Chapter Four
Slogging slowly forward. Haven't gotten so far behind as to lose hope, but have definitely got to grit my teeth and do some catching up.
Chapter Four
Gentle hearts are counted down,
The queue is out of sight and out of sounds.
Me, I’m out of breath but not quite doubting;
I’ve found a door that lets me out.
When you rock and roll with me,
No one else I’d rather be.
Nobody down here can do it for me-
I’m in tears again,
When you rock and roll.
- “Rock and Roll with Me,” David Bowie
If there is something more important to the lifestyles of Hunger City than the clubs and the drugs and the gangs and the faddish clothes, it is the music. The music changes flavors from club to club and from person to person, but there is no life in this city that does not have music in it. A few of the middling clubs have dedicated house bands on retainer. The cheaper clubs take what they can get-whatever band isn’t passed out in the back room and needs a little bit of coin, to buy a drink of water or just a drink of hooch. But the very best of the clubs, the ones where people go to celebrate the fact that they are healthy and sated and fat, rather than to forget that they aren’t, those clubs have a different act every night of the week. They’re good bands too, some of them with Before instruments even, or at least instruments modeled closely on the same instead of invented according to whatever was salvageable at the moment of the creator’s whim.
But despite how the posh clubs go on about their thousand and one glorious bands, and try to make it sound as though music is a commodity to be parceled out only to those who can afford it, like strong cloth or clean water, it isn’t true. There is music enough in the city for all, and rock and roll enough for most. The majority of the music is rock and roll; in the fifteen years since the knees of society buckled, the youth of the surviving world has gotten particularly good at being angry… and these days, nobody really lives past youth. There is not even anyone around with the job of asking what happens when all of culture turns to counter culture. Nobody makes it their business to ask if, when you get to that point, there’s anything left, really.
And so there is a lot of rock and roll. Every band has a drummer, of course, because drums are easy-made of wooden siding torn off of buildings, or crates, or metal cut from car doors , or oiled fabics or even skins stretched over frames or barrels. Then there are guitars, always guitars, in name if not in deed, wooden and metal boxes with strings or wires stretched taut over a sound hole. The best bands, the very best, have Before guitars, and the good but not as good ones have guitars made by people who know how to make guitars. It’s a good way to make a living. Everyone has to make one some way; the best way is to be a first supplier, a farmer or a labbie. If you can’t be that, you can weave fabrics from old thread, or make musical instruments… or you can be a rock star.
The boy from Freecloud plays with Arthur’s band, Deranged Salaam, at the Web every night now. It is debateable, however, whether he counts as a real rock star. Not because he is not popular, because he is; not because he does not play good music, because he does. His playing, in fact, feels more meaningful than anyone’s in the band, particularly angry, disturbed Arthur, who, as a rule, does not play sober. But Johnny is not a rock star, because he does not drink or smoke or take any of the pills that are passed around the room. Few people seem to know quite what to think of him. Arthur sees his abstinence as an affectation, but does not think less of Johnny for it, because after all, everything is an affectation, everything is the next new fad. At least at first, Arthur humors him, because to his mind Johnny is a fad starter with a fad that will never catch on. He labels Johnny a philosopher and has done with it.
Molly, on the other hand, reveres him. Johnny is a new Buddha to her eyes, forsaking the pleasures of the flesh. She tries it for two whole days, throws away her pills and refuses drinks from Arthur’s clay bottle of caustic booze. Johnny shares his clean water with her instead, that he goes and buys on Crooked Street during the day. It is a kindness that brings tears to her eyes, but she is not strong enough to stay with him.
She spends most of the later part of the first day holding tight to the table at which they sit in between sets, gripping the edge with white knuckles, staring at a knothole in the center of its wooden surface. She has to go home leaning on Arthur’s arm. The next night she cannot even sit up or sit still. She begins by pacing rapidly along the back of the club, and drinks all of Johnny’s water in a few minutes. Sometime past midnight she ends up on the ground, almost under their table, writhing and babbling. Finally Arthur shoots a nasty look at Johnny, and pulls out a bottle from the satchel around his waist. He puts a small tablet from the bottle under Molly’s tongue, and in a few minutes she is still and breathes regularly again.
