The Fall

The Fall

            The house was above us, built against the mountain cliff, but there didn’t seem any way to reach it.  A steep slope, narrow as a chute and clogged with car-sized boulders, rose to the foot of the granite escarpment.  The gravel road snaked upward, coiling around heaps of stone fallen from the heights above.  A fire had burned through the valley and charred the Joshua trees standing in sullen mobs in the ravines.  There were alcoves in the canyon’s walls, niches and nooks, where other houses had once been, but only ruins remained – a shimmer of broken glass in the fading sun, the asphalt apron of a driveway to nowhere, a scatter of scorched sheetrock in the thistles.  Herrsher’s house had survived, alone and aloof at the head of the canyon, a steel balcony mounted on stilts embedded in the talus beneath the cliff.  It was typical, I thought: what Herrsher owned survived while everything around him was destroyed.  That was his luck, or, perhaps, his misfortune. 

            The driver was African, a Somali, perhaps, or a Libyan from the Sahara.  He had grey-black skin but delicate Caucasian features and the huge white eyes of a creature that hunted at night.  Abruptly, he turned between two fortress-like boulders glinting with mica, following an unobtrusive, sandy track uphill.  The driveway wasn’t paved and had been scoured to rocky bones by flashfloods and so the big limousine heaved and jolted.

            “Is bumpy,” the driver said.

            “Not much of a driveway,” I replied.

            “The way the boss likes it,” he answered. 

            I lost sight of the house on the heights.  The lane ran in a shadowy slit in the cliffs.  A couple times, we emerged from the shadows onto slanting boulder-strewn terraces.  From one of them, I could see down to bottom of the gorge, where the steel girders supporting Herrsher’s cantilevered cliff-top house plunged into the rocky alluvial fan beneath escarpment.  A couple of battered pickup trucks were parked next to the base of the stilts supporting the house.  Several men in sunglasses were afoot, studying the rust-colored piers of cor-ten steel. 

            “What’s going on?”  I asked.

            “The big fire,” the driver said. “It burned at the base of those...iron..”

            “The steel columns,” I said.

            “They have to check every year,” the driver said.  “To make sure it is not weakened.  Otherwise – “

            He shrugged.

            “The house go – boom! – fall down in canyon.”

            “Only in California,” I said.

            From the terrace, I could see the house above us.  A wall of glass and stainless steel thrust out from the cliff and propped up by the tapering cor-ten piers.  Underslung below, there was a kind of silvery bulb, apparently other rooms hidden beneath the melodramatic belvedere perched in the sky.  A hawk, or buzzard, was riding a thermal just outside Herrsher’s front porch.

            The drive lurched up a last escalator-steep pitch and, then, we were above, looking down from a little stony knoll on the home’s other elevation.  Some retaining walls suspended a narrow, coffin-shaped plot of bright green grass: a putting green.  Six or seven cars were parked under an aluminum awning: a battered jeep and a dune-buggy and several vintage corvettes.  Curiously, this side of the house concealed the violence of the cliff and the aggressive cantilever balanced on the steel piers.  From the back – or was it the front – the place looked like an Orange County split-level, incongruously dropped into this stony wilderness.  Beyond steel cyclone fence, some dogs wailed mournfully.  Behind us, the desert rose in choppy pillars and abutments toward a bright spot in the leaden skies that was theoretically, some place, a sunset.  Sullen thunderheads bulged upward, climbing the sky like clouds of ash spit from volcanos lined up on the horizon. 

            The driver pulled the limousine next to a mud-spattered jeep.  Something triggered a watering system in the putting green and a fountain of pale silver was flung across the grass, enameling it. 

            “Home,” the driver said.

            When I stepped from the limousine, the day seemed to brighten for a moment – the windows of the big vehicle had been heavily tinted.  The smell of vodka and cigarettes mixed with marijuana accompanied me into the day.  The bumpy ride had hurt my hip and leg and I felt myself limping a little over the gravel path to the house. 

            Herrsher was waiting at the door, clad in silk kimono.  A fire-breathing dragon crouched over his heart.

            “It’s been a long time,” he said to me.

            “Too long,” I said.

            I put out my hand to shake with him, but he reached forward impulsively and tugged me into an embrace.  He smelled like the inside of his limousine.

            “You look good,” Herrsher said.

            I wanted to reply in kind, but it wasn’t true.  He had always been an unearthly-looking man, tall and cadaverous, forehead billowing up above his wet eyes to an impossible, freakish height.  When we had been together in High School, the other kids, the jocks and preppies, called Herrsher “the alien.”  In those days, he had shoulder-length hair that was prom-soft and lustrous, raven-black to set off his milk-white skin.  But, now, he had been bald for thirty years and the great smooth bulb of his brow was peppered with liver-spots.  Allergies had always troubled him and his nostrils were bright red with sniffling.   His eyes were also damp and watery, but, perhaps, he had been weeping.

            “You look good too,” I said. 

