by Ben Peek
“Yeah, I try not to come to places like this, either.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“No? You’re not one of those trailer park girls, are you?”
“You’re an idiot.” She raised her head, grinned. “I meant I don’t meet musicians, much. Especially ones who make music I like.”
“Well, thanks for coming.”
“I don’t know why you wanted to see me anyway.”
“It was Emily’s idea, mostly.” Lee pushed back his chair, stood. He dropped the harmonica and snatched up a blue coloured plastic kazoo. “You want a beer?”
“Sure.”
He entered the kitchen and, at the fridge, tapped the kazoo on the door in an incomplete child’s tune (was it ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb?’) as he pulled out two bottles of beer. “I thought I was kind of fucked at the Annandale, you know? Band was gone, I had no more gigs lined up, in a couple of weeks I’d be out of rent. And on top of that, I was playing like I’d never played before. It felt good playing it, but I didn’t think the audience liked it much—what audience there was, I guess. Then about a month later I started getting these calls to play. Calls from bars and venues that I’d never heard of.”
He placed the slick brown bottle in front of her, the kazoo tapping against his own glass as he did. He was repeating the opening of the tune, never completing it. “I did the shows, and at each one the audience kept growing, and I kept getting more calls. I had no idea why until after one show when this guy shows with a CD he’s bought of the Annandale gig.”
“A CD?” Zarina interrupted.
“Yeah, I thought he bought it off you.”
“No,” she said emphatically. “I don’t sell anything. The live shows on my site are free. I don’t sell it. Making money out of it changes it.”
Lee sat. “Don’t change it for me,” he said, his bottle opening with a hiss.
“It does. People are making off you and you’re not seeing any of it, whereas my site, it’s sharing the music that people enjoy. There’s no money involved—it’s just because everyone shares the interest.”
“You’re a bootlegger, right?”
“I make bootlegs,” she corrected. “I don’t sell bootlegs.”
“The difference in that is just passing me by.” He spun the bottle cap across the table. “You’re living in a world I don’t even want to know.”
Zarina’s bottle hissed open. “Look, downloading, bootlegging, it’s just not simple right or wrong. Nothing’s like that.”
“Hey, I’m not fussed.” Lee’s blue kazoo rose into the air with his hands in an exaggerated comic gesture of hands off. He grinned. “I’m getting gigs. I don’t care if someone is making a couple of dollars.”
“You should care.”
“Yeah, so I hear,” he said, lowering his hands. “It’s what Emily said.”
“She’s right. If someone is making money off you, you deserve some. Most people don’t want to take money from a musician of your level, so they’d rather pay to support you. Some aren’t like that, of course, but people do things for a lot of different reasons.”
Lee nodded, but he looked uncomfortable, so she added, “I’ll put a notice on my website, saying there are no authorized copies for sale out there. You can even start a PayPal account if you want.”
“You’re losing me now.”
“Lot of people download the Annandale show. I can put up a notice saying you need rent, and they’ll give you a bit of money. Help you get by.”
He twisted in his chair, agitated. “That’s not—”
“It’s no problem,” Zarina said, keeping casual. “People do it all the time.”
“That’s—I’m not—look—”
His voice broke off suddenly and his head dropped into his hands. Zarina called his name, but there was no response; slowly, she reached forward and touched his shoulder but, again, no response. Lee had just shut down. That was the only way to explain it, and because she could hear his breathing, she wasn’t quite yet panicking. Still, she had seen it in his face as he fell into his hands, and watched as the life behind his eyes disappeared like a light being switched off. Around her, the images of girls in sunflower yellow dresses stared outwards, the instruments they held in their hands having more in common with weapons than devices that created music.
His head still in his hands, Lee said quietly, “I can’t talk business. I just—I just cannot do that, okay?”
“Okay,” she said softly. “Whatever suits you.”
“It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just I got to keep focused.” His head rose, and in his gaze Zarina saw a sense of fatigue that his previous liveliness had hidden. “If I lose focus, I become something else.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t understand.”
“No.” How could she?
“Like I said, I could read. Once. When I was a kid. I loved reading. When I was nine, I read everything that I could get my hands on, and when I was finished with a book, I would start writing my own stories. Just inspired to make my own, you know?” His fingers placed the blue kazoo on the table and began to pull out a guitar string, the movement causing albums to slide over the table. Lee didn’t notice. “But then, one day, I found music. My dad showed me how to play a little tune on a piano. Nothing big. A nursery rhyme. But the sound—the way it made me feel, it was like nothing else I’d ever experienced. It was creation like I had never been involved in before, and after that, nothing was comparable. It was love. I could find it in every musical instrument I picked up, as if it were lingering in the wood or metal waiting for me, and I pushed the words and books out of my head to make room for the music.”
