Wonderland (5 page)

For five years or so in my twenties, I had my own band, Anna and the Squares. Daisy, Vikram, John, and Miguel. And me. Daisy and Vikram are married now, God help them. John and I stay in touch, barely, with blackened fingers. No one knows where Miguel is, raising the question: did we know where he was then? Did he? Long nights, cigarettes stubbed out in what was left of the pancakes, the sausages, the stew:
No, what I’m saying is
. . . We sounded smart, but not much more, I see that now. Clever, pretty, vaguely titillating, but only vaguely. We bitched about it all the time then, the unfairness of it all, but what were we giving, really? What were we willing to give or be given? Fact: we were all so wrapped up in one another that there wasn’t much room left over for an audience. Driving petulantly around the frayed, secondhand alternative zones of the East Coast in Vikram’s station wagon, all the equipment stuffed into the way-back, Daisy’s perfect cameo head on my shoulder, John riding shotgun, scribbling figures that never added up on his little pad. Fact: it was impossible. We were doomed from the start.

Now Tom is waking up, lifting his face from his chest. “Where are we?” he mumbles.

“Germany?” says Alicia, taking out her earbuds.

“No,” says Zach. “It’s Sweden. Göteborg is in Sweden.”

VALBURG
is written in black letters on a narrow white signpost. A woman wheels a cart with chocolate and sandwiches down the aisle. I have a coffee taste in my mouth, a buzzy feeling in my head; I think I am getting a cold. I bury my nose in the scarf, which is like burying my face in a hare. It cost a stupid amount of money, but tour money is different, tour debt is different, tour time is different. It has no edges, no top, no bottom. It is a series of present moments. And if my voice goes, we’re all lost.

“It’s Germany,” says Alicia.

“That field is so totally Swedish,” says Zach, almost accusatorily. The field is solid green, coated with veils of bright, bright yellow dots.

“It’s a field,” says Alicia. “How Swedish can a field be?”

“It’s Swedish,” says Zach, with a peculiar air of authority.

“I think the field looks anxious,” says Tom, squinting at it.

I turn on my phone, consider texting Simon, which I definitely shouldn’t do, then turn it off. It makes a strange and beautiful sound as it turns off, a swirling, tinkling, crunching sound, like a cloud disappearing into a volcano. Where does the cloud go? I would like to make a song that sounds like that, the edge of the cloud tipping into the volcano.

Boone murmurs in my ear, “You should keep your phone on. And Billy Q wants to hang out. He just texted me.”

“Wow. Okay.” Billy Q is the headliner at the festival we’re playing, the reason that thirty thousand Swedes are making the pilgrimage to some field somewhere outside Göteborg, wherever that is, which I still haven’t figured out.

“He’s a fan.” Boone winks. “Do you know him?”

“No.”

“What the fuck are you talking about, Tom?” says Zach. He has already appointed himself leader of the three of them, the translator of foreign newspapers.

The train slows, pauses on the track. Scraps of talk in other languages, the sigh of brakes, the ring of cell phones. I think I hear a familiar voice, then it’s gone. Alicia pushes her face against the window. “We could be, like, anywhere.”

Zach returns to the newspaper and his iPhone, having settled the Swedish question.

“Or maybe it looks sad?” says Tom, still squinting. “I think the field is having a crisis.” He pulls his hat down to his ears.

Zach says, “She insulted the Pope.”

“Which Pope?” says Alicia, scrunched into the window.

“The
Pope
Pope,” says Zach. “The Queen of Denmark. She forgot herself. That’s what it says: ‘The Queen forgot herself.’”

“Did she say that?” I ask. “Who said she forgot herself?” I didn’t even know Denmark had a queen. Does it have a king, then, too?

Zach frowns. “It’s just written like that, I think, as a statement: ‘The Queen forgot herself.’ The verb is weird. I’m not sure.”

“And has she remembered herself now?”

“I guess she has,” says Zach. He runs his hand over his shiny head. “I guess so, yeah. And you know what else? There was a flood in Nicaragua. Over a hundred people died. It’s all over the news. Beck is doing a benefit for it.”

Tom unwraps a chocolate bar. “Beck is a little fucker.”

The train doesn’t move. Outside, the field remains empty. It’s hard to see evidence of its crisis, if it’s having one. The yellow veil on the solid green is serene. Inside, the air is growing warm, almost humid. I take off the scarf and curl it in my lap, like a fluffy pet. I tap the top of my guitar case with my toe, just to hear the dull sound. Talk to me. There is the scent of coffee and chocolate. Someone whispering in German, rhythmically, as if reading aloud. A light, warm, female laugh. That flicker, a bit darker today, like a lick of dark lightning.

