Kevin Emerson: Exile

“Well . . .” But the librarian gets a little starry look in her eyes. I want to tell her he’s not worth it. “Okay,” she says, and we bring it over.

“Success?” Kellen asks, leaning forward.

Caleb feels around the outside, pressing the cover flat in every spot. After a moment, he hands the record to Kellen. “It’s not there.”

Kellen does the same, “Are you sure there was a tape?” he asks Caleb as he hands the record back to the librarian.

“Not completely,” says Caleb. “I mean, he made it sound like there would be.”

Kellen shakes his head. “Caleb, I don’t mean to speak badly of your dad, but he was in a pretty bad way on that tour. I’m surprised to hear he could get it together to make even one tape, never mind a second one.” He stands up, flipping the first tape in his fingers. “Thanks for this. And I’m sorry. You probably got your hopes up. I think he’d be proud if he knew you. But . . . this is kind of what it was like working with Eli.”

“That’s enough, Kellen.” Randy is still fuming.

Caleb just stares into space. “No, it’s cool.” Then, more bravely than I can imagine being, he meets Kellen’s eyes. “Thanks for the offer to play on the song. I’ll let you know if anything else ever turns up.”

Kellen smiles. It’s impersonal, like business, but still a smile. “I hear you know Jason over at Candy Shell?”

“Yeah,” says Caleb.

“Good. I’ll make sure he hooks you guys up with some great shows.”

Kellen and the detective get up and head for the door.

I watch them go. “What are the chances they’re going to meet up with Val somewhere? That she got the tape out of here before?”

Caleb shrugs. “I don’t even know if I care. Maybe it’s better there’s no second tape. I never wanted this. That gig tonight? It was fun. It should just be about that. The music.” He turns to Randy. “Can we go home? You up for driving back?”

Randy is distant. “Oh yeah, I’d be awake all night anyway.”

“I’ll text Weezil again,” says Caleb. “Just in case.”

I wish I could share his optimism. Caleb thumbs his phone as we make our way out of the Vault and back down through the seething club.

“Anything?” I ask as we emerge from the dancing horde in the welcome cool of night.

“She says to go without her,” Caleb reports.

“Are you going to ask her if she has the tape?” Jon wonders.

Caleb shakes his head. “Not tonight.”

We walk silently back to the van, and go.

MoonflowerAM @catherinefornevr 45m

Yoo hoo. Any other space travelers awake out there?

Hours pass in the infinite dark. Despite the swirl of the evening, exhaustion takes over. Caleb, Jon, and I lie on the floor in the back of the stalker van, the gear precariously stacked to either side of us. Our only contact with the outside is the retreat of taillights across the inside of the roof from the windshield, and the advance of headlights from the two tiny back windows. Randy is driving fast, always in the passing lane, eating up the late-night drivers and trucks.

“Randy,” Caleb asks, after a rest-area pit stop an hour into the drive. “What was going on with you and Kellen at the Vault?”

“Well, for one, I think he’s a dick.” He’s quiet for a minute, but we can feel that he’s got more to say. “I always thought it was bullshit that Kellen and Jerrod were trying to sue your dad for lost money and royalties. They were basically trying to get him to forfeit his rights to Allegiance money. After your dad got his head on straight, he was actually going to give them the rights. Void his contract. I told him I thought that was crazy. That what he needed to do was worry about fixing his drug and depression problems, and then get back to making music again.”

“What did he say?”

“He didn’t. We talked about it the last time I ever saw him. The afternoon before he died.”

“So, you blame Kellen for all that legal stuff,” I say.

Randy is quiet again. “There’s more. When Eli left me that afternoon, he said he was going to go see Kellen, to talk it out. Next thing I know, I’m standing over a casket.”

“Wait . . . ,” says Caleb. “Are you saying you think Kellen had . . . something to do with it?”

“Not exactly,” says Randy. “Kellen had a rock-solid alibi. He was at a party at Jerrod’s house. A big Candy Shell anniversary event that Eli was not invited to. So Kellen was never a suspect. But Eli apparently stopped by there. A friend of mine said he saw Eli early on at the party, and he seemed fine, but he wasn’t when he left.”

“How did he leave?”

“Shouting, screaming, and stumbling. Basically a wasted mess. Security threw him out. I don’t know if he got high before he went there, or while he was there, or what. He was fine when I saw him, and had been sober for a couple weeks. But after the party, he drove down to the beach, and took that swim. But . . .”

“What?”

“I shouldn’t even be saying this,” says Randy. “It was so long ago and there’s no proof. It’s not doing anyone any good.”

“Jesus, Randy, just say it.” I can hear the tension in Caleb’s voice.

“Well, if you’re Eli, and you went to talk to Kellen, and it didn’t go well, why would you get high at Jerrod’s house? If you hated all those people and were in legal battles with them. It just seems like Eli would have left, and done whatever drugs or booze he was going to do somewhere else.”

“What exactly are you saying?” I asked.

“Nothing, I’m not saying anything,” says Randy. “I just wonder if Kellen, I don’t know, drugged him or something, even just put an extra shot in his drink. It didn’t take much to get Eli started, and once he was going, then he went all the way. I know that sounds all conspiracy-ish, but . . . ah, it doesn’t matter now anyway.”

“Drugged him why?” Caleb asks darkly. “So he’d kill himself?”

“No, I don’t think it was that . Maybe just to make him make a fool of himself at the party, to create a widely witnessed scene of Eli acting out of his mind. That would have helped with the legal stuff. They were trying to prove that he was responsible for their loss of tour money and royalties, and also irresponsible when it came to himself, and the party would have been full of credible witnesses.”

He’s silent, and so are we.

I reach over and take Caleb’s hand. He responds, but there’s a guitar case between us and eventually our hands are cramped and he pulls his away. I try not to take it personally that he’s the one to retreat. I know he’s still hurting about the tape. But is he still hurt about me? What I kept from him about the gig and about Val?

With his hand gone, I fold my arms like I’m in suspended animation, nothing to do or be or even think until we arrive.

My thoughts run in circles anyway.

So, now what then?

It’s a three-ring circus spectacle. Tonight was a failure, or was it? I try to remember that even just the act of throwing yourself out into the universe and playing a stupid gig to twenty people is still participating, still practicing the routines that might someday get you to the place you want to be. I don’t have cliché notions, like that I regret not going on the college trips, regret lying to my parents, regret not telling the band about the better gig. I did what I thought was right for everyone. Except maybe when I thought everyone I was thinking more of me, of keeping myself safe.

Meeting Kellen has sparked a curious sensation in my head. We think of ourselves as the center of our universe, the star of some universal play, and that everyone else is in some way in this galaxy to act out a role in our story. And yet the more you see the world, the more you realize how silly that is. We are all planets, far comets, asteroids, and suns, inhabiting a shared universe, acting on one another. Eli is a force acting on Caleb, and yet he is a force acting on me, but then there is Kellen, or Randy, orbiting the Eli system, and on and on beyond that. All of us rotating around each other, sometimes feeling the heat of a sun, sometimes colliding and killing off the dinosaurs, sometimes just glimpsing one another across the void, barely realizing the effect we had on one another.