Sight Unseen Read online

  He knew Dud was at his wits end. Dud had been hoping to convince Donjon to play this song on the upcoming tour. Donny had almost said yes. So many times. And each time, he thought about the sort of man he became when he sang about sex, drugs, violence. It was so easy for him to get lost in those songs, to put too much of himself into them.

  “It’s not my fault, you know,” he told CJ.

  She fingered the straw in her Scotch and soda. “What’s not?”

  “That we’re not what we used to be. People make such a fuckin’ huge deal about how I changed our ‘direction.’ But all I did was do something for me. Just for me, without consulting anyone. Without running it by the fu—by the manager.”

  CJ shrugged. It irritated him that he couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

  “It’s music that’s changing. You know they have drum machines now? You can use them in place of actual drummers. You could be out of a job soon.”

  CJ shot him a glare. “Thanks.”

  “The whole world’s moving more toward sex as, like a—like it’s a necessity for music. I wouldn’t have wanted to go there anyway. I don’t want to do what everyone else is doing.”

  “It’s not just the new songs,” CJ said abruptly.

  His already unsettled gut clenched. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s the way you move onstage. Like you’re afraid to—to let go. To perform. In interviews too. You used to have so much fucking passion, and now you’re so . . . quiet.”

  Hurt gave way to anger. He took a deep breath, trying to tamp it down. “It doesn’t feel that way. On stage, I feel fine.”

  “You look different. You sound different.”

  “Because I am.”

  CJ looked away.

  Donny’s body grew tight and nervous. He started jiggling his leg. He needed CJ’s support. Even if everyone else bailed, he needed her. “You remember, there was that girl in Phoenix who drank my sweat? I used a towel and then threw it in the crowd, and she caught it and wrung it out into her mouth.”

  CJ snorted. “I wanna puke just thinking about it.”

  He nudged her under the table. “You’d drink my sweat too. Don’t lie.”

  CJ didn’t laugh. “I think we should do the song. In Sedalia.”

  “What?”

  “I really do. If we want to stay in the game, we need to do it.”

  His gut twisted further. The room rocked slightly, and he wondered if he needed another trip to the bathroom. “I didn’t think you’d take their side.”

  “This isn’t about taking sides. It’s about bringing us back to what we were. Because we were something fucking amazing, and I don’t want to lose that.” Her voice was rough.

  “For fuck’s s—” Donny caught himself too late. “CJ. No. The song won’t do that. A bad song we didn’t even write, how will that—”

  “I’ve heard you sing it,” she said fiercely, her eyes meeting his. “You know how to make any song mean something. Even with our new songs, even with the ones people hate, you make them mean something. The difference is this song could actually be popular. It’s exactly what people want, and you know how to sell it. I’ve fucking heard you.”

  “You’re swearing too much,” he said tightly. “If you’re serious about your path, you’ll th—think more about your language.”

  She let out an incredulous laugh. “You should talk. You’re falling off one goddamn wagon after another tonight.”

  It was true, and he was suddenly, deeply ashamed.

  She rolled her eyes and shook her head slightly as she brought her glass up to her lips.

  “You’re doing that interview in two days,” he said. CJ had been invited onto some morning talk show in St. Louis. Donny felt bizarrely anxious about the idea of her being interviewed without him. “They’re gonna ask you about me.”

  “No shit.”

  “What are you gonna tell them?”

  “I’m gonna share my recipe for sugar cookies, like a good girl.”

  He hesitated for a moment, surprised. Then he laughed, some of his tension diffusing. “Wearing your apron?”

  “Of course.” She hunched over her drink.

  A strange, hazy peace washed over him. The gentle clinking of ice in CJ’s glass suddenly seemed like the most beautiful sound in the world to him. He could tell her. If there was anyone he could tell, it was her. “Honest? Hey, honestly, CJ—and okay don’t tell anyone this, but I’ve been thinking lately about—” He put his tongue between his teeth and sucked in air “—about leaving the band.”

