“What’s the plan for this week?” Anya asks, half-mumbling. “Marina needs Tuesday off. The school is closed or something and she needs to be home for her granddaughter. Who gets PJ?”
“We can keep him here with us,” Zac says, without so much as a glance at Cal, and the comment feels like an execution-day reprieve. “We’ll be in the studio, but God knows we’re barely making progress as it is, so what’s the addition of a bouncing baby boy?”
Anya frowns. “Seriously? Still no progress? You two have been locked up in there for weeks. What the hell is going so wrong?”
Zac makes a face—eyebrows raised, judgment implicit—that means it’s not his fault. And yes, Cal knows this is on him, but he doesn’t know what to do about it. He searches for words and comes up with nothing at all.
“What’s it about?” Anya asks. “Zac said that you’re working on a concept album, and God knows I’ve heard him singing enough lyrics over the last few months, but it’s all sort of disjointed in my head.”
“Oh. It’s about...well. It’s about my, uh...” Cal still can’t help feeling embarrassed talking about it. “It’s about my alcoholism.”
Zac blinks. “No, it’s not.”
Cal blinks back. “Yes, it is.”
Zac’s quiet a moment, thinking, and then he says, more strongly, “No, it’s not. You asshole. Quit fucking with me.”
“I’m not. It’s about my drinking,” Cal repeats, because—well. It is.
“It’s about suicide. That line in track eleven. ‘Giving up who you used to see, grieving for what used to be, every day, every way, putting a bullet in me’...it’s about suicide, dude. The whole album is about trauma and struggle, and how it’s futile to fight it. He wants to kill himself, and then even when he decides not to, he dies anyway. It’s about how all the good shit ends and you can’t fix it and there’s no point in trying.”
“That’s—” Cal starts, and then he stops so short it’s like he ran into a train. That’s what it feels like, he almost said, but that would freak them out. It’s a concept album. A fictional narrative. It’s not a perfect parallel. It’s not meant to be. Obviously he’s not suicidal or anything, and it’s at least as much about killing his addiction as it is about the futility of living through struggle. He knows his sobriety is important, and he values it, but it’s exhausting and sometimes—like when he nearly relapses after eight years—it does feel pretty damn futile. It’s hard not to feel like killing alcohol is an impossible task, like all his effort to stay sober might end with him losing in the end anyway.
He can’t say that though, because he doesn’t want to spend an hour convincing them that it’s—that it was inspired by what it feels like, not what it is.
“It sounds rather bleak,” Anya says, when Cal falls silent.
“That’s because it is,” Zac tells her. “It’s the most depressing thing he’s ever written. There’s a reason neither one of us can stand to work on it. Well, him. I’m mostly tired of his whining.”
“I’m not whining,” Cal says, habitual by now, because he spends a lot of time whining in the studio and then having to deny it when Zac calls him out for it.
“This seems like the sort of thing you two probably should’ve talked about before now,” Anya says, because she doesn’t have a whole lot of patience for people being stupid. It makes Cal feel sheepish, but not so much so that he can’t put Zac’s fair share of the weight on him.
“Probably Zac should pay more attention to what I’m writing instead of just trying to figure out how to sing it,” Cal says.
“I pay attention, asshole. It’s about suicide.”
Cal sighs. “Zac—”
Zac recites, “‘Carving you out of my skin, again and again, can’t bear to see, bury this sin under the red river tree, carve it out under this red bleeding tree, oh my bottle is a blade, in this shadow, in this shade...’”
Cal wants to tell him to shut up. He’s embarrassed to have Anya hear such terrible lyrics. They sound especially bad without the music to bolster them.
Zac pauses, squints. “Are you talking to your alcoholism there? You’re, like, burying your addiction?”
Cal laughs quietly. “That was the general idea.”
“Shit. I really don’t pay attention to what you’re doing.” Zac shakes his head, mouth moving though he doesn’t speak anymore, obviously running the lyrics over again in his mind, assuming that the you in the song is alcohol this time.
“The lyrics are bad,” Cal admits. “I should start over on that last—”
Zac stabs a finger at him. “I will kill you. Seriously. I will leave your body in a ditch. We’re not changing them again. They’re good enough.”
Cal holds his hands up defensively, a little irritated. “Fine. I’ll leave them alone. All right? We’ll let it be confusing and depressing and garbage. Does that work for you?”
“Ha fucking ha,” Zac mutters.
Anya pulls her foot away, sits up straight, and then pats her thigh. “Your turn.”
He frowns. “For what?”
Zac snorts, but Anya reaches over and grabs Cal’s jeans leg, tugging until he lifts it. He’s not expecting it when Anya digs her thumbs into his arch. He’s surprised enough that at first he assumes it hurts, and he jerks away before the sensations actually reach his brain and register as pleasure. A bone-melting, warm pleasure, and thankfully Anya rolls her eyes and pulls his foot back and resumes rubbing.
Cal sighs and slumps back on the sofa. Her hands. Her hands. She rubs for a long while, humming to herself, teasing out every ache that’s ever existed in his foot and eradicating them ruthlessly with strong, relaxing touches. Zac turns the TV off and then doesn’t speak again, and it’s so quiet in the room except for her soft, tuneless humming, so soft and nice, that Cal starts to feel seriously sleepy. He almost doesn’t register her words when she asks, “Cal, can I ask why the album ends on such a dark note?”
He tries to make his brain work. It’s seriously impossible. His...his everything has turned into molten goo. “Uh. Because. That’s how it ends.”
“But why?”
He can’t think. “Because that’s what it feels like, I guess.”
Zac makes a small noise behind him, and Cal starts to surface, but Anya’s hands double down and he finds himself moaning instead. He’d be embarrassed, but he can’t find the energy. Anya makes a gentle shushing sound, but he’s not sure if it’s to him or Zac and he’s too relaxed to figure it out.