It’s nearly 1 AM and you’ve brought a cabaret act to a hardcore show. The natives are friendly but restive, you weren’t expected, and you might not be wanted. You’re dressed in clothes you’ve sweated through hours ago, you’ve drank your second hot van beer, you’ve admired the other acts and the aesthetic in general, and it’s time to go, because go is what you do, and tonight you go faster than you’ve gone for some time. Circumstances such as these set up everyone but Jack—because Jack is Jack and nothing about this scenario is likely to make him any more or less Jack than he currently is—for a certain kind of experience. Moist had been thinking about it for weeks, if not months, and this was going to steel her resolve in a certain kind of way. She would have a lot to say, and it was important that you heard it, whether you felt like you needed to or not. I myself want to be accurate, remind people that we play on team circle-A, and I drink Moist’s Jim Beam as she will allow, because I am warm and want to get warmer. Dallow would approach from the bottle side—there were friendly people here who wanted to see him completely blitzed and blinkered, and someone may have slipped him a waltz pill or two, because his dancing feet were happier than I’d ever seen them. Jeffrey looked Younger than he had all trip, but this was all business for him anyway, and he knew damn well the monitors are mostly for show in situations like this. This left Feli, who had continued his voyage against time, but had clearly sought a different vessel, and was going to try to tear open the fabric of the continuum right here, on this punk stage in this punk house for these punk people with these punky songs. And finally Furey, who would be that vessel. Furey was going to have to go through time, to either prevent a beating or administer one. Or possibly both.
Dallow pirouettes onto the stage much to the chagrin of some of the femmes who are leaving it, who have little time for his antics. There is nothing especially devious in his countenance, and if we were put into a lineup of who was most likely to get punched that evening, I think he’d have ended up somewhere around third choice at best/worst. Still, an auspicious entrance to the chaos to follow.
Feli is going to push this engine as hard as it can go. He redlines it, full steam ahead from moment one, and I am not just talking tempo. It’s all about feel this early morning, he is on his feet directing traffic, building a series of decorative birdhouses behind the drum kit all while making sandwiches for the crowd. He is all things to all people and also, coincidentally, has reasonably little time for antics, the usual ones excepted. So he pushes the shovel through the mire, driving a paddleboat through a lake full of gelatin, and time roars back as he sends razors from his eyes into it with each next beat.
Furey has been prepared for this moment, it’s as if he’s in the room all by himself, the crowd disappears, his fellow musicians dissolve into dust. It’s him and his guitar, and a blinking red button on a cursed keyboard which was found on, and belongs back on, a curb in Brooklyn. Furey is not pushing, he’s cutting through time, receiving Feli’s messages and bending them to his will. He neither wants nor needs, desire has left the equation, it’s purely duty and sensual feeling at this point. The light blinks on.
(Aside: there are a variety of possible reasons for ambient sound onstage. It could be a poorly grounded cable, an amplifier picking up radio waves, someone’s phone going off, channels crossed on the mixing board, or a sound person accidentally leaving on the house music.)
The salvo continues, and I marvel at the difficult-to-fathom intensity of the voyage against time. I hear a metronome clacking in my head, but it is seriously, defiantly out of tempo. The others start to hear it to, and there is a scramble. It’s not a metronome, it can only be a bossa nova, sounding like a lost Young Marble Giants number, or the spirit of the not-dead-yet Martin Rev diverting excess rhythm through our set. We’re exchanging glances at an increasing rate, and time keeps thundering on, wincing at Feli’s and Furey’s efforts but thundering nonetheless, and so we pause for a breath, and the blinking light can hide in plain view no longer. Dallow has inadvertently activated the drum function of his keyboard, and so added another adversary for Feli, the last thing any of us need.
We all share a laugh, but there is icy mercury in Feli’s veins. If we’re going to make it out of here alive, the voyage against time must continue, unimpeded, even then understanding how unlikely it all remains. Dallow is sheepish, but still blissful. Furey is steely, ready. The machine winds back up for the final act. Jack is still Jack.
The assorted stools and chairs in the place are now levitating ever so slightly at this point, just enough off the ground that you can see them flutter in response to the Feli-Furey time rip. The punks are working in a clockwise circle, heaving themselves in a vortex of their own, but that’s just a coincidence. The sheer effort of the voyage is dense, it surrounds all of us, Feli’s drumsticks are oars in the morass, and the spell is in full effect, which means it has to happen now. The bossa nova kicks back up at double the volume, the blinking red light extending a metaphorical middle finger in Dallow’s sweaty face. I turn to face Feli, to decide whether to laugh or duck at what might happen next. Feli is audible over the salvo of the voyage against time as he turns to his right, carefully pronouncing his words with only a modicum of rage:
“I am going to kick your ass.”
Dallow finds the red button and with the assistance of the mortified sound person mashes it back to its unlit state, first detouring through a quick rumba beat, then a foxtrot, then, mercifully, silence. In all the confusion, it’d be easy to have missed, but Furey had gone back in time, had spent, which is not to say squandered, his one opportunity in order to tell Feli that something ridiculous was about to happen, and he could be mad about it, but he should not kill the accordianist. It was selfless and it was silly and it was brave and it was best, and the furniture resettled itself and the Society, intact, took its bow.
