After six horrendous months of rehearsal, the Billets Doux, under the auspices of Artorius Finch, were to play the ConArts Warehouse. It was a cold and starless night and the Warehouse was as dense with humanity as a Thursday afternoon public beheading in Medina. Everything was going wrong. Aquinas was having a rare attack of nerves, covering it rather well, with an air of rakish cynicism. Mary was unusually cheerful, of itself a bad sign. She was best when pissed off about something. Maurice had left his lucky drumsticks on the coffee table at home and was fretting like a cat with kittens. Charlemagne was, well, Charlemagne was Charlemagne, low key in his pre-inebriate exuberance, bidding the world go fuck itself with gentle good humor. Otis was nowhere to be seen. The lights went out and swarmed briefly back on, illuminating Mary, jacket draped casually over her thin shoulders, fag end of a cigarette flying from her fingers to shower to sparks off the apron of the stage. Aquinas and Mary were still in hot debate at the edge of the stage when Artorius announced the band. They were discussing Otis’s no-show.
-He fucking blew it, Aquinas was saying, that’s all there is to it. If he shows up don’t let the prick on or I’ll kick his ass offstage.
Mary shrugged, turned her back on him and counted off the first song. No, things were not going at all well. Mary was playing with her back to the rest of the band, Charlemagne was having great difficulty hearing his bass against Mary’s angry roaring, and Maurice was glancing from one to the other for cues that were, alas, not forthcoming. If Aquinas was aware of the subliminal shrieks of desperation falling like spent tracers all around him he gave no sign of it. Half-blind without his glasses, he stood at the microphone, one pale hand gesturing transcendently upward. ‘Break over me like a flood of pearls’ indeed. Dion moved through the crowd of roller-skaters, bohemian expatriates, guerrilla upstarts, cotton-wool scorpions, bad boys and good girls, serene temptation beckoning him towards the cool air outside. In the sky a gray whale moved slowly, unraveling to a cataract of mist that veiled the licentious moon. These are pearls that were his eyes, this is a world of last goodbyes. Well, well, was this emotion? Clouding his vision, trembling his diaphragm with faint shivering that could not be explained by the cold, the starlessness, or the night? When he went back inside the Billets Doux were doing their final number. It was a French song sung with precise, heartbreaking bitchiness by Mary. She stepped away from the microphone and went into a solo, immediately shattering the tremolo bar against the pick-guard of her guitar. The tremolo bar glittered and fell to pieces in her hand as the guitar arched steeply out of tune. It sounded quite nice. Mary glared over the heads of the audience, retuning the strings while arpegiatting viciously off the top frets with her pick hand. Anais was working her Nikon like a reporter at the scene of an assassination. Someone whistled from the edge of the stage. For the first time that evening Aquinas looked genuinely amused. He stepped back outside just as a wash of feedback drenched the unfortunate dancers, frozen in mid-spin. Overhead the sky was festering with sudden stars and he watched, religious with awe, the liquid occulting of a new constellation: a love letter, torn down the center, its contents spilled clockwise across the dark sky. He read, left to right ….. this is the way the world ends, my dear little …..