Chapter 4: The Halo Curse

The Halo Curse

He had one eye open, half in the dream and half out, and the kid’s voice still going.

“I come here every day.”

“See you tomorrow.”

He’d told the kid no. Twice, and then a third time, flat, and the kid had taken all three of them the way you take weather. He’d said he was coming back anyway. He’d said tomorrow.

Quin pinched his left hand, which he did without deciding to. The little finger went most of the way and stopped. He held it there a second, feeling for the place where it quit.

Then he rolled over. That was the whole method. Don’t think about a thing and the thing leaves.

Theo had been sitting on the planter by the north gate long enough that the concrete had printed itself into the backs of his legs.

He stood up too fast when he saw him, both feet gone dead, and came around the end of the planter instead of over it, the little braid at his neck swinging.

Eli had his hat pulled down over his eyes, so Theo was talking to a jaw and not much else. He’d cut his last class for this. There was no time left to be tidy about it.

“Did it work?” he said. “What’d he say? Does he remember you?”

Eli answered the one that had an answer.

“No.”

No to the first, no to the second. He’d never built anything on being remembered. That wasn’t what he’d gone there carrying.

Theo watched him slide his student ID into the front pocket of the backpack.

“Where’s your case?”

“Lost.”

“Lost.” Theo pulled on the end of his braid, which was what he did instead of hitting things. “You lost the case.”

“It’ll come back.”

Eli zipped the bag and said it flat. Theo, who had known him since they were both missing front teeth, and who had never in all that time gotten him to say a thing he didn’t want to say, let it go and walked him across the quad.

Eight at night.

Twelve hours to the placement exam.

Five days until The Ladder stopped taking auditions.

Theo had the same three tabs open and had for an hour: the sign-up confirmation, the rules page he’d read four times, and his own post on the city board. DRUMS AND BASS SEEK GUITARIST WHO SINGS. MUST BE ABLE TO STAND US. Two replies. One had asked if they had a PA. The other was a photograph of a guitar with no caption on it.

He hadn’t shown Eli the post. There was no way to say it that didn’t sound like quitting on the guy, and Eli didn’t quit on anything. Eli didn’t want a guitarist. He wanted one specific person, and the polite word for that was a problem.

He refreshed past it and the feed handed him something else. A gossip account he didn’t follow, with a video already loaded: a parking garage, a car, two people against it, kissing with their whole faces. The caption had the word HEIR in it, and a name he knew. Theo was off the page before he finished reading it. Thumb down. Block. Dane Ashby. He sat with his mouth sour and hoped, sincerely, that Eli hadn’t seen it. Eli’s phone was a place where things like that had a way of arriving.

For no reason he could name, the alley came back.

Behind the courts at the middle school, north side, where the fence panel came loose if you got your fingers under the bottom edge and lifted. Seven or eight guys had gone in to close the exits. Theo came over the wall, and he was late, and the late part was the part that stayed with him. He was always late.

It was already over when he got there. One guy on his back on the asphalt with Eli above him, knee down on his chest, arm still cocked. The voice doing the begging was Dane Ashby’s — the Harrow Group kid, the face from the video he’d blocked four minutes ago, the face that went on posters. Get off, I’m done, get off me. It went on like that. Theo hadn’t needed the rest.

The one light over the back door kept dying and coming back on, dying and coming back.

Theo yelled. He yelled the name he’d used since they were seven years old, in sandboxes, in the backs of cars, in every line he’d ever stood in.

“Nashy!”

The arm came down empty. Eli stood up with no hurry in him at all and walked over, and on one of the on-off cycles of that light Theo got the whole face, and there was blood on it, and apart from the blood there was nothing on it.

A mosquito landed on the back of his hand, dead center of the sun tattooed there. He killed it, and the quad came back with a jerk: the planter under his thighs, the light still on in the booth across the walk.

In his field of view, Eli had come out of the dark beside the booth and was walking toward the window without hurrying.

