Periphery (25 page)

I think I might be finished writing about Flood and Harrah for now, but never say never.

“Camera” originally published in
Tough Girls: Down and Dirty Dyke Erotica
, Black Books, October 2001, Edited by Lori Selke. Reprinted in
Best Lesbian Erotica 2002
, Cleis Press, Edited by Tristan Taormino and Pat Califia, January 2002.

“Wire” originally published in
Best Lesbian Erotica 2004
, Cleis Press, Editors Tristan Taormino and Michelle Tea, November 2003.

Glory picked a bad moment to check out on us. We were booked on Autarie—one of those self-contained orbital casino resorts with nowhere to go but around and no easy way on or off—for six simulcasts. Lots of money, and every “night” a different time zone with no traveling or loading out for us. Sweet deal. Or it would have been if not for Glory’s sudden departure the night after the first show.

I suppose it was a trick of fate that I was the one who found her and not one of the others. There she was, stretched out on the coffee table in her suite as if it were a mortuary slab, her fingers cold and stiff around the neck of her trademark vintage Walker original. Her skin was all pastel shades of violet and blue, except where her black lipstick and eyeliner were smeared, as if at the end she’d shed a few tears for herself. Most don’t go so gracefully—history is full of those who went on wild rampages, died in flaming vehicles, collapsed of overdose in public places, or choked on their own vomit. But she just lay there, beautiful and dead.

She’d lost the Spark, and the grief I felt seeing her there, alone, cut off from us forever, was at least partly for myself. I knew someday I might go to a similar fate. And with her gone…my day seemed like it might be closer at hand than before. My mind was starting to fill up with details: our unfulfilled six album contract with Warner-Sony, tour cancellation…and then some tears came and blurred away all the business thoughts for a moment.

Calla was the next to come in. She’d heard me sob and come to see what was up. She probably thought Glory, in one of her mercurial moods, said something horrible to me, made me cry. But then she saw what lay on the table and she took me by the hands. “Oh, Luna, Luna, I’m so sorry,” she said and it took me a moment to realize she was talking to me. My lover—in name if not in function recently—was dead.

I coughed a little but the tears had dried up already. “Shit, Calla, what are we going to do now?”

She leaned against the sloping, non-rectilinear wall and rested her eyes on her hand. She looked remarkably un-debauched given last night’s events. Her blond hair gelled into a neat twist and her face fresh and make-up free above her resort-issue bathrobe. She was a double-x realgirl, like me, her eyelashes blond in the artificial light. “Did you guys have a fight?”

“Yesterday. Twice. You were there.” It had started out a bitch session and ended up a screaming fit for Glory. She’d been going on and on about how a gig on Autarie was the ultimate ignominy. I’d tried to point out, as our booking agent had, that doing orbital simulcast was economical and easier on us. But Autarie! she’d screamed. It’s like fucking Vegas! At the time I’d assumed that “Vegaz,” as she said it in her Saturnál accent, was an ex-lover of hers who’d sucked in bed. Now little pieces of rock and roll history bounced through my moon-raised brain and I recalled an old interview I’d read with Mick Jagger—or was it Sting?—saying he’d never play Las Vegas and the meaning came clear: home of the has-beens. No one had been listening to her but me. Once she would start to go hysterical the others would tune her out. I suppose I only listened because I was the one trying to argue with her. “Oh, fuck,” I murmured. Even if I had caught the reference, though, what good would it have done? I couldn’t have stopped her, could I? She was gone.

Calla went over and knelt in front of the body. “It looks like she just…lay down and died.”

“She did.”

“What do you mean?” Calla had been with us a year, a great bass player, but neither Glory nor I had been sure she would stick with us. So she didn’t know about The Spark.

“I don’t know,” I lied.

“Well, we have to get a doctor in here, find out what happened…”

I held up my hand. “No, no doctors.”

“But Luna…”

“Not yet.” My mind tried to come up to speed, but last night’s party and the shock of seeing her there like that kept me partly paralyzed. “Huiper. First call Huiper and figure out what to say about it.”

I put my head against the doorjamb and sighed. It was the end of Glory, the end of the Seekers in all likelihood, possibly the end of all our careers. Replacing a drummer or backup singer is one thing, replacing the lead singer and founder is another thing entirely. I felt cold and lonely and sick, and I sank down there in the doorway and almost wished it could have been me instead of her.

