Wonderland (15 page)

Holding Billy’s soft, warm hand, I take a step, and he steps with me. I take another step—I hope I am tracing this invisible arc, I’m not sure where it is or what the point of this is—and he steps with me. The bonnet smells of hot rubber and sweat. Our shoulders brush against each other. We take a step. It feels like we’re ice-skating together, and I am bad at ice-skating, but so is he, it turns out. We tilt, stumble. We stop. Billy looks up at me; his eyelashes are strangely long in his sorrowful, monkish face. His gaze is very strong, he is counting on me. I grip his hand more tightly, lean into where I think the circle is. We take a step. I feel the arc. His shirt-cuff tickles my hot wrist. My face is hot, too, but the arc is so pleasing. I want to follow it. The arc is seducing me. We take a step, we take a step, we take a step. Out of the corner of my eye, I see that the camera is moving ever so slightly. The flow comes up through my heels, the soles of my feet, travels up the backs of my legs, the way the famous song did at the festival in Göteborg, although it is utterly quiet in this parking lot in Berlin. Billy smiles, we lean into the turn. What is the lined-face man filming—both of us, my arm, my hand, our contiguous shoulders, the edge of the rubber bonnet? Vertiginously, I don’t know. We enter a dangerous part of the circle, holding both hands across our bodies, this is the downward slope, the belly, we are crossing some equator. I feel faint. Billy pulls. Up we go. His pointy pink shoes find the invisible line; I cross my leg in front of his and we both laugh. It is as if we are running, but we aren’t running, we are walking at an even pace. The inside of the circle is like the sea, and we are walking on the edge of the sea, all around the world. Joy.

We take a step, we take a step. At the top of the circle, now in the spot where we began, we stop. We touch forehead to forehead, breathing hot breath together, winded, our foreheads wet with sweat, still holding both hands, as something passes between us. It is like a kiss. “Thank you,” whispers Billy, breaking the hold of our joined hands at last, stepping back, pulling off the bonnet and wiping his face, his head, with a white cuff, which comes away gray. Everybody claps.

Boone, dashing toward us across the parking lot, says, “I got it all on my cell. That was
amazing!
”

“Lunch,” says the lined-face man, but he’s smiling. We have completed the circle, built the pyramid. I pull my damp shirt away from my body, blow down into the sweat between my breasts, lift my face to the sun.

Ezra. Moon man, wing walker, the one and only. Everyone, or nearly everyone, knows his skinny arms, his rings, his heavy, nearly Neanderthal brow. The high scrape of his Australian accent. He’s what, sixty-five? sixty-six? The image of him leaping, shirtless and barefoot, off a roof on the cover of 1978’s
Here and Now
is inscribed on the retina. We who were helpless before that flight. I listened to his eighth record,
Twist & Rain,
over and over in Paris. That drum solo, which no one can hear without thinking of how the drummer hanged himself three nights after he laid down the track. Ezra has been a superstar for such a long time that I almost can’t remember the world without his fame in it. Fame was different for Ezra and his kind; it turned slowly and heavily. It was Ezra who heard
Whale
and got excited by it, Ezra who brought me into the label for
Bang Bang,
who sent me to the chateau, connected me to Ethan. It was Ezra whom I failed. But tonight he hugged me close, as if I were still a rising star. And then he quickly turned away to murmur to Billy, who shook his head. In the courtyard, before the show, no one notices Ezra because he has pulled in his aura. He wears jeans and Keds. He leans against the wall, cap pulled low, it’s dark except for the light of the bar on the other side of the gravel-filled square. I can’t see his face. It may be for this reason that no one notices any of us: the show they came to see, and then some. Me, Zach, Alicia, Billy, and the three
zaftig
redheaded women who sing backup for the opening act, one more luscious than the next. Alicia, sheathed in a black bodysuit like Catwoman, has been handing out tabs of MDMA as if they were communion wafers, blessing every tongue. I politely decline.

Also within our circle is William, the proprietor of this venue. He is perhaps fifty-five. He wears glasses. His lined face is handsome. He is wearing an elegant white button-down shirt with the sleeves carefully rolled up to the elbow. His pale blue eyes behind his glasses are shy, with surprisingly long lashes. We’ve been in the courtyard for only forty-five minutes or so, but already I know that he travels often to Amsterdam, because he shares custody of his children with his ex-wife, who is Dutch. He misses them very much when they aren’t with him. I like William, and he seems to like me, too, leaning in to listen, gazing steadily into my eyes. For Berlin I wear black stockings, and my hair has been done up by a tiny man with muttonchops: it is pomaded into a 1940s twist. Thick, shiny red lipstick. The overall effect is of a theatrical decadence that isn’t really sexy; it only references sex, references decadence. Real sex is curled up, dusty, within its citations, like a figure from Pompeii.

