The Prom Goer's Interstellar Excursion

by Chris McCoy

  Ferguson gave Skark a shove with his foot. Skark fell from his stool and began crawling across the floor, jumpsuit soaked with perspiration, groaning and stopping every few feet to make sure he didn’t throw up. His limbs were spasming because he’d been bound too long, and he was shaking from the Spine Wine withdrawal. Every time he opened his mouth to speak to us, I could hear loose phlegm blocking his throat. “Gack,” he said, again and again.

  Ferguson stepped into the control room and locked the door to make sure we couldn’t go assault him, watching Skark as he made his way toward the rest of the band.

  “That is both a pathetic and a very satisfying sight,” said Ferguson.

  We got out of our chairs and lifted Skark to his feet. His legs were flailing, so Driver plunked him down in one of the folding chairs. He raised his head and looked at me, and his voice was a rasp when he spoke.

  “How—cough—did you get that horrible bump about your eye?” said Skark. “It looks like your brain is trying to escape from your head.”

  “Hanging out with you guys, it must know it’s being underused,” I said.

  Skark smiled and coughed again. “Gack. Probably true.”

  “How you feeling, Skark?” said Cad.

  “Terrible,” he sputtered. “But sober, for the first time in about ten years.”

  “This might be the first time the band has been together without somebody having some sort of liquor in his system,” said Cad.

  Ferguson rapped on the control room glass to get our attention and pressed the intercom button.

  “All right, there you go, you guys are reunited with your singer,” said Ferguson. “Hurrah, good vibes all around. Let’s lay this thing down.”

  “I have a question,” said Skark. “Were you the one who blew up the dam inside the Dark Matter Foloptopus?”

  Ferguson smiled.

  “I thought a good scare might get some of your creative juices going,” he said. “It makes me physically ill seeing what you are now, compared to what we used to be.”

  Ferguson opened a cabinet inside the control room and reached inside to remove a triangular case. Reverently, he unclicked the latches and extracted a polished metal triangle and a brightly burnished wand.

  “Hello, my treasure,” whispered Ferguson. He kissed the triangle, and I could hear the wet smacking sound through the studio microphone. “Time to make a classic.”

  “You’re kidding me,” said Driver. “Look at Skark. He’s in no condition to sing. He hasn’t even practiced with us yet.”

  “The point of being a professional is that you’re always ready to perform,” said Ferguson, pressing a button in front of him. “I’ve waited long enough. Tape is rolling.”

  “You’re not going to come in here?” said Driver.

  “I’m comfortable laying down the track from the control room for now,” said Ferguson. “I realize you’re probably feeling a little tense toward me, and I wouldn’t want you to lash out irrationally.”

  “You’ll have to wait,” said Cad. “We’re not playing until Skark is ready.”

  Ferguson angrily looked around the room, his eyes flicking to each of us before landing on Skark.

  “The Skark I used to know would record no matter what kind of shape he was in,” said Ferguson.

  “And the Ferguson I used to know was always inconsiderate to his guests, so I guess I’ve changed and you haven’t,” said Skark. “I’m not singing or listening to your atonal banging until I catch my breath, so begone with you, amateur.”

  Ferguson placed his triangle back in its case.

  “Just gives me more time to put some lotion on my hands before the fireworks,” he said. “Enjoy your night together, but I wouldn’t try to leave. The doors are locked and it’s a bit of an inhospitable area, so you wouldn’t get far.”

  Ferguson exited the control room, and once again we were alone.

  “Hate that guy,” said Skark.

  “His songs have always been unlistenable,” said Cad.

  “I’m going to try to see where we are,” I said.

  Although we were in a basement, there was a small window at the top of a wall of heavily marked Perfectly Reasonable fan photographs. It looked out over the ground level of the property, and I stood on the seat of Driver’s drum kit to peek outside.

