1. The Edge of Knowledge
In the first moment that ever existed, the Universe exploded. Clouds of ejecta coalesced in gravity’s fist to form a hardening sphere which, billions of years later, exerted its own gravity on the wheels of a gunmetal Subaru, pinning it to the highway where it hummed along at 80 mph in southwest Utah as Babette, peering from under her black bangs, steered towards the setting sun and turned down the astrophysics on the stereo. She had an idea.
One hand still on the wheel, she reached for the battery-powered Casio keyboard on the passenger seat, thumped an index finger down on the A below middle C. A mellow gurgling of organ. Nearly the same note as the hum of the tires on the road. Half-step down to the black key, G-sharp. That was it. The groove tone of Utah itself, as if the whole state was a spinning record and Babette was riding the needle arm of the Universe’s turntable.
“Oh, that’s a good note,” said Goldy.
Babette glanced at the photo negative of herself in the rearview, her twin. “It’s a goddamn black key. I can’t work with black keys, I’m not Bach.”
Goldy peered at the unscrolling desert that stretched to every horizon. “Sure you can. It’ll be good for you.”
Babette, left hand on the wheel and eyes on the road, continued exploring the keyboard with her right hand. A simple descending figure, a patchwork of blacks and whites and then back to G-sharp. Then an ascending phrase, mirror image, up to D-sharp until returning to the root. In just a few miles she found the pattern she wanted, the scaffold for the melody her mind had started forming, with the cruise control pegged to precisely 80.
“Or,” Goldy said, “you could slow down a bit and drop the road-tone a half-step.”
“Fuck.” Babette switched off the cruise control and let the car slow by degrees. As the speed dropped, the hum of the asphalt lowered in pitch. At 76 mph, it was a perfect G. Babette slapped the dashboard. “God dammit, I already learned the freaking thing on the black keys!”
Here was the thing about Babette: she and Goldy were the same person, but the Babette part of her needed to do everything her own way. It was a recipe for pain and frustration, but also a doorway to mastery and glory. Babette was unstoppable except for when she hit the brick wall of her own stubbornness. Accelerated back up to 80. Goldy, smirking in the mirror, shook her head but said nothing. “I’ll be Bach,” muttered Babette, and took it from the top in G-sharp.
~
The two-vehicle caravan etched its way across the surface of the Earth in the twilight, Babette and Goldy in their Subaru while Jenna and Carlos followed in their conversion van, both vehicles filled with the accoutrements of rock-and-roll—drums, amps, guitars in cases, duffels filled with outfits, wigs, make-up—bound for a stage in a dive bar off the old strip in Las Vegas.
Babette, still driving one-handed with the other hand making patterns on the keys, recapped the audiobook they’d been listening to in fragments since Denver, Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe. “So everything in existence is basically a rounding error in the balance of matter and anti-matter.”
Goldy hummed. “A cosmic mistake.”
“The point is,” Babette pressed on, “imperfection isn’t only a necessary part of life. Imperfection is everything.”
Goldy sat with that. “Sounds like God screwed up.”
Babette said with gravity, “He knows what he did.”
“Or she.”
“If God is a woman, she must be pretty stupid. Wait, do we even believe in God?”
“My students definitely do,” Goldy said. “Half of them are named after Catholic saints. But as for us: probably not so much after reading this book.”
“Fuck yeah. Science devours God. Your eighth graders are going to love this discussion.”
Goldy snorted and shook her head. She was scheduled to co-teach a section of middle school Earth Science back in Denver when the semester started in two weeks, and the twins were soaking up Big Ideas because that was how it worked: putting their minds together, entangling themselves, they could grasp things that might elude them individually. They were one mind, after all, divided into contrasting halves. And during these final weeks of summer break, they were tearing up the West Coast on tour with Babette’s power-pop trio, an up-close examination of cosmic mistakes in every form. An attempt to solve this existential equation:
Babette Goldy
Rockstardom + Teaching = x
“Unless, of course,” Babette said, “you quit the shit out of that teaching job and we go on tour forever. Reduce the equation and solve for x.“
Goldy flexed her jaw as the highway flung dash marks. “You know that idea doesn’t add up.”
