The Album of Dr. Moreau

by Daryl Gregory

  “Say what you want about my lyrics, but do not talk about the music that way. You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “I’m sure I don’t, but—”

  “Listen to me! Your average pop song has eight, maybe nine unique sounds—bass, guitar, drums, some synth, and a singer with maybe some backing vocals. And your average boy band adds five voices that need to be in every damn song, and that muscles out the other sounds. They put a lead singer in the middle, put everybody else on three-five interval harmonies, and call it a day.

  “But WyldBoyZ songs? You have no idea. We have all sorts of instrumentals, sometimes ten distinct sounds at once, plus our vocals, all without overlapping frequencies! Drum machines, percussion samples, synth sounds, real instruments—that guitar on ‘One of a Kind’ isn’t a patch, that’s a real lap steel guitar. Just by production value, our songs are more authentic and varied than anything anyone else is putting out. And I haven’t even gotten to the singing!”

  Tim realized he’d risen to his feet, and his toe claws were digging into the carpet. He didn’t fucking care.

  “Devin thinks it’s all about the lead singer, but we put two singers on counterpoint with harmonies, and full group harmonies on the choruses, and it works. Do you think it’s easy to balance our five voices? Tusk sounds like he’s inside a barrel, and Matt blows out our high frequencies—it’s a nightmare in the studio. Then there’s all the interplay. We do these crazy starts and stops on syncopated rhythms, and if any one of us messes that up live, it all falls apart. We’re performing songs with no room for error—while we’re dancing.

  “Think about that chorus in ‘Home’—you ever hear a hard right turn like that in another pop song? One moment we’re singing about loneliness and longing, and then bam, a full-on dance beat for sixteen bars, then back to the ballad! People like you hear that and think, oh, it’s a joke, it’s sloppy. No. No way. Twenty years from now some young musician will put on that track, hear that change, and it will blow their minds.

  “Oh, but let’s talk about the simple one, ‘Deep Down,’ everybody’s goddamn favorite. You know the two gaps before the choruses? We end on a nonfunctional harmony and then go to total silence. That leaves the listener totally high and dry for a full two seconds before the chorus hits. That’s forever in pop music! Fans say it gives them chills, right, because of our beautiful voices or whatever, but really it’s because it was written to make them need the resolution, and then withholds it! You ever hear a whole stadium of teenage girls go dead quiet in the middle of a pop concert? That’s us. That’s what we do.”

  The detectives were staring at him, openmouthed. Kat wore a sad smile.

  Tim thought, Oops, I did it again.

  The fury left his body. He sat down, looked at the empty grub bag. “Anyway. It’s not simple.”

  “I apologize,” Detective Delgado said gently. “I have to admit, I haven’t paid close attention to your music, but I’m sure my daughter has. She’s already more of a musician than I am.”

  “Go on,” Tim said. “Ask your questions.”

  “I was just wondering if it was possible you lost control a bit when you argued with Dr. M.”

  “I may have scratched him,” Tim said.

  “Tim . . . ,” Kat said in a warning voice.

  “It’s okay,” he said to her. “I can do this.” He took off his glasses and rubbed them on his shirt. “What do you want to know?”

  “Did you break the skin?”

  “I don’t know. I know I tore his shirt.”

  “When you got back to the room did you notice any blood on . . . yourself?”

  “You can just say claws,” Tim said. “And no.”

  “Have you ever fought with Dr. M before? Physically or verbally?”

  “I don’t say much to him. I mean, I didn’t.”

  “But you didn’t like him.”

  “Nobody liked him,” Tim said. “He’s a hybrid, too—ten percent human, ninety percent scumbag. He was conning us from the beginning.”

  “Let’s talk about the beginning, then,” Delgado said. “How did you meet Dr. M?”

  “He wasn’t Dr. M when I met him,” Tim said.

  * * *

  And the boys weren’t the WyldBoyZ. They were refugees. Monster refugees.

