Destroy All Monsters

by Jeff Jackson

  * * *

  Something stops the band from reaching for the amp. A noise emanating from backstage. The sound resembles static-tape hiss. Then, a throbbing exotic beat. Finally, it’s revealed as the actual and unmistakable sobs of a human being. A sort of convulsive aria.

  * * *

  It’s as if the wailing is trapped in the walls, embedded in the pores of the theater, broadcasting on a frequency to which they’re only now attuned. The hiccupping cry becomes more strangulated and increasingly anguished. It transforms into something feral and furious. A lacerating howl that refuses to dissipate. Transmitting in ever-widening sets of ripples.

  * * *

  Through the billowing red curtains, a girl emerges at the back of the stage. Her face floats through the feeble light. Cheeks runny with mascara. Lips ensnarled. Eyes wild.

  This bedraggled wraith stumbles a few steps forward, then stops as soon as she spots the boys. Each is bewildered by the other’s presence. The band is unsure how to react.

  —We should leave, Eddie whispers. Right now.

  Nobody moves. The band has invaded a moment so private, it feels like they’ve managed to break into somebody else’s dream.

  * * *

  The woman’s features come into focus. Her skin is unusually pale, lunar and luminous. There’s something coltish about her, from the enormous eyes to the flared nostrils. She cradles a white dress that resembles a uniform, except the skirt and sleeves have been shredded. The cuts look controlled, splitting the fabric into savagely even strips. At her side, she grips a steel paring knife. The boys’ apprehensive reaction prompts her to examine these objects. The woman acts surprised to be holding them. She lets them both drop and they’re swallowed by the shadows.

  * * *

  Florian finally recognizes the woman. The shaved sides of her head culminate in a messy patch of blonde hair. Her ramshackle style can’t disguise her attractive features. The curves of her body are barely concealed beneath a baggy purple sweater. As she scrubs the mascara from her eyes with a few deft strokes of her palm, her face hardens. She teeters in place, arms hugging ribs, holding herself together.

  Florian has known her for years from various shows and backstage scenarios where she typically kept to herself. He can only recall a handful of cursory conversations with her. There was always an unspoken static between them, and they steered clear of each other’s orbit. They’re the two people who knew Shaun best, and maybe that’s what kept them apart. Even at the funeral, he didn’t have an opportunity to offer his condolences.

  She was Shaun’s girlfriend.

  * * *

  Florian would like to ask Xenie about the shredded uniform and the paring knife, but he realizes this isn’t the time. He hangs back in the deepest shadows of the stage and keeps his mouth shut.

  —What are you guys doing here? Xenie says. Looking for mementos from the fallen rock star? Don’t you know it’s bad luck to steal from the dead?

  She shapes fingers into tiny fists. Spittle collects in the corners of her lips. She’s a mix of twitching vulnerability and truculent hostility. A startled doe with a foaming mouth.

  —Or do you just get off on watching girls cry? she says.

  * * *

  Randy the Mongoose flattens his bristly hair and steps forward. We were Shaun’s friends, he says. We all hung out in the Bunker. We played some of the same shows as his band. Eddie tugs at Randy’s arm, trying to get him to back off, but he continues to talk. We came for that green amp, he says. Shaun and the guys borrowed it from us.

  Xenie looks like she doesn’t understand. She squints in Randy’s direction as if a clearer view of his features will fine-tune the translation of his words.

  —You’re fucking kidding me, she says.

  —It is ours, Derek D. says.

  —Just get out of here, she says. Leave me alone. Please.

  * * *

  Florian moves into the murky light, whiskey bottle clutched to his chest. He reminds himself Xenie’s been more deeply affected than any of them and keeps his thoughts centered on Shaun. When he speaks, his voice is faint and frayed.

  —I’m sorry, Xenie, Florian says. I was at the show. It was awful.

  He can’t tell how she’s received his words. She looks down at her black boots and scours away the residue of makeup with the hem of her sweater. When she turns back to Florian, her resolute stare is utterly undone.

