Darling was a young man who wore yellow rain boots, depending on the season, and who declared cloudy days holidays, and who refused to go to school when in perfect health, as a child. He did this for the symmetry of the thing.
Darling carried a black magic marker with him at all times, in case he saw something particularly undeclared and had to rectify such a confusing situation. Once, for example, he encountered a big, bright, ceramic mushroom bolted into the sidewalk outside his university; he wrote the word "ENTRAPMENT" in bubble letters, careful of the patterns occurring inside the black lines of each one. This, he felt, was a valuable public service. He provided it out of generosity.
Darling played guitar in a band called Munch. He wrote his own tabs, always in thirds, usually involving minor chords. None of these were made into songs, because the three other members of Munch were shit-for-brained, as far as lyrics went. And Tommy, the bassist, was passive-aggressive with pretty much everything Darling did or suggested to the band. He complained about everything being saturated with minor chords, sounding too emo, which squashed anything more Darling might have contributed to Munch. To reply to his criticism Darling looked angrily down at his yellow rain boots, depending on the season, or twirled his black marker around in his fingers. (A is the longed-for, a-minor is the real, e-minor is the conflict of these two, etc.)
Richard and Paul were brothers. Richard played the drums. Paul was six feet seven, bony, the front man and vocalist. Paul and Darling played off each other at shows, though Paul could not scat for shit, didn't have the creativity to spit anything better than other peoples' lyrics, while Darling could pick a chord and invent something at least half interesting if it was demanded of him. Paul introduced Darling as "our weird-ass guitar god," which Darling countered by playing "Ashokan Farewell" on the lowest key possible. He thought it was funny.
Perhaps, thought Darling, one day I'll find a city where everything is as important as everything else. Darling looked at the rest of the world and the species as an earthquake-ridden expanse of land, its children as twisted and deformed as the ground they called their own. Darling thought of runoff water no longer reaching the ocean, and how meaningless that made thing. Piss, thought Darling, ought to reach the sea, but it doesn't any more, because the earth is twisted, and it's twisted everything, as below, so above. So Darling also carried a comb, for removing split ends.
He was resigned to the faces of strangers still being strange, wondering if stroke victims ever become used to their reflections in mirrors. He did not know how to treat this tragedy with anything other than music.
One evening, on the nightly news, Darling discovered a story about whales in Alaska migrating further and further towards the North Pole, pushed up there by a dying food source. Darling counted the notches on the spine of every whale. The sun had set outside his condo. He went out to the balcony. Oh, you foolish, inverted, paralyzed planet, thought Darling. He wondered if gravity still worked, and reckoned there was only one way to test such a thing; he went into his kitchen, into his cabinet, for a glass, and walked back out to his balcony. Over the railing he dropped the glass. It blew apart on the sidewalk below.
The moon was not full, and Darling thought about the moon, which, by December, would be an inch farther away from him. Darling responded to this by going back into his living room and pushing the television an inch further away from the balcony. Then he nudged the couch forward a bit. Then he went into his bedroom and did the same thing there. By the time he reached the kitchen, he'd discovered that the dish washer and cabinets could not be moved any further away from the balcony unless he wanted to unscrew them from the walls, and thereby the moon would stay unstuck to his sleeping ears. He thought about torque, the tragedy of the tides winding up with the rotation of the earth and throwing the moon away, and the hammer toss in the last year's Olympics, and Beijing, and Sydney, among other places.
Darling was playing with Munch in the basement of a bar. The theme of the bar was planets. There were little ceramic bowls, multi-colored, hanging from wires and containing lit light bulbs, which Darling was watching while he played. They covered some Clash songs. It was all right. Their crowd didn't mind. Nobody danced.
After they finished their show, the proprietor took the whole band back upstairs, to his office, to pay them out of his safe. He gave them a hundred dollar bill. He was an old, gay, divorced man. He had died his grey hair blue. He had taken off his wedding ring.
Darling asked to see the hundred bucks when the band had loaded itself back up into Paul's van, which was really Richard's, or their parent's, but nobody remembered. Darling took out his marker and drew a line lengthwise down the middle of the bill. He gave it back to Tommy.
"Fuck! What's the matter with you?" shouted Tommy, throwing the bill back at him. It did not hit Darling. It fluttered miserably in his direction, the stripe looking like an eyelid pinched shut.
"First buck I ever made in the business," said Darling. "You forget if you don't number every one."
"Who's going to make change for a hundred dollar bill with a mark on it?"
"It's no big deal, Tommy," said Paul.
"Christing weirdo."
"Calm down." Richard reversed course for the bank in an attempt to alleviate the situation. They exchanged the hundred for four twenties and four fives. Darling stuck his in his front pocket. He walked home, though Paul and Richard offered him a ride.
