Shoggoths in Bloom (31 page)

Bemused, Em let her make the exchange. The girl had no chin to speak of and a nose that took off across her face with a Gypsy spirit of adventure, as if it would know its destination when it found it. “Thank you,” she said. “Is this a roofie?”

“No.” And the girl plucked that glass from Em’s hand and exchanged it with her own, and then drank down half the glass.

Well, Em thought girl, but the woman might have been thirty. Or twenty-five under a lot of makeup. Women spend our whole lives trying to look older or younger. What is that shit?

Why was it, indeed, that no matter what you were it was never good enough? Did men get that too, or was it a feminine affliction?

Seth’s death-fouled body, twisting from a noose improvised from telephone wire. No, she rather thought intimations of lethal inadequacy were a human condition.

“I’m Sanya Poe,” the blonde said. “I’m the keyboardist and singer for the opening act.”

“Objekt 775.”

“You remembered. Impressive.”

Em rummaged in her pocket for a handful of supplements, and washed them down with the wine. “I never forget a band name,” she said. “The High Numbers, The Small Faces, Objekt 775—”

The blonde laughed hard. “Oh, from your lips to God’s ears.”

“Don’t say that too loud. He might hear you. Are you here to receive my blessing? Because I left my sack of indulgences in the car.” Em was, apparently, drunk enough to let herself sound smart. Always a surprise when that happened, though why it should be, she was never certain.

“No,” the blonde said. “I just wanted to say thank you, actually. This is a shitty business to be a girl in, and you were an inspiration to me when I was a kid. I mean, you were just as good as the guys, and just as hard as the guys—” She shook her head. “You made it okay for chicks to be rock stars first and chicks second. And you had the sense to walk away at the top instead of taking the long slow spiral down. It’s more important than you’d think.”

Em stuck the wine glass in her left hand and stuck her right one out. “Pleased to meet you, Sasha Poe.”

“Sanya,” she said, and grabbed Em’s hand. “Seriously. You rock. You always rocked . . . but I kind of wonder what you’d do if you picked up an axe again.”

“Same old shit,” Em said, and Sanya laughed warmly. “It’s not like I’ve learned anything this decade.”

The small talk was as awkward as small talk always was, and Sanya excused herself after a minute or two. Em shook her head. It wasn’t like she was going to be around long enough to mentor any starry-eyed young hotties, she thought, watching Sanya pick up the arm of a tall man who looked mixed-race. Maybe black and Latino? Em, warmed by the wine, smiled after her benevolently and turned to resume the previous conversation, but the guy from Rolling Stone had wandered off, and Graham was at her elbow, smelling of Bordeaux and carnauba wax. “Come over here,” he said. “The wife wants to see you.”

When Em woke up in her own bed in her own home—to which she had been taxi-delivered a little before sunrise—it was after noon the next day. One of the blinking lights on her machine was a call from Ange, inviting her to the Los Angeles show on Friday night. The other one was from Em’s oncologist, expressing concern that Em had missed another appointment. She wanted Em to start chemo last week, if not sooner, and she was concerned about diagnosis-related depression. She thought Em should see a psychiatrist—

Em hit delete on that one halfway through and walked away from the machine with her pajamas swishing around her ankles. The depression had nothing to do with the cancer; if anything, the cancer was a welcome solution to a depression that had been lingering since long before Seth’s irrevocable decision.

“You bastard,” Em said, only half out loud. “You were supposed to take me with you, you son of a bitch.”

She dropped to her knees beside the liquor cabinet and fumbled it open. Glasses were on the top shelf. One of the wolfhounds came over and poked a cold nose into her ear while she rummaged; rather than pushing his head aside, she hooked her arm behind his ears and hugged his brindleand-white neck. He huffed at her and pushed her over sideways, and while he stood over her, she lay on the floor on her back and scratched behind his jaw.

By the time she was halfway through her second breakfast Talisker, she was in the guest bath, eyeing the electric razor.

Ange clutched her forearms, forehead wrinkled hard enough to crack her foundation. “What on earth?”

“What, you’ve never seen a shaved head before?” Em smoothed a hand against the soft prickly bristles decorating her scalp. “I just wanted to see what it would look like.”

Ange glowered over crossed arms. Behind her, the backstage bustle redoubled. “Em. What is it that you’re not telling me?”

