The Last Days Page 2

  “But why?” I asked softly.

  “I don’t know, but right before she threw the Strat out she was holding it the right way. The way you really hold a guitar.” He put his hands in air-guitar position, his left fingers playing delicate scales along an imaginary neck.

  “Not like some model in a video,” I murmured. “That drives me crazy.”

  “Yeah.” He paused, then shrugged. “So it was her guitar. And she looked sad up there, not angry. Like someone losing everything she had.”

  Whoa. This guy was totally lateral, like he knew something he wasn’t saying. “Wait. You’re just guessing, right?”

  “Yeah.” He opened his hands and looked down at his palms. “Just looked that way to me.”

  “Well, then . . .” I put my hand on the plaid bundle between us. “If she wanted to throw it out, it’s not like we stole it.”

  He stared at me.

  “What?” I said. “You want to take it back and toss it on the pile?”

  He shook his head. “No. Someone else would take it. And they’d carry it around unprotected, pretend they were playing it.” He shuddered.

  “Exactly!” I smiled. “What’s your name anyway?”

  “Moz.”

  I must have made an uncomprehending expression.

  “Short for ‘Mosquito,’” the guy said.

  “Oh, of course.” He was kind of small, like I am. Have you ever noticed that small people are cuter? Like dolls. “My name’s Pearl. Not short for anything, despite its shortness.”

  Moz pulled his serious face. “So, Pearl, don’t you think she might want her guitar back after she . . .” His voice drifted off.

  “Comes back from wherever they lock her up?”

  He nodded, and I wondered if he knew I didn’t mean the generic “they” who lock crazy people up, but the two angels we’d seen on the fire escape. Did he understand what was happening to the world? Most people seemed to know even less than I did—all they saw were the garbage piling up and the extra rats, didn’t even notice the rumbling underfoot. But this guy talked like he could sense things, at least.

  “We could find out who she is,” he said. “Maybe ask someone in her building.”

  “And hang on to it for her?”

  “Yeah. I mean, if it was just some crappy guitar it wouldn’t matter, but this . . .” His eyes got sparkly again, like the thought of a homeless Strat was going to make him cry.

  And right then I had my brain-flash: the realization that had been screaming for my attention since I’d seen Moz running to catch the Stratocaster bare-handed. Maybe this was the guy I needed, a guy with raw heart, ready to throw himself under a falling Fender because it was vintage and irreplaceable.

  Maybe Moz was what I’d been waiting for since Nervous System had exploded.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ll keep it for her. But at my place.” I put my arm around the bundle.

  “Your place?”

  “Sure. After all, why should I trust you? You might go and pawn it. Three or four thousand dollars for you, when it was my idea to use the bedspread.”

  “But I’m the one who wants to give it back,” he sputtered cutely. “A second ago you were all, ‘It’s not stealing.’”

  “Maybe that’s what you want me to think.” I pushed my glasses up my nose. “Maybe that was just a cover for your devious plans.” It hurt to see his wounded expression, because I was being totally unfair. Moz might have been lateral, but I could already tell that he was nine kinds of nondevious.

  “But . . . you were just . . .” He made a strangled noise.

  I hugged the Strat closer. “Of course, you could come over and play it anytime. We could play together. Are you in a band?”

  “Yeah.” His wary eyes didn’t leave the bedspread. “Half a band anyway.”

  “Half a band?” I smiled, knowing now that my brain-flash had been right on target. “A band in need of completion? Maybe this is fate.”

  He shook his head. “We’ve already got two guitarists.”

  “What else?”

  “Um, just two guitarists.”

  I laughed. “Listen, a drummer and a bass player is half a band. Two guitarists is just a . . .” He frowned, so I didn’t finish. “Anyway, I play keyboards.”

  “You do?” He shook his head. “So how do you know so much about guitars? I mean, you called the year on that Strat when it was still in the air!”

  “Lucky guess.” And, of course, I do play guitar. And keyboards too, and flute and xylophone and a wicked-mean harmonica—there’s practically nothing I don’t play. But I figured out a while back not to say that out loud; everyone thinks we nonspecialists are amateurs. (Tell that to the nonspecialist currently known as Prince.) I also never show off my perfect pitch or mention the name of my high school.

  His dark and gorgeous eyes narrowed. “Are you sure you don’t play guitar?”

  I laughed. “I never said that. But trust me, I absolutely play keyboards. How’s tomorrow?”

  “But, um, how do you even know we’d . . .” He took a breath. “I mean, like, what are your—?”

  “Uh!” I interrupted. “Not that word!” If he asked me what my influences were, the whole thing was off.

  He shrugged. “You know what I mean.”

  I sighed through clenched teeth. How was I supposed to explain that I was in too much of a hurry to give a damn? That there were more important things to worry about? That the world didn’t have time for labels anymore?

  “Look, let’s say you hated graves, okay?”

  “Hated graves?”

