Meet Me in the Strange

by Leander Watts

  “What party?” I asked

  “Stupido,” he said. “Maximum stupido. You coming or not? I just found out which hotel it’s at. Come on, come on, come on.” He said this in one quick, rattling burst. “Everybody who’s anybody is there. The band, the insiders, the press, the right fans. That’s you and me, okay? True believers and some white gong. Friend or foe, yes or no? Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.”

  “Is Django still here?” I asked.

  “Not here. At the hotel. It isn’t far. I’ve been asking for an hour, and I just got the word. I had to pass along a little of the good stuff, but it’s worth it. You can always get more, right? The party’s still going strong. At the Mount Moritz. It’ll keep cooking till daybreak. Got it? Now let’s go. It’s time to party.” The first time I’d met him, the kid had seemed a bit depresso. Before the show, outside the arena, he’d been manic. Now, with the blue and orange comet melting on his face, draggled clothes and nonstop chatter, he seemed like something out of a comic book. He didn’t tell me his name or ask me mine. To me, he was just Comet Boy, my guide, my info, and my in.

  “It’s amazing,” he said. “I heard that Django’s still there, and all the guys from the band. There’s some movie people, and that writer from Creedo, the one with the—”

  “T.V. Geist?”

  “Yeah. That’s him. And about five hundred girls and a pile of primo fly-spell taller than you or me and it’s happening right now.”

  “But how are we going to get in?”

  “Just stick with me, Stupido. I’m the fan with the plan. And I’ll do what I can.”

  NINETY

  The Mount Moritz was the fanciest hotel in the city. Not as big as the Angelus, not as old or as beautiful, but still it had what some people would call grandeur. It had a golden glow, like a castle that had just floated down from heaven. I was used to walking right into the Angelus, so I headed for the main lobby.

  “Hang on,” Comet Boy said, grabbing my arm. “You think they’re going to let you just waltz in? I found out about a side entrance. For the cooks and maids. We can get in there, and then I do my magic.” He pulled out a plastic bag full of crystalline white powder. “Nobody says no to a pinch of this. If God made anything better, he kept it for himself.”

  We went around the side of the hotel, down a narrower street, but I kept asking myself, What are you doing? Even if we got in, even if we got to the party, what was the point? Anna Z had found what she wanted. She’d gone to Django, and he’d accepted her, taken her up on the stage and whisked her away. She didn’t want me anymore. She’d gotten what she’d come for.

  But Comet Boy had a kind of wild gravity about him, pulling me along. He was so up, so sure of himself that I didn’t argue.

  He was right. There was a side entrance. A gaggle of glammed-up girls—they had to be younger than me—were hanging around there, trying to get past the guy at the desk. They laughed and flirted and pleaded in singsongy voices. Finally he pointed to one of the girls, who was showing more skin than the rest. She went to him, he grabbed her around the waist, and that was our chance. Comet Boy gave me a hard elbow in the side, and we zipped by the desk.

  NINETY-ONE

  The feel there was different than any place at the Angelus, or at least it was that night. We ran down the hall, like invaders who’d gotten past the first line of enemy defense. An elevator opened and spilled out twice as many people as it should have held. We climbed over a guy who was obviously way gone on something illegal, and I pounded the button to shut the doors.

  So we got to the twelfth floor without anybody telling us to leave. There were people everywhere, some of them drunk, some zoned on who-knows-what, some just hyped on the post-gig party energy.

  “Where do you think he is?” Comet Boy said. “He’s here somewhere. I can feel it. But which room, which room, which room?”

  I didn’t have any idea about that. This was all new to me, all too much already. Maybe Django really was there, but more importantly, Anna Z was too. I might not get her back. I knew the odds of that were tiny. There was no way she’d give up this—being in the court of the Glister King—for what she had before. But I thought if I could just see her one more time, to really say goodbye, it would be okay for me to go home to the Angelus and my old life.

  “Where is he?” Comet Boy asked a girl who’d come tumbling out of a room. “Is he in there?”

