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  “You’ve been with Donjon since the start. Ten years, is that right?”

  “Yeah.” Twenty-three-year-old surly punk, smoking on a couch someone had left by a dumpster in back of McNeil’s. Inside the bar, on a bare plywood stage, a man who shouldn’t have been even remotely charismatic. Who looked like the sweaty, brooding lovechild of a porn director and a poodle, but who was so fucking talented he could make blue eyeliner and maudlin Minnie Riperton covers work for him. His band was called Don Johnson and the Storm Boys. Dumbass name. His guitarist was fine, but his drummer was terrible. CJ had gone outside to escape that assault on the very concept of rhythm. Had brought her beer with her and was balancing it on the sofa cushion beside her.

  Don Johnson came out eventually, wiping his forehead on his balled up T-shirt. She’d learn later that he loved being shirtless the way some people loved being outdoors. That he was oddly proud of his pale, skinny chest with its black curls.

  They’d hey-ed each other, and she’d wordlessly offered him a cigarette. He’d smoked against the alley wall for a moment, then she moved her beer so he could sit on the couch. She remembered being fascinated by the smell of his overworked body mixing with the autumn air. Remembered how starkly terrified she’d been of the desire that had ripped through her when he’d sat down—because she’d been warned about lust, and years of rebellious dreaming had been no match for her very significant, very Catholic fear of hell.

  For those first five minutes he sat beside her, she didn’t speak. She kept her legs pressed tightly together, like she was in danger of imminent violation from the very idea of fucking him. But inside, she was pure rock and roll. She sweated and she screamed, and she deafened herself with her own rhythm.

  Charlene’s voice snagged the edge of the memory, tore it away. “And rumors have always—I mean surely you know, the speculation about you and Donny.”

  “Is that a question?”

  Charlene’s smile broadened, but didn’t get any more sincere. “I understand this is a personal matter.”

  “You’re right.”

  Charlene shook her head a little, like she’d just had a door slammed in her face. “Okay. Let’s go back to the Hand. Is it ever frustrating, CJ, to watch Donjon’s ticket and album sales drop? To see the effect Donny’s conversion has had on your music, on your public appeal? Rock and roll requires a certain amount of, well—sexuality. Glamour.” For just a second, CJ could see how much Charlene Villalon truly loved rock and roll. CJ saw that look sometimes in the eyes of fans who swarmed them to talk a mile a minute about Mark’s insane bass riffs or the precision of CJ’s accents. Donjon had become famous for raucous songs dripping with innuendo. Celebrations of bodies and desire, all brought to life by Donny’s relentless theatricality, the sexuality that was present in every drop of his sweat. “I’m wondering if you ever miss that,” Charlene finished quietly.

  CJ sat back, letting her arms dangle. “Our true followers, they’re not gonna bail. You know? Our—the people who are with us, they’re with us. We’ve had a lot of good response to our new direction. Picked up a lot of new fans.”

  “I see.” Charlene sounded unconvinced. “And what do you say to critics who think that Donjon’s ability to remain in the public eye even after taking this new direction . . . is because you’re a joke? That it’s an ironic fanship—people laughing at Donny. And, by extension, you.”

  “Fuck them.”

  That was the most like herself she’d sounded all morning.

  Chapter 3

  February 15th, 1983

  Seven months earlier.

  Donny was lying in Dud Smats-Hinkle’s dry bathtub wearing jeans, his vessel, and nothing else, empty pudding cups stacked on the soap shelf. They always stayed at Dud’s when they were in Newark, never in a hotel. It was something that hadn’t changed in the ten years Donjon had been together. The house was ugly, and there wasn’t a corner in it that wasn’t host to at least three different kinds of mildew, but it was more of a home than any place Donny had ever known. He and Mark were singing “She’s Got Class”—a song they’d written years ago about a kindergarten teacher who told her husband she was staying late at school to help set up for open house (“The crash of clay handprints as our bodies hit the table . . . ”). Donny was still willing to sing Donjon’s old songs sometimes, when it was just him and Mark.

