by Chris McCoy
“How did you end up in the band?” I asked.
“Have you ever been to Atlantic City?” he said.
“Before today, I’d barely been out of southeastern New Mexico.”
Cad told me his story. After high school, he had managed to get a job playing bass in a lounge band at the Tropicana Casino in Atlantic City, backing an awful lead singer—bouffant hair, cheap suit, heavy cologne—on cheesy soft-rock ballads from the seventies and eighties: “Mandy” by Barry Manilow, “I Want to Know What Love Is” by Foreigner.
The lounge act had been between sets when Cad first saw Skark. Cad was eating some peanuts when all of a sudden he heard a roar from the craps table in the high-roller section of the casino. He peeked his head out of the lounge, and there was Skark, standing at a table surrounded by a huge crowd of gamblers, with the tallest pile of chips Cad had ever seen in front of him. The fact that Skark was an alien drew little attention—he looked human enough to pass as a giant with odd bone structure who was at the tail end of a bender. Atlantic City was used to eccentrics, and as long as he had money to bet, no casino would ever kick him out.
Skark jerked his arm back and threw the dice. The dealer yelled “Seven!” and there was a cheer, followed by the dealer pushing another stack of chips in front of Skark. Cad had never seen so much money in his life. And that’s when Skark looked at him across the room.
“You with the bass guitar,” said Skark. “You need a job? My bassist is in jail for getting high and trying to ride the roulette wheel, so I need a new one. You have six seconds to decide.”
Skark started counting down: “Six…five…four…three…” At that point, Cad figured that whatever Skark was doing to have that much money was better than what he was doing, so he joined. Ten years later, he was still in the band.
“Are you happy about that decision?” I said.
“I’d be happier if I got to play one of my own songs one of these days,” said Cad. “But Skark won’t allow it. He says he writes all the songs…even though he hasn’t actually written a song in years.”
“Do you ever see your family back home?”
“I don’t have a family back home,” said Cad. “My mom passed away when I was young, and my dad has been living with a wife and kid he cares about much more than me for as long as I can remember.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’ve had a long time to get over it,” said Cad. “For better or worse, this band has been my family for a decade. It’s just dysfunctional as all get-out.”
“Attention, ingrates,” said Driver over the bus intercom. “It’s showtime. Remember: we’re playing Berdan Major Arena tonight. Write the name on your hand so you don’t forget. Audiences don’t appreciate it when they realize you don’t know what planet you’re on.”
Cad picked up a pen and wrote Berdan Major Arena on his palm.
“I have to get ready,” said Cad. “If you have more questions, I’ll answer them after the gig.”
“One more and I’ll leave you alone,” I said. “How am I able to understand what everybody is saying if I only speak English and the band is from all over the universe?”
“It’s because of the Spine Wine. You know how when you’re buzzed, you feel like you can completely understand everything people are saying because you’re on the same cosmic level?”
“I guess. I’m pretty new to it.”
“Drinking the wine follows a principle similar to sitting around with your friends on a Friday night—sip a little bit of that stuff and you get just mellow enough to understand what any creature, animal, or inanimate object in the universe is saying. You just understand.”
“So I was drugged, is what you’re saying.”
“Technically, you were drugged, but I wouldn’t worry about it. On tour you could get dosed at any time.”
“Does that mean I have to keep drinking it to know what everybody is saying?”
“Nah, it stays in the body for years,” said Cad. “It’s like LSD in the way it changes the brain so you can never totally go back, but at some point your translation skills will start to fade. Now I have to get ready. I suggest checking out the view. Just don’t bother Skark—he’s a nightmare to deal with before gigs.”
—
I didn’t care that there was an embargo on talking to Skark before shows, or that the band had an engagement, or that if they were to kick me off the bus, I would be in a deep amount of trouble. I needed to help Sophie, now.
I found Skark standing in front of the bathroom mirror, painting a blue rectangle over his eyes with granular makeup. He was naked except for a pair of white leather jeans, and he was so thin I could see his ribs under the skin of his torso, which he had powdered to match his pants.
I lingered near him for a moment. He sighed, then spoke before I even had a chance to start the conversation.
“Good God, man, I hope you’re not going to ask me again about stopping the tour for your girl,” he said, pressing his eyelashes with a delicate metal curler. “If I’d known you had selfish reasons for joining us, I would have never invited you on board.”
“I’m not asking for you to stop the tour. I’m asking if we can get her before something bad happens. I know it’s a pain in the—”
“Truer words have never been spoken. Whatever part of the anatomy you were about to reference, it is a pain in that particular place. Let me ask—did I or either of my bandmates kidnap your prom date?”
“No.”
“So you agree that we are not responsible for the kidnapping of your prom date, yes? Please say that for me if it’s true.”
“You’re not responsible for her kidnapping.”
“And did we bring you aboard with the promise that we would help you in this heroic quest? That I would interrupt our tour for a lovesick member of a doomed race who happened to stumble onto my bus because he was too dumb to locate a cheeseburger on his own, and chose to beg for scraps like an underfed animal?”
“I’m not sure if insults are called for,” I said. “I’d think you could maybe try to be sympathetic to my position here.”