  Ferguson had told the truth about the remoteness of the area. It appeared we were at the top of a treeless, snow-covered hill in the middle of a viscous, half-frozen green lake. Ferguson’s comet—no longer glowing, now just a ship with its LED lights turned off—was parked on a flat piece of land at the bottom of the hill, with the Interstellar Libertine still latched to its back. It appeared that he had repaired the hole through which we had been extracted, soldering a panel of alien metal to the side of the bus. I couldn’t think of a reason why he would have fixed it up, other than thinking he was eventually going to be traveling with the band, which seemed optimistic in the wake of him imprisoning us.

  I put my hand on the glass for a split second before my arm reflexively pulled backward. It must have been a hundred below zero out there. I looked at my fingers—they were turning blood-red.

  “I can see the bus out there,” I said. “But holy crap it’s cold.”

  “Ferguson has always lived in these terrible places,” said Driver. “He thinks it makes him more of an artist to be isolated.”

  “If you’ll indulge me in a bit of I told you so, considering our present situation,” said Skark. “Would you please admit I wasn’t being paranoid when I said Ferguson was after me, given that he just confirmed he caused the dam to fall?”

  “I’ll admit you were right, if you admit that it may have sounded like just another one of your drunk complaints,” said Cad.

  “We’ve all made drunk complaints,” said Skark.

  “Yours were constant,” said Driver.

  Skark thought about this.

  “Let me say something while I’m thinking clearly, which I know doesn’t happen often,” he said. “I realize that I’ve always been difficult, and my behavior has become a bit more erratic in recent years, perhaps, I admit, due to my affection for wine. It’s not easy for me to acknowledge that character flaw, but I do. I care about this band, and it’s been hard for me to see its decline. Perhaps it was easier to drink than to recognize, as the songwriter, that our path to irrelevancy is my fault. The Dondoozle Festival is tomorrow, and the thing that breaks my heart the most is that people aren’t even going to miss us if we’re not there.”

  Nobody said anything. Cad and Driver seemed to agree with Skark, and I did too. The band’s fans had barely been turning up for shows where the Perfectly Reasonable was the headliner, and at Dondoozle they would be just another group on the undercard, hoping somebody would pay attention. And in an early-afternoon slot on the opening day, at that. Even in a best-case scenario, only a handful of people would be there to see them anyway.

  “And our prom we won’t be attending…,” I sang. Sophie laughed: “HA…hehhhhhhhhh.”

  Skark reached down and picked a guitar up off the ground.

  “We’re obsolete…,” he hummed, strumming a gentle melody. “And it’s all done….”

  Cad plucked at his bass.

  “We’re terrible…,” sang Cad. “It’s been a long dry run.”

  Driver tapped out a beat on his chair.

  “Oh, the Perfectly Reasonable are ending…,” sang Driver.

  I picked up another guitar and joined in, playing rhythm over Skark’s lead guitar.

  “All our deaths are pending…,” sang Skark.

  “And our prom we won’t be attending…,” I sang.

  Sophie laughed: “HA…hehhhhhhhhh.”

  It was the first time I had ever sung in front of another human being on purpose, and certainly the first time I’d sung in front of a couple of nonhumans, but I couldn’t help myself. The rhyme was there.

  “You don’t have a bad voice, Bennett,” said Skark.

  “
I think we just wrote a new song,” said Cad.

  “First in five years,” said Driver. “All we had to do was sober up and be held captive.”

  “Shall we write another?” said Skark. “If the goddess of music is asking us to dance, let us take her hand. What say you, young Bennett?”

  “What about Sophie?”

  “There doesn’t seem to be a violin or harpsichord around for her,” said Skark. “Which is unfortunate. I went through a chamber-pop phase in the mid-eighties, which culminated in our minor masterpiece ‘Scarves of Cashmere.’ ”

  “How about I help with the lyrics?” said Sophie.

  “Of course,” said Skark. “This band is a democracy, after all.”

  Driver chucked a drumstick at Skark, who dodged out of the way, smiling. For the first time, I heard him laugh, once again just a skinny guy in a band.