There was no awareness of reality in Lee’s gaze. He was telling his story and he believed everything that he said. Zarina, however, was not important to it; he could have been telling it to anyone. But while he lingered on the music, she lingered on the details of Lee’s father and what had really happened. It was the broken bit of the story, the edge that she could peel back to learn the secrets, but she knew—without questioning—that Lee Brown was incapable of doing that. It was when Zarina realized this that what she feared would happen, did, and in one quiet moment, the purity of his music was lost. She became detached, sympathetic, and sorry; aware that whenever she played theleeharveyoswaldband after this moment, the image of a young boy being abused by his father would be all that she could think of.
“You don’t believe me,” he said, the cord wrapping around his fist. “I can see that you don’t.”
“It’s not a question of that,” she replied gently.
“I’ve not slept for eighteen years.”
“What?”
“If I sleep, I will lose what’s inside my head. I will lose myself.”
“That won’t happen.”
“It will.” Gripping the cord tightly in his left fist, he reached into the mess of instruments and albums on the table to his right, and from beneath it all pulled out a flat envelope that she had not seen. It was old and yellowed and creased and had the words Lee Brown written upon it in faded red ink. “The proof is in here.”
Why do you think that Brown kept using the band name?
He loved the name. Just loved it. I asked him where he got it from once, and he said, “Me and the dead President have a lot in common.”
That’s all?
It was the only one he ever gave.
Still, I think theleeharveyoswaldband suited Brown and Malik more than it did when I was there. Kennedy’s death signalled a change in American politics, and theleeharveyoswaldband did the same thing for American music.
You really think that?
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think Malik made this culture of downloading, but she’s become the figurehead for it. With theleeharveyoswaldband she’s given it a credibility like it never had before.
She knows it, too. You just have
to read her interviews, listen to her on talk shows, whatever. She talks up the net and bootlegging and the creative commons copyright like a guru. You think of this stuff and you think of her. It’s not surprising that she’s become a hub for new bands, and that large labels have tried to bring her up on criminal charges.
I was reading an interview with executives from Sony the other day, and they were calling her dangerous and misguided.
That’s suits for you.
In truth, the corporate level has nothing to fear from Malik right now. She’s publicly said that she hasn’t moved more than a hundred thousand copies from the millions of downloads that have been made of the Annandale recording, and that’s her best seller. When you compare that to a giant label that will move five million copies of an album from a high profile act, it’s nothing.
But Malik isn’t a problem. Neither is downloading. Suits’ll just say that so they don’t have to approach the real problem, and that’s that their business model isn’t producing long-term acts, and what acts they do produce have no loyalty to the shareholders and company brand names. More and more bands with an established audience are leaving to become independent. I mean, shit, Hanson did it. Can you believe that?
Are you talking from the point of view of a musician who is not in the care of a large label?
You saying it’s jealousy?
Just asking.
The answer’s no. The type of music I make has never been mainstream enough for that.
Why do you think Malik became involved in the business side?
You read her interviews and she’ll tell you that she believed in the music—in Brown’s music especially. She said it needed an outlet and she provided one.
Do you believe that?
No one is that altruistic. I mean, it’s not like she did this for free.
Inside the envelope was a series of blue x-rays. Zarina pulled out the smooth sheets and looked at them on the table, held them up to the light, and then placed them back on the table. She had never seen an x-ray before and had no idea what she was looking at. But she knew that it was important for Lee that she examine each.
On the five sheets was the image of a skull, the bones displayed with a grey stain of skin and blood and veins around it and in the centre. Placing the final image down on the table, she returned her gaze to Lee, who was sitting straight up in his chair, the girls in sunflower dresses lined up behind him like soldiers. She said, “I have no idea what I’m looking at.”
“It’s a skull,” he said.
“I know that.”
“It’s my skull.”
“I know that, too,” she replied gently. “I don’t know what’s wrong with it, though. I can’t read these things.”
“Can’t you see that there’s nothing in it?” His voice became strained: a desperate note caught on the tight cord held between his hands. “Can’t you see?”
“Yes.” She wanted to tell him that she wasn’t a doctor, that she didn’t know enough, but even though she felt that these images were not right, that something was definitely missing, she didn’t think he should take it to mean that his head was empty. Instead, all she said was, “Yes.”
“You don’t understand!” He released the cord, flung it on the table where it lashed across the envelope. “There’s nothing in there. My head is completely empty. It’s just bone and skin and the only thing that keeps me alive is thoughts that I can keep there.”
“You can’t live like that.”
“I know!” he cried out, kicking back his chair to stand. “You don’t think I know this? I’m not stupid!”
“I never said that.”
“Stand up!”
“Lee,” Zarina began.
“Stand up,” he said, pushing the words through his teeth. “Stand up.”
Zarina rose slowly and sadly. She knew what would happen, but found herself without anger. She regretted that she hadn’t listened to Sara and stayed at home, but at the same time, with Lee trembling with anger in front of her, his gaze seeing something that she couldn’t even begin to understand, there was only sadness. As when she had first seen him perform, her thoughts were of nothing but him, his presence all that she was aware of.
