Wonderland (6 page)

I had my reasons. Such as: Daisy and Vikram, reconfigured as a tremulous duo called Whether, were opening for R.E.M. in Asia while I was still back in the States alone, in pieces, with a bunch of morons who made jokes about the cheerleaders who wouldn’t fuck them, or would, and who was a bitch (everyone). The van smelled of gas fumes and beer-soaked indoor-outdoor carpet. We slept on floors and sagging sofas, or, worse, in the van itself, in sleeping bags. Also: the part where Daisy and Vikram had broken up with me. Also: the part where they kicked me out of my own band. The Squares had been staying in someone’s house in Brussels; it was always miserably cold in that house, even to everyone else. We all wore shirts layered over other shirts, several pairs of socks. I also wore a parka. My hair was canary yellow with black dots in it. As we sat around someone else’s plexiglass dining room table wearing all the clothes we had, Daisy kept drawing a little pattern on her hand, maybe the shape of my stolen soul. She was already pregnant with their first kid, though she wasn’t saying that yet, of course. Also: being bewildered. Also: feeling murderous. Also: knowing it was over, our
Conformist
period had come to an end. Vikram, who used the word “reframing” at the plexiglass dining room table in Brussels, never did have any balls, not really. He mistook his narcissism for having an imagination. John and Miguel, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, said nothing, swathed in multiple T-shirts and badly fitting sweaters, pale and puffy from existing on martinis, teenage girls, and
frites.

Also: even in Brussels, even when I thought, or knew, my life was over, something else had already been occurring to me. It haunted me. I felt, irrationally, that the others had discovered my secret and that’s why they were really kicking me out. They hadn’t, of course. They were just assholes. Miguel was barely conscious. Daisy and Vikram were as self-enclosed as ever, psychically curled together, head to toe, in one cockleshell. John gazed at the ceiling. They didn’t know anything about my tender ghost: out of the corner of my eye, glimpsed in a window, overheard—that boy in the street in New York before we left,
Never
ever,
never
ever,
bro
—or some sonic bricolage, one or two notes of fork hitting floor in a restaurant, the harmony on a song I heard in Dublin, what was it called? It was late at night, a local band. The woman—young, round, with pockmarked skin—who was singing harmony only came in at entirely unpredictable times, a shadow line. You could barely hear her. The edge of a sound; the place where the sound has mostly rubbed away, leaving just a washed-out stain, like the head of a soldier and nothing else of him that I once saw in a fresco in Arezzo, like Mads’s disappearing
r
when he said “wonderland,” though I hadn’t met Mads yet or lived through the years before him. I kept that harmony to myself for a long time, because I didn’t understand it, and because I loved it almost too much.

Daisy and Vikram and The Squares had been all about understatement and 4/4 time; their innovation was pulling the notes back in the millisecond that the listener could anticipate where they were going next. (So like them.) Jouncing from city to city in the van, I decided that understatement in 4/4 time was bullshit, which is probably half-true; instead, I wanted my sound to be a spaceship or a knife, exploratory. I was so raggedy and fucked-up. I felt like hell every minute of the day. I had a rotten tooth that kept me up at night and that felt like my fate in my mouth. When I came off the soul-chilling tour with The Sweet, I walked back into the liberated zone of New York, where it was full-on, rotting midsummer. JFK smelled like an abandoned zoo. Jungle heat, stinking subways. The heat comforted me. The rot, inside and out, was a psychic landmark. Besides the heat and the rot, all I had to my name was a vague ambition, a too-short checkered skirt, about a thousand dollars, and, miracle, my friend Jonah, the sound wizard, who owed me a week of studio time because I had let him live in my tiny, tiny apartment at 19 th and First for two months after his girlfriend threw him out. A week is expensive. A week is a long time. In a week you can get to the first stop. I was wounded, exhausted, angry, broke, and past thirty. In other words, I was ready.

