The only place like that is Tania’s garden now. I call her again, and it just rings, but at least it rings. The country is air masks and plague, and I’m still covering the history of rock, and I don’t know why, because there’s nowhere to roll to.
“Daddy?” says my kid, answering at last. “We ate a cake for your birthday. Mommy made it.”
I remember that it’s my birthday. I look down at my jeans and wonder what the hell I’m doing. This is supposed to be the right way to do it, fifty years old and still cool, and instead my family is celebrating me while I’m celebrating Akercock.
In the background I can hear Tania singing under her breath, some notes that aren’t notes. They remind me of the band, suddenly, and that makes me feel—
“Where are you today?” I ask my kid. “Can you put your mom on the phone?”
“Daddy,” says my son. “I made a tree grow out of the middle of a lake.”
“What?”
“I made a star be born,” my kid insists. “Mommy taught me how.”
I cover the phone with my hand. “Where are we right now?” I ask the drummer.
“Putting a belt around the belly of the world,” he says. “You wanna get off the bus? We’re getting to the point we have a big thing to do. Last show, we’re going to have some special effects.”
The band’s singing a little, working out a melody, and I hold the phone up so that my son can hear it.
“Listen,” I say.
“Simon,” says my wife. The sound of her voice saying my name makes my ears hurt. I’ve been running since the last day I saw her, and I haven’t managed to stop calling. I wasn’t good for her, and I wasn’t good for him. This isn’t her usual voice, though. This isn’t rage. This is confusion.
“Hi there,” I say back to her, like this is normal.
I hold my phone out from my ear, expecting a stream of curses. There’ve been bad effects in the past. I should just hang up. My wife has a serious temper. Once I woke up knee-deep in ice, my feet blue inside blocks, and another time I was covered in fur, not just my ears, but my face, my whole body, and all I could do was wheeze. I’m allergic to fur. There are a few things I’ve been trying not to think about since the moment we met.
“Where are you?” Tania asks.
“On tour with a band called Akercock, about to be huge,” I tell her. There’s silence for a moment, and then there’s a garbled sound, a choking roar.
My wife starts to sing. Out from my phone it goes, a crazy twine of verse, no words I know, no words I want to know. Not how she usually does it, not a naming of elements and evildoers, not a list of hopes and of insects. Not rhyme and not staccato, but a song I know from listening to it every night on the road. On the bus, the band looks up, their eyes glittering.
Mabel’s over to me in a moment. “Who’re you on with?”
The bassist is next to me faster than I expected, and so are Eron and the drummer, all of their languid selves suddenly mercury, their skin shining, their hair standing up like stalagmites.
“Who’s singing?”
Eron is beside me, breathing into my ear. He says a name into the phone, and it’s a name like his own.
“Not anymore,” Tania says, very clearly, in tones I know all too well. “Let him go. You won’t get me that way. I won’t come home. I have my son and I have my life, and I’m over you. Don’t you have Mab now? Have her! Fuck my sister! I live here now, and I’m not coming back.”
“You’re breaking the world,” Eron says. “This is your fault.”
“I’m allowed to leave our marriage without you ending the world!”
“You’re not allowed to take my son!” Eron screams. “Bring me my child, or all the children come with me!”
She hangs up. I’m left with only the sound of wherever she is, the echo of it over the air.
“Fuck,” says Eron, turning to me, and everything about him is different than it was. All his cool is gone. He’s crackling, like ball lightning. “Who are you? Why would she? With you?”
“Heck Limmer,” I say, because there I am, standing in front of a guy half my age, whose muscles seem to exist without intentions. “That’s my wife,” I say. “On the phone.”
The drummer has a set of pipes, and he’s playing some kind of weird tune on them. He stops, and looks at me, and a bark of laughter comes out of his mouth.
“Of course,” he says. “My mistress with a monster is in love. Of course she is.”
“Was it you?” Eron says, and moves through space faster than he should, to the drummer’s side.
“Not me, man,” says the drummer. “You’re the one who cheated on her. You thought that was a plan? You thought she wouldn’t find someone new?”
“What’s the deal with you and my wife?” I ask, finally, though I’m pretty deep in knowing too much right now.
Eron Chaos looks at me with unexpected misery all over his face. “We had a son. She took him when she left, and—”
“She stole him,” Mabel says. “They got divorced six years ago, and she wasn’t supposed to take the child, but you know, man, she took the child.”
She says this in a way that is obviously relief. I’m not relieved. Certain things are dawning on me.
“It was the kind of breakup that makes you hate the songs you used to sing,” says the drummer, whose name I’ll probably never know. “The kind of breakup that makes everyone hate all the songs anyone ever sang. The kind of breakup that makes the leaves fall from the trees and the ground go gray, and the seasons go crazy, frost on the roses, floods over the cornfields, plague in the population. There aren’t any divorces where we’re from. It’s not done.”
“She left the band, and on her way out, she tipped the world over. There’s no option but starting from scratch now,” says Eron.
“You’ve been here, man,” says the drummer to me. “This place is broken.”
It seems very clear to me that I should’ve known who my wife was for a long time already.
“Let me off the bus,” I say, and Eron looks at me for a moment.
“You’ve seen my son?” he asks. “You’ve held him?”
“He’s mine,” I manage. “Adopted. I’ve been raising him.”
He gives me a haughty look. “He’s the prince of Adriftica,” Eron says. “And I’m the king.”
“How old are you?”
“Older than I look,” he says, and gazes at me, his long, slender form, the tips of his ears pointed, and his face too handsome for human use.
“Keep the old man,” says Mabel, and I feel lethargy come over me like an allergy to air. My knees are too weak to support me.
“It’s time to come off tour,” the drummer says. “It’s time to start over clean.”
“We can’t leave the queen here,” Eron says.
“She won’t come with us,” says the bassist. “She’s never been anyone’s to command.”
“I won’t leave my son,” Eron says.
“She won’t let us take them,” says the drummer. “Tania’ll come, and she’ll bring the boy.”