Page 39 of Come Back To Me

“I’m not playing,”I told them. “Everything will go to shit without the sweater.”

Sometimes a man gets carried away, but what does it matter? That’s a man’s business. They convinced me to go on anyway; hard slaps on the back and looks that made me feel like I was overreacting. The sound went out during the first song. It had worked fine during rehearsal, but I didn’t sniff her sweater, so it stopped working. Then during the middle of the show, the stage manager started violently throwing up. She was rushed to the hospital in the middle of our set after passing out and was later diagnosed with the norovirus and severe exhaustion. Again, the sweater. Then Ferdinand broke three guitar strings, and I forgot the lyrics to “My Wife’s Wife.” By the time we left the stage and were back in the tour bus, all the guys were convinced about the sweater.

“No more shows without Dave’s sweater,” Brick said.

He stank of beer and sweat and I didn’t want him anywhere near Yara’s sweater.

“Do we need to sniff it too?” Ferdinand asked.

Ferdinand somewhat understood my grief over Yara—having watched the whole relationship unravel, he never questioned it.

“No one sniffs the fucking sweater but me,” I said.

So the sweater became a sort of Ark of the Covenant for us, with me as its handler and the guys as firm believers in its magic. We didn’t go on tour without it, and it’s on the cover of our second album. Sometimes we tell the story at our shows and the crowd roars. They want to see the sweater. But Yara’s worn grey sweater is only for me. I wonder if she’s ever seen our album cover and recognized it—I wonder that too often actually. The most twisted thing about being an artist comes when you understand you’re creating for one specific person. The painful part is realizing who that person is, and the devastating part is knowing the compulsion will never go away. And they mostly stem from a death: emotional, physical—it doesn’t matter. They die to you and their things become sacred. She doesn’t deserve it; she’s a coward. But trying to control who controls you is like dictating what the weather should do every day.

We moved from Seattle to LA to pursue the music. Ferdinand, Brick, and our newest member, who we call Keyboard Carl. Carl came last but I like him most. He has greasy hair hanging around his face that reminds me of Kurt Cobain’s, and he wears 90’s boy band T-shirts. He gives Lazarus Come Forth a nice solid rock & roll vibe.

The guys found the transition to LA easier than I did. I was leaving behind memories; they were wanting to make new ones. In truth, they’ve always loved the idea of fame harder than I do. I just love the music.

We signed with a small indie label: a husband and a wife named Rita and Benny. They are so passionate about music they do little but eat, sleep, and talk music. They make me feel inferior but well taken care of. Everyone has a nickname in our circle, so we call them The Musics. We stayed in their house when we visited and by the end of the long weekend, they believed in us and we believed in them. I guess the rest is history.

Ferdinand buys his mother a lake house in Chelan, and Brick buys his girlfriend new tits the size of cantaloupes. Keyboard Carl says he’s saving his to buy an island. I think that’s an excellent idea, but there’s no one I’d want to take to the island with me, so I deposit my checks and try to forget that the money is in there. Some guys would use it to ease the pain, I guess, same way as some people use drugs. I want the pain to stay where it is, hard and heavy. It makes me feel close to her. I am inspired, but I am empty. The month after the tour ends, Ferdinand comes to my condo, which I had purchased from my aunt.

“You have a beard now,” he says, scratching his head. “How do you eat pussy with a beard?”

I laugh and we hug in the way men do with a few firm hits onto the back. I’ve always thought it funny that even in hugging, men show aggression. Ferdinand stays with me for the week and before he leaves, he tells me I need to find Yara.

He’s nervous when he tells me. I’ve seen him play to crowds of eighty thousand not even breaking a sweat or vomiting like Brick did before a big show. He sits now on the arm of my sofa, his legs spread. His body is bent so that his elbows are resting on his knees, his hands dangling between them. He looks me in the eye, but he’s having trouble doing so.

“Look,” he says. “I have a friend in London. He came to one of our shows once…”

“Which one?” I ask.

“Red Rocks. He came to Red Rocks and I asked him to keep an eye out for Yara.”

“How does one keep an eye out for someone they’ve never met, in a city with millions of people?”

“I showed him her picture. He writes restaurant reviews for a blog, so I figured if he was frequenting London’s bar scene he was liable to run into her.”

“And did he?”

“No.”

I can’t hide the disappointment from my face. “So why are you telling me this?”

“Because I don’t really give a fuck who you fuck. But, you changed after she left, and fucking all those girls didn’t help you. Neither did the album’s success, man, which I suspect was mostly written about her.”

I pause to think about “Atheists Who Kneel and Pray.” The night I had fallen drunk on a stranger’s lawn somewhere in North Bend, on my way back from a bar. The snow was falling around me, shocking my face and hand with little pinpricks as it landed. I’d stared up at the sky and thought about how I didn’t believe anymore—not in God or his creation. Definitely not in love. She’d come as a thief in the night and taken it all away. How could a person do that? How could they have so much power? And as I lay there, in a drunken state of heartbreak, I’d written the song that had put us on the map.

“You need to find her,” Ferdinand says. “You need closure, man. Or something else. Find her and tell her it was all for her. Whatever you need to do.”

Ferdinand’s mother was a shrink. I take it that he gleaned all his wisdom from her.

I rub my hand across my face. “Okay, man,” I say. “Okay.”

I check my trash for her e-mail. When she used to send me e-mails they went straight to my trash, I never figured out why. I tried to make it so they went to my inbox, but she’d send an e-mail and it would be sorted into the trash. A forewarning perhaps. The e-mail I’m waiting for is the one where she offers me a sincere and heartbroken apology. It gives me a decent reason for walking out on me six weeks after we were married.

I imagine I’ll read her e-mail and go, “Aha, I get it now. Thank you for explaining everything so well that I don’t have to hurt anymore.”

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