            Herrsher took my elbow and guided me inside.

            I had been the drummer in Herrsher’s first band, the one that toured in a VW bus towing

a stolen U-haul.  That band had played sour-smelling little dives around Detroit, then, bowling alleys where the thunder of the balls and pins competed with our tunes, and, finally, clubs in the college towns crowded with drunken frat-boys that hugged us after our shows and bought us shots of tequila and whiskey.  All of that had ended for me on a stretch of wet highway in the tamarack swamps east of Lansing.  Herrsher was driving late at night and we were all tired after tearing-down and he fell asleep at the wheel at exactly the wrong time, drifting into the oncoming lane and the path of a semi-truck.  Jesse, the bass-player, was killed outright and I was maimed.  Herrsher’s luck held – he walked away from the crash.  Herrsher’s little sister, Janelle, who was managing us, was following our VW bus in her Pinto and she came upon the accident   Jesse was her boyfriend and she was unhinged by the sight of the smashed vehicles and the carnage in the ditch.  An ambulance howled to the scene and took me to the hospital where I remained with pins and screws knitting my legs together for three months.  Janelle wandered off in the swamps.  The officials were puzzled, at first, by the abandoned Pinto parked aslant the shoulder in the spray of broken windshield.  Herrsher was dazed and said that he didn’t remember the crash and he was too disoriented to tell the police about Janelle.  She was found three days later, shivering under a bush, beside a muddy path that locals used during hunting season to cart deer carcasses out of the wet, dark woods. 

      Two weeks before the crash, Herrsher had signed the band with a Los Angeles recording label.  Our second record was complete; Herrsher intended to deliver the master recordings to the company the upcoming week.  I was in the hospital a lot longer than anyone anticipated.  I caught pneumonia and went into a coma and almost died.  When I was discharged, I was still too weak to walk, let alone play drums – I was sidelined for almost a year.  During that time, Herrsher released the record to moderate acclaim and formed a new band.  The recording contract was with Herrsher – he was our lead singer and the “commodity”.  I needed money badly after the accident – my medical bills were enormous – and so I signed an agreement exchanging my rights in the record and the songs for $20,000.  Herrsher had already signed with another, larger label for his third record and I was no longer part of the enterprise.  The third record, which included a half-dozen songs that I had written with him, went platinum.  This sparked new interest in the second record – to this day, no one cares about our first album – and it also went platinum.  All of the songs on the second album were my work with Herrsher, but, of course, I wasn’t paid any additional royalties.  I hired an entertainment lawyer and sued Herrsher and the LA label.  The lawsuit lasted many years – my first son was born just after the papers were filed and attending third grade when the settlement was finally signed.  The lawyer got most of the proceeds; I didn’t recover much of anything. 

            I suppose I was vain to think that I played any real part in Herrsher’s success.  He released a string of successful records, played arenas and stadiums, married and discarded movie stars and super-models.  I lived with my wife and kids in a bungalow in Pasadena and made my living as a studio musician.  Herrsher, who was Jewish, sent me Christmas cards, but I didn’t see him.  Sometimes, Janelle called late at night and talked to me for hours.  She had been my girlfriend a year before the accident, but had ended the relationship to take up with poor Jesse about six weeks prior to my injury.  She lived somewhere north of San Francisco.  Her husband was some kind of importer involved in trade with Asia, but she was unhappy with the marriage.  Later, after the divorce, she lived in Hawaii.  The time difference made phone calls inconvenient and, gradually, I lost touch with her.

            It was Herrsher who called to summon me to her bedside.  “Janelle is dying,” he told me. 

His husky whisper never changed – it was a sound I always heard in my mind when I was thinking about music or practicing on my drums.  “She wants to say goodbye,” Herrsher said.  I felt sick.  Herrscher arranged a flight by private plane from north LA to Palm Springs.  He told me that his house and recording studio were in the mountains near the resort town.  Herrsher had not scored a hit in twenty years – his last CD was self-released, something called “Spook Tunes”.  I was ashamed that I had not yet listened to the recording.  Before leaving Pasadena, I bought a download and listened to the thing on my laptop during the short flight down to Palm Springs.  The music made no sense to me: it was all ambient noise, wind blowing and dogs howling, bird songs and an eerie, omnipresent drone – shrouded in distance, I heard a guitar, some clarinets, perhaps, and an accordion, a ghostly Klezmer band, it seemed, struggling to produce sounds that seemed to parody Herrsher’s greatest hits from three decades ago.  All of the songs were co-written with someone called J. Fukiyawa – just as the plane’s wheels bumped down in Palm Springs, I realized that “J” stood for Janelle.  Vaguely, I recalled that Janelle’s importer husband had been Japanese.    

            The inside of Herrsher’s house was silent and intricate with reflections: glass walls intersected with mirrors and shiny columns of polished aluminum.  Blood-colored Persian rugs covered the floor.  Herrsher lead me through several rooms, enclosed by glass walls like terrariums, and, then, down a little fan of steps to a big chamber where carcasses of big, black leather couches looked out over the canyon.  The glass windows were tinted and the burnt gorge below the precipice seemed lightless, like a gallery buried deep inside the earth. 