“After the Dondoozle Festival we will either reevaluate your situation or safely return you to your planet, but until then you will mind yourself and you will stay out of my way and you will not ask me to help you again, do you understand that? Now go.”
Skark slammed the bathroom door in my face.
“Don’t worry about him,” grumbled Driver, looking back at me over his shoulder. “These days he’s always irritable before shows, because the crowds aren’t as big as they used to be.”
“Considering there are trillions of planets in the universe, being the billionth biggest band still seems like it could be lucrative,” I said.
“We’re one billion sixteenth,” said Driver. “But people only want the top bands, so I guess we’re lucky to still be playing at all. I don’t know. Sometimes I think I should have stuck with fashion.”
“You were a fashion designer?”
“Aspiring designer,” said Driver. “When I was younger, it was always difficult to find clothes that fit, so I started making my own.”
I glanced at Driver’s stained shirt and stonewashed jeans. He caught me looking.
“I’ve put those dreams on hold,” he said. “I don’t know. Maybe someday I’ll make an outfit I’m proud of, and the creative spark will return. I’m in a little bit of a personal and professional lull at the moment.”
“Is Driver your real name?”
“Of course not. But everybody has a tough time remembering Queckburt Hodabink, so I make it easy for them.”
“That is tough.”
“In my language, it means ‘energy-efficient heater,’ ” sighed Driver. “I’m not sure if my parents ever loved me. But enough about the past. Come look at this—it might take your mind off your girl for a moment.”
I joined Driver at the wheel, and what I saw seemed impossible. In front of the bus was a stadium hollowed out of an en
tire planet, and it was on fire. There were thousands of seats. As we got closer, I saw a scoreboard the size of a continent blaring a message:
BERDAN MAJOR ARENA WELCOMES THE PERFECTLY REASONABLE
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” I said.
“It’s not even one of the good stadiums,” said Driver. “This is the musical boondocks, whether or not Skark wants to admit it. To be honest, we didn’t sell enough tickets to even justify being here.”
“There are better places than this?”
“Wait until you see the Dondoozle Festival,” said Driver. “I swear, it’s like heaven without the halos.”
Driver thought about this.
“Actually, that’s not true,” he said. “Last time I was there, I saw a creature who was a halo. Just this golden disk, floating through the air, minding its business. I followed it for hours, trying to find a way to put it on my head, thinking it would give me some divine powers or something. I was pretty blasted at the time.”
“Did you get it?”
“No, it ended up biting me,” said Driver. “Wouldn’t have even thought it had jaws.”
Driver looked at a C-shaped scar on his arm. He rubbed it with his thick fingers, recalling the pain.
“I realize that’s not a great representation of the festival,” he said. “Trust me, Dondoozle is better than I’m making it sound.”
“All I care about is getting to Sophie.”
“Patience,” said Driver. “Cad and I have your back. But Skark calls the shots, which means that for the moment he’s got every other part of you.”
—
I was terrified to eat the snacks backstage at Berdan Major Arena. The tables were packed with finger sandwiches stuffed with slices of strange glowing meats, fist-sized snails hanging limply from their spiky shells, and edible flower buds that blossomed when you picked them up.
One of the band’s roadies—an anthropoid in a black T-shirt who resembled a lowland gorilla and had the musky scent of a bag of decaying leaves—lumbered up next to me and surveyed the food.
“Decent spread,” he said. “Better than the reheated crud they’ve been serving us lately. I’ve lost three hundred pounds since the start of this awful tour, if you can believe it.”
“I’m overwhelmed,” I said. “I’ve never seen a buffet like this.”
“You should have seen the food at the places we used to play. I’ve seen eyeballs pop out of roadies’ heads while they were looking over the selections. Then I’ve seen other crew members accidentally eat those eyeballs because they thought they were exotic delicacies. You ever eat an eyeball?”
“No.”
“Fatty, but delicious. After you’ve had a couple, you want to hit the gym to work off the guilt.”
“If the band is out of money, how do they afford roadies?” I said.
“They have no choice,” said the roadie. “Without us, there’s no show. You think these clowns could set up their own equipment? Skark couldn’t figure out how to plug in a blender these days. He’s a washed-up drunk.”
I had learned from Cad that the Perfectly Reasonable’s roadies traveled in a brigade of trucks separate from the Interstellar Libertine because Skark found them slovenly in appearance and crass in behavior. He refused to even see the roadies until the day of a show, which meant the equipment caravan was forced to travel different routes to the band’s gigs, often through dangerous space. As a result, Skark was not popular among his crew.
“By the way, since you’re human, I’d stay away from the crayborps,” said the roadie. “Your species can’t digest them. They’ll crawl up your backbone and eat your brain.”
“Good to know.”
“Enjoy the show—if Skark can get through it without passing out or storming off. These gigs have been touch and go recently.”
The roadie grabbed a Coca-Cola—which seemed to be as common in the rest of the universe as it was on Earth—and trotted off toward the stage to help with the setup.
I went exploring backstage.
