The Last Days

"Um, Min's been studying Spanish, sort of." Pearl pulled out her cell phone and frowned at it. "Speaking of which, I think we need to get back to Brooklyn for your, um, lesson."

"You're studying Spanish?" Zahler said, grinning. "Mas cervezas!"

"Prefiero sangre," Minerva said, her teeth glimmering in the darkness.

"Yeah, okay." Pearl turned to Alana Ray. "Listen, it was great to meet you. You were brilliant. I mean, especially for paint cans."

"Paint buckets," Alana Ray said. "It was good to meet you too."

"So... you want to play with us again?"

Alana Ray looked at me, and I nodded - at seventy-five bucks she was a bargain. She smiled. "Yes. This was very... involving."

"That's us. Involving." Pearl swallowed. "Sorry that Min and I have to run, but you've got the room until eleven. If I go reserve it for next week, can you guys handle breaking down?"

"What about your mixing board?" Zahler said.

"They keep it locked up downstairs. Here's my key." She threw a glittering chain across the room to Zahler and grabbed Minerva's hand. "Come on, Min. We really have to motor."

Zahler shouted goodbye, but Pearl was already pulling Minerva out of the door, yanking her along like a five-year-old who didn't want to leave the zoo.

I followed them into the hall, running ahead to stab the elevator button.

"Thanks," Pearl said. "Sorry to leave you guys to clean up. It's just..." Her voice faded into a sigh.

"Smelly Spanish lessons," Minerva said. From all around us, the mutterings of bands leaked out, the thump of drums, muffled stabs of feedback.

"Don't worry about it." I wondered what their mysterious rush was really all about. Not Spanish lessons, obviously. I tried to remember what Pearl had said on the phone that morning. Something about ninjas? "You've done everything so far, Pearl. It won't kill us to put some stuff away."

"Not everything. You guys found Alana Ray. She's incredible."

"Yeah, I guess she is." I smiled. "Listen, I'm sorry I was so sleepy when you called this morning. Next time, I'll be glad to help out..." I glanced at Minerva. "With whatever."

"Oh, cool," Pearl said softly, her smile growing. She was staring down at the floor. "That's great."

The elevator came, and when they stepped on, I did too, wanting a few more seconds with Minerva. "I'll come down with you guys, if you don't mind, and then ride back up."

"We don't mind," Minerva said.

It was quiet in the big freight elevator, the walls padded with movers' blankets to protect them from the ravages of dollies, amps, and drums.

I cleared my throat. "Listen, Pearl, I've been kind of a dickhead."

"About what?" Pearl said, and Min's eyebrows rose behind dark glasses.

"About everything; about you. But this band is finally coming together, and I feel kind of stupid about the way I've been acting. So... I'm okay now."

"Hey, Moz. It's my fault too." Pearl turned to me, her face a little pink, almost blushing. "I know I can be sort of bossy."

"She's got a point there," Minerva said.

I laughed. "Nah. You just know what you're doing." I shrugged. "So me and Zahler should come over tomorrow? Get some new tunes worked up before next Sunday?"

Pearl nodded, still grinning. "Perfect."

"You coming?" I asked Minerva. "I mean, you're the singer and everything." I pointed at the notebooks she still clutched to her chest.

"Um, probably not," Pearl said. "She's kind of - "

"It's very intensive Spanish," Minerva said.

"Oh. Sure."

The elevator doors opened, and we stepped out into the lobby, Pearl still pulling Minerva along. A couple of guys were rolling a dolly full of turntable decks into the building, negotiating the bump between stairway ramp and marble floor with extreme care.

Pearl stepped up to the front desk, pulling out a credit card and talking to the guy about next week.

Minerva turned to me and said softly, "See you next week."

I nodded, swallowing, suddenly glad she was wearing those dark glasses. I wondered how many fewer stupid things I'd have said in my life if all pretty girls wore them. "I'll totally be there."

Okay, maybe not that many.

But Minerva just laughed and reached out with the hand Pearl wasn't holding. Hot as a freshly blown-out match, her fingertip traced my arm from wrist to elbow. Between her parted lips, I could see teeth sliding from left to right against each other, and then she mouthed a silent word.

Yummy.

She turned away from my shiver, back to Pearl just as she finished up and flicked open her phone.

"Elvis? We're ready." Pearl snapped the phone shut and looked at me. "See you guys tomorrow. Call me?"

"Yeah. I'll tell Zahler." My breath was short, the line Minerva had traced along my arm still burning. "See you."

They waved, and I watched them walk through the door and out, then make their way toward a huge gray limo - a limo?  -  that slid into view. Minerva's mouthed word still echoed in my head, so unexpected, more like a daydream than something that had actually happened. My brain couldn't get hold of it, like a guitar lick I could hear but that my fingers couldn't grasp.

