Read The Last Days Online

Authors: Scott Westerfeld

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Horror & Ghost Stories, #Performing Arts, #Music

The Last Days (18 page)

BOOK: The Last Days
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Moz swung his veto gaze toward her. “What?”
“How about Crazy Versus Sane?”
“Pearl, darling,” Minerva said. “Don’t you think that’s kind of . . . pointed?” She looked at Alana Ray, not noticing that everyone else was looking at her.
“It’s not about
us
,” Pearl said. “It’s about all the weird stuff going on. Like the black water, the sanitation crisis, the crime wave. Like that crazy woman who dropped the Stratocaster on me and Moz . . . That’s how this band got started.”
“I don’t know,” Moz said. “Crazy Versus Sane. Sounds kind of artsy-fartsy to me.”
Score another one for the Moz Veto.
I tried to think, random words and phrases spilling through my head, but Pearl had been right. Band names only got harder the longer you waited to pick one. The deeper the music got into your brain, the more impossible it became to describe it in two or three words.
The silence was broken by the shriek of some metal band’s demo tape echoing out of another scout’s office. The steel walls of the safe seemed to be closing in, the air growing stale. I imagined Astor Michaels shutting the door, giving us until we ran out of oxygen to come up with a name.
I thought of the growling, thumping rehearsal building on Sixteenth Street and wondered if all the bands in there had names. How many bands were there in the whole world? Thousands? Millions?
Looking up at the ranks of safe-deposit boxes surrounding us, I wondered if we should all just get numbers.
“Why don’t we just pick something simple?” I said. “Like . . . Eleven?”
“Eleven?” Moz said. “That’s great, Zahler. But it’s no ‘the Desk.’”
Minerva sighed. “That’s the problem with Crazy Versus Sane: it’s false advertising, seeing as how we’re kind of short on sane.”
“What’s not sane is making us choose a name this way,” Pearl said, glaring up at the rat photos.
“Is this sort of ultimatum normal for record companies?” Alana Ray asked.
“No. It’s totally
para
normal,” I said.
Pearl’s eyes lit up. “Hey, Zahler, maybe that’s it. We should call ourselves the Paranormals!”
“Plural,” Moz said. “Do you guys not
get
the plural thing?”
“Whatever,” Pearl said. “Paranormal?
The
Paranormal, if you want to be all
the
about everything.”
“
Paranormal
can mean two things,” Alana Ray said.
We all looked at her. Those rare times Alana Ray actually said something, everybody else listened.
“
Para
can mean
beside
,” she continued. “Like paralegals and paramedics, who work beside lawyers and doctors. But it can also mean
against
. Like a parasol is against the sun and a paradox against the normal way of thinking.”
I blinked. That was just about the most words Alana Ray had said in a row since that first rehearsal. And like everything she said, it was very weird and kind of smart.
Maybe Paranormal
was
the right name for us.
Pearl frowned. “So what’s a parachute against?”
Alana Ray’s eyebrows twitched. “The chute of gravity.”
“Gravity sucks,” I said softly.
“So if we go with Paranormal,” Alana Ray said, “we should figure out whether we are
beside
normal or
against
it. Names are important. That’s why I ask you all to call me by my whole first name.”
“Hey, I just thought Ray was your last name,” Moz said, then frowned. “What
is
your last name anyway?”
I held my breath. With Alana Ray, asking her last name was practically a personal question. But after a few seconds, she said, “I don’t have a real last name.” She didn’t continue right away, her hands flickering nervously.
“How do you mean?” Pearl asked.
“At my school, they gave us new last names, ones that anyone could spell. That way, when we told our names to people, no one would ever ask us to spell them. It was to save us from embarrassment.”
“You have trouble spelling?” Pearl asked. “Like, dyslexia?”
“Dyslexia,” Alana Ray answered. “D-y-s-l-e-x-i-a. Dyslexia.”
“Dude,” I said. “I couldn’t spell that.”
She smiled at me. “Only some of us had trouble spelling. But they renamed us all.”
“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” Minerva said softly, and everyone turned toward her. “As long as the music’s good, people will think the name’s brilliant too. Even if it’s just some random word.”
Moz nodded. “Yeah, the Beatles had a pretty stupid name, if you think about it. Didn’t hurt them much.”
“Dude!” My jaw dropped open. “They did
not
have a stupid name! It’s a classic!”
“It’s lame,” Minerva said. “
Beatles
, like the insect, except spelled like
beat
, because it’s music?”
Pearl cleared her throat. “Had to do with Buddy Holly and the Crickets, actually.”
“Whatever,” Minerva said. “It’s a really pathetic pun.
And
it’s plural.” She smiled at Moz.
“Whoa . . . really?” I blinked. But they were right:
beetle
didn’t have an
a
in it. They’d spelled it wrong.
Moz and Minerva were laughing at me, and he said, “You never noticed that?”
I shrugged. “I just figured they spelled it that way in England. I mean, I read this English book once, and all kinds of stuff was spelled wrong.”
Now
everyone
was laughing at me, but I was thinking maybe Minerva was right. Maybe it didn’t matter what we called ourselves: the Paranormals, the F-Sharps, or even the Desk. Maybe the music would grow around the name, whatever it was.
But we kept arguing, of course.
 
