Descriptions of Wicked Girls' Bedrooms

Orcrist is not factual. This is something she knew. But for a moment, she lets herself dream. The house lights darken. Flickers, only: Lynchian glimmers. A fire, kindled in an iron brazier; thrumming bass notes from full Marshall stacks that the sun alone powers. Then lights: a full band, Iago and his nebulous musical brothers—Glamdring, Aragorn, Narsil, Olorin—all filth and eschatological, final. Iago wears a stag’s skull on his brow, white lights animating his irises. The crowd, hundreds somehow fitting in this space, stands mesmerized, hushed. Then cheers as the band begins: shreds of guitar, grandeur and synthesizer, allegiances sworn immediately: a new congregation: the sorceress rising from their cloud of music and incense to conquer the planet. All her aims fulfilled.

The band is looking between you and Tom. Greg shuffles his feet.

Excuse me, he says. —He looks at Tom. —Is it getting close to lunch? Maybe we should all take a break and cool down.

You are not hungry at all, your fingers tapping on the console. After a moment, you adjust the monitors to fill the recording booth with the Midnight Automotive backing track and start it playing. Behind soundproof glass, you can only imagine it filling the room, rising up in gelatinous ripples from the dry carpet, a rushing river of slime that drowns your family out. They stare at you, confused, as you let the track play to its conclusion and fade; you try to stare at a place somewhere between all of them so as not to single anyone out.

This is gonna be such a good album, you say. People’re gonna be so into this album. You can’t even realize it. This album’s gonna change everything. Every human life. Women and men. I give it maybe five years before, you know, the ideas really filter out to everywhere in the country, and we get the whole big problem of translating it. Maybe we oughta be thinking about that already. That’s maybe a big blind spot in our, uh, conception of this matter.

What’re we going to do to follow this up? Clyde asks. Shucking off his seatbelt, he squats like a hunchback on top of the bucket seat as best as he can under the convertible top. —It’s gotta be something better than this one.

Why does it always have to be better, Opal says. —Why does it always have to be more.

An album about space, see, Clyde says. —You’ve got sun and you’ve got moon already. Space is the only place left to go.

We already did Space-Girls, you say. —I don’t want to repeat ground.

But you won’t be repeating ground, because with this space album, you’ll be recording a track on the actual moon, Clyde says. —I’m joking, but I’m not. The government’s all into going there anyway, right? And I haven’t formally run numbers on this, but after a year or so of the album being out, we can probably massage the figures enough to justify booking the whole like extended band with round-trip tickets.

You drive, squinting; you are thinking about how the moon has low atmosphere, and what this will mean in terms of microphone pickups or instrumental tone. How do you tune a guitar to play in a low-gravity medium? You twist the problem around in your mind but can’t figure out whether the strings should be tighter or looser, so you open up the question to Clyde and Opal, discussion of which kills the next quarter hour.

I dunno, you finally say. —We can’t get too carried away with one idea. I’m thinking instead we go smaller. Like an album that’s entirely about a flower or a bug or a tree. But like, the perfect album about a bug, say. Like there’s a song about the thorax and a song about how the wings work, and like what it means to only live for an hour and to mostly need to eat during that time. Every fact included and musically correct. I feel like this is where the teen market is going.

Yeah but can you write a whole album about like bug parts, Clyde asks.

I can write an album about anything, you tell him. —It just has to be spiritual.

On the way out of the house after the day’s writing session, you stop to talk to Clyde.

Hey uh Clyde, I’s thinking, you say. —The guys in the band said we’d need a new manager, since I’m no good at it. You’ve got a pretty nice house here. You’ve got your head on pretty straight about money. You want to be our new manager?

I’ve been waiting my entire life for someone to ask me that question, says Clyde.

You know in horror movies, you say, —how like if a dracula or an alien or something bites you, like you become a dracula or an alien? Like do you think the same kinda thing could happen if the mirror pieces work their way up my skin? Do I just become a mirror?

I don’t think it could happen, Clyde confides, after consideration. —I mean you should wash your hand so it doesn’t get an infection.