Wonderland (16 page)

My mother picks up right away. “Honey? Where are you?”

“Berlin. It’s insanely hot.”

“You have to stay hydrated. Are you performing tonight?”

“Yeah. In a few hours. How are the cats?”

“Oh, you know.” She laughs. “Still fat. I give up. I think it’s because the mice are fat here. And then we feed them on top of it.”

“Do you think I should have stayed with Jim? Did I make a mistake?”

One of the things I love about my mother is that she doesn’t ask why I’m calling her from backstage before a show in Berlin to ask such a question. Instead, she says, “It always seemed to me—don’t take this the wrong way—kind of like an arranged marriage somehow. I don’t know.” I hear the patter of kibble being poured into the cats’ bowls.

“What?” I spot a Bounty bar under a chair and grab it. Melted bad chocolate and syrupy coconut: I hold it carefully in my fingers, eat it in two bites. It is delicious.

“I just mean—what do I mean?”

One of the massive bald men shuffles into the room to drink a beer by the breezeless open window, next to a nearly denuded ficus tree that barely covers its corner. “
Ist okay?
” he asks. I nod. He sits down and wipes his brow.

My mother continues, “Consider the source, Anna. What do I know? He was a good guy, obviously very talented. And I know you had been struggling. We liked him—Ed and I both liked him. Very much.”

“But?”

“You know, honey, it was the first time I ever knew you to make such an
organized
choice—you and Lila were always so different that way—and I guess Ed and I wondered . . . you know. Oh, I don’t know.”

“Now I’m freaking out. What are you saying?” The massive bald man holds the cold beer to his forehead, closes his heavy-lidded eyes. He looks like the man in the moon.

My mother sighs. “Remember, your father and I never got married—”

“I know, but—”

“Anyway, all I’m saying is that I felt you were trying to arrange things for yourself and he
was
a good guy, maybe a little gloomy. But very committed to his music. It wasn’t hard to understand why you thought he might be a solution, and maybe, you know—he got you back out there. You helped him with his drug problems. It made a certain kind of sense, I guess.”

“Don’t people go through bad patches? Haven’t you and Ed had bad patches?”

“Sure.”

“So—”

“Do you want to go back to him?”

“No.”

“Well.”

“But I don’t know why not.” I hope the bald man, meditatively drinking his beer, doesn’t speak English. He looks as if he might be falling asleep, cheeks flushed, the moon setting.

“That’s a different question. When you’re done with the tour, why don’t you come down for a while? You’re always so exhausted after those things. The swimming will be great then. I can show you what I’ve been working on for that show in Philadelphia. It’s been incredibly complicated, I’m half blind from it.”

“Okay.” I shift on the chair, rest my chin in my hand, taking care not to smear my makeup, which was also done, in expert layers, by the tiny German man with thick muttonchops. “Are you guys all right?”

“We’re fine. Have a great show.”

“Okay. Thanks, Mom.”

“Love you, honey.”

Onstage, Ezra and I are standing about three feet from each other as the slow opening chords of “Burning Horse” sound. The band—there’s a lot of it, mine and pieces of his, plus bits from the opening act, mixed together—is piled up behind us, double-stuffed onto risers, sharing microphones. A young man in a spangly minidress is dancing like a snake, or an imp, darting from crevice to crevice, popping up unexpectedly. He is left over from the opening act, apparently unwilling or unable to stop. The smell of collective sweat mixes with the smell of old beer, overpiney floor cleaner, and, when he wiggles up close behind me, a light perfume on the dance-dress-snake man. We drop with uncanny quiet into the first verse. Singing with Ezra is weightless. This is how it all starts to happen, of course. This is why he’s been such an enormous star, and such a legendary addict. They go together; you’re not supposed to say that, but it’s true, though in a specific way, not the way you might assume: Ezra is like a ghost, he can walk through walls, especially when he’s as high as he is now. When you’re with him, you can walk through walls, too. This is what we do so well, what we did from the beginning. Together, we exist as ghosts, hand in hand against the wallpaper, semi-transparent, perfectly orthogonal to every known note.

