by Chris McCoy
By the time we were through, Skark was green. His motion sickness must have been terrible, because he wasn’t even consuming his Spine Wine.
On the other side of the Hyperbolic Back Roads, we saw a strange comet. At first we thought it was just another point of light hanging in the blackness, hurtling past us. It was always peaceful to watch the comets wafting past—they reminded me of the outer space equivalent of birds, long tails streaming behind them, wandering from their places of birth but planning to return someday.
Normally, Driver was excellent at avoiding the comets, so what happened with this particular comet couldn’t be considered his fault. Initially the rock was a far-off speck, silhouetted against a swirling purple-and-white nebula. It was streaming toward us, but it wasn’t going faster than any other comet we had seen, and Driver didn’t even look at it twice as he pulled back on the controls, lifting the bus to safety.
He peered into the back of the bus, where I was eating an egg roll I had found in a Styrofoam to-go container. I was hungry again.
“Hey, back there,” said Driver. “Good-sized glower should be passing underneath us in a couple of minutes, in case you want to take a look. I don’t know how many comets you’ve seen up close, Sophie, but it’s worth checking out.”
“I wouldn’t like to see any comets up close,” said Sophie. “I’m done with danger.”
“It’s coming right past,” said Driver. “But don’t worry, I’ll keep us comfortable.”
Sophie glanced out the window, then quickly pulled back, startled. She yelled to the front of the bus.
“I thought you said that the comet was going to be beneath us,” she said.
“It is.”
“It’s changing directions,” she said.
“Impossible,” said Driver. “Comets don’t change trajectory unless they hit a gravitational field or some other object. They’re just chunks of burning ice…whoa.”
Driver yanked the wheel just as I was about to pop the nub of my egg roll into my mouth. It slipped from my hand and hit the floor, gathering dust as it tumbled to a stop. I decided not to try to eat it again.
“What’s going on up there?” yelled Skark.
“Sophie’s right,” said Driver. “Somehow this thing changed its course and is heading toward us. Hold on, I’m going to try something else.”
I looked out the window and saw that the comet was close. Driver was maneuvering out of the way when it abruptly dropped, cutting off our path. Driver jerked the bus to the side, but again, the comet was there, coming at us at full speed. Each time it moved, streams of superheated air shot out of various spots all over its surface, and as we got nearer, I could see that it looked like it was made of metal rather than ice.
“It’s not a comet, it’s a ship,” said Driver. “I’m going to back us up.”
But there was no point. Before Driver could put the bus in reverse, the comet had zipped underneath us and was trembling, as if it was staring angrily at the Interstellar Libertine.
“What’s it doing?” said Sophie.
“It looks like it’s getting ready for something,” said Cad.
Hooks shot out of the comet and lodged in the side of the bus.
“That was totally unnecessary,” said Skark. “They could have contacted us without damaging the exterior. Do they have any idea how much it costs to have this thing detailed?”
“At least the hooks didn’t break through the hull,” said Cad.
There was a drilling sound outside the bus.
“I think the hooks are breaking through the hull,” said Sophie.
A glittering, angry-looking obelisk punctured the wall. Its tip folded back on itself, sealing the hole while at the same time leaving a tubelike protrusion at its end. Liquid began sputtering from the tube and pooling on the floor of the bus. The dribble became a spray that drenched the walls, furniture, and ceiling, splattering the band and slathering the inside of the bus.
“What is this stuff?” I yelled, covering my mouth with my hand so I didn’t swallow any of the goo. It stuck to my skin, cold and gelatinous.
“It’s awful,” said Sophie, squinting her eyes against the torrent. “Make it stop.”
“Everybody get away from the tube,” said Driver, trying to clear the glop out of his eyes.
“Does this stain?” said Skark. “This better not stain my couch. I feel like it’s going to stain.”
The goo was solidifying on our arms and legs, making it impossible to get away, not that there would have been any place to run even if we could have moved.
