Music for Love or War

by Martyn Burke

  Apparently, I was one of the designated hooligans.

  Laughing probably made my situation worse. “It wasn’t me,” I yelled. “I didn’t download a damn thing! It was Mr. Pubic Head.” And it was. Albert. Using my computer while I was off at war. Downloading music for another of his get-rich-quick schemes. But no one paid any attention to me.

  And: “. . . I want to bring in Mr. Milo . . . who graciously agreed to be here tonight as one of the most respected music pioneers of our time, in order to . . .”

  And from somewhere in that thicket of microphones, I saw Eugene grinning a kind of leering what-the-hell’d-you-expect? grin.

  What’s the big deal?

  Milo, the wizened ferret, stepped into the hungry glare of those syndicated television cameras, pointing that artificial, sequin-covered hand at me like a prosecutor skewering the defendant. “With this one subpoena, we in the recording industry want to call attention to the outright theft, to the illegal downloading of music, stealing revenues from the poor artists, the record companies, the . . .”

  “Get real. It’s Liberace,” I yelled. “This is the best thing that happened to him since he died. And probably even before!”

  Milo’s sequined hand shot toward me again. And it all became blah, blah, blah, blah . . . in the midst of the roiling media where microphones flailed like cudgels of the information age and sun guns blocked out all the light.

  The story had already been written, filmed, edited. Nothing mattered. We were all just shooting a script. The machine had to be fed.

  So Danny decided to feed it. Really feed it.

  He had been watching from the throng, yelling into that vinyl sewer words that no one heard. He shot a glance to me, and then when he couldn’t stand it anymore he simply snapped, going full Canadian, wading through the bouncers, who stumbled backward, caught off-guard. And with one, almost rocket-propelled fist, he caught the wizened ferret somewhere in his middle, lifting him clean off his feet.

  Milo looked like his shoes had exploded.

  It was a raw, unadorned explosion of primordial justice. It was one of those moments you know are just wrong! You’re raised to believe civilization depends on it being wrong! Vigilante justice is wrong! But I do confess to a terrible sense of satisfaction on seeing that multicolored projectile explosion of bodily fluids from the ferret’s various orifices. Mea culpa. After all, the spectacle was essentially devoid of any higher purpose except to provide highlight-reel immortality for the screaming-segment producers who were already gleefully editing the sequence in their heads.

  • • •

  It took until almost dawn before the ferret could sweep aside the tatters of his rage and figure out—aided by his PR consultants—that by pressing charges against a war hero, the ferret would simply call attention to his own five marriages, bitter former employees, and nonpayment of royalties to old singers he no longer cared about. The real capper came when one of those consultants googled Danny and learned that he had been recommended for a Bronze Star, a U.S. Bronze Star. But by then I could see that Danny no longer cared what was going to happen.

  23

  Hours earlier, in the midst of that chaos outside the club, with Milo the ferret being carried to his limousine, oozing, gagging, and screaming No pictures! as the media monster devoured him, Danny, from a tangle of restraining arms and voices, nodded to me. It was a quick motion of his head, directed toward the door. It was the kind of gesture we’d sometimes tossed silently to one another in Afghanistan when words were a problem. In all that diversion he loudly provided for me, I stepped behind a jostling tangle of testosterone and slipped unnoticed into the club.

  It was like stepping into my own private inferno, complete with a pulsing, heavy-metal soundtrack blasting through the red-tinted light and darkness that strobed through the throngs.

  It was easy to find Annie. She was standing off to one side, away from the ferret’s other blondes, who were laughing hysterically at something that held them together in a tight little coalescence. It was obvious none of them knew what had just happened to Milo outside.

  I walked toward Annie from the side. She was in a world of her own, singing. Actually it wasn’t really singing—it was more like a kind of belting out of words. With her eyes closed, clenched, she yelled out some strange words. It took me a moment to understand what I was hearing:

  Dirty deeds done dirt cheap

  It was lyrics that were blasting through the enormous speakers. They were from an AC/DC song I used to hear as a kid.

  Dirty deeds done dirt cheap

  I touched her arm. “Annie.”

  Her eyes clenched shut even tighter. Again and again she yelled the same lyrics, even when the music changed—dirt cheap. I stood in front of her, gently placing my hands on her arms. I could feel something seismic within her when I did. She was rocking back and forth in a tiny, pendulous motion, a magnified trembling. “Annie. It’s me.”

  But her eyes clenched still more tightly shut. I waited. The lyrics came in drum rolls, identical and repetitive. Dirty deeds . . . Finally I leaned over, very close to her face, and said again, “Annie!”

  She opened her eyes as if she was startled, breathing in bursts. Then tears rolled down her cheeks and everything seemed to let go at once. I almost had to hold her up, moving her back into a corner in the shadows. “I’m sorry,” she said over and over again, until it too became a loop. Her eyes were glazed and the tears were almost bubbling from them.

  “Annie? What are you on?”

