Destroy All Monsters

by Jeff Jackson

  —Xenie, she said. This is important.

  I didn’t care.

  —There will be music and singing, she said.

  I didn’t want to sing.

  —Don’t be scared, she said.

  Aunt Mary tried to distract me by pointing out a flock of birds pouring from the sky into a single tree. She said, Do you ever wonder why they’re all gathering together like that?

  I didn’t answer.

  Aunt Mary coaxed me closer to the crowd. A few people held up signs, and a couple clutched fresh flower bouquets. Everyone stood around the body. Aunt Mary had talked about a young man, but there was only a chalk outline. The arms and legs were spread wide. Inside the lines were dark splotches, like someone had rubbed red into the asphalt. I tried not to stare at the bits of hair and congealed clumps. There was less to a dead body than I had imagined. Maybe it had been absorbed by the ground, and the chalk marked the edges of a trapdoor it had vanished through.

  Behind us, several musicians with beat-up horns and guitars began to play. It was a slow song that made the air feel heavy. People started to whisper the words, then sing them softly to themselves, as if they were afraid of puncturing the sadness.

  Each time the song reached the end, it would restart. Each time, people’s voices grew louder and their wet eyes shined. The sad song seemed to lift something chained inside everyone’s chests. My aunt put her hands on my shoulders, coaxing me to join in.

  I keep thinking about that parking lot. I remember how I didn’t want to sing, how the tune was an itch in my skull. I remember when I finally opened my mouth, people’s faces slowly turned in my direction. I remember they came up to me afterward with a startled look in their eyes.

  They said: You have a beautiful voice.

  part two

  THE ECHOES

  To the novice, the voices of the dead sound like static. It takes a patient ear to discern their musical murmurings, which resolve with infinite slowness, like the notes in a strange and shimmering chord.

  —VIVIAN DARKBLOOM

  chapter one

  THE ERASED

  IT’S HARD TO TAKE ALL THIS SILENCE. The concrete corridors of the Bunker remain empty. Familiar practice rooms are mixed throughout the rows of storage spaces, but there are no mobs of musicians squatting in the halls, sharing flasks and six-packs, tuning guitars and tinkering with effects pedals. No raunchy gossip filtering through clouds of sweet-smelling pot smoke. No muffled feedback and sputtering grooves permeating the warehouse’s passageways. There are only rows of wooden doors chained shut with rusty padlocks. Pools of brackish water collecting from unseen leaks. The stale stink of fermented socks. The Bunker is now a ghost site where even the ghosts seem half rotted. Its hallways are haunted by a solitary presence, a tall and gangly boy who grips the sides of a trash can with both hands. He can’t seem to stop vomiting.

  * * *

  Florian spits out a final mouthful of spew. He feels ambushed by the tidal wave of nausea. It’s left him light-headed and queasy, but it’s not as serious as it looks. Even in his early twenties, he still walks with a storklike gait that makes it seem as if he’s a few steps from toppling. He continues down the main loop of the Bunker, avoiding the labyrinthine passageways that veer off like tributaries. He pauses at a couple of practice spaces, spying through the gaps in the crumbling yellow foam that serve as soundproofing. If he peers long enough, the darkened rooms reveal their shapes: the billowing tapestries tacked to the walls and the instruments arranged on cast-off Oriental carpets emerge from murky memory. But when he tries to imagine the particular sounds of the musicians—

  I can’t hear anything. There’s too much quiet.

  He continues down the corridor until he reaches the room where Shaun’s band used to rehearse. It’s remained off-limits since Shaun was murdered and the other members seriously wounded. Florian has avoided coming here for months, dreading this final confirmation of his friend’s death. He’s been encased in a haze of depression, his waking hours smothered by a pervasive grayness, his nights stricken by vivid dreams. The rehearsal door, draped in cascading folds of shiny black fabric, reminds him of a casket.