  She just laughed and started pounding on the door, which somebody had slammed behind her.

  “Where’s the main party? Where’s Django?” Comet Boy had his bag of white crystals out now, dangling it like a lantern to light his way in darkness. “I got the goods. Come on, come on, come on, somebody tell me where he is!”

  This was a big mistake. A security guy, who probably weighed more than the both of us put together, saw what Comet Boy was doing and came down on him like a hammer. Luckily by then, the crowd had pushed us apart somewhat. The security guy grabbed Comet Boy, dragged him into a room, and I was alone again.

  NINETY-TWO

  Now what? I asked myself, standing in the hallway as knots of people tangled around me. What did I have that would get me what I wanted?

  A door crashed open, and I got a glimpse of a much bigger space. Yelling, laughter, music, a hundred hyped conversations blurring into one surge of noise. It was the main party room. It had to be.

  Maybe pharmaceuticals wouldn’t work, but I still had my wad of money. I pulled it out, started peeling off bank notes and headed for the door. A guy who had to be three heads taller than me stood guard. He said, “Put it away, kid. Somebody’ll grab it.” Then he turned to say hi to somebody and I was in.

  A squad of fan-girls had shimmied down from the floor above and gotten to a balcony window. Django’s roadies were drinking, blowing off steam, and when they saw all those girl-faces and girl-bodies pressed up against the glass, they went a bit mad. Somebody with a movie camera was already there, setting up his lights and sound equipment as though it was a film set. I just stood off to the side there for a little while, watching, soaking in the craziness. Freaks and fakes, players from other bands, a gypsy fortune-teller, a fire-eater from the circus, and an Indian snake-dancer had showed up too.

  Some older guys were near me. Listening, I figured out there were studio techs, talking about Django’s next record. And I even got a glimpse of T.V. Geist, the writer from Creedo. He was skinny, very pale, with his bulby head shaved clean and a goat-beard waggling on his chin. His voice was louder than most, and sharper, cutting through the din. “You really want to know? Get a bucket and a mop right now, because this’ll blow your brain. I’m serious as a shark-bite. This one will melt you down to a puddle of blue goo.”

  I edged closer, trying to hear the secret he was threatening to reveal. It wouldn’t be about Anna Z, I understood that. But because he was famous, and could get the inside story, I thought maybe he knew if Django was still there at the hotel.

  It didn’t happen that way. We never met. I was close enough to hear the wheeze in T.V.’s voice between the words. But before I asked him the big question, there came a scream, a slam and a string of curses from the doorway.

  Lukas had found the party and was there to get his sister back.

  NINETY-THREE

  It got insane very fast. Lukas had already been knocked around, probably fighting with the Polizei at the arena. One of his sleeves was ripped, and his left eye was swollen almost shut. He’d been a madman before. Now he was a doom-rocket, blasting straight for his target.

  One of the roadies tried to toss him out and was soon down on the floor with blood all over his face. Kids were running around now and the movie guy was trying to get it on film. The snake dancer started wailing in a weird, inhuman voice. More roadies went into action. And though they were big, tough, and used to dealing with unruly fans, Lukas had a ball of burning hate inside his heart. And he had nothing to lose anymore.

  He picked up a chair and swung it around his head, keeping
everybody back. “Where is she?” he screamed. “I want her back!”

  Somebody told him to cool it, and he threw the chair. Before anyone could get him though, he’d picked up another one. “I’ll kill everyone in the room if I have to. I’ll do it. Now tell me where she is.”

  “Who?”

  That made him even madder. “You want to die right now?” he shrieked. “I’ll kill you all.”

  Then a door opened at the back of the room. And there was Django Conn: calm and silent. He almost glowed, that’s what it seemed like, with a cold, imperial, alien power. Anna Z was beside him, like his young queen. I yelled out her name. She turned toward me. Lukas turned too, for just a second, and then lunged straight at Django, filled to overflowing with that freak-out energy.

