The Nobodies Album

by Carolyn Parkhurst

  • • •

  After half a day of travel, I arrive in a place where it’s still morning and bright as spring. Once I’m installed in my hotel room, tired and dazed, I turn on CNN to see what news may have broken during the few hours I was moving through the air. I find out immediately—it’s printed on the screen, I don’t even have to wait for the words to be spoken aloud—that Milo has been released on bail. It’s a relief, though perhaps it shouldn’t be. It changes nothing about the larger situation, but I’m glad to know that, for the moment anyway, he’s not being raped or threatened with a shank or whatever goes on in a prison inhabited by real criminals and not Hollywood actors, which is my only point of reference. The fact that he’s been released also implies a judgment about the severity of his crime: the police may still think my son is a murderer, but if they’re willing to let him walk the streets, then they must not think he’s the very worst kind of murderer. It’s a matter of degree that would have been too subtle for me to grasp twenty-four hours ago. Strange how reassuring I find it now.

  Milo’s lawyer is on the screen, talking to the news anchor. His name is Samuel Zalakis, which I copy down onto the hotel-letterhead notepad next to the phone. I don’t know if Milo picked this man himself, but he seems like a good choice. He’s in his mid-fifties, sleek and well groomed, charismatic but not unctuous. He could perhaps be called fatherly, but only if your father had a taste for thousand-dollar ties and appeared comfortable speaking in front of fifty million people.

  “At this point,” the anchorwoman asks, leaning forward, “it does not look likely that prosecutors will seek the death penalty, is that correct?”

  A snake moves through my belly. Living in Massachusetts, where no one’s been executed since—when? the forties?—I hadn’t even thought of that.

  “That’s right. The charge is first-degree murder without special circumstances, which in the state of California is punishable by twenty-five years to life.”

  “And if, during the course of the investigation, the district attorney were to determine that there were special circumstances, such as lying in wait or mayhem, which we’ve seen before in high-profile murder cases …?”

  “We don’t expect that to happen, but yes, it is possible that additional charges could be filed, which might affect the sentencing.”

  I lie down across the bed, resting my cheek against the rough silk of the bedspread. My heart beats; I breathe in, I breathe out. I don’t know how I’m supposed to do this.

  The show goes to commercial; I stretch for the remote and turn off the TV. I’m certain there will be more coverage, but I don’t want to see it right now. After a few moments, I force myself to sit up. I didn’t come all the way across the country to lie on a bed. I reach for my cell phone and call directory assistance to request the number of Zalakis’s firm.

  “Zalakis, Sampson, and Dugger,” says the receptionist who answers.

  “Hello,” I say. “I’m trying to reach Mr. Zalakis. I’m Milo Frost’s mother.”

  I’m hoping for a shocked pause, perhaps even an expression of disbelief, but she’s a pro. “I’m sorry,” she says, “Mr. Zalakis isn’t available right now.” Of course not; I just saw him live on CNN. Did I think she was going to give me his private cell? “If you’d like to give me your name and number, I can take a message.”

  I give her the information and hang up. I’ve got one more vague idea. In my purse I find the old address book I pulled from my desk this morning, and I look up the home number for Rana and Salima Khan, the parents of Milo’s bandmate Joe. I’ve known Joe for a long time. He and Milo go way back—junior high, at least. I can remember the two of them holed up in Milo’s bedroom, listening to music so loud the house shook. On more than one occasion, I went in to turn the music down and caught them with contraband they shouldn’t have had: a girly magazine, firecrackers, a joint. I remember the startled panic on their faces at my appearance, the rush to hide whatever they didn’t want me to see. This is how I imagine Milo reacting yesterday morning when the police stormed into his house.

  Salima answers. The conversation is awkward—we haven’t spoken in probably ten years, and this isn’t the best week for getting in touch with old friends—but when I hang up, I have Joe’s number written on my hotel pad.

