He watched me as I popped the videotape into my camera. Watched me with those seemingly ageless eyes of his. Jonathan Mendez—the legend himself—sat before me. Fender Strat resting on one knee, cigarette clipped between two fingers.
I remember him saying he'd quit a year ago. Guess old habits die hard.
We shook hands. I saw that Jonathan Mendez was not as tall as I thought he would be. Standing upright, he barely even came up to my shoulder.
"You ready?"
"Of course. Are you?"
"Ready as hell."
"The cap on your video camera's still on."
I checked, and unscrewed it. "Oh. Yeah. Sorry about that."
Jonathan grinned. Deep creases appeared along the corners of his mouth. I noticed a scar, streaking from his earlobe to the base of his neck. It was the scar he'd gotten at a barfight, during their 1997 European tour. First time mentioned in an issue of Rolling Stone.
Even after their decline, he never passed up the chance to tell that story. So we started with that. He went on to tell me how he "bashed the fucking bastard's head in" after he cut his face. Considering the bastard in question was a two-meter tall Czech, I had my doubts.
Jonathan took a few gulps of water from a bottle, fished out another cigarette from his breast pocket. He began to play the beginning riffs of a song on his guitar.
I recognized the melody—but only vaguely, like an echo in a dream. Cracking my knuckles, I shifted in my seat. For a moment there, I began to think—no, feel—that I was somewhere else entirely. No longer night, but warm sun, and the churning waves...
He stopped as soon as he began, ending the final note with a weary sigh.
"So what's the story behind that?" I asked.
"What makes you think there's even one?"
"All songs need to have a story behind it. Otherwise, they're meaningless." At this point, I realized that I might have said too much.
Jonathan leaned forward and said in a low whisper: "You're not really a reporter, are you?"
"No."
"What's your name, kid?"
"Aidan."
"Well then, Aidan." His tone was abrasive. Mocking. "What are you here for? Be honest."
"I was hoping I could ask you to do a...collaboration. With me and my band."
He began to laugh. "This is a joke, right? You know I don't do that shit anymore."
"Look," I said. "I promise you'll get paid for it. No problem."
"How many records have you put out? Albums?"
"None, yet. Not officially."
"Lives?"
"A few."
"So you're making this offer. You? Some indie nobody who thinks he can just waltz in here and talk to me like he was some label bigshot? Well...forget it."
"One track. That's the deal."
"One track's too much. Besides, it won't do your image any good--partnering with some washed-up musician. I'd go so far as to say I'm actually doing you guys a favor."
"Listen. If you would just consider--"
"Didn't you hear what I said? Forget it." He continued strumming, starting over from the beginning. The air grew heavy. "I should say one thing, though. I admire your tenacity. It's gonna get you places."
I had to try. "This isn't for us, Jon. It's for you."
He laughed again. "Sure, kid. Whatever."
"Look. I know I might come off weird saying this, but...I know one thing for sure. That song you were playing a while ago? It has to be out there. The world needs to hear it."
"Because?"
"Because...it was the last one you've ever composed with Rob Davidson. All these years you've been playing it over and over, like a damned broken record. God knows for how long."
That caught his attention.
"And what the fuck would you know?" he seethed. Years of pent-up rage, despair, all bottled up and hidden away.
"I know that they all tried to lock Rob away, if only to move on. They probably don't even talk about him anymore—not even about better days. It was necessary. I get that. But you never did let go, did you? You never could."
The tiny room began to shrink, compress around me. It was getting harder and harder for me to breathe. I slipped my specs off. My hand was trembling as I wiped them with the cuff of my shirt.
I should be back in the hotel by now, getting my well-deserved rest. But that would be wishful thinking. As soon as my eyes would close, the dreams would come again. If not tonight, then the following night. The anticipation made it worse.
I began to cough. "Excuse me..."
At once I felt the strength of the current dragging me away and under, water filling my lungs...
It's all in your head. All in your fucking head. I repeated that over and over. It worked before, but it wasn't doing me any good now. I balled a fist and pounded it against my chest hard as I could.
"Excuse me."
I gasped for breath, clutching at my shirt. I tasted salt in my mouth. Storm's up ahead. Clouds are turning gray and dark, roiling...
I stood up, and made a mad scramble towards the corner. Fluid bubbled out from my mouth—saltwater, spittle, blood.
"Oh, shit! Shit!"
Jonathan Mendez stopped playing immediately. As the melody tuned away, I felt the constriction in my chest begin to ease. He helped me up to my feet and back onto my chair.
I swore I saw him as he once was then. A young man at the height of his career, eyes ringed with black liner, brow glittering with beads of sweat. "This is it, man. We've made it."
"You alright now, son?"
I blinked. The hanging bulb swung back and forth. A trick of the light, that was all.
I gestured towards the dark stain on my chest. "I'm okay. Just need a fresh change of clothes."
"Listen, I don't know how you knew about that," he said, much calmer now. "No one in the band knew about this song aside from me and Rob."