  CJ glanced up, looked Donny right in the eye, and said nothing. He could tell she was shocked though. Ten years together, and he could tell.

  He continued, “We had our time. But there comes a point . . . There comes a point.”

  CJ still didn’t say anything.

  “I think you ought to come with me.” There. It was out. “Really, you’re good—a genius. And you and I could do like a two-person thing, or else look for a couple other guys who are more . . . more into what I’m into.” It occurred to him that that an offer like this from Donny Times didn’t mean what it once might have to CJ. That she had, somewhere along the way, stopped worshipping him. “Mark isn’t gonna go for this much longer. This keeping our songs clean thing, I mean. Dud’s gonna drop our asses. Harbor’s pretending he likes what we are, but he doesn’t. I don’t even think he wants to be in a band anymore. He wants to be with his kids.”

  CJ released her straw and pushed her glass a few inches to the right. “I think you oughtta do two things: go to bed, and in the morning tell Hinkle we’ll do the song.”

  “CJ.”

  “Things’ll look nicer tomorrow.”

  Donny’s jaw clenched. He scratched the table with a fingernail. “And if they don’t?”

  “They will. I know you.”

  He began to sing again, softly:

  “Black hair, eyes like distant fire. She is dancing on a wire . . .”

  “Shut up,” CJ muttered. Then her voice rose in anger. “You can sing it here. You can sing it here, so why the fuck not on stage?”

  “You know why.”

  “The Creator doesn’t care what you fucking sing!” CJ’s eyes blazed. Donny could feel people turn toward them. “The Creator doesn’t care, because there is no Creator! Or if there is, he or she or it or whatever the fuck has better things to do than make sure you’re not singing about wanting to stick it in someone!” CJ was shouting now, and Donny let her go. His face was growing hot, but there was something beautiful about this, this outpouring of feeling that he’d denied himself for the past few years, but that he could now have vicariously through CJ.

  “Look at you,” CJ hissed, venom in her tone. “Sitting there with that ridiculous fucking necklace and what, drink number five in front of you? You fucking hypocrite. You complete, delusional piece of—”

  Now his anger flared. “Don’t you dare fucking mock me.”

  “There it is! Show me a little fire, Donny.”

  “I’m trying to be better.”

  “Congratulations. You’re boring instead.” There was a catch in CJ’s voice. “You were everything. Do you get it? You were like no one else I’d ever seen. I was so—before you, I was so, just—stuck. And then I met you, and it was like—like I understood what I was here for. I left my family; I told my parents I was doing this whether they liked it or not, I gave up my—any fucking speck of privacy . . .”

  He was shocked to suddenly see tears in her eyes. She dashed them away quickly with her fist.

  “God. I miss you.”

  Those words stilled everything in him. For a moment, there was just a soundless, blurring room, full of dark shapes and lamps glinting off glass.

  “That wasn’t me,” he murmured. “That was someone trying too hard. That was someone who hadn’t found peace yet.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “How the fuck would you know?” he demanded.

  “Because I do know you.” />
  “And I know you. Know you’re a mess. Worse than me. What the hell kind of woman does the things you do?”

  CJ’s mouth fell open. Donny regretted the words so completely and so immediately, but it was too late. CJ stood and shoved back her chair, toppling it. The room went red, and she stormed out, a couple of the security guys scrambling to follow her.

  *

  When she was nineteen, CJ went with her friend Alana to hear Catherine Berry, a “radical feminist performance lecturer and artist,” give a talk. She hadn’t wanted to go, but Alana had dragged her. Catherine was tall and thin, wearing a tailored pantsuit with artful rips in the knees. There had been something magnetic and repellant about her. Or maybe what repelled CJ was the crowd of worshippers, the way they nodded vigorously, whooped, snapped their fingers every time Cathy said something they agreed with.

