It was nice to be alone with my guitar. The problem with touring constantly was we were always driving, always with people, always playing the same songs we already knew. And when we did have down time, we’d spend it tracking down new gigs, or following up to make sure the next places still existed. The important things like writing new songs fell to last on the list.
This guitar and I, we were old friends. The varnish above her pick guard had worn away where I hit it on the downstroke. Tiny grooves marked where my fingers had indented the frets. She fit my hands perfectly. We never talked anymore.
She was an old Les Paul knockoff, silver cloudburst except where the bare wood showed through. Heavy as anything, the reason why my back hurt so constantly. The hunch of my shoulder as I bent over her was permanent. And of course with no amp she didn’t make any sound beyond string jangle. Still, she felt good.
I didn’t need to play the songs we played every night, but my fingers have always insisted on playing through the familiar before they can find new patterns. I played some old stuff, songs I loved when I was first teaching myself to play, Frightwig and the Kathleen Battle School and disappear fear, just to play something I could really feel. Then a couple of bars of “She’s the One,” then what I remembered of a Moby K. Dick whale song. I liked those kids.
When I finally hit my brain’s unlock code, it latched onto a twisty little minor descent. The same rhythm as the whale song, but a different progression, a different riff. A tiny theft, the kind all musicians make. There was only so much original to do within twelve notes. Hell, most classic punk was built on a couple of chords. What did Lou Reed say? One chord is fine, two chords is pushing it, three chords you’re into jazz?
I knew what I was singing about before I even sang it. That StageHolo offer, and the idea of playing for a paid audience night after night, the good and the bad parts. The funny thing about bargains with the devil was you so rarely heard about people turning him down; maybe sometimes it was worth your soul. I scrambled in my gig bag pocket for a pen and paper. When I came up with only a sharpie, I wrote the lyrics on my arm. The chords would keep. I’d remember them. Would probably remember the lyrics too, but I wasn’t chancing it.
Silva stepped out a little while later, wearing only a ratty towel around his waist. “There’s a bucket shower out the back!”
“Show me in a sec, but first, check it out.” I played him what I had.
His eyes widened. “Be right back.”
He returned a moment later wearing jeans, bass in hand. We both had to play hard, and I had to whisper-sing to hear the unplugged electric instruments, but we had something we both liked before long.
“Tonight?” he asked me.
“Maybe… depends on how early we get there, I guess. And whether there’s an actual soundcheck. Do you remember?”
He shook his head. “Four band lineup, at a warehouse. That’s all I remember. But maybe if we leave pretty soon, we can set up early? It’s only about three hours, I think.”
He showed me where the shower was, and I took advantage of the opportunity. The bike kids appeared with a bag of lumpy apples, and we ate the apples with our omelets, sitting on the floor. Best breakfast in ages. They explained the barracks – the story involved an arts grant and an old school and abandoned buildings and a cat sanctuary and I got lost somewhere along the way, working on my new song in my head.
After breakfast, we made our excuse that we had to get on the road. They walked us back the way we came, around the front.
My smile lasted as long as it took us to round the corner. As long as it took to see Daisy was gone.
“Did you move her, Jacky?” Silva asked.
“You’ve got the keys, man.”
Silva patted his pockets, and came up with the key. We walked closer. Glass.
I stared at the spot, trying to will Daisy back into place. Blink and she’d be back. How had we let this happen? I went through the night in my head. Had I heard glass breaking, or the engine turning over? I didn’t think so. How many times had we left her outside while we played or ate or showered or slept? I lay down on the path, away from the glass, and looked up at the morning sky.
The bike kids looked distraught, all talking at once. “This kind of thing never happens.” “We were only trying to help.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” I said, after a minute. Then louder, when they didn’t stop. “It wasn’t your fault.” They closed their mouths and looked at me.
I sat up and continued, leaning back on my hands, trying to be the calm one, the adult. “The bad news is we’re going to need to call the police. The good news is, you’re not squatting, so we don’t have to work too hard to explain what we were doing here. The bad news is whoever stole the van can go really far on that tank. The good news is they’re probably local and aren’t trying to drive to Florida. Probably just kids who’ve never gotten to drive something that didn’t drive itself. They’ll abandon her nearby when she runs out of gas.” I was trying to make myself feel better as much as them.
“And maybe they hate Chinese food,” Jacky said. “Maybe the smell’ll make them so hungry they have to stop for Chinese food. We should try all the local Chinese food places first.”
Silva had stepped away from the group, already on the phone with the police. I heard snippets, even though his back was turned. License plate. Yes, a van. Yes, out of state plates. No, he didn’t own it, but the owner was with him. Yes, we’d wait. Where else did we have to go? Well, Pittsburgh, but it didn’t look like we’d be getting there any time soon.
He hung up and dug his hands into his pockets. He didn’t turn around or come back to the group. I should probably have gone over to him, but he didn’t look like he wanted to talk.
The kids scattered before the police arrived, all but Emma disappearing into the building. Jacky walked off somewhere as well. It occurred to me I didn’t really know much of his history for all the time we’d been riding together.
