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Bobby Trejo sang from
the back of his throat, his half-swallowed words
incomprehensible against the fuzzed guitars. He had his
eyes closed for the entire duration of “Play Me”. Sweat
flicked off his hair every time he jerked his head. The
stage beneath his feet gave slightly as he moved, back and
forth, black jeans low on his hips.
When he sang, he felt
like he was praying. He just didn’t know who to.
The club was all smoke
and no mirrors, so it didn’t pull the crowd who only wanted
to see themselves. It pulled, instead, the lost and the
forlorn, the sullen and the sad. They drifted like wraiths
around one another, long-necked Buds hanging from slack
fingers. It was as if the smoke was solid structure, and
their bodies drifted and coursed through it, immaterial,
untouchable.
Bobby didn’t look at the
band. He didn’t look at the set list. He just flickered
out of “Play Me” and barked into the prelude of
“Nocturnal”. The audience didn’t know the song. They gave
no sign of caring. Some of them were nodding the rhythm
from behind curtains of hair. Some of them were lost inside
themselves. Some of them were trying to score; a hit, a
tab, a conquest. Something to make them feel alive.
None of them had any
idea that Death was amongst them.
She stood at the back,
leaning against the wall. She had eyes the color of oil on
the roadway and skin like mocha. Nobody touched Her.
Somehow, even the ones who were completely lost in the haze
inside and outside, lurching and staggering, managed to veer
aside rather than cannon into Her.
She watched, silent and
still.
She listened.
Bobby slid to his knees
for the final verse of “Nocturnal”, and as the last chords
broke over him like a wave, he bowed his head. Sweat
dripped from the point of his chin.
The band hit straight
into “Dollhouse”, but Bobby didn’t move. He just knelt
there, head bowed, eyes closed.
There was incandescence
inside him. There was only light, utterly perfect, burning
away all the shadows that normally hung in the corners of
his mind and whispered the songs to him in the stations of
the night.
There was a voice there,
too; a voice he didn’t know, quiet and cold and utterly
certain. He couldn’t quite make it out. He was trying to
shut out everything else, trying to make out the words, when
Mickey kicked him on the arm.
Bobby opened his eyes.
Mickey was bellowing at him. The words failed to make it
through the wall of noise but the meaning was clear.
Sing, you worthless
fuck. Sing, goddamn you.
Bobby arched his back,
still on his knees, turning his face upwards to the
fragmented glare of the stage lights. Part of his mind
hunted down the words, slotted them into the rhythm, threw
them at the audience.
Part of his mind was
hunting something else entirely. The cool, passionless
voice.
When he found it again,
his body went limp, and all the other noises went away.
There was light,
everywhere. Only light; nothing of substance, nothing of
the world. Bobby squinted, but it didn’t help. The light
was everywhere; there was no source to it, nothing he could
filter out. He lifted a hand, to shade his eyes.
The light faded to the
grey of morning fog, rolling in over Huntingdon Beach.
“Hey, Bobby”
It was the voice. The
cool and perfect voice. It was nothing like his own, but
somehow, he knew it was the voice he’d been trying to find
since the first time he’d grabbed a microphone and clutched
it like a lifeline.
“What is this place?” he
asked.
“This isn’t a place,
Bobby. It’s a state of mind.”
“Okay... if you say so.
Who are you?”
“Don’t you know?” There
should have been amusement in the voice, or puzzlement, or
something. Something. But there wasn’t anything at all;
there was just the sound of it, pure and perfect.
“Look, I... this isn’t
like any trip I ever had. I don’t...”
“This is a new trip,”
the voice said. “And it’s one way.”
And She was there, in
front of him. She wore a dress that shimmered. No. It
didn’t shimmer. It blinked. It was made of _eyes_, a
thousand of them, a million of them; eyes woven together,
and all of them blinking, in rhythmless patterns across her
contours.
“Who...”
“You know,” she said.
“You don’t sing about much else.”
“You don’t got a
scythe,” he said. It was meant to be humor, but even that
last defense seemed to fail him. His voice sounded thin and
weak and incomplete, set against hers.
“No,” She said. “No
scythes. No skulls.”
“So I’m really dead?”
“You can hardly be
surprised, Bobby. You’ve spent the last two months living
on a cocktail of booze and drugs and the occasional bucket
of fried chicken. You really think that’s healthy?”
“Shit.”
“It’s too late for
denial, Bobby. Let’s face it, you’ve been worshipping me
for three years. You’ve written thirty-seven songs, and all
but six of them are about dying. You’ve seen three of your
friends OD since April. You’ve worked hard for this,
Bobby.”
“It ain’t fair. I was
gonna be a star.”
“No you weren’t. You
were going to be dead. And then the band will make it,
because I’m always a good talking point. But they’ll break
up, two months from now. Tito will go help his brother
shifting stolen cars, and he’ll be shot by police three
years from now. Diggs is going to be shooting up behind
dumpsters inside six months. Mickey will form a new band
with a singer from Laguna Niguel who writes songs about cars
and girls, and they’ll play the same crappy little clubs for
three more years, and then give up. He’ll die from a heart
attack when he’s sixty-one, after nearly forty years in an
advertising company.”
“How do you know this?”
“How do you think?” She
waved a hand. Her sleeve fluttered its multitude of
eyelashes at him. “I’m Death. I’m there right now,
standing over Diggs in a filthy alleyway near the Fox lot.
I’m there at the freeway exit where blood’s pulsing out
between Tito’s fingers. I’m there in the Sterling Walsh
office, watching Mickey clutching at his chest, unable to
stop the trip-hammer pounding his heart into a useless lump
of flesh. I’m Death, Bobby. And I’m bored.”
He stared at Her. He
didn’t know what to say.
“You don’t want it to be
true. Nobody does. Even the suicides. They swallow the
pills, they slice through the veins, they pull the trigger.
And then they tell me they didn’t mean it. They beg me for
another chance. But they don’t deserve it. They don’t
worship me. Not like you do, Bobby.”
For the first time,
expression flickered across her cold and perfect face. It
was a smile.
“So, uh... what now?”
“That depends on you,
Bobby. You could move on.”
“Move on? You mean,
like.... heaven? Or...” He couldn’t say the word.
“Perhaps, Bobby. Do you
really want to know?”
He wiped the back of his
hand across his mouth.
“I... I don’t wanna go
to hell. What can I do? I mean, can I, like, repent or
something...”
“Or something,” she
echoed.
Bobby Trejo sang from
the back of his throat, his half-swallowed words
incomprehensible against the fuzzed guitars. He had his
eyes closed for the entire duration of “Play Me”. Sweat
flicked off his hair every time he jerked his head. The
stage beneath his feet gave slightly as he moved, back and
forth, black jeans low on his hips.
When he sang, he felt
like he was praying. He knew exactly who he was praying
to. He knew exactly what he had to do to make sure his
prayers were answered. He had the names, and the places,
and the dates, and all the horrible ways. All burned in the
pathways of his mind. The long list of people of he had to
kill, to send to Her, to alleviate an eternity of boredom.
At the back of the hall,
a woman with eyes the colour of spilled oil on a roadway and
skin like mocha smiled, and turned, and left. |
