Clay let go of her.
Savy’s shoulders slumped.
Clay turned—to walk away, to find an ax to put through his own head, to scream until all the Knickerbocker letters toppled over—and he realized Spider and Fiasco were no longer on the roof.
Savy saw this too and was alarmed. She hurried to the parapet and gazed over the side of the building. “Shit.”
Peeking over the edge, Clay saw, twelve stories below, two LAPD cruisers parked in front of the hotel. “Fiasco called the cops on me?” Clay said, hating how wounded he sounded. “That fuck-king prick!”
So this was it. He was powerless to stop what the Hailmaker had set so effortlessly in motion. I should give in too. Whatever happens, at least she and I would be together.
But it was too late, even for that. He had refused what was offered and was going to be returned to the empty life he had always known. And that was the worst punishment of all.
Caught in a whirlpool, feeling the inescapable suck of the bottomless drain, Clay could only appeal to the girl right in front of him. “I need you. You can see Rocco. Without you, I’m just some kook hearing voices.”
“Fiasco didn’t call the cops,” Savy told him. “I called them.”
She met his frozen stare, determined not to flinch. “Priest told us you suffered a panic attack and lit the Generator on fire, that the cops would be looking for you and eventually you’d show up looking for me. Right now Fee’s telling them you’re on the roof, threatening to jump.”
“No,” Clay said, and in stepping away from her, it felt like he was separating himself from the whole world. “Not you too.” Like Essie. And Karney. She was their puppet now.
“No,” she said.
“You called the cops for them.”
“But I didn’t say I was going to let them catch you.”
Savy snatched his wrist and led him to the fire escape. “Go down through the Marilyn suite, left out the door. Take the utility elevator to G and cross the garage. You’ll exit out in the alley.”
Clay was already on the escape, looming over the city, over the plume of white smoke still rising from his own distant hillside, before he realized Savy was walking away. He caught her shoulder, just before she moved out of reach. “Hey—fuck the contract. Come with me.”
“I’m not worth it, Clay, trust me.”
“I do trust you. But you’re wrong about that.”
“Get out of here. Leave town, don’t look back.”
Clay’s fingers found her face. “Listen to me. Please. Are you listening?”
Savy looked right back at him, even if it was the last thing she wanted to do. “I know what you’re going to say. It isn’t enough to save us.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Then you’re a fool.” And even before her expression hardened, her arm flew up—and she swatted his hand away.
PART IV:
THE DISHARMONIC
26
GODS & MONSTERS
There was no accounting for the next few hours, only that he spent them in his Jeep behind the Tallyrand Restaurant in Burbank, the pain in his chest rising like hourglass sand. Choking, suffocating on it. It was hard to move, hard to blink.
Rocket Throne’s “All Goes Dark” was on the speakers, a fourteen-minute opus to close the album of the same name. Clay had always been fascinated with their longer tracks, where song convention was thrown out the window. At its fifth minute “Dark” broke from its verse-chorus-bridge cycle and gave way to extended solos and odd time signatures, Boyle’s voice a wordless instrument, every note perfectly rendered, and at the ninth minute, the music cut out completely and an unsettling wind overtook the track, blowing forlornly, sweeping the notes and lyrics and all that had come before it into the void. The wind howled long, sloooow… and then Ooljee’s bass returned, downtuned and thumping ominously. Thum-tum, thum-tum, thum-tum, thum-tum… Four bars and the drums locked on, Roethke playing behind the beat, dragging his ghost notes, each snare crack filled with a sense of uneasy anticipation. Then Boyle’s guitar joined, clean strings, whistling hauntingly, and his voice was almost transcendentally calm, as he crooned over this sea-pitching soundscape: There’s something I haven’t told you; but tonight there’s nothing more to hide… I want you at my side, when there’s nowhere left to hide… all goes dark and through the dark I call: Find me at the precipice, ready for the fall… all goes dark and to the dark I call: Find me at the precipice….
Clay listened to the song over and over.
At some point, the sun dropped low enough to shine in his eyes and he snapped from his trance, long enough to weigh his options: 1) Surrendering to the police; 2) Kissing Priest’s feet and pleading forgiveness; 3) Pointing eastward and gunning it until he ran out of gas. No, no, and no. Every course of action, and subsequent outcome, felt destructively hopeless.
Throwing the Jeep in gear, he drove toward his own neighborhood, skirted Via Montana and took adjacent Harvard Road up into the foothills, past the public golf course.
He parked in a hiker’s lot and his crunching boots gained elevation quickly in the failing light. The myriad dots of light appearing along the Valley floor reminded him of the time he’d buried Deidre’s ghost at the scout camp, the time he’d run into Savy up here, as if by cosmic coincidence—
Isn’t it convenient that you found a talented band looking for a frontperson at the same time you met the ghost of your dead idol?
—and she had told him he was “in” the band. It had meant everything to Clay. Like her approval had validated
