The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (10 page)

It didn’t matter, though, because after about five feet the swing stopped again like a car braking hard.

Once everyone in the arena figured out what had happened, they gasped like they were the ones singing “Breathtaking,” and half the band stopped playing, and my chest felt like it was thirty feet above me.

I could stop and ask to be let down. But I got my balance and said, “It’s all part of the show, folks,” which is what you say for any major technical malfunction, and continued singing and the band started up after me. The guy operating the swing did slowly move me down to the stage right away, though.

At the end I gave one of my “This was the best show ever!” lines, but with Roberto’s mistakes and no one being on point and the swing especially, it was one of my worst ever.

Backstage, Jane hugged me. “I’m going to sue someone,” she said. “So help me God, I’m going to sue the shit out of someone.”

She was stroking and kissing my head and squeezing me tight against her implants, which are kind of hard, so it hurt a little, and I also couldn’t breathe too good, so I said, “Jane, I’m fine, okay? I’m not hurt or anything.”

She let go and breathed out and crouched in front of me. “We’re not using that swing again. You hear me?”

“No, I went deaf from the swing, I can’t hear anything.”

“Stop messing around. Are you upset?”

“I’m more upset at Roberto.”

“Roberto?” She pushed some hair out of my eyes that had gotten sweaty and lost its stiffness from the gel. “Why?”

“He fucked up his moves twice. It distracted me.”

“Don’t curse, baby. Do you want me to fire him?”

He never even noticed when I gave him that scowl, and either didn’t think he’d done anything wrong or figured I didn’t catch him and he’d gotten away with it or that I just didn’t care much. I didn’t know which was worse.

“Yeah,” I said. “Fire him.”

She kissed my forehead and wiped the sweat away and said, “You do your encores and then play games in the star room. I’ll deal with all this and meet you there later.”

I did my encores with the instrumentalists, not the dancers. We always do two separate encores, with a minute in between each. When you come back the first time, the crowd gets so amped up, and it sounds like they can’t possibly get crazier, but you do it the second time and
they’re even happier because they really thought you’d left. Jane and Rog say three encores would be too much, since they’d never believe you’re going away and it doesn’t mean as much when you come back.

I went to the room and filled up on desserts to make up for what I’d vomited, and also because Jane wouldn’t get pissed this time since she was upset about the swing. I took a slice of Eureka lemon cheesecake and an espresso crème brûlée from Spago that the salad bar had kept cold and warm, and took bites while playing Level 65 of Zenon. No one came in after shows, not even Walter, who stayed outside and said, “Good show, brother,” like he always did. I think he thinks I want to be by myself postshow, which I mostly do, but around him, I don’t have to be on, the way I do with other people.

As my character was coming up on a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, I heard Walter and another voice outside my door, and Walter did his two knocks and a pause and a knock. He stepped in and said, “Roberto wants to talk to you.”

I said okay. Roberto slumped in and closed the door and sat down on one of the beanbag chairs. I kept playing Zenon.

“Hey, Jonny,” he said. “I’m real sorry about tonight. I was off, and I know it fucked with your rhythm. That’s on me.”

I went inside the farmhouse, and there was a mother and father and daughter eating stew at a table lit with one large candle. The father said, “Greetings, noble warrior, we are honored by your presence and invite you to share in our supper, meager though it be.” I sat down with them.

“So,” Roberto said, “I wanted to man up in person.”

I nodded and ate the stew and took a bite of the Spago cheesecake.

“Your mom.” He ran a hand over the back of his buzz cut. My male dancers aren’t allowed to have longer hair than me. “Jonny, your mom wants to fire me. Just for what happened tonight.”

I stood up from the table and took the candle. “Yeah, she told me.” I brought the candle over to a curtain and put it against the material. It caught fire slowly before ripping into an orange rectangle. The father leaped up to fight me, but I drew my sword, and he ran out of the farmhouse with his wife and daughter behind him.

“It was a little mistake, Jonny. We all make mistakes.”

“I don’t,” I said. “That’s why I’m in the star/talent room and you’re in the band/vocalist room.”

