Dead Americans (25 page)

Behind her, the door opened.

“The infected areas are coloured red, right? It has been a while since I’ve seen one,” O said, not yet turning. “There is a theory that the virus is proof of alien life.”

There was no reply.

“It’s in this country already.” She turned, facing the child that she had once been: skinny, black, and with wild hair. “It’s in New Orleans, brought over by Baker Thomas. Right now, he leads in a small community of infected—the number is fifteen, if I remember right. It isn’t difficult for him to hide, but in ten years, it will be impossible to keep his community a secret and he’ll have to take action. Just like you will with your uncle, Octavia.”

She used the name that had once been her own and found herself curiously detached from it and the girl before her. She recognised Octavia as herself, and could not deny it, but within herself was the quiet realization that the girl before her was long, long dead. O. was no longer her, no longer on the edge of a bumbling, confused sexuality that would only become more confused over the next years thanks to her uncle. And neither was she what the girl would grow up into: a woman who suffered from addiction and who placed herself in abusive, possessive relationships that stemmed from the early relationships with her uncle and mother.

“That’s why I know you’re early to school,” she said, finally. “It’s in your eyes.”

Octavia blinked in response.

Was I always this quiet?
O. had never believed that she was, but as yet, her younger self had not said a word. Instead, Octavia stared at her with wide, brown eyes, fearful and distrustful, yet also wanting, and needing. That’s how her uncle made her feel: as if you were alone, as if you could not trust a single person anymore. The memory came back acutely as she stood there, and O. spoke about the dog fight.

She made no attempt to change the story, or to alter it, as she had thought that she would do so earlier. Instead, as she pulled the knife out, she was very aware of how much she didn’t belong there at that moment. Octavia’s life would be led; it had been finished for over a century, if O. was to believe what Alrea told her. Changing it would do, what, exactly? Give her black skin instead of white? Give her blood and ovaries? Over the years, O. had longed both to restore her identity, to give her a sense of place, to ground her reality in herself, to make her herself again.

But, standing there, before her younger self, she found it impossible to deny what had happened; it had made her, shaped her and what she did now, with Alrea and the children, was a direct response to it. Yes, she was a slave, a barren mother, and a black woman trapped in a shell. She hated it, but yet, she knew what Alrea knew when it had dug through Zu’s body: time, history, could not be ignored, could not be treated as if it were a minor thing that did not make them who they were. Changing it would not alter her problems. She would still want freedom for herself and the children.

The past was the past: it could not be corrected, she realized, just learned from.

In front of her younger self, O. placed the knife.

“Don’t forget this, yeah?”

She knew she wouldn’t.

“Okay,” O. said, “but just one. Just one story out here before I leave.”

In the evening, she had built the campfire behind the back of the sprawling house, trying to make it as much as she remembered, with a ring of grey rocks around a shallow pit. The night before she had told the children that, yes, they could camp outside for the night, and she wanted—in what was a rare display of affection for her past—to give them the most picture perfect campsite that she could. By the following night, when dark had fallen, all sixteen children found sleeping bags around the fire, each of them sized to accommodate the youngest (five) and the eldest (seventeen). Before she had let the children out, however, she had made the oldest three girls and one boy look after the youngest for the night and to keep the peace, though she expected at least two of the children to run back to her, crying, after being picked on, or being scared. That was part of the experience of camping, too.

As was the story:

“The story I have is about a girl who was a vampire. She was no older than Mary—being, I mean, that she was eleven, a tiny, tiny girl with dark skin and wild, wild hair.” In front of her, the white skinned Mary’s eyes crinkled with amusement; she had heard the story before, O. knew, and had heard the vampire given different names, but that didn’t change the fact that she liked being singled out. “She had been born on Earth, and had grown up with her parents in a nice house, near a beach. She did not know that, however, when she woke up, because she awoke without a memory, without any idea of where she should be.

“Why, she could’ve been on Mars.”

