Wonderland (25 page)

“You’re blond?”

“Was.” He palms his head. “And curly. It was ridiculous. My bar mitzvah pictures would make you cry.”

I lean back. Just below the top of Zach’s pants I can see a bright yellow swath of his underwear. Canary yellow, in fact. I puzzle over that. Zach getting up in whatever hotel room in whatever city, suitcase open on the floor, taking out a pair of canary-yellow briefs.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“What?”

“You might be burning already. You’re red.”

“No, I’m all right. I should have brought a hat, I guess.”

“Should we go back to the van and get one?”

“No, no. I won’t fry all that fast.” I sit up straight. “How’s it going?”

He squints up at me in the sun. “How’s it going? It’s cool.” He drizzles sand on his toes. “It’s cool.”

“What does that mean?”

“Touring is just, like, this constant sense of failure, you know? And then for like a few minutes”—he stretches out his hand—“you’ve got it, the thing is happening.” He snaps his hand shut. “Next town. Next show. And if we
don’t
do a show—like that one in Munich, the one that got canceled?—I feel like I’m going to jump out of my skin. I can’t sleep that night. So it’s just.” He tosses a handful of sand up in the air. “Fucking Sisyphean. I’m so tired.” He lies back in the sand, crosses one ankle over the other. I just barely keep from kissing him. I wonder if I ever saw him lying down in Göteborg; I only remember a stumble, the tangle of our legs, and then him sitting up.

“We’re almost done. After Rome, it’s over.”

“Yeah.”

I touch him on the forearm. “Want to go in?”

We strip down to our underwear and walk toward the water. His canary-yellow ass is high and firm, and his legs are lean, runner’s legs. I wonder why no one ever corrected the duck toes, or, for that matter, his slight overbite. He is long-legged but short, compact in the body. His biceps are bigger than they need to be for playing guitar; clearly, they are like that for some other reason. Where is he from? Who are his people? He walks ahead of me into the water and the yellow turns darker, heavier, autumnal. The water, which is calm, just a few ripples, stops at his waist. “Come on,” he says.

I know that my white cotton bra and underwear will become transparent in the water; I keep my back firmly turned to the beach, with its audience of people and one-eyed blue metal horses, and wade in. The floor of the Baltic Sea is soft, slushy; the water is a dull brown, warmish, not especially saline. I think,
We are swimming in the Baltic,
except that we’re not swimming, we’re wading, and as I reach Zach I realize that the water is only wading depth for quite a ways out. Fifty yards away, people stroll in water to their thighs. An empty, polka-dotted inflatable raft wafts along dreamily, heading for Sweden. Zach stoops, splashes his torso with water. The sea runs down over the taut curves and slopes of him, finds the hollows, the dips, the short, firm arcs. I see him see me watching him. He splashes his face, his lips, the back of his neck. I turn away, reddening.

We are swimming in the Baltic.
Zach looks down at the placid sea around his waist, frowning. “Now what?”

“Float?”

He dips back and rests, elongated, on the surface, his long white feet waving gently underwater. “Okay.”

I dip back and rest as well, my feet and hands rising, the water cooling my scalp, my ears. Weightless, I lie down between the sky and the sea, Zach quietly floating next to me. I feel my hair streaming and swirling above my head in the soft current. When I tear up, it feels oddly soft, too, not a full crying but a nearly unbearable tenderness that suffuses everything. When I open my eyes, the light is blurry. Zach is nearby, arms outstretched. The small ripples move over us.

He stands up first, holds out his hands; I take them and stand. We just skim one another, cooled by the sea. We don’t let go.
We are swimming in the Baltic.
Although we are not swimming, we are standing very close together, breath to breath. His eyes are green.

It begins to rain around six, just as I’ve started on seconds of a bland thing with noodles and vegetables in the catering tent. The rain resounds against the canvas. “Oh, motherfuck,” says Zach, next to me.

Boone, chatting up a motley group of white people with dreadlocks at a neighboring table, glances over at us, up, over at us again, makes a face.

“I don’t want to get electrocuted,” says Alicia, hunched into a shredding red turtleneck, smoking. “I’m not going on in this.”

Zach shoots her a black look.

Tom holds up an unidentifiable piece of meat on his fork. “This is a three-point-five,” he says to Zach.