Skark, Driver, and Cad each had their own dressing rooms, which I knew was a bad sign. Throughout high school, I had spent countless weekends in my room watching music documentaries, and from those docs I had learned that whenever the band members stopped preparing for gigs together in the same room, it meant that there wasn’t much time left before a breakup.
Cad popped out of his dressing room. “Bennett, come here,” he said, waving me over. I had been trying to avoid getting in his way prior to the gig, but now he was lifting the embargo. “I want to show you something.”
I walked into his dressing room, which was a bit like what I imagined the presidential suite at a high-end boutique hotel would look like. Chandelier. Canopied bed. Beer bottles chilling in champagne buckets. A pair of vaguely human-looking girls were lounging on a red suede couch, bored.
The band might be broke, but they seemed to still have excellent backstage perks.
“Stenya, Delya, this is Bennett,” said Cad, introducing me to the girls. “He and I are from the same planet, but he’s a little young to handle the two of you, so I’m going to need you to leave him alone.”
The girls pouted.
“Aww,” said the one I guessed was Stenya. “But he is so cute.”
“And we are bored,” said Delya.
“Where are they from?” I whispered.
“I have absolutely no idea,” said Cad. “They were here when I showed up, which happens sometimes. Such is the life of even a fading star. But they’re not what I wanted to show you.”
Cad pressed a button on a remote control, and an entire wall lit up with images. As he began flipping through the channels, he explained that television was intense in the rest of the universe because there was no censorship. What was fine on one planet—for instance, a cooking show featuring a chef preparing clams—might be offensive to a culture that regarded clams as gods. Since the universe had a near-infinite number of worlds, it meant that everything would be offensive to somebody, so nobody knew what to censor. As a result, the networks would put absolutely anything on the air, and they just let different cultures react how they saw fit. Occasionally this policy led to wars or to different species exterminating each other entirely, but from the networks’ perspective, there was no other way to deal with such a vast audience. Ratings were ratings.
As Cad flipped through the stations, I caught glimpses of some of these alien programs—a show devoted to gelatinous blobs wrestling above a pit of salt, a program featuring clouds striking each other with lightning, a half dozen channels playing music videos starring familiar-looking female pop stars dressed in scanty neon outfits.
“Wherever you go in the universe, pop stars are exactly the same,” said Cad. “Here, this is what I was looking for…the All-Universe Nature Channel.”
But what Cad showed me didn’t seem nature-ish at all. Instead, it resembled the inside of a mall. There was an Adidas. There was an Orange Julius. There was a Starbucks across an atrium from another Starbucks, with a third Starbucks just down a corridor and a fourth Starbucks being remodeled nearby.
“How is that nature?” I said.
“That’s what the Jyfos think Earth looks like,” said Cad. “Correction—it’s what they think America looks like, because America is where they get most of their specimens.”
“Why?”
“It’s a nation of slow-moving people, filled with wide-open spaces where the Jyfos can land without attracting attention. Seems like a no-brainer to me.”
The camera panned over the mall, and for the first time I saw that it was packed with agitated-looking men and women. They were sitting on benches drinking Big Gulps, smearing sauerkraut on hot dogs at food kiosks, trying on cheap pants at Old Navy, all constantly sizing each other up with their tiny eyes. The residents of the enclosure seemed to be the type of individuals you always heard about aliens abducting—obese truck drivers, flannel-wearing lumberjacks, dead-eyed mental patients shuffling around
muttering to themselves.
The Internet was right—alien abductors definitely had a specific type they targeted.
Some of the residents of the enclosure were holding baseball bats and wearing protective sporting gear—catchers’ chest protectors, Rollerblading kneepads, bicycle helmets—while others were outfitted in camouflage cargo pants and heavy boots. Some were traveling in groups, some were walking alone, some were limping, some had visible wounds on their arms or legs. Nobody seemed relaxed, except for those individuals who were sucking back Spine Wine. The hooch didn’t seem to be as high quality as Skark’s beverage of choice—instead of Skark’s small-batch, individually labeled bottles of the liquor, the residents of the enclosure were guzzling generically packaged boxes of the stuff straight from the spout, snapping at each other when fellow drinkers hogged them for too long.
If it was just humans here, I didn’t know why they would need the Spine Wine, unless it was to facilitate discussion between residents who were abducted from different countries—though from my cursory analysis of the inhabitants, it didn’t seem like a whole lot of intellectual discussion was probably taking place.
The camera pushed in on the window of a Starbucks.
“What’s happening?” I said.
“The documentary crew always does that zoom thing when they see something interesting,” said Cad. “The cinematography is incredibly predictable, which is one of my problems with the show.”
Through the windows of the Starbucks, I could discern the faint outline of a girl. The image was blurry, so at first I couldn’t be sure it was Sophie. She had her hands cupped around her eyes and was looking outside, sweaty bangs hanging down over her fingers.
Then the girl took a step back and in one definitive motion pressed her middle finger against the glass, flipping off whoever was looking at her from outside the coffee shop.
Yep, it was definitely Sophie.
Seeing that she was still alive—not necessarily safe, but living—caused relief to ripple through my body. I pushed as close to the television as I could without the high-resolution image burning my eyes, straining to see whether or not she was injured. All I wanted was to know that she was okay.