“Is it okay if I sit with you?” Tammi asked, and Niki shrugged, wondering what Theo would have said, what Daria wouldn’t have had to say.
“Thanks,” Tammi slurred cheerfully and sat down. “You know, I went to high school with a Japanese girl.”
“Really?” Niki sighed, half-smiling through gritted teeth.
“Yes ma’am,” Tammi replied eagerly. “She said she was born in that city we dropped the nuclear bomb on.”
“Which one?” Niki asked and glanced longingly back, past the girl’s puzzled face, at Spyder’s corner, towards the goths and the boy standing watch over them, but someone had already turned the house lights down, and there was only shadow.
2.
Because she was Spyder, they came to her, to sit near her and breathe in the air she breathed out. They brought her the meager precious offerings of their company, their fragile faces painted like gentle death to hide the real scars and pain. She wasn’t sure what she had to offer them, but accepted that it was something that they needed, something that soothed or at least distracted, and they never seemed to take anything away.
Robin pressed tighter against her and Spyder knew how much she enjoyed the masked envy of the others, these who could come as close as a seat or standing room at her booth on Saturday night, but never any closer.
Walter was sitting on her left, and Byron standing point like a pretty gargoyle, or just keeping his distance, distant now since Thursday evening in the shop. He’d stayed away on Friday, hardly a word to her since he’d called her house afterwards, and she thought that maybe he’d flinched when she kissed his cheek earlier in the evening. She’d said nothing more to him about what he had or had not seen in the alley, knew that he wouldn’t listen to her anyhow.
The terrible grunge that seemed to have been playing most of the night ended abruptly, partway through a song, and even over the rambling voice of the crowd, the silence seemed profound. “Thank god that’s over,” said the boy sitting next to Robin, black Sandman T-shirt and tonight he was calling himself Tristan. Spyder nodded her head, and the lights were going down lower, pumping new life into the shadows; more darkness to hide within, and at her table she felt nervous bodies relax a fraction. Except for Byron.
You’re losing him, she thought and shoved the thought quickly back the way it had come.
The stage lights came up and Spyder buried her face in Robin’s jasmine-scented hair, kissed her throat. Tonight, she’d come for more than the usual self-conscious and jealous attentions, had come knowing that Daria Parker and Stiff Kitten were playing, a month or more since she’d seem them last. Daria had not come back to Weird Trappings on Friday as she’d hoped, had hoped for no reason she’d been able to recognize. Except that Daria had been getting into her dreams lately, sometimes looking down on her from high places while Spyder walked the Armageddon streets. More than once, Spyder had looked up and there she’d been, her face pressed against window glass, hair like the blood that filled the gutters and gurgled down storm drains. Silent judgment in her eyes.
“I heard this band really sucks,” Tristan said, risking brave opinion; Robin leaned over and whispered something into his ear. He bit his lower lip then, and shrugged and looked sheepishly away.
“Well, the girl who said that’s a dweeb, anyway,” and then he was quiet. Robin smiled a wicked-mean grin, and Spyder kissed her on the forehead.
The band entered from a door poorly hidden behind the stage, taking their places on the rough platform of plywood and railroad ties: drummer first, skinny stick man whose name she always forgot, and then the towering guitarist, and Daria last of all. She wore her bass like an albatross or something deadly from an old Buck Rogers film. Spyder sipped at her watery gin and lime, the one drink she’d allow herself all night, savoring the pine sap or turpentine bite of the liquor.
The band opened gently with a cover of the Velvet Underground’s “There She Goes Again,” spooky lilt and punched up just a little, but still as much a lie, as much an act of misdirection, as the hushed moments before a tornado. Last verse, and Byron turned and she caught him looking at her, his face more than its usual pinched, and he looked immediately away again.
Yeah, you’re losing him, and she took a bigger sip from her drink, pretending it wasn’t true, watching Stiff Kitten across the writhing dark of Dr. Jekyll’s. The spotlights stabbed down from the cramped balcony, borrowing definition from the smoke, blue and red, too much like something toward the end of any one of her nightmares.
Only if you let him go.
Daria Parker was building a mournful, droning bridge with her strings, segueing into their own “Imperfect.” Spyder knew the titles to a few of the songs because she’d bought their demo tape a few months back, five tracks and a grainy black-and-white photocopied snapshot for the cover, snapshot of a very run-over cat.
Up there, her lips pressed to the microphone, muscle-taut fingers locked in their brutal tarantism, Daria drove her words like nails. And Spyder tried not to think about anything else, nothing but the sneer and tremble of Daria’s lips and words.
‘I always meant, always meant to open up,’ my skin starts to tear, my skin starts to tear, my skin starts to tear…
Down in the pit, bodies slammed together, meat stones pounding themselves for some sympathetic spark, some uglier echo or answer, and from where Spyder sat, the moshers looked more like the condemned souls from a Gustave Doré illustration.
…and what’s inside pours itself out, pours itself out, ink into your arms.
Daria wheeled suddenly away from the mike, yielding to the guitarist, set her back to the crowd, and played now to black building-block stacks of amps. Under the gels, Keith Barry’s red Fender looked bruised, damaged by his hurried, certain hands. He was left-handed and played left-handed, and Spyder always felt like she was watching him through a mirror, reversed. Then Daria was back, managing to sound bitter and innocent in the same conflicting instant. Daria, mike stand pushed forward and teetering on the edge of the stage, head bowed, leaning out over the damned, leaning into herself. Her hair, washed red-violet in the lights, ripe plum tangle and spray of sweat, whipped side to side, her face a blurred snarl.
You see there’s nothing else left for you in there, nothing that you’d want to fuck, nothing you could steal…
Her fingers released the steel strings, drawing sudden silence from the bass, and Keith Barry and the drummer were on their own for the last furious, rushing beats. At the end, after the end, the fading whine of the guitarist’s final, angry chord, alone for the brief and empty space before the applause. And Robin’s hand, like a hungry child’s, at Spyder’s breast.
3.
“It doesn’t snow down here, does it?” Theo asked, hugging herself tightly, stomping her feet loudly on the sidewalk.
“I don’t know,” answered Niki, and Theo nodded her head.
“I keep forgetting you’re not from around here, either.”
Niki looked up at the low sky, the baby-aspirin clouds hanging closer than before the show, pearly and swollen with reflected city light.
“Well, I think it’s gonna snow,” Theo said.
They were waiting for Keith, who was supposed to be bringing the van around, had been waiting for almost ten minutes now, for Mort and Daria still inside the club. Shivering caryatids bracketing what Niki supposed you’d call the stage door, standing guard over the amps and cases of sound equipment stacked up beside the curb. This door was wider and the same black as the wall, no handle on the outside so it would be almost invisible when closed.
“I’ve never really seen snow,” Niki said.