“Hey —“ Theo got up. His legs had gone dead on the planter, and he got four steps before he had to stop and shake them out.

By then Eli was already at the glass.

The voice got there before the man did.

It came around the corner of the booth easy and full of nonsense, aimed at the guy behind the glass. The same guard as always, one earphone in and the other swinging against his collar. Quin had used this gate every day for a year of his life, and the guard had known him then, and evidently still did.

Eli had that voice in his headphones all week, one old song after another. Here it was out in the open, fifteen feet away, with the same lazy swing on it, and something in him did what it always did. Restart. Load. One more time.

Quin had stopped at the booth window. Something small and black had changed hands there, and now he was turning away from it with his hands in his pockets.

Then he saw Eli, stopped, and let one breath of a laugh out through his nose.

“Freshman,” he said. “You really went all in on this one, huh.”

Something jumped under Eli’s left eye. It wasn’t much and he didn’t fix it.

In the shop the man had said his name out loud, slow, like he was reading it off something. This was the other thing. Not a name. A category, with half a campus in it, and no way to be anything inside it.

He took the face from the top: the mole on the cheek, the one that wasn’t on the other cheek. Then down. Ink on the throat, ink on the wrist, and more of it than there’d been a week ago, three new pieces at least. Thinner. Hair longer, still curling. Sun on him. No ring in the lip, and the hole would be shut by now.

“I need you.”

Quin laughed, one clean beat of it, loud enough that from ten feet back it would have passed for real.

He’d heard it before. First time was at his own door, a week ago: the kid on the landing with the bottle in his hand, saying he was putting a band together and he needed somebody who sang and played. Three words laid down flat, like a form he was supposed to sign. And the word was the one that turned his feet toward the street. Need. Put that word in front of him in a sentence and he’d be halfway down the block before the sentence finished.

“Real sincere,” he said, and the smile went flat out of his eyes. “And what’s it to me?”

Eli didn’t do anything with his face, because there was nothing there to do. He waited a beat, then said the next thing he’d come to say.

“There’s a competition. It’s called The Ladder. We’re putting in for it. We’re short one guitarist.”

He held out the flyer.

“That’s him on drums,” he said, tipping his chin back. “I play bass. Our room’s five blocks from here. I know you don’t want the job. I’m not asking you to want it. Come watch one run-through first. If you’ve got the time.”

Quin looked at the flyer — black type, a logo somebody had paid for — then at the white-haired kid standing a few yards back with his mouth open, then at the one in the hat, and nearly laughed again, for a different reason.

He could not get this face to hold still. Third time up close and it was still coming in pieces: the hat, the mouth, the teeth. And the pitch was bad. Nobody had sat him down and taught him how to do this. He’d said the whole thing straight, no angle on it, and still read Quin all the way to the bottom.

The mouth, though. You could put a ring in a mouth like that.

He shut that down.

“I’ve got the time,” he said. “I don’t have the interest.”

He crushed the flyer into one hand. Then he went by, and on the way past he put his shoulder into Eli’s shoulder — not hard, not careful either.

“Here’s the thing.” He was talking over his shoulder by then. “I’m garbage. And garbage wants to stay in the can. That’s the one right garbage has. It doesn’t want to get recycled.”

He was half a block gone before it registered that the flyer was still in his fist, and he decided not to think about that either.

“Forget the band,” he called, without turning. “Go to class, freshman.”

Theo watched him go and had the usual thing happen, which was that he wanted to say something and there was nothing.

He’d seen that man on a stage exactly once, four years ago, in a room with a low ceiling. Half a set. Then him and his own drummer on the floor, and a limited-run Fender off its stand and in pieces under them. Theo still remembered how quiet it got after. A room full of people all breathing at the same time.

The reputation came through before the man ever did. Neurotic. Dug in. Arrogant in a way that wasn’t even fun to watch. Up one day, down for a month. Hard on everyone he played with, and worse on anybody who tried to help him. He came into a scene like weather. Roof off, road gone, then nothing, and the wreckage standing around for whoever came next.