  CJ walked in, hands shoved in the pockets of her jeans, dark brows lowered, anger crackling in every movement. Donny’s vision shrank to a narrow band that encompassed only CJ Crespo—cropped blonde hair, dark eyes, bronze skin. A pliable mouth with oddly pale lips. When CJ was angry, any room she walked into seemed to light up like an arena, filaments in every bulb burning red. It excited Donny on some primal level, even after all these years.

  Mark didn’t seem to notice. He was sitting on the floor by the toilet, strumming an acoustic, his long stringy hair falling forward. He was in a demonically good mood because he’d hung up on his mother earlier in the evening. The phone had rung twice since then, with Donny whispering “be strong” each time, as Mark’s hand hovered over the receiver. Now Mark said, “CJ, listen to this,” and started strumming before Donny could decide if he was going to venture into the fire of CJ Crespo’s eyes; if he was going to give her the satisfaction of knowing she’d roused Donny’s concern—or at least his curiosity.

  Donny said, over the sound of Mark’s Fender, “Something wrong?”

  CJ put one hand on the wall and dropped her head. Opened her mouth. “She—” The rest was lost as Mark played louder, nodding in time to the music, mouth hanging open in stoned concentration.

  Donny shifted in the tub, the skin of his naked back squeaking against the porcelain, his jeans making doglike whuffing sounds. “Mark, quiet a minute.”

  Mark’s playing tapered guiltily and he looked from Donny to CJ.

  CJ sighed. “Some bitch in the bar accused me of stealing seventy-five dollars from her. Whuhthefuck do I need her seventy-five dollars for, right? But she leaves her wallet on the stool next to me while she goes to piss, then she gets back and she’s looking at it lying there on the stool, like ‘How’d that get there?’ Then she starts glancing at me. Checks inside the wallet, then keeps saying it, over and over again, like she believes it: ‘She stole my money. I had seventy-five dollars in here!’ Showin’ the bartender her empty wallet and all that.”

  “Did she know who you were?” Donny asked.

  CJ shrugged. “Never said one way or another.”

  “You punch her lights out?” Donny hoped not. Hoped CJ remembered that she’d made a promise to the Creator to swear off violence. He wasn’t pleased that she’d gone to a bar.

  “Nah. Bartender knows who I am, though. He’s telling the woman, ‘Look, I was here the whole time. She didn’t touch your wallet.’ Meanwhile my bodyguard’s moving in like he’s gonna . . . But she’s sayin’ she’ll go to the cops, and I don’t need that after last week, you know?” CJ plucked her bare throat. “So I gave her my vessel, to shut her up.”

  Donny went cold. “You did what?” He glanced at CJ’s neck, and sure enough, the silver chain and small vial were gone.

  “She was drunk; she kept pointing at it. ‘What’s that? What’s that?’ So I said, ‘Here, you want it?’ And I gave it to her. She was drunk enough that she was just, ‘Ooh, shiny.’ And took it.”

  Donny felt inexplicably lonely. That CJ could part so easily with her vessel told him she’d never quite taken it seriously in the first place. Had never taken anything about Hand in All seriously. He’d asked her last month to join him on this path because he’d believed it would help her. That she was lost and looking for guidance. He hadn’t pressured her—at least, it hadn’t felt like that. CJ didn’t do anything she didn’t want to do. So he’d assumed she’d stepped onto the path of her own accord, and things had seemed to get better for her for a while. Fewer binges, fewer fights, less surliness with the media. Then things had soured again.

  Last week in A
lbany, CJ had nearly been arrested for pissing out of a hotel room window and into the pool. She’d been trying to show Harbor that women could piss standing up—they just had to train themselves to control the spray. Fortunately it had been after hours and nobody had been in the pool, and the man who’d spotted her from across the courtyard, a married keynote speaker at a weekend Global Transfer Pricing conference, had done so from astride a Cornell undergrad. The whole thing had been settled relatively quietly, and Donny had been almost disappointed to find the incident mentioned in only one or two shabbier industry publications in the coming days. A part of him still craved tabloid attention.

  Donny shifted again, knocking over the stack of pudding cups. Leftover chocolate flecked the tub. “Yeah?”

  Mark had started playing a scale, very softly, glancing up every few seconds as though to make sure he wasn’t going to be yelled at. Donny sang the scale as he collected pudding cups: “Eat piss, eat piss, eat piss, eat piss, eaaaaaaaaaaat . . .” He stacked the cups without looking at CJ. He wasn’t entirely sure whether the Creator was okay with the word “piss” or not, but in this moment, he didn’t particularly care.