She sits back up, and takes her place at the table, bright and scintillating and lightly laughing again, but she looks at Johnny and tears stand in her eyes. He smiles at her, and reaches across the table and clasps her hand in his. She smiles at him gratefully, and then leaps up to dance. Neither Johnny nor Arthur mention to her that she dances to no music; Arthur just gathers the other members of Deranged Salaam and they ascend to the stage, Arthur to wail through his bullhorn-the same he carried the day Johnny met them-and Johnny to pluck his sitar and the others to beat on improvised drums or strum guitars made from boxes.
In a broken world such as this one, there are plenty of messiahs to be had. Most of the ones who make it as far as martyrdom are rock stars.
v
Casus is on Crooked Street today, with black gear grease under his fingernails and a length of hemp rope coil hooked over his shoulder. As he goes by, nobody smiles or waves or calls out to him, even the ones who know him. Casus comes to Crooked Street with some regularity, but he is not much the type to make friends. The suppliers and the sellers let him go about his business and do not bother him.
He makes it well past the west side of Crooked Street before he finds what he’s looking for: a thin, sunken chested man wearing no shirt and a ragged, dirty loincloth. His once-red hair is grimy and stringy, and there is a red and blue paint smear across his hollow eyed face in the smudgy shape of a great craggy crack or slash. His spindly arms and legs are, too, smudged and mussed with paint and dirt. Around his bony wrists and ankles are many bracelets made of thin circlets of dented wire, strung with sequins and spangles. At one time they must have shone and glittered. The man does not notice Casus as he approaches, as occupied as he is with jamming a sharp-looking piece of metal into a packed full wheeled cart.
“Aladdin.”
The young man’s head jerks up so suddenly it is as though he is reacting to pain, and his eyes meet Casus’s. Aladdin’s eyes are ice blue, and the pupils are like pinpricks. His thin, reddened lips spread in a friendly, welcoming smile.
“C-casus! It’s good… it’s good! It’s good to see you. Again.” He gives the piece of metal in his hands one more sharp shove and succeeds in wedging it in among the rest of the pieces of metal in the cart. He runs one angular hand through his hair. “W-what are you doing back here though? Have you run, run o-out since yesterday?”
“I wasn’t here yesterday,” Casus says, in a brusque tone more matter of fact than impatient. “I saw you last two months ago, Aladdin.”
“Oh. Well, yes, of course you… did you really?” A confused quirk of the brows. Casus nods once.
“Yes.”
“Oh. Well I… hm. Well yes, of c-course. Have you run out si-since two months ago, then?”
“Not exactly. I’ve got plenty of the basic stuff, but I’m needing some specifics. Haven’t got the bits for a train car hookup, have you?”
Aladdin’s nonexistent eyebrows go up, and his crazy eyes go narrow and rather surprisingly shrewd. “Jack’s got a new project, has he?” Casus merely meets his gaze with steely dark gray eyes, saying nothing. “You tell him to watch out, Casus,” Aladdin says sharply. “He shouldn’t be keeping his hands so busy he forgets to hold his trousers up.”
Casus’s face does not betray any thought he might be having. “Jack wears braces,” he says evenly. “I think he can do what he likes with his hands.”
The compressed line of Aladdin’s mouth goes soft and screwed up at the corners again, and his eyes lose a bit of their focus. “Well, course he can. I’m just… just s-saying, you know.” He runs a measuring eye over the contents of his cart. “Well, I haven’t picked up anything like that today, but there might be some back at my place. Come on, and I’ll see if I can’t find, if I can’t find anything for you.” He gets behind the cart and pushes it down the alleyway, away from Crooked Street, and Casus follows silently behind him.
After a few more turns and alleys, the path gives way to walls made of scrap metal and fencing. From the cart Aladdin pulls a pair of floppy shapes that look like they were made by pouring melted rubber over someone’s hands and letting it cool. He slips his hands into them, takes a wooden crate from his cart and sets it into place, stands up on it, and pulls a metal lever almost just out of his reach. The electrification on the fence surrounding Aladdin’s scrapyard is primitive, but not so primitive that it doesn’t keep his stash and his home left alone. He gets down from the box, pulls off the gloves, puts the box and the gloves on the cart, opens the great metal gate, and gets behind it again.