            We sat on the chilly, slick leather and Herrsher produced a can of beer dripping from silver ice chest beside the couch. 

            “Do you still drink?” Herrsher asked.

            “Not too much anymore,” I said.

            “Well, enjoy,” he said.  He shook some liquid out of a flask filled with rattling ice cubes into a martini glass.

            “I thought we would meet at the hospital or something in Palm Springs,” I said.

            “No,” Herrsher said.  “Janelle is here.  I’ve brought her home.”

            “I thought she lived in Hawaii.”

            “Not anymore,” he said.

            He paused, fixing his eyes on something remote beyond the window.

            “She was in the Mayo clinic up in Minnesota,” Herrsher said.  “But this is the end.  I don’t know if she’ll make it through the night.”

            “She is here?” I asked.

            “Downstairs, there’s a nurse too,” he replied.

            “I’m very sorry,” I told him.  “I always thought Janelle was very admirable.”

            Herrsher nodded his head.  The beer tasted funny in my mouth.

            “I haven’t been sleeping too well,” Herrsher said.  “I’ve got worries.  I’ve got woes.”

            “Well, your sister...”

            “It’s a lot of things,” Herrsher said.  “I’m just not sleeping.”

            “Is she conscious?” I asked.

            “I think so. Always,” Herrsher said.  “How long has it been?  I mean since you saw her.”

            “At a funeral, ten years ago, maybe,” I said.

            Herrsher cleared his throat: “She doesn’t look the way you remember her.”

                                                “I suppose,” I said.    

            “I mean just so you know, dude.”

            Some shreds of bright color splashed intermittently across the big plates of glass hanging over the gorge.  It was momentarily startling.  I looked over my shoulder and saw that, in another room, behind bluish glass partitions a mural-TV was turned on – men hiking uphill at a golf course and, then, commercials for big, sleek cars.  Reflections from the Tv screen sometimes splashed against the window overlooking the canyon. 

            Herrsher followed my eyes, looking over his shoulder.  He seemed jumpy, afraid, nervous as if something was about to spring at him from some recess in the house.  But the house was all glass inside of glass, mirrors turned inward upon other mirrors and, in this labyrinth of reflections I wondered where anything could be hiding.

            He gestured back at the TV.

            “You hear our tune played during those car commercials, the Escalade, I think,” Herrsher said.  The sound on the TV was turned down to nothing and so I supposed that he was speaking generally. 

            “The song we wrote together for the second album?”

            “Yeah,” he said.

            “I’ve heard it.”

            “Strange, isn’t it?

            “Lots of things are strange,” I said.

            “Since the fire,” Herrsher said, “the foliage, the cactus and stuff, it’s all gone and so there’s nothing to hold the dirt together.  When it rains, you can see a half-dozen waterfalls from here – huge muddy cascades leaping off the sides of the canyon.  My house is the only place up here that survived.”

            “How far are we from Palm Springs?” I asked.

            “Only 25 miles,” he said.

            “It seems farther,” I said.

            “Like a thousand miles,” Herrsher replied. 

            “What if we need to get an ambulance or something for Janelle?” I asked.

            “Dude, she’s come here to die.  She knows that, I know that, I want you to know that.”

            I nodded my head.  “Won’t call no ambulance,” Herrsher added.

            “It looks like a storm is coming,” I said.

            “Stormy weather,” Herrsher said.  His drink was gone.  He dribbled another one from the flask into his martini glass.

            “This is a pour-off,” Herrsher said.  “The water scoots right underneath the house and just billows out, down into the valley.  You gotta see it.”

            “Well, if it rains –“

            ”It will rain,” Herrsher said.

             Herrsher got up and stood facing me, his back to the vast panorama of charred canyon.

            “We need to say goodbye to Janelle,” Herrsher said.

            “Of course,” I replied.

            “But I’m troubled, man, I’m very troubled.”

            “It’s your sister.  I know it’s got to be hard for you.”

            “Not just that,” Herrsher said.  “My therapist says I’ve got to deal with some stuff.  I’ve got to make amends.”

            “Amends?”

            “Well, you know, dude, I treated you poorly.  That record deal.  The way those things went down.”  he looked like he was going to cry.

            “That’s a long time ago.”

            Herrsher said: “I never made amends.”

            “Well, you can write me a check.”  I said.

            “You know it was never about the money. Right?”

            “Right,” I said.  “It was never about the money.”

            “You’re my last friend,” Herrsher said.  “And I know you’re not my friend but my enemy – but still...”

            “There’s a lot of shitty water over the dam,” I said.

            “I’m sincere,” Herrsher said.  “I need to apologize.  See, I’m not sleeping.  I can’t.  I keep going over things in my mind.  Again and again.”

            “Okay,” I said.