  Tim told the detectives how the five of them had spent more than two weeks crammed together on the lifeboat, lost in the Pacific, no help in sight. They were all exhausted, Tusk especially. The motor wouldn’t start, so Tusk had pulled them away from the burning barge using a line looped around his neck, paddling and paddling, mostly submerged with only his trunk above the water. For the first two days he spent hours in the water, pulling them east, toward South America. That stopped when the sharks arrived. From that point on, the boys spent most of the day under a tarp, out of the harsh sun. Matt’s skin was cracking, Devin’s hair was falling out in clumps, and even Bobby had stopped talking. And what did Tim do to help them? Nothing. He spent all his time, day and night, curled into a ball. A coward.

  Tusk made sure they rationed the water, which lasted until Day Fifteen. On Day Seventeen, an Ecuadoran fishing boat spotted them. The crew took one look at them and refused to allow them on board. They thought the animals would attack. But they did lower a bucket of water and a bag of cat food. That’s when Devin stood up and, in his dehydration-cracked voice, began swearing at them. The crew didn’t have a lot of English, but they knew the essentials, such as “goddamn” and “motherfuckers.” The crew laughed uproariously. They never allowed the boys onto their boat, but the food got better.

  The fishermen towed them east for two days and cut them loose at Isla Isabella. “Oh my God,” Matt had said. “We’re in the Galápagos Islands. This is where Darwin figured out evolution.”

  “Why are you laughing?” Tim asked.

  “Because a hundred years ago, we could have fucked his shit up.”

  The Galápagos, as far as Tim was concerned, were hell. The newspeople had found them, and the boys were harassed every waking minute and many of the sleeping ones. A hotel was putting them up for free and let them eat in the restaurant as long as they allowed tourists to photograph them. On the third day the foreign press descended, and soon the boys were on BBC, and then CNN and National Geographic. The boys knew most of the news personalities; they’d had not much to do on the barge except watch television, and most of television was American.

  The boys were on a satellite feed with Katie Couric, America’s Sweetheart, when they accidentally changed their lives. Katie asked them how they kept their spirits up while they were imprisoned on the ship, and Bobby said, “Whenever I’m feeling sad, I simply remember my favorite things.”

  “You mean like the song?”

  “How did you know? Singing is our favorite thing!”

  Then Katie asked them to sing something. Of course it came out in five-part harmony, because that’s the way they’d learned every song.

  The next morning, a large, very sweaty man sat down at their table. The tourists never did this—they took tons of pictures but always stayed well back, as if the boys might at any moment charge and tear out their throats. The intruder smiled broadly and extended a hand to each of them. “I’m Maury Bendix,” he said. “And I’m going to make you rich and famous.”

  Tim groaned. Tusk said, “We don’t want to be famous.”

  “We don’t?” Devin said.

  “How about rich?” Bobby asked.

  “Fuck off, Maury Bendix,” Matt said in a cheery voice.

  “Hear me out,” Maury said. He took a napkin from Tim’s place setting and mopped his brow. “Jesus Christ, is it humid here.”

  “Please leave the table,” Tusk said. He’d lost weight during the two weeks at sea, but he was still formidable.

  “Let me ask you a question,” Maury said. “What are you going to do when the CIA comes for you?”

  “Why would the CIA come for us?” Tusk asked. But Tim had already be
en worried about just such an eventuality.

  “There’s no one else like you,” Maury said. “You’re crazy genetic mix-’em-ups! I heard your story, that whole thing about growing up on some fucking secret science barge run by evil scientists and whatnot. There’s not more of you, right? No more on the boat?”

  Tim winced. Tusk said, “No. Not anymore.”

  “Which goes to my point—you’re unique! You think the other governments don’t want to get a hand on you? Take you apart to see how you work?”

  “That’s what I’ve been saying,” Tim said.

  “Listen to the armadillo,” Maury said. “It’s a rough world out there. The only way to protect yourself—the only way—is to be so famous and so rich that they can’t touch you. You have to be beloved, and right fucking now!”

  “Beloved sounds good,” Devin asked. “How do we do that?”

  “I manage bands. Music groups. You can become the biggest thing the world’s ever seen, just by using your God-given talents.”

  “I don’t think God gave us those,” Matt said.

