I.
BABY PLEASE DON’T GO
SHE LET GO his hand as the pallet slid into the narrow tunnel. “Niko?”
“Right here, Jem.” He squeezed her foot beneath the cover pulled so tight she looked like a streamlined mummy.
“It’s really small in here.” Her voice muffled in that cramped space. The technician’s voice came tinny from the intercom. “You okay?”
“Umm. Yeah. I think so.” Percocet thickening her tone. “It’s like wearing a knight helmet. Like a joust.”
Behind thick glass the technician nodded. “The regular CT unit is down for scheduled maintenance. Bessie here’s our backup. She hasn’t let us down yet. But we can try again another time if it’s bothering you too much right now.”
“No. We’ve come this far.”
“Okay. I’m going to activate the scan now, all right? I need you to hold perfectly still, okay? Try to keep your arms straight and don’t move. Can you do that?”
“Do you have to close the door?”
“No, we’ll keep it open for you.”
The Muzak played some watered down song by Gerry and the Pacemakers. Niko squeezed Jem’s foot to maintain contact as they listened in the nervous interlude.
A muffled laugh. “Just wait’ll they do this to one of your songs.” She began to hum a cheesy lounge act version of “Notes on Her Sleeping” and Niko smiled even as his face went tight and his eyes began to sting. “I think they already have,” he said.
“Okay,” said the intercom. “Here we go.” There was a slight vibration.
“It smells like vanilla.”
“There’s some evidence it reduces stress,” the intercom said.
The leaden laugh again. “Better use the whole can.”
Niko patted her foot and felt the corn on her big toe. Countless gigs in high heeled shoes. He pressed and her foot kicked.
The intercom said Hold still please.
“Sorry.”
“You’re doing fine, Jem.” Niko squeezed her foot again and bit his lower lip. He should get another Grammy for this. Or an Oscar. Best Vocal Performance by a Son of a Bitch in a Lead Role.
Hidden engines surged invisible energies through her head.
“I can’t feel my arm.” The fear in her voice tore a plug from his heart. They’d told her there was a slight chance of allergic reaction to the iodine. One in ten thousand, nothing to worry about. But she’d had to sign waivers.
The intercom said It’s normal for limbs to get pins and needles when forced to hold still, nothing to be alarmed about, we’ll massage them as soon as you’re out.
But there had been that single moment of mortal dread, Jemma lying without moving in a tube with metal inches from her skin, iodine coursing alien in her veins and her limbs numbing. And Niko thinking o god is this it, can this be it.
When they got home the Percocet kicked in bigtime and Niko helped her sag upstairs and tucked her into their huge bed and kissed her brow and dialed down the light and crept out of the room and eased shut the door, stopping to look back at her through the narrow slit and feeling like a father peering in on a sleeping child. He left the door cracked open and the intercom on in case she woke disoriented.
THE WEST HALL was lined with framed concert posters, many of them decades old. Drippy letters and high contrast dayglow colors. Niko’s name on all of them. Or the names of bands he’d played in long ago. Before the four letters of his shortened name alone became enough to fill arenas. Jemma’d put the posters up here. He had thought it much too vain. Decades of his pawned off life arrayed along these walls. Legendary days. Those early Perish Blues gigs, the fevered howling yearning. Fights broke out during his solos. He made the room crazy just by playing his guitar. Made the crowd want to fight or fuck or both. He just stood there playing. And somehow just standing there made the music stronger. Surrounded him with energy. Incredible such anger and such anguish could be wrung howling from the neck of a guitar throttled by a young man who just stood there like the center of a cyclone oblivious to its debris.
On the strength of their live gigs Perish Blues recorded Say Hey on the Decca label. A single got decent local airplay but the band just never caught. The feeling was they had something live that recordings could not capture. Niko’s playing was ferocious but he was bagged half the time, he forgot playlists, missed rehearsals and even gigs, tiraded incoherently. He felt restless and the band was discontent.
Perish Blues disbanded and their lead guitarist felt bad about it and felt good about it too. He sat around his apartment and drank and thought about getting another band together and didn’t. He played sessions with a few wellknown bands but didn’t get around to much else.
He’d met Jemma around the beginning of his fiery arc. She’d sung backup in some now forgotten band that opened for his, at one point trading call and response with their lead guitar. He simply couldn’t believe her voice. The beautiful pain of it. Niko so broke he had to borrow money to get his Fender out of hock to play the gig and still he asked her out. Then the long series of attempts to be together. Our staccato love, he’d joked.
Jemma left him after one of his more mundane binges. Though by then it was more correct to say that Niko was on one long bender that ebbed and flowed. This time out was not as spectacular as the time he’d thrown their furniture and clothes out on the curb, the time he’d hurled a paperweight into a blacksmoked mirror, the time he’d doused his Fender with butane and torched it on the balcony of their matchbox apartment off of Gower. This was just another drunk, a sad and stinking unshaved weekday drunk where Jemma had come home to find him crying incoherently about what a nogood shit he was, emptying himself until he slept and then awoke alone all wound in sour sheets like a corpse within a shroud. A C-clamp hangover tightened on his temples as he waited and waited for Jemma to bring him morning coffee the way she always did rain or shine, pleased with him or mad, a little ritual enacted in their daily life together. And when the coffee didn’t come he knew that she was gone. He called her name regardless but of course there was no answer. A hollow silence lay about the place that was precisely her subtracted measure. She had finally had enough. Last night just the final night in the parade of nights spent waiting for him to come home, sweeping broken glass from tile floors, bringing him a basin to throw up in, trying to convince him he was not the demon he imagined himself, holding him through his senseless crying jags and patiently thinking she could fix him. For Jemma was a fixer. She could not bear to see potential squandered. Which had sparked her interest in him in the first place and kept her with him past the point of any reason. At least until she’d understood she couldn’t fix what wanted to be broken.
However bad he got he always seemed to come through whole while those around him lost some unseen thing. You always land on your feet, she told him. And the ones who catch you fall.
With Jemma gone there’d been little to stop him slowly drowning in a whiskey river. He told himself he was only dulling the pain and the pain was pretty bad. Better put me under, doc, a local anesthetic just won’t do.
But when he slept his callused fingers clutched a pillow and caressed her absent contours like a phantom limb. She fired his brain like a lovely fever and throughout his long descent he felt her burning out there in the world apart from him. He’d lie drunk and crying in the bed just big enough to hold them both or howl the Strat he’d borrowed after torching his own, two a.m. and another whiskey bottle consigned to the graveyard of failed consolations. He’d lie on the thin worn carpet and stare up at the waterstained ceiling and make pictures out of earthquake cracks, fissures on some vast and endless plain, or he would cruise the empty glitter of latenight Sunset in a blurred and weaving stupor with the puttering station wagon’s radio cranked until the music left no room for thought. Niko driving down the unabating night and knowing she was awake in the shabby North Hollywood house she’d rented with her friend Bonnie. Knowing her bedside light was on beside her. Knowing she could feel him out here burning too.