  Someone must’ve called the Polizei as soon as he’d gotten into the Mount Moritz. Because four of them, armed riot-troopers, stormed into the hotel room just as Lukas made his last attack. He fought back, and it was a good thing they hadn’t sent only one. It was ugly, and wild, and it hurt me to watch it. Lukas might’ve been wrong-wrong-wrong for Anna Z. He’d messed with her in ways nobody ever should. But it was loss and grief that drove him now, the pure misery of losing her forever.

  As the Polizei brought him down, he kept yelling that Anna Z belonged to him and nobody else. She was his and his only. How could she do this to him?

  Assaulting a roadie was bad enough, fighting back against a law officer in that city—and breaking bones—meant there was definitely jail ahead for Anna Z’s brother. A long stretch of hard time. They dragged him out, cuffed at the wrists and ankles.

  Anna Z looked up into Django’s eyes. He didn’t smile or nod, but there was a big yes in the look he gave her. She crossed the room, the crowd parting for her, and she said, “This is Davi.”

  NINETY-FOUR

  “It’s perfect. Nobody’ll bother us down here.” We’d found two seats together at the back of a car. The sun was just coming up as the train came out of the tunnel. “We’ll be home in a couple of hours, and I need to tell you everything before we get there. Okay? So just listen. You’re the best listener in the world, Davi. And I need that now more than anything.

  “Just listen and try to understand. ‘It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn.’ Doctor Frankenstein said that. I read those words when I was little, and I never forgot them. It was like he was talking straight to me. That’s what the story is really about and what the creature is really made out of. Not dead body parts and chemicals but the secrets of heaven and earth. That’s why we went to the show, right? And that’s why you found me and I found you and we went to Django together. To meet me in the strange and find out the secrets of heaven and earth.”

  We sat together in our secret place, a pair of seats that faced backward, set off from the others by an overloaded luggage compartment. With her arm around my shoulder, holding me tight, she talk-talk-talked. Her breath was warm in my ear. Her hand felt hot, squeezing mine. Her face was flushed, as though a fever was rising inside her.

  “I’m still a virgin, if that’s what you’re wondering. You and me, Davi, the last virgins. I did get to be with Django for a little while, just the two of us. He didn’t need another girl. Not for that. He’s got a million, if he wants them. And they’re all willing. That’s not why he let me come up on stage and then go with him back to the party. He wanted to talk to me, and when I told him about you, he said you could come around some time too. And he really meant it. He’s even more amazing in person, I mean one-on-one, than in concert. I could feel the weird vibe coming off him like the pure energy of a star. A real star, massive solar, like the sun: light and heat and something else I don’t think there’s even a word for.

  “We just talked. Me and Django. That’s all. We talked about his songs a little, and what we’ve both seen in the skies, and how everybody is an alien. That’s what he explained. We really are all aliens. It’s just that some of us feel it deeper. You and me get it the way most people don’t. We all come from Dimension X. Or the dark side of the moon. Alpha Centuri, Albebaran, or Arcturus. Doesn’t matter what name you use, it’s still out there. It’s still The Strange. It’s where we come from and where we’re going. ‘Meet me in the strange secret faces.’ That’s what Django was talking about in that song. You and me look up at the sky and we see the electrum light. Everybody could too if they looked. Everybody wants it but they just don’t know how to get it.”

  NINETY-FIVE

  It came out like a storm. A first wave, a whirlwind, then a lull, and another blast of words. It came in a brilliant swirl and muddy jumble. The facts, the feelings, what she saw, what she heard, what Django said. Secrets of heaven and earth? Maybe. Sights and sounds she’d never experienced before? I think so. Did she meet somebody in the strange? Absolutely.

  “Django said that everybody wants it bad. Like the people who stand in line, all the way around the block for hours, just to be the first into a theater to see a new movie. They could wait a few days, right? And there’d be no lines then. But people want to get there the first day because there’s something in the pictures and the voices, in the light and the sound, something that people call magic, but that’s not the right word. They want to be in that first wave of The Strange when it comes off the screen and out of the speakers.