“Come on. I’ve got a good feeling about this tour.”
“Fine, but I like my job. I’m a good teacher. What’s the shame in that?”
“No shame,” said Babette, “but this astrophysics shit is way beyond whatever the eighth graders are learning in freaking Earth Science. You’re just trying to impress the other science teachers.”
“Sure. But I need to be able to talk science stuff, just like you need to talk about guitars and amps with all those dudes who slither up after a show.”
“I hate those dudes!”
“But I don’t hate my students, or my colleagues. That’s my point. Why would I quit a job I love?” Goldy scowled at the highway, the distant horizon. “Besides, if there’s one thing I’m good at—I mean really good at—it’s getting kids hooked with just the right nudge at just the right moment. I’m as good at dropping mind-bombs on stinky tweens as you are at seducing people with a guitar solo.”
“Mind-bomb,” drawled Babette with a smirk.
“I said what I said.”
“So did Rosaura drop a mind-bomb on me, or was that a heart-bomb?”
Goldy showed a stormy look in the rearview. “I thought we weren’t going to spin out about Rosaura. This whole trip is about forgetting her, isn’t it?”
“Sorry, you’re right. Duck the heart-bomb and run away.” Babette wiggled in her seat to adjust her posture, clear her mind. Meanwhile Venus, the only star in the sky, blazed in a pinpoint over the hills. Mountains upended the horizon. She poked play again on the audiobook. The narrator’s voice filled the car and spoke of vast stretches of time, the tiniest constituent parts of existence which manifested themselves across oceans of emptiness to a Subaru cocoon at the leading edge of time’s arrow.
2. The Dilemma of Space, Time and the Quanta
Tonight Screamy Deluxe was playing an opening slot for The Melvins, who had packed the place with overlapping generations of punk rock weirdos and rocker freaks in black tees, cowboy shirts, holey jeans that dated to the Clinton Administration, bandanas and baseball caps, a scattering of ironic Stetsons. These people mowed the lawn in these outfits, which was one reason why Babette fancied up so much: gotta bring the show.
Tonight’s outfit: a Twister mat that she’d cut and torn and stitched and gathered into the rough silhouette of an old Pan Am stewardess’s suit, complete with a little gold lamé pillbox pinned to her shaggy black wig. White leather knee boots with gold piping and chunky heels, a pair of gold leather cuffs with snap buttons around both wrists. Glittery midnight-blue eyeshadow, kohl-rimmed eyeliner, yellow nail polish, a sparkling sheen of concealer on her cheekbones and on the oval window of bare chest below a white leather choker. She looked like a Replicant hooker out of Blade Runner, and no one here had ever seen anyone like her in real life. That was the point. A hologram from the future made flesh, she struck a stance at the front of the stage, one boot atop a wedge monitor in a beam of light as she tweaked the tuning on her gold-top Les Paul with the volume dialed down.
The first song had been creaky: one of the tone knobs on her guitar made a crackling noise when she dialed it. She experimented unsuccessfully with workarounds while the guy at the soundboard got the mix dialed in now that the venue was full of bodies. Max’s ReBar in the scuzzy part of Vegas. To her right, Carlos in his pink tracksuit tuned his bass as Jenna, behind the drum kit, fussed with the wing nuts on her cymbals. Jenna wore a gold lamé bikini top with cut-offs and looked like the second coming of Farah Fawcett dipped in tattoos, already shining with sweat in the stage lights. With the first song out of the way, it was time to unleash the glory.
No one in the crowd had come tonight to see Screamy Deluxe, but no one would forget them. Babette brought her glossed lips a hair’s breadth from the microphone and pushed her voice into the room: “One-two-three-four-five, you won’t get out of here alive!” Carlos and Jenna tumbled in with an avalanche of sound as Babette cut a metallic slash through the room by dragging a pick down the bottom string of her guitar. Heads turned, people moved towards the stage. Babette jumped, twisted, landed on her boots as the beat locked in, fingers flying through the chords while she darted her head at the mic to bark the next line, the line after that. A quick glance at Carlos as the end of the verse drew near, his no-look nod, his half-turn to Jenna to loop her in, then Jenna’s BANG-BANG-BANG on the floor tom that signaled the key change into the chorus. Babette windmilled on a barred A-major as she screamed from deep in her chest, “Where are you now?” four times, letting her voice go raggedy on the last one. Singing most definitely about Rosaura.