The young policewoman who arrived to take our report was standoffish at first, like we were the criminals. Emma explained the situation. No officer, not squatting, here are the permits. I kept the van registration and insurance in a folder in my backpack, which helped on that end too, so that she came over to our side a little. Just a little.
“Insurance?”
“Of course.” I rustled in the same folder, presented the card to her. She looked surprised, and I realized she had expected something electronic. “But only liability and human driver.”
Surprised her again. “So the van isn’t self-driving?”
“No, ma’am. I’ve had her – it – for twenty-three years.”
“But you didn’t convert when the government rebates were offered?”
“No, ma’am. I love driving.”
She gave me a funny look. “
“Was anything in the van?” she asked.
I sighed and started the list, moving from back to front.
“One drum kit, kind of a hodgepodge of different makes, Ampeg bass rig, Marshall guitar amp, suitcase full of gig clothes. A sleeping bag. A box of novels, maybe fifty of them. Um, all the merchandise: records and t-shirts and stuff to sell…” I kept going through all the detritus in my head, discarding the small things: collapsible chopsticks, restaurant menus, pillows, jackets. Those were all replaceable. My thoughts snagged on one thing.
“A road atlas. Rand McNally.”
The officer raised her eyebrows. “A what?”
“A road atlas. A book of maps.”
“You want me to list that?”
“Well, it’s in there. And it’s important, to me anyway. It’s annotated. All the places we’ve played, all the places we like to stop and we don’t.” I tried to hide the hitch in my voice. Don’t cry, I told myself. Cry over the van, if you need to. Not over the atlas. You’ll make another. It might take years, but it could be done.
It wasn’t just the atlas, obviously. Everything we had hadn’t been much, and it was
suddenly much less. I was down to the cash in my pocket, the date book, the single change of clothes in my backpack, my guitar. How could we possibly rebuild from there? How do you finish a tour without a van? Or amps, or drums?
The officer held out her phone to tap a copy of her report over to me.
“Non-comm,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
Silva stepped in for the first time. He hadn’t even opened his mouth to help me list stuff, but now he held up his phone. “Send it to me, officer.”
She did, with a promise to follow up as soon as she had any leads. Got in her squad car. She had to actually use the wheel and drive herself back down the rutted path; I guessed places like this were why police cars had a manual option. She had probably written us off already, either way.
I turned to Silva, but he had walked off. I followed him down the path toward an old warehouse.
“Stop!” I said, when it was clear he wasn’t going to. He turned toward me. I expected him to be as sad as me, but he looked angrier than I had ever seen him, fists clenched and jaw tight.
“Whoa,” I said. “Calm down. It’ll be okay. We’ll figure something out.”
“How? How, Luce?”
“They’ll find Daisy. Or we’ll figure something out.”
“Daisy’s just the start of it. It’s amps and records and t-shirts and everything we own. I don’t even have another pair of underwear. Do you?”
I shook my head. “We can buy…”
“We can buy underwear at the Superwally. But not all that other stuff. We can’t afford it. This is it. We’re done. Unless.”
“Unless?”
He unclenched his left fist and held out a scrap of paper. I took it from him and flattened it. Nikki Kellerman’s business card, which had been on my amp when I last saw it.
“No,” I said.
“Hear me out. We have nothing left. Nothing. You know she’d hook us up if we called now and said we’d sign. We’d get it all back. New amps, new merch, new stage clothes. And we wouldn’t need a new van if we were doing holo shows. We could take a break for a while.”
“Are you serious? You’d stay in one place and do holo shows?” I waited for an answer. He stomped at a piece of glass in the dirt, grinding it with his boot heel. “We’ve been playing together for twenty years and I wouldn’t have guessed you’d ever say yes to that.”
“Come off it, Luce. You know I don’t object the way you do. You know that, or you’d have run it past me before turning her down. I know we’re not a democracy, but you used to give me at least the illusion I had a choice.”
I bit my lip. “You’re right. I didn’t run it past you. And actually, I didn’t turn her down in the end. I didn’t say yes, but she said some stuff that confused me.”
That stopped him short. Neither of us said anything for a minute. I looked around. What a weird place to be having this fight; I always figured it would come, but in the van. I waited for a response, and when none came, I prodded. “So you’re saying that’s what you want?”
“No! Maybe. I don’t know. It doesn’t always seem like the worst idea. But now I don’t think we have another option. I think I could have kept going the way we were for a while longer, but rebuilding from scratch?” He shook his head, then turned and walked away again. I didn’t follow this time.
Back at the building where we had stayed, the bike kids had reappeared, murmuring amongst themselves. Jacky leaned against the front stoop, a few feet from them. I sat down in the grass opposite my drummer.
“What do you think of StageHolo? I mean really?”
He spit on the ground.
“Me too,” I agreed. “But given the choice between starting over with nothing, and letting them rebuild us, what would you do? If there weren’t any other options.”
He ran a hand over his braids. “If there weren’t any other options?”
I nodded.
“There are always other options, Luce. I didn’t sign up with you to do fake shows in some fake warehouse for fake audiences. I wouldn’t stay. And you wouldn’t last.”
I pulled a handful of grass and tossed it at him.