S
AME THING, DIFFERENT
year. You’re there, I’m out here, roaming around with a band of gypsies. I can’t do the math on the time difference—Sweden to Wyoming, what is that? We must be ahead, but we might be behind, and maybe the aurora borealis gets involved somewhere, I don’t know. Lila, it’s the long days here now. What that means is that every note of the sunset is held for hours instead of minutes. It does something to you, some kind of feeling on the edge of happiness and sadness. That summer by the Irish Sea was like this, not that we noticed, busily engaged in who knows what with the books and papers and records everywhere, the loose tobacco you rolled into cigarettes, the lumpen soda bread that never came out right, the starfish drying on the window ledge. We saw the gray curve of dolphins more than once. That was also the summer they did the retrospective on Dad at the Whitney, and it was weird. We said to each other that it was weird. In the clippings Mom sent us, and that we picked up at the post office in the little stone town, he looked thin. A tawny young woman with buck teeth and big eyes on his arm, no comment from Mom on that one. It was weird, because the three of us were the only ones who knew, in all the world, that it was over. Had been since Rome.

I
SOLD THE
bit of rubble from the perforated lighthouse in Ireland, along with the sketch of same, to pay for the making of the CD, a good chunk of the touring expenses, my time away from my job. My father gave me the bit of rubble and the sketch when I turned twenty-one. He gave a fragment of ruined temple wall and a sketch from the Berlin project to Lila when she turned twenty-one. These talismans, pocketed by him, had some kind of juju, marked and embodied moments of . . . what? Revelation? Despair? Triumph? He didn’t like to say. Since nothing else remained of the big work, they had become valuable to the art world. My bit of rubble was about the size of my palm, surprisingly heavy, dark gray, jagged from where it had been smashed out of the wall, pitted from years of salt and weather. Lila’s looks like the most ordinary shard of concrete, perhaps six inches long or so, with a faded red stripe, but it’s two centuries old. She keeps it in a safe-deposit box. I felt guilty when I signed my precious rubble and sketch over to that soft-voiced dealer, but there was nothing I could do. I didn’t have anything else to sell. I was down to it. Jim and I had reached the last act, we were done; he left his bicycle when he moved out—the kind of odd, potlatch gesture that was both why I fell in love with him and why I fell out of love with him. Or why I thought I fell in love with him, and so on; I dreamed of Simon often.

I don’t know what it means that my time away from the music scene coincides with my time with Jim. It should have been the opposite. He was a musician, too, a good one; he came from a family of folkies, diehard lefties; none of his demons had anything to do with making music, a core that remained as pure as clean water in him. His wide gaze was earnest, and that felt like a lifeline at first. My self-imposed exile had started just before I met him, it was a cloudy thing.
The Pillars,
my third record, had been a dead end; unlike
Bang Bang,
which I had loved, I never loved
The Pillars,
not really, which only made the whole thing more shameful. I was working on something, I said, if asked. But it kept on not coming together, and then its absence grew, year after year; it was like an animal. A broken animal. The people from that time went away; some got famous, some died, some slid down into ragtag lives like mine. I stay away from Facebook. What I’ve finally made,
Wonderland:
it’s more disassembly than assembly, but you can kind of dance to it, in places. Jim, though his bicycle was all that was left of his presence in my apartment, did the arrangements and played half the instruments, grim-faced, his knit cap pulled down low over his ears. Another potlatch, but I needed the help. I overpaid him. He donated the money to Greenpeace.

I had to sell the bit of rubble from the perforated lighthouse because after seven years away, I’m not bankable. I was never all that bankable anyway, however well regarded I may have been in certain circles. Moreover, from thirty-seven to forty-four, in music years, even the kind of unhit-making music I make, is impossible. The Atlantises of a hundred careers as bright as mine, brighter, have sunk since then. It was my own fault, to be sure. I was the one who choked, and the price has been steep.

Here’s what I’ve been doing to make a living for the past seven years: I teach carpentry to girls at a private elementary school on the Upper East Side. Jim knew someone whose girlfriend, a poet, taught English there. I learned carpentry from my father; so, five days a week, I am faced with a hundred little girls in safety goggles, holding hammers. We make benches and tables, birdfeeders and bookcases. They call me Miss Brundage. They have no idea that I have ever had any other life than this, that I am not simply that too-tall red-headed woman with bangs who rides her bike to school from the East Village and reminds them about
Safety First.
Their parents, of course, remember me—they stop me outside the school to tell me about listening to
Whale
in their dorm rooms, on their road trips, on the mornings after their raves, how they came out to see me at Irving Place, how closely they listened. They tell me I look great. I’m hoping that the mystery of my absence will put a thumb on the scale, that people like this will show up for concerts; I’m not above selling back to them their memory of their younger selves. I was always bigger in Europe, anyway.