Where are you, Babette? You’re making music with your friends, mostly your own songs, indie radio play, download cards and tee shirts on the merch table at the start of a Western states tour. Your only responsibilities: caring for your guitar, driving your car, and keeping the scumbags away from sweet Goldy because she tends to walk right into trouble with a smile on her face, so you find yourself holding at arm’s length the endless string of dudes who linger around after the gig wanting to talk about gear—”Is that a twin reverb Fender? Nice tone from those Humbuckers, you been playing long?” No comeback effective enough to scare them away. You owe no one anything except perhaps providing yourself with some psychic and emotional distance from Rosaura’s heart-bomb, and, to that end, writing some more songs, both rockers for the band and weirder stuff for yourself. A pop gem for Screamy Deluxe, an ethereal ballad for her twin. One for Babette, one for Goldy. That noodling around on the Casio. A feeling of creative fertility as the late-summer days and the humming highways and the blasted-wide American sky all pour into you, filling you and emptying you at once. That’s where you are.
After the second chorus, she whipped the guitar’s neck away from the mic stand, spun around, jerked here and there even as her hands slid tightly up and down the fretboard in the shape of the chords, right hand digging the sound out of the instrument in slashing motions. She shot Carlos a look and he dropped into the root notes, freeing her up to go nuts. That unspoken, real-time communication being her favorite part of this whole thing, the dark matter that bound the three bandmates together like gravity. She slid a finger up the bottom string, followed a scale into the upper frets, then locked into a pattern of upside-down triangles, stair-stepping from string to string. From out there, it was a guitar solo, but from Babette’s perspective it was a series of interlocking questions and answers, growing in intensity while climbing through the octaves. Reaching a tight figure on the top three strings, high into the guitar’s cutaway, she glanced at the front edge of the stage, calculated her move without letting up on her fingers, picked an empty spot on the floor and jumped. Boots tucked up high to clear the wedge monitors, she came down on the beat in the midst of the crowd, feet splayed, then whaled into a barred A-major with her arm finishing straight up in raised devil-horns, the pick flying from her fingers, not giving a fuck.
The crowd staggered back, faces blurry ovals of surprise and wonder, Carlos and Jenna not letting up—pound pound pound—as Babette ripped back through the solo in reverse, picking sloppily with just a fingernail through a descending cascade. That crackling noise again—maybe it wasn’t the tone knob, maybe one of the pickups needed fixing? But no one else noticed because the music was a monster in the room. Whoops and screams. A reaching hand grasping her shoulder. She swung the guitar around, carving out a space for herself like a one-woman fight. A face caught her eye—pretty white girl with long brown hair in a macrame halter, glowing sun-kissed shoulders, an un-inked ringer for Rosaura. Babette drew near, eyes locked. The girl stared back, a chicken hypnotized by a fox. Hands still punching out chords, full tempo, Babette leaned towards the girl and let her face go slack. Gazed at the girl’s painted mouth, the constellation of freckles across her perfect nose, shining cheeks. Babette looked into her eyes as nakedly as a silent movie actress, now only a breath’s space away, the guitar still between them but the noise and power of the song was like a storm somewhere out in the Universe while in here—in this quantum bubble she had created beyond the forces of space and time—there was only desire and connection and heat and breath. The girl, stricken, dropped her gaze to Babette’s mouth and melted forward. An instant before contact, Babette sprang away and charged back through the crowd guitar-first, high-stepping onto the stage, someone’s hand helpfully shoving her ass, the cheers now as loud as the speakers as Jenna went BANG-BANG-BANG and Babette regained her spot at the mic, whipped the guitar cable out of the way—crackle-crackle—and screamed right on cue, “WHERE ARE YOU NOW?”