With a sudden movement, Lee snatched her hands. She closed her eyes, waiting, unwilling to watch . . . and heard a heavy thud. Opening her eyes, Zarina saw that Lee had fallen to his knees and lowered his head towards her, while bringing up her hands. At first, she could feel nothing but his hair, thinner than she had thought, and then, slowly, small puckered scars, the shape of a drill head or screwdriver.
“What is this?” she whispered.
“They examined me,” he replied, his voice hollow. “When I stopped sleeping and reading, my father took me to a doctor who ran his tests. When he found that my head was empty, he ran more.”
“More.”
“We didn’t have health insurance, but the doctor worked for free. He said he had never seen anyone like me. That I was special. He laid me out on a bed and shaved my head. There were injections. I could feel nothing, but I watched as he took his metal instruments and dug them into my skull. He told me as he worked that beneath the skin, past the bone, there was nothing but emptiness. Nothing but black.”
Zarina wanted to remove her hands, but couldn’t. She wanted to tell him how sick and awful this was, but the words would not emerge from her throat. It was dry, choked, and he pressed his head into her fingers, taking pleasure from her touch, starved for attention and affection in ways that she would never be able to understand. And she, knowing this, revolted but unable to deny him, stroked his scarred and tortured head, drew it into her grasp like a mother with her child.
“That’s why I can’t sleep,” he whispered, his voice slurring its vowels heavily in what Zarina would realize, a moment later, were tears. “I’ll die if I sleep. All my thoughts will cease to exist. All the music I hear and feel will go. It’ll fade away. I can’t let that happen. I can’t let it die. I have to make music in my mind.”
Do you think he’s dead?
Yeah.
Yeah, I do.
I’ve heard the theories that he’s not. A kind of Elvis thing for the new century that says Lee just got tired and left and that wasn’t really him with his veins cut open, but that’s wrong. Even with that last interview with him saying he was tired all the time, it’s wrong.
Lee couldn’t leave music. It meant too much him. He was impossible to play with, but he loved it. You couldn’t deny that. It was all he had.
So that’s it?
Yeah. There are no encores here.
Acknowledgements
Short story collections leave a trail of people to thank. First and foremost, the editors who published the individual stories originally: Forrest Aguirre, Shane Cummings and Angela Challis, Jay Lake and Deborah Layne, Ben Payne and Robert Hoge, Ekatrina Sedia, Cat Sparks, and Sean Wallace. A big acknowledgement goes to Brett Savory and Sandra Kasturi, who looked at all the individual parts and agreed that it would make a collection, to Stephen Michell for his work on it, and to Erik Mohr who provided the wonderful cover.
Authors also owe a debt to the authors who have come before them. First and foremost for myself is Octavia E. Butler. The story in her name is the smallest debt that I can pay.
To those of you who have not read her work, I can only hope that I have pointed you in the direction you must go.
Publication History
“There Is Something So Quiet and Empty Inside of You That It Must Be Precious” is original to this volume.
“The Dreaming City” was in Leviathan Four: Cities, ed. Forrest Aguirre, The Ministry of Whimsy Press, 2004.
“John Wayne (As Written by a Non-American)” was in Aurealis, #37, Chimaera Press, 2007.
“Possession” was in Fantasy Magazine online, 2007.
“Under the Red Sun” was in Fantasy Magazine, #4, 2006.
“The Souls of Dead Soldiers are for Blackbirds, Not Little Boys” was in Agog! Ripping Reads, ed. Cat Sparks, Agog! Press, 2006.
“The Funeral, Ruined” was in Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy, ed. Ekaterina Sedia, Senses Five, 2008.
“Johnny Cash (A Tale in Questionnaire Results)” was in Shadowed Realms #4, 2005.
“Octavia E. Butler” is original to this volume.
“theleeharveyoswaldband” was in Polyphony Six, ed. Deborah Layne and Jay Lake, Wheatland Press, 2006.
About the Author
Sydney-based author Ben Peek’s previous novels are Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, Black Sheep, and Above/Below with Stephanie Campisi. His short fiction has appeared in Steampunk: Revolution, Polyphony, Leviathan, Paper Cities, Aurealis, Overland, Fantasy Magazine, Clarkesworld, and various Year’s Best volumes. He is the creator of the Urban Sprawl Project, a pyschogeography pamphlet given out in the suburbs of Sydney, and with artist Anna Brown, the autobiographical comic, Nowhere Near Savannah. Later in the year, Immolation, the first novel in his series Children, will be released. He lives with his partner, the photographer, Nikilyn Nevins, a cat, and a tree that both paid a lot of money to save. But it is a nice tree, and the man who poured seven litres of copper naphthenate into it, agreed.
Copyright
Dead Americans 2014 by Ben Peek
Cover artwork © 2014 by Erik Mohr
Cover design © 2014 by by Dan Seljak
Interior design © 2014 by by Dan Seljak