It was like going through the eye of a needle. In a week, after hours, Jonah and I, snorting piles of cocaine, roughed out
Whale.
It was a scratchy sort of freedom. Sand in my mouth as I whirled down the dune. The coke, after a while, felt like cold sand, too; my head was filled with sand; my eyes were filled with sand. As if I had walked into a blizzard of sand, but I had to keep going, I couldn’t stop, and besides, I had nowhere else to go. Coke-burned, bitter, bereft, empty, untouched literally and figuratively by sunlight, in a state of idiocy. It would be easy to say that I was rotting like my rotten tooth, like the city, but that wouldn’t be right, because rot is slow and organic, unavoidable, and everything I did was willed, too fast, airless, like something metal whirling in a vacuum. The studio was cool, low-ceilinged, at the back of a Buddhist meditation center. I never saw any Buddhists that week, maybe they were on vacation in Nirvana. During the day, Jonah raked in a lot of money making people you’ve heard of sound like they could sing; at night, for free, he returned the one favor I had left to call in. Jonah had a habit of twirling his hair as he worked. We stared at each other through the glass of the studio booth for hours, both of us dogged and sleepless and hopeless, me in socks, him twirling his hair, trichotillomanic. I called up a few people to contribute instrumental tracks and paid them in coke and my good will, promises of future labor, organ donations. I tried to lay down the vocals, but night four, night five went by and I was still hungry, still thirsty for the sound I wanted. My hair seemed to be falling out, squiggly red strands glittering on the floor of the sound booth. My tooth was getting worse, throbbing its red warning light, but I needed the money for that cold sand that was fueling it all.

And then on night six, stinking and exhausted, drowning in dunes of self-pity, I passed through the eye of the needle to wonderland—to the broken, the illogical, the roads that double back on themselves, the weird, the uncanny, the in-between. It was such a small sonic shift at the time, an awkward half-note, like a single letter in a familiar word turned backward. And yet. It changed the entire thing. I saw all at once that my form would be to be in search of a form, like someone wandering, tracing an unpredictable path. You can’t understate a phrase you can’t predict. Fuck Daisy and Vikram’s fucking good taste, their snowglobe for two, I thought morosely, belligerently. And I realized something else: the central importance of the unheard chord, the chord that is never played, the chord that happens after the music ends. How had I missed it for so long? It’s the sound you don’t quite hear, the reverberation coming off the top or the side or the edges of the note. Not a silence but a potential sound, a space exactly the shape of what the sound is about to be. Invisible, inaudible, and yet revelatory, what finishes and composes the sequence retrospectively: you discover that it was all going, in the end, toward the chord that isn’t heard but is only anticipated. Which is to say, the last chord happens in the mind of the listener, as if he is remembering a sound which in reality he has never heard before. The unheard chord feels like, must feel like, a memory. This was my ambition.

I followed the awkward half-note, again, again, again. Finally, very late on a Tuesday night, Jonah looked at me from the other side of the glass of the booth, twirling his hair, nodding. I was saved, not for the last time. In that moment I became the girl of the stumbling half-note, the note that thrilled the smart people of 2002 and made them feel the heroism of stumbling. My sound wasn’t the propulsive, cathartic shamanism of, you know, fill in the blank with your favorite name. My sound was the sound of the gap, the place where the seams show, where your fate feels like it’s quietly rotting inside your head. We used maybe three or four instruments on
Whale,
and Jonah did the percussion himself, wrapping his socks around the drumsticks, twirling his wrist a certain way, and glancing at the beat while seeming also to fall asleep halfway through it and then waking up at the last minute to finish it. The record sounded simultaneously like a dress slipping off a bare shoulder and a girl falling down a well. People liked that sound that year. I stood around on the lip of the half-note, shining my little flashlight up at the night. I wasn’t wrong. That half-twisted half-note was the right one, then.

