up, silhouetted by the blaze flaring from the oil drum on the demolition site. They weren’t supposed to be here, but then the site was supposed to have been cleared off two years ago. Larkin shuffled over toward them—an identical blob of tattered refuse at one with the urban wasteland.
“Wuz happnin’, bro?” Pointman asked him.
“Too cold to sleep. Had dreams. Had bad dreams.”
The black man nodded understandingly and used his good arm to poke a stick into the fire. Sparks flew upward and vanished into the night. “About Nam?”
“Worse.” Larkin dug out his bottle. “Dreamed I was a kid again. Back home. Cedar Lane.”
Pointman took a long swallow and handed the bottle back.
“Thought you told me you had a happy childhood.”
“I did. As best I can remember.” Larkin killed the bottle.
“That’s it,” Pointman advised. “Sometimes it’s best to forget.”
“Sometimes I can’t remember who I am,” Larkin told him.
“Sometimes that’s the best thing, too.”
Pointman hooked his fingers into an old shipping crate and heaved it into the oil drum. A rat had made a nest inside the packing material, and it all went up in a mushroom of bright sparks and thick black smoke.
Larkin listened to their frightened squeals and agonized thrashing. It only lasted for a minute or two. Then he could smell the burning flesh, could hear the soft popping of exploding bodies. And he thought of autumn leaves burning at the curbside, and he remembered the soft popping of his eyeballs exploding.
Gary Blaze sucked in a lungful of crack fumes and fought to hold back a cough. He handed the pipe to Dr Syn and exhaled. “It’s like I keep having these dreams about back when I was a kid,” he told his drummer. “And a lot of other shit. It gets really heavy some of the time, man.”
Dr Syn was the fourth drummer during the two-decades up-and-down career of Gary Blaze and the Craze. He had been with the band just over a year, and he hadn’t heard Gary repeat his same old stories quite so many times as had the older survivors. Just now they were on a very hot worldwide tour, and Dr Syn didn’t want to go back to playing gigs in bars in Minnesota. He finished what was left of the pipe and said with sympathy, “Heavy shit.”
“It’s like some of the time I can’t remember who I am,” Gary Blaze confided, watching a groupie recharge the glass pipe. They had the air conditioner on full blast, and the hotel room felt cold.
“It’s just all the years of being on the road,” Dr Syn reassured him. He was a tall kid half Gary’s age, with the obligatory long blond hair and heavy-metal gear, and getting a big start with a fading rock superstar couldn’t hurt his own rising career.
“You know”—Gary swallowed a ’lude with a vodka chaser—“you know, sometimes I get up onstage, and I can’t really remember whether I can play this thing.” He patted his vintage Strat. “And I’ve been playing ever since I bought my first Elvis forty-five.”
‘“Hound Dog’ and ‘Don’t Be Cruel,’ back in 1956,” Dr Syn reminded him. “You were just a kid growing up in East Tennessee.”
“And I keep dreaming about that. About the old family house on Cedar Lane.”
Dr Syn helped himself to another hit of Gary’s crack. “It’s all the years on the road,” he coughed. “You keep thinking back to your roots.”
“Maybe I ought to go back. Just once. You know—see the old place again. Wonder if it’s still there?”
“Make it sort of a bad-rocker-comes-home gig?”
“Shit!” Gary shook his head. “I don’t ever want to see the place again.”
He inhaled forcefully, dragging the crack fumes deep into his lungs, and he remembered how his chest exploded in a great blast of superheated steam.
Garrett Larkin was dreaming again, dreaming of Cedar Lane.
His mother’s voice awoke him, and that wasn’t fair, because he knew before he fell asleep that today was Saturday.
“Gary! Rise and shine! Remember, you promised your father you’d have the leaves all raked before you watched that football game! Shake a leg now!”
“All right,” he murmured down the stairs, and he whispered a couple of swear words to himself. He threw his long legs over the side of his bed, yawned and stretched, struggled into blue jeans and high school sweatshirt, made it into the bathroom to wash up. A teenager’s face looked back at him from the mirror. Gary explored a few incipient zits before brushing his teeth and applying fresh Butch