“This w-way,” he says needlessly, and pushes the cart through the gate. Casus follows him through.
Aladdin’s scrapyard takes up the entire intersection of two unused streets, as well as extending into some of the streets themselves. Buildings with window or door access are blocked up with big pieces of metal bolted across the openings, and the electrified fence stretches across the width of the streets that once led into this square. When his cart is all the way through, Aladdin closes the gate again behind them, and pulls another switch mounted on the corner of a building, much closer to the ground and rubber coated itself, instead of requiring the gloves. They are surrounded by piles of scavenged metal and wood and brick, piles sometimes taller than even Casus, and organized with a structure that makes perfect sense to a mad mind.
The mad mind himself now scurries from pile to pile like a rat in a bare larder looking for food. “Fairly sure I, sure I have what you’re l-looking for. Train car h-hook up. Didn’t tell the Bewlays, of course. Bewlays don’t need to know. If they want it I’d, I’d sell it to them, of course, but don’t n-need to advertise. And you got here first so, so. So. Here, it’s somewhere here…”
There is a short silence, and when Aladdin speaks again, he keeps his head down, his pinhole eyes on his search. “I don’t want to… I wouldn’t presume, I wouldn’t want to presume, but Casus, you should tell J-jack… This isn’t a good time to be, to be plotting. Big things happening. Big things changing. The mountain is grumbling and strangers are coming to town. This isn’t a good time to skulk and plan and plot. B-big things. The Dogs aren’t one of them. The Bewlay’s aren’t another. Strangers coming to town, Casus.”
It is only now that Casus remembers the tale told to him by Halloween Jack’s reporter. “You’re not on about this Genie too, are you?” Again the head snapping up as though stung. There are no words from the ragged man in front of the metalworker, just the eyes watching. “Fellow showed up a couple days ago. Walked down Crooked Street. Tall black hat. You didn’t see him? Seems everyone else did.”
Aladdin’s eyes go narrow again, just for a moment, and then fall back down to the pile he’s sorting through. “Black hat. No, not him. Well, him too, but not mostly. Too much shine and flash about him for the talk… for the talk to, to, to have meaning. Mostly the one nobody is noticing yet, the one with the kind and w-wild eyes and the curling hair, the one who arrived at night while the world slept and, and who everyone looks through except the street ones with their booze and b-bright rags.”
Casus does not take the man’s mutterings for much. He mutters as a matter of course, and if they mean much it is nobody’s secret but his own. So Casus does not take them for much. But he does not take them for nothing.
“You’re a madman,” he says curtly but not unkindly, “and I don’t know what you expect me to do with your ravings. Just get me Jack’s hook up like you’re meant to.”
“Of course,” says Aladdin. “Of c-course. Didn’t want to, didn’t mean to presume. No. Just a madman.” He turns around and reaches into one more stack, and this time he pulls out a clanking bit of heavy, half rusted metal. “It needs bolts,” he says, “Or b-brads, or welding, or you know. It doesn’t… The ends are broken but I’m sure you can. Use it. Can, can you? Is that what you need? Beca-cause I can keep looking, but I doubt I have, I have much anything else f-for you.”
The hook up is turned over in rough and callused hands. “No, this will work fine. Thank you, Aladdin.” That wide, wobbly smile on Aladdin’s ruddy lips.
“Y-you’re welcome. You’re always welcome here, Casus. You’re, you’re good to me, and I’m a madman but you’re not mean.” He pads past him and pulls the rubber coated switch again. He swallows and looks at the other man hard. “Stay low. Stay low and hold on loosest to the things you most want to keep or you’ll do something you’ll regret. Strangers coming to town.” He drops his head again. “Always w-welcome.”
Casus nods and walks past him with his spoils, and out through the gate. It swings shut behind him with a mighty clang.