Fists pumping, voices shrieking. In front of the stage, one person stood motionless, face like a sparkling moon in the cosmos: the pretty white girl with long brown hair, storm-tossed and ravaged, hair mussed like she’d just been fucked. Babette smiled even as she went on singing. Of course I believe in God, she thought. I am God.
3. The Cosmic Symphony
The observable Universe extends for 13 billion light years in every direction from Earth, but how can this be if the Universe is only 13 billion years old? Unless Earth itself was the precise location of the Big Bang? In fact, something much weirder happened: cosmic inflation.
Babette closed the book but kept her finger between the pages of the doorstop paperback, a gift from her sister for the times in between bouts of listening to the audiobook. A patchwork of astrophysics to thread the hours and days together, an antidote to rock-and-roll. Now she sat on a corduroy couch in the backstage green room among instrument cases, drum shells, stashed coats and backpacks, beer cans, wine bottles, tequila. The Melvins were onstage now, rocking loud enough to simulate an earthquake. Jenna and Carlos were out there, cashing in their drink tickets and headbanging.
Babette had already headbanged enough. She and Goldy sank together into the couch, sipping a PBR she’d fished out of a slushy tub. As spent as the husk of an exploded firework but also deeply content. She read another paragraph of Brian Greene then let the book fall closed to reel her mind back through what she’d just taken in, attempting to put it into words for Goldy, who would then paraphrase it back to her. Wonder twins united, this was how they constructed their understanding.
“Blow my mind,” Goldy said.
Babette held her hands up to illustrate. “So in the early moments of the Universe, shit exploded, right?” Splayed fingers. “Everything rushed apart. But it was more than that, see? Because things could move at the speed of light and no faster. That’s the law.”
“Fuck the police.”
“Good point. But here’s the thing—the space between things expanded. Like, massively. And way faster than the speed of light because it wasn’t the objects that were moving, it was the vacuum of space itself that expanded like the inside of a balloon. We need a balloon!” She sat up, looked around as if a balloon might be floating among the rock gear heaped everywhere.
“But,” Goldy said, “how come?” She was channeling her eighth graders.
“Dark energy, or dark matter—I’m not sure which.”
“Sounds metal,” Goldy said. Devil horns.
The hallway door opened. A wave of sound pushed in as a face peeked. The pretty white girl with long brown hair. “Can I come in?”
Babette waved her in. The girl approached as if walking barefoot over glass, looking at the rock gear like it might hurt her. Carrying a rolled-up tee shirt in one hand, she stood before the couch looking sweaty and tired and disheveled under the punishing overhead light. “Are you just hanging out by yourself?”
“Yep,” said Babette, “just me and my alter ego.”
The girl looked around as if someone might be hiding somewhere in the cluttered room. Then, with a grin punctuated by a dimple, “Would you like some company?”
“Well, you see,” Babette said, tucking an escaped tendril of blonde hair under her black wig, “that’s the thing about an alter ego: I’m never really alone.”
“Okay.” The girl touched fingertips to her own chest, switched tactics. “I just wanted to say, you were—amazing.”
“Thanks, Sweetpea.”
The girl held out the tee shirt and offered a Sharpie. “Would you mind?”
Babette got to her feet—shorter than the girl now that she was in her socks—then turned the girl by the shoulders to spread a portion of the tee across her back. She dragged the tip of the pen across the fabric to make a figure of an owl, headlight eyes, fork-like feet, and scrawled Who loves you? BABETTE! in a dialogue bubble underneath the Screamy Deluxe logo. While the girl was still turned, she smacked a kiss in the center of her shoulder blades—salty and warm—and then gently pushed her away.
The girl ogled the cartoon, clutched the shirt to her chest. “Oh my God, thank you!”
“Go on, kid, get outta here,” Babette growled with a smile.
The girl peered from under her lashes. “Do you and your alter ego want to chill and smoke something, maybe?” She held up a joint with a twisty end.
Babette grabbed the girl’s free pinky and shook her whole arm with it. “Honey, that sounds…amazing. But I’m grappling with the implications of dark matter, and it’s turning my mind inside out.”
