Wild Awake

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. It’ll be your big comeback. We have five days to write all our songs.”
    Skunk is quiet, and for a moment I think he’s going to protest. But he’s nodding. Skunk is nodding. He agrees with the plan. “What will our band name be?” he says.
    I pull the string on the electric ferret. It leaps out of my hands and convulses diabolically on the floor. We gaze at it, this convulsing ferret, like a sign from the gods. I grip Skunk’s arm and whisper in his ear.
    “Daffodiliad,” I say.
    After the Army & Navy, we decide we desperately need coffee, so we head down to the Waves on Main Street, where a woman in a purple jacket standing in front of us in line takes a skinny, practically hairless white dog out of her bag, roots around in the bag for her cell phone, puts the unresisting animal back in, and zips it up. The lights behind the counter undulate in a sort of faded neon slurry. We order the biggest coffees we can get.
    I talk to Skunk about our new band, Daffodiliad. I tell him exactly how it will go. The Train Room will see that Phil Coswell has not slunk off into the dark. He is not a monster. He is still as ferociously talented as ever, and as gentle. Our music will be soft, intellectual, peculiar, and lovely. It will hit the airwaves all over the country, and it will be specially engineered to make the other members of Birdseye go insane. We will go on tour in Skunk’s van, or perhaps riding our bicycles, pulling our instruments behind us on little red carts. We will play to packed venues all over North America, then put our bicycles on a plane and tour Europe.
    We must do all these things. We must do all these things, and we must make love frantically at every possible opportunity.
    “Okay, Skunk?”
    “Okay.”
    We collect our bikes from the place where we locked them and ride back to Skunk’s house. While we’re putting our bikes in the shed, laughing and snatching the blossoms out of one another’s hair, a car door slams in the alleyway, and Skunk’s aunt comes crunching across the gravel, carrying a bag of groceries. I wave at her.
    “Hi, Martine.”
    When she sees us, she stops.
    “Philippe. Dr. Winterson called. You missed your appointment today.”
    Skunk slowly leans his bike against the shed wall.
    “I’m sorry, tante Martine . I can’t believe I forgot. I started taking the pills again. I’ve been taking them every night.”
    Her face doesn’t soften. She jerks her head at the door.
    “Come with me, Philippe. Your uncle and I want to talk to you.”
    She glares at me, glares at Skunk, crosses the courtyard, and goes inside.

chapter forty
    That night, Skunk calls to say that Martine is thisclose to kicking him out. He has been Reckless and Noncompliant, and no amount of promises to take his meds will do. From now on, Skunk has to check in with her every morning at six thirty and every night at ten. She’s going to watch him take his meds just like with the patients at the hospital.
    There are to be no visitors.
    And no midnight bike rides.
    And no afternoon omelets when she’s out of the house.
    When Skunk comes over the next day, we have a grim conference about how best to deal with these constraints.
    We decide that Skunk will come over before noon every day, and we’ll play music until 9:24. He’ll bike home in time