Why he quit, nobody had ever told Theo, and Theo had asked around. Eli had come onto this campus looking for him once and gotten two words out of an office and a shrug: withdrawn. The band plugged the hole with a new singer and a new guitarist and kept playing, and you could still hear where his hands had been in the writing. Their first single was still up, and the top comment was still at the top of it, with thousands on it, and Theo had read it so many times it had worn smooth.

[wherever quin cornell shows up, the place gets the halo curse. not even a joke at this point.]

Theo had said a version of that out loud once, standing in a kitchen. Eli had listened the whole way through and then gone and done exactly what he was already going to do.

Eli stayed where he was for four or five seconds.

He didn’t look like somebody who’d lost. He looked like somebody redoing a column of numbers. Then he turned around and walked back to the booth window.

“Hey.” The guard leaned into the gap in the glass. “Nash? This yours? Guy just handed it in.”

He set the case on the sill and laid a clipboard on top of it with one finger, and Eli signed his name on the third line and took the case and did not open it. He knew what was in it and he knew how much would be missing from it, which was nothing.

“So that’s it, right?” Theo had made it over by then, breathing through his mouth. “That’s a whole city of guitar players. I could put up another flyer tomorrow —“

“I moved my shift to the afternoon.” Eli put the case in the backpack. “I’m clear after the exam.”

“You moved the shift.”

“Mm.”

Theo opened his mouth to say the other thing. That it was the fifth time. That the guy had called him freshman with a straight face. That there was a limit somewhere and they’d gone past it two days ago. He took the mouthful back.

“I practiced five hours yesterday like an idiot. My arms are shot, I can’t get my elbow up past my ear.” He rolled the shoulder around. “I’m going home to ice it. You don’t practice tonight.”

Eli put a flat hand on his shoulder and pushed once, and then, because it was Theo, and because it cost him nothing, he smiled.

Four teeth came down longer and sharper than anybody else’s. The dimple showed on the right side, the only part of that face that ever went soft, and only when he handed it over on purpose.

“We’ve got time,” he said. “Go home.”

The dorm was a long ride, and it hit at the crosswalk, about twice a week, with no warning and nothing to sit down for.

Metal. Glass. Then the siren, which was the part that never got easier, and which had been filed into him young enough that there was no place to stand outside it and look at it.

He put his headphones on at the curb.

Shuffle gave him one of the old songs. That voice, first bar, before anything else in the mix, and the noise went down under it and stayed down, and by the time he’d walked the bike through the gate and locked it to the rack, it was gone.

He sat on the curb with the lock in his hand and did not understand the thing he never understood: how a voice like that comes out of a man, and then the man decides the world doesn’t get to hear it anymore.

Eli took people apart. It was the one thing he could do without trying. A person did a thing, the thing had a reason under it, the reason had another reason under that, and the more layers you had, the more of the person you were holding. It had never once failed him. It got him through every room he’d ever needed to get through.

He wanted the whole of Quin laid out on a table, in pieces and in order. Then he’d know what to say to him, and the saying would work.

There was one piece missing. Somewhere in the middle of it, one thing didn’t sit where the rest of it said it should, and every time he tried to lay the man out flat there was a hole in the shape of it.

Tomorrow at eight he’d sit the exam, in a building behind the gate the man had walked out of. Then the afternoon shift at the 512, the party house two blocks off campus, six rooms and a warehouse floor, named after the area code the owner had moved away from. Then the practice room. Then the gate again at night.

Upstairs, he set the case on the desk on its side, the monogram facing the room. E N, white thread on black. He didn’t open it. He set his alarm for six-thirty and lay down in the dark with the headphones around his neck and went back through the whole evening, front to back.

Three questions. One answer.

He lay there and thought about the mole, and the ink, and the fist that had closed on the flyer and carried it off the block instead of dropping it.

One piece missing. He’d find it the same way he’d found the door, the shop, and the booth.