The Last Days

"Hated graves?"

"Yeah, detested tombs. Loathed sepulchers. Abhorred anyplace anyone was buried. Understand?"

"Why would I do that?"

I let out a groan. Mozzy was being very nonlateral all of a sudden. "Hypothetically hated graves."

"Um, okay. I hate graves." He put on a grave-hating face.

"Excellent. Perfect. But you'd still go to the Taj Mahal, wouldn't you?" I spread my hands in explanatory triumph.

"Um, I'd go where?"

"The Taj Mahal! The most beautiful building in the world! You know all those Indian restaurants around the corner, the murals on the walls?"

He nodded slowly. "Yeah, I know the one you mean: lots of arches, a pond out front, with kind of an onion on top?"

"Exactly. And gorgeous."

"I guess. And somebody's buried there?"

"Yeah, Moz, some old queen. It's a total tomb. But you don't suddenly think it's ugly, just because of its category, do you?"

His expression changed from tomb-hating to lateral-thinking. "So, in other words..." Brief pause. "You don't mind if you're in a band that plays alternative death-metal< cypherfunk, as long as it's the Taj Mahal of alternative death-metal cypherfunk. Right?"

"Exactly!" I cried. "You guys can worry about the category. All the death metal you want. Just be good at it." I picked up the Stratocaster, wrapped it tighter. "How's tomorrow? Two o'clock."

He shrugged. "Okay, I guess. Let's give it a shot. Maybe keyboards are what we need."

Or maybe I am, I thought, but out loud I just told him my buzzer number, pointing across the street. "Oh, and two more questions, Moz."

"Sure?"

"One: do you guys really play death-metal cypherfunk?"

He smiled. "Don't worry. That was hypothetical death-metal cypherfunk."

"Phew," I said, trying not to notice how that little smile had made him even cuter. Now that we were going to jam together, it didn't pay to notice things like that. "Question two: does your half a band have a name?"

He shook his head. "Nope."

"No problem," I said. "That'll be the easy part."

3. POISONBLACK

-  MOZ-

The next day, Zahler and I saw our first black water.

We'd just met outside my building, on our way to Pearl's. A gang of kids across the street was gathered around a fire hydrant, prying at it with a two-foot wrench, hoping to get some relief from the early afternoon heat. Zahler stopped to watch, like he always did when kids were doing anything more or less illegal.

"Check it out!" He grinned, pointing at a convertible coming down the street. If the hydrant erupted in the next ten seconds, the unwitting driver was going to get soaked.

"Watch your guitar," I said. We were twenty feet away, but you never knew how much pressure was lurking in a hydrant on a hot summer day.

"It's protected, Moz," he said, but he stood the instrument case upright behind himself. I felt empty-handed, headed to a jam session with nothing but a few guitar picks in my pocket. My fingers were itching to play their first notes on the Strat.

We were sort of late, but the car was a BMW, its driver in a suit and tie and talking on his cell phone. Back when Zahler and I had been little, soaking a guy like that would have been worth about ten thousand fire-hydrant points. We could spare ten seconds.

But the kids were still fiddling as the convertible passed.

"Incompetent little twerps." Zahler sighed. "Should we give them a hand?"

"It's already after two." I turned and headed up the street.

But as I walked I heard the cries behind us change from squeals of excitement to shrieks of fear.

We spun around. The hydrant was spraying black water in all directions, covering the kids with a sticky, shimmering coat. A thick, dark mist rose into the air, breaking the sunlight into a gleaming spectrum, like a rainbow on an oil slick. The screaming kids were stumbling back, bare skin glistening with the stuff. A couple of the little ones just stood in the torrent, crying.

"What the hell?" Zahler whispered.

I took a step forward, but the smell - earthy and fetid and rotten - forced me to a halt. The dark cloud was still rising up between the buildings, roiling like smoke overhead, and the wind was shifting toward us. Tiny black dots began to spatter the street, closer and closer, like a sudden summer rain starting up. Zahler and I backed away, staring down at the pavement. The drops were as luminous as tiny black pearls.

The hydrant seemed to cough once, the gush of black water sputtering, and then the water turned clear. Above us, the cloud was already dissolving, turning into nothing more than a shadowy haze across the sky.