The younger children laughed; the four older ones rolled their eyes. O. kept her smile to herself.

“When she awoke, she was hungry like she had never been, but she did not want food, not in the way you do. No sandwich, no pie, nothing you would eat would satisfy her: only blood would. Inside her head, her mind screamed BLOOD! BLOOD! worse than it had ever done in her entire life. This was partly because our young vampire had been hurt in a fire and was badly injured. Her need for blood came not because she was hungry, but because blood healed them, and she was in horrible pain. Normally, if our vampire found you or I, she would bite us just here, on our necks.” With her white hand—a hand that she still loathed to recognize as her own—she reached out to one of the young boys, Gerard, and pinched his dark skinned neck. “She would do it lightly, and it would be like a kiss, and she would take just a little to get by. But, it could hurt if a vampire drank too much. They could kill a human—which is exactly what would happen if this girl found you or I. She would grab us, grab us by the neck and bite deeply, and harshly, and drink us dry.

“Sadly, this is what happened to the young man who found her lying on the ground. He touched her shoulder to see if she was alive and she grabbed him, breaking his bones with her grip as she tore chunks of skin out of his neck.”

Every eye was on O., while behind her, the shuttle that Alrea had crashed into the surface of Mars lay in a pale orange light, ten minutes across the grass field that lay between it and the house. It was a walk that the children made every morning for class, where they learned about math, science, literature, painting, and anything else that Alrea deemed important. In the halls, they walked in Alrea’s warm skin, spoke with its voice—gone was the horrific visage of the last Baker Thomas and his astronaut’s suit—and then left, to walk across Alrea’s grass, breath its air, and live in as much freedom as they could have.

As they were given.

“Afterwards, she felt terrible,” O. continued. “She had never meant to kill him, and knew it was wrong to take life. Worse, she had broken one of the vampires’ most sacred rules, which was that she had fed without consent, and the blood in her stomach was tainted and awful because of it. A vampire, even a hungry, hurt one, was subject to the same rules that you and I are part of. To drink from someone without consent, to kill them before their time, was something that a vampire should never do, just as you or I should not kill someone, or force them to do something against their will, and just as we would feel bad for doing so, so was she. Our vampire was violently ill and vomited all over the grass she stood on.”

She was subverting the nature of vampires, making it a moral that she could use to seed in the children notions of what was right and wrong. Soon, she would introduce an evil vampire who wanted to control humans and treat them like cattle. It was he who had hurt the young girl, and he who she and her friends would fight against at the end. But, before that, O. would tell the children how the vampire needed her companions, all of them human, to survive. That she was talking in part about Alrea would escape all but the eldest, and Alrea itself, but the latter had been losing its control and power since she had returned from her third and final trip in time, wherein she had sat in the room and listened to herself retell the story she knew so well.

After she had left herself outside Alrea’s door, she had returned, and since then, fought for her independence. The house and atmosphere she had was part of it, but she was not free, not yet, not completely. Her methods in fighting, however, changed, and she found herself looking just not at herself, but at the children she raised. They were her battleground, and she fought Alrea within them, subverting the stories of her youth and of Earth’s past, to ensure that they understood the necessity for freedom, that they could fight Alrea, and that together they could assure not just their freedom, but that the events that had brought them to this point, did not happen again.

“My band is not here. They’ve left. They’ve
gone
. That’s why it’s just me on the stage tonight. I’m going to try and make it work for you all anyway.”

Years later, Zarina Salim Malik would write that it was these words that changed her life. It was impossible to think that at the time: the vowels of each word were slurred, mashed together, and lost within the heavy, deep bass voice that emerged from crackling speakers. But it was true. It would change her life. There was a magnetic quality that allowed the musician’s voice to rise over the chinks of glass and snatches of conversation and reach her and the other fifty New Yorkers in the Annandale Bar with a tone that implied that he mattered. That they should listen. It was a tone that ignored the fact that the audience present was not there because they cared for the opening act, but because they wanted prime choice in space for the later band they had actually paid to see, and because they had a dedication to music that had nothing to do with any individual performer or act. But the voice ignored that.