"Personally I think it's great. Shame you never came around to releasing it."
"I might do that. Once I'm done with it."
"But that's just it. You'll never be done. It's been fifteen years too long now." After a short pause, I told him: "I could help you finish it. I could. Then maybe that'll give you the closure you need. And you can come back."
"Desperate, aren't you? I never met anyone so determined. Except maybe..."
Not surprisingly, Jonathan Mendez burst into a fit of bitter laughter. I knew then how he saw me. Tall, gangly, pale, with a mess of dark hair—but that was where the similarities ended between me and Rob Davidson.
"I appreciate the gesture, really. But, the thing is...neither of us will be able to do it any justice." He picked up the bottle of water at his right side, and took a swallow. "See...uh, Rob. He was one of a kind. The way his mind worked, the way he saw things. Quiet guy, but you got him talking—that's when his brilliance would really shine through. I wasn't the one who knew him the longest, but I felt that out of all of us I was the one who really connected with him. Understood his process. With Rob, it was always about telling a story—just like you said. Though sometimes those songs were a little too much for the censors, and he got a lot of flak for them. And it got to him, sometimes.
"There was this place he whenever he felt he needed to clear his head. He used to call it—"
"The World's End," I finished.
"Yup. That's what he called it," Jonathan Mendez said. "How on earth did you—?"
"He'd...mentioned it somewhere," I lied.
The first ever dream I had, had nothing to do with the waves or the storm. Instead there was only me, standing alone in a vast expanse of dry grass. The expanse was littered with headless statues, women with no hands, stone limbs strewn about randomly. And the silence there was so heavy, it was so easy to drown in a metaphorical sea of thoughts, of ideas.
I wrote the lyrics to a song after that. I finished it in one afternoon as I holed up in my flat. I wrote them down at the back of an envelope and left it stowed away in a drawer. Forgotten.
I should take it out. God knows it might be worth something.
"I went with him there. There is where we usually got high, like nobody cared. This was in the earliest days of the band. We never imagined we'd get so big. Heck, we never even imagined leaving town. Not that it really seemed to matter to him. For Rob, the most important part was getting his thoughts out there. That was enough for him to light up. The first time we heard our single play on the FM station, he was as excited as a kid in a toy store. That guy you see in the cover of those music magazines, on the posters? With the black leather and the spiky hair? That wasn't all that Rob was. But that was the image they built up for him. A modern Orpheus, if you may. That was what got the chicks quivering in their skirts." He guffawed. "You can imagine them all so disappointed once they finally got to know him. They all ended up sleeping with me after a night or two. Not that I had any complaints about that."
"No. You wouldn't," I said, managing a small smile.
"It wasn't just the women. I got carried away by a lot of things. I can't lie—the fame did get to me at one point. You'd understand—once you get to be in our shoes. Soon, maybe?"
"That's taking it too far ahead, don't you think?"
"Ambition. You need a healthy dose of it, if you want to succeed," Jonathan Mendez said with a shrug. "Rob didn't, certainly. Somehow, it did eventually take a toll on him. I think that he just woke up one day and just decided that he didn't know where he was going—that he was just, you know, drifting. The further we got from our roots, the more agonizing it got for him. He left the ivory tower, but never let it out of his sight."
How do you suppose we got here? A question carried in the silence of the World's End. A question that always came from a voice just over my shoulder.
I don't know. I told it. Does it really matter?
But of course it does. It should. You'll understand once everything comes full circle.
"For the record," I told Jonathan Mendez then. "I don't think any of it was your fault."
"Yeah. Not that it's any more reassuring, coming from you. That's what everyone says," Jonathan Mendez said. "I was the last person he got to see before he vanished. I remembered him being so excited again, like he hadn't been in years. Few months before that he was already growing distant. But no one really seemed to care. Ask anyone and they'll tell you that those were some of the best lyrics that he ever wrote in his entire career. You'd never guess that things weren't so great with him.
"But like I said—I knew Rob well. I had a hunch, and it turned out that hunch wasn't wrong. Truth is, I think the other guys suspected it, too. Just that they ignored it. They had their reasons, I'm sure, but to me they're just bullshit.
"One day, I tried to cheer him up. Said, 'You really outdid yourself, man. We're fucking legends. Twenty years from now, they'll still be playing our stuff over the airwaves.'
" 'I'd like to think so, yeah,' he said. I remembered he smiled then. It was the first time he'd smiled in ages.
"I continued: 'Maybe some five-thousand years from now, they'd still exist in one form or another—maybe like a lullaby, or a hymn to some strange pagan god. Now wouldn't that be a real riot?'
"Then he hung his head, and this is what he said: 'Guess it doesn't matter either way. Maybe that's how we'd get to live on. In the things we leave behind.'
"Since then, I kept picturing him in the middle of that open field, walking further and further away into the distance. I could have pulled him back, but I didn't. I let him slip away. I let him give into his madness. It doesn't matter how you spin it—you can't convince me that it wasn't my fault."