The girl went slack-jawed, then recovered enough to gush and flirt as Babette herded her to the door. She pushed it open and ejected her into a wind tunnel of noise. A dude leaning just outside caught Babette’s eyes and hollered, “Aw man, you tore it up on that Les Paul! Is that a ’70s deluxe you’re playing?”
She did a thumbs-up as the door swung closed, then collapsed back onto the couch.
“That was a fuck tribute,” Goldy said when they were safely alone again. “Did you want her?”
Babette sighed. “No, too much ghost of Rosaura in that one.”
“Christ! Not every chick is haunted with Rosaura.”
“No, but that one was.”
Babette let that idea fizzle into the ambient noise of the green room, then peeled the book back open and returned to the enduring mysteries of the Universe.
4. String Theory and the Fabric of Spacetime
More highways, more desert, more shows. Her voice growing seasoned, her fingertips hardening. The Hemlock Tavern in San Francisco, another sold-out show opening for The Melvins, then a smaller headlining show the following night at a dive bar in Ocean Beach with a local punk band where the half-empty room was a relief. They played looser, jammy, and tried out some new stuff. Not the Casio thing—that was still under wraps—but some raggedy numbers they’d never quite nailed down, and of course they ruled. Every night a parade of fuck tributes and dudes who wanted to talk guitars and amps, and each night Babette begged off to drag herself to the Adrian Hotel in the Tenderloin, reading and paraphrasing aloud with Goldy the building blocks of time and space while sirens and screams and breaking glass resounded in the streets of planet Earth below.
Carlos and Jenna slept in their conversion van among the drums and amps, parked in a slightly safer part of town, along with whatever sexual conquest they lured back with them because this was American rock-and-roll at the tail end of civilization. Babette, gun-shy from whatever damage Rosaura had wreaked, avoided all comers. That was another function of the astrophysics book: a shield against heart-bombs, past and future.
On the fourth or fifth day of the tour—she was losing track—they pulled into Eugene, Oregon at twilight and went straight to their gig at Tiny’s Tavern, a timberwood saloon where there wasn’t even a stage. They pushed the tables aside and set up their gear right on the plank floor and played without an opening band. Tiny was Carlos’s old friend from busking days in Europe, and this gig was a favor in both directions: Screamy Deluxe brought rock cred, and they could all crash in Tiny’s Zen garden cabins afterwards.
Tonight there were maybe fifty people in the room and the band sounded louder because of the empty spaces between the bodies. Babette heard all the problems with her guitar: the mysterious crackle, some iffy intonation on the upper frets where the tuning got wonky. She felt low energy; she’d gotten spoiled by the string of buzzing venues. This was a gathering of slow-witted hippies who just stood and blinked into the noise. When it was done, she hit the bar to cash in a drink ticket for a tequila. There was a feeling that she had to dig something more out of this night. Unsatisfied hunger.
A dude moved in next to her, leading with a smile.
“How about this,” she said, pre-empting him. “You don’t say a goddamn word to me about my guitar.” Softened it with a smile.
He considered that with a nod. “Actually, I was going to point out that we’re in serious shoe rapport.” He wiggled his white leather creepers with blue stitching and a gold buckle.
She slid her white leather go-go boots next to his shoes, then put a hand on his forearm. “Thank Christ for that.”
They talked shoes for twenty minutes and it was the best conversation she’d had with someone besides Goldy since Denver. The energy she’d failed to put into the performance she put into chatting with this guy, James, who waited for the most hilarious moment to reveal his profession: “Actually, I’m a luthier.”
Babette watched him for a beat, gauging his seriousness. His wavy salt-and-pepper hair, powdered sugar whiskers, deep grooves in both cheeks like runaway dimples. Handsome like a guy in a vintage cigarette ad. She barked, “Ha!” and collapsed on him in laughter.
He waited for the moment to deliver his next line. “But I swear to God, if you start talking about guitars I will walk right the fuck out of here.”