  Joe spent quite a bit of time with us when he and Milo were teenagers. I was happy to have him there; with just me and Milo in the house, it was helpful to have someone else around to act as a buffer from time to time. He was a nice kid, smart and funny, more even-keeled than Milo ever was. I think he’ll be willing to talk to me, though I don’t know how much my absence from Milo’s life over the past four years will have influenced his ideas about me.

  He answers on the second ring. “Hello?” he says, like it’s a question. Now that everyone knows who’s on the phone before the first words are spoken, a call from an unfamiliar number is cause for suspicion.

  “Hi, Joe,” I say. I’m nervous suddenly. “It’s Octavia Frost.”

  “Mrs. Frost,” he says. I tried for a while, I remember, to get him to call me by my first name, but it never took. “I was wondering if I’d hear from you.”

  “You were?”

  “Well, yeah, of course. I figured, with all this going on, you might be trying to get in touch with Milo.”

  “Have you seen him?” I say. “Since he … was released?”

  “No, not yet, but I talked to him. He sounds, you know, okay.”

  “Where is he staying? Not back in the house?”

  “No, the police are still there. He’s going to stay with Roland Nysmith for a few days.”

  This takes me by surprise. Roland Nysmith, the venerable rock god from the seventies band The Misters, has long been a hero of Milo’s. I had read that they’d become friends, but I had no idea they were close enough for Milo to call in a favor like this. It’s a brilliant move, actually, probably the work of some PR damage-control guru. Roland Nysmith’s one of the few celebrities who’s managed the curious transformation from tight-trousered rebel to elder statesman without stumbling into the murk of self-parody, and his support lends an air of respectability to the whole sordid mess.

  “I see,” I say. “Can you give me the number there, or maybe even take me to see him?”

  “Oh, you’re here? In San Francisco?”

  “I flew in this morning.”

  “That’s funny. When I talked to Milo a little while ago, I asked if he’d talked to you, and he said no. I said, ‘I bet she’ll want to see you,’ and he said he thought you’d probably want to watch everything unfold from a distance. He said he thought you’d just want to know how the story ends.”

  I don’t say anything. It’s just a bratty throwaway comment, typical Milo, but it hurts me.

  “Oh, God,” says Joe. “I can’t believe I said that. I’m sorry, I haven’t gotten any sleep in, like, thirty hours.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “Well, I’m here and I would like to see my son. Do you have his phone number?”

  “Well, here’s the thing. He told me that if you did get in touch with me, I shouldn’t tell you anything.”

  “Oh,” I say. I’m not surprised, but I still feel a buried thrum of grief.

  “But now that you’re actually here,” Joe continues, “maybe he’ll feel differently. Let me give him a call, and I’ll get back to you in a few minutes, okay?”

  I thank him and we hang up. The last time I saw Milo, he was getting ready to board a plane. He’d been home for Christmas, and I saw him off at the airport. Pareidolia’s debut album had just come out, and the first single was getting a lot of airplay. I was in a professional honeymoon mood myself, having written the last pages of my novel Carpathia the day before he’d arrived. We’d had a lovely visit; there had been a sense of things about to happen. I wish now that I’d gone into the airport with him—he’d had some time to kill, which turned out to be a crucial factor in everything that followed—but I had some errands to run, so I droppe
d him at the curb. We hugged good-bye, and I kissed him on the cheek. Neither of us knew, not yet, that by the time Milo stepped off that plane, our relationship would have changed irrevocably.

  The phone rings. “Hi, Joe,” I say.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Frost. He said no.”

  All at once I feel nothing but angry. The little shit, I think, then immediately feel guilty, as if I’d said it to his face. I suppose I have to admire his backbone. Why turn this into a melodrama? The tearful mother pressing her hand to the jailhouse glass, the wayward son ashamed to meet her eyes … no. Not us. I’ll leave, I’ll fly back tonight. The next time I come, it will be because he asked me to.

  “Mrs. Frost?” says Joe. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” I say, my voice tight.