I knelt on the sidewalk, peering down at one of the black drops. It glimmered unsteadily for a moment, reflecting sunlight as the shadow from the cloud overhead faded. And then it boiled away before my eyes.

"What the hell was that, Moz?"

"I don't know. Maybe somebody's heating oil leaked into the pipes?" I shook my head.

The kids were staring at the hydrant warily, half afraid the water would turn black again, but also eager to wash themselves. A few stepped forward, and the oily stuff seemed to slide from their skin, dark stains disappearing from their soaked shorts and T-shirts.

A minute later they were all playing in the spray, like nothing weird had happened.

"Didn't look like any oil I've ever seen," Zahler said.

"Yeah. Probably just old water in the hydrant," I said, not wanting to think about it. It had disappeared so quickly, I could almost imagine it hadn't happened at all. "Or something like that. Come on, we're late."

Pearl's room looked like a recording studio had mated with a junkyard, then exploded.

The walls were lined with egg cartons, the big twelve-by-twelve ones that you see stacked outside restaurants. Sinuous hills rose between the egg-shaped valleys, curving like the sound waves they gobbled.

"Whoa, you've got a ton of gear!" Zahler exclaimed. His voice was echoless, rebounding from the walls with less bounce than a dead cat.

I'd always told Zahler that we could soundproof his room this way so that his parents would stop yelling at us to turn it down. But we'd never had enough motivation to make it happen. Or enough egg cartons.

The floor was covered with spare cables, effects boxes, all the usual fire hazards - we stepped lightly over the spaghetti-junctions of power strips, dozens of adapters squeezed into them, all labeled to show what was plugged in where. Two racks of electronics towered at one end of the room, the cables gathered with twist-ties. The modules were organized neatly into tribes: black and buttonless digital units; flickering arpeggiators; a few dinosaur synths with analog dials and needles, like old science-fiction movie props ready for takeoff.

Zahler was looking around nervously, probably wondering if his cheap little electric was going to get squashed under all that gear. I was wondering why Pearl, if she owned all this keyboard stuff, had risked falling toaster ovens just to save a vintage guitar.

"Where do you sleep?" Zahler asked. The bed was covered with scattered CDs, more cables, and a few harmonicas and hand drums.

"The guest room, mostly," Pearl said proudly. "I suffer for my art."

Zahler laughed but rolled me a look. Pearl wasn't exactly suffering. She hadn't showed us all of her mom's apartment, but what we'd seen was already bigger than his parents' and mine put together, the walls crowded with paintings and glass cases full of stuff from all over the world. Stairs led to more floors above, and we'd passed a pair of armed security guards down in the lobby. Pearl had probably seen the Taj Mahal in person.

So why had she contemplated helping herself to the Strat, when she could obviously afford to buy one of her own?

Maybe she was used to everything falling from the sky. She'd looked pretty annoyed when we weren't on time, like this was a job interview or something.

I sifted through the CDs on the bed, trying to peg her influences. What was Pearl really into, besides old Indian tombs, punctuality, and soundproofing? The discs left me clueless. They were hand-labeled with the names of bands I'd never heard of: Zombie Phoenix, Morgan's Army, Nervous System...

"Nervous System?" I asked.

Pearl groaned. "That's this band I was in. Bunch of Juilliard geeks and, um, me."

I glanced at Zahler: great. Not only did Pearl have lots of real gear, she also knew some real musicians, which meant she might not be too impressed with us. We weren't exactly into virtuosity - we hadn't taken any lessons since sixth grade. This jam session was going to be a bust.

"Did you guys play any gigs?" Zahler asked.

She shrugged. "We did, at their high school, mostly. But the System had no heart. Or it did, I guess, but then the heart exploded. You guys want to plug in?"

The Stratocaster soothed my nerves.

It swung from my shoulder, featherlight, lacquered back side cool against my thigh. The strings were six strands of spiderweb, with the easiest action my fingers had ever felt. I strummed a quick, unplugged E-major chord and was amazed to hear that even a three-story fall hadn't knocked the Strat out of tune.

Pearl pushed in the power button on a Marshall amp, a hulking old beast with tubes inside. (Why did a key-boardist have a guitar amp handy? Had it also fallen from the sky?) The tubes warmed up slowly, the hiss fading in like a wave breaking.