I wonder if the faces of the hundred little girls holding hammers will be more or less dear to me when I get back, and why. If the sound of the small saws sawing badly will be a comfort or a torment, and why. I suppose that would be the least of what I wonder, but it’s what I think about often: how it will be to walk back into that not unpleasant room in a few months and see all those small pairs of eyes, rendered strange and aquatic by the goggles, looking at me. What will I say? Where will I tell them I’ve been?

A
NARROW ROOM
with a high ceiling in a little hotel on a side street. A double bed wedged into the room, leaving just enough space for a chair opposite. Umber wallpaper, imprinted with sprigs of some charming, unshowy, flowering branch, that stops halfway up the wall. My black roller-board suitcase open on the floor, the
Wonderland
journal tossed on top. A tented bit of cardboard on the bed encouraging me to reuse towels.
WE ARE GREEN
, says the cardboard. No, we are not: my checking account balance, my computer tells me, is already sinking into the red. For instance: two hundred dollars gone before the plane even left Newark. Good thing I put the scarf on a credit card. I shut the computer, lie down, and set the tented card on my chest, like one of those pyramids that give you pyramid energy.
WE ARE GREEN
. We are also jet-lagged, broke, broken-up, unsure; we are developing a twitch in our left eye; we were once almost pretty famous in certain circles before we blew it; we have everything riding on this; we are hungry, we are sad, we miss him, we are not going to call, because we know he won’t answer. We wish one of those hounds from Christiania, Igor or Elgor, were here. We need a drink. I turn my hand over on the bed, palm up, as if that’s how you send an email, a letter, a smoke signal, an invitation.

Hello?

My fingers curl of their own accord, like a baby’s grip, or maybe they’re looking for the rolled-up dollar bill—or the lira, the five-franc note, the deutsche mark, all the different colors, the badges of our ambition. But that was another, more reckless hand, a hand that would have called, but won’t call tonight, from another time. I’m not sure what time it is now, or if the time has changed since we came north. I think north is the direction we came, or was it east? It could have been south. But why are we going north, anyway? Will we end at the Arctic Circle? Note to self: ask Boone where we are. The concert is tomorrow. Tonight there is a party, someone Zach knows from another band. The party is in a castle. I wonder if the castle has a moat. The Queen of Denmark steps lightly over the floodwaters in Nicaragua, trying to remember herself. The woman in white lights the stars. The guitarist tunes up in the castle. Outside, it is ten o’clock at night, or 22, and the light is the color of an eggshell with a candle inside it.

I turn my phone on. There is a text from Boone, sent an hour ago.
U R late hry up.

We are in wonderland, we think. We are back in wonderland.

A
FTER THE SQUARES
broke up, I played with so many different bands, some folky, some punky, some who knows what. I was whatever anyone needed me to be. I played bar mitzvahs. I told myself I was free, which mostly meant free to be very, very poor. This went on for years, or possibly centuries. I went on a U.S. tour with a band called The Sweet, which was more or less some guys who had grown up together in Iowa. They made cheerleader jokes I didn’t understand and went drinking in dive bars without me. They thought they needed a girl with long legs and long red hair singing backup. Midway through the tour, they decided they didn’t need that girl, but it was too late by then. Pittsburgh, Avenue A, San Luis Obispo, Chicago, Tucson, a few linty folds of the universe. Places where guys played darts while we sang. Places where fights broke out. When I wasn’t bored or pissed off, I was trying, and failing, not to call Daisy and Vikram, just to say hi, you know, it’s been a while, how are the kids?; not to smoke; not to drink too much, especially alone; not to surrender to the bleakness of four in the afternoon in whatever Bates motel or someone else’s drafty house scattered with kids’ toys or while drinking the third cup of coffee in some diner, down to reading the real estate listings in the local paper. Could I live in that bungalow? Out by the river on that horse farm? Rent the room over the hardware store? It’s cheap. Sound check not until six. What do you do with those two hours? Try not to ask the big questions. Fail at that, too. The sunlight on any wall, for instance the wall of a cruddy motel room in a fifth-rate city, at four in the afternoon, is beautiful, unquestionably. Lemon, butter, daisy, illuminated eggshell, seraphic, gilded, color of a duck’s wing or a Tuscan hillside. Which should be comforting or even inspiring, but generally isn’t. Sometimes it makes things worse. In the midst of such beauty, how dare you decline?