  CJ sighed and tapped the wall with her fist. “It’s just a glorified necklace. You know the Creator’s interested in our souls, not our accessories.”

  He did know that. He wore his own vessel on a chain around his neck—a small glass-and-pewter tube filled with a viscous liquid. There was a story behind it, a story his Guide had taught him, but when he got upset, he couldn’t remember the story. Something about giving shape to uncertainty. Some days he wore it and felt proudly submissive to the Creator—less lonely, less confused. Some days he looked at it and felt like a fool.

  Hearing CJ say that, about souls, calmed him slightly. “What’d you drink at the bar?” He tried to sound casual.

  She stared at him like she couldn’t believe his nerve. “I had a coke.”

  “Mixed with what?”

  Her mouth opened slightly. “Jesus, Don.”

  “You stink of it,” he said calmly from the bathtub. “I can smell it from here.”

  She’d agreed to let go gradually—booze, cigarettes. She couldn’t quit these things cold turkey, she’d said. And he’d accepted that. Except now he got the sense she wasn’t even trying.

  “Eat piss eat piss eat piss . . . ” he sang. He balanced the stack of empty pudding cups in his palm and flicked the top one off the stack. It hit CJ in the knee.

  “I don’t need you policing me.” The fire was gone from CJ’s eyes. But something else was there when she met Donny’s gaze—a deep, black pain. Suddenly Donny was angry with himself for shaming her instead of guiding her. If his own Guide had been this impatient with him, he’d never have made it past the first two weeks of the program.

  He squirmed into a crouch and stood unsteadily in the tub, extending a ropy arm to take her sleeve. “Come here, CJ, I know what you need. Come sit on the side of the tub. We’re singing old school songs. Mark and me. Sit down and listen.”

  “Let go of my shirt.” CJ pulled away. She whipped her drumsticks out of her back pocket. Mark began playing the intro to “She’s Got Class” again. Donny lay back in the tub and stared up at the ceiling. He began singing, and soon the battered house rang with his voice. CJ listened and tapped on the wall, slowly and evenly at first. Then she began to strike the wall full force, and the toilet, and the sink . . . One stick came within an inch of Donny’s knee as it shot out to whack the edge of the tub. Mark glanced down at his guitar as if giving it a silent signal, and then began playing loudly. Donny raised his voice. CJ drummed harder.

  There was a crack, and something hit Donny just under his right eye and then smacked into the tub, rolling for a moment on the porcelain. Half of CJ’s drumstick. Donny let the note he was holding turn into an exaggerated shout of pain. Mark stopped playing. Donny tried to stand up, but fell back, blood running down his cheek and into his mouth. CJ let the broken drumstick fall to the floor. The other one landed in the toilet. “Shit, I’m sorry.” She grabbed the edge of the toilet paper roll and yanked. The holder clattered as soft white tissue unraveled, until there was nothing left but the cardboard tube. CJ gathered the toilet paper into a massive wad and stepped toward the tub. Pressed the mass to Donny’s bleeding cheek.

  Donny moaned. You asshole, he almost added. But his face was inches from CJ’s breasts, and she smelled so familiar and so . . .

  No.

  Donny’s Guide, a man named Christopher Ainsley who’d been assigned through the Hand in All program, had explained that lust was natural, common. But it wasn’t productive. It was something that would leach his creativity and disappoint his Creator. Because it was so base. There was nothing complex or beautiful about lust. Nothing artistic.

  Mark left to go get Dud, who had been in school for physical therapy before becoming a talent manager. Someone always got Dud when there was a problem. When Harbor got caught with a prostitute, when Donny trashed a hotel room, when CJ brawled in a bar. When any of them came down with a cold, when they were hungry but the restaurant they wanted food from was closed.

  Donny was left staring at CJ, his right eye hidden by an enormous billow of toilet tissue. CJ grinned. “Sorry,” she said again.

  If Donny’d had a thousand right eyes to lose to a flying drumstick, he would have lost them all, just as long as his left eye was intact to see CJ Crespo smile.