            “So I’m apologizing for the record deal and the lawsuit.  That wasn’t me talking.  That was those fucking lawyers.  You know a thing like that takes on a life of its own.”

            “I know.”

            “So I’m apologizing.”

            I didn’t say anything.  It was very quiet.  Some ice in Herrsher’s flask shifted places and made a silvery tinkling sound. 

            “It’s my apology,” Herrsher said.

            “I hear you,” I said.

            He turned to look out over the barren landscape.

            “There’s another thing,” he said.

            “What?”

            “That car crash, you know, when you got so badly fucked-up...”

            “Yes.”

            Herrsher shook his head a little.  “That was my fault.  You don’t recall but we pulled into a rest stop.  Just before the crash.  I said I had to take a dump.  But that wasn’t it.  I was using then.  I shot up in the toilet and, then, came out and drove and, you know, bang!”

            “I didn’t know,” I said.

            “Somehow I didn’t get hurt,” he said.

            “You were lucky,” I told him.

            “The police believed Jesse was driving and so I just let them think that.  I never told the truth.  You were hurt and couldn’t say anything.  So that’s how it went down.”

            “I didn’t know.  I thought it was something like that.  But I didn’t know exactly.”

            “Yeah, that’s how it went down,” Herrsher said.

            It was quiet.  I finished my beer and put it down on the ebony side-table.

            “So I’ve got to make amends.” Herrsher said. “Dude, I’m apologizing.”

            “I hear you,” I said. 

            Herrsher came back to the couch and sat beside me.  His pupils looked like pinpricks and he was sweating – I could see beads of perspiration on his upper lip and forehead. 

            “Should we go and see Janelle?” he asked.

            “Whatever you say,” I replied.

            Herrsher took a dime out of his pocket and flipped it in the air.  The coin bounced one and, then, lay on the bright threads of the Persian rug.

            “Heads,” he said.  “We go down to see Janelle.  Okay?”

            “Okay,” I said.

            Herrsher lead me to a spiral of steel stairs.  Beneath the deck-level overlooking the gorge, the house assumed a different character: windows shrunk to portholes, like nautical hatches, and, beyond, the view showed a webwork of girders and I-beams, sheer rock walls, lacy spiders gathered against the glass.  Rooms interlocked, an eccentric geometry with a floorplan like puzzle pieces hinged together.  The place was empty and showed little signs of habitation – a magazine lay face-down on a table and, in another room, some paperback books were stacked on shelves that looked like they had come from a hardware store.  The spaces didn’t seem differentiated by function – each room could anything or nothing.  Another vertiginous spiral staircase dropped down into a deeper and more shadowy part of the home.  There were no windows on this level:   walls and ceilings alike were frescoed with perforated acoustic tiles.

            “My recording studio,” Herrsher said.  In the middle of the big space, there was a cube-shaped glass enclosure where the altars of three big soundboards were positioned to outline a triangular space heaped with cables and coils of wire.  Flourescent lights stuttered fitfully overhead and the air had a stagnant, heavy odor like a crypt. 

            “I have a dormitory-wing,” Herrsher said.  He gestured to door that was like an airlock, screwed shut with a big wheel that turned with a high-pitched creaking noise.  “You can have a band partying back here and not a sound, not a noise, intrudes into the recording studio,” he said.

            He pulled the heavy door open and we entered a narrow corridor aimed toward the porcelain and mirrors of a toilet at the end of the hall.  Small cell-like rooms equipped with beds and TV sets opened out from each side of the hallway.  Near the end of the corridor, light outlined an open threshold. 

            “Janelle is here,” he said.  “It’s quiet for her.”

            A heavy-set woman with olive skin appeared in the doorway.  She was wearing a white uniform.

            “Her nurse,” Herrsher said. 

            The woman frowned at them.  She had a slight moustache decorating her upper lip.

            “How is she doing?”  Herrsher asked.

            “About the same, Mr. Herrsher,” the nurse said.

            “You can knock off,” Herrsher said.  “There’s nothing anyone can do now.”

            “That’s very true,” the woman said.  She spoke with a slight Spanish accent. 

            “Abdul is upstairs,” Herrsher said.  “I’m sending him home for the weekend.  He’ll take you back into town.”

            She thanked him, turned, and went back into the room to gather her purse as well as a battered leather valise like the bags doctors are shown carrying for house-calls in old time movies.  “Do you want TV on?”

            Above the bed, there was a TV game showing men plunging to and fro on a muddy field, chasing a soccer ball. 

            “No,” Herrsher said and so she picked up a remote and shut it off. 

            Herrsher and I stood at the entryway.

            The nurse checked the IV running the tube between her fingers from the suspended bag of fluid to the white gauze patch near the elbow of the figure lying in the hospital bed.  “The morphine is infusing fine,” she told Herrsher.  “The drip is set to run all night.  I can check it tomorrow when I return.”

            “I don’t think it makes much difference,” Herrsher said.