  Maury ignored him. “We gotta get you a name—I’ve been working on some ideas on the plane. What do you think of Doctor Darwin and the Zoo Crew? I’m just spitballin’, the name is flexible. But we really gotta decide your personas. You, cat boy, you’re obviously the cute one, I want to hug you right now. Who’s the funny one?”

  “Personas?” Tusk asked.

  “Okay, we’ll figure the rest of you out on the flight back,” Maury said. “The key thing is to nail down the marketing message before the first press conference on dry land.”

  “You can fly us to the United States?” Tusk asked.

  “Of course! I’m your manager! They’re going to love you, it’s going to be like the Beatles landing at Kennedy. Nobody’s really famous until they’re famous in America.”

  “Like King Kong,” Matt said.

  “Exactly! Now here’s the thing—do you have any original songs? Anything we can work with?”

  Everyone looked at Tusk.

  “We may have one or two recordings.”

  “Fantastic! Let’s hear ’em.”

  Maury loved the music, but the flight never happened. He didn’t know who to bribe to get them Ecuadoran passports, and because the boys had no ID and their legal status was highly questionable, US passports were out of the question. They sat in that hotel for three weeks while Maury called embassies, arranged interviews, and sent pleading emails to record companies. Unfortunately, no one could think of a band name that met Maury’s three criteria: It had to sound exciting to ten-year-old girls, it had to hit the animal theme, and it had to be an unused trademark.

  “I won’t do it,” Devin said sometime at the start of Week Four. “I won’t be a part of any band that has an animal in the name.”

  “Right,” Matt said. “We’re not the Beatles. Or the Beastie Boys. Or the Animals.”

  Tim lay curled up under the coffee table. He was so tired of the talking.

  Tusk said, “What’s the top one on our list?”

  Paper rustled. Bobby said, “Boys 2 Animals.”

  “That’ll get us sued,” Matt said.

  “And it’s not scientifically accurate,” Tusk said. “We didn’t start as boys. Our genetic structure—”

  “This is demeaning,” Devin said. “It’s not our genetic structure that sets us apart, it’s our singing. Our harmonies. Who we are in our souls. Names don’t matter.”

  “Devin’s right. We shouldn’t even have a name—people should just know.”

  “Fuck you, Matt.”

  “It’ll be like the Black Album,” Matt said.

  “You mean the White Album,” Tusk said.

  “Nope.”

  “We’re not animals or humans,” Devin said. “We’re all things! Animal, human, white, Black . . .”

  “Wait, are we white or Black?” Bobby asked.

  “Race is a construct,” Tusk said.

  “You mean like a robot?”

  “Yes, Bobby,” Matt said. “Race is a robot.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” Devin said earnestly. “Who’s more constructed than we are? We’re all races, and we are all—”

  “I don’t see color,” Matt said.

  “Bullshit,” Devin said.

  “Literally, I don’t see color.”

  “Tim, what do you think? Tim? Helloooo.”

  “Please don’t knock on my shell, Bobby.”

  “Give us an idea for a name. I was thinking Furr-Evah. Two r’s and an ‘evaaaah.’”

  Devin groaned.

  “Two of us don’t have fur,” Tusk said.

  “It’s a metaphor!” Bobby said.

  “The name doesn’t matter,” Tim said. “None of this matters.”

  Tusk said, “In some ways the name doesn’t matter. The Beach Boys didn’t surf, and yet—”

  “How about Souls?” Devin said. “No! The Naked Souls.”

  “—their music transcended labels and content. Mozart by any other name would still be Mozart.”

  “That was his stage name,” Matt said. “He was born Amadeus Buttlicker.”

  “I do not lick my butt!” Bobby shouted.

  “Dude,” Devin said. “We’ve all seen it.”

  Maury had stepped into the room. “Boys! Listen up! We have a plan—I figured out how to get you across the border. Plus! We have a bus and we’re driving to the US of A. This is our driver.”

  No one spoke for five seconds.

  Now Tim was curious. He slowly unrolled, and the clacking noise seemed to fill the room. A short, tattooed woman in blue coveralls stood next to Maury. Tim raised his hand and said, “Hi.”