But she turned back toward me just before she ducked into the car and stuck her tongue out. Then her smile flashed, wicked and electric.

The limo slid away.

I swallowed, turned, and ran back to catch the elevator's closing doors. The guys with turntables were piled inside, leaving just enough space for me to squeeze in. As we rode up, I was rocking on the balls of my feet, humming one of the strange fragments Minerva had left in my brain, bouncing off the blanketed wall behind me.

I glanced over at the two guys and noticed they were watching my little dance.

"Fresh tunes?" one said, grinning.

"Yeah, very." I licked my lips, tasting salt there. "Things are going great."

PART III

REHEARSALS

The Black Death had a distant twin.

At the same time the Plague of Justinian was raging across the Roman world, a great empire in South America, that of the Nazca, was also disappearing. The Nazca temples were suddenly abandoned, their cities emptied of life. Historians have no clue why this vast and sophisticated culture, thousands of miles away from plague-ridden Rome, vanished at exactly the same historical moment.

Most people haven't heard of the Nazca, after all. That's how thoroughly they disappeared.

It wasn't until the 1920s that the outside world discovered their greatest legacy. Airplanes flying over the arid mountaintops of Peru spotted huge drawings scratched into the earth. Covering four hundred square miles were pictures of many-legged creatures, vast spiders, and strange human figures. Archaeologists don't know what these drawings mean. Are they images of the gods? Or of demons? Do they tell a story?

Actually, they're a warning.

It is often noticed how they were built to last, cut into mountaintops where rain hardly ever falls and where there's almost zero erosion. Amazingly, they're still clearly visible after fifteen hundred years. Whatever they're trying to say, the message is designed to last across the centuries.

Maybe the time to read them is now.

NIGHT MAYOR TAPES:

282¨C287

13. MISSING PERSONS

-  PEARL-

The halls of Juilliard seemed wrong on that first day back to school.

This was my fourth year here, so the place was pretty familiar by now. But things always felt strange when I returned from summer break, as if the colors had changed slightly while I was gone. Or maybe I'd grown some fraction of an inch over the last three months, shifting everything imperceptibly out of scale.

Today I couldn't get used to how empty the hallways felt. Of course, it made sense. All my friends in Nervous System (or ex-friends, really, thanks to Minerva's meltdown) had graduated last year, leaving the school full of acquaintances and strangers. That was what I got for hanging out with so many seniors when I was a junior.

I picked up my schedule from the front office and checked over the signs saying which classes and ensembles had been canceled due to lack of interest. No baroque instruments class this year. No jazz improv group. No chamber choir?

That was kind of lateral.

But all my planned classes were still scheduled. They made you take four years of composition and theory, after all, and my morning was full of required academics: English, trig, and the inescapable advanced biology.

So it wasn't until lunch that I began to see how much had really changed.

The cafeteria was the biggest room at school. It doubled as a concert hall, because even fancy private schools like Juilliard couldn't take up infinite space in the middle of Manhattan. My third-period AP bio class was just next door, prime real estate for getting to the front of the food line. Walking in ten seconds after the lunch bell, I was happy to see all the vacant tables. The familiar floury smell of macaroni and cheese ¨¤ la Juilliard, one of the nonfeculent dishes here, made me smile.

Even if the System was gone, it was good to be back.

I got a trayful and looked around for anyone I could sit with, especially someone with useful musical skills. Moz and I might want to bring in backup musicians one day.

It only took a few seconds to spot Ellen Bromowitz all alone in the corner. She was in my year and a fawesome cellist, first chair in the orchestra. We'd been temporary best friends in our early freshman days, back when neither of us knew anyone else.

I took a seat across from her. Cellos could be cool, even if Ellen sort of wasn't. Besides, there was hardly anyone else there.

She looked up from her macaroni, a little puzzled. "Pearl?"

"Hey, Ellen."

"Didn't expect to see you here." She raised an eyebrow.

"Well..." I wasn't quite sure what she meant. "Haven't seen you in a while. Just thought I'd say hi."

She didn't answer, just kept looking at me.

"How's it going?" I asked.

"Interesting question." A wry little smile played across her face. "So, you don't have any friends to sit with either?"

I swallowed, feeling more or less busted. "I guess not. The rest of Nervous System were seniors. All your friends graduated too, huh?"

"Graduated?" She shook her head. "No. But no one's back yet."

"Not back from where?"

"Summer." She looked around the cafeteria.

The place still hadn't filled up. It seemed so quiet, not like the lunchtime chaos I remembered. I wondered if it had always been this spacious and peaceful in here, and if this was just another of those little summer-shifted perceptions making everything feel wrong.

But that didn't quite make sense. Things seeming smaller every year, I could understand. But emptier?