“I don’t want to get electrocuted, either,” I say to Alicia, “but—”

Thunder sounds; rain guns down on the canvas roof. The white and green paper lanterns strung along the ceiling bob. A young woman with wet hair, a violin case clutched to her chest, dashes into catering. “It’s a monsoon!” she says. “The tents are fucked!”

“Damn,” says Tom. “Good thing we didn’t unload the equipment yet. Is that mousse over there?”

“I don’t trust that van,” Zach says, zipping up his jersey. “I’m going to check it out.” He stands, looks at Tom. “Dude, you coming?”

Tom, with a sigh, stands up. They leave the tent. The rain guns harder, slams, thuds with a shocking determination. It is not behaving well at all.

At the empty table, Alicia blows a smoke ring, eyeing me. Her cuticles are ragged. “I hate Latvia,” she says.

Standing in the opening of the catering tent, stronger and stronger waves of rain washing in on me, I can see Zach’s bald head, Tom’s hatted one, as they move around in the back of the van, stooping. The top of a guitar case bobs up in the long window, leans. One of the panel doors in the back opens, Zach squats there, pushing water onto the soaked ground. He turns his head to say something over his shoulder to Tom. Another guitar case appears to lean beside the first in the long window.

Ducking my head, I run out of the tent, splashing across the backstage area in my flapping Taormina sandals. Already the mud is rising, softening. My ankles are wet and cold. The color has gone out of everything; the music has stopped playing everywhere. I lose my left sandal, grab it with one hand, and orient it back in the vicinity of my foot, where it doesn’t stay. The trees darken in the rain. Two guys with ponytails drag a big, black-and-silver trunk away from a small, red, half-collapsed tent. I splash up to the back of the van where Zach is crouching, bailing water with his hands. Behind him, Tom stoops, trying to maneuver Alicia’s cello up on top of a pile of suitcases. The water seeps through a seam in one of the side windows, trickling in almost sweetly, so delicately that at first it’s hard to connect it with the puddle on the floor of the van, cold water on cold, dirty metal.

“Oh, Jesus,” I say to Zach, who grunts, bailing.

Splashing across to the double-decker tour bus, I pound on the closed door. “Hey! Hey! Terry!”

“They’re not there!” shouts Zach.

“Not there?” I pound again. “Where could they be?”

“I don’t know, Anna,” he yells, “they’re just fucking not fucking there.”

I stand back from the door, peer up at the windows on the upper deck, getting drenched. “Do you think they’re all sleeping?”

No answer. Boone dashes into view, holding his light jacket together with one hand, hair plastered down on his chipped-plate face. “We can take it all into catering,” he says. “Come on, Anna, get in.” He climbs up into the driver’s seat, Zach gives me his hand, and I step up into the back with him and Tom, who is holding the guitars upright by leaning against them, pudgy arms spread wide. It smells like wet dog back here—wet dog, wet fabric, wet skin. Zach and I perch on a duffel bag, which I think is his, damp shoulder to damp shoulder.

“Is anything ruined?” I ask Zach.

“I don’t know. We have to lay everything out and look.”

The van jounces Tom braces his feet and bends his knees to keep a grip on the guitar cases. “Slow down,” he calls out, although we’re barely moving, and in a minute or two we’ve arrived at catering.

“Oh, man,” says Boone. When he comes around to open the van doors, I see the other bands who have come in vans or cars, lugging equipment through the rain to the relatively more substantial catering tent. One petite Asian woman, in curlers and black leather pants, carries an amplifier. I stand up, or crouch up, and take a guitar case from under Tom’s left arm; Zach takes a guitar case from his right, along with another, smaller guitar case. I sling someone’s backpack on my wet back. We clamber out of the van and lug the gear into catering, which, when we enter it, now looks like a triage center for musical instruments during some kind of war or natural disaster. All around the tent, cases are opened; drum kits and violins and horns and flutes and innumerable guitars are laid out on towels or tablecloths or bits of clothing—jeans, dresses, sweatpants—as musicians hover over them, wiping them down with paper napkins, paper towels, shirts, boxers, rags. The ferocity of the storm has taken everyone by surprise. Next to the soda machine, a black man with a long face and long arms crouches by a harp with a sprung string; the broken string tendrils along his back as he unwinds it from the base. His other hand fans out against the harp strings. Not far from the harp, three young men with full beards play guitars and sing in Spanish, occasionally thumping the bodies of the guitars. A lady is leaving, it seems, the heart is breaking. The heart is breaking, the lady is leaving. Thump of the heart, or is it the footsteps of the lady?