"You guys have to share this amp," Pearl apologized. "Nonoptimal, I know."

Zahler shrugged. "That's fool."

She raised an eyebrow. Zahler says fool instead of cool, which is kind of confusing. But at least he didn't mention that I'd never owned an amp, so we shared one over at his place too.

Pearl tossed us cords, and I plugged in - a sizzle-snap of connection, then the familiar hum of six open strings. I dampened five of them and plucked a low E. Zahler tuned up to it, booming through his strings one by one, setting off a little plastic chorus of CD cases shivering against one another on the bed.

The Marshall was set to 7, a volume we never dared in Zahler's room, and I hoped Pearl's egg cartons worked. Otherwise, her neighbors were going to feel us in their bones. But I was ready to risk someone calling the police. The Strat was squeaking impatiently as I slid my fingers along its neck, like it was ready too.

Finally Zahler nodded, and Pearl rubbed her hands together, sitting down at the little desk jammed between the two racks of electronics. A computer waited there, cabled to a musical keyboard, the kind with elegant black and white keys instead of the usual jumble of letters, numbers, and symbol-junk.

She rested one hand on the keys, the other on a mouse. At her double-click, dozens of lights on the towers flickered to life. "Play something."

My fingers were suddenly nervous. It was important to get these notes right, to make a solid first impression on this accidental guitar. Pearl thought that "fate" had brought us together, but that was the wrong word for it. Fate hadn't made that woman go insane. People had been edgy this whole weird summer, what with the crime wave, the rat wave, and the crazy-making heat. That was bigger than Pearl and Zahler and me.

This guitar wasn't destiny. It was just another symptom of whatever bizarre illness New York City was coming down with, something strange and unexpected, like that spout of black water on the way over.

For a moment the Strat felt awkward in my hands.

But then Zahler said, "Big Riff?"

I smiled. The Big Riff went back a long time, as long as we'd been playing. It was simple and gutsy, and we didn't bother practicing it too much anymore. But the Strat was going to make it new all over again, like playing baseball with bottle rockets.

Zahler started up. His part of the Big Riff is low and growly, his strings muffled with the flesh of his right hand, like something trying to sizzle up out of a boiling pot.

I took a slow, deep breath... then jumped in. My part's faster than his, fingers roaming in the high notes halfway up the neck. My part skitters while his churns, blowing sparks from his embers. Mine darts and mutates, keeps changing, while Zahler's stays level and even and thick, filling in all the gaps.

The Strat loved the Big Riff, sliced straight into it. Its spiderweb strings tempted my fingers faster and higher, weightless against Zahler's firmament. If the Big Riff was an army, he was the infantry, the grunts on the ground, and the Strat had turned me into orbital ninjas dropping from the sky, black pajamas under their space suits.

Pearl sat there listening, fingers flexing, mouse twitching, eyes closed. She looked ready to pounce, waiting restlessly for an opening.

We kept going for ten minutes, maybe twenty - it's hard to tell time when you're playing the Big Riff - but she never jumped in...

Finally Zahler gave a little shrug and let the Riff peter out. I followed him down, wrapping up with one last plunge from orbit, the Strat skittering into reluctant silence.

"So, what's the matter?" he asked. "You don't like it?"

Pearl sat silently for another few seconds, thinking hard.

"No, it's excellent. Exactly what I wanted." Her fingers stroked the keys absently. "But, um, it's kind of... big."

"Yeah," Zahler said. "We call it the Big Riff. Pretty fool, huh?"

"No doubt. But, uh, let me ask you something. How long have you guys been playing together?"

Zahler looked at me.

"Six years," I said. Since we were eleven, playing our nylon-string loaners from school. We'd electrified them with the mikes from his older sister's karaoke machine.

Pearl frowned. "And all that time, it's been just the two of you?"

"Um, yeah?" I admitted. Zahler was looking at me kind of embarrassed, maybe thinking, Don't tell her about the karaoke machine.

She nodded. "No wonder."

"No wonder what?" I said.

"There's no room left over."

"There's no what?"

Pearl pushed her glasses up her nose. "It's totally full up. Like a pizza with cheese, onions, pepperoni, chilies, sausage, M&M's, and bacon bits. What am I supposed to do, add the guacamole?"