The stage in the Annandale was at the end of a small, shadow stained rectangular box of a room with a dirty wooden floor. It had metal fans against the left side that did nothing to cool the place down when it was full and opposite these was a bar where students worked for cheap wages and stole liquor but never cleaned. The whole room lingered in the taste and smell of cigarettes, beer and sweat. It was a shithole, but the bands were cheap and when the music mingled with her pulse, Zarina didn’t care. Nothing mattered but the music. But when that voice snagged the part of her mind that went on instinct, something different happened. She had never felt an intensity like this before, and she watched the shadows of the stage as the musician dragged a stool to the front; watched as the electronics squealed and drowned out everyone, then faded; watched even when Sara, slender, cute, blonde Sara in black and green and Japanese tattoos down her spine,
that
Sara, began to speak and she ignored her. In fact, Zarina leaned over, ashed into the half filled metal tray they had been sharing, then stood—herself in black and red and an inch shorter than Sara, with only one tattoo of a sun coloured butterfly on her neck that her long black hair hid—and she said, “I’m going up front.”

The musician emerged from the shadows and into a weak yellow light as she did. He sat himself on the stool behind the lone metal stem of the microphone. He had a wooden acoustic guitar in his grasp and he was white. That last part surprised her. She hadn’t expected a tall, lean, unshaven, post-grunge-slacker musician in his late twenties with messy blonde-brown hair. He had no shoes and wore faded black jeans and a dirty white shirt covered in a pattern of girls in sunflower yellow dresses playing musical instruments. Sure, he was good looking if he was your type, but he wasn’t Zarina’s. Never would be. And yet, despite this, she sat at an empty table in the middle of the Annandale’s floor, aware even as she pulled back the dull metal stool how fucking weird this was, how her gaze hadn’t left the scene before her, how she’d totally turned obsessive. It had taken her months to draw Sara out. Months. And now she’d left her (she was following, but Zarina didn’t know this, didn’t much care) for a musician she didn’t even know the name of. But she sat. She waited. Sara settled next to her, her fine pale fingers touching her leg, their first touch and Zarina couldn’t focus on it. She was watching and listening to
him
. Watching as he plucked string after string, tuned with his bony figures whose ends were coated in black polish and moved like magpies jabbing their narrow, sharp beaks into the earth when moving across cords. On instinct, Zarina reached beneath her shirt and turned on the microphone connected to her ipod. She had planned to bootleg
Robots Unconquered
when they played two hours from now—and she still would—but without ever having heard a note, she began recording this lone man whose band had left him just as his head bent towards the microphone.

The following is an interview with John Fritzgerald (Jack Ruby), former drummer for theleeharveyoswaldband. A short, squat man covered in coloured bright tattoos of skulls and women and revolvers, he sits in a cheap diner in Brooklyn, wearing blue jeans, a Hawaiian shirt, and leather jacket. He answers questions with a casual ease. The interview was conducted by Rolling Stone in May of 2006, one week after the death of Lee Brown (Lee Harvey Oswald), the singer and guitarist who, in 2002, became the sole member of theleeharveyoswaldband.

You and bass guitarist Kevin Lynch (Jack Kennedy) left the band the day that the now infamous bootleg of the Annandale was recorded. Do you look back with regret at that?

For a while, I did, but not now. I just tell myself—I just say, how could I have known? No one could predict that that was going to happen. You can’t regret that.

Not even when you have, in some circles, been labelled a villain?

It’s the curse of those stupid stage names. You call yourself Jack Ruby and eventually you’re going to be the villain.

Besides, working with Lee . . . it was just impossible. The guy was the most illiterate person I’d ever met. I mean, he couldn’t even sign his own name. He avoided giving signatures for that reason—but I saw him once, trying to fill in a deposit slip for cash. He couldn’t even understand what the boxes were for.

