The Prom Goer's Interstellar Excursion (25 page)

I looked at Sophie. I was malfunctioning. She was standing in the middle of the dusty field, hair sticking out in all directions, arms blotchy with bruises and lined with scratches, shielding her eyes from a strange sun, having been through hell. She was here because of me. I didn't want to fail in front of her.

“Pretend like you're in your bedroom!” she yelled over the drums. “You can do this!”

And with that…a strange feeling came over my fingers, which started to move like they were doing what they wanted without my conscious control. They knew just where to go, which I guess made sense, since I was playing one of my own songs. I leaned into the microphone.

“I'm going to call a little bit of an audible for our first number,” I said into the mike. “This song is called ‘Sophie and Me Under the Waterfall.' ”

Sophie's mouth
dropped.
I turned to Cad and Driver, who were equally shocked.

“What the hell is ‘Sophie and Me Under the Waterfall'?” said Cad.

“Just follow my lead,” I said.

Having spent hundreds of afternoons alone in my bedroom with my guitar, I had mentally collected the fragments of a million songs I didn't have any idea how to finish, which until now I'd always thought was a flaw in my character. Every time, I would hit that point where I got discouraged, and give up.

But with Sophie standing in front of me, I wasn't going to give up this time. I started to sing.

Love is gonna run, but I'm gonna chase

Sophie's gonna win, but I'm gonna place

As I began, it felt like I wasn't Bennett anymore—I was just another note hovering above the stage, channeling ideas. From my perch, I watched a crowd start to come, approaching with
the sandwiches and drinks that a few minutes before had been a more enticing option than watching the first show of the festival.

I tried not to look at Sophie—I knew she was shocked, which was understandable, considering that
every song
I was playing was clearly about her, and I was using her real name in all of them. Less than a week ago, when I had spotted her through the telescope and we had started this journey, I had assured her that I wasn't a stalker. These songs
really
weren't going to help my cause.

The fifth song in the set was the long-in-development “Sophie and Me Up in Those Trees,” about us living together in the Amazon jungle. Halfway through, I realized the stage manager had turned on the video screens on either the side of the stage. For the first time in my life, I caught a glimpse of myself fifty feet tall and singing:

You're swinging up there and I'm looking up at you

Can't wait to come home to a tree house made for two….

Oh!

It was the first time I'd ever shouted
oh!
I could see why singers did it all the time. It was satisfying.

The video screens, the growing crowd, and the
songs
attracted bigger crowds, and by the seventh number—“The Time Sophie and I Got Locked in a Target”—we weren't getting only
snack-gobbling curiosity seekers, we were getting fans who were
showing up
already dancing, pushing their way to the front for a better view.

By the eighth song, I figured it was time to try something else, so I eased the band into a song that had no title, which we had worked on together in Ferguson's basement, words courtesy of Sophie.

As was the case with everything she did, writing lyrics had seemed to come to Sophie with ease, and throughout that night I had watched Skark repeating her rhymes to himself as they popped out of her head, laboring to commit them to his newly sober working mind.

These particular lyrics were patently about being trapped with a bunch of people you didn't want to be stuck with. Because they were fresh in my mind, they rattled off my tongue:
“Nowhere to go but out in the snow, nowhere to hide with these guys as my guide.”
Propelled by the
thump
of Driver's drums, they poured out of me, and I could see Sophie grinning and looking around at the crowd roaring behind her.

For the ninth song, my brain went back to one of my own compositions, just called “Sophie,” which I knew was uncreative. I couldn't see where the crowd ended, and they were all
moving.
Or at least jumping—by now, the crowd was too tightly packed for any individual to be doing a solo dance number.

That's something I forgot to mention about the songs—while they started out with me strumming a guitar alone in my bedroom, with Cad's bass and Driver's huge backbeat, they had
somehow morphed into
dance songs.
And I
liked
watching the crowd move out there.

This was why I needed a band. I had always thought my personal musical style would end up somewhere in the Bob Dylan / Jeff Buckley / Van Morrison song-as-confessional mold—but it turned out that in my heart, in true seventies funk-lord style, all I wanted to do was make the people
dance.

As we began the tenth song—“Sophie at the End of the Telescope,” which was another number that wouldn't help my
I'm not obsessed with you
case—I looked at Sophie to see her reaction, but all I got was the back of her head, because she had turned around and was pushing back against the crowd pressing her up against the stage.

I see you through my glass viewfinder

Let me be your lovin' next-door minder

I reached down from the stage and pulled Sophie up to keep her from being crushed. I didn't even lose my balance—three songs in, I had become one with my platform shoes, and by this point I thought I might never take them off again.

She yelled into my ear over the music. “Every song is about
me.
I think you owe me royalties,” she said, smiling.

“Sorry about the surprise,” I said.

“It wasn't a surprise,” she said. “I've been listening to you singing about me for
years.
”

Well, that solved that mystery. She
had
heard me singing
about her through my open window. I didn't have time to feel self-conscious about it. There were a hundred thousand eyes—grouped in twos and threes and fours—staring up at me from the field.

I turned to make sure Sophie made it safely to the wings of the stage. And there, for the first time since I'd started performing, I noticed Skark.

He was rubbing his throat and pacing back and forth barefoot, miserable. This was supposed to be his moment, but there I was in his shoes, fronting his band, playing to the entire ticket-holding population of Dondoozle.

We finished the last song. “Thank you and
good night
!” I yelled. “The Perfectly Reasonable loves you.”

I hustled offstage and immediately began taking off my boots as the audience stomped and clapped and screamed for the obligatory encore.

