Walking on Sunshine

by Jennifer Stevenson

  I admitted cautiously, “I have a roommate. I call him Veek.”

  “Ah,” Yoni said. Apparently that was the only confirmation she needed. Great.

  “Yes, yes!” Sophie exclaimed. “We met at the shop, and we talked, the three of us, and you are Ashurbanipal of the Mesopotamians, and you will convince him to let me have the stuffed goat’s head that Jake left, if you please, because I can see Veek has no use for it, and it would be a shame to let the vodou lady keep it, for she can get a goat’s head any time she likes, n’est-ce pas? And you will tell Yoni that Veek needs her help. My father is dangerous enough when he is angry, and that’s when he is a lawyer only. With this magical veil—”

  She broke off and shook her head bodingly, her delicately arched black brows coming together and her curls bouncing around her vivid little face.

  I was pretty sure that, by now, Yoni had heard enough to know she wanted no part of this nut job.

  But when I turned to her, my love-goddess was also frowning. “You heard her. Remember, that asshole lawyer who came to my suite that day is her father.”

  “Are you both kooky?” I said. Yoni looked at me. I protested, “Don’t involve me in this!” That didn’t go over any too well, either. “Look,” I said, strictly to Yoni, “I’d like to talk to you privately.”

  Yoni got up and went to the door. After whispering to the guard, she summoned the stalker chick and told her, “Conversation over. If there’s anything to be done, Baz—Ashurbanipal will contact you through his roommate. Shoo, now.”

  The stalker chick went outside, making fan-girl eyes at Yoni, and Yoni shut the door firmly behind her.

  I complained, “A week ago you were begging me to keep her away from you. What the fuck?”

  “I know,” Yoni said. She looked troubled.

  “That little sweetheart is pure dynamite. Veek told me some shit about her. She’s wack. She could do anything.”

  “She got past security.”

  I nodded.

  “That horrible lawyer is her father,” Yoni said again. “He’s your roommate’s opponent in a lawsuit. The kid can help, or she can get creative on her own, but, Baz, she’s not going to stay out of it.”

  “Oh.” I blinked. “I hadn’t thought about it like that.” As usual, Yoni was thinking farther ahead than I was.

  She nodded. “What’s this lawsuit about? Your words, not hers. She’s adorable, but I can’t follow anything she says.”

  I said, “I know zip about the lawsuit. It’s between Veek and his family back in France. I can’t do a goddam thing about it right now. I’m not messing with it until he asks me to.”

  Yoni sighed. She looked at her watch, and then at the case in my hand. “That your bass? Let’s go do sound check.”

  YONI

  The band trickled in. We did our sound check. The club manager warned us, “Five minutes,” and then doors opened and we scooted back to the dressing room for a smoothie. I went over the play list for both halves of the show, with the slow version of the new single “Baby, Come Home” about four songs from the end of the second half. I figured we’d give ’em that, pretend to close, get some encores, and finish with the longer, dance-pace version of “Baby, Come Home” again. Good way to promote the new CD.

  And it would send my guys home in a good mood about the future. I couldn’t really pay them enough to back me. They had to have extras. Club dates were good for those—the guys got to feel the love up close and personal.

  I said, “Baz, do you want to be backstage for the second half, or do you want me to call you up out of the audience?”

  He fidgeted. “Uh . . .”

  “Audience,” I decided while he wavered. “More dramatic. And more clubby. The audience goes crazy. That’s why they’re paying so much for these intimate side gigs. I’ll name you, you climb up onstage and flash ’em a grin, and we’ll swing into it right away. And wear your anti-charisma until your entrance. Make ’em gasp.”

  I glanced around at the band. They nodded.

  “Grab some more eats,” I warned them. “It’s a long evening.”

  We all fueled up.

  Baz came over and picked at a piece of pepperoni.

  “You okay?” I said.

  “You’re a different person on the job.”