That’s a serious level of illiteracy there.

It was worse. I mean, I felt sorry for him—someone had fucked him education wise—but he couldn’t read music, either. He couldn’t write down those songs of his in a way we’d understand and it was just frustrating. You’d try and force a set list onto him, but what was the point? He couldn’t read it, couldn’t play it, couldn’t do shit for it, but worse, he didn’t want to do it.

If you bought up the fact that he should learn—that he should go to night school or some shit, he’d just shut you out.

Which just meant that every time we went on stage, we were playing whatever he thought of. Whatever popped into his head. Like, now, I might want a drink. Maybe a Coke. Maybe milk. Maybe a beer. That’s how he played. Kevin and me were always playing catch up. Trying to keep a beat that was impossible to know in the first place.

But the music he made—

Was shit, most of the time. That Annandale bootleg was—fuck man, it was like seeing pictures of the Kennedy assassination from the grassy knoll.

From behind rain slicked glass, the streets of Detroit were a dark pattern highlighted by smeared yellow light. To Zarina, it felt as if hundreds of eyes were weeping brightly as she passed. She watched them from the passenger seat of a tiny blue hatchback that was driven by the plump, middle-aged Emily Brown, who, as her name suggested, wore a baggy brown suit to match her cheaply cut brown hair and name.

“You’re being quiet,” Emily said.

“Yeah.” They were at a red light. Emily only talked at red lights. “Just thinking.”

“Try not to over think. Nothing good comes from that.”

Zarina made a noncommittal sound, then said, “I think I’m making a mistake.”

“Nonsense.”

But she was. Zarina hunched down into her patched army jacket and stretched her black docs out so that they were under the little car’s heater. She didn’t know why she had done that: she wasn’t cold—in a minute, the heat would seep through her boots and turn uncomfortable—and hunching made her jacket bunch at her neck unpleasantly. But she couldn’t keep still; she fidgeted while trying to reason out why she was there. She
should
be back in her apartment uploading new recordings and making sure that someone was covering shows for the Pixel Babies and Eddie Isn’t Dead Yet next Saturday. She should be cooking for Sara. She shouldn’t be taking two unpaid days (Friday and Monday) from her call centre job to make this trip to Detroit to meet the sole member of theleeharveyoswaldband. She should have said no and junked the email. But when she had read Emily’s words telling her that Lee wanted to meet her—

“You’re fretting,” Emily interrupted as the hatchback stopped at another light. “I can see it on your face.”

“I don’t—I don’t usually meet artists I like.”

She laughed. “My. I’ve never heard Lee called
that
before.”

“It’s just—just meeting them, y’know?” Zarina continued, trying to push out her words, her fears. “Meeting them can just—can just fuck it all up. That’s what I tell Sara. That’s always what I tell her. Just the thought of meeting him has woken us up at night.”

“Is Sara your daughter?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

The light turned green.

The other thing, Zarina knew, was her life. She wasn’t ashamed of who she was, knew she didn’t have to justify anything—and wouldn’t, fuck the world if they thought she should—but after that one word, Emily shrank behind the smooth mat black steering wheel and chewed on her bottom lip, allowing the silence to grow heavy as she drove slowly through the wet streets. It reminded Zarina of the very real possibility that Lee Brown could say something that would ruin his music for her. All he would have to say was some small-minded thing, some red state thing, and that would be it. Her fingers pressed into the palms of her hands, bones cracked, and she thought about that night, after the Annandale, when she had returned to her apartment. Without flipping the lights on, she had crossed the cold wooden floors, flipped on the stereo, dropped her ipod into it’s cradle, and with Sara’s cool white fingers sliding across her stomach, played theleeharveyoswaldband set. The set meant more to her than Brown ever could.

“Well,” Emily said, then paused. She cleared her throat like a careful teacher. “Well, it doesn’t matter. There’s no need to fret, anyway.”

“I shouldn’t have come.”