I watched the goo turn Driver into a petrified lump as he tried to take shelter underneath the steering wheel. It glued Cad to his bed as he tried to shield himself with a blanket. It froze Walter as he was jamming himself beneath the kitchen sink.
Sophie was closest to the tube when it started spraying, which meant she was hit the worst, rapidly mummified by thick layers of the goo. I could no longer see her face, but I could hear her struggling beneath the heavy cover. “Mmmmmff.”
By the time the spray stopped, one of my eyes was somehow still mostly uncovered, with just a clearish coating on it that was turning my vision purple, like I was all of a sudden looking at the world through Prince’s eyes. The Interstellar Libertine started to shake, and for a moment I thought that we were going to be towed toward the comet.
Nope.
The drill sent out thin blades that cut a jagged rectangle in the side of the bus. The panel fell out of the wall and drifted into nothingness, and—frozen like statues—everybody aboard tumbled outside.
Which was how I ended up floating in space.
—
Weightlessness.
I tried to yell, but the goo was sticking my mouth shut; I tried to breathe, but it was clogging my nose.
The eighteen years of my life played in front of me, and it was nothing but an endless series of homework assignments interspersed with scenes of sexual and songwriting frustration. I wish I could say that having been given a second chance to prepare for my own death, I thought about my parents and my family and approached my end with dignity, but this wasn’t the case—I thought about myself, cursing creation for allowing me to die a virgin, and sniveled and whimpered inside my mind.
But after a few minutes, I realized something—I had been blubbering and mourning my passing, but I wasn’t dead. The coat of goop was silencing me and restricting my movements, but it was also saving my life. In addition to protecting me from the subzero temperatures of space, it seemed to be breathing for me; I could feel it forcing oxygen through my skin into my blood. It was an odd sensation, not needing my lungs anymore.
When I realized I wasn’t going to die—at least not immediately—I started to relax, and the floating became soothing. I looked around. Nothing else to do. I saw stars slowly rotating below my feet, and above my head I saw red blankets of cosmic debris.
My brain was having difficulty wrapping itself around the vastness of space, and the incomprehensible distances between where I was drifting and the wonders that I was observing. The thought popped into my head that all of creation looked a bit like a computer screen saver from the early nineties, which was a manageable concept that allowed me to temporarily get a grip on myself.
Everybody from the bus seemed to be gliding in the same general direction, covered in their own coats of goop, with the exception being a lump I assumed was Walter the ram, who was spinning a different way entirely. I watched him become smaller and smaller until he was just a splotch far behind the empty husk of the Interstellar Libertine, indistinguishable from any small piece of detritus.
Goodbye, Walter.
I had no sense of how long it took for the comet to finally come and scoop us up. Ten minutes? An hour? It sailed toward us to begin its collection process. I couldn’t imagine what Sophie was thinking—just when she thought she had been saved, she had to deal with this.
The comet positioned itself over Cad, opened a portal in the bottom,
and—shloop—sucked him inside. The comet repeated the process with Sophie next—shloop—and I felt a wave of relief wash over me to know that she was okay.
Driver was sucked up next—shloop—and then it was my turn.
The comet came to a stop above me, opened its portal, and—as if invisible hands were cradling my body—I felt myself being gently pulled toward it. I didn’t know if it was chemicals in the goo or steady vibrations coming from the ship itself, but I suddenly felt like everything in my life was going to be totally fine.
Then I realized, nope. Not fine at all.
While the sensation of being coaxed into the floating rock was pleasant, the angle at which I was being brought up was askew. Instead of being sucked into the middle of the portal, I was positioned way over to the side of the hole.
“Mmff,” I said, or rather attempted to say—no sound in space—trying to signal to somebody on the comet to readjust my trajectory, but I couldn’t move my arms to gesture for them to stop. I also couldn’t shut my goop-covered eye, which meant I had no choice but to watch the rocky edge of the portal get steadily closer and closer and…
CLUNK
I hit my head on the ship, and for the second time in less than a week, everything went black. If I ever got home, I was going to start wearing a helmet.