  He muttered, “Kiss me and make it better.”

  To his shock, CJ leaned in and placed a kiss on his forehead. An awkward kiss—her lips hit eyebrow and toilet paper, and her soft chin scraped the bridge of Donny’s nose. And Donny was suddenly back in dozens of hotel rooms, with dozens of bodies curled next to his, and none of them were CJ, but he’d always wished they were. His dick hardened; even shame couldn’t stop it.

  CJ snickered as she pulled back. “Any better?”

  She was leaning over the tub. He had the urge to grab her and pull her over the edge, into his bare-armed embrace. To forget these past two years of restraint and denial. But then Dud came in, followed by Mark and Harbor. “Good lord,” said Dud, surveying the blood in the tub and on the tiled floor, blossoming through the wad of toilet paper. “Let me see.”

  He knelt beside Donny. CJ removed the toilet paper. Bits of it stuck to Donny’s face. He watched CJ’s hand retreat, and felt the wound open up to pain. Dud took Donny’s chin in his fingers and turned his head this way and that. Donny heard a rat-rat-rat and realized it was blood falling onto his jeans. “It’s deep. Let’s get you to the emergency room, Don.”

  Dud drove him. No one else offered to come. All the way there, Donny gazed out the window through his left eye, his right eye obscured by a dishrag. He watched the trembling lights of the city. He didn’t know if it was kinder to himself to avoid CJ, or to take moments like the one in the bathroom where he could get them—feed off them until he was engorged with fantasy, letting the blood-balloon protrude into reality while his head stayed buried in a dream.

  Mark said rock and roll was on its way out, which made Harbor furious. Harbor was the only one with any semblance of a normal life—a wife and two kids back home, parent-teacher conferences and soccer matches they sometimes scheduled tour dates around. But Harbor believed so completely in music that you got the feeling he pictured his family as a series of riffs and chords. That when he was home he read his kids tablature as bedtime stories and ran his fingers up and down his wife like a fretboard.

  Donny didn’t know what to believe. He knew the others blamed him for Donjon’s sales slump. Blamed their tame new songs and the way they’d neutered some of their old songs to make them Hand-appropriate. Donny almost wanted to believe that rock was dying, just so he didn’t have to take responsibility for the drop. But every day he seemed to wake up with less energy, and now the only times he felt whole and powerful were when he was singing, or when he was around CJ. He’d founded his first band at twenty-one. Had shot to fame at twenty-six, and had ne
ver really taken the time to learn who he was when he wasn’t fueled by anonymous adoration; when he wasn’t snarling and clashing with Harbor and Mark, or reveling in his quiet friendship with CJ. A person couldn’t live like this forever. You could never know what you really wanted, as long as you had everything people thought you should want.

  Dud glanced over at him. “You all right?”

  People all focused only on the idea that Donny was no longer allowed to swear or drink or fuck. That he couldn’t even sing about sex anymore. They didn’t see that he was trying to improve himself as a man, not an artist. Fame was permission to perform the cruelest, most venal aspects of oneself. He’d needed, desperately, a way to combat it.

  Donny shifted, adjusted the greasy dishrag over his eye. “I miss the seventies.”

  Chapter 4

  February 28th, 1983

  Two weeks later, CJ was trying to do a better job of avoiding cigarettes and bars. Couldn’t fucking fall asleep most nights—just lay there with her fingers twitching around imagined Marlboro Reds.

  Donny’s wound was now a small blue splotch beneath a strip of white tape—he frequently changed the bandage in front of CJ, like he wanted her to see, wanted her to feel guilty. She just told him he looked fuck ugly and snagged pieces of his gum while his hands were occupied.

  Dud booked them a private dining room at a Richmond country club. There he presented them with a seafood spread and “Chariot of Desire”—written for Donjon by Kurt Frowland, an industry freelancer who penned songs for struggling bands for cash under the table. CJ took her copy of the sheet music and ate three more shrimp.

  “What is this shit?” Harbor squeezed the pages between his thumb and fingers. “Why would we need someone to write a song for us? We’ve got our own songs.”

  “Nothing platinum since ‘Kiss This Ground.’” Dud’s voice was firm. “Which you don’t perform anymore. You need to do something people want to hear.”