Basil almost tripped over me when she came in waving hc of a review of last night’s show. I liked Basil, even if I wasn’t sure if she was a double-x or some form of genderqueer. Those things never mattered to the omnivorous Glory. For me it was good enough that she used a female pronoun. She was about to begin crowing the good bits of it aloud when she caught sight of the spectacle on the table. I couldn’t bear to watch her face crumble into grief. So, I looked at my own whiter-than-white hands, and at Glory’s, still streaked with indigo and violet of last night’s stage makeup, clamped tight around the neck of the guitar. I supposed that the Walker was mine now, but I couldn’t bring myself to pry it out of her grip.

I heard my own voice. “We can’t have her photographed like this, like some funeral or something.” Oh Glory, couldn’t you have lived up to your name and gone out with a blaze of it?

Calla did not turn around, but said in a weak voice “Was she…with anyone last night?”

I looked up at the two of them. Basil was taking it well. If anything she looked a little pissed off, and when she heard Calla’s question she stiffened. Young and spurned. “Not me. She took off during the party and didn’t come back…”

Until after we were all unconscious. Poor Basil, the newest of us, she’d only been playing with the Seekers for about six months and Glory’d been leading her on for most of it. She cursed under her breath. Glory had liked her youthful fire, her defiance. Perhaps she saw a little of herself there, or perhaps someone else she knew. She would have been a good vessel for The Spark, too, but Glory had held back passing it on. “Baz, could you get Huiper on a secure channel?”

“I’ll try,” she said, and went into her room to boot up a terminal.

Calla had left the room, too, leaving me alone with my dead lover. Ex-lover in any case now, I supposed. Although neither of us had taken up with someone else—we hadn’t “broken up”—we hadn’t had sex in a long time. A year, maybe two. And the fights recently had been worse, hadn’t they? I’d wanted to believe that Glory’s irritability, irrationality, and general out-of-control bitchiness was just a periodic magnification of her lead-singer prima donna persona, just a phase that we’d work out. But all along she had been suffering. The burning out. The end.

And I hadn’t even felt it. Could I have helped her? Saved her? She’d been so distant from me, I doubted it. When the Spark is lost, there’s no getting it back.

The first one I’d ever seen was just a month after I’d joined the group. Glory’s ex-lover Saffron had split off to form his own band, but he came back once in a while to jam with us. His band wasn’t doing very well. The critics were lambasting them for repeating the formulas of the past, and even I thought his music was kind of dull. He went out with a super cocktail of drugs and stims. Repeating the formulas of the past, as it were. We found him with the injector still in his hand at one of Glory’s penthouse suites on Triton.

That one was easy for me to handle. I didn’t know him that well, I was in love with Glory, and I was so young and new to The Spark that I didn’t really connect Saffron’s fate with mine. Huiper, our publicist, did a pretty good job of spreading the dirt around about the wild rock and roll boy who didn’t know when to stop, and even made him into a kind of small-time martyr among his few but loyal fans. That was Huiper’s job. But what would he say when he heard about Glory?

He would, of course, look for an angle that would generate maximum publicity and make Glory into a posthumous legend. That wouldn’t be hard since she was already a legend when she was alive. We all were. It was all a part of the Spark, the magic. We were stars in the celebrity skies of the whole solar system. But Huiper didn’t know why or how she really died and this time I didn’t have a story to feed him. “Mysterious Cause of Death Unknown” is what the headlines would have to say. The powers that be took her too soon, they’d lament. Or, maybe she died of a broken heart? Had our love really died? I shuddered at the thought. Huiper wouldn’t implicate me in such a thing, would he? A sordid affair of lost love and betrayal?

The first fight we’d had yesterday was at sound check. The kind of spat that turned the mills of tabloid rumor, and all too typical. One of those fights that started as a bad mood, became a disagreement, then a full-fledged argument, and finally that hands and skin and bodies roughness that comes all too naturally with those who have been lovers. I had been tuning my guitar while she picked at the catered food backstage. Artificial gravity always screwed up her stomach for a couple of days but I didn’t see as how that was any excuse for her to treat us all like shit. So when she brushed past me and bumped my tuner I griped at her loud enough for everyone to hear. I would have, stupidly, made even more of it if Maynard, our stage manager, hadn’t called for everyone to take places for sound check.