When Astor Michaels came back expecting an answer, Pearl pulled out her phone. “It’s only been forty minutes! You said an hour.”
He snorted. “I’ve got work to do. So what do we call this band?”
We all froze. We’d come up with about ten thousand ideas, but nobody could agree on a single one. Suddenly I couldn’t remember any of them.
“Come on!” Astor Michaels snapped his fingers. “It’s do-or-die time. Are we in business or not?”
Naturally, everyone looked at Pearl.
“Um . . .” The silence stretched out. “The, uh, Panics?”
“The Pa
nic
,” Moz corrected. “Singular.”
Astor Michaels considered this for a moment, then burst out laughing. “You’d be amazed how many people come up with that.”
“With what?” Pearl said.
“Panic. Whenever I give bands the Name Ultimatum, they always wind up calling themselves something like the Panic, the Freakout, or even How the Hell Should We Know?” He laughed again, his teeth flashing in the semi-darkness.
“So . . . you don’t like it?” Pearl asked softly.
“It’s crap,” he chuckled. “Sound like a bunch of eighties wannabes.”
No one else was asking, so I did: “Does this mean we’re dumped?”
He snorted. “Don’t be silly. Just trying to motivate you and have a little fun. Lighten up, guys.”
Minerva was giggling, but the rest of us were ready to kill him.
Astor Michaels sat down behind his desk, his smile finally showing all his teeth, a row of white razors in the darkness. “Special Guests it is!”
19. THE IMPRESSIONS
-ALANA RAY-
When the doorman heard our names, he didn’t bother to check the list or use his headset. He didn’t even meet our eyes, just waved us in.
Pearl and I walked straight past the line of people waiting to have their IDs checked, to be patted down and metal-detected, to pay forty dollars (a thousand dollars for every twenty-five people) to get in. It had all happened just as Astor Michaels had promised. We were underdressed, unpaying, and in Pearl’s case underage, but we were getting in to see Morgan’s Army.
“Our names,” I said. “They worked.”
“Why shouldn’t they?” Pearl grinned as we followed the long, half-lit entry hall toward the lights and noise of the dance floor. “We’re Red Rat talent.”
“Almost Red Rat talent,” I said. The “almost” part was making me twitchy. Pearl’s lawyer was still arguing about details in the recording contract. She said that we would thank her for this diligence in a few years, when we were famous. I knew that details were important in legal documents, but right now the delay made the world tremble, like going out the door without a bottle of pills in my pocket.
“Whatever,” Pearl said. “Our band is nine kinds of real now, Alana Ray—and real musicians don’t pay to see one another play.”
“We were already real,” I said as we crossed the dance floor, the warm-up DJ’s music making my fingers want to drum. “But you’re right. Things do feel different now.”
I looked at one twitching hand in front of me, mottled with the pulsing lights of the dance floor. Flashing lights usually made me feel disassociated from my own body, but tonight everything seemed very solid, very real.
Was it because I’d (almost) signed a record deal? My teachers at school always said that money, recognition, success—all the things normal people had that we didn’t—weren’t so important, that no one should ever use them to make us feel less than real. But it wasn’t exactly true. Getting my own apartment had made me feel more real, and making money did too. The night I’d gotten my first business cards, I’d taken them out of the box one by one, reading my name again and again, even though they were all exactly the same. . . .
And now my name had gotten me to the front of a long line of people with more-expensive clothes and better haircuts, people who hadn’t gone to special-needs schools. People with real last names.
I couldn’t help but feel that was important.
Pearl was beaming in the dance-floor lights, as if she was feeling more real too. It was illegal for her to be here, and I’d expected the doorman to know she was only seventeen, even if Astor Michaels had said it wouldn’t be a problem.
That thought made me nervous for a moment. At my school they’d taught us to obey the law. Our lives would be complicated enough without criminal records, they liked to point out. Of course, saying that people like us couldn’t afford to break the law suggested that other people could. Maybe Pearl and I were more like those other people now.
My fingers started to itch and pulse, but not because of the flashing lights: I wanted to sign that record deal soon. I wanted to grab this realness and put it on paper.
 
As we waited for the first band to start, I looked around for Astor Michaels. He made me shiver sometimes, even though he seemed to like me, always asking my opinions about music. He also asked about my visions, which didn’t upset him the way they did Minerva. Of course, I never saw Astor Michaels upset by anything. He didn’t care that his smile made people nervous, and he only laughed when I told him that he moved like an insect.
I found him easier to talk to than most people, just not to look at.
“Too bad Moz couldn’t make it,” Pearl said. “What did he say he was doing tonight?”
“He didn’t,” I answered, though I had guesses in my head.
Moz was different now. In the last month he’d started borrowing things from the rest of us—Astor Michaels’s smile, my twitchiness, Minerva’s dark glasses—as if he wanted to start over.
He and Minerva whispered when Pearl wasn’t looking, and the two sent messages to each other while we played. When my visions were strong enough, I could see their connection: luminous filaments reaching up from Minerva’s song to Moz’s fluttering notes, pulling them down toward the seething shapes beneath the floor.
I tried not to watch. Moz still paid me and said he would keep paying until Red Rat Records had actually given us money. He had never broken his promises to me, so I didn’t want to tell my guesses to Pearl.
And I didn’t want to make her sad tonight, because it was nice of her to have asked me along to see her favorite band.
 
The opening act had just been signed by Astor Michaels—like us, except for our “almost.” But they already had a name.
Toxoplasma
was stenciled on their amps.
“What does that word mean?” I asked Pearl.
“Don’t know.” She shrugged. “Don’t quite get it.”
Neither did I, but I also didn’t understand why Zahler never used his first name, or why Moz had started saying “Min” instead of “Minerva,” or why no one ever called Astor Michaels anything but “Astor Michaels.” Names could be tricky.
After his little joke, Astor Michaels had said it didn’t matter what we called ourselves, that our real audience would find us by smell, but that sounded unlikely to me. I hoped we would come up with our own name soon. I didn’t want one tacked onto us, like “Jones” had been to me.
BOOK: The Last Days
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