The Last Day of the War, with Parrots

THUNK THUNK THUNK-AH THUNK. THUNK THUNK THUNK-AH THUNK... a heavy tenor drum, stomped full force, began pounding the night outside the bunker. I recognized the beat as the intro for “Moth Metamorphism,” a cut that we’d scheduled to record later in the week. I should have known. All on his own, the Singer couldn’t lay down instrumental tracks; for his new song, he must have written new lyrics to existing music.

The flow inside me clicked a notch higher. I knew this music, knew the through-line, the harmonies. I could kick the hell out of it.

When it flows, it flows.

The robot in the doorway began to whir, receiving radio orders from the Singer. I didn’t resist as it wrapped a tentacle around my wrist and led me from the bunker; the bot could barely keep up with me as I strode out into the night, up to the plateau where the beam-lamps shone. A second bot appeared, carrying a microphone. I grabbed the mike, no time to wait, the music still booming. One slap to stick on the throat patch, a second slap for the battery pack, check the adhesive on both, and then I was surging forward, into the heat of the lights.

I stepped onto a green expanse of meadow, showing only one sign of the war: a glistening patch where the soil had been seared to black glass by some energy weapon. In the middle of the glassy surface stood a stone altar, a prop made for the recording of “Dead Man’s Prayer'; and just back from the altar lurked the fog machine, hooked up with an extra hopper of dry ice.

The mist would really roll tonight.

All right, all right, keep going. The Singer wasn’t here, but keep going. Set up for a sprawl-shot on the altar. What else could the Singer want? I slid up on top, sprawling, waiting, shaking, THUNK THUNK THUNK-AH THUNK.

And Alex appeared.

He came over a rise, just a silhouette, sharply backlit with sprays of yellow sparks — nothing more than a black outline against a fountain of fire, but I knew it was Alex. The Singer moved more gracefully, more intentionally, like he was trying to prove a point; Alex just moved. I lifted myself higher, hands and knees, truly believing I could simmer Alex’s blood just by staring.

THUNK THUNK THUNK-AH THUNK.

Alex picked his way down to the plateau, trying to hurry but slowed by clumps of weeds on the hillside. Once he lifted his head and maybe he called to me, but the drumbeat drowned that out.

THUNK THUNK THUNK-AH THUNK.

Now Alex hurried into the light of the beam-lamps. His shirt was buttoned and he was shouting, “Get out of here, Lyra! Get out!”

I simply shook my head.

“I pushed him down for a minute,” Alex said as he ran to me, panting. “He’d been outside for a long time, he was tired. But he’ll be back, he will, and you can’t...” Alex held out his hands, showing the brown bloodstains. “This will drive you crazy, it really will. The noise gets so loud, it deafens you. And it’s all so angry. I never knew people were so angry. Back at camp it was like a chain reaction, a little hostility, people getting angry in return, then everyone going furious... in five minutes, they were honestly trying to kill each other. And him, the Singer — he was in the middle of it, egging them on...”

I took Alex’s hand. The blood on his skin was dry, textured like satin. “It will be all right,” I said. “Don’t worry, it will be all right.”

“It won’t, it won’t. He loves the anger, he thrives on it, but it’ll rip you apart. He wants to see it rip you apart. He wants to see you snarl like an animal.”

“Alex,” I said again, threading my fingers through his, “it will be all right.” I squeezed his hand tightly, wanting to squeeze my strength into him.

“You don’t...” He pulled his hand from my grip and pressed it against his forehead. “You aren’t...” His head snapped down, then up again, and he roared, “Where are you, milady?”

The Singer emerged in gentle Alex’s face like ice crystallizing in water. His eyes narrowed; his mouth grew hard. “Damn the fool!” he screamed, and with both hands, he grabbed the collar of his shirt and ripped downward, tearing fabric and scattering buttons onto the ground. Gasping, he lunged forward to support himself unsteadily on the altar. “He caught me by surprise. What has he done with milady? Milady! Milady!”

The man was staring straight at me, blind to my presence. All the rehearsal I’d done before, trying to make myself love Alex — that was pure nonsense, just priming myself to put on a good show. But in the moment of transition, when simple well-meaning Alex was crushed away by the Singer’s rage, something sparked in my heart and made the love real. The love didn’t feel like Romeo and Juliet or Trash and Thrash. It probably wasn’t woman/man love... mother/son maybe, or big sister/kid brother. So what? My heart and brain filled with compassion, and to the Singer, I was invisible.

I rocked back onto my knees and thrust both hands into my sash. Two parrots, the last weapons to be drawn in Caproche’s long war. As I touched them, the blare of the Singer’s thoughts struck my brain like thunder, hate mixed with fear mixed with anger; but I was moving and mere noise couldn’t stop me.

At the last instant, the Singer’s head jerked up and his eyes met mine.

With all my strength, I clapped the parrots against his temples, slam, both sides of his head. The parrots burst in my hands like rupturing bags of blood, gushing across the Singer’s face in brown spatters. For a split second, I could hear the echoes of fragmented thoughts outside me: the roadies, Helena, Roland, screeching far away. Then a jagged ripping sound split inside my head and my brain shattered.

Two parrots had died in my bare hands.

Imagine reliving your life through a black filter.