—
The basement room where I woke up was clearly some sort of recording studio, given the amount of hi-fi equipment around, though to my blurry eyes it more closely resembled a sloppily constructed madhouse. Ripped foam padding covered the walls, there were deep cracks in the temporary-looking floor, and harsh fluorescent light shined down from naked bulbs hanging from the ceiling.
Promotional photographs and posters of younger incarnations of the Perfectly Reasonable were haphazardly tacked up everywhere. In each picture, the faces of the band members were scribbled out or graffitied or had nails driven through them. We were clearly in the hive of an individual obsessed with the group.
The band’s instruments were lying in a pile on the floor. The comet-ship had saved them from space as well, though I had been blacked out when this salvage mission happened. All of the band’s other possessions seemed to be gone, lost to the void.
Driver, Cad, and—to my overwhelming relief—Sophie were all there, while in a corner of the room there was a glass vocal booth in which Skark was sitting in a straitjacket, looking like he’d been zapped with electric currents. I later found out this had actually been the case—when he refused to enter the studio, he was zapped by our captor, and when he refused to sit down, he was zapped again, and then he was zapped a few more times so he wouldn’t be such a pain in the ass going forward.
A heap of stained rags was piled against the wall, next to a can of solution that smelled like turpentine. It appeared that this combination was what Sophie and the band had used to wipe the goo off their skin, though nobody had done a particularly thorough job, and purple specks dotted everybody’s face and clothing. I figured that Sophie had been the one who had de-gunked me while I was unconscious, given that she left behind her gooey SG initials on my arm.
“Thank God you’re up…,” said Sophie. “I can’t listen to any more of Cad and Driver’s asinine conversations.”
“What were they talking about?” I said groggily.
“They were playing I Spy with My Little Eye,” said Sophie. “And Cad kept spying me.”
“Cad…,” I said.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to be sketchy. It was just boredom.”
Skark was sitting in his booth, ogling us in catatonic shock. His mouth was moving, but we couldn’t hear him because of the egg-crate insulation in the tiny vocal booth. A music stand with lyric sheets was positioned in front of him, and a microphone was pointed at his mouth.
On the other side of the room, behind a sheet of protective glass, hunched at a mixing console covered in knobs and switches, was a man with curly red hair. He was wearing a torn Perfectly Reasonable T-shirt, and each time he turned his head, I could see the heavy curve of his scoliosis-gnarled backbone.
There wasn’t a doubt in my mind. This was Ferguson, the triangle player exiled from the band nine years before.
Ferguson pressed a button on the mixing console, and his voice rang out through an intercom.
“Finally finally,” he said. “Looks like we’re all up and alert now. You know, when you guys kicked me out of the group, you told me I’d never be in the same room with you again…and yet, here we are. Back together, happily. The music press is going to flip out.”
“The band was already together, Ferguson,” said Driver. “You’re not a part of the band anymore.”
“Since you fired me, you’ve been a glorified cover band,” said Ferguson. “You have no idea how disappointed I’ve been, watching what you’ve become. One billion sixteenth in the universe. Disgusting. When I was in the band, we were twelfth. Now let me think for a second. What is the missing link here?”
“It has nothing to do with you no longer being in the group,” said Cad.
“The time line says otherwise,” said Ferguson. “You might as well be busking in some red-light district for Spine Wine and loose change.”
“You think that someone playing a stupid triangle has an impact on a band’s popularity?” said Cad. “That’s how far gone your spongy little brain is. Anybody can play the triangle. I could train an ape to play the triangle.”
“I was the most talented triangle player this universe has ever seen. And you dropped me without consideration of the work I had put into my craft, into this group. And now—here we are again, all together, and the triangle solo will be part of the Perfectly Reasonable once more.”
