“So far from town,” Gherosimini said, repeating a portion of True’s question. He was lounging in a bright orange inflatable chair. The windchimes tinkled softly as the fan’s breeze touched them, and Stereo gnawed on his chewie. “Nothing around here. Why do you think that, Mr. Manager Man?”
“Because I have two working eyes.”
“You sure they’re working?”
“Pretty much.” True took another sip of the water stained with iron oxide. It wasn’t so bad, but what he would pay right now for a glass of iced tea!
“How about you?” Gherosimini’s attention turned to Ariel. “You’re very quiet. Do you think there’s nothing around here?”
She shrugged, not sure how he wanted her to respond. “I guess I—”
“No,” he interrupted. “Say what you really think.”
“I think…” She saw he was forming an appraisal of her, and she decided to tell him what she really thought. “I think there’s the wind at night, and when you walk in it you can hear music, or voices, or both. I think there’s a silence that asks you who you are. I think there’s a sky of stars that would knock a person’s eyes out. I think the colors of the sunset and sunrise are never exactly the same. I think you could swim in the moonlight if you wanted to. I think you could stand in the blue cool of the evening and smell the ocean waves that used to roll here.” She could smell those right now, from the smoky cone of incense. “I think the rocks might move when you’re not looking, but if you keep looking one day you’ll see it happen. I think you could see a hundred thousand pictures in the clouds and never the same one twice. I think maybe you could see angels out here, if you tried hard enough.”
“And devils?” Gherosimini’s thick gray eyebrows shot up. “Could I see those too, if I tried hard enough?”
She nodded. “Yes. But I wouldn’t want to try that hard.”
He looked at his other guests with a smile that told them the quiet ones always ran the deepest. “What do you think about that, Mr. Manager Man?”
“I think I must be nearsighted,” he said, which really was the truth.
That made the genius of the 13th Floors laugh. The sound must’ve been unusual, because Stereo looked up from his chewie and made a weird questioning noise between a whine and a growl. Call it a whrowl. Then he went right back to chewing.
“My turn for a question,” Nomad announced. He realized Terry was looking at him with fear on his face, not knowing what John was going to throw at his hero. Nomad had heard of the 13th Floors before, sure, and Gherosimini had earned his respect for blazing a trail, but this bell-bearded sixty-something-year-old bag of hippie dust was just plain ol’ Jack to him. “You called Terry your brother and said he’d finally come home. What was that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t have a computer here,” Gherosimini answered, and then he sat there so silently and for so long that Nomad thought the tons of acid he’d swallowed back in the dark ages had come back to drop a psychedelic bomb on his brain. But then the man finished his cup of weird water. “After I got Terry’s letter, I went to the Internet room at the library in town. I went to your website. Nice site, man. Very cool, easy to navigate. I watched your videos. I wrote Terry that I bought one of your CDs. They’re hard to find. But…you know… I knew you before you were born.”
“Really?” Uh huh, he thought. Acid bomb, bigtime.
“Really. You were the lead singer of the Mojo Ghandis. And you were the lead singer of Freight Train South. You were up on stage fronting The Souljers, and man did you work your ass off for Proud Pete and the Prophets. Oh yeah, I knew you. Watched you burn up a stage, work up a crowd, many nights. Many, many gigs.” The wispy-haired head nodded, the blue eyes fixed on Nomad and unyielding. “I knew Ariel, too. She was the girl you went to when you needed to come down to earth. When it got real floaty and spooky up there in the high dark, and you needed a safe place to land. She was the one who told you what you didn’t want to hear, because she was one of the few people—the very few—who gave a shit whether you lived or died. And Terry…oh, yeah. He was there. In how many bands and behind how many keyboards, who can count? But he was always where he needed to be, when he needed to be there.”
Gherosimini looked at Berke. “I’m not sure,” he said, “if I ever knew you. Not in my era. The female drummer was a freak. Shit, you may be a freak too. But I do know one thing: you can bust it up with anybody who ever sat behind me. So take that compliment from a gator who drove drummers so fucking crazy they’d do anything to get out of the band, including jumping out of windows. And that guy you’ve probably heard about, who jumped into a pool at a Holiday Inn and broke a woman’s back?” Gherosimini grinned. “That spaz thought we were on the parking lot side.”
A frown suddenly surfaced. “Your bass player. Where is he?”
It hit them all, at that moment, that Eric Gherosimini had no idea what The Five had been through in the past twenty-four days. Without a computer, without the Internet, possibly without a television or a radio, maybe adverse to reading newspapers and magazines…he truly had decided to put many miles between himself and modern civilization. Maybe, Nomad thought, he just didn’t like the music anymore.
“Mike’s not with us,” Berke said. “But we’ll catch up with him later on.”
“Outta sight,” was Gherosimini’s comment, with an upraised thumb. “Oh, yeah…your question.” He focused on Nomad. “Terry’s my brother ’cause he feels the love. Of what we do. What we feel when we’re playing. And I say he’s finally come home, because he’s wanted to come here for a long time. Not necessarily this place, man, but to wherever I am. I know what I’ve done. I know who I am. Terry’s like family. He’s finally come home, and I know the why of that, too. He wants to meet the lady. Isn’t that right, Terry?”
The question made Terry’s heart race. The moment was near. “Yes,” he said.
Gherosimini stood up, and so did Stereo. “Let me introduce you.”
They followed him into the small kitchen and then through a sliding metal door into a larger room at the back of the house. He flipped a light switch. When the fluorescents came on, Terry thought this must be the first step on the stairway to Heaven.
It was another room whose walls were covered with the white acoustic tiles. The floor was of gray concrete. Within the room were several sets of speakers of different sizes, a twenty-four-track mixing board on a desk, a chair for the board rider, and cables connected to an item True certainly recognized, a multitrack reel-to-reel tape recorder. Next to the console was a wooden rack holding what the others knew to be echo and effects boxes, compressors, limiters, and other studio necessities. None of the equipment looked very new, and most of it was definitely vintage, from the late ’60s or early ’70s. If any of this stuff still worked, Nomad thought, gear collectors would piss their pants with excitement in here. Various vintage microphones were on their stands waiting for use. A plastic crate held a rat’s nest of cables, wallwarts and power cords.
On the left side of the studio stood a second desk, smaller than the one holding the mixer, on which sat a typewriter. A piece of paper was held in the rollers, with typing on it. Near at hand was a sheaf of paper, a tin cup holding some pens and pencils, and an ashtray with half of a plump brown cigarette in it that True decided he wouldn’t stroll over and examine. On the right side of the studio was a workbench with various pieces of circuitry and wiring lying atop it.
Terry was focused straight ahead. Nothing in Eric Gherosimini’s studio pulled at him but the array of mind-blowing vintage organs and electric pianos on their stands that dominated the space.