  And with that, we started to jam.

  —

  Pinkish light filtered through the slats of the window, casting our shadows on the studio floor. Outside, I could hear the cold wind blowing and the ominous thundercracks of the lake’s alien ice moving and splintering. Hours had passed.

  “Come here, Bennett,” said Skark. He was sitting against a wall, posture upright, looking over an old photograph of the band that he had pulled down. The picture featured the three beaming faces of the current core of the band—Skark, Cad, and Driver—along with Ferguson over to the side, slumped in a chair, recovering from whatever debaucheries he had committed the night before.

  I couldn’t believe how young Skark, Cad, and Driver looked in the photo. It was more than the fact that the picture had been taken when they were at the height of their careers—their skin was clear, their chests were out, they were grinning. More than anything, they were leaning into each other. Buddies. There was no distance between them, no tension, no sense of the epic manner in which everything was going to be falling apart for them in the next couple of years. There wasn’t even a bottle of Spine Wine in the photo. They were just happy.

  “Have a seat beside me,” said Skark.

  I plopped down next to him. He continued to look at the photo.

  “I barely recognize myself in this photo, you know,” he said. “I know it’s me, of course—I’m the only one who could pull off that tight of a trouser leg—but anytime I’ve looked in the mirror in the past few years, that hasn’t been the man looking back at me.”

  “What do you think is different?”

  “When this photo was taken, we had a future. Now I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. It’s one thing to lose your record distribution deal in some tiny world where it doesn’t make a difference one way or another to your career. But to lose your record deals everywhere in creation—it’s hard to bounce back from that. Where do you go?”

  He looked at me. He actually wanted my opinion.

  “I can’t say I’ve ever been in the same kind of position as you,” I said. “I’ve never had any success at all—aside from getting Sophie to go to prom with me, I guess—but I think the idea is that you just move forward and focus on making yourself as good a person as you can and stop worrying about what everyone else is thinking or saying. I know that’s what I did in high school when I felt like things were hopeless—I just put my head down and studied and hoped if I worked hard enough things would get better.”

  Skark stared at me. He looked skeptical.

  “How did that work out for you?” he said. There was a flat tone in his voice, like he was afraid of bringing up some conspicuous bit of information.

  “You know something, don’t you.”

  “I may have…talked to the guys. About your general approach to the college application process.”

  Fantastic. Now even Skark knew that I had screwed up my college future. I pictured a universe in which my gaffe was passed from mouth to ear from world to world, until every sentient being in creation would look at me with pity and shake their head at my lack of foresight.

  “I never went to college, but I may have some advice for you,” said Skark. “When you don’t get something you want, give yourself a moment to feel terrible about yourself, and when that’s over, remember that all rejection means is that every other possible path has just opened up to you. It’s freedom.”

  “I haven’t been totally rejected yet.”

  “It’s always pretty hard to get off a wait list,” said Skark. “I’m still on a list to get into the Patarto Venturai Country Club. They said it could take eight hundred years, and I doubt I’ll even live to more than five hundred, the abysmal way I’ve treated my body.”

  “That’s…too bad.”

  “It’s fine, I hate stuffy environments,” said Skark. “I was only doing it because there was a waitress there I used to fancy. I got her eventually when she came to a show. But look. In the past few days, you have become one of the few humans who have definitively learned that not only are you not alone in the universe but there are literally almost an infinite number of options out there. All problems are small, and remarkably solvable.”

  “What about your problems?”

  “Mine are huge, but that’s because I’m huge,” he said. He took a moment to think about this, then exhaled. “Was huge, I should say. I know it’s just in my head these days.”

  Across the room, I noticed that Driver had fallen asleep behind his drum kit, exhausted from the all-night jam. As he slumbered, he made small twitching movements with his hands, his fingers making what looked like controlled, repetitive scooping motions. Skark saw me looking.

  “He’s dreaming,” said Skark.

  “About what?”