The flames caught on the wooden walls and floor of the farmhouse and spread out on both sides. Out of the corner of my eye, Roberto was looking down and shaking.

“I know,” he said, like he was crying even though there weren’t any tears. “I’m real distracted lately. It’s my pops, man. He’s real sick.”

The fire blazed on the entire wall and the screen was turning reddish from the heat, like when you close your eyes after staring at a bright light. “What does he have?”

“I don’t know.” He was shaking more now but he still wasn’t crying. “Something’s fucked-up with his heart and he’s got all these doctor appointments and his insurance doesn’t cover shit. And I’m the only one in my family who makes any money.”

The fire was everywhere, and the screen got so red I couldn’t hardly see anything, way thicker than the red smoke onstage. The farmer probably thought I was crazy for staying inside so long, but I’d never seen it get so hot like that in the game before. I ran out of the farmhouse in the direction I remembered the door was, and knocked against something solid with a sound effect, but I found the door and the screen lost all the redness and I could see again in the cool blue night air with the white moon hanging like a fingernail clipping, and my body was all blackened but not burned or damaged, and I dropped to the ground and sucked in air like a fish in a boat.

I’d gained twenty-seven experience points.

I finally turned to Roberto. “I’ll talk to her.”

He took a long time getting up, breathing slow in and out of his nose. “Thank you,” he said. “I won’t fuck up again.”

He left and closed the door like he was trying not to wake up a baby, and I ran away from the farmhouse once I could breathe again, past the family who was beating their fists on the dirt and moaning at the smoky sky, and the level’s gem appeared on the ground before me.

Walter came in and told me we were ready to go, so he gave me an Angels hat I squashed down almost to my eyes because I forgot my sunglasses, and he escorted me through the personnel exit. Jane’s car
was waiting right near the entrance. I jumped in the back and slid down into my usual postshow slouch even though the windows were tinted almost black.

We had a smooth venue exit since only a couple paparazzi were camped outside the personnel lot, and Jane just got the car pretour so they didn’t recognize it or the plates. Once we were on the freeway I told her I’d changed my mind about Roberto. She only nodded and said, “So I talked with Bill about the swing.”

I’d forgotten about the swing because I was so happy about getting the gem on Level 65. “What’d he say?”

Usually Jane looked at me in the rearview mirror when she talked to me about something serious, but she just faced straight ahead and her hands tightened around the wheel. “He said they figured out what the issue was and resolved it, but there are apparently three separate safety devices on it, so even if it happens next time, you’re protected by three levels of defense.”

Walter’s eyes shifted over to Jane before he turned his head out the window.

“It didn’t feel that safe,” I said.

“I know, baby. That’s what I told him. But he swears it is. And it really is the technical highlight of the show, and the fans are going to expect it now.”

I thought about climbing back into the swing. When something bad happens once, you always think about it after. It was like how I’d choked onstage one time on my bottle of water, in New Orleans, and now every time I took a sip I worried I’d do it again, mostly because choking on water would be such a crap way to depart the realm. At least crashing in the swing would be cool.

“If you say so.”

“Great,” she said. “We’re going to use it for a lot of visual promo content. And Bill knows what he’s talking about.”

Walter laughed quietly to himself. “Something funny, Walter?” Jane said.

“If he knew what he was talking about, it wouldn’t have gotten broke in the first place.”

Jane kept driving without talking, but it was the kind of not talking that said a lot. It wasn’t the smartest thing for Walter to say that to her, but I thought again of him jumping in front of me to catch a bullet. General Jonny and Private Walter.

“Don’t mind me,” Walter said. “It’s not my place. You going out tonight, or are we driving straight home?”

“Home,” Jane said. “And I’d appreciate it if you kept your mind on security issues, Walter.”

He kept looking out the window. “Sorry, Miss Valentine.”

Jane turned on the radio to a classic rock station. We didn’t talk the rest of the way. When we got home, Walter mumbled good night to us and went off to his bungalow, and Sharon was still up and asked us if we wanted anything. Jane said she was going to sleep and reminded me we had a six a.m. wakeup.