  * * *

  Florian tries not to think about the farce of Shaun’s funeral, a theatrical spectacle mobbed by ghoulish strangers who barely knew him. They had drifted apart in recent years. After the bassist of the 40 Thieves persuaded Shaun to join his new band, they only spoke when they ran into each other at shows. Florian didn’t know whether it was guilt or love that spurred him to wade through the crowds, past the mayor and city council members, to attend the service. He tried not to focus on how everyone seemed obsessed with positioning themselves as close to the wooden casket as possible, performing some perverse pantomime of public grief. He managed to sit through the severe hymns that reminded him of the tunes his mother used to sing. He struggled to block out the sermon, which sounded like it was written for somebody else. The minister kept stumbling over phrases, perhaps sensing they weren’t right, deepening the disconnect. Halfway through, Florian fled the church to find sanctuary in the bar across the street, figuring that while getting blind and blackout drunk in his old friend’s name wasn’t much, it was still a more fitting memorial.

  * * *

  Next to Shaun’s rehearsal-room door, a newspaper is tacked to the wall. Beneath the local headlines about a possible chemical plant closing and a high school football victory in overtime, there’s a collection of mug shots of the epidemic’s most notorious assassins from across the country. Florian is surprised how many he recognizes by sight. The harelipped boy in the baseball cap who shot the cowgirl singer between the eyes. The bronzed surfer boy who sprayed a spastic volley of bullets at a costumed cover band. The skinny boy who sprang onto the nightclub stage and stabbed the R & B diva. The freckled girl who blew apart the stoner rock trio in the historic auditorium, then sat backstage to wait for the cops. The dreadlocked boy with the backpack full of explosives who stood listening to the street-fair musicians play songs about an endless summer. Somebody’s stuck this paper here in an infantile attempt at a transgressive gesture. Next to it, in what looks like black lipstick, they’ve scrawled the phrase YOU CAN’T KILL KILL. Florian rips down the newsprint and balls it in his fist, but for some reason he can’t bring himself to throw it away.

  * * *

  Florian’s face is twisted into an odd strangulated shape. He has a simian brow, but his minuscule eyes simmer with intelligence. His large expressive mouth seems to conceal a perpetual secret. Essential components of his onstage charisma. His band has been invited to headline a gig at Echo Echo, which has been shuttered since the shooting. It’s a special concert to try to resuscitate the Arcadia music scene. An opportunity to pay a worthy and genuine tribute to Shaun. If only it didn’t mean placing himself in the line of fire. Soon the other members of Florian’s band will arrive, and they’ll have to make a decision. As he navigates the empty hallways to their rehearsal room, he listens to the lonely echo of his footsteps. The crumpled paper in his hand begins to itch.

  I have to do something for Shaun.

  A cockroach squirms on its back. Abdomen exposed, legs madly paddling the air. Florian feels a pang of kinship with the panicked creature. He bends down and flips it over, waiting to see if the stunned insect will regain its composure. Its antennae gingerly probe the air, then it scurries away, vanishing beneath one of the countless darkened doors.

  * * *

  Florian sits in his usual wooden chair in the rehearsal room, unfolds the newspaper, and places it on a music stand. He isn’t sure why, but he needs to take a better look at the smudged faces of the killers. Most people believe the epidemic has fizzled out, but Florian worries more murderers are out there. He can taste the sour residue of stomach acid as he stares at these steely portraits. Each one looks straight past the camera. Fish have more animated eyes.

  * * *

  The most disturbing face is the killer from Arcadia. The boy with the zigza
g scar, wearing a child’s birthday hat, who stood in the wings of the theater and fired his semiautomatic rifle until he’d shot through his ammunition. It happened only a few blocks from here. At his arraignment, with serene and unshifting eyes, the killer faced down the injured audience members, maimed musicians, next of kin. He pled not guilty, claiming extenuating circumstances, giving a rambling speech that few bothered to follow, something about how he felt assaulted by the difference between the music he heard in his head and the music he heard onstage. How the musicians had unleashed something contaminated and contagious upon the audience. He informed the jury: I acted in self-defense.

