Daniel Abraham - Inside Straight

To stage left, Bottom thumb-slapped his Fender Precision, his ass’s head nodding aggressively in time to the music. Michael felt rather than heard Bottom’s bass, a solid minor pattern caught in lockstep with the subsonic pounding of Michael’s bass drum, the lowest of the tympanic rings set on his body. Shivers, his appearance that of a demon snatched directly from the fires of hell, stalked stage right before a wall of Marshalls, his blood-red guitar screaming like a tortured soul in hands of the same color.

Next to Shivers was S’Live, floating behind the ranks of his keyboards like a garish hot air balloon painted with a face, multitudinous tongues flickering from a too-wide mouth to punch at the keys. And, in the gel-colored clouds of dry ice fog drifting at the front of the stage, there was something: the ghost of a thin body caught in the floodlight-colored wisps and gone again, a wireless Shure SM58 microphone floating in the air before it, though no hand seemed to hold up the black cylinder. There was a voice, though— The Voice: a powerful baritone that alternately growled and purred and shrieked the lyrics to “Self-Fulfilling Fool.”

Michael—“DB” to his band mates and most of his friends, “Drummer Boy” to much of the world—heard mostly The Voice. He wore earpiece monitors to dampen the 120+ decibel hurricane, with only The Voice’s vocals coming through his monitor feed. He could hear his drumming quite well, resonating through his body, and no earplugs could entirely shut out the unearthly cacophony of the stage equipment.

Michael loomed at center stage, pinned in spotlights, his six arms flailing as he beat on his wide, tattooed, and too-long torso with his signature graphite drumsticks, the multiple throats on his thick muscular neck gaping and flexing as they funneled and shaped the furious rhythm. He wore a set of small wireless mics on a metal collar around his upper shoulders. While the gift of his wild card talent gave him more than enough natural amplification to be heard throughout the auditorium, the volume would have been uncomfortable for everyone on stage and in the first rows: it was easier to let the sound system do the work. He prowled the stage as he drummed, the actinic blue of the spots following him as he danced with The Voice in his cold fog, grinned at Bottom’s driving, intricate bass line, screamed his approval of Shiver’s searing licks, or swayed alongside S’Live’s saliva-drenched tongue-lashing of his keyboards.

For the moment, he thought only of being here. It was what Michael loved about being on stage: for those magical few hours he could leave the rest of the world behind. For that time, there was only the music.

La Cavea, the outdoor venue at Rome’s Auditorium Parco della Musica, could accommodate 7,000 spectators. There were that many and more packed into the seething mass of humanity in front of him, a dark, fitfully lit sea of heads bobbing in time to the song, fists pumping their approval back to the stage, their energy fueling Joker Plague’s performance in an endless feedback loop. The pit in front of the stage was a tight crush; out in the auditorium, everyone was out of their seats and standing. Against the night sky, the beetlelike shell of the Parco della Musica loomed, caught in blue and red spotlights beyond the tall ranks of the upper balcony.

It reminded Michael uncomfortably of an Egyptian scarab.

The song—their third and last encore—ended in a flourish of riffs and cymbal crashes from Michael, a final power chord from Shiver, and an explosion of pure white light from a bank of floodlights behind the stage. The audience roared, a deluge of adulation that swelled and broke over them. “Fuckin’ yeah!” The Voice screamed at the audience through the Italian night. “Thank you! Grazie! Buona notte!” They shouted back, a wordless, thousand-throated monster’s voice. Michael underhanded his half-dozen sticks into the audience as the stage lights went dark and house lights came up at the rear of the auditorium. The audience seemed to be split nearly evenly between jokers and nats, judging from the faces Michael glimpsed, but it was the jokers who were nearest the stage, the nats mostly lurking to the rear.

Roadies swarmed the stage, hooded flashlights guiding the band off to the tunnel behind the stage. “Fantastic show, DB! Great job! Esposizione eccellente!” they said, as he passed them, leading the way. He nodded, but he could already feel the stage adrenaline rushing away, and with it any sense of pleasure. The malaise and subdued anger he’d felt since leaving American Hero wrapped more tightly around him with every step he made toward the dressing room, the energy and pleasure of the performance fading.

“Fuckin’ A, that was tight,” Shivers said as the door closed behind them. He tossed his ancient, scarred Stratocaster into its case, grinning—with his red-and-black-scaled face, it looked more like a leer. “Better than the Paris show. Shit, DB, those new kicks in ‘Stop Me Again’ were killer. Just killer. S’Live, you and me gotta catch those next time.”

“Yeah,” Bottom added. He’d popped one of the champagne bottles and upturned it into his horselike snout. More of the bubbling liquid seemed to escape the sides of his mouth than went down his throat, soaking his already-sopping T-shirt. “Let’s listen to the board tape. If I punch those bass drum hits with you, it’ll be monster. Wish we’d recorded it that way in the studio. DB, man, you listening?”

He wasn’t. Michael dropped onto the couch, multiple arms sprawled out, his eyes closed. The remnants of the show still rang in his ears. The cushions at the far end sagged a few moments later under an unseen weight and Michael felt the springs move in response.

“’Sup, big guy? You ain’t yourself,” The Voice said from the air: low, sonorous, a cello bowed by a master. “You were playing angry out there—sounded nice and aggressive, but it ain’t the usual fun-lovin‘ you. ’S matter, man?”

Michael shook his head. The searing adrenaline high he’d felt during the concert was gone, as if someone had pulled a handle and flushed it away. “Nuthin’,” he said. “And fuckin’ everything. When we’re playing, it’s cool. But after …”

“Bad shit goin’ down in Egypt.” Michael glanced over to where The Voice’s head would have been and could almost see the raised eyebrows. “Hey, I ain’t fuckin’ stupid, man. I seen what you kick up on your laptop: CNN and Yahoo News instead of porn. Shit, how boring is that?”

Michael shrugged with all six arms. “Hey, I’ve been—”

The door opened and their manager came into the room: Grady Cohen, a nat the label had hired as part of their contract. “Kiss-Ass Cohen,” DB had dubbed him early on. He wondered if Grady knew why the band usually called him “KA.” Michael thought that if Grady was ever infected with the wild card, he’d turn into an empty suit. Behind him, in the theater’s backstage corridor, Michael could see the groupies waiting to be let in.