sweat and mint toothpaste and a touch of garlic—but I could not smell what I had come to think of as an essence scent. Nor could I smell any of his thoughts or feelings. It was unnerving—like meeting someone who didn’t have a shadow.

I extended my other senses and saw that the pinkness of Aaron Rayc’s skin was actually a slight irritation, as if he had scrubbed himself too hard when he bathed. I listened to the thick, quick
drub-drub
of his heartbeat and the strong pull of his breathing and understood that the big man was excited and trying not to seem so.

“You say your wife is an artist?” he asked, and his voice boomed painfully. I winced and raised the screen.

Da’s face lit up the way it always did when he was talking about Mum. “Her name is Zambia Whitestarr. Maybe
you’ve heard of her, if you’re a patron of the arts.” He refilled their teacups and got some more milk.

“I am interested in artists of many kinds,” Aaron Rayc said, following Da’s movements with his eyes. He had a voice like thickened cream, all smooth flow and rich blandness. No sign in it of the eagerness I could see in his body language.

“Those drawings are Zambia’s.” Da nodded to the wall by the door as he passed it. Aaron Rayc got up to look at them, and that was when I noticed the air around him was distorting the way it did around Da. I had the impression there was some difference, but it was hard to make it out against the busy background of the kitchen.

“Your wife’s work is very unusual,” Aaron Rayc said. “But I have to say that, in general, I am more drawn to mainstream art because it has a wider appeal. It is accessible and, as such, it is democratic. Much so-called high art and, if you will forgive me saying it, fringe art like your wife’s is too introverted. Very often its elevation owes itself to elitism; the desire to have a work of art that only some are able to understand inevitably sets up cultural haves and have-nots.”

As he spoke, he had a habit of lifting his big hands and waving them about elegantly to emphasize whatever point he was making, then dropping them suddenly and limply into his lap, as if they had fallen dead.

“Whew,” Da said. “What you’re saying sounds very much like you see art as a form of political expression.”

“Like anything creative, it is both a form of expression and a potential force. Think about it. Used properly, painting,
music, writing—all of the arts—can be forces for change in society. Haven’t all the greatest musical artists changed the world? Elvis, the Beatles …”

“Maybe,” Da said. “But I’m afraid I don’t think it’s the business of an artist to
want
to change the world.”

“No?” Aaron Rayc looked weirdly delighted. “What about your ‘Song for Aya’? That is virtually a protest song.”

“You’ve heard that?” Da laughed in disbelief. “I don’t think of it as a protest song, though. I wrote it for someone, because I wanted to tell her how I felt about what had happened to her. I guess you could say it was as much a song about me as anything, although I didn’t think that at the time. It was my way of trying to bear what was happening to her. My helplessness … but maybe you know the story behind the song?”

Aaron Rayc made a gesture that might have been a nod.

“Anyway, I don’t write songs to protest about things,” Da said. “I write to understand things more deeply.”

“But surely there is an outward urge as well as an inward one?”

“Of course, but it’s secondary. If you want to know the truth, I think of my songs as a kind of howling at the moon more than anything else. Wolves howl because they can’t help it, you know. The moon demands it of them, just like the world demands a response in music from me.”

“Very poetic. Do you write all of the songs for the band, then?”

“I work with the others to produce the music, but the
lyrics are mostly mine. Neil has written some of them. Of course, a lot of our music is instrumental, and it just evolves.”

Aaron Rayc nodded, but his eyes were unfocused, as if he were thinking about something else. I wondered why he was here. Their conversation wasn’t giving me any clues.

The entrepreneur spoke again. “You will not deny that regardless of your intent, the music you make requires a response from an audience? Is, in fact, a spiritual call to arms.”

Da frowned. “I don’t deny that people react to the music. I hope they do. But I don’t see it as a call to arms because that implies I want them to do something. And I don’t. If I think of the ‘outward urge,’ as you call it, I see myself and the others as sometimes giving voice to things that can’t speak for themselves. Children or animals or the earth—but we are also trying to learn how it feels to be that thing we are writing about. To understand it better.”

“You believe that you can understand another species? Is that not an arrogance?”

Da nodded. “Of course, but I don’t think it is a bad arrogance if the result rouses people to feel for something other than themselves and their own species.”

“So you
do
want to change the world?”

Da laughed. “I wish humans would evolve enough to
belong
to life rather than wanting always to dominate and use it. But the truth is that when I make music, I’m trying to figure out what I think about things. I am not setting out to tell others how to feel or think or act.”