  * * *

  The Arcadia shooting was only a sliver of the national epidemic, but the tragedy still sank bone deep. The local imagination was stained with its own particularized images of tear-choked faces, victims in bloody T-shirts slumped on the sidewalk, blaring rows of ambulances rushing to the theater, columns of helmeted officers brandishing shotguns and creating a perimeter. There were sprawling memorial services, traumatic school assemblies, swarming influxes of professional grief counselors. A few national journalists flew in to file stories, but mostly the town was left to mourn alone. Its nightmares went unreported, children and parents screaming themselves awake in the chill of the night, their bodies wound in sheets they’d started to rip apart. After a few weeks, a shrine for Shaun spontaneously materialized at the site of the shooting. A teeming assemblage of photographs, homemade scrapbooks, handwritten testimonials. You warped my life in the best ways. Your music will always live on. Your blood is the truth. It was a lucky shot. Stop playing dead. Please watch over us. And there were bouquets of roses. Always roses. The scentless kind wrapped in plastic, bought from the bodega down the street. Behind the shrine, the theater sits empty on the edge of town, cordoned off like a collapsed mine shaft.

  * * *

  A few weeks ago, Florian was unable to sleep and seized by a compulsion to contribute to the shrine. He wanted to place something personal among the sentimental trash piled up by strangers, a totem his dead friend might actually treasure. He arrived at the theater in the obscure hours of the morning carrying a cassette of the first songs that he and Shaun wrote together as kids in his bedroom. In those days, they shared a method for judging music: the more times a song used the word love, the worse it was. As an inside joke, every song on this tape was a love song. Florian slipped the cassette between a teddy bear and a row of votive candles. Even partly obscured, the violet cover stood out. As he walked away, those songs spun round his head, their naïveté almost profound. The recording is colored by Shaun’s enthusiasm, his contagious conviction that all his friends were secret geniuses. The boys trade off vocals, sounding so young that Florian often forgets which voice belongs to which body.

  I still remember all the lyrics: The words we say, they never fade away.

  Florian finds himself obsessively cleaning the rehearsal space. The room is four stark white walls, devoid of personal touches like posters and any adornments apart from a couple of chairs and a rectangle of industrial carpet slid under the drum kit. He collects the few stray candy wrappers and cigarette butts, then grabs the broom. He tries to get lost in the rhythmic whisk of straw across the concrete floor, the dispersal of the clouds of dust that settled during the deserted months. When he reaches the far wall, he listens for some sign of the man who rehearses on the other side. Nobody in the band has seen him, but their schedules are often synched. This solitary phantom has been the subject of much laughter and speculation. They imagine he works either as ticket taker at the shabby independent movie theater or stocks shelves at the lone electronics store. They’ve dubbed him the Shit-Faced Robot because he plays note clusters on an analog synthesizer that constantly tumbles out of tune. Florian hopes he’ll be there today to distract them. He raps his knuckles against the partition, but there’s only a feeble echo. The silence of the screechy soundtrack adds to his unease. Another yawning absence.

  * * *

  Randy the Mongoose enters with his usual greeting. Yo Flo, he says. And Florian replies: Hey Goose. Normally there’s something comforting about this exchange, a shorthand developed several years ago when they formed the band, but today Florian finds it annoying. They haven’t been together in this room for months, yet they’re pretending it’s just another practice. Florian knows he should put away the newspaper, that it’ll probably piss off Randy, but he can’t bring himself to remove it. Neither of them mentions the gig.

  Randy the Mongoose believes there’s no mystery to the epidemic, that the killers are a pack of chemically unbalanced psychopaths. He’s repulsed to see their faces but doesn’t comment on the photos. He refuses to get drawn into it. His bandmates gave him the nickname for his sinuous frame and pointed nose, though he likes to think it’s equally deserved for his discreet cunning.

  Randy sticks to the routine, heading straight for his drum kit, picking up his sticks, testing out a new pattern. He speeds up the tempo, slows it down, adds and subtracts beats, letting himself get lost in the particulars. He pauses to tune the drums, knocking his palm against the Mylar heads and progressively tightening the metal rods, evaluating the depth of each hit.