My body was tired but my mind was racing from the concert, so I asked Sharon to make me some decaf green tea with honey from the kettle, not the microwave or the hot-water faucet. It would take longer that way.

It was just me and Sharon awake in the house. She leaned over the island counter. “How was the concert, Mr. Jonny?”

“One of the dancers kept messing up and it threw me off, and then the swing that carries me over the crowd, it broke when I was inside.”

She put her hand over her mouth. “It broke?”

“But there are three safety devices. So I didn’t get hurt.”

“Oh, good.” She swept my hair to the side. “They’re not going to make you do it anymore?”

“No,” I said. “Jane said she wouldn’t let them put me in it again for a million dollars.”

Sharon said that she worried so much about me when I did tricks in my concerts, but now she could relax. I finished my tea while she read the front page of the
L.A. Times
on the counter. She’s taking an adult-education writing class and they have to read the front page every day. When I was done, she looked up from the paper and said, “I love watching you drink your tea. You’re so serious about it.”

She took my mug and opened the dishwasher and bent over to put the mug in the back of the bottom row. Her butt was like two huge boulders guarding the entrance to a cave in Zenon. And I felt like I wanted to disappear inside that cave and close out the world around me and hide in there. I imagined running around the island and grabbing the chub around her hips and under her purple sweatpants and humping her. Thinking about it got me hard, and in my mind I was holding on to her so tight, she was captured like an animal and could never escape. Sharon wasn’t just chubby, she was fat, but there was something about a fat body that was better than a chubby body. Like, either be skinny or be fat, but don’t be somewhere in the middle. It’s sort of like how it’s okay to be super-famous or not famous at all, but don’t be a D-list celeb.

She went to bed. I was still hard, so I tried in my bathroom, but couldn’t make it happen. At least a groupie could never accuse me of getting her pregnant, except I’d have to issue a public statement like, “It’s impossible, I can’t even do it on my own,” and a policeman would have to watch me in private to see if it was true, and they’d give me an adult glossy to help, and we’d also have to bring in Walter to make sure the policeman wasn’t a child predator. I was wired, and I figured Jane was asleep from her zolpidem by now. She probably hadn’t locked her door since she hadn’t been drinking, and I didn’t know when my next chance to go on the Internet was. At her door, I heard her breathing heavy, almost snoring, so I crept inside. Her computer was on top of a suitcase so she wouldn’t forget it. I took it into her bathroom and booted it up. If she caught me, I’d tell her I couldn’t sleep and was researching slave autobiographies for Nadine.

There were eight new emails, and my stomach jumped up like it did when the swing fell. But they were all spam. He hadn’t posted anything new that I could find in my fan forums, either. I looked at my Facebook page to see how many new likes and comments I had. Jane had posted a photo of my Phoenix show, and there were 31,158 likes and 5,385 comments.

I didn’t want Jane to catch me, even though browsing my Facebook page wasn’t that bad and showed I was interested in growing my social
media platform, and I closed out. An over-the-counter pill wouldn’t cut it tonight, so I popped one and a half zolpidems from her medicine cabinet. It’s like the sleep command in Zenon, when you can select how many hours you want to sleep for, and you do it right away and wake up refreshed. Only it’s not as deep as regular sleep, and plus you have to be careful not to take it too much or it doesn’t work as good. That’s Jane’s problem.

I
woke up to Jane tapping my head. It didn’t make sense, but I was still so sleepy that for a second, with my eyes closed, I thought it was my father waking me up, except I imagined him as the soldier in that war movie we saw.

“C’mon, make hay while the sun shines, you sleepy numbskull,” she said. “You have an estimated twenty-three thousand, three hundred and sixty days left on earth. Make this one worth it.”

That was Jane’s Jonny Valentine Departing the Realm Countdown. I mumbled okay, but when she left the room I fell asleep again. She came in again. “Jonathan, seriously, we have to be out the door in forty-nine minutes.”

I looked at my Cardinals alarm clock. I’d taken the zolpidem six and a half hours before. In Zenon, the only time you get woken up early is because of nearby enemies.

She watched to make sure I got out of bed. I was really out of it, though. My legs were spaghetti, and I felt like if I inhaled too much my chest would pop open.