  “Sewing. He loves music, but when it comes to what really touches his soul, it’s always been clothing design.”

  Driver’s subconscious must have heard us talking about him, because his eyes quivered and popped open. He looked at us looking back at him.

  “Was I talking in my sleep?” he said.

  “No, but you might have been designing a cardigan,” said Skark.

  “How do you know that?”

  “It looked like you were using a tuck stitch,” said Skark. He winked at me. “I know a little bit about clothes too.”

  On the other side of the room, Sophie was sleeping against the wall. Next to her, Cad was tuning his bass strings, trying to get them right after a night of banging and pulling at them in a kind of manic freedom.

  Abruptly, Sophie gave him a quick kick with her heel and looked over her shoulder at him.

  “Could you please do that somewhere else?” she said. “We were up all night. I deserve twenty minutes of sleep without having to hear a bass.”

  “I’ll move if you promise not to kick me again,” said Cad.

  “I’ll take it under consideration,” said Sophie, rolling over and closing her eyes once more. Cad climbed to his feet and walked over to Skark and me.

  “How do you think Ferguson is going to react when he realizes that we stopped practicing his song?” said Cad.

  “We had more important things to do,” said Skark, grinning. “Music is about chemistry, and we have discovered it again. It will take us ten minutes to lay down the song when the time comes.”

  “You might want to rest your voice in the meantime,” said Driver.

  Driver was right. Skark had been singing new lyrics—most of which were Sophie’s—over our improvised playing all night, and now his voice, already raspy from detoxing, sounded positively gravelly.

  “My voice will be fine,” said Skark. “It has never let me down before, and it certainly won’t so close to Dondoozle. Some hot water with honey and I’ll be fine.”

  “I’ve never heard you ask for something other than booze,” said Cad.

  “It’s been a long time since I’ve desired anything else.”

  I looked out the window to see if anything had changed. The bus was in the same place, but there was nobody out there we could flag down to help us. Because of the good vibes resulting from the ban
d putting aside their differences and playing music together again, nobody had said what I was sure we were all thinking—that unless something extraordinary happened, there was no way we were getting out of here. Ferguson could keep us prisoners until he was satisfied with his song.

  Then, through the window, I saw something peculiar—an object in the lake was moving.

  At first I thought it might be a piece of debris, but then I realized it was changing direction—every time it came to a large slab of ice, the odd dot would slowly paddle its way around the chunk and keep pressing on, getting closer to our island. When it was confronted with an unbroken sheet of snow, I saw it dive, disappearing for perhaps half a minute before reemerging through a fissure near the shore, where it remained motionless for several seconds before beginning to paddle again. As it got closer, I could see it was purple, and as it finally climbed up onto the bank and slumped on its side, catching its breath, I knew what the thing was.

  “It’s Walter,” I said. “He’s outside.”

  Skark, Cad, Sophie, and Driver joined me at the window. Walter had begun trudging up the hill toward the house, still covered in purple gunk.

  “How did he get here?” said Skark.

  “Rams are known for being resolute,” said Sophie.

  “Walter!” yelled Cad. He hit the glass with the side of his fist, then quickly pulled it away. “Man, it is cold out there.”

  “Don’t get frostbite from the glass—we need your fingers for Dondoozle,” said Skark. “I have an idea.”

  Skark held up his rings to the window, attempting to reflect the morning sunlight to get Walter’s attention. Halfway up the hill, the ram winced and stared straight at us.

  “Walter!” shouted Skark.

  Walter put his hoof underneath his beard and made a slicing motion across his neck, like he was telling Skark to knock it off. His fur was slicked down with the purple goo, but he had clearly managed to gain some degree of flexibility in his joints, and he continued stiffly trudging up the hill.

  Walter walked up to the door of the Interstellar Libertine and gave it a firm whack with his hoof. The door opened. He climbed the steps one at a time, getting his feet set before each jump like he was scaling a cliff, and then disappeared inside the bus.