  “What makes sexism the most pervasive problem facing humanity,” Catherine had said, stalking the small stage, gesturing with her long, thin hands, “is that in no other contemporary system of oppression is the oppressee expected to lie in bed next to their oppressor. To worship that oppressor. To take him inside her. Think about it. Colonial dynamics among races and ethnicities continue in the workplace, in politics, in our schools, certainly. There are situations in which the oppressed are asked to work civilly alongside their oppressors in public spaces. But women . . . women’s need for our oppressors in our homes . . . is celebrated. Our romantic and sexual connections to our patriarchal keepers is commodified. Put on a pedestal. We call it the happiest day of a woman’s life when she vows to love, honor, cherish, even obey someone who represents an unforgivable disparity in wealth and power. Who is complicit in a system of violence and fear.” She paused, scanning the crowd. “Is this the world we want?”

  “Noooo!” came the chorus.

  “Is this the world our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers fought for?”

  “Noooo!”

  Alana had been radiant after the lecture, and had signed up immediately for Catherine Berry’s newsletter. Had stood arguing with a graduate student who claimed that Catherine’s thesis of sexism as the most ubiquitous form of oppression was misguided and offensive. CJ was simply confused. Which was often the way she felt about feminism. She was wary of organizations. Of movements. Of people who tried to tell her what to think. But she also had a bad habit of going along with anyone whose life had an interesting rhythm. Of worshipping the wrong people. Her mother was wrong. It didn’t have to be her idea, or she wouldn’t do it. It only had to feel right in the moment.

  When she added accents on stage or in a studio, she didn’t plan them. She listened to how the song was going. She took in the way Donny was singing—was he in one of his manic moods, or one of his pensive ones? Listened to determine whether Harbor was drawing ahead of the beat, the way he sometimes did. Coordinated wordlessly with Mark, who also liked to improvise. And then her body moved on its own, slashing one instrument or another with a precision that had been honed over years.

  She walked the streets for a long time after she left the hotel bar. No one spoke to her. No one even seemed to recognize her. She thought about finding a payphone, calling her mother. She thought about finding another bar. But eventually she went back to the hotel. Took the elevator to the fourth floor and knocked on Harbor’s door. He let her in. She went to his bathroom and drank out of the sink. Returned to the main room, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand. “How are the kids?”

  He shrugged and sat on the bed. “Good. Talked to them a couple of hours ago.”

  She nodded. “That’s good.”

  He was silent a long moment, then patted the space beside him. She sat. He pulled his guitar from under the bed—an aging Fender that he rarely took onstage anymore. Just kept it around for practice. He started to strum softly. CJ grabbed two hotel pens off the nightstand and began tapping the comforter. The sound wasn’t at all satisfying, but as Harbor continued to play, she discovered different sounds she could make by hitting the pillow, the headboard, leaning down to strike the metal bedframe.

  I wish we could have been revolutionary.

  I wish I’d been my own person and not an offshoot of him.

  I wish I called my parents more.

  I wish . . . I wish . . .

  She looked at Harbor, and he leaned closer to her, and they played with their heads together, the sound soft and inelegant, but they kept it going all the same.

  Chapter 6

  August 17th, 1983

  Sedalia was with them. With Donny.

  These fairgoers were into it. They cheered and sang along with the “tame” songs, infusing them with a brilliant energy. They stood when they were supposed to stand. Swayed when they were meant to sway. They sang the revised lyrics on the old songs, instead of shouting the original lyrics, trying to drown out the censored versions, as some crowds did.

  And yet Donny was still restless. The whole night felt . . . not enough. CJ’s words had been running through his head all night. “The way you move onstage . . .” He’d tried to let go, to move like he used to, but he suddenly understood what she meant. So much of his old grace his grandness, was gone. “You used to be full of passion.” He was, still. He believed in this. Didn’t he?