  * * *

  Florian picks up his electric guitar, strums the strings, and mumbles some phrases over a languid riff. Sounds bad. Reworks the riff and syncopates it. Sounds worse. Hums a wisp of a melody until it shimmers into shape. Sounds like something he’d make fun of another band for playing. Every song he writes these days feels false. He lays the guitar flat across his knees and stares at the newspaper. The vacant expressions loom in judgment. All his friends call the killers zombies, but Florian worries they might be something even more disturbing, true believers in pursuit of some ideal they can feel but can’t name. Perhaps they represent the true essence of the audience. He simply refers to them as fans.

  * * *

  Randy breaks into a drumroll. Their unspoken signal for Florian to add a riff and start jamming. The unofficial launch of rehearsal. Florian looks down at his guitar but can’t even bring himself to plug in his instrument. This ritual they’ve built over the past few years suddenly seems empty. Randy initiates the drumroll twice more, but he doesn’t acknowledge the cue. He’s paralyzed by the memory of Shaun sitting cross-legged on the floor, patiently counting off the openings of their songs because Florian was forever coming in too late. He remains motionless. The beat goes on without him.

  * * *

  Florian feels his temples tighten. A telltale sign a headache looms. When he was younger, stress made his skin break out in red blotches that left him self-conscious. Now his body has escalated to crippling headaches, less visible but more damaging. He takes out a pill bottle and swallows several capsules to ward off the migraine. His mind is a mess these days. He can’t process more than a few moments at a time. He scoops a sandwich off the card table. Roast beef and Swiss cheese on pumpernickel, freshly wrapped in cellophane. Can’t even remember having bought it. Since Shaun’s death, his inner and outer worlds keep slipping further out of synch, invisibly grinding against each other like continental plates. Every item in the rehearsal room is arranged in its customary place, but the space feels entirely alien.

  The epidemic has ruined everything, but everything still seems the same.

  Eddie, who serves as the band’s unofficial manager, appears in the doorway. He stands hunched, pulling at the threads of his tatty cardigan sweater, his stare resolutely trained on his sneakers. It’s a familiar posture that Florian recognizes as meaning that something is up.

  —Echo Echo called again, Eddie says. We have to let them know today about the show.

  He shares the latest information about safety precautions, reciting the litany of the club’s promises. A crack security team comprising prison guards and war veterans. State-of-the-art metal detectors. The latest frisking techniques. His high-pitched stammer betrays a discomfort with the epidemic, as if even speaking about the violence might put the impul
ses back into circulation and start the killings all over again. He doesn’t approve of this gig, but he’s silent after his speech, channeling his energy into cleaning the fishbowl lenses of his enormous eyeglasses.

  * * *

  Florian doesn’t want to be the first to speak. His thoughts are too tangled. He unwraps the sandwich and takes a bite. Revolting tang of horseradish. Still no memory of buying it.

  * * *

  No matter how close he looks at the photographs, he’s unable to chip loose any warnings about the future, not the slightest sliver of portent.

  * * *

  He can’t stop thinking about the emptiness of the eyes.

  * * *

  Uninhabited.

  * * *

  Whistled notes drift in from the hallway. They’re followed by the casually pursed lips of Derek D., a recent addition to the group. The band dandy wasn’t recruited for his punctuality or bass-playing abilities. He’s reliable for his expertly mussed coif, impeccably rumpled clothes, simultaneously scuffed and burnished boots. This afternoon, he sports a shredded black bandanna round his neck.

  —Everybody’s here now, Eddie says. So you guys let me know.

  It takes Derek D. a moment to figure out what he’s talking about. The epidemic has made less of a dent in his psyche. Occasionally he parrots the pundit opinion that the violence in the music itself prompted the killings. Mostly, he shrugs off the entire thing.

  —The show, Derek D. says slowly. I think people are feeling safer and they’re ready for things to get back to normal. There’s been a lot of talk. Everyone seems excited about it. The timing’s finally right, you know?

  Derek D. picks up his electric bass and briefly tests out a pose with it, plucking a few random notes without bothering to plug it in. Satisfied, he sets the instrument down.