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“Of course. It wouldn’t be fair if we sung all of mine, now, would it?”
Legendary recording artist Priscilla Lamb had, for some reason, learned one of my songs and invited me here to sing it with her. I was now fully convinced I was hallucinating. Maybe Priscilla had in fact filled the booth with water and sharks and piranhas and such, and I’d passed out while drowning into this weird fantasy land where she was starting to play the opening bars ofmy song.
She stopped. “Oh, you take the lead on this one, of course. I’ll harmonize.”
I blinked and nodded, stupefied. But as she started up again on the opening bars of my song, I felt the peace settle upon me that always did when one of my songs was played. Usually, it was me playing it. But it was a nice experience to not have to think about the guitar, to instead just get ready to sing the vocal part, to be able to focus all my attention on just one instrument: my voice.
I sung. And Priscilla played. And Priscilla sung, too, heart-wrenching harmonies that blended perfectly and contrasted perfectly with my usual vocals to the song. It gave it even more resonance than it usually did. This was a song close to my heart, about the loss of my mother, though it used enough metaphors that it wasn’t so obviously shmaltzy.
At last, my vocals finished, and it only remained for Priscilla to play out the rest of the song. I found I was shaking, overcome with the situation.
When Priscilla finished, she turned to me and tilted her head to one side. “My dear. Are you crying?”
For some reason, I didn’t feel like hiding the fact that I was crying from her. I simply nodded one moment, and the next moment I was being pulled into her warm embrace. Those long fingernails curled around my shoulders, but in a way that felt warm and protective, and not menacing.
She was nothing like my own mother, who had died young, on the surface. But my mom had been a musician and an artist, and in her own way, she had disappeared mysteriously. One day she had gone climbing in the mountains and hadn’t come back.
For years, I’d made up stories about how she was still out there: she’d been picked up by a hot air balloon, she’d fallen through a portal into another dimension, she was living with a secret tribe in the caves.
Eventually I accepted that she was gone, that she was dead. That it was just me and my dad, and that was how it always would be.
Priscilla was nothing at all like my mother. Except, in that moment, letting myself cry in her arms, I felt something oddly comforting – maternal, I suppose – emanating from her. She had me entirely under her spell.
Before I left, she said, as if guessing at what I was thinking: “I won’t tell Apollo about this. Don’t worry your little head.”
Sylvester
My eyes felt like they were gonna pop out of my head. “You sung with her?”
“Yes. Why is that the part you’re focusing in on?” Luna seemed somewhat defensive about the odd circumstances under which she’d ended up singing with a legendary missing recording artist in a recording booth at the topmost floor of my arch nemesis’s office building.
It was, of course, categorically insane that that had happened. For some reason, though, Luna was offended by my perplexed exclamations. I didn’t want to upset her, even if I was confused, so I tried to tone it down. “Okay, sorry for focusing on that part. You wanted to tell me about... the part where you heard Apollo calling Priscillamother?”
Luna nodded, exasperated. “Yes. That’s what I’ve been looking for, isn’t it? A clue for you about the whole... Apollo thing?”
“Yes. Yes, of course. That is quite odd, considering we tested their DNA and it came back as a negative match.”
“Is there a chance there wasn’t enough of her DNA on that tissue?”
I shook my head. “No. It would have come back ‘inconclusive’ if that were the case. No, there was enough there to tell with absolute certainty that those two are not related.”
“Okay, so, if they’re not related by blood... perhaps she’s his adoptive mother?”
Something wasn’t adding up. “I don’t know... are you sure he wasn’t saying, like,motherfucker, or saying it in a sarcastic way, y’know?”
Luna shook her head. “No. Apollo’s a lot of things, but he’s hardly subtle. If he was being sarcastic I’m sure I’d have been able to tell. But you can listen in for yourself.” She held up a small device – the same one she used to record our meetings – and pressed play.
There was a muffled scuffling sound for a moment, presumably of Luna snatching the recording device, and then two voices faded in.
Apollo’s irritating, smug voice was first. “I don’t think that’s a good idea...Mother, you keep saying...shouldn’t make hasty decisions here...”
And then laughter from a deep, feminine voice, and: “My darling boy...trust your Mother, hmm?...like the good old days...knows best, and I always do...”
Luna clicked the recording off. “I hoped the device would have heard more than I did. But that’s about all I heard, too. I don’t know what they were discussing. But they do seem to have some kind of familial relationship.”
I was still staring at the recording device. “You’re a menace with that thing, huh.” My voice was soft and contemplative. I was thinking over everything, trying to figure out what we were missing.
I wasn’t smart enough to put the puzzle pieces together. But if any group of people could, it would be my brothers – the Brocks that weren’t my nemeses.