“Where have you been so far?” asks William.

“North—Denmark, a festival in Sweden.”

“Ah, near Göteborg, yes?”

“Yes. Billy killed, he was amazing.”

“This, tonight, will be amazing,” says William. He leaned in, softly touching my arm. “I can’t believe Ezra is here. You know, we all thought he had died.”

I laugh. “What?”

William doesn’t laugh. “Maybe the story didn’t make it to the U.S. He was in the hospital, some sort of overdose, the early reports here were that he had died.”

“When was this?”

“Maybe a month ago? They said he was in rehab, but I don’t know, here he is.”

I thought that Boone had arranged for Ezra to sit in with us as a favor to me, but now I see that it might have been a hand extended to Ezra, a reminder of the old days, when he had such an incredible ear. Before it all got the way it did.

“Is that why his wife—?”

William inclines his chin in something less than a nod. “Well, one can’t know, but my God, thirty years of this. Perhaps the poor woman got tired.”

“The last time I saw Susie, she was keeping right up with him.”

William touches my arm again. “I think that was some years ago. She cleaned up after his stroke.”

“His
stroke?
His stroke?”

“Shhh.” William puts a finger to his lips, half stagily, making a joke of gossiping the way we are; we stand closer so as not to be overheard. He smells of soap, not yet of cigarette smoke. “Yes. Last year. Don’t you get the news?”

The hundred little girls holding hammers study their nails, smirking. “I guess I missed it.”

Ezra, chatting, laughs his famously peculiar laugh, a kind of Aussie Woody Woodpecker sound. I can’t see the stroke on him, the overdose. He looks to me so unmarked, or, more accurately, he is already so marked that I doubt I could tell the recent marks from the older ones. He is not a handsome man, never has been. His face, in the half-light, has an ursine, lumpy quality. What can be seen of his hairline plunges, Ben Franklin style, nearly to his ears; his fringe of hair is wispy, of indeterminate color, and coarse. His face is pitted with acne scars. His eyes are small, tend toward the red. His magic emanates in part from that, from his unregenerate ugliness. He looks like a creature of the night who can hold his own with creatures of the night. Alicia, in her Catwoman bodysuit, glides up, and he opens his mouth and extends his famously long tongue.

“Jesus.”

“Berlin,” says William, “is not such a good place for him. You can get everything here so easily. He barely has to ask. Like now, look at him. And you?” He looks into my eyes, thickly ringed by false eyelashes, applied one by one by the muttonchop man.

“Oh, that? No.” I return William’s touch, lightly. “I have cheaper ways of self-destructing.”

William nods. “As do we all. Excuse me, I need to prepare a few things.” He crunches across the gravel and goes inside, walking at a slight angle, like a man in a strong wind.

I lean against the wall near Ezra, resting my feet, trying to take in what William has just told me. Jim and I didn’t see Ezra when we were here last. The last time I saw Ezra was in New York, just after
The Pillars.
A party somewhere in Tribeca. Ezra, in a black suit, like a preacher, surrounded. Tiny, skinny girls in towering shoes on the arms of men with tight faces: one of those parties, an industry thing. He invited me to help me out, not that anyone really could by then. Fame had long since evolved from the monument to the glimpse, and I had been glimpsed already, glimpsed as the maker of glimpses that I was. I shouldn’t have minded; I knew better. And wasn’t I my father’s daughter? Didn’t I have better taste, better politics than that? Oh, but still. Ezra, in Tribeca, waved me over to join him and Slash, and I didn’t hesitate for a second.

I look over at Ezra, singed, always burning. Still burning now, burning down. He is licking Alicia’s palm up to the wrist. He has never had any eyebrows to speak of, and where they went is one of the vast array of facts that aren’t known about Ezra, if that is even the name on his birth certificate. He says he’s from Australia but was really born in New Zealand; his entire family died in a fire, goes the story, and perhaps the fire took his eyebrows to mark him as its own. Fire and flame are recurrent images in his songs, but then again, no one has ever found the graves or the ashes of the outstation. And many have looked. The orphanage appears to be real, and to have raised him. The school records show that he was often disciplined. His cigarette glows in the dark. Alicia glides away on her little cat feet.