You get to remember that first kiss: two hours of standing in front of the house on a cold winter night as your boyfriend worked up the courage to go through with it. You can remember how you shifted back and forth from one leg to the other, shivering because you were only wearing a short skirt and stockings, and you can remember how many times you almost gave up hope, how you hated him for being so stupid, how you hated yourself for being too scared to grab him and kiss him before you died of frostbite. But do you remember the elation when it finally happened? Do you remember how you lay awake for hours with a huge smile on your face, as you counted the ways your life had changed? No — your memory is too busy skipping ahead eight months, when suddenly you and your boyfriend can’t agree on anything, you know he makes up excuses to avoid seeing you, and when the two of you do get together it’s only because you’re hooked on those hour-long petting sessions on that couch in your basement. You get clean, clear memories of all the people you hated or feared, but the people you loved? Only the times they annoyed you.

Imagine reliving your life through a black filter.

Then imagine doing the same thing with two men watching.

One of the men is a lunatic. The other is so innocent you can’t bear him to see your life, the many petty ugly things you’ve done.

But that’s not the end. Imagine reliving someone else’s life while you’re reliving yours. A life with two strands, lunacy and naпvetй. Oh, yes, relive a childhood so tormented that your personality crumbles to fragments, then a dozen harsh psychological treatments intended to heal you, then the blood-red fury of the Singer suppressed but not extinguished. Every memory from infancy to adulthood seen through two sets of eyes that never agree, every tenderness seen as weakness, every love dismissed as infatuation.

Reliving everything through a black filter.

Imagine doing all that in the time it takes a parrot to die.

My eyes met the Singer’s at the moment I smashed the parrots against his head. We shared the parrots’ deaths. We shared our own lives.

Then white noise. Static. The Singer screeched and reeled blindly away from me, staggering backward toward the fog machine. He collided with the nozzle and grabbed at it, seizing it with both hands. Maybe he was just catching his balance, maybe he was trying to break something, I don’t know; but he gave another scream and wrenched the nozzle loose from the machine, setting free a bloom of fog that had built up inside. Berserk, he began to smash the broken nozzle down on the machine, over and over, howling all the while.

The Singer wrapped in fog — a gaunt silhouette in the night, backlit by beam-lamps. THUNK THUNK THUNK-AH THUNK.

Then the noise changed, the sound of his howls. I had parrot blood on my hands and maybe the sound I heard was only in my mind, but the explosive fury was overlaid with louder moans of pain: not from the Singer, but from Alex.

All this time I hadn’t moved. My head was swimming, and like Roland after the parrot died in his hands, I was on the verge of passing out. But when I heard Alex’s cries, his pain and terror, I forced back the edge of my dizziness and clumsily crawled off the altar. Fog was billowing everywhere, spreading fluidly over the grass. I staggered into it, the cold, dusty-smelling CO₂ fog, trying to stay on my feet long enough to reach Alex.

I found him in the heart of the fog bank, sprawled across something my muddled mind didn’t recognize at first — a box, some kind of open box, like the one Alex and I had found on the hill. But as I stumbled closer, I saw it was the hopper for the fog machine, its lid smashed off in the Singer’s rage. Steam boiled off the dry ice inside, curling and churning around Alex’s prone body. He lay flat across the exposed ice, his bare chest pressed against it.

He screamed as the intense cold burned him like fire.

I grabbed his ankles and pulled weakly, trying to drag him off the ice pile. He didn’t budge; I wondered if he’d actually frozen in place, like flesh bonding to sticky-cold metal. Then his legs kicked feebly out of my grip and I heard the voice of the Singer in my mind. “No, milady. I have sought the cold and found it. Cold, true cold, bright cold.”

Alex howled.

“You’re killing yourself,” I shouted to the Singer. “You can’t survive in there. God only knows what it’s doing to your heart.”

The Singer just laughed.

“Lyra?” Alex whispered. A real voice, forced through his lips by lungs that could scarcely breathe.

“Yes, it’s me.” I fumbled around to the other side of the hopper, only managing to stay on my feet by clinging to the edge of the bin. “Yes, Alex, I’m here.”

His hand moved slightly, but his palm seemed stuck to the ice. I could feel him steeling himself, Alex’s voice in my mind muttering, Do it, do it. Then he heaved the hand upward, ripping off most of the skin as he freed it from the ice’s grip. Bleeding, he held it out to me. “Lyra.”

I took his hand, holding it high above the ice. My fingers still dripped with parrot blood; Alex’s blood mingled with it, in the fog and the cold.

The Singer’s thoughts crooned with the cold, but I could hear nothing from Alex. Whatever went through his mind was too gentle for parrot blood to transmit.

“Alex,” I said. Then a fresh surge of dizziness washed over me and I sank into its blackness.

I woke groggily, roused by burning pain. When I had fainted, my arms slumped across the dry ice, still holding Alex’s hand.

His hand was as cold as the ice. Fog filled the hopper and dribbled out over the sides.

I looked down at my hands, still lying against the ice. Their skin was white and puckered, and they didn’t ache much; the serious pain was higher up, near my elbows. I knew that was a bad sign — so much nerve damage in my hands, I couldn’t feel how badly I was hurt.

That was when I realized the night was silent — no sound of thoughts. Not Alex’s, not the Singer’s, not mine. Parrot blood glistened on my fingers, parrot blood crystallized to ice; but my hands were too injured for the blood to work.

Pulling my hands off the ice left strips of skin behind. I scarcely felt it. For a moment, I considered pulling Alex’s body out of the hopper, but I couldn’t move my fingers. I couldn’t grab him, I couldn’t hold him; and it wouldn’t make a difference if I could. It was far too late for anything to make a difference.

I took one last look at him lying there, burned and blue, silent on a bed of fog. Then I began plodding back to camp.