  * * *

  Florian looks closer. He’s pierced by Xenie’s dirt-encrusted purple sweater. This shabby item once belonged to Shaun. Her pained expression is also familiar, a battered reflection of his own emotions, and he realizes they might share more than he imagined.

  —I keep having dreams about Shaun, he says.

  —We were best friends when we were kids, he says, but the dreams are never about those times.

  —I always see him singing the opening number from that night, he says. I hear the way his voice fills the theater when he gets to the chorus.

  —Maybe you’ve been having those same dreams, he says.

  When I close my eyes at night, my hands shine with Shaun’s blood.

  Florian is confused by Xenie’s reaction. She simmers with resentment. Taking a few tentative steps toward him, she thrusts her face forward and talks through bared teeth.

  —Don’t talk to me about that night, she says. Don’t talk to me about that show. You think you know my dreams? You don’t know anything about me.

  —But I know something about you, she says. You wish you were the one who was famous. You’re upset you didn’t get shot in the head.

  —Take your amp, she says. I don’t care anymore.

  Xenie flees the stage, her sprinting feet reverberating through the theater’s unseen chambers.

  * * *

  Derek D. lets loose a high whistle. That’s one cracked bitch, he says, half in contempt and half in amazement.

  The others look away from Florian as he glares at the red curtain, its folds still rippling from her exit. Bitch is right, he mutters. He can’t believe he felt sorry for Xenie. He could never understand what Shaun saw in her. She’s as arrogant as he always suspected.

  —Come on, Randy says. Let’s grab the amp and get the hell out of here. He picks up the vintage machine by the handle, grunting at its surprising weight.

  Florian lingers on the stage. He kneels to pick up the paring knife and turns it over in his palm, testing the sharpness of the steel blade. A reminder of Shaun’s penchant for collecting complicated friends. Outsiders who nurse a perpetual grudge against the world. Of course, some people take it too far.

  He realizes the knife lies in the precise spot where Shaun stood that night. Florian raps his knuckles against the platform and is greeted by a hollow echo. There’s a fissure in the floorboards and he presses his index finger into the hole, pushing straight through the stage, until he can almost touch the emptiness.

  If Shaun was in my place, there would be no question.

  He’d play the show. He’d do it for me.

  The band retraces their steps, sticking to the rutted trails they blazed through the trash, their eyes focused on the glow produced by their phones. Florian follows their dim beacons through the darkness. He holds his breath through the waves of sickly smells. He wonders if the dust particles from that night could have fermented, becoming an airborne form of contagion.

  —Hurry up, Randy shouts. His panicked words rebound against the walls, adding to the urgency.

  The band finds themselves running, tumbling into the rubbish, dashing blindly toward the office. It’s as if they’ve removed something load bearing that they fear will compromise the stability of the entire structure.

  * * *

  The unseen bird starts to chirp. A succession of notes without human inflection. Its song untranslatable.

  * * *

  As they slink down the sidewalk, a fresh contribution to the shrine flaps in the breeze. A colored-pencil drawing of the town’s historic emblem: a s
tag in a meadow with a golden crown hovering above its antlers.

  Across the street, a police officer stares at the band. He leans against a parked patrol car with his boots crossed, hands cradling his mirrored sunglasses, intently chewing gum. There’s a sadness to his posture as he evaluates the boys, weighing his options, deciding whether they should be treated as potential thieves caught trespassing.

  The band halts. Randy slides the amp behind his back. The others wait to see what will happen, but Florian marches straight toward the officer. You spare some gum? he asks. The cop hesitates, then puts on his mirrored sunglasses, concealing his eyes. He holds out a shiny foil pack. Florian removes a stick, unpeels the silver paper, and pops it in his mouth. He thanks the officer and heads down the street, not waiting for the others to fall in behind. Once they’re out of sight, Florian spits on the pavement.

