He shrugged. "Okay, I guess. Let's give it a shot. Maybe keyboards are what we need."
Or maybe I am, I thought, but out loud I just told him my buzzer number, pointing across the street. "Oh, and two more questions, Moz."
"Sure?"
"One: do you guys really play death-metal cypherfunk?"
He smiled. "Don't worry. That was hypothetical death-metal cypherfunk."
"Phew," I said, trying not to notice how that little smile had made him even cuter. Now that we were going to jam together, it didn't pay to notice things like that. "Question two: does your half a band have a name?"
He shook his head. "Nope."
"No problem," I said. "That'll be the easy part."
3. POISONBLACK
- MOZ-
The next day, Zahler and I saw our first black water.
We'd just met outside my building, on our way to Pearl's. A gang of kids across the street was gathered around a fire hydrant, prying at it with a two-foot wrench, hoping to get some relief from the early afternoon heat. Zahler stopped to watch, like he always did when kids were doing anything more or less illegal.
"Check it out!" He grinned, pointing at a convertible coming down the street. If the hydrant erupted in the next ten seconds, the unwitting driver was going to get soaked.
"Watch your guitar," I said. We were twenty feet away, but you never knew how much pressure was lurking in a hydrant on a hot summer day.
"It's protected, Moz," he said, but he stood the instrument case upright behind himself. I felt empty-handed, headed to a jam session with nothing but a few guitar picks in my pocket. My fingers were itching to play their first notes on the Strat.
We were sort of late, but the car was a BMW, its driver in a suit and tie and talking on his cell phone. Back when Zahler and I had been little, soaking a guy like that would have been worth about ten thousand fire-hydrant points. We could spare ten seconds.
But the kids were still fiddling as the convertible passed.
"Incompetent little twerps." Zahler sighed. "Should we give them a hand?"
"It's already after two." I turned and headed up the street.
But as I walked I heard the cries behind us change from squeals of excitement to shrieks of fear.
We spun around. The hydrant was spraying black water in all directions, covering the kids with a sticky, shimmering coat. A thick, dark mist rose into the air, breaking the sunlight into a gleaming spectrum, like a rainbow on an oil slick. The screaming kids were stumbling back, bare skin glistening with the stuff. A couple of the little ones just stood in the torrent, crying.
"What the hell?" Zahler whispered.
I took a step forward, but the smell - earthy and fetid and rotten - forced me to a halt. The dark cloud was still rising up between the buildings, roiling like smoke overhead, and the wind was shifting toward us. Tiny black dots began to spatter the street, closer and closer, like a sudden summer rain starting up. Zahler and I backed away, staring down at the pavement. The drops were as luminous as tiny black pearls.
The hydrant seemed to cough once, the gush of black water sputtering, and then the water turned clear. Above us, the cloud was already dissolving, turning into nothing more than a shadowy haze across the sky.
I knelt on the sidewalk, peering down at one of the black drops. It glimmered unsteadily for a moment, reflecting sunlight as the shadow from the cloud overhead faded. And then it boiled away before my eyes.
"What the hell was that, Moz?"
"I don't know. Maybe somebody's heating oil leaked into the pipes?" I shook my head.
The kids were staring at the hydrant warily, half afraid the water would turn black again, but also eager to wash themselves. A few stepped forward, and the oily stuff seemed to slide from their skin, dark stains disappearing from their soaked shorts and T-shirts.
A minute later they were all playing in the spray, like nothing weird had happened.
"Didn't look like any oil I've ever seen," Zahler said.
"Yeah. Probably just old water in the hydrant," I said, not wanting to think about it. It had disappeared so quickly, I could almost imagine it hadn't happened at all. "Or something like that. Come on, we're late."
Pearl's room looked like a recording studio had mated with a junkyard, then exploded.
The walls were lined with egg cartons, the big twelve-by-twelve ones that you see stacked outside restaurants. Sinuous hills rose between the egg-shaped valleys, curving like the sound waves they gobbled.
"Whoa, you've got a ton of gear!" Zahler exclaimed. His voice was echoless, rebounding from the walls with less bounce than a dead cat.
I'd always told Zahler that we could soundproof his room this way so that his parents would stop yelling at us to turn it down. But we'd never had enough motivation to make it happen. Or enough egg cartons.
The floor was covered with spare cables, effects boxes, all the usual fire hazards - we stepped lightly over the spaghetti-junctions of power strips, dozens of adapters squeezed into them, all labeled to show what was plugged in where. Two racks of electronics towered at one end of the room, the cables gathered with twist-ties. The modules were organized neatly into tribes: black and buttonless digital units; flickering arpeggiators; a few dinosaur synths with analog dials and needles, like old science-fiction movie props ready for takeoff.
Zahler was looking around nervously, probably wondering if his cheap little electric was going to get squashed under all that gear. I was wondering why Pearl, if she owned all this keyboard stuff, had risked falling toaster ovens just to save a vintage guitar.
"Where do you sleep?" Zahler asked. The bed was covered with scattered CDs, more cables, and a few harmonicas and hand drums.
"The guest room, mostly," Pearl said proudly. "I suffer for my art."
Zahler laughed but rolled me a look. Pearl wasn't exactly suffering. She hadn't showed us all of her mom's apartment, but what we'd seen was already bigger than his parents' and mine put together, the walls crowded with paintings and glass cases full of stuff from all over the world. Stairs led to more floors above, and we'd passed a pair of armed security guards down in the lobby. Pearl had probably seen the Taj Mahal in person.
So why had she contemplated helping herself to the Strat, when she could obviously afford to buy one of her own?
Maybe she was used to everything falling from the sky. She'd looked pretty annoyed when we weren't on time, like this was a job interview or something.