  “Yeah, detested tombs. Loathed sepulchers. Abhorred anyplace anyone was buried. Understand?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  I let out a groan. Mozzy was being very nonlateral all of a sudden. “Hypothetically hated graves.”

  “Um, okay. I hate graves.” He put on a grave-hating face.

  “Excellent. Perfect. But you’d still go to the Taj Mahal, wouldn’t you?” I spread my hands in explanatory triumph.

  “Um, I’d go where?”

  “The Taj Mahal! The most beautiful building in the world! You know all those Indian restaurants around the corner, the murals on the walls?”

  He nodded slowly. “Yeah, I know the one you mean: lots of arches, a pond out front, with kind of an onion on top?”

  “Exactly. And gorgeous.”

  “I guess. And somebody’s buried there?”

  “Yeah, Moz, some old queen. It’s a total tomb. But you don’t suddenly think it’s ugly, just because of its category, do you?”

  His expression changed from tomb-hating to lateral-thinking. “So, in other words . . .” Brief pause. “You don’t mind if you’re in a band that plays alternative death-metal< cypherfunk, as long as it’s the Taj Mahal of alternative death-metal cypherfunk. Right?”

  “Exactly!” I cried. “You guys can worry about the category. All the death metal you want. Just be good at it.” I picked up the Stratocaster, wrapped it tighter. “How’s tomorrow? Two o’clock.”

  He shrugged. “Okay, I guess. Let’s give it a shot. Maybe keyboards are what we need.”

  Or maybe I am, I thought, but out loud I just told him my buzzer number, pointing across the street. “Oh, and two more questions, Moz.”

  “Sure?”

  “One: do you guys really play death-metal cypherfunk?”

  He smiled. “Don’t worry. That was hypothetical death-metal cypherfunk.”

  “Phew,” I said, trying not to notice how that little smile had made him even cuter. Now that we were going to jam together, it didn’t pay to notice things like that. “Question two: does your half a band have a name?”

  He shook his head. “Nope.”

  “No problem,” I said. “That’ll be the easy part.”

  3. POISONBLACK

  -MOZ-

  The next day, Zahler and I saw our first black water.

  We’d just met outside my building, on our way to Pearl’s. A gang
of kids across the street was gathered around a fire hydrant, prying at it with a two-foot wrench, hoping to get some relief from the early afternoon heat. Zahler stopped to watch, like he always did when kids were doing anything more or less illegal.

  “Check it out!” He grinned, pointing at a convertible coming down the street. If the hydrant erupted in the next ten seconds, the unwitting driver was going to get soaked.

  “Watch your guitar,” I said. We were twenty feet away, but you never knew how much pressure was lurking in a hydrant on a hot summer day.

  “It’s protected, Moz,” he said, but he stood the instrument case upright behind himself. I felt empty-handed, headed to a jam session with nothing but a few guitar picks in my pocket. My fingers were itching to play their first notes on the Strat.

  We were sort of late, but the car was a BMW, its driver in a suit and tie and talking on his cell phone. Back when Zahler and I had been little, soaking a guy like that would have been worth about ten thousand fire-hydrant points. We could spare ten seconds.

  But the kids were still fiddling as the convertible passed.

  “Incompetent little twerps.” Zahler sighed. “Should we give them a hand?”

  “It’s already after two.” I turned and headed up the street.

  But as I walked I heard the cries behind us change from squeals of excitement to shrieks of fear.

  We spun around. The hydrant was spraying black water in all directions, covering the kids with a sticky, shimmering coat. A thick, dark mist rose into the air, breaking the sunlight into a gleaming spectrum, like a rainbow on an oil slick. The screaming kids were stumbling back, bare skin glistening with the stuff. A couple of the little ones just stood in the torrent, crying.

  “What the hell?” Zahler whispered.

  I took a step forward, but the smell—earthy and fetid and rotten—forced me to a halt. The dark cloud was still rising up between the buildings, roiling like smoke overhead, and the wind was shifting toward us. Tiny black dots began to spatter the street, closer and closer, like a sudden summer rain starting up. Zahler and I backed away, staring down at the pavement. The drops were as luminous as tiny black pearls.

  The hydrant seemed to cough once, the gush of black water sputtering, and then the water turned clear. Above us, the cloud was already dissolving, turning into nothing more than a shadowy haze across the sky.

  I knelt on the sidewalk, peering down at one of the black drops. It glimmered unsteadily for a moment, reflecting sunlight as the shadow from the cloud overhead faded. And then it boiled away before my eyes.

  “What the hell was that, Moz?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe somebody’s heating oil leaked into the pipes?” I shook my head.

  The kids were staring at the hydrant warily, half afraid the water would turn black again, but also eager to wash themselves. A few stepped forward, and the oily stuff seemed to slide from their skin, dark stains disappearing from their soaked shorts and T-shirts.

  A minute later they were all playing in the spray, like nothing weird had happened.

  “Didn’t look like any oil I’ve ever seen,” Zahler said.

