Corona

by P. J. Lyon

  Corona

  P.J. Lyon

  Published: 2010

  Tag(s): "short stories"

  Dedication

  For D. Boon

  Known too late.

  Lost too quick.

  Corona

  Corona

  By P.J. Lyon

  “Where’s Eric?” Lance said from behind the cover of a struck bass string.

  Garrett held his drumsticks in the air like a shrug.

  Lance glanced nervously to the waiting audience.

  Moshers in the pit unable to mosh. Stage divers without the cover of loud music and dimmed lights to excuse their acrobatics. Pogoers without a pogo between them. And there, at the rear of the restless and muttering crowd, the Music Man. The man who held their futures in his hand and the nod of a head. The suited man who checked time all too frequently.

  Carl smiled ineffectually at the visitor, and he was as surely that as he was anything else. A tourist in amongst the tribe, watching, searching for culture to take back to the civilised world.

  A world where there were no day-jobs and no alarms to wake up to and…

  “Did he call you?” Lance said, masking the question with a reach for a bottle of water.

  The drummer blew out his cheeks in a gerbil manner, which was a yes and a no all at the same time.

  “Not just any time, Garret. I mean today. Sometime today, like, earlier today, before now?”

  “Just you know.”

  “No, I don’t. What?”

  “To say he’d be late. He called to say he’d be late.”

  “Late?”

  “Yah.”

  “How late?”

  The drumsticks shrugged.

  “Jesus, Garret, when were you going to tell me this?”

  “When you asked?”

  “Could have told me before we got on stage, right? Could have—“

  A fizzing, half full bottle of beer sailed through the air and skidded across the stage before Lance’s feet.

  For a moment it twisted, turned, like a bottle in the game where secret loves could be chosen with the right kind of spin. It turned, twisted, passed Lance and then Garret, and chose, finally, the empty space where Eric should have been standing, guitar in hand and ready to shred.

  Someone in the crowd hooted.

  Another someone, anonymous and shielded at the centre of the muttering, found his courage in that shelter and shouted: “Get on with the show!”

  Words, which spread and shortened as they were passed from one to the next until they became a chant.

  “Show! Show! Show!”

  The Music Man checked his watch again and wagged his head as though he’d answered no to some question that had gone unasked, but not unheard.

  Lance knew what that question was. It was the same question all bands wanted asked and answered with a yes. It was the dotted line about to be signed. It was the time in a studio and the possibility of sleeping horizontal instead of upright in some dirty, ramshackle van.

  Lance felt his heart sink into the place that was reserved usually for the deep bass rumble of a loud amp.

  “Show! Show! Show!”

  How could Eric have done this and when they were so close to making it? How could he, when he knew that their whole future turned on this night and this stage and the man in the audience who held that future in his hands. How could—

  And there the thought stopped.

  From the rear of the crowd she came.

  Tandy, Eric’s girlfriend.

  Her eyes swam in a river that all would know at one time or another. A river that carried everyone on its currents, whether they wanted to swim or not.

  Lance felt the bass rumble of something far worse than disappointment, much louder than any amp could produce.

  It was the future, lost.

  It was the empty space chosen by the spin of a bottle.

  The unplugged amp, the guitar left unshredded.

  Lance held a hand up to the crowd, and through that Moses command of the musician, he beckoned them to stop.

  The tides of moshers who hadn’t moshed, divers who hadn’t dived, parted to let the familiar, yet strikingly unfamiliar woman through to the stage.

  Then silence.

  Hush.

  Even the Music Man stopped checking his watch.

  A bottle might have spun in that time when all were holding breaths to hear the news. First they heard the tears. And tears were always bad news.

  Lance leant into the woman as she collapsed at his ear.

  And at his ear she spoke a single, broken word.

  “Gone.”

  ***

  He sat on the hill watching the sunset, the empty bottle in his hand.

  The world was purple going into blue and would soon be a punctuated black.

  Lance noticed none of the colours changing. He watched only the reflection of the world in the bottle.

  It was a twisted world, frosted, bent out of shape. The kind of world where an oldest friend might be smiling at you one day, where you might be passing dreams and hopes back and forth over a beer and the next the smile and the dreams were crushed under the wheels of some monster.

  He did not want to imagine the monster, but it was hard not to.

  From the hill he could see down and onto the road where the monster had snatched his friend. He could see the black stain, the permanent shadow on the grey concrete where oil and blood had mixed. And every time he blinked away a new tear there was a moment in darkness, a moment where he saw the monster out on the road ready to spill that oil and blood and snatch the future from them all.