            “Probably not,” the nurse replied. 

            She removed a pen from a pocket at her breast, wrote a few numbers on a clipboard, and, then, nodding to me, walked past us and down the hall.  The heavy sealed door squeaked as she opened and shut it behind her. 

            “Janelle,” Herrsher said.  “I know you can hear me.  I’m here and I’ve brought a friend.”

            He named me.

            “He’s come all the way from Pasadena to say hello.”

            “Hi, Janelle,” I said.  “I’m sorry to see that you’re so sick.”

            The figure in the bed was moving.  Its edges were blurred.  But the motion seemed purposeless.

            “The desert is beautiful,” I said.  “The house is fantastic.  I’ve never seen anything like it.”

            Herrsher offered me a chair next to the bed.  I sat down across from the shape twitching on the white sheets.  He sat on the other side of the bed, beside a monitor that made soft whispering sounds.  There were tubes and wires sprawled across the floor and flabby sack of fluid flopped on its side was somehow connected to the figure in the bed.

            “I’ve been enjoying talking about old times with him,” Herrsher said.

            “Lots of nostalgia tonight, hah-hah-hah,” I said.

            “I’ve been making amends,” Herrsher said.  “I suppose I’ve got lots to apologize for.”

            “All old stuff, ancient history,” I said.

            “He’s accepted my apologies,” Herrsher said.  “I think we’re square now.”

            The figure in the bed wore something like a shower-cap over its skull.  Its legs were restless and shuffling over one another – I saw that its calves were wrapped in cotton anklets.  Some kind of restraint held the figure curled up on its side, bent into a fetal curve.  Eyes and mouth were open and a kind of wheezing hiss came from the thing’s throat.  Long pale fingers were trembling, twitching a little as if imprinting a text-message into an invisible cell-phone. 

            “I wish we had spent more time together,” I said.

            The doll in the bed could fool you.  It looked for a moment that she was nodding in response to my words, but, then, the nodding continued, a sort of tremor wriggling through the figure.

            “She hears everything,” Herrsher said.  “She’s inside her body listening to you.”

            “I know you can hear me,” I said.

            “She’s happy you came.  I can see by the way she’s blinking her eyes.”

            The figure seemed to nod again, but again, it was probably just a spasm shaking the figure’s bony shoulders.

            We sat beside the bed and talked to her and one another for a very long time.  At least, it seemed to me a long time.  I don’t remember any of the things that we said.

            A thick, syrupy perfume hung in the air disguising the other scents in the room.  But, after a time, I began to smell the other odors.  The doll-shaped body rocked a little back and forth on the mattress. 

            “We’re tiring you,” Herrsher said.  “We are going upstairs to eat a little something.” 

            “I’m not –“ I began to say.  Then: “I know we’re probably exhausting you.”

            “We’ll be right down again in a little while,” Herrsher said.

            He gestured to the door and we left the room.  Before we departed, he shut off the overhead light.  A cream-colored glow from a night-light cast deep shadows around the twisted figure in the bed.

            We climbed the two spiral staircases to the deck cantilevered over the dark canyon.  Sheet lightning was twitching across the black, bulging masses of cloud in the sky. 

            “Is it raining?” I asked.

            “Rain-in-the-sky so far,” Herrsher said.  “Most of the time, it doesn’t reach the ground.”

            The last curving ascent up to the stair to deck had twisted a serpentine dizziness around my thoughts.  I felt disoriented.

            We sat on the couch again.  Herrsher poured more booze out of his silver mixing flask.  I lifted a sweaty beer from the ice chest and snapped it open.

            “What happened to her?” I asked.  “Is it brain cancer or Alzheimer’s?”

            “Much worse than that,” Herrsher said.

            “Multiple sclerosis or something?”

            “No worse,” Herrsher said.

            “How long has she been like this?”

            “Maybe a month,” Herrsher said.  “We have to keep her hair under that plastic cap or she pulls it out, big clots right out of her scalp.”

            “My god,” I said.

            “And the wraps on her legs,” he shrugged.  “She rubs her feet together until the skin breaks down.  She gets sores down to the bone from rubbing her ankles together.”

            “What is it?”

            Herrsher looked at me with something like irritation.

            “It’s called FFI,” he said.  “Fatal Familial Insomnia.”

            “I’ve never heard of it.”

            “It’s very, very rare.  Maybe, the rarest disease in the world,” Herrsher said.  “She inherited a mutated gene.  Something goes wrong with the thalamus – that’s part of the brain.  She can’t fall asleep.”

            “She can’t sleep?”

            “About nine months ago, Janelle started having trouble falling asleep.  At first, she thought it was just worry, you know, or something temporary – but it wasn’t.  That was the beginning of the disease.  See, its progressive.”

            I nodded.

            “She hasn’t slept for even a minute for seven months now.  She can’t.  It’s just not possible.”

            “Is she conscious?”  I asked.