  “Where are you staying?” he asks.

  I tell him.

  “Do you want to meet for coffee or something? I could be there in a half hour.”

  • • •

  There was a girl I knew, growing up, named Lisette Freyn. She was a quiet, bending willow of a girl; she smiled a lot, but she never seemed to have any friends. She left home at fifteen, and the story was that she’d run away to become a groupie, following rock bands on the road. To me, naive and still comfortable in the straitjacket of home life, it was like hearing she’d run away to become a peacock. To be part of a crowd every night, losing your edges in a thudding gush of music; to lick the sweat from the faces of men whose albums you’d bought with your birthday money … I couldn’t imagine anyone I knew living such a life.

  A few years later, in the mid-seventies, when Bramble Wine came out with their song “Lisette Spins,” we all knew (or thought we knew) that it was about her. A girl with “burning eyes and a firefly smile,” a girl “young enough to spin across the room, old enough to land here on the bed.” A girl who “whispers her mama’s name when she thinks I can’t hear.” The song comes on every so often on the oldies station, and for a long time, before the Internet made ignorance quaint and unnecessary, I would think about her and try to imagine what had become of her.

  She died of an overdose. Or she married a chiropractor.

  She hates the song, she calls herself Lisa now, her kids don’t even know.

  It’s a story she tells at parties. Or she never talks about it but she makes sure the hostess points her out to every guest.

  She’s moved on; she doesn’t even recognize that young girl anymore.

  Or maybe it’s like this: maybe she’s spent every moment of her life listening for the rising arc of those opening notes, waiting for the words to remind her of who she’s supposed to be.

  Of course, the romance of letting an old friend fade out of your life is a luxury of the past, and I’m far too curious a person to have let this one rest. I looked her up a few years ago, and we’ve been in touch sporadically. We’re closer as online “friends” than we ever were as friends in the flesh, and her Facebook updates have turned her from a mythical icon to an ordinary woman living her life. She lives in San Francisco, and if this were a trip for business or pleasure, I’d certainly take the time to get in touch with her, to see if she wanted to get together.

  But now, as I sit in the café where Joe has agreed to meet me, I’m thinking about Lisette the wandering girl and not Lisette the fifty-two-year-old divorced real estate agent. The people around me don’t look much different from people buying coffee in any other American city, but I’ve absorbed enough of the California mythology to imagine that each of them is in the grip of some sharp-flavored ambition, aching to be known and remembered. I’ll bet any one of them would be thrilled to have a song written about them. I know I would.

  As I wait for Joe to arrive, I tune in to a conversation at a table on my right. Two guys with laptops, one typing away, the other sitting back reading something. From time to time one of them will talk on the phone to someone else. It’s a different model of companionship than I’m used to, but they seem content.

  The one who’s been reading looks up. “Hey, here’s a good one. What’s the name of Pareidolia’s follow-up to December Graffiti?”

  His friend looks up from his screen, smiling already. “What?”

  “Dismember Your Sweetie.”

  His friend shrugs, makes a noncommittal gesture with his hand. “Eh,” he says. “I’ve heard better.”

  Much is being made already about the dark nature of the lyrics Milo has written. Everyone’s scrutinizing his songs, looking for violence, misogyny, anything that can be sharpened and used to poke with. The results are iffy at best, but when people see a puzzle, they will find pieces that fit. In one song, “Saskatchewan,” Milo sings, “Be a whore for me / You know how, you’ve done it before.” Not my favorite lyric, but not terribly out of the ordinary when placed in the context of modern pop music. And the irony of it is, “Saskatchewan” is a love song. The narrator (who may or may not be Milo, let’s not forget) is telling his girlfriend that he doesn’t care how many men she’s been with before, as long as she stays true to him. It’s as close to gallantry as this type of music gets. Another song, “Plutonium Kiss,” contains the following couplet: “She had poison between her lips and poison between her thighs / We played Russian roulette to find out who should die.” This one makes me laugh. I’ll bet even Milo can’t keep a straight face when he sings those lines. It’s ludicrous; it’s posturing for effect; it’s a ninth grader showing off for his friends.