  I chugged some water. “I’m in charge,” I said, wiping the corners of my mouth delicately with my thumbs so my lipstick wouldn’t smudge, and eyeing him. If he couldn’t handle me in charge, he couldn’t handle me.

  “Will you be okay in the audience?” I said.

  He hunched a shoulder. “Nobody’ll know me.”

  “Until you step onstage,” I said. “When you’re up there tonight, you’re Ashurbanipal of the Mesopotamians. I don’t care if nobody knows how you got in here.”

  He still didn’t look comfortable. I remembered how hard he’d dodged when I asked him what killed his music career . . . or more accurately, what made him kill his own music career.

  “Baz,” I said, and stepped closer, letting that sacred boundary between me and the rest of humanity go a little fuzzy, breaking my own rule against closeness when I was on the job. “If you can’t—if you don’t want to do this, we can do the number without you.”

  He looked at me with eyes wide open, but he didn’t seem to see me. Was he on drugs? Shit!

  “What is it?” I demanded, less friendly. “Are you fucked up?”

  “I’m scared,” he muttered. “Okay?” He kept looking me in the eye.

  I realized that his pupils would be weird if he was on something.

  I relaxed. “You don’t have to do this,” I repeated.

  “You have my promise.”

  More gently, I said, “If everything you promise to do scares you, you need to rethink that.”

  While I watched, his shoulders slumped. His eyelids slid half-shut. He tilted onto one hip. My chilled-out sex demon was back.

  “Banzai, buddy.” I winked at him.

  He nodded. “Remember the Alamo.”

  I was onstage before I realized that that wasn’t exactly the spirit I was aiming for.

  BAZ

  I wouldn’t have found a place to stand if Yoni hadn’t warned the club manager to save me a spot at a table down front. But of course she had. She thought of everything.

  I’m in charge.

  She certainly was.

  The club filled up. Then it filled up some more. The crowd in back squished into the tables in front, and eventually the management gave up and some of the security guys wiggled through and started removing the tables, hand-over-hand over everyone’s heads. Beer bottles clanked around our ankles. Nobody could breathe. Somebody lit a joint near me and got it taken out of his hand after his first toke. I sneaked a toke, myself, before I passed it along. I could have inhaled two bongs and never relaxed. I was keyed up.

  They did the first half of the show. Yoni handled that dinky club like a chef on a food truck. She touched everything and everybody within her reach. Nobody was beyond eye contact. Nobody left the room at the break—the street outside, they said, was packed too. The cops were having no luck with it. When she came back onstage the whole room breathed in. I smelled cigarette smoke from the street being pulled inside and through the room.

  Her mood that night wasn’t as, I dunno, not as certain somehow. As if she had some tension that wouldn’t let go. Even the hear-me-roar type songs came across a little wistful. It occurred to me I might be rocking her confidence somehow.

  If that was true, it sucked.

  It occurred to me also, eventually, that she was holding back on the oomph. All that practice at the hotel, holding the mana in, keeping it from trashing the joint, was doing some good.

  Yet the audience was hungry. They wanted it. I wanted it, and I had a lot of practice at not wanting stuff.

  Eventually I realized that Yoni herself wanted something and she hadn’t got it.

  That had to be my fault. Hell, I only had my sex demon powers to pride
myself on these days, and if I’d left her wanting . . . .

  She could command anything she wanted from me and get it.

  But she held it in. She seemed determined not to set off some kind of magical chain-reaction nuclear poppity-pow.

  This would be the room to do it in. This mob was wound tight.

  Before I knew it, she was calling for a spot on the front rows of the audience. Light blinded me. “—Special guest tonight, just for this song. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Ashurbanipal of the Mesopotamians!”

  The mob let out a yell. It was kind of questioning, like, Who? What?

  On automatic, blinded by the spot, I pivoted in place, holding up a hand, and then clambered up onstage. Her regular bass man handed me my instrument. I found my mic. We backed into position.

  Long before the yelling had stopped, she gathered our eyes, then gave the cue. Thank God. I was fucking terrified.

