The house was a light tan with darker brown trim around the windows. A picket fence guarded the property. There was a rock garden in front, and the eucalyptus tree threw shade over the park bench. The Scumbucket and the trailer stood in the short driveway, behind Chappie’s vanilla-colored VW Beetle. When Ariel emerged from the house and started down the front steps, two agents got out of the white Yukon parked on the street and began talking to each other as if discussing baseball scores or some other interest between men. Ariel saw that they were wearing sunglasses and they didn’t really look at each other as they spoke; they were scanning the street and the houses and hills. She approached them, and when one of the men recognized her presence she asked if she could bring them something to drink but the man said, “No, miss, we’re good, but thank you.”
Ariel wondered if there was a toilet in the rear of that giant SUV. It was likely there was some sanitary setup for their convenience. She sat down on the bench, under the tree, and opened her notebook to the lines of the song again as the men, no longer talking, stood with their backs to her.
It was a puzzle to her. What this could possibly mean. She had no idea where it was supposed to go or what it was supposed to say. She considered the idea that if she closed her eyes very, very tightly and thought very, very hard, maybe the girl would come to her again from the green mist of the blackberry brambles and tell her exactly what it was supposed to mean, or if the girl was feeling particularly salvatious today she would offer up the next line or two.
But deep down Ariel knew it was not going to work that way. The Unknown Hand was not going to write this for them. The song, like any other act of creativity, was no good if it wasn’t strained through the joys and woes of human experience. It was no good if it was not in some way personal. It would not come fully-formed from a girl in a dream. It would have to be worked on, trial and error, writing and scratching out, searching for rhyme and struggling for reason.
Just as it always was, no different.
“Inspiration?”
Ariel looked up at Terry, who had taken his own shower and was dressed in gray shorts and a seagreen shirt covered with small blue and gray paisleys, circa 1969. “Going over our song,” she told.
“You mean the song, right?” He nodded toward the empty half of the bench. “Can I sit?”
“This seat is saved,” she said, “just for you.”
Terry sat down. He angled his head to read the lines and Ariel cocked the notebook toward him so he had a better view.
“Say anything to you?” she asked.
“No, not really. To you?”
“I guess it’s about change. A summing up of things. Where you stand,” she decided. “Like…where are you in your life. What do you need to keep and what do you need to let go of, in order to move on. Does that make sense?”
“Yeah,” Terry said. “I can see that. So you’re wanting another couple of verses and a chorus?”
She thought about it. “I don’t know what I want,” she said. What she meant was: I don’t know the why of this song, much less the what. It sounded so crazy, so spooky-oooky, to say that the girl at the well was directing them. That maybe John had come up with the idea of the communal song on his own, it was something he felt was necessary to keep the band on the same page, but the girl had…what?…read his mind, or planted a seed in Mike’s head, and made a passing statement of care that had struck George strongly enough to remember it in his ICU bed, and maybe…planted the desire to finish this song in Ariel’s own psyche?
But if that were true, in a Twilight Zoney way, then what was the why of it?
“I have to ask you something,” she told him. “This is going to sound strange, but have you had any weird dreams lately?”
His eyes blinked behind the specs. “The night before Stone Church. I was pretty tense about that gig. I had a weird dream that I was playing the Hammond and it bit my hands off at the wrists.”
“That’s not what I mean. I know you believe in God and a Heaven of some kind—whatever that is—and you believe in the other side of that, too. Right?” She waited for him to nod. “I want to tell you about a dream I had last night…or this morning, or whenever it was. I just want you to sit and listen, and then I want to talk to you about some things that are on my mind, and if you think I’m losing it…okay, fair enough. Maybe I am losing it. Maybe I’m the one who ought to be hanging it up for a while and taking a break.” She stared directly into his eyes. “But I don’t think so.” She hesitated, to underscore her resolve at this statement. Then: “Can I tell you?”
“Yeah, sure. Go ahead,” Terry said.
How trustingly he said that, Ariel thought. How bravely he said it. In the next few minutes, she would find out how trusting Terry was of his system of belief, and how bravely he could handle her interpretation of the Unknown Hand at work.
Because she was already thinking that the other side also had its unknown hand.
And it too might be at work.
TWENTY-TWO.
When Ariel had finished and they’d talked it back and forth for about ten minutes, Terry felt either that the incident at Stone Church had snapped her strings or something was happening to The Five that he could not explain or understand. He didn’t know which he believed. It was one thing to hear your voice spoken in a church by a man you could not possibly know, and that was strange and frightening enough, but this…
This was like looking at your reflection in a mirror and putting your hand up against it, and suddenly your hand pushes through the mirror like it’s a thin pane of ice and beyond it is a world that was right there all the time, and maybe you suspected it was right there all the time, and you talked about it and made theories about it, but to actually look into it, to actually see the fearsome wonder that lies hidden beyond the mirror…
Or it was like swimming in the sea at night, under a million stars, and swimming further and further out from the lights of shore until a current takes you and you can’t get back, and you swim and swim against the current until you’re tired, but you have to rest for a while, have to tread water and get your strength back, and then in that night-black water something massive and covered with the scars of time slides along under your feet, and it just keeps sliding on and on, an entity too awesome to look at, and you know the leviathan has either come to eat you or give you a place to stand with your head just above the waves.
What Ariel had told him, and her thoughts about that girl and the song, about George seeing her in his hospital room and calling her an angel of life, about crows flying from the mouth of Jeremy Pett in the blackberry bramble battleground…it was too much for even a believer. It was too much for even someone who had heard his name spoken by a stranger in a church far from home.
“I don’t know,” he told her, sitting on the park bench in the fragrant shade of the eucalyptus tree. She had just asked him if he thought they should talk this over with John and Berke. He could tell that she wanted to, but she needed him to agree. “I’m not sure they’re ready for this.”
“You mean, you’re not ready.”
“Ariel…listen… I’m trying to make sense of this, okay?” Terry felt himself floundering, like that swimmer in the night far from shore. “You saying this song is…like…divinely inspired, right? By that girl, and she was something other than an ordinary girl? But John had the idea for all of us to write the song before we got to that place.”