Part 33: Xander
The chance that Xander and Bobby would call each other at the exact same moment was very slim, but it did happen. Fortunately, though, when each of them heard the busy tone and resolved to call back right away, there was enough variance in the speeds of their respective right-aways that Xander was just about to hit the green phone-shaped button when he heard his ringtone blaring.
“What the hell?” he snapped at Bobby.
“Right?” Bobby answered. “I mean, it’s not a bad idea by any means, we can definitely make it work, it’ll be great for hype . . “
“Hype? That’s what this is about to you?”
“Sure, of course, it’s also a great artistic and literary accomplishment and a genius solution to our dilemma,” Bobby said, rather dismissively.
Xander decided to ignore the self-praise. “Kind of a blindside, though, don’t you think?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I was thinking.” Bobby sounded annoyed. (Because Xander hadn’t praised his writing? Even he couldn't be that shallow.) “I mean, I know you’re trying to be an artist now, but that doesn’t mean. . ."
“So you thought I needed some help getting inspired, is that it?”
“Well, if that's what I was doing, then clearly it worked.”
“Yeah? What’s the evidence of that?”
“The story is the evidence,” Bobby said impatiently. A meaningless platitude of an answer. “Of course, I’m sure you realize this is only the beginning and there will still have to be an album and such, but—”
“What if I don’t want to write a goddamn concept album about a Soviet prison camp?” Xander felt, even more than usual, that he was being treated like a pawn
“Well I guess you should have thought of that before. They’re not going to be satisfied without an album. Don’t let this be your Chinese Democracy or your Sufjan Stevens yeah-I’m-gonna-make-an-album-for-every-state. Plus, yeah I know you hate to hear this, but we’ve got to have some way of making money here, still got to keep the lights on somehow, you know."
Xander was still stuck at the beginning of this tirade; the rest was pop-culture allusions and capitalism, two hallmarks of Bobby’s speech that he barely even processed at this point. “Before what?”
“Before you wrote the story, for Christ’s sake.”
“I didn’t write it!”
“All right, sure, you didn’t write it. It was the guy in the Soviet prison camp who just so happens to have the same name as you. Obviously don’t say that last part in the interviews and shit, let them think they’re being clever by figuring it out, but never break character. Good, that will be fine.”
“No, really, Bobby,” Xander insisted, using his name for emphasis. He wasn’t a use-people’s-names kind of guy. It felt strange. “I’m not being coy. I really didn’t write it. I thought you did.”
“Hmm.” Xander could hear Bobby tapping his fingers idly on some desk or table. “Clever. What better way of being coy than saying you’re not being coy. But fine, I’ll play along. You didn’t write it, it just appeared on the website of its own volition. Or you ‘discovered’ it, sure, that’ll work. And then if you get caught somehow, I guess you can fall back on the whole, like, Michaelangelo didn’t carve David, David was already in the marble, art writes itself sort of thing. Fine.”
Xander fingered the owl in his pocket, quickly becoming a sort of worry stone. The paper bag was wrinkled and soft. “Oh, okay, I get it. I see what you’re doing here. You don’t think you can trust me not to say you wrote it. I’m too ‘unstable,’ I’m too ‘temperamental,’ too ‘impulsive.’ Like I’m some ‘eccentric creative’ type that you have to ‘manage’ . . .”
“You can stop putting ‘manage’ in scare quotes, that’s literally my job,” Bobby replied.
“But I’m not an idiot, I know when to keep my mouth shut. I know how to give those kids the stories they want to hear. That’s not the issue. That’s never been the issue.”
“So what’s the issue?”
“The issue is you don’t trust me.”
“Xan, you know perfectly well I can’t write for shit, I’m not creative. So even if I had wanted to write that stupid little story - and the more I think about it, the more I really do have to admit it’s a brilliant idea - I couldn’t have. So your false flag attack doesn’t even make sense, you’d have been better off blaming one of the other guys in the band or, like, actually pretending you found it in some treehole in the middle of the woods.”
“So you hired someone to do it. You think I don’t know about ghostwriters?”
“Ghostwriters cost money, Xan, and speaking of money, let’s start talking about next steps as soon as possible. I’m thinking maybe graphic novel to tide them over before the album’s ready, and then . . .”
Xander didn’t hang up, but he did take the phone away from his ear and place it down on the cafe counter in front of him. He couldn’t listen to Bobby’s voice anymore, not right now, and Bobby didn’t need an audience when he was in this mode. He caught a glimpse of the lyrics he had started writing earlier, on a fast-food napkin tucked under his laptop as a paperweight:
This life is a cage that suffocates and strains
Try to breathe deeply, my lungs fill with dust
My voice only knows one unhappy refrain
My beautiful metal has all turned to rust
Those lines would work perfectly in a song about a Soviet prison, he realized with annoyance. Possibly everything he wrote would.