  He began to feel he was missing something, some fundamental truth about the present. Something was happening now, stirring now, changing now. And he couldn’t see it. He was alone except for these four, and they all looked so old, except for CJ; Harbor with silver threads glistening in his black mane. Mark, with a gut that hadn’t been there in the seventies. Donny’s life was nothing but the channel from his diaphragm to his throat, and a mishmash of places, beds, sound checks, vomit, card games, and so much noise. It was time to go home, go solo, go somewhere. But first . . .

  He stared down at the chain around his neck. The small vessel hanging from it. How easy would it be to take it off? To forget the past two years, and go farther back, to the days when they’d wailed into each other’s faces onstage, buoyant and wild, lost in the noise and the thrill, laughing as they ramped up the sound again and again.

  The crowd was stirring, waiting.

  He gripped the mic and murmured into it. “This here’s a new song we’ve been working on.” And then he launched into it a capella:

  “Black hair . . . ”

  There was only a moment’s hesitation, and then Harbor joined on the keyboard. Mark followed.

  The intro to “Chariot of Desire” reminded Donny of Tom & Jerry cartoons—the bass line like an exaggerated tiptoe, the cat sneaking up on a mouse who feigned unawareness. Mark played it like a storyteller—drawing it out, making it ring against the stars, pulling it back to a whisper. The audience hung on every chord.

  The drums came in—soft pops of the snare and a hiss of cymbals.

  Donny sat down on the first of two steps leading up to the drum platform. A shaft of violet light fell on him. He propped his mic arm casually on his knee, and brought the head of the mic close to his lips. The crowd was somewhere in the distance. They should have been right here with him, where they’d been for the last two hours. But now Donny was alone. Even the guitars, the keyboard, seemed far away. It was as if he were listening to the concert from the front porch of a house a couple miles away, singing along in the darkness.

  Only the drums were right where they should be—just above him. Loud, but not so loud that he wouldn’t be able to hear himself. Just Donny Times and the drums, and a sea of faces.

  “Black hair, eyes like distant fire,

  She is dancing on a wire,

  She drives the Chariot of Desi-uuhhrr . . .”

  He turned and watched CJ. She was looking down. The drums kept on, making slick sounds like rain. He stood, and she glanced at him.

  Something wonderful happened: the song opened up in front of Donny, and he crawled inside. The song was full of colors he had never seen before, ghosts and voices and a jagged bolt of warmth down his spine.
He faced CJ, and she was staring at him now, eyes flashing in those pools of liner. He was performing a petty rebellion, but it came from a true and honest place. A stupid song, but he was swept away by the meaning of it.

  “Her skin, hot coals beneath my hands,

  She is the one who understands

  The endless tread of broken feet

  On shifting sands . . .”

  Harbor hit the keys as though he were trying to shove them into the board. Donny remembered a black-haired girl on a couch in an alley, who’d told him she could drum. He remembered slipping back into the bar’s back room where his set had been stashed and asking her to show him. Remembered her drumming like the whole world had fucked her over. How alive she’d been, how she’d brought something to his music that wasn’t there before.

  He put all of those years into the song. Every joint they’d shared, every night they’d stayed up until dawn, comfortable and quiet beside each other. Every time he’d slipped and she’d caught him. Every rare smile she’d given him. Every time he’d fallen asleep to the memory of the patterns she’d created on stage. Every ounce of longing he’d ever felt for a body that seemed untouchable—like he’d never be worthy of it.

  “The chariot that takes me home

  Is one I’ll ride in all alone

  But the chariot that is taking me higher

  Is the chariot of desire . . .”

  He rose and stepped up to the platform, moving toward the drums. She kept playing even as he stood right beside her, his voice slipping into the space she’d created for it. He reached out and brushed her shoulder, and she looked at him, full of fury and wonder, as the lagging follow spot found them both.

  The solo. Harbor reared back and charged into it. Donny opened his whole body and sang:

  “I loooooooove you. I loooooooooove you. My fiiiiiiii-uuuuuuu­hhhhhhhhh­rrrrrrrr. You drive me hooooooooooooo­ommmmmmme . . .”