  Lance turned away from his own imaginings and turned the bottle with him.

  Now he trapped the trees in reflection.

  They were bent out of shape like the rest of the world. The charred and bony hands reaching out from darkening skies to grab and hold the dreams of those who dared dream and crush them close to some dark and unbeating heart. They were the hands of time and the hands of a friend whose last words were stolen by fire.

  Lance closed his eyes.

  He cursed the world, twisted and untwisted as it might be.

  He opened his eyes away from the glass to the town and the world that waited for him now.

  What now? What of the band? What of the future?

  They were never a duo, always a trio. But nobody could replace Eric. There wasn’t anyone who could sing the songs. Nobody with that strange mixture of innocence and anger.

  Nobody with the same passion.

  Eric hadn’t wanted the favours of the Music Man. Eric hadn’t wanted to make it big or even make it small. His dreams were small and already fulfilled. It was enough to play the clubs and bars of the town and then on to the clubs and bars of the places not so far away. Stadiums were for sports not for music.

  A chord was struck in Lance, and it echoed in the hollow chambers of his body.

  Guilt in F Sharp.

  It was a bad chord. The beginning of a melody that Lance didn’t want to hear.

  Wasn’t your fault, was it? You didn’t down ten beers before climbing behind the wheel of a monster and aiming it at Eric, did you? You weren’t the one who did this to him.

  But if he’d known about the Music Man, if Eric had known about what I had planned… if he’d—

  And what exactly did you have planned?

  Nothing, he realised. Nothing at all. The Music Man might have made an offer, but it was an offer they would all have rejected, no matter how broke, no matter how twisted the world was under the glass of the bottle or beyond the glass. The Music Man might as well never have been there.

  And he wouldn’t have been if Eric had turned up. If that monster hadn’t taken him. It would have been a very different night altogether.

 
Lance smiled.

  The first smile he’d had on his lips in a long time.

  He thought of Eric and what might have happened if Eric had seen the Music Man. All the music stopped as Eric climbed off the stage and grabbed the Music Man by his expensive collars. In that imagining, Lance heard the cheers as Eric frogmarched the slick bastard out into the night and told him never to return.

  Lance smiled. He coughed out a laugh between fresh tears.

  “I wish… .” Lance said, but there was no way to make a wish the truth and so many ways to end the sentence that it would take a week to get through them all. Still… “I wish you were here.”

  His voice was stuttering and low, like the crackling of electricity crossing wires. His message carried to nobody and nobody there to listen. And damn, but he wished that Eric had believed in something beyond all this mess, beyond the twisted and untwisted world. He wished there was some way to talk to the dead and that the dead weren’t just lost to the greater darkness. He wished he could tap into the wires that criss-crossed the town and send a message to the beyond.

  He wished.

  But wishes were the worst kind of hope. That kind of hope was useless, maybe even an insult to his oldest friend.

  Eric was gone and their future was lost.

  There was no time and all the guitar strings would go unplucked, the drum skins left unstruck, the moshers, the divers, the pogoers would have to find someone else to make them dance.

  Forever.

  Lance stood.

  He looked out to the dark stain reminder of where his oldest friend had left this life.

  He pulled back his arm.

  He threw the empty bottle as far as he could.

  His back turned, walking away, he waited for the shattering of glass, but heard nothing.

  ***

  He had a van and a day job in a local music store. He had a life and only once a year did Lance feel the tug of the past. Never strong enough to take him to that road on the outskirts of the town, but strong enough to lock the doors of the apartment and have him listen to the only seven inch single that the band had printed. One day per year when he would drink himself into and out of tears. One day of mourning for the future and what might have been.

  One day when he’d forgotten to buy himself any juice.

  He climbed in the van.

  Forgot about the road and the stain that remained there.

  Travelled that road.

  And forgot all about juice and locking himself in the apartment when he saw what was waiting there.

  ***

  “Meet me,” Lance said.

  “Do you know what time it is, man? What year it is, Christ!”

  “There’s still time, Garett, we have to make a choice.”

  Garrett’s voice was more or less a yawn. “Choice?”

  “About the band.”

  “ Jesus, man, the only choice I make is between one brand of breakfast cereal and the other. What’s got you all sentimental?”

  Lance’s tears were fresh and good. He wiped them from the corners of his upturned smile.

  “The band. We have to get the band together.”

  “It’s been five years, man, are you crazy or just high?”

  “Both, but in a good way.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you said you’d never pick up an instrument again, right?”

  “You’re not wrong and you are wrong at the same time.”