  But the song people are really excited about is “Diesel Lights,” which describes a lovers’ quarrel at a highway rest stop. As the song builds and the tension rises between the couple in the story, the speaker tells his girlfriend:

  I grabbed you hard

  There was no one else around

  I’ll tell you now

  I could have beat you to the ground.

  In light of what’s happened … well. But I don’t think it’s particularly revelatory. I know from personal experience that this kind of treasure hunt is not useful. When Pareidolia’s second album came out, I spent hours with the lyric sheet, looking for anything that might mean something to me. Some hidden wish for immortalization à la Lisette Freyn. And sometimes—a verse about long-standing anger, a line about betrayal—I thought I might have found it. But I was never sure.

  Anyway. Young men don’t write songs about their mothers; you’d worry about them if they did. Milo is not some folksinger, composing sentimental ballads about his childhood home, and he’s not a country singer belting out odes to his mama. He’s going for rock star; he’s going for hard, pointed, edged like a sword. And how much can you tell about a person from what he writes anyway? He has a lot to juggle, I imagine—he’s working with rhyme and meter, making the story fit the music—and he’s trying to manufacture a particular image. You can’t assume he’s telling the truth about anything.

  • • •

  The door opens, and there he is, Joe Khan, all grown up. He’s wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses—the half-disguise of the semicelebrity—and he’s affected a careful scruffiness that seems miles away from the true slovenly disregard of his adolescence. It’s a strange sensation to see him here. We haven’t been in a room together for five years or more, but I can’t say that I haven’t seen him in that time. I’d seen enough recent pictures to know what to expect—I knew his hair would be shorter than the last time we met, and that his face would look slightly more angular—but I had forgotten about texture and curve and depth, all of the corporeal minutiae that can’t be conveyed on film. Looking at him in the flesh—in 3-D, as it were—makes me realize that I’ve come to picture Milo in that same flat way.

  Joe takes off his sunglasses, and I see his eyes, wide and brown as a seal’s, just exactly like they always were. I feel lifted, somehow, just standing in his presence. To see him after all this time, this man whose boyhood was so entwined with Milo’s, who ate noisily at our table and broke the sugar bowl from my mother’s wedding china, who once couldn’t look at me for a month after
reading a novel of mine that included a few racy scenes—it’s like letting out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. There’s a surrogate pleasure in it, a chance to extend some maternal warmth by proxy.

  “Joe,” I say. I give him a hug. “You look good.”

  “Thanks,” he says. “You too. You really do.”

  “Thank you,” I say. I look okay, I suppose, for a middle-aged woman lost in catastrophe. My hair is shorter now, too, but it’s softer and wavier; I used to blow-dry it straight in a way that looks severe to me now in pictures. And though I’m a little travel-rumpled, I took care to dress up today, in the apparently foolish hope that I might be seeing Milo. Perhaps Joe had imagined I’d look worse than this. I’ve been using the same author photo for ten years, so he may not have known what to expect.

  He gestures toward the counter. “Let me just grab a coffee.”

  I watch as he goes up, orders, pays. No one seems to take any notice of him, though his picture’s been in the paper nearly as much as Milo’s.

  “So I should tell you,” he says as he sits down at the table. He pulls the plastic lid off his cup, blows ripples across the surface of the coffee. I can see he has a small tattoo on his forearm, just above his wrist; it looks abstract, some kind of runic design, but it’s partly covered by his sleeve. “My lawyer has advised me not to talk about the case.”

  I nod. “Sure,” I say. “That’s fine.” I expected as much, though it does leave us with some awkward holes in the conversation. “So,” I try. “How are your parents doing? I talked to your mom briefly, but we didn’t really have time to catch up.”