Robots vs. Fairies(99)
He isn’t my biological son, but I raised him. The moment I saw him, I knew what kind of thing he was. Our baby was a rock & roller, and he wanted rock & roll.
I swallow hard. I try to breathe. I’m not a singer. I’m a writer. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I start to sing that lullaby anyway, over the noise of the best band on Earth, over the magic they’re doing, over the piper summoning the last hopes of salvation into a cave underground.
I sing as loudly as I can sing, a lullaby of Earth and all its dirty concerns. Prayers that switched over to poems when Cohen died, when Bowie died, when Prince died. Funk and rock turned religion. Sinatra-styled stun-gun supernatural soul. I sing Kurt Cobain and will the world not to shift into a full-on disaster. I sing a chorus of the purple one’s grind, and three bars of Patti Smith, and Joan Jett and a bar or two of Elvis and some notes made famous by the Rolling Stones because there is no satisfaction, but you stay on Earth anyway. I’m singing like I’m actually a singer, when really I’m a journalist who’s spent his life following the boys in the band around and writing them down like I was the scribe to the Apocalypse.
I shift the song and sing the rest of what I know, the song I learned from Tania, which is a song of names. All the names of Earth and elsewhere. The city moves around the van, and the band is barely playing now, because the song of their queen shuts them up, even if she’s not here to sing it.
Even if she doesn’t want to sing it with me. Even if I fucked everything up too badly, and even if I can’t save the world. I start to close the rift with my song, shaking the edges of the boundary between fairyland and here.
Eron Chaos is a blinding light of fury and guitar, and he’s standing above me suddenly, looking down on my poor mortal self. I’m like a garter snake beneath a shovel.
It’s only now that I see my wife, standing in the street in her red dress with my son holding her hand. She’s wearing my old leather jacket, the one I thought she burned to ashes, and she’s watching me, her eyes glowing.
She nods, and in her nod is forgiveness for my failures. In her nod are the redwoods and the coast of California, the logs with the mushrooms under them in the woods in Washington, the way we lay on our backs looking up at the meteor shower one August in the desert, the way she told me she loved me at four in the morning, and then made me scream, the way she said she was no longer a tourist but a resident, the way she let me put my ring on her finger and put hers on mine, and the way we held hands as we slept.
I’ll take this dream, if it means I get to hear Tania naming the world all over again, and beside her, my kid, naming too, rhyming back to her, singing the words for grass and leaves, singing the words for dropping out of a band and staying dropped, singing the words for love and for choosing to stay where you live instead of running back into a place made of light and drift. They’re singing the words for saving this place.
Eron Chaos is before Tania, standing in his electric suit, his teeth clenched, black tears running down his face. My wife stands in front of him. I’m terrified she’s on her way back to Adriftica, but if I was born for anything I was born to run lucky in the world of rock. Maybe I was born to lose her. It was worth the loss, the love.
“Titania,” he whispers.
“Oberon,” she replies. She takes his hands in hers. She looks into his eyes.
“I lay no claim on you,” Tania says. “Release yours on me.”
My son is beside her, and I see him reach for his father. Eron picks him up, this child whose voice—I know from experience—can call down bald eagles, whose laughter can make banks of flowers bloom in the dark, whose first steps made a ridgeline in our backyard, whose first meal caused every field in a hundred miles to fill with food ready to harvest. He holds my son, and my son laughs.
In spite of myself, I see the resemblance, my child too handsome for humans and too strange for kindergarten. I see how he might, one day, strut across a stage singing, strumming a guitar and bringing a revelation. I see how he might be exactly what his other father is, but better.
“He’s my child,” Eron says. “All I want is time.”
I know the expression on Tania’s face. We’ve had enough arguments over the years. My love has a temper. She is also fair, when she feels fair.
“Summers,” she tells him. “Let him camp in the bower. Take him spinning with the spiders and singing with the songbirds.”
He looks at her for a long moment. Then, at last, he nods to his band. To Mabel, whose fingers twist into his. To the drummer, who vibrates with a rhythm only he can feel. To the bassist and to the van, which shakes itself like a horse ready to gallop.
“Summers,” he says, and kisses his child. “That means you must bring summer back.”
Tania moves her hands and trees begin to bloom.
Eron Chaos does a slide on his knees with his guitar, and then he’s gone into the green. One by one, the rest of the band disappears, ending with the drummer, whose wings are spread fully as he departs.
The city is all kids, all around me.
Here she is, this woman I’m still married to, naming the pain, singing the words for fixing the things that are broken. Here she is, standing in the center of nowhere, this rock & roll queen who came from under the hill. My wife and son are stamping their feet and spitting syllables, and around them, all around them, the children look up and start to learn the words for fixing the bright and broken world.