Chapter 7: The Apex

“Salt Point,” Quin said.

“Never heard of it.”

“You weren’t there. Three days on the water. It rained straight through our set. The wind came in off the ocean sideways and took the tarp off the drum riser, and some guy’s flag came up off the front barricade and never came back down.”

A rustle of sheets. Hollis had been asleep and now he wasn’t. Something in the call changed — the particular quiet of a man sitting up in the dark with his feet on the floor.

“Floral shirt,” he said. “You wore the floral one. The green one. Who dressed you for that? I want to say it wasn’t me.”

“It was you.”

“I’d still like to say it wasn’t.” A pause. “No. Wait. That’s the one where you made me draw.” He said it like the insult had just happened. “Two in the morning. I’m at the table with a pad, and you’re across from me going no, the eyes, do the eyes again. Like I’m the sketch artist on a cop show. Two hours, my hand cramped up, and you didn’t pay me a dollar.”

“That’s the one.” Quin turned onto his back. The letter was on the table where he’d left it, the drawing under it. “I still have it.”

“I know you still have it.”

“I had you do the eyes. I dreamed about him again just now.”

He had never been able to work out why it took. He forgot names while he was being introduced to them. Faces went by the following week. Whole afternoons he had been present for, gone. And a pair of eyes had been sitting in the middle of him for years, and the strangest part was not that a person could carry something like that around. It was that the person carrying it was him.

That day had been the best day of his life. He’d said so out loud once, years ago, heard how it landed, and after that he’d kept it to himself, in shorthand: the top of the arc.

Rough Corner had just put the single out, and the whole summer had been built around that one show. New song, new record, and the tour announced from the stage at the end of the night. That part wasn’t his; somebody else took the mic for the talking. What he remembered was the field. Faces from the barricade back to the fence line, every one of them turned up, and the noise coming off them in one piece.

He played that night. The solo in the fourth song, the new one, had a shape he’d worked out in the rehearsal room, and he left the shape. He went somewhere else with it and felt the band come up underneath him and stay, which was the only thing he had ever actually asked a band for. And when the chorus came around, the field sang it back at him, every word of a song that had been out for three weeks.

Two-thirds of the way through the set, the sky opened.

It came off the water in one gray sheet. The raincoats went up across the field all at once, thousands of them, catching the light rig on the way up, and then the wind got under the plastic and lifted the whole thing. Everybody down there got wrecked in the same minute and nobody left. You can’t get that from a room.

He stepped up onto the sub at the end of the drum riser — a habit he had never explained to anybody — and stood in it with the water coming off his hair into his eyes and the low end coming up through the soles of his shoes, and for about forty seconds he had the whole world.

He stayed up on the sub through the talk, laughing at something somebody said, half watching the field, when the wind came across it again, harder than before.

Hats went up. Two, then five, then more of them, turning over in the air above the first few rows, hands grabbing after them and missing. He watched one with a brim go end over end and drop out of sight behind the barricade. He looked for it, because there was nothing else to do up there but look.

The person it belonged to had their head down.

Mask on. Then they lifted their face.

Black hair, short, blown sideways and sticking to the mask. And above the line of it, a pair of eyes pale enough to take every light on that stage and hand it back to him in two small circles.

They were looking straight up at him.

He had been looked at by crowds before. A crowd is one animal with a great many eyes, and none of the eyes are ever about you. These were. They had a hook in them, and in the second they held him the field went quiet in his ears, and it was like meeting a wolf head-on in the middle of a crowd, something that had come in by mistake and knew it.

Then a shoulder came up in front of them, or the wind took the hair across the face and the eyes with it. He looked again and there was nobody. No hat. No mask. Nothing where the person had been, and no gap in the crowd to show where they’d gone.

He missed his entrance.

The next song started, the count went by him, and he came in late on a song he could play asleep. He was already off the sub and going for the front of the stage. Over the edge — that was the plan, and it had taken him no time at all to make it. Over the barricade, through the pit, find whoever had just put a hook through him. Rudy’s hand closed around his arm and hung on until he came back in on the verse.

That was the whole thing. That was the clip.

He had been on the road for years and made exactly one scene in public, and the internet kept that one. For a long time after, if you said the singer of Rough Corner was on something, you did not have to make anything up. There he was on somebody’s phone, in the rain, up on a speaker cabinet with twenty thousand people in front of him, staring at nothing, coming in late.

He had not had a drink that day. He had been clearer that night than he was most nights.

That part never caught on.

He asked the festival for the photographer’s files and went through every frame of them twice. The field, the pit, the rail, the wings, the empty stage at two in the morning. No mask, no short black hair, no pale eyes.

Maybe there had been nothing to find. He could hold that idea — he could hold it right up until he couldn’t. He was not a man who saw things. He had never once mistaken a dream for a street.

But he had not been drinking, and he had not been sleeping badly, and standing up there in the rain he had known exactly what he was looking at.

Real memories go. Some of the ones he would have chosen to keep were already going, and he could feel it in the mornings. So the tour ran out the rest of the summer, and when his flight finally put him back on the ground he went to Hollis before he went home.

Hollis had closed the shop and put a pad on the table in the back room with no idea what he’d been brought there for. He drew, and while he drew, he dug.

“So it’s the eyes,” he said. “That’s the whole thing? How much can you like a pair of eyes?”

Quin thought about it as carefully as he had ever thought about anything.

“The amount where I want to blow up the planet,” he said. “Except I’d put him on a ship first. Then I’d do it, and then I’d go find him.”

Hollis put the pencil down and looked at him for a while.

“You’re out of your mind,” he said. “I’m telling you that as a friend.”

In the apartment, with the letter out on the table and the phone warm against his ear, dawn was still two hours off and Hollis was still talking.

“That was a hundred years ago and you’re still having dreams about it. You’re sick. And you made me do that thing on your throat the same night. After the eyes. Two in the morning, and you write something in the corner of my drawing and tell me to put it on you. I did a man’s throat with my eyes falling shut.”

Quin put two fingers on his throat, where the word sat under the jaw. Four letters.

He had picked the pencil up off the table himself. Turned the pad around. Written it in the bottom corner of the drawing and slid the pad back across to Hollis. One word. This one.

Turn.

It was the word he had for it. It was the place in the road where the road stops going the way it was going. He could not remember where he had taken it from — a book, a record sleeve, some afternoon on a bus — and he had not needed to know, because it was the only one that fit, and because he had wanted it somewhere he could feel it when he talked.

In the dream he could hardly stand to look at the guy up on the sub. Soaked through a shirt that was somebody else’s idea of a joke, halfway up a speaker cabinet like it was the roof of a house, holding a whole field of people in one raised hand. Quin did not like him very much anymore.

But the few seconds with the hook in him came back exactly the way they had been. Same distance. Same rain. Same pair of eyes picking him out of a field and holding on.

The hit had been hard enough that he had wanted to keep it. He didn’t keep things. There was one drawing in a folder in the closet, the one Hollis had done, and there was the word under his jaw.

“Go to sleep,” Hollis said. “I mean it.”

“Yeah.” Quin put his thumb on his throat, on the word, and laughed once at the ceiling. “It’s funny. There it was again.”