Of course, I was still a wreck.
Very,
as a shrink put it wryly (much) later on,
rock-and-roll.
I felt it was owed me. I barely remember the
Whale
tour, mostly funded by my parents, who still had some money left then (bless their boho optimism)—Pittsburgh, Ann Arbor, Jersey City, San Francisco, and then, as it blew up, New York, Los Angeles, Europe—but everyone else remembers it, it changed their lives, I saw them, I saw through them, they saw themselves in me, prismatically, as through a broken window to a mirror, which makes sense, because I was completely busted to shit, sending bulletins from back behind the back, where even the cardboard boxes are soggy and torn. I didn’t let the dentist finish putting the crown on so that I could touch the pointy tooth stump with my tongue, secretly tasting my will. But to everyone else it was the beginning of something, an era, everyone remembers that sound, the sound Jonah and I made in a week of nights out of sand. That was the sound of
then.
From
Whale
forward. Everyone agrees that it started with
Whale,
the new thing that everyone remembers so well. The sound waves spread out from that moment. Around the indie recording studios, I became, for a season, a verb. “Brundaging” meant tearing up the sound, erasing half of it, sending it skittering over the abyss, though no one was able to reproduce the way Jonah twirled his wrist over the drumhead, no one had his socks, so they were never able to copy that exquisitely muffled, glancing beat. In another life, Jonah might have been a tennis champion: he knew the precise, unreturnable angle at which to hit the ball.

By the time we left Los Angeles for Europe, I’d been signed by the adventurous sub-label of a major label. They were even willing to help out with the European tour for
Whale,
add bookings, musicians, upgrade our hotels. This angel manifested in the form of a skinny woman in a red dress with a terrible nose job who appeared in my dressing room on New Year’s Eve with a contract. Flattening out the pages on top of my guitar case, I signed. She kissed me on the lips. Her nostrils were enormous. “Congratulations, baby,” she said. “Here we go.”

Privately, I’ve always thought that I got famous, in certain circles, because of what the most astute ears could hear: my failure. I broke through, I broke in, but I couldn’t entirely break the train. And I knew it. That longing—I longed for so much then, and certainly so much happened—was vast, but the deepest note, the worst part, was my longing to cross that last few inches, to get up, over, or behind the note, topple the train open. The way some people long for the divine, I longed for that. I didn’t just want to be famous; I wanted to be something better than famous. I wanted to lie down at last in the heat of the gap. I was stumbling so effortlessly, so perceptively, in my rush to break the train. That’s what the smart people heard, whether they were conscious of it or not: my awareness that I was reaching for what I couldn’t quite grasp, the space just beyond my fingertips. I imagine pilots feel the same way, flying higher and higher until the sky thins. In fact, I was in wonderland then, but only in some hazy amber of memory. At the time, I wasn’t anywhere. I was reaching for the train as it disappeared, flash of silver, around a curve. Now I’m trying to go back to a place I’ve never been.

My fans said I was the sound they’d been waiting for. With me, they said, they went to the place, through the eye of the needle. They felt that we went there together, night after night.

I don’t remember much about any of that. What I remember is the light on the wall of a hotel room in Budapest. It was the color of piss, it vibrated as trucks passed outside. It was beautiful and I didn’t care about it at all. Three hours to showtime. I closed my eyes, indicted.

T
HE LIGHT IN
Göteborg is clear, fine: a transparent light. The boulevards are wide and the trams that run along them are blue. Everyone here, to me, looks like a professor. Poseidon reigns over the top of the main boulevard, naked and muscular in black marble but with a strangely truncated penis; he is staring with some consternation at the massive, compensatory fish he brandishes in one hand. Boone and I are having lunch with Billy Q, shivering at an outside table, because Swedes have a different definition of “summer,” it seems. The restaurant, improbably, is called Corazón de la Noche. We are eating tapas, which are actually quite good.

Billy Q looks like a little monk. He is pushing fifty, and he has folded his fame wings around himself like an invisibility cloak, but the magenta heat still comes off him, a mix of extraordinary intelligence, unease, vulnerability, and everything we know and don’t know about him, all the places and times we’ve heard his voice, that burnt vibrato. He is wearing a keffiyeh and several layers of brightly patterned scarves wrapped this way and that, draping down his back and snaking around his shoulders. His gaze is kind but also piercingly curious, restless. His head—his famous head—seems set in the scarves just so, like a precious stone or a crystal ball; his body is incidental, a pedestal, it doesn’t interest him.

“I love
Wonderland,
” he says. “You’re amazing. We’ve missed you.”

Helplessly, I blush. Billy Q missed me? “Thank you.
Quarterlife
was incredible. I can’t believe it’s been that long—”

“Right? Twenty-five years. Unimaginable.” He raises his eyes to the sky. “I feel like I’m a hundred years old.”