~
She kept her cool. No hooking up, just a flirty convo that ended with a lingering handshake, James offering his business card that bore the stylized silhouette of a freaking Les Paul. She pressed a kiss onto the card and waved it as she walked away. The rest of the evening was yet another mellow wind-down alone in the excellent company of her alter ego, this time on a pillowy futon in a cabin in the backyard of Tiny’s suburban acreage where a magical stream gurgled through the cattails just outside rice-paper windows that glowed with moonlight.
Waking up alone in a morning sunbeam, she conferred with the mirror. Contour, eyeliner, lipstick. Babette emerged like a Polaroid. She pinned on the black wig, tucking away the blonde tendrils, and sharpened her affect until it was Babette in the real world and Goldy who faded into the reflection. “Crackerjack,” she muttered. Goldy showed a smirk in the mirror, and it was Babette who grabbed her Les Paul hardshell case and walked out into the day.
Wide, shady streets, college kids cruising around on bikes. James’s business was a pocket-sized storefront between an art gallery and a brewery. A jingling bell announced Babette’s entry into his world. He was perched at the counter, bent over an acoustic guitar that lay on a strip of carpet like a patient. His smile when he saw her was wry and warm.
“Lady, you better not be coming in here with some guitar nonsense.”
She laughed, grinned, felt her whole face burn red, couldn’t think of a single comeback. Flailing, she admitted, “There’s a crackle in my Humbucker.”
~
Her beautiful Les Paul lay upon his carpeted counter. The matte gold-top finish, sans pick guard, no binding tape around the contour, the black tone knobs, the toggle switch which bore a ball of duct tape because it had snapped off in some prior misadventure. James surveyed it all without comment, dimples seeming to deepen with concentration. Babette said nothing, waiting for a verdict. He ran a finger around the edges of one of the Humbucker pickups, looked at a pink smear on his fingertip. She realized there were red dots stippling the hardware from where she’d bled last night. Going deeper into the guitar’s archeology of rock-and-roll injury, he fingered the ball of tape on the toggle switch, then removed the tape to reveal the switch’s severed stalk like a Q-tip with the end snapped off. Raised an eyebrow at her. He reached for her right hand, questioning, and she offered it. His touch was dry and gentle as he peeled her fingers open and regarded her palm. A scar curved across the meat at the base of her thumb. “Whoa. You carved yourself a second lifeline.”
She let him run his thumb along the scar, healed but still red. “What was I going to do, stop playing?”
He grinned at her hand, then raised his eyes. “That’s hardcore, Babette. You sliced yourself good on this thing.”
She took her hand back, kneaded her palms together. “That was our last tour, in Albuquerque over spring break. I didn’t even realize I’d cut myself until I saw blood on Carlos’s jumpsuit. I was just flinging it around.”
James was shaking his head but smiling too. “You were doing some Pete Townsend windmill action.”
She stuck out her chin, defiant. “Who are you? Who-who?”
They looked at each other, smiling like idiots. This one is going to hurt, she preminisced, but it’s going to be fun too.
He stroked the guitar’s body with a feathery touch. “Does she have a name? Goldie?”
Babette froze up. “Wait. What?”
“I mean, a lot of people name their guitars. I just want to make sure I don’t call her by the wrong name when I’m working on her.”
Babette couldn’t stop herself from smiling. “Actually, that’s my name. I’m Goldy.”
His eyes flicked up. “I thought you were Babette?”
She dismissed that with a wave. “Babette is my stage persona. She only exists when I’m being a rockstar.” She hesitated a moment, standing alone in front of him just as she’d sat alone on the corduroy couch backstage, alone in the Zen cabin, alone in the Subaru all this time. She went through with it: pulled off her black wig to reveal her golden mop top. Corn-silk bangs, mussed and wild. “I’m Goldy.”
“Well, hello there,” he said with a reassessing tilt to his head. “So nice to meet you.”
5. Unification in the Twenty-First Century
The band spent the day cruising around the leafy streets and bike trails of Eugene on old five-speeds from Tiny’s garage, then sharing an epicurean meal in the Zen garden. Roasted asparagus, kale and blueberry salad, braised pork belly, all of it landing like a miracle after so many days of gas-station sandwiches. James came by once they were several bottles into Tiny’s stash of Chilean red to deliver Babette’s repaired guitar. He pulled it out of the case, polished and gleaming and restrung, with a new rubber-tipped toggle switch, and handed it over to Babette like a holy offering. Unplugged, she swept through a chord progression to assure herself that the instrument still channeled the same spirit. “Crackerjack!” was her verdict, and everyone toasted to that.