At this point, Jonathan seemed to drift off. His eyes took on a faraway gaze. The silence grew between us, heavier with each second that passed. It was interrupted only by a knock on the metal door. So much for a quiet place where we wouldn't be bothered, I thought.
"What is it now?" Jonathan Mendez called out.
"Someone's on the line for you, Mister Mendez," I heard a woman's voice say.
"Oh God, I almost forgot." He rose and then stretched a little bit. He turned to me. "Could you give me a sec?"
"Sure, man."
He was off, leaving the guitar resting against his seat. I walked over to where Jonathan Mendez had been sitting. The guitar's surface glistened, oily-black under the ghostly light. I ran my finger lightly against the strings.
"It's served its purpose. But some reason I can't get rid of it so easily."
Jonathan had returned. His hands were on his hips. "Go ahead. Give it a strum," he said with a nod.
"I'm terrible at guitar," I told him.
"Is that so? Yeah, the way you said it just now...you almost sound like—" Jonathan sighed, a deep, resigned sigh. He rubbed his right eye. "Sheesh, just now I thought for a second that—never mind. Maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part. About this track right here...he planned it out to be the song to spearhead his solo album. He was dead set on it being his magnum opus. It'd shake the foundations of the industry, he said. Shame all that never saw the light of day. Shake the foundations, sure. What a dream that was."
The room got quiet again. The soft ticking of my wristwatch turned into a steady pounding in my head.
It's useless. It isn't done. It won't ever be done.
My eyes snapped open.
"It's getting late. You're already nodding off, kid," said Jonathan Mendez. "I'm sorry. Guess I wasted your time."
"It's fine. I understand."
"So we're cool, then?"
"I suppose so. Though...there's something I've been meaning to ask. Just before I go. Something entirely unrelated."
"Be my guest."
"Do you ever wonder how you got here? And can you honestly say it was worth it?' I retracted a little, not knowing how Jonathan would respond to my question. "I mean, in the grander scheme of things?"
"It was," said Jonathan Mendez. "It definitely was. But not really in the way you'd think. It's a satisfaction like getting a weight off of your chest. This clamoring voice that won't leave you alone until you give it what it wants. And about the grander scheme of things—I guess it really doesn't matter to me. In a way, maybe Rob did have a point. I think it's fair to say that even when everything's gone to pass, we still leave traces of us behind. And that way, we're never really forgotten."
"I see. Thanks. That's all I needed to hear." My gaze drifted to the Fender Strat, still resting against his chair. "Say, mate," I started. "Maybe you'd like to try and give that baby another go, what do you say?"
"Nah. I'm good. I'm good."
"Well," I said. "It's been very nice knowing you, Jon."
"Nice knowing you too, kid. And take care. Sorry I disappointed you."
"It's all right," I told him. "I'm sure we'll find somebody else."
I gathered my things and thoughts, made my way to the door. "Ah. Fuck it," he murmured, under his breath. He grabbed the guitar by the neck, and propped it up. "One last time. Better make it count," he said, mostly to himself again. He looked up at me. "You still leaving?"
I shrugged. "Guess I could stick around for a bit."
"You sure about that, kid?"
"Yeah. Sure as hell."
Despite the tremor in his wrist, and an initial hesitation, Jonathan began to play. I swore I saw Rob in the corner of that dusty office room, looking on. I recognized him as easily I would an old friend. His was the same face plastered all over back issues and faded vintage shirts. But the world had moved on after Rob Davidson. I figured that after this night was over, Jonathan Mendez would have done so as well.
I never encountered Jonathan Mendez again after that meeting. We found someone else willing to collaborate—a music school alum with a famous last name. Good enough, but I always felt that there was something lacking. In the end, it didn't work out, either.
After another rehearsal, I headed off home. Two beers, and after I would call it a night. My thoughts drifted to the envelope I had stashed in my drawer. I considered getting rid of it. It made no sense to keep it now. There were some stories never meant to be told. And songs never meant to be sung.
I noticed a package resting at the foot of my door when I arrived home. Curious, I bent down and picked it up.
In it was a thumb drive, containing a single, untitled track.
I felt a stab of guilt, realizing that Jonathan Mendez had given it away to me for free. But all that went away soon as the music filled the silence. The sound was nostalgic—a throwback to the days of Rob Davidson and the band. I took out the envelope. My eyes focused on the words written there, on what they meant and what they didn't mean.
I scribbled more words across the blank space at the middle of the paper. I had to continue—it was the only way to silence that ache. Satisfy the pull, so to speak.
It finally all came together. Was then that I understood what it was all about.
It was the way Jonathan wanted it to be. Just the same, it was the way Rob Davidson needed it to be. The track stopped, and started again on a loop.
And that night, instead of the vast, sweeping plain of the World's End, I saw instead a roaring crowd that numbered thousands.
There I stood, head and shoulders above them.
Just like it was meant to be.