  “Yeah. Probably just old water in the hydrant,” I said, not wanting to think about it. It had disappeared so quickly, I could almost imagine it hadn’t happened at all. “Or something like that. Come on, we’re late.”

  Pearl’s room looked like a recording studio had mated with a junkyard, then exploded.

  The walls were lined with egg cartons, the big twelve-by-twelve ones that you see stacked outside restaurants. Sinuous hills rose between the egg-shaped valleys, curving like the sound waves they gobbled.

  “Whoa, you’ve got a ton of gear!” Zahler exclaimed. His voice was echoless, rebounding from the walls with less bounce than a dead cat.

  I’d always told Zahler that we could soundproof his room this way so that his parents would stop yelling at us to turn it down. But we’d never had enough motivation to make it happen. Or enough egg cartons.

  The floor was covered with spare cables, effects boxes, all the usual fire hazards—we stepped lightly over the spaghetti-junctions of power strips, dozens of adapters squeezed into them, all labeled to show what was plugged in where. Two racks of electronics towered at one end of the room, the cables gathered with twist-ties. The modules were organized neatly into tribes: black and buttonless digital units; flickering arpeggiators; a few dinosaur synths with analog dials and needles, like old science-fiction movie props ready for takeoff.

  Zahler was looking around nervously, probably wondering if his cheap little electric was going to get squashed under all that gear. I was wondering why Pearl, if she owned all this keyboard stuff, had risked falling toaster ovens just to save a vintage guitar.

  “Where do you sleep?” Zahler asked. The bed was covered with scattered CDs, more cables, and a few harmonicas and hand drums.

  “The guest room, mostly,” Pearl said proudly. “I suffer for my art.”

  Zahler laughed but rolled me a look. Pearl wasn’t exactly suffering. She hadn’t showed us all of her mom’s apartment, but what we’d seen was already bigger than his parents’ and mine put together, the walls crowded with paintings and glass cases full of stuff from all over the world. Stairs led to more floors above, and we’d passed a pair of armed security guards down in the lobby. Pearl had probably seen the Taj Mahal in person.

  So why had she contemplated helping herself to the Strat, when she could obviously afford to buy one of her own?

  Maybe she was used to everything falling from the sky. She’d looked pretty annoyed when we weren’t on time, like this was a job interview or something.

  I sifted through the CDs on the bed, trying to peg her influences. What was Pearl really into, besides old Indian tombs, punctuality, and soundproofing? The discs left me clueless. They were hand-labeled with the names of bands I’d never heard of: Zombie Phoenix, Morgan’s Army, Nervous System . . .

  “Nervous System?” I asked.

  Pearl groaned. “That’s this band I was in. Bunch of Juilliard geeks and, um, me.”

  I glanced at Zahler: great. Not only did Pearl have lots of real gear, she also knew some real musicians, which meant she might not be too impressed with us. We weren’t exactly into virtuosity—we hadn’t taken any lessons since sixth grade. This jam session was going to be a bust.

  “Did you guys play any gigs?” Zahler asked.

  She shrugged. “We did, at their high school, mostly. But the System had no heart. Or it did, I guess, but then the heart exploded. You guys want to plug in?”

  The Stratocaster soothed my nerves.

  It swung from my shoulder, featherlight, lacquered back side cool against my thigh. The strings were six strands of spiderweb, with the easiest action my fingers had ever felt. I strummed a quick, unplugged E-major chord and was amazed to hear that even a three-story fall hadn’t knocked the Strat out of tune.

  Pearl pushed in the power button on a Marshall amp, a hulking old beast with tubes inside. (Why did a key-boardist have a guitar amp handy? Had it also fallen from the sky?) The tubes warmed up slowly, the hiss fading in like a wave breaking.

  “You guys have to share this amp,” Pearl apologized. “Nonoptimal, I know.”

  Zahler shrugged. “That’s fool.”

  She raised an eyebrow. Zahler says fool instead of cool, which is kind of confusing. But at least he didn’t mention that I’d never owned an amp, so we shared one over at his place too.

  Pearl tossed us cords, and I plugged in—a sizzle-snap of connection, then the familiar hum of six open strings. I dampened five of them and plucked a low E. Zahler tuned up to it, booming through his strings one by one, setting off a little plastic chorus of CD cases shivering against one another on the bed.

  The Marshall was set to 7, a volume we never dared in Zahler’s room, and I hoped Pearl’s egg cartons worked. Otherwise, her neighbors were going to feel us in their bones. But I was ready to risk someone calling the police. The Strat
was squeaking impatiently as I slid my fingers along its neck, like it was ready too.

  Finally Zahler nodded, and Pearl rubbed her hands together, sitting down at the little desk jammed between the two racks of electronics. A computer waited there, cabled to a musical keyboard, the kind with elegant black and white keys instead of the usual jumble of letters, numbers, and symbol-junk.

  She rested one hand on the keys, the other on a mouse. At her double-click, dozens of lights on the towers flickered to life. “Play something.”