Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

“A little snare?” Josie said.

Suki began, a slow march, and the three of them, being musicians, unfairly blessed with the power to weave together instantaneously, created what sounded like a real song, a slinky and seductive tune, that might announce the arrival of a femme fatale. Josie closed her eyes, and in a flash remembered a time when her mother appeared at the top of the stairs wearing an antique mink coat — something she’d gotten from her own mother. She’d sashayed down the stairs to some old song, her eyes encircled in heavy eyeliner. Josie had been twelve, maybe, and it had thrilled and confused her to see her mother this way, a sexual being, capable of theatrics and artifice. Josie had been at the bottom of the stairs, with her father. Holding his hand! She remembered this now, how strange it was to hold his hand at age twelve, but she had done that, hadn’t she? They had stood at the bottom of the stairs, and at her mother’s behest they’d put on a record. What was that record? And they had watched as she vamped down the steps, a nurse wearing furs and makeup, her hair curled and shiny.

“Josie?” It was Cooper. “Anyone else?” he asked.

Josie sat up, finding the faces of the other ten musicians, everyone at the ready. “Sorry,” she said. She looked over to Paul, whose eyes seemed on the verge of worry. “I think we’re ready for everyone now.”

“Continue from where we were?” Cooper asked.

“No,” Josie said. “Something different. Let’s start with your G. A faster tempo now. Just strum, the G and D and F, but faster.”

Cooper began, and she swirled her arm, telling him faster. He sped up, and the sound overwhelmed the room. She pointed to Suki now, who began a slow rumble, a self-serious rhythm.

“Now you,” Josie said, pointing to Frank. He began to play, and after just one stroke of his bow across the human curves of the instrument, Josie stopped breathing. The cello was a voice. More than any other instrument, the cello was a human’s voice. A dying man, a dying woman. Josie’s eyes quickly filled, and Frank noticed, and seemed ready to pause, but she gestured to him, insisting he continue. She pointed to Cindy, who began singing, but now at a lower register, responding to the cello in a way Josie didn’t expect but felt was correct, or correct enough for now. Suki, unasked, grew louder, and Josie liked that, and Frank grew louder, too, slicing his cello, vacillating between a few notes, Josie had no idea what notes, what chords, but they sounded like every disappointment, speaking for her terrible love of her poisonous past, every bit of it tasting bitter but filling her with a dark intoxicating fluid. The cello was the steady downward pull of lost time.

From behind her a violin leaped in, and she turned to find the older woman, now with her eyes closed, glasses atop her head. She was playing something different, though, a jauntier tune, and Josie nodded vigorously. It was time. She pointed to the violinist and smiled.

“Everyone like that!” she yelled over it all.

And now, one by one, the musicians joined in. The guitars doubled the sound and doubled it again. The trombone gave it the lumbering sound of everyday, the trumpet gave it the sun, the bursts of irrational joy — trumpets were the sound of laughter, Josie knew now — and on top of it all, the oboe and clarinet provided the madness. The woodwinds sounded like the insane, like loons and coyotes, a fighter plane twirling down from the sky to its doom, like a row of Rockettes. Now Ana appeared in the doorway, her antlers at her side.

“Come,” Josie yelled, and extended her arms.

Ana didn’t walk to her, but instead began sneaking over, the antlers held on her head, as if she were a deer trying to enter the room unnoticed. The musicians smiled, their eyes crinkling, and Ana fed on it. Josie was sure she was on the verge of exploding.

She was right. Ana dropped the antlers and raised her arms, as if drawing more power from every corner of the room. Now she sprinted in place. She turned on one foot, then the other. She danced with shocking rhythm and funk, shaking and twisting and periodically kicking one foot toward a musician — giving each of them, Frank and Lionel and everyone else, a kick of salute, never actually touching — a theatrical kick of fraternity and communal insanity. A kick for you ! she was saying, and then would turn to kick another. A kick for you, too!

The musicians could barely keep it together. She was a star, a natural being of the theater, meant to exaggerate and eviscerate the attempted dignities of being human. Animals! her body was saying. You are animals. I am an animal. It is good to be an animal! She kicked high in Paul’s direction, then kicked again, this time knocking the legal pad from his hands. Delighted, she pulled him to the carpet, to dance with her. Not knowing how to keep up, first he simply lifted her into the air, and she went with it, raising her hands to the sky like a figure skater raised high by her partner. But she wanted down, and Paul lowered her, and now she circled him, and he followed suit, and they circled each other, growling and pawing, and finally just leaping straight up, again and again, urging each other higher. All the while the music grew louder, Cooper strumming with what seemed to be double the volume and depth. The pace was growing quicker, more urgent and frenetic, and Josie looked around to find that the musicians had left their own moorings. They were all on their feet, dancing, high-stepping, kicking, following Ana’s lead. Two were on the ground, their legs pedaling upward. The trumpeter was in the kitchen, playing into the fridge, and it sounded marvelous. It was all a maniacal wall of cross-cutting sounds, all of it separately desperate and tragic underneath but on top of it all, there was a lunatic spiraling, all of it sounding exactly like but completely different from any of the sounds she’d heard in her head for so many years, when she thought she had some music in her. She lay back down, luxuriating in the sounds, thinking she could stay here, not just at Cooper’s, but in this town, too. She could be a dentist again, as Cooper suggested, and every week could come to Cooper’s house like this, could further articulate this chaos inside her, could clean their teeth, and in exchange there would be this kind of release.

But now there was a new sound. Josie sat up, annoyed. It was an artificial sound, a man-made sound of panic. Sirens. They wove slowly into the music. And one by one the musicians stopped to listen, and phones began to ring, and it was all over.

JOSIE STEPPED THROUGH the front door, feeling dazed and sated, the light an assault to all senses, and saw a pair of fire trucks speed by, sirens screaming. She turned around to find Cooper on his cellphone. Frank hustled by, squeezing past her and out the door. “Fire’s coming this way. They’re evacuating. Told you.”

The rest of the musicians followed, and spread all over the lawn, going in all directions, carrying their horns and guitars. Paul and Ana appeared in the doorway.

“We have to go,” Josie said.

But she didn’t know where. She didn’t know where the fire was coming from. She assumed from the south, where the closest fire had been, but what did that mean for the cabin, the Chateau?

A woman in an orange vest was running down the street. “Mandatory evacuation,” she called out. She was out of breath.

Suki emerged from the house and breezed past her. “Bye Josie,” she said. Cindy followed her, going the opposite way. “Bye Joze,” she said. Josie said goodbye and turned to the woman in orange.

“Where’s it coming from?” Josie asked her.

“South,” the woman heaved, and pointed.