The Last Days

Maybe Moz was what I’d been waiting for since Nervous System had exploded.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll keep it for her. But at my place.” I put my arm around the bundle.

“Your place?”

“Sure. After all, why should I trust you? You might go and pawn it. Three or four thousand dollars for you, when it was my idea to use the bedspread.”

“But I’m the one who wants to give it back,” he sputtered cutely. “A second ago you were all, ‘It’s not stealing.’”

“Maybe that’s what you want me to think.” I pushed my glasses up my nose. “Maybe that was just a cover for your devious plans.” It hurt to see his wounded expression, because I was being totally unfair. Moz might have been lateral, but I could already tell that he was nine kinds of nondevious.

“But… you were just…” He made a strangled noise.

I hugged the Strat closer. “Of course, you could come over and play it anytime. We could play together. Are you in a band?”

“Yeah.” His wary eyes didn’t leave the bedspread. “Half a band anyway.”

“Half a band?” I smiled, knowing now that my brain-flash had been right on target. “A band in need of completion? Maybe this is fate.”

He shook his head. “We’ve already got two guitarists.”

“What else?”

“Um, just two guitarists.”

I laughed. “Listen, a drummer and a bass player is half a band. Two guitarists is just a…” He frowned, so I didn’t finish. “Anyway, I play keyboards.”

“You do?” He shook his head. “So how do you know so much about guitars? I mean, you called the year on that Strat when it was still in the air!”

“Lucky guess.” And, of course, I do play guitar. And keyboards too, and flute and xylophone and a wicked-mean harmonica—there’s practically nothing I don’t play. But I figured out a while back not to say that out loud; everyone thinks we nonspecialists are amateurs. (Tell that to the nonspecialist currently known as Prince.) I also never show off my perfect pitch or mention the name of my high school.

His dark and gorgeous eyes narrowed. “Are you sure you don’t play guitar?”

I laughed. “I never said that. But trust me, I absolutely play keyboards. How’s tomorrow?”

“But, um, how do you even know we’d…” He took a breath. “I mean, like, what are your—?”

“Uh!” I interrupted. “Not that word!” If he asked me what my influences were, the whole thing was off.

He shrugged. “You know what I mean.”

I sighed through clenched teeth. How was I supposed to explain that I was in too much of a hurry to give a damn? That there were more important things to worry about? That the world didn’t have time for labels anymore?

“Look, let’s say you hated graves, okay?”

“Hated graves?”

“Yeah, detested tombs. Loathed sepulchers. Abhorred anyplace anyone was buried. Understand?”

“Why would I do that?”

I let out a groan. Mozzy was being very nonlateral all of a sudden. “Hypothetically hated graves.”

“Um, okay. I hate graves.” He put on a grave-hating face.

“Excellent. Perfect. But you’d still go to the Taj Mahal, wouldn’t you?” I spread my hands in explanatory triumph.

“Um, I’d go where?”

“The Taj Mahal! The most beautiful building in the world! You know all those Indian restaurants around the corner, the murals on the walls?”

He nodded slowly. “Yeah, I know the one you mean: lots of arches, a pond out front, with kind of an onion on top?”

“Exactly. And gorgeous.”

“I guess. And somebody’s buried there?”

“Yeah, Moz, some old queen. It’s a total tomb. But you don’t suddenly think it’s ugly, just because of its category, do you?”

His expression changed from tomb-hating to lateral-thinking. “So, in other words…” Brief pause. “You don’t mind if you’re in a band that plays alternative death-metal< cypherfunk, as long as it’s the Taj Mahal of alternative death-metal cypherfunk. Right?”

“Exactly!” I cried. “You guys can worry about the category. All the death metal you want. Just be good at it.” I picked up the Stratocaster, wrapped it tighter. “How’s tomorrow? Two o’clock.”

He shrugged. “Okay, I guess. Let’s give it a shot. Maybe keyboards are what we need.”

Or maybe I am, I thought, but out loud I just told him my buzzer number, pointing across the street. “Oh, and two more questions, Moz.”

“Sure?”

“One: do you guys really play death-metal cypherfunk?”

He smiled. “Don’t worry. That was hypothetical death-metal cypherfunk.”

“Phew,” I said, trying not to notice how that little smile had made him even cuter. Now that we were going to jam together, it didn’t pay to notice things like that. “Question two: does your half a band have a name?”

He shook his head. “Nope.”

“No problem,” I said. “That’ll be the easy part.”

3. POISONBLACK

— MOZ-

The next day, Zahler and I saw our first black water.

We’d just met outside my building, on our way to Pearl’s. A gang of kids across the street was gathered around a fire hydrant, prying at it with a two-foot wrench, hoping to get some relief from the early afternoon heat. Zahler stopped to watch, like he always did when kids were doing anything more or less illegal.

“Check it out!” He gri

“Watch your guitar,” I said. We were twenty feet away, but you never knew how much pressure was lurking in a hydrant on a hot summer day.

“It’s protected, Moz,” he said, but he stood the instrument case upright behind himself. I felt empty-handed, headed to a jam session with nothing but a few guitar picks in my pocket. My fingers were itching to play their first notes on the Strat.

We were sort of late, but the car was a BMW, its driver in a suit and tie and talking on his cell phone. Back when Zahler and I had been little, soaking a guy like that would have been worth about ten thousand fire-hydrant points. We could spare ten seconds.

But the kids were still fiddling as the convertible passed.

“Incompetent little twerps.” Zahler sighed. “Should we give them a hand?”

“It’s already after two.” I turned and headed up the street.

But as I walked I heard the cries behind us change from squeals of excitement to shrieks of fear.

We spun around. The hydrant was spraying black water in all directions, covering the kids with a sticky, shimmering coat. A thick, dark mist rose into the air, breaking the sunlight into a gleaming spectrum, like a rainbow on an oil slick. The screaming kids were stumbling back, bare skin glistening with the stuff. A couple of the little ones just stood in the torrent, crying.

“What the hell?” Zahler whispered.

I took a step forward, but the smell—earthy and fetid and rotten—forced me to a halt. The dark cloud was still rising up between the buildings, roiling like smoke overhead, and the wind was shifting toward us. Tiny black dots began to spatter the street, closer and closer, like a sudden summer rain starting up. Zahler and I backed away, staring down at the pavement. The drops were as luminous as tiny black pearls.

The hydrant seemed to cough once, the gush of black water sputtering, and then the water turned clear. Above us, the cloud was already dissolving, turning into nothing more than a shadowy haze across the sky.

I knelt on the sidewalk, peering down at one of the black drops. It glimmered unsteadily for a moment, reflecting sunlight as the shadow from the cloud overhead faded. And then it boiled away before my eyes.

“What the hell was that, Moz?”

“I don’t know. Maybe somebody’s heating oil leaked into the pipes?” I shook my head.

The kids were staring at the hydrant warily, half afraid the water would turn black again, but also eager to wash themselves. A few stepped forward, and the oily stuff seemed to slide from their skin, dark stains disappearing from their soaked shorts and T-shirts.