  —I hate grape, he says.

  His saliva has a violet tinge.

  * * *

  Florian shouts his name, but Eddie is nowhere in sight. He must have slipped away in the theater when things got awkward, Florian says, shaking his head as they cross the railroad tracks. He hates that sort of confrontation. He’s too sensitive.

  —I used to be that way, Derek D. says. My stepbrother was a bully and I was always hiding from him. I never stood up for myself. One day, he slammed my head into a metal door and ran away laughing. There was this huge gash and it bled like crazy.

  He sweeps the hair from his forehead to showcase a faint sliver of scar tissue.

  —I used my shirt to soak up all the blood, Derek D. continues. I held it against my head until the thing was drenched. Then I stuffed the bloody shirt under the covers of my stepbrother’s bed so he’d find it that night and freak out.

  Randy and Florian look startled by this revelation, but Derek D. continues in the same unflustered tone, as if he’s reporting the weather.

  —You don’t have to fight, he says, but you do have to send a message.

  * * *

  As they enter the Bunker, Florian looks down at his hands and realizes he’s no longer clutching the whiskey bottle from the shrine.

  Maybe the memorials don’t mean shit

  until we add our bodies to the pyre.

  Without discussing it, they set up for rehearsal. Florian wipes away the layer of dust from his amp before turning it on. It’s no coincidence this machine and the tattoo of his mother’s initial share the exact shade of emerald green. She was the only person he allowed to call him by his real name. He wonders what she would’ve thought about playing this concert. He shuts his eyes and tries to summon her words of advice. For a startling second, he hears it. Not his mother’s words but her voice, not recalled but actually heard, that slight and lilting lisp.

  * * *

  Florian experiments with each of the amp’s dials. There isn’t one that can alleviate the weight of playing a worthy show for Shaun. His sound still isn’t quite right, but there are no more settings left to try.

  * * *

  Nobody talks during the cacophony of tuning instruments and adjusting levels. Randy revisits the earlier drum pattern and slows it down, as if in a reverie. Derek D. refashions his bandanna to a rakish angle and experiments with half-remembered riffs from the last time they practiced. Their noises gradually intertwine, bathing them in a brace of dissonance. Florian detects something budding. He prowls the edges of the room, listening with eyelids shut and lips pursed. He increases the volume on Derek D.’s amp until the bass frequencies thrum through their bones. He taps Randy’s cymbal with his fingers, prompting the drummer to play a terse martial rhythm. Florian launches into a hiccupping riff, his tall body twitching in time to the racket, channeling the sound like a conductor’s baton. The barrage escalates, locked into an improbable groove, cresting toward an ecstatic din. At its peak, Florian wrings a series of keening phrases from his guitar. He lets the notes sustain, and drift, and slowly decay. He stops and signals Derek D. to wind down. Then he motions to Randy, who shifts into a decelerating drumroll, escorting the wash of sound as it ebbs from the room.

  * * *

  Florian is encouraged, though he knows those moments are almost impossible to repeat. He unplugs his guitar and listens to the faint plink of raindrops against the Bunker’s roof. They tap out an irregular rhythm, a spattering with sudden surges. A storm blows through the streets, past the empty theater, soaking the huddled contents of the shrine. Even nestled at the back, the cassette of Shaun and Florian’s music won’t be immune to the weather. The edges of the violet label will dampen and curl, warping the handwritten titles. Florian thinks about how fast things have changed. He’s confident nobody would want to hear those tunes now. The epidemic has made love songs irrelevant.

  The boy with the revolver enters the warehouse,

  winding through the labyrinthine hallways,

  past one empty practice room after another,

  tracking the source of the music.