  “And I’m going back to bed. Call me in the—“

  “Got to do it now,” Lance said.

  “Right now? It’s… so damn late I can’t even find my clock to tell you how late it is, man.”

  “Meet me.”

  There was an itching pause, a scratching moment in time where across the telephone lines Garrett dug his fingers into the curly locks on his head and brought himself out of his sleep.

  “Where?” he asked.

  ***

  “You got me out of bed for this?” Garrett stood at the side of the empty road, scratching his head with a drum stick. “And what exactly is this, Lance? If this is some kind of joke then—“

  Lance held the dusty bottle in the air as if it were Excalibur fresh from the lake.

  “The future,” he said.

  “Looks like a bottle to me.”

  “Know how old it is?”

  Garrett tapped the side of the glass.

  “No idea,” he said.

  “I threw this thing away a week after Eric… after he died.”

  “And you found it after all this time?”

  “No. I was up there on the hill and I hurled this as hard as I could just after Eric died.” Lance pointed to the past and the space which he’d occupied on that night so long ago. “So I’m riding up here today and there it is, just stood at the side of the road. Just stood there as though it was part of everything and… well… ”

  Garett tapped the bottle again, and once more for good measure.

  “You’ve not gone religious on me, have you?”

  “What?”

  Garett clawed his hands, lowered his voice to a spook-house pitch and said; “A message from beyond the grave!”

  “No. It’s a message from me. From that other me from back then.”

  Garret lost the spook and found some confusion.

  “A what? A message saying what?”

  “Carry on, I suppose. Do it.”

  “The band.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just because you found some bottle on the side of the road. What if it ain’t the bottle you threw away? What if it’s just—“

  There was a moment of doubt, but no more a moment than it took to blink and focus on the dusty bottle in his hand.

  “Don’t matter if it’s the bottle or not. The bottle is here, that’s all. Like Eric was here. We had something, right, with the band?”

  “Something, yeah,” Garett said.

  “Why can’t we have it again?”

  Garrett made puffed his gerbil cheeks out. He bit at his lip.

  “Won’t be the same, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Have to find a new singer.”

  “No.”

  “No? Well you can’t sing and I can’t—“

  “We find a different singer, not a new one. A different singer and a different band. Nobody could replace Eric.”

  Garett smiled, despite the late hour, despite the tiredness in his eyes and the confusion that went along with this impromptu road meeting.

  “Nobody,” he said, through that smile.

  “Agreed then?”

  Garrett nodded.

  “So what do we do now?” Garrett said. “You got a singer in mind.”

  Lance hadn’t thought that far. He hadn’t though further than this moment on the road, and the bottle in his hand and the bright revelation of a new future he’d had on the road that morning. He hadn’t thought about the future or what that future would be without Eric, or even if there could be a future with the lead singer gone.

  “Remember the night?” Lance said.

  “The night?”

  “When we got the news, when we were up on stage and Tandy came and… the night, remember?”

  “Sure, what about it?”

  “Remember how the bottle hit the stage and took a spin and it pointed toward where Eric should have been?”

  “Freaky, yeah.”

  “How about we spin the bottle again.”

  “For what?”

  “Just to see, to see where it points and wherever it points… well… ” Lance looked from the road to the town, from the town to the road, north and south, west to east, there were paths to take and all led somewhere into the unknown future. “Wherever it points we head in that direction. We head that way and see what happens, agreed?”

  “Sounds like a plan, not much of one, but a plan anyway.”

  The two crouched low to the ground. Lance took the bottle in hand and laid it down. He flicked a wrist.<
br />
  The bottle spun.

  North.

  South.

  East.

  West.

  Garret to Lance to Garret to Lance to –

  The bottle struck a loose piece of gravel. It took a new spin that rocked it onto its side. For a few moments it teetered and tottered until, finally, it came to a stop, pointing directly into the dark skies above.

  “Uh-oh, now what do you think that means?” Garret said.

  Lance stood.

  Garrett did the same.

  “Means,” Lance said, “we do what we want and… ” He fixed on the bottle. “Means… .”

  “Yeah?”

  Lance giggled.

  He didn’t believe in the afterlife or that prayers late at night could save a soul. Neither had Eric when he was alive, but looking now at the corona of streetlamp light around the bottle’s edge, Lance thought it would be good if it was Eric talking to him from beyond the grave. It would make the most sense. As though Eric were reaching out across time from that night when he was lost to the monster. Reaching out and saying “It’s okay, man. Go on without me. Go on.”

  “Means… ” Lance said as he put an arm around Garrett’s shoulder and pulled him close. “… Eric approves.”

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