Glory was the first one out of the room but the last one to climb onto the riser and sling her guitar over her shoulder. We were only on the second verse of “Tears” when Glory called for a halt. “I need this monitor up, less rhythm guitar.”

I tried to talk into my mic but it was off. I waved at Maynard to up it and everyone heard me say “…can’t do that. I won’t be able to hear myself and you’ll get off strum and you know it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” She put her hands on her hips, the guitar hanging loose over her middle. Even under the house lights her skin had some hints of the lavender and blue that were her trademark colors. “You’re so loud I can’t hear the backing vox.”

“Glory,” I said, walking closer to her so she could hear my unamplified voice. “That’s what you said at our warm up gig on Metassus and your solo was completely off.”

I saw her jaw clench as she made a little starting/stamping motion. “You deaf wretch!” She took a step toward me now, swinging the Walker off her shoulder and brandishing it in one hand like a scepter. “You wouldn’t know a good solo if it split your skull.” Her voice had gone shrill and Maynard modulated it through the PA to save all our ears. “Which one of us is the lead here?” And then she broke down into hurling epithets at me in Saturnál.

I didn’t hear what she called me. I started to shout back “Fuck you, you egoistic bitch.” But all I got out was “Fuck…” and then I threw off my head-mic and put my guitar in its stand and started to stalk off the stage. I couldn’t be reduced to calling her names. I had to walk past her to the stairs and as I did, she pushed me on the shoulder. My arm flailed back and connected with her cheek and then she was trying to grab me by the hair and strangle me and bite me all at the same time. Then the road crew, uniformly burly, uniformly imperturbable, were pulling us apart. She’d scratched my arm hard enough that bright crimson blood began to trickle down my skin, lurid on the paleness of flesh that never sees sunlight. And she said “You ungrateful bitch! Without me you’d still be rotting on your ass in moondust! You’ll never be anything more than a second-rate fill-in back-up stringer!”

I was gone before I heard any more; I didn’t need to. Fact is without her I’d never have been in this band, or for that matter ever made it away from suburban Luna. Fact is I mostly believed the rest, too. Sometimes she told me I only had that one good song in me, and sometimes I believed her. We never recorded another one of mine after “Tears,” that’s true. Huiper, the paparazzi, the fansites, were always making up stories about us. Sometimes it was hard even for me to tell truth from fiction. The legend they tell about me is that I sneaked backstage at a Seekers show on Luna with a demo in my back pocket, which when she heard it, she fell in love with me. In some versions she is heartbroken over Saffron leaving, and that’s why she swore off men, and fell for me.

The true story is not like that. First of all, Glory’s heart never broke. And second, although I did go to that show on Luna, it hadn’t been my intention to meet her. My own band had just broken up from the force of apathy and neglect. I’d been ready to sell the guitar, maybe move to Earth where my parents wouldn’t have any more say about me, but I decided to spend at least one night forgetting all of that, suped up and dancing like a banshee at their show. It was at the Dome, huge crowd, thousands at the biggest gathering space on all of Luna. It was being simulcast all over Earth, a big event. I was in the general admission section down front where I elbowed my way to the stage. I can only speculate that she saw me then, and liked what she saw. Halfway through their final encore one of their road crew pulled me out of the crush at the front, over the security wall into the tech pit. I couldn’t make out what he was saying but I got the vague idea that I wasn’t being busted but invited to some kind of party. There were some others there, dressed like fans, looking lost too, so I figured we were all either equally safe or equally endangered.

It was a party. A tremendous party at the Lunar Grand Hotel. We were all a part of the entourage and never before had I felt so welcome wearing ragged black denim in the retro-look of the times. We were ushered into a grand ballroom where food and swirling lights were already in attendance, as if the inanimate party had already begun. And at some point I recall being near her, Glory, and wanting to tell her something about how much I had enjoyed the show. Maybe I did tell her. Anyway, she led me to the true party within the party, an inner sanctum penthouse where the band members and all manner of miscellaneous wildlings were lounging, boozing, orgying, and so on. And eventually she pulled me even deeper into things, and we were in her own room, and in her own bed, in the dimness, as I traced the curve of her stomach by the shine of the glitter there and she breathed hot on my sex and we did not sleep until well into the next morning.