“Nonsense. You changed his life.”

“That didn’t have anything to do with me.”

The Annandale Bootleg changed everything, didn’t it?

It made Lee Brown a cult icon. I mean, seriously, I saw him on a fucking t-shirt the other day. Couldn’t believe my eyes.

It is ironic that a man who couldn’t read would be so embraced by net culture.

You got to thank Zarina Salim Malik for that.

You don’t think it would have happened without her?

No.

Some people, y’know, some people—that fame will happen anyway, and it doesn’t matter who is around. I’ve heard people say that if it wasn’t for Sin-e that Jeff Buckley wouldn’t have been found—but Sine-e was just a café that he played in, y’know? Could’ve been any place, it wouldn’t have mattered cause Buckley was just genius waiting to be found. Buckley was going to be Buckley and it didn’t matter how it would happen.

But theleeharveyoswaldband wouldn’t have been anything without Malik. The music was shit, Brown couldn’t keep a band, he could never get regular gigs—and then she showed and bootlegged him in a pub and put it on the net and suddenly it’s everywhere and people can’t get enough of him.

Thanks, in part, to Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing who pushed the link through the site to the thousands of bloggers who reproduced it.

Exactly. Blog culture, the net—it just gave theleeharveyoswaldband an audience, and that allowed Malik, who eventually became Brown’s manager and record label, to exploit it.

I remember reading this article that said that the success of the band rested in the fact that it never released a studio album, and that new recordings—new unique records—were put out at every live show and loaded up by dedicated bootleggers, making them part of the process—part of the music, the sharing, the distribution. It was basically saying that because it embraced everything established music didn’t, that’s why it worked. Which is some weird logic, you ask me, and ignores the fact that Brown was just messed up, and that the brains behind it all was Malik, a blogger with an already existing bootleg audience. But, apparently, the more messed up he became—

Well, the more of a cult figure
she
could make him.

Zarina had never been to a trailer park before.

She had seen them, of course, on television and in movies and across the web, but those images were nothing like the reality at the
Rainbow’s End Park
. The rain smeared the yellow light from the trailer windows as it had done earlier, but with the city now a dark outline behind her, the light looked as if it was contained in a wet blur of battery chicken cages, made not from mesh wiring, but fibro and metal, and with each looking as if it were joined to the one next to it, and then the next, and so on as they sat like a school of lost things on the side of the mud and pebble paved road that Emily navigated her hatchback down. In the slick windows of the single wide trailers, Zarina watched the silhouettes of the occupants, but could not imagine what they looked like, what they were doing beyond the cliché of the environment. Beyond drugs, abuse, violence, neglect, and struggle. Each shadow animated itself in her mind; a flat puppet made from other people’s limbs. Half way through the park, she became conscious of the weight of her own life, of her education, of the degree she had left incomplete, the college her parents had paid for, the advantages she had ignored to work in a call centre she hated for money she wasted, and the bootleg she had made without a second thought of the man who lived here.

The hatchback slowed, stopped with a jolt outside a single wide with the number 45 on the side. Beyond that, there was nothing to distinguish it. “I’m not sure about this,” Zarina repeated softly, staring at the light behind the screen door. “I think I might have made a mistake.”

“Nonsense,” Emily replied. “Just nonsense. Now up to the door you go.”

The windshield wipers rubbed against the glass, a pair of black sticks lifting a curtain and dropping it. The last thing she wanted to do was step out into that wet, artificially lit lot it revealed, but how could she leave now?

Releasing her seatbelt, Emily leaned over and grabbed hold of the door handle. With a shove, she pushed it out into the rain. The light flicked on above them and, lit by it, Emily smiled at Zarina. There was nothing warm in it: the brown in her teeth was darker than her pale skin, and the lines and bags around her eyes gave a look that mixed tiredness and apathy into one. It was clear that she didn’t care what Zarina felt or what she was experiencing; this was just a stop before she returned home to her children and husband and the routine she had for her life.