  “What do you know,” the woman said. “A talking pangolin.”

  * * *

  “And that’s how we came to America,” Tim said.

  “Typical immigrant story,” Kat said. Detective Banks laughed. She said, “They changed their band name a dozen times during the bus ride. I made the mistake of mentioning the Moreau novel, and that was the one thing Maury wouldn’t let go of.”

  “The last adaptation was terrible,” Banks said. “Forget Val Kilmer—give me Burt Lancaster or Charles Laughton any day.”

  “How did Dr. M get you across the border?” Delgado asked.

  “This is embarrassing,” Tim said.

  “Exotic animal license,” Kat said. “They came as property. Also a typical immigrant story.”

  “It caused a lot of problems, later,” Tim said. “The contract we signed with Maury was not enforceable, because we weren’t considered human beings. It wasn’t until the Alabama thing that this all came out.”

  “The bestiality case against Devin?” Banks asked.

  “Everything was evidence,” Tim said. “The contracts, the animal license, the shipping invoices. The DA found everything.”

  Detective Delgado said, “And that’s when you realized Dr. M was ripping you off?”

  “Right. But suddenly he had to testify that he’d misled the US government, or else Devin would be declared an animal—”

  “You’d all be declared animals,” Kat said.

  “And then the band would be over. So then he had to pay us according to the contract.”

  “And even that contract was fucking egregious,” Kat added, “I told the boyz so. Yes, they got millions, but there’s millions more that Maury was hiding. I told them they ought to sue.”

  “Did Dr. M suspect you’d been helping the band?” Banks asked her.

  “Oh yeah, he knew at the end. I didn’t fucking care. I’m exhausted. I’ve spent seven years on a bus with a bunch of bickering teenagers. Forget everything else, just imagine the smells.”

  Tim already knew she felt this way, but it still hurt to hear. Kat noticed him cringing. “Aw, Timmy, you know I love the band. But I’m ready to move on.”

  “That’s too bad,” Delgado said. “It seems like you’ve been the glue holding them together. Tusk says you’
ve done almost every job for them, down to sorting the mail.”

  “Ah fuck. I suppose I have. No wonder I’m tired.”

  “Did Dr. M receive any hate mail? Anything from someone who might wish him harm? Threats, email . . .”

  “Only every fucking day,” Kat said. “Mostly from what Dr. M called backstreet bitches.”

  “What now?” Banks asked.

  “Sorry—his name for fans of other bands. Dr. M did an interview where he cast aspersions on some of the competition, and since then he’s been a target. Stupid thing to do, no percentage in it, but that’s the way he was.”

  “Any of this mail stand out?” Delgado asked.

  “Like, ‘I’m going to dress up and murder you in bed’? We have a team of people handling the mail now, but any specific and credible threat we flag for the lawyers at our label, and they alert the police if they feel the need. I can give you the numbers of the people who handle that shit.”

  “Now would be good,” Delgado said. She picked up something from the carpet with two fingers and dropped it into a bag. “You mind if I use your bathroom for a second? I want to wash my hands.”

  “Right around there,” Tim said.

  Delgado went around the corner and a few seconds later shut the bathroom door. Kat found the first name in her contacts and read off the number to Banks. Tim began to feel uncomfortable with all these strangers in his room. He thought, Maybe I could slowly ease back behind these cushions. . . .

  Delgado came back out. “Thanks for that. I’ll try to leave you alone—you look as tired as I am. How’d you sleep last night?”

  “Me?” Tim said. “Fine. I mean, the same. I’ve only had a few good nights since this tour started.”

  “I know what you mean,” Delgado said. “I work nights and I have trouble. A kid at home, daytime noise, all that. I use a sleep mask and earplugs sometimes. I was thinking, maybe I need to make myself a cave out of couch cushions.”

  “It’s a poor substitute,” Tim said.

  “For what?” she asked.

  “A real cave,” Tim said. That should have been obvious. “Or at least a good hole. When we were recording the first album, we were staying at Dr. M’s house and he let me dig in his backyard. There’s nothing better than a cool, dark burrow.”