I take the first notes of the chorus and, after a time, he turns and follows. He acts as if he is following my lead, and maybe he is. I’ve never wanted him, but I’ve always wanted to be the one who encircles his wrist with my fingers and takes him somewhere else. He’s always let me do it, from the very first time we caused a sensation with this song. (This is also how a man as ugly as he is enchants so many women: the unicorn, the Beast, kneeling in the garden at her skirt. He knows the power of his submission.) His line is the melody, mine is the unpredictable shred. Even as I tear up the notes, I know that this is why, even in an earlier era, I would never have been a star the way he is, and every note I tear only confirms it: torn tickets. To be a star like Ezra, you have to leave a blank space, like my hotel key, where people can make of you what they will, and much of what they make is dross. Ezra doesn’t mind the dross the way he doesn’t mind his acne scars. And, cynically, he invites it: the dross is where you make your money, and Ezra has an extraordinary amount of it.

The band joins harder, we go harder, melancholy-cacophonous. “Burning Horse” is the song we did, the song I changed forever, that first time at Glastonbury over a decade ago, the song we’ve done so many times since, that I’ve done without him, that he’s done without me. “Burning Horse” was a classic even before I reinvented it. I first heard it when I was fifteen, in Buenos Aires. I heard it in a car commercial in the States two months ago. I almost don’t mind that he copied our duet a few years later, note for note, with Kylie Minogue; it’s a business, after all, and the song is so famous it’s almost public property. I hear all these versions, and more, on the radio in my head, even now, as we sing it. I plant my feet apart to get a grip on the stage; my skirt and top hold me tight, upright. My hair stays shellacked into place. Ezra, in his jeans and Keds and faded Pink Floyd T-shirt, holds the microphone close, as if he’s never held one before. It is like running downhill: I remember this. He eyes me, smiling. The crowd is red in the red light, the front row reaches toward us, red hands, red fingers, upturned red faces. Shouts of “Ez!” “Anna!” “Z-man!” “Berlin loves you!” I am sweating so profusely I’m afraid I’m going to drop the mic. I can make out Billy Q at the back of the house, swathed in keffiyehs, deeply embedded in a thicket of people; Boone is murmuring in his ear. His circle, caught on film today: it doesn’t do this. Nothing can do this anymore. The horse on fire runs through us. The meridians blaze, the audience burns and begs to burn, fingers red, alight. We know the story, the whole thing. All is forgiven, and, after all, am I not a sinner, too? My hands are no cleaner than anyone else’s, when it comes down to it. I want this. I always have. The hundred little girls hold their hammers high and swing them.

When I turn around to dance a little (“Anna!”), I see that Zach is exhilarated, eyes closed, shoulder to shoulder with one of his idols, John Strong, Ezra’s bassist from the beginning. John has never changed one iota of his casually ratty look; his gentle eyes peer out of an increasingly fallen, still quite handsome face. Zach is sweating madly, muscles flexing; his bald head is drenched. As I shake my ass, I think, Well, at least I gave him this. Alicia, marooned at the tiptop of the musical pantheon like a cat stuck in a tree, looks as if she is about to faint, sweat-soaked, diligently plying her cello bow. Ezra glances up at her, winks.

I turn back around for the last chorus. Ezra and I roll up together. We go all the way down, fast, loud, and hard. The band piled up behind us avalanches sound. I’m singing so hard that I know I’m singing badly, ruining my voice, and I never, ever want to stop. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot the two massive bald men from the kitchen in the wings. The sun and the moon are smiling. Ezra leaves the stage with a wave and the rest of the set flies straight toward morning.

Upstairs after the show, I find Ezra in the kitchen, standing by a tray, holding up something with a plastic fork that must, I guess, be a pepperball, unless it’s a meatball. He is staring so intently at it that I wonder if it’s staring back. His stringy fringe of hair is still dark with sweat. He has taken off his T-shirt and stuffed it into his back pocket. He is as skinny as a spider, all knots and tendons, with the famous tattoo of the eye gazing out from between his smooth, almost boyish shoulder blades. Even now he is a creature from another world. No amount of money or fame can disguise that. He looks at the red ball of meat quizzically, then puts it back in the tray. The eye on his back shudders, damp, ever open. The veins in the eye always seemed a little juvie to me—we
got
the point—but now they look oddly sweet, almost optimistic, poignant.

“Thank you,” I say. My own sweat veils me, head to toe. My feet, wet, slide in my shoes. My toes are wet. My ears are wet. “That was incredible.”