            “We think so,” Herrsher said.  “But it’s sort of twilight consciousness.  Like she’s just on the verge of falling asleep except sleep never comes.”

            “My god.”

            “She lost the ability to speak about five months ago.  She kept combing her hair until it began falling out by the handfuls.  Three months ago, she stopped walking.  For awhile, she thrashed around like she was trying to dance, laying there in the bed.”

            “And there’s no cure?”

            “No cure,” Herrsher said.

            “Is she suffering?  Does she feel pain?”

            “What do you think?” Herrsher said.

            Thunder rumbled outside.

            I didn’t know what to say.

            “It’s hereditary,” Herrsher said.  “Remember my old man.”

            Except for a vague feeling that Herrsher’s father had been some kind of threat, I didn’t recall him.  He was there when I was young, angry always, it seemed, and somehow hurt.  Then, he had killed himself.  People said that he had some awful secret and that it was more than he could bear. 

            “He used a shotgun and took off his head,” Herrsher said.  “Now, I know why.”

            “So Janelle inherited the gene from your dad?”

            “Evidently,” Herrsher said.  “And, you know, I haven’t been sleeping myself.  At least, not normally.  For more than a month.”

            “Is there a test or something?

            “There is,” Herrsher said.  “It’s simple, a swab from your cheek, DNA, I guess.”

            “Have you been tested?”

            “No, and I won’t be.  I don’t want to know.  It’s a simple coin-toss: fifty-fifty.  Heads: the disease gets me.  Tails: something else takes me down.”

            “I suppose it doesn’t matter,” I said.

            “We’re all dying,” Herrsher said.  “It’s just a matter of time for all of us.”

            “But it must be torture, not knowing.”

            “I’m afraid,” Herrsher said.  “You saw her.  I’m afraid every second of the day.”

            Light from inside the house studded the big window across from them with jewels.  Drops of rain were clinging to the glass and lit so that they sparkled like diamonds.

            “It’s starting to rain,” Herrsher said.  “You should smell the air in the desert after it rains.  It’s like nothing else in the world.”

            The darkness outside flashed with lightning and wind whipped up dust not yet tamped down by the rain.

            “I don’t feel like I’m done yet,” Herrsher said.  “My heart’s still young.  I have more to give.  But I haven’t been able to write, not a syllable, not a note, nothing since Janelle got sick.”

            “You always liked to collaborate,” I said.

            “The first two records – those were you and me, buddy.  You and me.”

            “Yes, they were.”

            “You know, I was afraid that I couldn’t compose without you.  I was so used to fitting my stuff to your ideas and vice-versa that after the band broke-up – “

            ”You mean, after you broke-up the band,” I said.

            “However you want to say it,” Herrsher replied.  “But after.. Afterward, I thought I couldn’t do it on my own.  I forced it, you know, I forced the next couple albums.  See, I felt I had to show the world I could write songs, and good songs too, on my own – without you or anyone else.”

            “You proved your point,” I said.  “You treated us like shit.  But, in the end, I suppose it won’t matter.  You had the stuff, I mean the genuine stuff. Genius. That’s clear enough now.”

            “But it wasn’t clear at first,” Herrsher said.  “I had to show myself.  And, this’ll make you mad – but, you know, I used you.  I used you in my mind.  When I was working on a song, I always asked myself: well how would he do it?  You know, what would he think?  What word or chord or whatever would you have used.  It was like I called on you, channeled your ideas...maybe, ideas you didn’t even know you had...I borrowed them.  I made them mine.”

            “I guess I’m flattered.”

            “I kept waiting for you to come out with a record,” Herrsher said.  “I kept waiting for you to form another band and show me up.  But it didn’t happen.”

            “You had the spark,” I said.  “Whatever I provided – I don’t know – but you had the spark.”

            “I got to thinking that I was like a vampire,” Herrsher said.  “I got to thinking that I was somehow stealing your ideas before you even had them.  It was like I was sucking all the music and the lyrics right out of you.”

            “Look, I’m just a studio musician, drummer-for-hire, a session man,” I said.  “I’ve got the chops.  Of course, I can play.  But so can a thousand other guys.”

            Herrsher looked at me with his huge wet eyes: “It was like I somehow sapped you.  Like the records that I made came out of some deep ancient place where you and I were still partners.  Listen, that’s how I felt.”

            “It doesn’t work that way,” I said.  “When you’re young, it seems, that no one can succeed without taking away from some other dude.  Like a zero-sum game: I win only because you lose.  But, now, I’m pretty much done.  I know better.  I’m more than half-retired and I know that it just doesn’t work that way – you know, there’s lightning out there, hiding up in the skies, and some it strikes and others it doesn’t and there’s no accounting for it.”

            “It’s mostly luck,” Herrsher said.

            “Almost all luck,” I said.

            “A flip of the coin,” Herrsher said.

            The thunder outside boomed up and down the canyon, echoing off the wet cliffs.  A sound vibrated in the air, a deep thrumming noise like a tuning fork.

