She shrugged. "It's a little bit trying-too-hard; the word crazy, I mean. Like in Catch-22. Anyone who tells you they're crazy really isn't. They're just faking, or they wouldn't know they were crazy."
"Okay." I frowned, remembering why hanging out with Ellen could be a drag sometimes. She had a tendency toward nonenthusiasm.
But then she smiled. "Don't worry, Pearl. You'll think of something. You playing guitar for them?"
"No, keyboards. We've got one too many guitarists already."
"Too bad." She pulled up an acoustic guitar case from the floor, sat it in the chair next to her. "Wouldn't mind being in a band."
I stared at the guitar. "What are you doing with that?"
She shrugged. "Gave up the cello."
"What? But you were first chair last year!"
"Yeah, but cellos..." A long sigh. "They take too much infrastructure."
"They do what?"
She sighed, rearranging the dishes on her tray as she spoke. "They need infrastructure. Most of the great cello works are written for orchestra. That's almost a hundred musicians right there, plus all the craftsmen to build the instruments and maintain them and enough people to build a concert hall. And to pay for that, you're talking about thousands of customers buying tickets every year, rich donors and government grants... That's why only really big cities have orchestras."
"Um, Ellen? You live in a really big city. You're not planning to move to Alaska or something, are you?"
She shook her head. "No. But what if big cities don't work anymore? What if you can't stick that many people together without it falling apart? What if..." Ellen's voice faded as she looked around the cafeteria once more.
I followed her gaze. The place still was only two-thirds full, with entire tables vacant and no line at all for food. It was like nobody had been scheduled for A-lunch.
It was starting to freak me out. Where the hell was everyone?
"What if the time for orchestras is over, Pearl?"
I let out a snort. "There've been orchestras for centuries. They're part of... I don't know, civilization."
"Yeah, civilization. That's the whole problem..." She touched the neck of the guitar case softly. "I was so sick of carrying that big cello around, like some dead body in a coffin. I just wanted something simple. Something I could play by the campfire, whether or not there's any civilization around."
A weird tingle went down my spine. "What happened to you this summer, Ellen?"
She looked up at me and, after a long pause, said, "My dad went away."
"Oh. Crap." I swallowed, remembering when my parents had divorced. "I'm really sorry. Like... he left your mom?"
Ellen shook her head. "Not right away. You see, someone bit him on the subway, and he... got different."
"Bit him?" I thought of the rumors I'd heard, that some kind of rabies was spreading from the rats - that you could see people like Min on the streets now, hungry and wearing dark glasses.
She nodded, still stroking the guitar case's neck. "At least I'm still on a full scholarship. So I can switch to guitar before - "
"But you're a great cellist. You can't give up on civilization yet. I mean, New York City's still around."
She nodded. "Mostly. There are still concerts and classes and baseball games going on. But it's kind of like the Titanic: there's really only enough lifeboats for the first-class passengers." She scanned the room. "So when I see people not showing up, I sort of wonder if those passengers are already leaving. And then the floor's going to start tilting, the deck chairs sliding past."
"Um... the what?"
Ellen turned to me with narrowed eyes. "Here's the thing, Pearl. I bet your friends are already off in Switzerland, or someplace like that."
I shrugged. "They mostly just graduated."
"I bet they're in Switzerland anyway. Most people who can afford it are already gone. But my friends..." She shook her head, then shrugged. "They don't have drivers or bodyguards, and they have to ride the subway to school. So they're in hiding, sort of."
"You're here."
"Only reason is that we live around the corner. I don't have to ride the subway. Plus..." She smiled, touching the case in the seat next to her. "I really want to learn to play guitar."
We talked more - about her father, about all the stuff we'd seen that summer. But my mind kept wandering to the band.
Listening to Ellen, it had occurred to me that bands like ours needed a lot of infrastructure too, as much as any symphony orchestra. To do what we did, we needed electronic instruments and microphones, mixing boards and echo boxes and stacks of amplifiers. We needed night-clubs, recording studios, record companies, cable channels that showed music videos, and fans who had CD players and electricity at home.
Crap, we needed civilization.
I couldn't exactly see Moz and Min jamming around a campfire, after all.
What if Luz's fairy tales were true, then, and some big struggle was coming? And what if Ellen Bromowitz had it right, and the time for orchestras was over? What if the illness that had ripped apart Nervous System was going to bring down the infrastructure that made having our kind of band even possible?
I straightened up in my chair. It was time to get moving. I had to quit patting myself on the back just because Moz was happy and Minerva was relatively noncrazy and rehearsals were going well.
We needed to become world-famous soon, while there was still that kind of world to be famous in.
14. REPLACEMENTS
- ZAHLER-
We churned out one fawesome tune after another - me, Moz, and Pearl, meeting two or three times a week at her place. After we'd used up all our old riffs, we started basing stuff on Pearl's loopy samples, and the Mosquito didn't even buzz about it. Ever since the band had gotten real - with a drummer, a singer, even separate amps for Moz and me - he'd finally realized that this wasn't a competition.
What he hadn't realized was how hot Pearl was or that she had a major crush on him.
All I could do was shake my head about that last part. The problem for Pearl was, she'd really given Moz something. She'd stripped away his shell, had shown him a way to get everything he really wanted, had helped him find a focus that he'd been too lame to discover for himself.