Neil McMahon - Revolution No.9

As he raised his fist to knock on the door, he realized that someone inside was playing a guitar. The past rose up to twist his gut. Glenn had fooled around with guitars throughout his adolescence. As with his studies, he had showed plenty of ability but little discipline.

There was no response to the knock. Monks opened the door and leaned in.

Glenn was sitting cross-legged on a large pillow on the floor, bent over a steel-stringed acoustic guitar. His left hand slid easily up and down the neck, coaxing out the sweet dark strains of Skip James’s great Delta blues. “Hard Time Killing Floor,” Glenn’s quavering voice rose to join the music.

“If I ever get off this killin’ floor, Lord, I’ll never get down so low no more. Mmm-hmmh, mmm, mmm-mmm-hmmh-”

Abruptly, Glenn slapped the strings to silence and looked up.

“I ain’t got nothing to say to you, Rasp,” Glenn said. “I’m only doing this because Freeboot said I have to.”

Monks noted the use of his own old navy nickname, short for Rasputin, given to him because of his thick tangled eyebrows. Under other circumstances it might have been joking or even affectionate, but here it was clearly a taunt. He noted the grammar, too. Glenn had not been brought up to say “ain’t got.” His kinky ginger-colored hair bushed out from his head Afro style. A silvery skull-shaped earring, a punkish affectation, hung from his left ear.

“I’m not here to read you out, Glenn. I’d just like to know how you’re doing.”

“Call me Coil. Glenn was a middle-class white motherfucker. He’s gone, man.”

“All right, Coil it is. Because you’re wound really tight?”

“You got it.” Glenn bared his teeth in a defiant grin, and Monks’s gut twisted again. Dark blotches were starting to form on Glenn’s teeth and gums. Monks had seen similar ones in the ER. They were blisters that came from methamphetamine.

“You mind telling me how much of that stuff you’re using?” Monks said.

“What stuff?” Glenn said innocently.

“Speed. And whatever else.”

Glenn shrugged. “As much as I want. It’s not hurting me.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“Jesus, Rasp.” Glenn slapped the guitar neck again, this time angrily. “You’re in the door thirty seconds and already you’re on my case.”

Monks exhaled, biting off his next questions: Have you shared needles? Had an AIDS test?

“Okay,” he said. “I’m concerned, that’s all.”

Glenn pulled a cigarette out of a pack and lit it. Monks saw with slight relief that it was a Marlboro 100-at least it was filtered. The cabin reeked of smoke. There was an ashtray stuffed with dead butts on the floor beside Glenn, along with a bottle of screw-cap Tokay wine. Paperback sci-fi novels, computer magazines, and what looked like adult comic books were scattered around. This seemed to be Glenn’s corner, and it had the feel of a teenager’s bedroom. But it was made eerie by the clear evidence that Glenn was living with a much older woman. Instead of a mountain man’s hard and narrow bunk, there was a new, expensive queen-sized bed covered by a duvet. Through the open door to the small attached bathroom, crude and concrete-floored like the washhouse, Monks glimpsed a wooden clothes-drying rack hung with lingerie.

“Your mom and sister are doing well,” Monks said.

“I don’t want to hear about my perfect sister, okay?” Glenn sucked hard on the cigarette, managing to look disdainful. Stephanie was in her third year of medical school at UCSF. That would probably be a sore point to bring up to a high school dropout. But, then, it seemed like just about anything would be.

“You mind telling me how you hooked up with these folks?” Monks said.

“I was junked out. Shrinkwrap found me and took me home. She cares about people like me,” Glenn added accusingly.

“Are you one of the, uh, maquis?”

“Nope. Those guys are the muscle. I do the complicated computer stuff.”

“Such as?”

Glenn shook his head. “It’s none of your fucking business, Rasp, okay?” His tone had the same sense of superiority, of being the elite guardian of secret knowledge, that Monks had sensed in Freeboot and the maquis.

Glenn started playing again, another blues. This one was jazzier, involving complex fingerpicking, with the sound of Robert Johnson’s knife guitar.

“You’ve gotten good,” Monks said.

Glenn nodded, continuing to play, and for a few seconds Monks sensed his son’s pride in showing off for his father. Glenn had become a man, at least in his own eyes, and he handled the guitar with genuine feeling and talent.

Then his hands moved abruptly, the right slashing down across the strings with a discordant clash.

“Take this, brother, may it serve you well,” he growled, in the deepest bass he could muster. They were the same words that Captain America had spoken ceremoniously when he came into the lodge last night.

“Tell me what that means,” Monks said.

Instead, Glenn started chanting in a high-pitched nasal tone, playing the same strident chord over and over:

“Number nine, number nine, number nine…”

It took Monks a moment to recognize the source-an old Beatles song called “Revolution No. 9.” He remembered it as being nonsensical and noisy.

Glenn kept up the chanting, rotating his head to it like a parody of a marionette controlled by a stuck record.

“Number nine, number nine…”

Monks stepped forward, dropped to one knee, and clamped his hand around the guitar neck. Glenn stared at him in outrage.

“Look. I can understand why you helped them bring me here,” Monks said. “I’m willing to let it go, I won’t press charges. But that little boy’s going to die if he doesn’t get help. This isn’t some kind of game.”

“Game? What the fuck do you know about it? I was living on the streets, man. My friends were dying.”

“You were living on the streets by your own choice,” Monks said. “You could have come home anytime you wanted. And a lot of people have seen a lot more people die than you have, including me.”

Glenn wrested the guitar away from Monks and scrambled to his feet.

“Freeboot’s doing something that nobody else in the fucking world can do, and I’m part of it. He needs me, man. You got that? For the first time in my life, I matter. And the way I live is up to me, and nobody else, okay?”

“You think you’re smart and cool, but you don’t know shit,” Monks said, his own voice rising fiercely.

Then he stopped, and lowered his face into his right hand, thumb and forefinger squeezing his eyes shut. This was how it had always gone between them, and it was the signature of his own failure-his own immaturity, his intolerance of a kid’s outbursts, when a father’s love should have prevailed and made him just take the punch. It was true that Glenn had demanded unconditional love-the freedom to do whatever he pleased-and Monks was incapable of giving that.

But for a few terrible seconds, he wondered if he had ever loved Glenn at all-if Glenn had somehow sensed that from an early age, and all of his problems stemmed from it.

Maybe what Glenn had said last night was true: Monks did owe him bigtime.

He raised his head to face his son. “I’m sorry, Glenn,” he said.

“Yeah, well, being sorry doesn’t do anybody any good,” Glenn said, with angry sarcasm. “Remember how you used to tell me that?”

Feeling suddenly leaden, Monks nodded. He sought for some line of conversation that might get Glenn to open up.

“This cause that you and Freeboot are involved in,” Monks said. “Will you tell me about it?”

“I just did. Now get out of my place.” Glenn slung the guitar down onto the pillow and pushed past Monks to the door.