He repeated himself. “Really. I don’t know what you’d do. You wouldn’t be you anymore. You’d probably still come across to some people, but you’d have the wrong kind of anger. Anger for yourself, instead of for everybody. You’d be some hologram version of yourself. No substance.”
I stared at him.
“People always underestimate the drummer, but I get to sit behind you and watch you every night. Trust me.” He laughed, then looked over my shoulder. “I watch you, too, Silva. It goes for you, too.”
I didn’t know how long Silva had been behind me, but he sat down between us now, grunting as he lowered himself to the ground. He leaned against Jacky and put his grimy glass-dust boots in my lap.
I shoved them off. “That was an old man grunt.”
“I’m getting there, old lady, but you’ll get there first. Do you have a plan?”
I looked over where the bike kids had congregated. “Hey, guys! Do any of you have a car? Or, you know, know anybody who has a car?”
The bike kids looked horrified, then one – Dijuan? - nodded. “My sister has a Chauffeur.”
“Family sized?”
Dijuan’s face fell.
Back to the drawing board. Leaning back on my elbows, I thought about all the other bands we could maybe call on, if I knew anybody who had come off the road, who might have a van to sell if Daisy didn’t reappear. Maybe, but nobody close enough to loan one tonight. Except…
“You’re not saying you’re out, right?” I asked Silva. “You’re not saying StageHolo or nothing? Cause I really can’t do it. Maybe someday, on our terms, but I can’t do it yet.”
He closed his eyes. “I know you can’t. But I don’t know what else to do.”
“I do. At least for tonight.”
I told him who to call.
Truly arrived with her sister’s family-sized Chauffeur an hour later. We had to meet her up on the road.
“It’ll be a tight squeeze, but we’ll get there,” she said. The third row and all the foot space was packed tight with the Moby K. Dick amps and drums and cables.
“Thank you so much,” I said, climbing into what would be the driver’s seat if it had a wheel or pedals. It felt strange, but oddly freeing as the car navigated its way from wherever we were toward where we were going.
I was supposed to be upset. But we had a ride to the gig, and gear to play. We’d survive without merch for the time being. Somebody in Pittsburgh would help us find a way to Baltimore if Daisy hadn’t been found by then, or back to Columbus to reclaim her.
With enough time to arrange it, the other bands would let us use their drums and amps at most of the shows we had coming up, and in the meantime we still had our guitars and a little bit of cash. We’d roll on, in Daisy or a Chauffeur, or on bikes with guitars strapped to our backs. No StageHolo gig could end this badly; this was the epic, terrible, relentlessness of life on the road. We made music. We were music. We’d roll on. We’d roll on. We’d roll on.
* * *
Sarah Pinsker is the author of the 2015 Nebula Award winning novelette “Our Lady of the Open Road.” Her novelette “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind” was the 2014 Sturgeon Award winner and a 2013 Nebula finalist. Her fiction has been published in magazines including Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Uncanny, among others, and numerous anthologies. She is also a singer/songwriter with three albums on various independent labels and a fourth forthcoming. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland with her wife and dog. She can be found online at sarahpinsker.com and twitter.com/sarahpinsker.
The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn
By Usman T. Malik
“When the Spirit World appears in a sensory Form, the Human Eye confines it. The Spiritual Entity cannot abandon that Form as long as Man continues to look at it in this special way. To escape, the Spi
ritual Entity manifests an Image it adopts for him, like a veil. It pretends the Image is moving in a certain direction so the Eye will follow it. At which point the Spiritual Entity escapes its confinement and disappears.
Whoever knows this and wishes to maintain perception of the Spiritual, must not let his Eye follow this illusion.
This is one of the Divine Secrets.”
The Meccan Revelations by Muhiyuddin Ibn Arabi
• • • •
For fifteen years my grandfather lived next door to the Mughal princess Zeenat Begum. The princess ran a tea stall outside the walled city of Old Lahore in the shade of an ancient eucalyptus. Dozens of children from Bhati Model School rushed screaming down muddy lanes to gather at her shop, which was really just a roadside counter with a tin roof and a smattering of chairs and a table. On winter afternoons it was her steaming cardamom-and-honey tea the kids wanted; in summer it was the chilled Rooh Afza.
As Gramps talked, he smacked his lips and licked his fingers, remembering the sweet rosewater sharbat. He told me that the princess was so poor she had to recycle tea leaves and sharbat residue. Not from customers, of course, but from her own boiling pans—although who really knew, he said, and winked.
I didn’t believe a word of it.
“Where was her kingdom?” I said.
“Gone. Lost. Fallen to the British a hundred years ago,” Gramps said. “She never begged, though. Never asked anyone’s help, see?”
I was ten. We were sitting on the steps of our mobile home in Florida. It was a wet summer afternoon and rain hissed like diamondbacks in the grass and crackled in the gutters of the trailer park.
“And her family?”
“Dead. Her great-great-great grandfather, the exiled King Bahadur Shah Zafar, died in Rangoon and is buried there. Burmese Muslims make pilgrimages to his shrine and honor him as a saint.”
“Why was he buried there? Why couldn’t he go home?”
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