Skark gave me a gesture of
what are you doing?

“
You're
going out there,” I said. “But you can't do it naked, so you're going to have to put all of this back on. Fast.”

I looked at Sophie.

“A little privacy, please,” I said.

“Let me point out that I've just been watching you jump around in the tightest jumpsuit
imaginable
,” she said, turning around and covering her eyes. “So there isn't much
mystery
between us anymore.”

“That's not true,” I said. “You're still totally mysterious to me.”

I saw Sophie smile. She liked that.

I took off Skark's jacket and peeled the jumpsuit from my body while Skark pulled off the scrubs and handed them back. It was a little odd standing face to face with a naked man who had a body kinda similar to my own, like I'd stumbled into an abstract black-and-white photograph from the 1970s, but there was no time to dwell on it.

“Hackkk,”
said Skark, rushing to put the jumpsuit back on. Dressing him up wasn't going to solve the issue of him not being able to speak.

There was still one thing we hadn't tried, maybe because we hadn't had the right kind of spackle.

I pulled a sweaty wad of balled-up festival program out of my boot and shoved it into the hole in his throat.

“Garumpf,”
said Skark, shocked.

“See if that helps,” I said. “I
know
you've got one song in you.”

Skark rubbed his stuffed voice box and looked at me.

“A little better…,” he croaked.

I held the top of the platform boot open, and reluctantly he lifted his callused foot toward me.

“You know what?” I said. “Your foot is bugging me out, so I'm going to let you put on your shoe yourself.”

One after the other, he jammed his feet into his boots and laced them himself. He stood, checking his balance, and put out his hands to me.

I gave him his guitar.

“Thank you,” he whispered, barely forcing it out. “I'm glad you came on the bus.”

“Me too,” I said. “Good luck.”

With that, Skark smiled at me and walked onstage for the encore. The applause was deafening, and I was pleased that it was partly mine.

If anyone in the audience had questions about why the Skark who walked onstage for the encore was taller, had slightly different colored hair, and carried himself in an alternate manner than the Skark who had walked
off
the stage two minutes earlier, they forgot them once the real Skark stepped up to the microphone.

“Accckkk,”
he hacked, willing his throat to do what he wanted.
“Accckkk
…dammit…
accckkk.”

It was disgusting, but the crowd thought it was part of the theatrics of the show, and they loved it.

Skark grinned at the crowd, and I saw him relax. If they were going to cheer for him for simply
clearing his throat
, then he already had them where he wanted.

Before Skark got up there, I'd cockily been thinking that my own performance had been rather showstopping—my singing was in key, my songs were embraced by the audience, my fingers knew what to do with the guitar strings without me having to tell them—and then Skark went up there and proved how a true legend owned a stage.

“
Accckkk.
Aha. There it is. You'd
forgotten
how good the Perfectly Reasonable could be, hadn't you?” he said. “I assure you that after tonight you won't forget us again. This next song is called ‘You Can't Hide'—perhaps you've heard it before.”

They launched into the song, and it became evident that I had exploited only a
fraction
of the energy the audience had pent up inside their bodies. I might have
started
them dancing, but Skark took it from there, whipping them into such a froth I was fearful they'd rush the stage and rip the Perfectly Reasonable to shreds, which would have perhaps hindered their comeback. But it would have been a glorious way to end a career and would have no doubt received some exceptional press.

“I think I'm turned on,” said Sophie, watching Skark.

“Turn off,” I said.

I'd never seen Cad and Driver
smile
while they were playing music together onstage, but now they looked like thirteen-year-old kids who'd just started a garage band and were realizing it was a lot of fun to make a lot of noise.

The ground was shaking as Skark stood on the amplifier at the front of the stage and soloed over the crowd, then fell backward into the audience and allowed his adorers to catch him. He played horizontally as he was passed from hand to hand, his clothing being torn to ribbons. By the time he was returned to the stage for his final song, he was naked aside from his jacket, which was fortunately
just
long enough to keep the concert from turning pornographic.

Skark stood at the microphone, fixing his hair. “You could have
waited
until I was done with the show before stripping me to the skin. You know I've always had an open-door policy regarding fans coming home with me, and I'll need your help to keep in shape until the next tour.”

“When is the next tour?”
shouted somebody from the crowd.

“We're planning it as soon as we finish this, so silence thyselves and pay attention. For the rest of your days, you'll be gloating about this next performance to your friends who aren't here, for you're about to witness the solo debut of our bassist, Cad, playing his own song.”

Skark took off his guitar and handed it to an astonished Cad.

“The only reason I never let you play before now was that I wanted to give you the largest possible audience,” said Skark, smirking.

“How
thoughtful
of you,” said Cad, putting down his bass and strapping on the guitar.

Skark took the bass and retreated to the rear of the stage, graciously gesturing Cad to the center microphone. Cad looked out at the audience.

“The last time we were here, it was the best gig of my life,” said Cad. “Now this is. You've given this band new life. This is a song I wrote called ‘Home.' ”

The moment Skark said Cad was going to play a song, I had hoped it would be ‘Home.' His lyrics about looking for something but not wanting to go back to the place you came from—
born on the coast but never saw the ocean again, knew
I'd meet you but I never knew when
—ran over and underneath and through the endless sea of crowd members raising their arms, embracing him from where they were standing. The first part of the song was just Cad and his guitar, but when the chorus kicked in—
made it here with you
, repeated several times—Driver fell into a groove behind him and hammered through the rest of the song like he'd been playing it his entire career.