  We did the song, and it went as well as it had in the studio. Yoni began to unwind, and I relaxed, too. By the time she stepped back and let me jam, she looked happy. I noodled and riffed and growled into the mic and yanked on my awesomeness as if the last eighteen years of bongs and beers had never happened. The house howled. We picked up the duet portion, the band picked up tempo, and off we went.

  I could feel the mana in the air. If she wasn’t making it, then the audience must have been making it, because I felt as tall as a house.

  The band guys were all pros. They didn’t blink when she called for an early end to the song. We cut it off before it became a stomp. I tried to fade back, but she put her foot on mine and met my eye, so I stayed.

  She faked the close. The crowd roared for more. She did three short encores, flirty ballad versions of some of her older hits.

  Then we did the new number again, our number. This time she made eye contact with me, and we held it, and the mana began to pour out of her.

  Maybe she’d forgotten about being a good girl.

  I didn’t question it. It was terrific.

  I was so very, very grateful to be okay with her that I let myself go, too.

  This time we ran extra choruses. We let the stomp come. The audience tried to dance, but the room was packed too tight. Security kept them off the stage, but they were squishing out the doors. The walls creaked, the street outside clamored, the floor shook, and the ceiling tiles trembled and shivered dust over our heads.

  When she called for the finish, there was still no silence.

  They roared. In the roar I heard my name. Ashur, Ashur! They took it up as a two-stomp. Ashur, Ashur! I looked out over a sea of humanity, packed too close to move, yet their fists punched the air, Ashur, Ashur! Sunlight blinded me, the heat stifled me, the smell of blood filled my throat, and all those severed heads lurched at me on the ends of their spears, Ashur, Ashur! Ashur, Ashur!

  Ashur, Ashur!

  Ashur, Ashur!

  YONI

  The band had left and Baz still hadn’t waked up. He normally looked pale. Now he looked like an albino in a dead faint.

  A doctor had turned up out of the people packed around the back door. We let him in. He wasn’t much help.

  “Drugs?” he guessed, although Baz’s pupils were still big. “Low blood pressure?” He wanted to administer nitroglycerine and I said no.

  I sent him away with a hundred dollars and an autograph.

  The club manager came in, looking worried. “Uh, Yoni, can you talk to somebody from the city?”

  I looked up. “What?”

  A big blonde woman pushed forward, flashing a badge. “Department of Consumer Services. Can you explain the disturbance in the street outside your concert, ma’am?”

  I stood up. My joints creaked. I felt like I’d channeled the Niger River, and maybe the Mississippi and the Nile as well. “Why? What happened?”

  “Please come outside.”

  “Uh,” I said. I looked at David, my security guy.

  “They’re mostly gone, Yoni,” David said.

  I frowned. “In that case—”

  The city lady said, “Please. Outside?”

  I collected David and a couple of his burly guys, and we went to the front door, past the Cubby Bear’s cleanup crew. The floor tiles were all cracked, as if someone had dropped a dozen claw-foot bathtubs, repeatedly, everywhere.

  Somebody was pushing a broom over the cracked tiles, moving a pile of red rose petals toward a much bigger pile of rose petals.

  Uh-oh.

  I glanced up at the ceiling. No gold rays on the ceiling. Whew.

  On the street, four or five paddy wagons stood, all their blue-and-red flashers going. A dozen more squad cars sat idling. Their cop radios blared. People were being loaded into the cars and wagons in pairs, locked together as if they were cast in bronze, carved of marble, inseparable, oblivious, obsessed. Kissing, embracing, were they even fucking? They were holding too tight even for that.

  I saw rose petals all over the street, too.

  “Awesome,” I murmured weakly.

  “You don’t have any idea where all this came from?” the city lady said. She stooped and scooped up a handful of rose petals, examined them, and stuffed them in her pocket. “Or why your audience went out of control?”

  Well, of course I had an idea. I’d lost control. So they lost control. It was a clear-cut case of Yoni and Baz, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. I muttered some kind of weak denial, turned away, and ducked to the side of the door before somebody could spot me and take a picture.