Zach unbuckles buckles, unzips zippers, bent over the gear. Tom and Boone and I lug pieces from the van into catering, going back and forth, soaked. Alicia shows up, her red turtleneck and pedal pushers going as soggy as everything else as she hauls gear into the tent. Her platinum hair sticks to her head. When the van is as hollow as it is cold, I close the doors, lock the wet lock, and put the keys in my pocket, next to what I realize is a sodden mass of licorice, now paste. I toss the brightly colored paste into a trash can, wipe my hands on my pants. Inside, in our rough square of triage, Zach has laid everything out with geometrical precision: neat rows of instruments, butterfly screws, cables, and cords on three tarps, and, carefully elevated above the floor on shoes, Alicia’s cello, over which she hovers, wiping it down with a flowered blouse. She is crying. Tom, standing anxiously nearby, says, “I really think it’s okay. It was hardly in there ten minutes.” Alicia twists a bit of fabric around her index finger, runs her finger down each string. Tom kneels and steadies the cello for her as she tends to it. The cello case, empty on the ground, is spattered with rain.

Zach has torn a pair of his jeans into rags. He and Boone and I methodically move from guitar to guitar, cable to cable, drum piece to drum piece, each with a length of denim, drying as best we can. We look as if we’re harvesting some invisible fruit or vegetable from a strange field. The hum inside the tent is sociable, the men with beards thump their guitars, the white and green lanterns sway as the storm continues full force. I reach over to put a hand on Tom’s shoulder. “All of the kit looks good,” I tell him. “I think it was far away from the windows.”

He sighs, shaking his head. “It’s my best kit. Everything else I have is junk.”

“It’s all right. Really.”

“I’m going to have to retune all of it.”

“Everything,” says Alicia, tense-faced. “It’s all going to be a mess.”

The Spanish guys are singing something else now. What is that tune? Though they’re singing it in Spanish, I recognize it, “Stormy Weather,” at the same moment as others in the tent do; laughter rises from the musicians stooping and dragging and rubbing down their instruments. The mood is communal, but there is a palpable undertow of anxiety. Most of the people here can’t afford to replace their instruments. Like Tom, like turtles, they travel with the only houses they have on their backs. Like me, selling my precious bit of rubble to get here, where I might never be again. I dry a guitar neck. It looks like I have the left ass cheek of Zach’s jeans.

“What?” asks Boone.

“Nothing.”

I scoot inch by inch across the tarp, drying curves and strings and pedals and plugs with Zach’s back left pocket, his waistband. I put my hand in his pocket to get a better grip. Thus mittened, I make my way down the rows. Throughout the tent, men and women and even a few children do the same, stooping and standing and stooping again. Boone wipes his face with one of Zach’s worn-out knees. “We might not make it back to Riga tonight. Terry’s driver told me the roads are flooded. He thinks they have enough bunks on their bus for us.”

Zach, inspecting an amp, winks at me, and I shoot him a look that means,
Don’t even think about it,
although I am thinking about it, of course, crawling over the tarp. The narrow bus bunks with their little curtains in the middle of the night, shoes in the corridor outside each bunk, the sepulchral hush, the scattered laughter and sounds of gunfire from the movie a few people are watching, Terry and Tom racking up a lazy line or two, sprawled on the couches on the lower deck, the rain tapping the bus windows, tangled hair and warm skin, the turning toward each other. Let’s just put it this way: it’s not impossible.

Not impossible at all. Boys fall out of trees all the time. When I leave him, tripping over a high-top sneaker, to slip back into the bunk next to his, I find that it smells of him, because I smell of him. Lying down alone, I still feel as if I am floating with him in the parked tour bus.

In the morning, I pull on the skirt that’s still damp, a sweatshirt Kiki lent me, the sandals that are now swollen, flaking, and also still damp. The rain has turned them definitively from provisional to notional. I make my way around the little staircase to the lower deck, where Kiki, in a head wrap imprinted with skulls, sits nursing the baby, breast modestly covered by a pretty little blanket imprinted with evergreen trees. On one of Kiki’s fingers is a ring in the shape of an airplane.

“Hey,” says Kiki. “It stopped raining, but it’s a swamp out there.”