  “Please . . . don’t.”

  “What drugs, Annie?”

  Over her shoulder I could see the ferret’s security team hurrying and herding the other blondes toward the door. Susie Boo was yelling and pointing toward the back of the club, but the ferret’s men were in too much of a hurry. Stragglers in that herd would be left to fend for themselves. Susie was almost carried out by a guy who looked like a sidewalk slab dressed in a suit.

  “Oh god, I’m so sorry,” said Annie, her head sinking into my shoulder and her makeup running all over my shirt.

  • • •

  Danny had “liberated” Eugene’s Dodge and tossed me the keys. Annie slept all the way to the ocean. The last store open at the end of Washington Boulevard, down near the pier, sold beach towels so I bought five of them and two big T-shirts, went back to the Dodge, picked her up, and carried her out onto the sand, to where it crests and then gently runs down to the surf.

  She didn’t awaken, not even as I was putting the big T-shirt over her—and over that red dress. In the near darkness of the beach, the dress still caught glints of light. As I pulled the T-shirt down, there was something that seemed right about making that dress vanish under it. The girl I remembered from somewhere near here, telling fortunes and smiling as she brushed away her sandy hair blowing from under a colored bandana—that girl would never have worn a dress that made light glint. I kept telling myself that. It was my way of looking for certainties where there were none. And at that moment, I desperately wanted certainties. However I could get them.

  I wrapped the beach towels around us, a terrycloth cocoon that kept out the chill air that came off the ocean. I leaned back on my elbows, looking out into the obsidian void that lay before us. We were at the end of Earth, Annie and I.

  She made little noises, fragments of words as she lay nuzzled into my arm. Then she was still again.

  Not far to the south of us were the simple lights of the Venice Beach pier, the unadorned concrete structure that stood like the chrysalis of its gaudy cousin, the Santa Monica Pier, a mile or two to the north. That one was a whirl of light and color, bouncing through the night, the Ferris wheels and roller coasters circling to nowhere, a rouged calliope blasting its recorded mirth out across the waters. Annie and I were between the two. I lay looking from one to the other and then settled back, listening to the waves and remembering all the nights in Afghanistan when I’d prayed for this night to happen. And now that it had, with Annie
lying pressed against me, in some state beyond mere sleep, I had no idea what was really happening.

  I fell asleep like I usually did now, searching the sky for stars.

  • • •

  She was sitting with her back to me, looking out at the ocean as the dawn wedged away the night. The red dress lay on the sand beside her, like something discarded from another presence. She only half turned when I sat up. “I need to ask you something.”

  “Okay.”

  At first I thought she hadn’t heard me. Then she said, “Don’t try to save me.”

  I lay there listening to the waves rolling in for a long time. “I didn’t know I was.”

  She reached out and put her hand on mine. It was the first real act of touching I had felt in years, and it caught me completely by surprise. This simple little gesture shook loose any defense I’d encrusted around some fragile, secret place where only I existed. A flicker of panic, of vulnerability lit up this refuge. Then the warmth of her hand brought a stillness I had almost forgotten.

  She continued looking away. “I am not who you want me to be.”

  “I never wanted you to be anything. You just were. Are.”

  “I’m not strong enough, even for that.” Her voice was so quiet the waves almost muffled it.

  I reached around and gently tried to move us both so she would look at me. “Hey. It’s me.” I wanted her to see me, to know that I was smiling, and trying to keep it all from getting difficult. To let it be like it once was. She kept her eyes lowered and slowly shook her head.

  “Bad things happened.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You can’t say that. You don’t know what happened.”

  “Is all this because of Susie?”

  “Don’t blame her.”

  “I’m just asking.”

  “I owe her.”

  “What do you owe her?”

  “You wouldn’t understand. We’re twins.”

  “You’re not her.”

  “Maybe I am.”

  “Is she the one who organized this Milo and his five blondes circus?” It was a word I instantly wanted to take back. But it had an unplanned effect. For the first time, she looked at me.

  “Circus?” she said, her eyes trying to hold back indignation and failing. “Milo’s saved us.”

  “From what?”

  “I told you—bad things happened.” I waited out her silence. “Susie’s boyfriend went to prison. And all the things he gave her, the car and the condo, got seized by the court. And . . .” She was shaking her head. I waited. “. . . I was with someone.”

  With. The all-purpose word in conversations like this. Draining away all meaning.

  “With?”

  “He was the brother of Susie’s boyfriend. He took care of me.”

  I didn’t want to hear any of this. But choice was not an option now. She was turning away again. “What happened?”

  “He was murdered,” she said in a voice so faint the waves smothered it.

  It was as if sheet lightning had gone off in my mind. I couldn’t move. The words bubbled out. “He wasn’t really a drug dealer. They said he was, but he wasn’t.” She was crying. “He was only helping his brother, the guy Susie was getting all the gifts from, and I wanted to help her. But it wasn’t his fault that the guy in Vegas got stiffed. It wasn’t him, it was his brother who did it.”