“It was fun, yeah. Have you seen Alicia?”

Down the corridor, people are laughing, talking. Just here, just now, Ezra and I are suspended in the heat together. He looks straight at me, his unpainted eyes wide, unfocused. I wonder if he knows where he is. He seems like a man sending a hologram of himself from a distant planet, silently desperate that you agree that this is the real thing. “Ezra,” I begin, but my nerve fails me, for which, one day, there is sure to be a reckoning.

“Anna, come back. You and your band could stay here with me this winter—there are amazing people here. You’d love it. Bring that guy from Stonecreek—didn’t you get married?”

I wonder that he doesn’t remember, then I don’t wonder. “Jim. It didn’t work out.”

“Ah, fuck. Fucking musicians, right? Never quit while they’re ahead. What did he play?”

“The fiddle. Like an angel.”

William is waiting for me at the bar when I come down, shucked of my glamour, returned to the blouse and jeans I came in wearing. I feel satisfied, as if I have gone to outer space and am now splashing down, wallowing in gravity. My hair remains extravagantly sculpted because of all the products the tiny muttonchop man used to invent it. The armature of my hair is strangely elevating; I have the fantasy that it is making me stand up straighter. I kept the false eyelashes on, partly because I’m not sure how to take them off. Billy Q, Boone, the three luscious redheads, the dance-dress-snake man (now meek, unremarkable, with a caterpillar’s face), Zach, the bespectacled lead singer of the opening act, and various roadies and crew members are spread out around the bar, giving off a glow, congratulating one another, collecting compliments from fans. Tom, in his fisherman’s hat, is standing with the sun and the moon, drinking beer. I turn and glimpse the back of Ezra’s faded T-shirt and the sole of one sneaker as he ducks out a side door. Just in front of him, the long black curve of Alicia’s bodysuit, his hand in the ebony small of her back. The side door closes. A plump man in a vest, wearing yellow-rimmed glasses, face shining with sweat, takes my hands in both of his and says, “There are no words. No words. You are an artist. Please come back to Berlin.”

I assure him that I will, of course. Over the plump man’s shoulder, I smile at William, he smiles at me, hands me a whiskey, kisses my hand without irony. I kiss his hand back. “You are lucky for us,” I tell him. “Thank you.”

Boone’s pale face swirls close. “We’re all going to Zoo.”

“All right.” I am returning William’s gaze. “In a while.”

Boone swirls away, one white thumb turned up. He gathers people as he goes, a moving, agglutinating ball of the luscious and the ugly and the famous and Zach, glancing around at the emptying bar. I drink my whiskey slowly, returning to earth.

William says, “I live not too far from here. Would you like to come over for a drink?”

“Yes.”

William says something in German to the woman behind the bar, and she nods.

“
Kein problem,
” she says.

We leave the former police station. I wonder who left it in previous years, in what states. The heat hasn’t changed intensity, only color. Where it was bright and bleached during the day, now it is full of high contrasts, neon and shadow, streetlight yellows, taxicab whites. We soon turn off the main avenue and head into what seems to be a business district, quiet at this late hour. There are few people on the dark street. William takes my hand; we intertwine fingers as if we are lovers. Berlin, everywhere, seems to be under construction. Plastic tarps scrim the fronts of buildings, rendering the insides watery and indistinct. An orange crane is stilled in an empty lot. One half of a building, vertically, is still nondescript gray stone, while the other half is modern glass and steel, like half a face stripped to the bone. I’m not sure which I prefer. Outside a synagogue, armed guards lean on a wooden barricade. I’d forgotten this about Europe—the casual presence of soldiers. A tall, dark-haired one with long sideburns winks at me. I smile as we pass.

The hot night air gets under the line of my blouse, dampens my sleeves. I taste licorice in the back of my throat. William guides us to the left. This small street is quieter still, quite graceful, with one spare building that’s fronted by a peculiar sort of frosted green glass that changes subtly as I walk past it, becoming momentarily transparent in the street light. Through a ground-floor window in an empty, lighted room, I see a desk, papers, a dark computer monitor, a closed office door, an empty coat hook on the wall, before the glass goes green, then dark again, reseams itself. All of the buildings on this small street are closed, silent; these must be businesses, though it also looks as if they could be part of a single university or set of government offices.