  Florian walks over to the newspaper. He methodically rips up the assortment of mug shots, letting the fragments sift through his fingers and flutter into the trash can. One of the tattered images lands on the concrete floor. His bandmates are awaiting some word about the concert, but he can’t bring himself to look away from the acne-scarred boy in the sweatshirt. The boy whose gun accidentally discharged and blew off his own foot before he could injure anyone else. Like a handful of other killers, this boy was a musician. The usual excuses for his violence don’t seem to apply. He wasn’t jealous of the band. He didn’t feel left out. But still, his faraway stare is the same as the others’. Florian previously assumed this would-be assassin was acting out of blind idiot hatred, but now he wonders if maybe, like a few crackpots claim, the boy was motivated by some misguided love of music. He’s transfixed by the boy’s absolute inexpression. As he replugs his guitar into the amp, he’s seized by a desire to translate what’s behind those glassy eyes. He’s haunted by a premonition that the concert will be meaningless until he can connect with the exact level of that fathomless blankness.

  THE BIRDS

  Daybreak. A solitary bird, perched in a grove on the edge of town, carries on a multipart melody. Three notes, each lower than the last, repeated in a halting rhythm. There are many songbirds in this area, but this one sounds like a sparrow. House sparrow? Russet sparrow? Parrot-billed sparrow? No, hold on, this bird is a white-throated sparrow. The creature puffs its breast and extends its chin. It unleashes a series of insistent trills. The song reprises with small variations, surges in volume and ornamental fillips. It’s tempting to read some emotion into the furrowed yellow patches over the sparrow’s eyes. Is she watching over her nest? Is she calling to her child? There’s a long pause, an uninflected silence, maybe a calculated rest in the sparrow’s composition. Then the song resumes its strange beckoning. If only there was some way to get inside these sounds, to use this music to send you a message of my own.

  chapter two

  THE EQUALS

  XENIE HEADS STRAIGHT FOR THE WOODS. She strides purposefully across the empty expanse of the theater parking lot. Her tears have evaporated, but her breath retains a slight wheeze. She tries to smooth her tufts of blonde hair and knock the crumbs from her crusty purple sweater. In the haze of twilight, she can barely distinguish the jagged tops of the trees ahead. She should stick to the streets, but it’s quicker to cut through the forest on the edge of town. It offers the added benefit of being a haven for unstable homeless, the site of gruesome rapes, a dumping ground for stolen corpses. This fits her mood perfectly. Charcoal clouds loom overhead. Moisture saturates the air. Encroaching thunder clatters. Let it come down.

  * * *

  Xenie sings to herself, a gently soaring tune, half recalled and half invented. She’s barely aware of this reflex, this old pleasure she can’t seem to suppress. The closer she gets to the darkened opening of the woods, the louder her voice grows. The multipart melody emboldens her to continue. She’s beguiled by her own siren song
.

  * * *

  Somebody calls out behind her. Xenie stops singing, shoves fists in pockets, and quickens the pace. Her eyes fixed straight ahead. Soon a boy is running beside her.

  —Hold up, the boy says.

  It’s one of the guys who broke into the theater. The skinny one with enormous glasses. He’s waving something at her. In its ragged way, it resembles a white flag.

  Xenie stops and snatches it away from him. She examines the bundle of white cloth with a twinge of revulsion, as if it’s coated in unknown secretions.

  —Thanks, she says. I wasn’t finished shredding it.

  The boy blushes. He must be seeing the outfit’s frayed strips for the first time. The precise patchwork of energetic cuts, sawed and jagged.

  * * *

  He says: Sorry about what happened back there. I told them it was wrong to break in, but sometimes they’re real pricks.

  He says: We were all really shook up about, you know, his death.

  He says: You’re his girlfriend, right?

  —I was, Xenie says.

  Don’t say his name. I can’t stand to hear

  another one of you say his name.

  Xenie starts walking again to reset the rhythm of her thoughts. There’s the sound of her boots scuffing the asphalt. The deepening sky. The beckoning woods. The boy lagging a few paces behind.

  —Where are you going? he says.

  —Home.

  —Those woods can be dangerous, he says. I could give you a ride.

  —That sounds a whole lot safer. No thanks.