Zahler made a face. "You mean it sucks."

"No. It's big and raw..." She let out a hiss through her teeth, nodding slowly. "You guys made a whole band out of two guitars, which is very lateral. But if you're going to have a real band - like, one with more than two people in it - you're going to have to strip your sound way down. We have to poke some holes in the Big Riff."

Zahler glanced at me, eyes narrowed, and I realized that if I decided to blow this off right now, he would march out of there with me. And I almost did, because the Big Riff was sacred, part of our friendship from the beginning, and Pearl was talking about tearing it up just to make room for her towers of electronic overkill.

I glared up at all those winking lights, wondering how she was supposed to squeeze that much gear into anyone else's sound without squishing it.

"Plus, it's not really a song," she added. "More like a guitar solo that doesn't go anywhere."

"Whoa..." I breathed. "Like a what?"

"A guitar solo that doesn't go anywhere," Zahler repeated, nodding. I stared at him.

"I mean, you guys want to do songs, right?" Pearl continued. "With verses and choruses and stuff? Don't you think the Big Riff could use a B section?"

"Fool idea," Zahler said. Then he scratched his head. "What's a B section?"

4. NEW ORDER

-  ZAHLER-

The new girl was intense. And kind of hot.

She could pull a tune apart like it was nothing. Not like Moz, who always talked in circles. Pearl could just hum what she meant, fingers waving little patterns, like she was seeing air-notes at the same time. I watched carefully, wishing my fingers could do that.

She was one of those girls who looked better in glasses - all smart and stuff.

The way she stripped down the Big Riff was totally fawesome. Like I knew would happen, she didn't touch my part. My part is basic, the foundation of the Riff. But Moz's jamming could get kind of random, like she'd said about pizza. You know when they have the sundae bar at school where you make your own sundae? I always add toppings until the ice cream disappears, and it winds up kind of disgusting. Give him enough room, and Moz's playing can get like that.

Don't get me wrong - the Mosquito's a genius, a way better player than me, and there was some pretty fool stuff in his Big Riff zigzags. But it took Pearl to pick out his best threads and weave them back together in a way that made sense.

She explained that a B section was a completely different part of a song, like when the chorus has a different riff, or everything slows down or changes key. Me and Moz didn't do that too much, because I'm happy playing the same four chords all day long and he's happy buzzing around on top of them.

But when you think about it, most songs do have B sections, and we sort of hadn't noticed that ours almost never did. So the moral of the story is, you shouldn't be in a band with just two people for six years. Kind of saps your perspective.

Moz was all buzzy at first, like the Big Riff was his pet frog that Pearl was dissecting. He kept looking at me and making faces, but I eyeballed him into submission. Once he saw that I thought Pearl was okay, he sort of had to listen to her. It hadn't been my idea to drag my ax all the way down here, after all.

In the end, Moz was no idiot, and only an idiot would mind listening to a smart, hot girl telling him something that's for his own good. And for the good of the band, which is what the three of us were already turning into.

It was fawesome to watch. All the years Moz and I had been jamming, it was about adding more to the riffs. So it felt great to see stuff getting erased, to sweep away all the mosquito-droppings and get back to the foundation.

Which, like I said before, is where I'm happiest.

Once the Big Riff was cleaned up, Pearl started playing. I'd figured she was going to blow us away with some kind of thousand-note-a-minute alternafunk jazz, because she'd been in that Juilliard band. But everything she played was sweet and simple. She spent most of her time poking around with her mouse, diluting the tones flowing from her synthesizers until they were thin enough to sneak through the folds of the Big Riff.

In the end, I realized that Pearl was playing some of the lines she'd erased from Moz's part. Even though she'd simplified them, the whole thing wound up bigger, like an actual band instead of two guitarists trying to sound like one.

And then came the moment when the whole thing finally clicked, totally paranormal, falling into place like an explosion played backwards.

I yelled, "You know, we should record this!"

Moz nodded, but Pearl just laughed. "Guys, I've been recording the whole time." She pointed at the computer screen.

"Really?" Moz skidded us to a halt. "You didn't say anything about that."

I eyeballed him to calm down. The Mosquito is always afraid that someone's going to steal our riffs.