In the reflection of the glass partition that separated the control room from the rest of the studio, I could see that there was a contusion above my left eye where my head had smacked into the bottom of the ship. It was a cloudy purple, and speckled with smooth, blood-red bubbles. Every time I moved, I could feel my brain sloshing around inside my head, banging into the interior of my skull.
“Where are we?” I said.
“We’re in Ferguson’s basement,” said Driver. “You can tell from the lack of style.”
“This studio is about music, not comfort,” said Ferguson.
“I have a question,” said Cad. “How are we supposed to play when you won’t even let us talk to our singer?”
“I’ll let Skark out of his booth when you learn the sheet music in the folders,” said Ferguson. “Until you know the new song I wrote, there won’t be any music for him to sing over, so for now he’s staying in his vocal booth. It’s a little time-out as punishment for his past deeds, and a moment to reflect on what he’s going to say in your press release stating I’m back. When you’re done, I’ll come in and lay down some triangle.”
“Skark is our guitarist,” said Cad.
“Oh, give me a break,” said Ferguson. “Everybody plays guitar. Have the guy with the welt on his head do it. You probably play guitar, right, new guy?”
“A little,” I said.
“Then learn the song,” said Ferguson. “I’ll be back after I take a bath and do a mask. I need to look good for my reemergence onto the universal stage.”
Ferguson got up from his engineering console and left the room.
“What a dick,” said Sophie.
“He’s always had an inflated sense of his importance to the group,” said Driver.
We looked at the booth. Skark’s hair was falling out in handfuls, clustering on his shoulders. He was shaking.
“That is awful to see,” said Driver.
“Can you help him?” said Sophie.
Driver was silent for a moment, examining Skark.
“You might not believe me, but I think what’s happening to Skark is actually good,” said Driver.
“Why?” said Cad.
“I think he’s detoxing,” said Driver.
I had noticed that Cad also wasn’t looking so great. He wa
s grinding his teeth, and his cheeks were sunken and corpselike. Runnels of red capillaries were polluting the whites of his eyes, and he kept pulling at his shirt like he was overheating.
“I’m feeling a little off myself,” said Cad. “And look at you, Driver. You’re sweating everywhere. It’s disgusting.”
Cad was right. Perspiration was pouring out of Driver’s temples, down over his ears, and onto his shoulders, forming sweaty pools in the indents of his collarbones.
“I thought my body was readjusting from floating in space,” said Driver. “But you may be right. Perhaps we’re all detoxing, but Skark has it the worst.”
Hands trembling slightly, Driver picked up the paper with Ferguson’s song. “Does anybody know how to read sheet music?”
Sophie nodded. “I do.”
“You can read music?” I said.
“I play violin,” she said. “My parents made me learn in middle school.”
“There is so much I don’t know about you,” I said.
“My family also has a harpsichord in the attic,” she said. “I’m weirdly good with any kind of baroque instrument. Too bad there are none here.”
Cad looked at me.
“She’s amazing,” he said.
“I’m aware,” I said.
“Shut up and let’s start,” said Sophie. “The sooner we do this, the faster we leave. Give me a B major.”
There was silence in the room.
“What’s a B major?” said Cad. “I just play by feel.”
“Okay, this is going to take some finessing,” said Sophie. “Just play something that sounds like this. Hmmmmmm.”
Cad plucked a note that sounded like Sophie’s humming, and we were off.
—
Cad, Driver, and I did fifteen run-throughs of Ferguson’s terrible “Explosion of the Heart”—Sophie humming the song’s notes as we figured them out on our instruments—before Ferguson made his way to the studio wearing a towel and holding a pair of scissors. He made his way to Skark’s booth, and with a quick snap of metal he cut the straps of his straitjacket.
“There,” said Ferguson. “You once cut me loose, and now I’m returning the favor. I know it must be hard to be a front man when you know you have no control. So, so sad.”