People lived and people died, and the lives of people were precious; their time to create and exist, live and love, was also precious. The song said, keep trying, keep living in the fullness of life, keep growing and creating, because no one here gets out alive. It was not a cry of fear; it was a declaration. You are here today, said the song. One tomorrow you will not be.
The song asked: Between those days, what will you do? Who will you become?
Could it be a new world, in this old one?
It could be.
Might it be a new world, in this old one?
That was for each person to decide. Travelling there was an inward journey, across an often fearsome land. The world within each person, the private world held deeply within. That was where the change happened, where a world could be made new in the midst of the old.
And that journey took all the courage you had.
< >
But for certain, Nomad thought as he sat with Ariel’s notebook in his lap, for himself it was not and would never again be the same old world.
That’s what it was about.
In the end, he’d repeated Mike’s opening with a variation, and added what he thought suited the song. He didn’t think his part was very good. He had listened to Ariel’s ideas about the music, the intro, the chord structure and the chorus. He’d given suggestions that he thought worked, but Berke didn’t like his idea about speeding up the beat, and Ariel thought he was wrong about some of the chord changes. He was deadset on throwing a B-sharp in there at a particular point, but she didn’t like that at all.
“Are we writing a fucking church song?” he’d asked in frustration. “We’re a rock band, guys!”
“It’ll come out well,” Ariel had told him. “When it’s finished. It will.”
“Okay, you finish it, then! Shit! I’m going out to get a smoke!”
But the deal was, he feared the song.
“What was supposed to happen?” he asked Ariel again, at their table in the Magnolia Café.
She shook her head.
“Do you have any opinion? I mean, what was it for? Yeah, I know what it’s about. Or at least I think I know what it’s about, but we don’t really know, do we? We’re not sure, are we?”
“No,” Ariel said, “we’re not sure. How could we be sure?”
“Maybe it was for Gina Fayne. Maybe it was for that guy to hear, and for him to ask Berke to help keep Gina Fayne from overdosing on smack. Does that make sense?”
She could tell he didn’t believe what he’d just said, but she answered, “Maybe it was.”
“Uh huh. Tell me, then: You think the angels are that bent out of shape about Gina Fayne’s heroin habit? You think they set up this whole thing to save Gina Fayne’s life, so she could go on and be the next Janis Joplin? And you think whatever wanted to stop us—to fucking kill us—wanted to make sure Gina Fayne never became the next Janis Joplin?” Nomad almost pounded his fist on the table. He held himself back. “No way!” He was getting worked up, he had to eat his hamburger and ease down again. “I don’t see the point,” he said. “I wish somebody would tell me what it is. Or was. How come that girl, that…whatever she was…just didn’t tell us what she wanted? What we were supposed to do. She could speak English. I mean, Jesus, I guess she could speak every language in the world, if she was what you think she was! So how come she didn’t just tell us?”
“Because,” Ariel said, “we would never have believed her. And how would you like to write a song knowing something we can’t understand—something awesome, John—is asking for a command performance? She did want us to write a song. We wrote the song she wanted.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Yes. And we wrote the song we wanted. It was as much for us, as it was for—” She stopped, because she couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Gina Fayne?” Nomad asked.
Ariel ate some of her sandwich and drank from her bottled water.
Nomad watched her. There were so many things he wanted to ask her about all this. One question was: Why us? Another was: Are those things in this café right now, only we can’t see them? And: Are they everywhere all the time, and when I’m sitting on the toilet I ought to be a little more modest? And, maybe the questions he wanted to ask the most: Do they know everything? What don’t they know? Do they sleep, do they eat, do they screw? Is everything around us a fucking illusion, the dream within the dream?
And, oh yeah, one more: Where do they come from?
But she was eating her Reuben, really getting into it, and Nomad thought she could answer those questions no better than he could, no better than they’d been answered since the beginnings of time by scholars, priests, philosophers and thousands of others.
They were not allowed to know.
Nomad figured it was like the cosmos. You could only go so far, thinking about how many stars there were, and space going on into eternity. Where were the walls of the box?
“I just want to make music,” he said, and Ariel looked at him over her sandwich and gave him a crooked half-smile, and before he could monitor his mouth the question jumped out of him: “Do you still need me?”
“What?”
“Do you still need me?” he repeated, and he answered it. “You really don’t. You’re ready to go out on your own. Maybe I was hard on you in Tucson, but I was telling you the truth. You could put your own band together. The Ariel Collier Band.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Oh, that sucks.”
“The Ariels. The ACBs. The Blue Porkpies. That’s a good one. I like that look, it’s cool. Okay, back to naming your new band. The—”
“Two,” she said, and she gave him the mystic blast.
“I’m out of this for a while,” he told her, averting his gaze. “I need some time. Just to think.”
“I need the same thing.”
The moment had come. It felt so natural now, so right to do this. The new old world, at this table in the Magnolia.
“You’re better than I am,” he said. “You’re a better guitarist, a better singer, and I know for sure a better songwriter. And you’re only going to get better still. I’m a party band type of guy.”
“‘When The Storm Breaks’ isn’t a party band song. You’ve written plenty of songs that aren’t.”
“You wrote all the parts that really said something. You wrote the parts that touched people. Their emotions, and all. I just hung on. You know what was driving me? Anger. At a lot of things, and I’ll explain if you want to hear it. Anger’s a tame word for it. More like fucking white-hot volcanic rage, which I guess you guys saw a lot of.” He took a drink of his Pibb. “You can only go so far on that. I figured out, when we started getting the big crowds and the media attention… I started losing my anger. I started feeling like…you know…we were a success, which is what the lack of was making me even more angry. Without that in me, what do I have? I’m not nearly as good as I need to be. I know that. So what do I have?”
“You are good,” she said. “Ask the fans if you are or not.”
“I’m not good enough,” Nomad said.
She sighed heavily and threw him a look of exasperation. “No one’s good enough! Everybody has to push, and push, and try to break through some kind of wall. I know I’m not good enough. But I hope—I plan—on being better tomorrow, or the next time out. You start from where you are. You’ve broken through a lot of walls. Yes,” she said when he made a scoffing noise, “you have. But maybe the next wall you have to break through will be with your talent, not your fists.”