“Anna.” Ezra squints under the cap. “It’s great to see you. You look great.”

“Thanks,” I say. “You, too.”

Ezra taps out a cigarette, lights it. “You should stay awhile. You’d love it. There are amazing people here now.” He leans over, kisses one of the three luscious redheads: Beauty and the Beast.

She licks her lips. “Like me.” She fairly glows in the dark, her freckles backlit by her skin.

Ezra pulls back in mock surprise, one sparse eyebrow raised. “Jesus. Give an old dag a break.”

She shrugs. “I worship you. I mean it. I used to dress up like I was you, the thing with the torn jacket? In kindergarten. My mom has pictures. She was a huge fan of yours, too.”

Ezra adjusts his cap. “Well, thank you, ma’am. I’m honored.” He says this with utter sincerity. I wonder if the liposuction rumors are true; his gut protrudes anyway, defiant, unregenerate, like a thickly knotted root. He still wears his jeans so low that a wisp of grayish pubic hair is visible.

She hands him a card. “This is us, see? This is our site.”

I smile at him in the near-dark, but he doesn’t see me because he is earnestly studying the card. Billy and I exchange a glance.

“Your new record is incredible,” says Billy to Ezra. “It killed me.”

“Nearly killed me, too,” says Ezra, flicking his dead cigarette onto the gravel and lighting up another. “I had hair when we started.”

“I can’t stay,” I say. “Wish I could.”

Ezra regards me. “Why not?”

“We leave in the morning.” All the little girls with hammers look at me gravely, their hammers by their sides. I am sweating in the black stockings, the pomade. I am queasy, breathless, ready to go onstage. “Maybe I’ll come back after the tour. It’s not a very long one.”

Boone, clicking on his phone, glances up, grins. “I love this venue,” he says. “It used to be a police station.” He returns to his phone.

Ezra says, “I’m serious, Anna.”

And now I hear it, the note of urgency. “How’s Susie?”

“She’s back in the States. She felt like she needed to go home for a while, check in with the kids.” Ezra hitches up his pants. “She doesn’t like these winters.”

“But now it’s—”

“I’ll be here most of the winter,” says Billy in his soft voice. “Let’s work on something. I know some incredible artists who would love to hang out.”

Ezra’s small, reddish gaze, however, is fixed on me. He squints. “You got married, right? To that guy—the one from Stonecreek?”

“Jim. It didn’t work out.”

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. We just fell apart. We’re not like you and Susie.” I offer up this disingenuous flattery, then, ashamed, reel it back in. “He got sober.” I shrug, as if that weren’t a dig. “We didn’t know each other well enough, maybe. But he’s a great guy, he helped me out a lot on
Wonderland.
His own stuff is amazing. He’s a fiddle virtuoso—brilliant.”

Ezra nods rabbinically. “I’ve heard that.”

“I did try,” I say, embarrassed to find myself tearing up.

“I’m divorced,” Alicia offers sympathetically. “I got married too young.”

“Me, too,” says one of the luscious redheads. “He kept the dog. I loved that dog. I tried to steal her, but it didn’t work. I spent a night in jail.” One of the other luscious redheads squeezes her hand.

Billy Q smiles radiantly. “Your set is going to be awesome,” he says.

Upstairs, a corridor lined with large rooms constitutes the backstage, the green room, the dressing rooms, and the kitchen, where two massive bald men stand guard over melting cakes and steam trays of dubious, lumpy concoctions, neatly labeled
Pepperballs with Meatballs
and
Catfish on Cucumbers and Tomatoes.
It is as hot as hell, post-apocalyptically deserted, as if nearly everyone has just run out into the street, leaving everything behind. Empty water bottles are scattered everywhere. In the men’s dressing room, the bespectacled lead singer of the opening act is sleeping on a sofa, his bare feet propped on the sofa arm. Picking my way carefully down the corridor in my outfit, I turn into the putative women’s dressing room, which is filled with racks of clothes, open makeup cases, and a curling iron—the one used on me?—which has been left on, the better, I suppose, to burn the place down and cause a fatal stampede, perhaps in the middle of my set. I turn it off, sit down gingerly on the edge of a chair. I open my tiny black mesh bag, barely big enough for my phone and a hotel key card, which is blank, a plain white rectangle. I hold up the key card, but no fissure opens up in the space-time continuum. There isn’t even a breeze. I take out my phone and turn it on for the first time today. It is bristling with texts from Boone, as always.