Wild Awake - By Hilary T. Smith Page 0,88

of excitement people make when something bad is happening and it’s not happening to them.

“Whoa-ho-ho, man—are they gonna fight?”

The camera tilts toward the floor, showing a dim swarm of sneakers and pant legs, and when it swings toward the stage again, Skunk is locked in a slow-motion wrestling match with the harmonium player, still shouting “STOP!” and “NO!” and all sorts of things in French.

Everything happens in the next two seconds.

Skunk wrenches free and staggers forward, swinging his bass like a club. Most of his bandmates get out of the way in time, but in the midst of the chaos, you can just make out the blond girl’s arms flying up to protect her head.

“Dude, I think he nailed her!” says the person shooting the video.

A second later, the video ends.

I sit at the computer wrapped in a blanket, watching it over and over again, until every millisecond of crappy footage is burned into my eyes.

chapter thirty-nine

“They were broadcasting my thoughts through the speakers,” says Skunk. “They’d been doing it the entire tour.”

It’s Monday afternoon and we’re at the Army & Navy store on Cordova Street, shopping for cat supplies. As we talk, I grab things and toss them into my basket: a red-and-white bowl, a catnip mouse, bags of litter and food. Snoogie misses Doug, I can tell from the way she sniffs around Denny whenever he opens a beer, despite the fact that I have informed her in both English and cat-speak that we are not acknowledging his pathetic existence.

“You mean, you thought they were,” I say.

“Yeah. I thought they were,” echoes Skunk distractedly, as if to him the distinction hardly matters. “I realized they were using my bass as an antenna. I was going to smash it so they couldn’t do it anymore.”

“And Tess got in the way?”

“And Tess got in the way.”

I throw another cat toy onto the pile, some kind of battery-operated ferret that squirms when you pull a string. Snoogie is going to rip its freaking head off.

“Did you try to explain?” I ask him. “Did you tell them about the broadcasts?”

“They thought I was on mushrooms,” Skunk says. “Nobody realized what was really going on.”

As we wander the aisles, Skunk tells me everything. He tells me how the police and ambulance showed up at the Train Room, their carnival lights spraying all over Cordova Street. He tells me about the hospital ward, with its long, windowless hallways, where he bounced like a pinball in the doctors’ attempts to Stabilize Him.

Ten medications. He tells me their names: Risperdal. Lithium. Seroquel. Haldol. Lamotrigine. Trazodone. Depakote. Celexa. Wellbutrin. Ativan.

The doctors turned the volume up and down on Skunk, adjusted his bass and treble. Now he was the Messiah; now he was cold and dumb as a potato. He lost all emotion for weeks at a time. Couldn’t speak. Lumbered fatly down the hall looking for a window to look out of. Couldn’t find any. All communications suspended. The world went flat and fuzzy. Abort.

I kiss him quickly. An old lady looking at salad spinners glances at Skunk’s tattoos and edges away. We’ve drifted into the kitchen section, all translucent plastic picnicware and lemonade pitchers. I gaze at a stack of cups printed with ladybugs. “What did your band do?” I ask, and his words weave themselves into a movie in my mind.

The rest of Skunk’s band drove back to Montreal, back to a warm sunlit spring of shows and acid trips. On the West Coast, it rained. The nurses would come into work with damp hair, carrying umbrellas. They kept saying he was almost ready. Almost cooked, like a fat loaf of bread. Yeasty and soft on the inside, blank.

The days crackled by.

When they finally let him out, he was not Philippe anymore. He did not look like Philippe. Under the spell of the pills, he did not feel like Philippe. When he finally made it back to Montreal, people he knew no longer treated him like Philippe. His bandmates shunned him. His mom and stepdad treated him like a criminal. At least on the West Coast, he could hide in Aunt Martine’s basement and be left alone.

I listen to this. I listen to this, and my heart swells with love and indignation until I can’t contain it anymore. When we circle back to the cat aisle, I stop Skunk midsentence. “Here’s our plan.”

“We have a plan?”

“Yes. You’re going to play the victory show with me at the Train Room on Saturday night. Instead of Lukas.