  I lay back with it all drifting away from me as the words kept pouring out of her. “. . . He wasn’t a dealer, he wasn’t . . . and after Milo paid off the people in Vegas, he took care of Susie and then me . . .” and in some bizarre moment all I could think of was that poem “Journey of the Magi,” which I had memorized on this same beach over a decade ago. I’d crammed, in between waves, fearful of getting kicked out of the English class the next day, and resenting having to learn such gibberish.

  And then, amazingly, discovering that I loved it, that I somehow thrilled to the images that the poem unleashed in my mind. The same images that overwhelmed me now, of the Magi discovering what they came to wish they had never learned. And how they could no longer be the same after Bethlehem and this hard and bitter agony of theirs, living with what tore down old certainties.

  I remember sitting on the beach, seeing the Magi making their journey home to emptiness once they had learned what they did not want to know.

  I should be glad of another death.

  As should I now. Not literally, but something that would take me away from the devastation.

  “I told you. I told you, bad things happened,” she said.

  Yes, you did, Annie. You did.

  With the voices singing in our ears, saying

  That this was all folly.

  She had turned to face me, looking right at me now and wanting me to hear her while some drumroll in my head was playing out that this was all folly. But if it was, why couldn’t I stop that sheet lightning behind my eyes?

  “I wish you hadn’t come here,” she said. “It was easier remembering you and knowing that when I could get myself clean again, you would be there. I didn’t stop loving you, you know.”

  “Maybe I’m not smart enough to follow all this,” I said. It was my turn to look away. It felt safer that way. “I keep coming back to one word: Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re a free person. You make your own choices.”

  “Junkies don’t think that way.” She had gathered up the red dress and raised herself to her feet.

  “Where are you going?”

  “My mother still lives in the same place on the canal.” A memory flooded back, the frivolous couple who had been her parents, seeking out self-involvement however they could find it. “My father died last year.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I didn’t cry,” she said. “You know, for a long time my mother used to ask me if I’d seen you. She said I should have stayed with you.”

  “We should have let the mothers handle it all.”

  “You think?”

  “Annabelle never missed a beat. She kept a pipeline of National Enquirers coming all the way to the mountains in Afghanistan. She made sure I read this stuff about you. And your sister. And sometimes afterward I didn’t much care what happened to me over there.”

  “It went both ways.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Your mother would photocopy your letters and get them to me. No matter where I was, she could find me. I would end up reading them. I didn’t cry when my father died, but I would cry when I read your letters.”

  Annabelle?

  “Why would you care? When you were with someone?” I’d fallen into Annabelle’s job—loading on guilt. And I instantly wanted to pull it all back.

  “Because of a nightmare that always came back to me. The nightmare started right after I reread one of your letters. One day I would leave all this, I’d get clean. And go looking for you all over, and finally find you and be telling you how glad I was that I’d found you. And while I was telling you, a woman appears in the background with children and I just knew who they were before you said anything. And in my dream you were looking at me strangely and I couldn’t figure out why until you held up a mirror. And when I looked in the mirror I was old, really old, and chewed-up and horrible-looking. And I looked at the woman in the background and it was me, but me when I was young, like when you first met me.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “Almost. I remember looking at myself in the mirror and thinking, ‘This old hag doesn’t deserve him.’ And then looking at the other woman—in my dream it was me when I was young—and thinking, ‘She could make him happy.’”

  “There’s only one of you.”

  “There’s been two of me.” She smiled the saddest smile I’d ever seen. “Gotta go,” she said, slinging the red dress over her shoulder. I started to get up. “No,” she said. “Don’t.”

  I watched her recede across the huge beach, walking into the dawn. When she
got to the asphalt bicycle path that lay like a scar across the beach, she turned around. “I’ll come to you,” she yelled. “I’ll clean up.”

  “Come back now,” I yelled.

  “No. It can’t work now.”

  She was right. I watched her walk away and imagined that I saw blood all over the sand.

  24

  I have found grace where I least expected it. Sort of like a flower growing in concrete, these things simply should not be. Because by all the laws of cosmic probability, expectations have a gravity all their own, some inevitability that allows us to believe we understand our tiny worlds. Sheltering us from the endless surges of uncertainty and surprise that could otherwise burn through our puny circuitries of comfort.

  And so it was with Annabelle.

  My mother, the sharpshooter of the emotional drive-by, leaving you lovingly mowed down, riddled with passing words. “Oh, I see in the National Enquirer that Annie is wearing diamonds now. Did you buy them for her?”

  That Annabelle.

  After watching Annie vanish into infinity across that endless beach, I went there, to that little stucco bungalow on the rim of Santa Monica Canyon. I still don’t know why. Maybe it was all because Annabelle was my mother. Maybe that’s the only gravity that matters, the genetic pull of one body, one mind, one history, acting on another. Einstein never came close to figuring that out. E=mc2 is nothing compared to the planetary pull of a mother.