For months he dieted on trashy novels and tv and stayed indoors. Reading the same paragraph over and over he would wonder Where are you tonight Jem, are you thinking of me, are you alone?
Friends told him he was crazy to punish himself like this. They told him to put it behind him. But he kept Jem alive in his mind precisely because he wanted to feel the pain. The pain cut through the haze as proof that he could feel at all.
One day there was a knock on his apartment door and he opened it and blinked in the bright afternoon sunshine bleary and hungover and already getting drunk again. A tall thin man dressed like some kind of psychedelic drum major with a bushy afro stood holding a guitar case and grinning as if he’d just told a really good joke and was waiting for the laugh. “Hey,” he said. “Can Niko come out and play?”
Niko stepped back into the house. “Naw. But you can come play with him.”
And so they jammed long into the night. They had never met before but they had common influences and mutual admiration. Niko played his new Dobro while Jimi played his beatup Gibson and they howled at the moon and raised the devil and drank like fish and laughed like thieves and cried the blues. It never occurred to either of them to record the session. Its frail unwitnessed evanescence made it all the better in a way. Lost in pure creation without a thought about the world without. Before the night was over Jimi dug out his rig and asked if Niko indulged and Niko said yeah sure why not, old Mr. Daniel’s isn’t getting the job done anymore.
He would only snort. Injecting was hardcore. Injecting was for junkies. It made him itch and it made him sleepy and it made him float a half an inch above the floor but best of all it made him just plain go away. He dove into a river of oblivion and lay contented in the bottom mud. Jimi staggered off sometime near dawn, leaving Niko with a little powder present in a cellophane twist. The gift that kept on giving.
Soon the rush just wouldn’t happen when he snorted so he started shooting. He became a kind of alchemist. Into his veins went china white and out his hands came sorrow and pain and terrible beauty. He fronted shortlived bands and couldn’t get a deal and played some of the best guitar of his or anyone’s career. And all the while out there somewhere shining faintly in his battlemented heart was Jemma. She was doing well he knew. Background vocals for successful acts. On the road half the year, studio time in L.A.
Niko would imagine showing up backstage at some gig of hers. He catches her eye as she sings off to the side, she falters at the mic. The tearful backstage reunion. But he knew it wouldn’t happen because he hadn’t really changed.
He shot up alone, he shot up with friends. Celebrities, strangers, people he didn’t much like. If he wasn’t playing a gig he was lying down at home or crashed on someone’s couch. He lived on junk food and whatever else was in arm’s reach. Sometimes after gigs he brought women home and failed miserably in the sack. If he cared enough to try at all. But they helped to fill the howling silence waiting for him every time his footsteps echoed in his new apartment in the hills beneath the Hollywood sign. He lived on tv dinners and spent bleary afternoons unshaven and unbathed with his new soap opera friends, blathered for hours on the phone to people he didn’t even like just to hear a voice, hired managers, fired managers, contracted hepatitis, trashed a contract meeting by showing up drunk and telling a major producer to go fuck himself, drove someone else’s manager’s Cadillac into someone else’s swimming pool, frisbeed someone else’s gold record out the window of a VP’s office at a friend’s record label, watched someone OD at a party that got raided not five minutes after he stumbled away.
He had felt her out there all that awful lost and forlorn time, quietly burning, and knew that she would not come back until he came back to himself. And that didn’t happen till he signed away the most fundamental part of himself and killed his brother Van.
ALL THESE HALLWAY posters. All this past. Niko looked away. Jemma couldn’t have known what kind of awful scrapbook she had put together in this hall. Let it go.
He left Jemma to her medicated sleep and hurried down the hall and down the sweeping curve of staircase. Through the cavernous living room and into the study. The house was open and airy and Mediterranean but the study was Victorian and dark, brass and polished woods. Tracklights highlighted gold and platinum records in plain wooden frames between pilasters on one wall. On the mantel three gold phonographs on wooden trapezoids, a Lucite pyramid on a black block base, a silver astronaut planting an MTV flag. Him and Jemma hugging Goofy at Disneyland. Jemma with her eyes closed singing background at the mic, blobs of Vari-lite rig behind her. Her portraits of sleeping people, murky acrylics distorting shapes like funhouse mirrors. Newly inaugurated president shaking his hand there on one end of a maple bookcase. Etta James hugging Jemma on the other. On the battlements of maple bookshelves stone gargoyles vigilant before mystery and horror and occult. Her doll collection spaced out among cookbooks, selfhelp books, art monographs. Floppy ragdolls dangling stuffed legs over the wooden precipice like overseeing patchwork angels.
And Jemma’s pencil sketch of him. Seated on a rude stool in his studio with the Strat high on his thigh, eyes closed and fingers poised and a length of ash on the burning cigarette pinched on the guitar head. Shock of hair obscuring one eye as his head inclines. Historical artifacts, ladies and gentlemen. Note the longlost days of this immortal youth when cigarettes were the least of many vices, when the hair was jet and hanging in the unkempt fashion of the day, not thin and flecked with gray. He’d looked as old back then as he is now. Older.
The day Jem gave him that portrait. So tentative. They’d been together only a few months. He’d looked from his drawn face to hers so worried and in his heart he’d felt a driven nail of terror because she already loved him more than ever he would her. No one owned a key to that deep place. He would not allow it.
Niko looked away. This panoply of static things. Totems in some pharaoh’s tomb. Jemma upstairs fading.
On a marble pedestal in the form of an ionic column stood the weathered remnant of a lyre under glass. Its tortoise shell beneath the dust-shouldered belljar. The mystery of it. He’d bid ruthlessly through intermediaries when it came up at Sotheby’s. He had to have it, he didn’t know why. It brought him close to something old and deep. What hands now dust had plucked forth what notes long carried away?
Niko pulled a volume from the bookcase by the lyre and pressed a button and the bookcase opened inward.
Many mansions harbor hidden rooms and tunnels. Panic rooms and getaways, dungeons and shrines. Used with great solemnity and rarely secret at all. But Niko’s little room was truly secret. The woman he had shared his life with never knew about it. Perhaps she had her own such rooms. Perhaps she kept them hidden in her heart.
Niko stepped through the bookcase like a storybook child.