            “The pour-off is dropping a waterfall against the girders holding up this balcony,” Herrsher said.  “You can hear it.  A resonance, listen!”

            The sound was deep, a rumbling midway between a noise and a vibration.  When the lightning flashed, I could see the brown ledges across the canyon pouring floods of water down to burst in white explosions on the valley floor. 

            “The way I work,” Herrsher said.  “I have to draw my energy from someone else.  It was like that when we were partners.  And, then, later – did you see that my last few albums I wrote with Janelle?”

            “I noticed.

            “It’s not that she did that much.  She just sat up with me talking – that’s when she could still talk, of course.  But she was my muse.  She was the source, even though I can’t tell you what exactly she contributed.  It’s my way of creativity.  Do you understand?”

            “Not really,” I said.  “I’m not creative myself.  I never really was.”

            “When she’s gone, I don’t know what I’ll do,” a sob came into Herrsher’s voice. 

            He stood up and went to a roll-top desk pushed against the glass wall.  He opened a drawer and took out a little jade pipe, cut into the stylized shape of a lizard.

            “I’m going to smoke,” Herrsher said.  “I want you to smoke with me.”

            “Tonight?”

            He took a little canister from the drawer and salted the pipe with marijuana buds.

            I said: “I haven’t smoked dope for a decade.”

            “The shit’s got really good,” Herrsher said.  “The triumph of American horticulture.  You’ll be amazed, dude.”

            He lit the pipe, inhaled, then passed it to me.  I took a hit and began coughing immediately.

            “See what I mean,” Herrsher said.

            “I don’t know if this is a good idea,” I said.  I felt light-headed, like a jolt of electricity was surging down my spine.

            “I want to write a new album with you,” Herrsher said.  “It’ll be a tribute to Janelle.  See I know you loved Janelle.  I know you’ve always loved her.”

            “She was an admirable woman,” I said.

            “We’re going to collaborate again,” Herrsher said.  “We’re going to write an opera, something like an opera.  It’s going to catch this night, this wild, horrible night in music – see that’s what I want from you.  Look around, see what you see, and, then, you’re going to lend me your eyes and your thoughts and your heart and we’ll write it all down.  It’ll be an opera.”

            “I don’t know, “ I said.

            The dope ignited a tingling in the places where my legs had been fractured.  I felt pain sharp and insistent, like a knife dissecting nerve away from tissue.  Probably, the pain was always with me, but the marijuana, somehow, brought the sensation of fresh, terrible injury to the forefront of my mind.

            I winced.  Herrsher was still talking.

            “We can start writing tonight.  Let’s work all night.  See, I can’t sleep anyway.  I don’t know if I’ll ever sleep again.  But right now – “ Herrsher paused.  His hand holding the jade lizard-shaped pipe trembled.  “Right now I feel like I’ve never felt before.  Every vibration is trembling in me.  I’m the rain shattering the red and the black ants, I can sense the jackrabbits trembling in their holes as the thunder marches overhead.  I’m a scorpion poised to strike –“

            ”It’s very, very powerful dope,” I said.

            Herrsher got up.  There was something unbalanced about his gait.  He left the room for a moment and I watched the light show flashing over the canyon.  The sides of the mountains were heaving forth red mud like blood. 

            I heard a chord.  How much time had passed?  A few seconds, or a half hour?  I didn’t know.  Herrsher was very near, seated so close that I could smell him.  He had a guitar across his lap and he was caressing the instrument the way you might pet a dog. 

            “Let’s get warmed up,” Herrsher said.  “We’ll sing together.”

            “What do you want to sing?” I asked.

            “Dock Boggs.  You know, from the Anthology.”

            “I haven’t thought of that music for years,” I said.

            “Remember how we used to pore over it,” Herrsher said.

            “I remember.”

            Herrsher handed me two drumsticks.  “Like Elvis’s comeback special,” he said.  “Keep the beat with me on the coffee table.”

            The drumsticks felt reassuring in my hand.  They were hard and cool, something to clutch against the storm raging outside.                          

            Herrsher struck his guitar with his hand and sang:

                        I wish I was a mole in the ground

                        Yes, I wish I was a mole in the ground...

            “That’s not Dock Boggs,” I said.  “It’s Bascom Lamar Lunsford.”

            “I remembered it was Dock Boggs,” Herrsher said.

            He started again, singing high in his throat, so that the sound was almost falsetto.

                        I wish I was a mole in the ground,

                        Yes, I wish I was a mole in the ground

                        If I’se a mole in the ground, I’d root that mountain down

            And I wish I was a mole in the ground.

            I was looking at the Persian rug below my feet, lost in it intricate details, red thread figures, like clots of roses in a sea of blood, patterns that seemed to approach and retreat.  Herrsher repeated the stanza that he had sung, louder now, and, suddenly, the carpet seemed to vibrate and the woven figures blurred.  The tuning fork sound was louder, ringing in the air.