And dammit, Ange was not supposed to be that perceptive. She was supposed to be shallow and self-absorbed.

Em, Em realized, was not the only one who could pretend to be stupid when it suited her. “I came to LA to see you,” Em said. “Not to get quizzed about my haircut. Look, I was drunk, it seemed like a good idea at a time. At least I didn’t shave my eyebrows off.”

“So that’s one way you’re up on Bowie.” Ange stepped away. “If you’re not going to tell me, you’re not going to tell me. Graham’s gonna ask you to play again, you know.”

“I know,” Em said. “Anything to get on YouTube, right?”

“Right,” Ange purred, grinning. “What are you going to tell him?”

“I’m going to tell him yes.”

This time, Em watched the opening act from backstage. Objekt 775 was a five-piece: Sanya on keyboard and vocals, two guitars, bass, and the tall mixed-race boy on drums. They were loud and crude and they didn’t suck at all, and there was one other girl besides Sanya, even. Through most of the six-song set, Em surprised herself by paying attention.

Enough attention that she didn’t notice Graham at her shoulder until he cleared his throat with precise timing, in that fraught and ringing silence between songs. “Good, you think?”

“Good enough,” she said. “The rhythm section doesn’t fuck around.” “You got that right.”

She turned to him. He was in stage clothes, except the flannel shirt buttoned over his bare chest for warmth he wouldn’t need when the spotlights hit him. The skull ring glinted on his hand. “Hey,” he said. “I like the hair. Or lack of it.”

“I said I’d play,” she said. Her fingers already ached from an hour’s fumbling, but she had surprised herself with how fast it came back. “One last time.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Look, about that—”

It startled her that her heart sunk. “I don’t have to. It’s all right.” His stare, the twist of his lips, could not have been more nonplussed. “I talked to the guys,” he said. “We want you to do two songs at the top of the first half. One of ’em a Warlords tune.”

“Graham—”

He rolled over her as if she hadn’t even opened her mouth. “How do you feel about ‘Galleons Gallant’? Then we’ll jam on the Dylan while the band takes a piss break, and then you can hit the showers?”

“The band takes a piss break? What about you?”

“I don’t piss,” he said, and grinned at her. “Look, Em. I know you hate me—”

“Hate’s a strong word.”

“Shut up and let a man talk, would you?”

Startled, she held up a hand. Talk, then.

He took a breath, and held it in a longer time than she would have imagined. He touched her wrist. His hand was strong and cold. “Ange thinks you’re dying.”

And Em, who had been seven kinds of weak in her life, but never a coward, looked him in the eye and said, “I have a grade four astrocytoma. Inoperable. My doc wants to try radiation and chemo.” She shrugged. “I’ve gotta decide if I want to live that badly. And that poorly. If I lived.”

His eyes were bottomless in the backstage dark. “What are the odds?”

She turned her head and spit behind the Marshall stack.

He said, “Suffering for nothing.”

“Pretty much,” she answered. Oh, sure. There was hope. While there was life, her mother used to say, there was hope. And if hope seemed more like a punishment than a protection, that was hardly God’s fault, was it?

He let his hand slide away, soft as a breeze. Even in dim light, veins and tendons stood out like a relief map under papery crumpled skin.

“I died of an OD in 1978,” he said. “Heroin. It was after that concert at Hammersmith. Do you remember?”

“Jesus Christ, Graham,” Em said. “Don’t tell me the coke paranoia finally got you.”

He laughed, though, big and brash, and put his palm against her cheek. It was cool, room-temperature. He took her hand and pressed it to his chest. “Feel anything?”

And of course, she did not. Not even the rise and fall of his breathing.

Nothing at all.

She tried to say his name. Failed. Would jerk her hand away, if he would let it go, but he didn’t and so she stood shaking with her palm pressed to his cold self.

He shrugged and let her hand drop, finally. “Ange said she told you that you should take the cure. And me, I’m here telling you that you don’t have to—”

“Die?”

“No.” A dismissive snort turned into a much less dramatic laugh. He was half-yelling to be heard over the stacks. It didn’t matter; nobody who wasn’t standing right behind her would ever overhear them. “You have no choice about dying. But what happens after death—for most people, it’s just a candle snuffed out. All those pretty stories amount to nothing.”