“You let someone touch it?” said Jenna, incredulous. Babette’s inner Goldy muttered, “Cloudy with a chance of dick tonight.” But James didn’t stick around long and left with a chaste handshake after refusing to accept payment. Babette distracted herself for the rest of the evening, messing around on the Casio in the little cabin, Goldy’s voice humming in tandem with her own almost as if they were two separate people. That was the great thing about having an alter-ego: a sounding board inside your own head, someone to push back and keep you sharp. Someone to call you on your shit, and drive you harder than you thought you could go. The evolving tune was becoming more and more complex and she scarcely looked up from the keys, the interlocking geometry of blacks and whites. How much one needed the other.
~
The next night: Kelly’s Olympian, downtown Portland. Another Melvins show, bodies packed to the walls. Tiny had come up with a carload of people from Eugene, including James who stood against the side wall looking blissfully stoned. In the middle of a blazing version of “Where Are You Now?” Babette did her guitar hero leap off the front of the stage, battering-ramming her way through the crowd to come right up on James with the Les Paul in between. Crowd hollering and surging, Jenna and Carlos cranking out rhythm like a conveyor belt. James’s eyes went wide as Babette pegged him with her fox stare even as she churned through a chord progression.
He stared right back, a fox himself. He reached out a hand. Her concentration skipped a beat, she flubbed a chord and now she was thinking about it and fucking up. Lost the progression, muted the strings with the edge of her palm but kept chunking out the rhythm. James’s hand drew near. With a knuckle, he flicked the new toggle and the guitar’s tone went toothy with treble.
She tossed her head in laughter, partially in relief that he hadn’t tried to grab her uninvited but mostly because—being the instrument’s mechanic—he knew that he was the only person on Earth who could get away with touching her guitar like that. She let a chord ring out—crackle-free, tone perfect—then plunged her right hand into the hair at the back of his head and pulled him into a kiss, a deep one, tongues and slobber and breath, all of it. Hammering rhythm like a heart attack all around, the overdriven guitar squelching and twanging between their bodies until she abruptly pulled away. Caught the beat in unison with Carlos. Boom, back into the song, blasting chords, and now James wore the chicken look like he’d just gotten his head chopped off and didn’t know he was dead yet.
She sprang away. Climbed back onstage to holler her line, catching eyes with Jenna who gave a shout and devil horns in a hand that blurred as her sticks attacked the toms.
Where are you now, Babette? You’re destroying your voice, going hoarse even as you feed your soul. You’re a priestess of groove, you hold the crowd in your thrall. Singular magnetism, radiating everywhere. One fox, infinite chickens. You could do this forever, you were made for this.
The song crescendoed into a slash and bang, Babette leaping and clomping down on the final chord/crash. The momentary buzz of amps in naked silence, then an eruption of whoops. Screams like orgasms. She touched her smeared lips to the mic, eyes scanning the room not for James but for Goldy who lingered in the shadows at the back where all the things that didn’t exist hung out. Staring into that darkness, making her eyes pierce like nails, Babette spoke three words into the mic in her ravaged tenor: “Quit. Your. Job.”
That got more cheers out of the crowd but she couldn’t be sure if Goldy had gotten the message.
~
As the prophecy foretold, ’twas a night of dick. A Comfort Inn in Beaverton—giggle, giggle—while Jenna and Carlos partied in their van in the parking lot. Naked in the sheets while Contact played silently on a movie channel, post-fuck, Goldy and James savored their first real moments alone. He was incredulous to learn that she was only a part-time rockstar but a full-time middle school teacher and this was just the tail end of her summer vacation.
“What do you think teachers do during the summer? You think they just unplug us and stick us in a storage closet?”
“No, it’s just—those seem like two really different career paths, like you’re a figure skater and a—I don’t know—an astronaut.”