  “Or like the people at the cathedral with their saints and statues and beads. They believe and it really matters. They pray and sing and bow down. They’ve got the idea that somewhere in the cathedral, there’s power and glory, and if they do the right things, they might get a little taste of it. And you know what, Davi? We’re not much different really. You and me going to Django are like the old ladies who go on a pilgrimage to their special shrines and holy wells. And they come back different. Going to the show was our pilgrimage. We went and now we’re going back, changed forever.”

  NINETY-SIX

  New movies and old pilgrims, true believers and The Strange: those were important. I got that. But was that really why she was there with me, going home, instead of traveling with Django? If he was so amazing and he chose her out of all those thousands of girls to come up on stage, then why would she choose me? What possible reason could she have for giving up the new Star-World, the court of the great Glister King, for the old Angelus and little me?

  “He needs us here, Davi. That’s what he told me. Bright virgin specters. And if it’s not you and me, then who? Was there anybody at the Maxima who really got him and his music the way we did? No, no, and Triple-X No. We’re it. We’re his Flash Bang Babies: ‘I’ll be your ears. I’ll be your eyes.’ That’s what he really needs, for us to stay where we really live and keep watching the skies. That’s where it’s really going to happen. More music and mutation? Listening deeper into his sound? Opening up to the Alien Drift? Yes, yes, and Triple-Y Yes. But there’s a place for us, and it’s not wandering around the New World with the band.

  “He’s going to do an album in the New World. Something fresh. A whole new sound with new musicians to work with. He already has a new name for the band: the Alien Drifters. Sort of an outer space cowboy vibe. The plan is to move there, to the New World, and make a record that will change everything. Break it all wide open. It’s supposed to take six months. I heard people saying that’s how much time he’s booked at the studio. Maybe more. On the other side of the world. It’s going to be a different sound, a different feel, way past everything he’s done before.”

  He was taking his whole entourage to the New World, and she could’ve gone along. For a few weeks, it might be wondrous. That was the word she kept using, “wondrous.” Traveling with his people would be like nothing she’d ever seen or felt. And he told her it was up to her to choose. But she didn’t play any instruments and she hardly sang. What good would she do him there? After a while, she’d just be one more girl. Maybe a wondrous, wild girl, but still, just another Django-mad fan. She didn’t just want to follow the band around like a groupie. There was a m
ore important job for her to do.

  When he made his Grand Comeback, when the album was done and he did the world tour with his new band and sound, then we’d be here, ready. He needed our ears and eyes. That’s what he told her. He needed his young spectral virgins. He’d be back, in a year or two, and when he came through on the tour, we could be with him again.

  NINETY-SEVEN

  “He told me to stay free. That was the most important part. If I went with the band, it would be wondrous, weird, and good. But he said that after a while it would have to end. He’s amazing, Davi. He sees something for just a few seconds and he gets it, like he’s been studying it for weeks.

  “Lukas is gone, gone, gone. Off to jail. And I’m really free. That was what Django saw right away. We heard the fight, the yelling, and I knew right off that it was Lukas. Django took my hand. It was the only time he touched me at the party. He just held my hand and said everything was going to be all right. We went out to the big room and that’s when Django really got it. He saw the whole thing in a flash.

  “I need to be free, and if I went with the band, no matter how amazing it might be for me, still I’d lose something. I wouldn’t be free anymore. And that’s why I’m back, Davi. That’s why I’m with you. For the first time in my life, I’m free. When we get back, we’ll have the whole city for ourselves, and we won’t have to sneak around. No more running away, hiding, being afraid all the time.

  “Django got it. He understood me and my brother, and you too, even though you’ve never really met him yet. It was like he saw right inside me and knew everything. So we’re going back where we belong. It’ll be the same, sort of, and totally different too. I know it, Davi. I feel it. I’m free. And so are you. Really free.”