"Well, it was a pretty feculent summer," I said. "Between the sanitation crisis and the rats and stuff. Maybe not everyone's back from Switzerland or wherever else they escaped to."

Ellen finished swallowing some mac and cheese. "My friends don't go to Switzerland in the summer."

"Oh, right." I shrugged, remembering how scholarship students always hung out together. "Well, Vermont, or whatever."

She made a little sighing sound.

"Still, it's great to be back, huh?" I said.

Her eyes narrowed. "You're in an awfully good mood. What's that all about? Got a new boyfriend or something?"

I laughed. "No boyfriend. But yeah, I'm really happy. The weather's finally cooler, the subways are working this week, and I'm getting another band together." I shrugged. "Things are going great, I guess. And..."

"And what?"

"Well, maybe there's a boy. Not sure yet if it's a good idea, though."

I felt an embarrassingly nonsubtle grin growing on my face.

True, I wasn't sure whether it was a good idea at all, but at least the downright feculence between me and Moz had finally ended.

Having a band had wrung all the resentment out of him. He never complained about our early Sunday morning rehearsals anymore, just showed up ready to play. Moz could be so amazing when he was like this - like my mom said, totally fetching - focused when he played, intense when he listened to the rest of us.

So maybe sometimes I imagined distilling that concentration down to just the two of us, putting his newfound focus to work in other ways. And maybe, writing songs in my bedroom, I occasionally had to remind myself that it wasn't cool to jump the bones of your bandmates.

Mark and Minerva had shown me how much trouble that could cause. I'd heard he'd cracked up completely over the summer. Must be tough, losing your girlfriend and your band on the same day.

So I bit my tongue when Moz starting looking really intense and fervent, reminding myself it was for the good of the band, which was more important to me than any boy.

But that didn't mean I never thought about it.

The band had changed Minerva too. She could be nine kinds of normal these days. Maybe she still wore dark glasses, but the thought of going out in the sun didn't terrify her anymore. Neither did her own reflection - mirrors were her new best friends. Best of all, she loved dressing up and sneaking out to rehearsals. Her songs evolved every time we played, the formless rages slowly taking shape, bent into verses and choruses by the structure of the music.

One day soon, I figured, the words might actually start making sense.

The funny thing was, Alana Ray seemed to help Min the most. Her fluttering patterns wrapped around Minerva's fury, lending it form and logic. I suspected that Alana Ray was guiding us all somehow, a paint-bucket-pounding guru in our midst.

I'd gone online a few times, trying to figure out what exactly her condition was. She twitched and tapped like she had Tourette's, but she never swore uncontrollably. A disease called Asperger syndrome looked about right, except for those hallucinations. Maybe Minerva had called it during that first rehearsal, and Alana Ray was a little bit autistic, a word that could mean all kinds of stuff. But whatever her condition was, it seemed to give her some special vision into the bones of things.

So now that we had a drummer-sage and a demented Taj Mahal of a singer, the band only had two problems left: (1) we didn't have a bass player, which I knew exactly how to fix, and (2) we still didn't have a name...

"How does Crazy Versus Sane sound to you?" I asked Ellen.

"Pardon me?"

"For a band name."

"Hmm," she said. "I guess it makes sense; you're going to be all New Sound, right?"

"Sort of, but better."

She shrugged. "It's a little bit trying-too-hard; the word crazy, I mean. Like in Catch-22. Anyone who tells you they're crazy really isn't. They're just faking, or they wouldn't know they were crazy."

"Okay." I frowned, remembering why hanging out with Ellen could be a drag sometimes. She had a tendency toward nonenthusiasm.

But then she smiled. "Don't worry, Pearl. You'll think of something. You playing guitar for them?"

"No, keyboards. We've got one too many guitarists already."

"Too bad." She pulled up an acoustic guitar case from the floor, sat it in the chair next to her. "Wouldn't mind being in a band."

I stared at the guitar. "What are you doing with that?"

She shrugged. "Gave up the cello."

"What? But you were first chair last year!"

"Yeah, but cellos..." A long sigh. "They take too much infrastructure."

"They do what?"

She sighed, rearranging the dishes on her tray as she spoke. "They need infrastructure. Most of the great cello works are written for orchestra. That's almost a hundred musicians right there, plus all the craftsmen to build the instruments and maintain them and enough people to build a concert hall. And to pay for that, you're talking about thousands of customers buying tickets every year, rich donors and government grants... That's why only really big cities have orchestras."

"Um, Ellen? You live in a really big city. You're not planning to move to Alaska or something, are you?"

She shook her head. "No. But what if big cities don't work anymore? What if you can't stick that many people together without it falling apart? What if..." Ellen's voice faded as she looked around the cafeteria once more.