“Makes perfect sense to me. I know how to perform. I know how to enthrall.” Her voice rose into comical stridency: “Are you not enthralled?”
“Absolutely, all the way down to my toes.”
“See? But I work in a school district where teachers get fired for posting a social media photo with a glass of wine, so I have to keep my bad self on the down low. Hence the alter-ego.”
“Ah.” Propped on an elbow, he evaluated her through a squint. “So who’s the real you, Goldy or Babette?”
She plopped back on her pillow. “That’s not even a question. That’s like saying, ‘What’s the real water, the hydrogen or the oxygen?'”
He nodded. “I wish I had an alter-ego. All I have is a brother who makes more in a year fooling around with software than I’ll make in a lifetime fixing guitars.”
She hummed. “So what’s stopping you from making up a better brother in your head? All you have to do is believe.” She made an imaginary rainbow in the air above their heads, eyes twinkling. “I actually do have a sister—a real one—but she’s, like, the most glamorous person you’ve ever seen and I can’t be around her too much or she makes me feel like a loser. Pilar. She lives in Spain and she’s a better musician than me. It’s infuriating.”
“A better musician than you? That’s hard to believe.”
“It’s true. Babette is basically a funner version of Pilar that I made up in my head. See how that works?”
He drew a design on her bare chest. “I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone before,” he said.
“Oh?” Shining eyes.
“You’re better with guitars than anyone I know.”
She popped up on her elbows. “Really?”
“I mean it. Performance-wise, I’ve never seen anybody do what you do.”
She was melting, chin quivering. “That’s the coolest thing anyone’s ever said to me.” She was halfway fucking with him, being funny, but it was also true.
“Now, when it comes to tech specs and restorations, you know, I’m probably—”
She pressed fingertips over his mouth. “Sh-sh-shhhh.”
They cuddled and made love and dozed the rest of the Beaverton night away and kissed goodbye in the drizzled morning as the gravity of rock-and-roll flung her farther up the road.
~
Tiger Lounge, Seattle. Her voice entirely shot, just a static squeal when she reached for higher notes. An instrumental set, including a swinging vamp of “A Love Supreme”—a song they’d never played before but which bloomed out of nothingness and many years later would be the most vivid musical memory she had of that crackerjack summer. There was James too, of course. Their fling acquired depth and spark in her memories which not even his own reappearance in her life could touch. When he visited Denver in the spring, she found him pretentious and clingy, totally separate from the quick and intuitive lover she’d known for scarcely 48 hours on the road. It turned out, he was better with guitars than with people; her Humbucker never crackled again. She suppressed the reality and dialed-up the memory, and wrote a handful of songs about him even after their connection faded. Those songs were piano numbers in the key of the Utah highway, blacks and whites at 80 mph., sharps and flats all over the place. Bach as hell.
But mostly, the whole Western states tour lived in her memory as a backdrop to the mind-expanding reading she’d done with The Elegant Universe, the sense that she’d connected herself to ideas that superseded what small sliver of reality she could perceive. How matter and anti-matter made the Universe; how Nothing and Something made Everything. As for her own equation, she’d solved for x, and the answer was 1. Babette and Goldy, sharing a single body and a single soul, as integral as space and time. It had always been this way.
In a gas station in Olympia, already on the road home as the huge summer drained away, she spied a package of balloons behind the counter. “Do those blow up into funny shapes?” she asked the cashier, who had no idea.
Standing on the tarmac under washed out stars between the convenience store and the gas pumps, she fished her autographing Sharpie out of her jeans and made twin dots on an uninflated yellow balloon. One for Goldy, one for Babette. “This is what I’m talking about,” she said. “Cosmic inflation. See, the dots don’t move, but watch what happens.”
She smiled. She already knew where this was going, and it would be a good visual to use with her squirmy eighth graders.
She blew up the balloon with a half-dozen puffs. The twin dots became separated by an inch or two of space. Individuals now, standing alone, separated by the breath of the Universe without having moved a millimeter from where they’d begun. Forever entangled. She tied it off, bounced it, tapped it, then danced around under the stars and streetlights, keeping it airborne for a while.