Darling got back at his condo at four o'clock in the morning. He was dead tired and ready to sleep, and almost reconciled with himself to hit his mattress without moving it an inch away from the moon. While mounting the stairs to the fourth floor (really the third, but numbered that way for the sake of luck) Darling thought about his burning quadriceps, and how they got their name. Darling got his name from his mother — he was Peter Darling Jones, but nobody called him Peter like nobody called thighs quadriceps. He imagined the old painting of the Dutchmen at an anatomy lesson, but with a leg instead of a forearm, the muscle exposed and the tendons whitely poking into view, the students' thoughts loud upon their faces: My God — quadriceps!
When he got into his condo, he noticed a blinking red light on his answering machine, and played back the following message:
"Hi, Mr. Jones. This is Allison Friendly, reporter with the Petersburg Sentinel. I'm writing a piece on some emerging local talent. I was at your show, uh, your band's show tonight and wondered if you'd agree to an interview? My phone's —"
Darling saved it, wrote it down, filed it away, though he had nothing in which to file, instead sticking the scrap of paper with Allison's digits on the top of a pile of papers he had resolved to organize the following morning. He would forget it while he slept, while the moon careened overhead, rotating at the same speed it revolved, keeping its far side obscured, only dark in slivers.
Darling woke in the afternoon to his phone ringing. Allison had called Tommy; Tommy had called Richard, figuring Richard was the one less likely to call Darling. He was right, but Richard wasn't enough of a bastard to ignore Darling the way he figured Tommy wanted him to.
"We have an interview in two hours, put on some nice clothes."
"Where?"
"The bar where we played yesterday. Hurry up, we'll be over in a few minutes."
Darling wore a black striped shirt and a pair of dirty blue jeans and his cowboy boots, because the sun was out, and would suffocate rubber, and leather only slightly less so. He stared at the little holes poked into the tops of both boots, wondering what possible purpose there was for them: they didn't ventilate anything, they would only make the boot weaker, easier to tear. He heard Paul's van on the sidewalk and two honks of a car horn. Darling collected his wallet and keys and went down. Reconsidering, he went back up and got a ukulele from under his bed and returned to the car.
"What the hell is that for?" asked Tommy.
"I just feel like bringing it along," Darling said.
"Like hell. You're not taking it."
"Tommy, we have to leave now," said Paul.
"He's going to fuck this up," said Tommy. "For everybody. Just watch."
Getting back to the bar took half an hour, because they got lost. It didn't matter. Allison was also late, later than them, which meant blame was spread out evenly on both sides, which meant Darling doubled back to the van, when she entered, for his ukulele.
"Are you going to serenade me?" asked Allison. She had on a grey business suit which did not match the planet lights. (They hung at different heights.)
"No, I just have a feeling."
Allison nodded and made another note in her little red notepad. The questions she asked weren't too obscure for at least one of the guys to remember the answers. Richard knew when they'd first started. Tommy knew why the drum lines were so simple. Paul knew when they'd start up with their own lyrics. Halfway through the thing, Darling started picking something out on his ukulele.
"What's that?" Allison asked. He was well enough into whatever it was for him to not lose his place. She had decided this before saying anything at all.
"I don't know."
He was playing five strings with three fingers, which sounded messy, but she did not notice. Tommy crossed his arms. Allison noticed this. After a minute, she said, "Are you playing anything in particular?"
It was like his coat was caught in the door of an open G. "No, can't think of anything."
"Okay. When did you join the band?"
"About four months ago."
"How'd you find it?"
"Ad in the paper." Darling hit the open G four times with something he might have described as finality before putting the ukulele down. Tommy looked relieved. Allison noticed this, too.
Allison left before the rest of them. She thanked them as she went out of the bar. The planets swayed as the air from outside came in through the door. Then she was gone.
The band celebrated by calling it a stepping stone to greatness and ordering two rounds, which was all they could afford. Darling noticed that Tommy was much less of an asshole when he drank, but still an asshole. They left in single file.
At the door, Darling turned around and said to the proprietor, "Can I ask you something?"
"Go ahead." He leaned an elbow on the bar and ran a hand through his blue-grey hair. He looked a bit shocked.
"Any of the bands that ever played here, have any of them meant anything?"
The owner shrugged. "Well, I don't know, never paid much attention to them."
On the way back to his place, Darling mentioned the question he'd asked the owner. He thought it was strange, how surprised he'd been.
"It's probably because we told him you were retarded," said Richard.
"What?"
"Yeah, that's how we got the gig. Went okay, didn't it."
Tommy laughed. Darling wasn't bothered by this.
Upon getting home, a bit buzzed, Darling had a few drunken thoughts about writing a poem, and wrote one, entirely in his head, before forgetting and falling asleep. He had not moved any of his furniture, and had irritable dreams. He woke up in the middle of the night and became determined to find the moon, but could only see an outline, and the stars beginning to hide. He wondered if one of those tiny dots was an outline or a ghost or hint of things to come, an eternity away, after the dizzy earth finally succeeded in throwing itself away. He went into the kitchen and picked up his ukulele and threw it as far as he could off the balcony. It erupted in splinters below him, making a last drunken open G and dirtying the night. He imagined the chord slipping in its orbit before returning to bed.
Sam Virzi is a student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.