  Weirdly, no one was looking at me. Everyone who wasn’t loading the paddy wagons was locked in a clinch.

  In another nine or ten months, I’d have a mini population explosion on my conscience, too.

  I shut my eyes and reached for the edges of my energy field. It was out there—wow—way out there. Yards and yards. Maybe a few blocks. Wow. I stood in the doorway, eyes shut, and thought about pulling all that edge back in, pulling it toward me, making myself smaller.

  As I pulled the edge toward me, I heard voices complaining. I opened my eyes. The couples being arrested were now parting, letting the cops separate them, climbing into custody one at a time. They didn’t seem any less obsessed with one another, but at least they weren’t glued together anymore.

  I felt smaller now, but oh, so much fuller. I felt tight as a sausage with mana. I was afraid to breathe, afraid to look at anyone. I was too mentally exhausted to protect anyone, and I was so full of power I was afraid I might smash someone like a bug by accident.

  I flicked a glance at the city lady. She was looking at the scene on the street.

  “Uh, I don’t feel so good,” I murmured. Instantly, my guys ushered me back inside. They blocked the city lady from following.

  David delayed her. “Thank you for taking time to check on us, Officer Heiss,” he said smoothly somewhere behind me. He would probably try to offer her money or tickets for tomorrow night’s show. She didn’t look bribable. I couldn’t care less.

  I fled to the dressing room.

  Baz was coming around.

  “Out,” I said to the guys. They cleared the cleaning crew and the club manager and left me alone with my bad-boy rocker.

  BAZ

  I woke feeling like I’d been run over by a truck. Somebody put a bottle of water in my hand. I sat up on a couch and sucked water until the bottle was empty. My hand shook. I was weak as a cat.

  “Baz, what happened?” That was Yoni. I looked up at her, speechless. She looked worried, but I could tell she was still the boss.

  I shook my head. Ashur, Ashur! I turned aside and puked.

  Yoni said, “Baz?”

  I rolled off the couch. On hands and knees, I puked like a dog until my back arched, my stomach ached, and my throat was raw.

  “What happened?” She filled the air with her power. Her voice was irresistible.

  It was Aphrodite all over again.

  “No!” I croaked. I staggered to my feet.

  She handed me a to
wel and I wiped myself off. Being near her set my skin a-tingle.

  No.

  Why the hell was I here? She didn’t need me. I was crumbling, disintegrating like a mummy in the fucking rain. If she came any closer I might shatter. I’d be biting the dirt, trying to die.

  We stood five feet apart. It wasn’t far enough. She spoke, but I winced away. The overtones of power in her voice made my eardrums pop. She was exquisite, perfect, radiant, and being this close gave me such a hangover that I wished I was dead.

  Ashur, Ashur!

  The room began to fill up with other people. Blinking through the ache in my head, I recognized her uncle, her aunt, and her douchebag cousin Joe. They were all upset about something. They showed her a picture.

  Yoni stood frowning at it.

  “—Letter demanding money so he won’t publish it. Now do you see why I warned you?” her uncle yelled. “He must have planted the camera before he took you there.”

  She looked up at me. The force of her energy wilted.

  I felt like a one-legged man trying to run up a mountain. “What?”

  “Did you,” she said, “have this picture taken?”

  I squinted. Two people in a room, kissing, wound together, practically having sex standing up. My stomach folded around a sharp point.

  The woman in the photo was Yoni.

  My neck hairs prickled.

  Accustomed as I was to dodging the shaft from the sneaky fuckers who suck up to power, I understood instantly what had happened.

  Yoni was practically in tears.

  Her aunt and uncle had a creepy look. They seemed self-satisfied and ashamed at the same time.

  A few minutes ago I thought I’d felt Aphrodite in the room.

  But it wasn’t her, it was Yoni.

  Yoni had made it. She was the goddess, and she was doing fine without me, and I was a landmine in her world. I wasn’t up to the job.