            “The mountain’s moving,” Herrsher said.  “It’s a landslide below us.  The flood’s rapping the steel support girders with big boulders.”

            “What will happen?” I asked.

            He ignored me.  Herrsher began to sing again:

                        Oh, Kimpy wants a nine-dollar shawl,

                        Yes, Kimpy wants a nine-dollar shawl

                        When I come o’er the hill, with a forty-dollar bill,

                        ‘Tis, “Baby, where you been so long?”

            The floor continued to tremble and our reflection on the big glass window trembled.

            A screeching sound came from deep below, somewhere in bowels of the house.

            “Hear that old lonesome railroad whistle,” Herrsher said.  “Do you hear it?”

            The screeching continued and, then, stopped.  Herrsher sang:

                        I been in the bend so long

                        Yes, I been in the bend so long

                        I been in the bend with the rough and rowdy men

                        ‘Tis “Baby where you been so long.”

            The storm pounded at the house and, for a moment, it seemed that glass in the windows was flexing and about to erupt outward.

            A wild wailing shriek came from below.

            “My god,’ I said.  “What is that?”

            “Just feedback in the recording laboratory.  It’s a feedback loop.  Sometimes, it just happens and I don’t know why.”

            The shriek increased and, then, wavering fell into a low moan.  There was a thudding sound, something dragging.  Lightning interrogated the landscape in the canyon, discovering turbulent pillars of water lunging off cliffs.

                        I don’t like them railroad men

                        No, I don’t like them railroad men

                        ‘Cause a railroad man, he’ll kill when he can

                        And drink up your blood like wine.

Another howl quivered in the air. 

            “Feedback,” Herrsher said.

            “There’s someone in the house,” I cried.  “Someone’s coming up the stairs.”

            Herrsher ignored me.  He bent over his guitar.

                        Oh it’s Kimpy, let your hair roll down,

                        Little Kimpy, let your hair roll down,

                        Let your hair roll down and your bangs curl around

                        Kimpy, let your hair roll down.

            In the midst of all the storm’s clamor, I heard another sound: it was hair, long hair luminous with static electricity, hair that someone was combing, stroking.  I thought: it’s the dope – I’m hearing things.

            But Herrsher stopped.  He looked up and transfixed me with his immense sad eyes.

            “Do you hear her combing her hair?”

            “I think so.”

            “The pot makes your senses supernaturally strong,” Herrsher said.  “In all this tumult, do you hear her combing her hair?”

            “I do,” I said.  “I believe I do.”

            “This is the end,” Herrsher said.  His hands were like a tarantula swift over the strings of his guitar.  His voice rose to an unearthly howl”

                        I wish I was a lizard in the spring,

                        Yes, I wish I was a lizard in the spring,

                        If I’se a lizard in the spring, I’d hear my darling sing,

                        An’ I wish I was a lizard in the spring.

Herrsher stopped and lifted the green pipe to his lips and sucked at it.  His lips made a wet, slurping sound.

            “Look behind you,” Herrsher says.  “She’s come to sing with us.”

            I turned my head and saw a white figure standing at the top of the spiral stairs.  It was Janelle.  Tubes and cords and IV line were trailing behind her, dangling down into the oval opening in the floor.  She had yanked the rubber bathing cap off her head and long, white hair, matted and humid with sweat encircled her face.  Her eyes were so deeply sunken into the sockets of her skull that I could see no light there, no color, just a dense overwhelming darkness. 

The white, impassive mask of her face opened.  Her lips were cracked and blood streaked her jaw.  She extended a hand spasmodically, jerking at her hair.

            “Help me,” she said.  Then, she slumped forward.

            Herrsher rose and caught her in his arms.  A window burst, propelling shards of glass out into the storm.  The house was rocking under foot, flexing, and bucking.  Another window splashed outward, reflections vanishing in the roar of the storm.

            “My house is built on a waterfall,” Herrsher cried.

            A rending sound roared through the house and a wall snapped outward.  Furniture pitched into the gorge.

            Suddenly, the abyss was only a few yards away, bellowing with the sound of falling water.

            I ran out of the room and through the maze of shattering glass to the door.  The driveway was buried under huge tongues of thigh-deep mud that were lapping against the putting green and the walls of the house.  I staggered out into the tempest.  Suddenly, a vortex opened behind me, between the sidewalk and the edge of the house and the ground dropped into darkness.

            Ankle-deep water churned around my feet.  I staggered up the hill.

            Lightning flashed and, in the stark glare, I saw Herrsher’s house slowly rotating, spinning as if caught in an immense whirling auger.  The house spiraled downward, collapsing into the howling darkness.  Only the cantilevered balcony remained upright, still lit, a rectangle full of light where I saw Herrsher holding Janelle.  Then, blackness filled the room perched on the edge of the waterfall and it dropped out of sight. 

            From the little gravel-covered knoll overlooking the driveway, I saw that all that remained of Herrsher’s house was that spike of corten steel impaling a huge waterfall of sleek, red mud.