“How do you know?”

He smiled.

He knew.

And while she was processing that—the OD, the idea that maybe you didn’t even need to put the ring on before you died—he shucked off his flannel, leaving the shirt slumped on the boards like a discarded skin. Em looked away from his withered pecs. He cleared his throat and said, “You don’t have to stop existing, is what I mean. Actually, all in all, I expected undeath to be a bigger deal.”

“Jesus, Graham.”

But he was holding out a hand, and she reached out and lifted hers up underneath it, open, flat, and expectant.

He laid a silver ring across her palm. It was cool to the touch.

“When you put it on,” he said, “You’ll seize. It’s pretty awful. You’ll want to be someplace safe and easy to clean. You’ll heal damage after, better than before, but it still takes a while. Give yourself a few hours for the transformation.”

“Uhm.” She stared at the ring, and it stared back, unwinking. “Ange too?”

“1981,” he said. “Sorry. We would have told you—”

“No,” Em said. “It’s all right.” She weighed the ring on her palm. “What’s it cost?”

Oh, that grin, and all the lines on his face rearranging themselves. “You lose weight,” he said. “Mostly desiccation. It’s not great for your facial tone.” With one hand, he rubbed slack cheeks. “Ange has had her face pinned a couple of times.”

“That’s not a cost.”

He shrugged. “Life isn’t Hollywood. Everything doesn’t come with a price. Hey, I gotta get my hair fixed. See you onstage?”

“See you onstage,” she said, and held out the hand with the ring in it. But he brushed past her, making a dismissive gesture with one long hand. Keep it.

So she slipped it into her pocket and did, pausing to congratulate Objekt 775 as they came off.

Sanya beamed at her, and gave her a quick, sweaty, distracted, euphoric hug. She ran her palm across Em’s scalp and laughed, but the noise from the audience was too loud for talking. The hug was sincere, and she leaned in and shouted “That was for you, Em!” and kissed Em on the cheek.

A pretty girl kissed me, Em thought. She blinked back the sting of tears, but the embrace made it easier to contemplate the blood blisters from the Strat. That hour warming up didn’t make calluses miraculously grow back. Neither would lubing the fretboard and her left hand from an aerosol can of Finger-Ease.

Those new Trial songs just weren’t getting any better, no matter how many times she listened to them. And it was Graham, all Graham. His playing was technically great, better than ever.

But he might as well have been dead up there. She thought about that as she heard her name, and strode out to a roar, swinging the strap of the borrowed guitar over her head.

She might be out of practice, but she still had her ear. When she jammed with the band, they took fire.

When Em got back to the house in Carlsbad, the dogs were waiting on the cool marble of the entryway. She scratched chins and fondled ears, and they pushed one another out of the way to lean against her thighs. She picked her way through them, moved to the living room, and raised a hand toward the dimmer switch.

The silence in the big house stopped her. The whole place was sealed up and alarmed; she couldn’t hear the swish of the sea, far below. And suddenly, she needed to.

So she was outside on the deck that cantilevered out above the cliffs when Ange found her, tossing stones over the rail into the hissing ocean forty feet below.

Ange had the key and the codes, of course, because somebody other than Em and her business manager had to. In truth, Em would have been surprised if Ange hadn’t followed her home.

Ange sat down on a cedar recliner beside Em, and put her feet up. “Did you put on the ring?”

“Can’t you see in the dark?”

“Not that well,” Ange said, and reached out to take Em’s wrist. Her touch was as chill as the night air, and Em bit her lip, forcing herself not to pull free. Instead, she reached out and folded Ange’s hand in her other one, her sister’s silver ring like a cool nugget against her palm. “And I’m not tired either,” she said. “I don’t sleep any more, before you ask.”

“It’s a mug’s game, Ange.”

Ange shuffled her chair closer, near enough that Em would have felt her warmth at hip and shoulder if Ange had any to give. “You live forever.”

“And cut the same old fucking albums.”

“Oh, yeah,” Ange said. “At least Graham’s cutting albums.”

“And at least you had the integrity to put down your axe when you figured out you couldn’t play worth shit any more. Isn’t that right? When was the last time you picked up a guitar?”

Ange stared at her. And then she sat back in her chair, released Em’s wrist, and swung her feet up. “Not since I broke up the Sisters. You figured that out?”