Part 83: Xander

In the afterglow of creation, Xander and Bobby laid on the same bed, looking up at the ceiling, in a state that Xander had to admit felt awfully post-coital. It felt like they had been up all night. Hotel rooms, like airports, are timeless, seasonless places. All around them were scraps of paper, and the wooden owl was somewhere behind them on the bed - they’d even managed to shoehorn that in somehow - but the true object of their efforts was conceptual.

“It’s perfect,” said Bobby. “It’s beautiful.”

“Do you think they’ll get it, though?” Xander said.

“Some will get some, some will get more. Doesn’t matter, though. That’s already built into it.”

“How so?"

“Well, the people don’t appreciate K______’s story, either. And that’s a brilliant piece of art. In the story, I mean.”

Xander remembered what the bassist had said about good art. “Hmm. And if they don’t get that K______’s story is supposed to represent the album?”

“Still works. What's that line, 'to be misunderstood is to be great'?” Bobby sat up. “Haven’t we already talked about this? Besides, that’s what the interviews are for. Got to save something for those. And the smart ones will explain it to the dumb ones. They’ll do most of the work for us. It’s perfect.”

“Oh my God."

“Yes?"

“EX-ile!”

“Xander, you’re a fucking genius.”

“No, Bobby.” Xander sat up as well, and made eye contact with the man who, it turned out, really wasn't the villain. Not in real life, anyway. “You are. I couldn’t have done any of this without you.”

“That’s true. If it wasn’t for me harping on you to write the album, you never would have come up with the Robber Baron. All part of the plan."

“Oh, come on. Don’t pretend you masterminded me."

“It was, though.” Bobby smiled, an inclusive smile; a smile with not a smile at. “I’ve been playing, you know, what is it called, eleven-dimensional chess this whole time. It’s not my fault you’re still stuck on checkers. Clever thing with the names, though, by the way.”

“Names?”

“Robber, Robert.”

“Holy shit. I am a fucking genius.”

“I do have to say something, though,” Bobby said, shifting his tone and his body uncomfortably. “And this is something that I don’t say very often, this is probably the only time you’ll ever hear me say it in our entire time of knowing each other, and it doesn’t leave this room, but. I was wrong.”

“Yeah? When? About what?”

“The time I told you you didn’t have to bother trying to grow as an artist, that you should just suck it up and be a hack, give the audience what they want.”

Xander hadn’t realized he could feel any better, but this brought a whole new wave of satisfaction. “So now you see that I was capable of more?”

Bobby chuckled. “No, no, it was never a question of could, it was a question of should. I thought doing something like this was going to alienate your audience. Well, I mean, I thought it was going to alienate your audience and that was a bad thing. But now I get it, they want to be alienated.”

“Have you been talking to the--Omar?”

“No, fuck that guy. He’s got no principles, no scruples whatsoever.” The bassist had been totally replaced by The Soldier, at least in this room. “But it’s like, sure, The Beatles may have poisoned the well, created this whole idea that artists have got to grow, stretch their wings, whatever, but these kids have been drinking that water too. They might not want you to make something new and different but they expect you to. So they can get mad about it and say they only like the old stuff, and demand you play the old stuff, but you can’t actually play the old stuff because then they’d have nothing to complain about and that’s what they really want.”

“Right. Sure. Right.”

“Like that’s what separates them from Teen Group A. With Teen Group A, you shut up and play the hits because they want to hear the hits. Teen Group B, you shut up and play the hits so they can go home and whine on the message boards about how you didn’t play some random B-side from 2002 that no one even likes.”

“Are you finally admitting there’s a difference?” Xander said, incredulous. “The old Bobby would have said it didn’t matter why you were doing it if you were doing the same thing.”

“Well, it doesn’t, really,” Bobby said hastily. “I mean, not as such. Not in itself. But sometimes, it does mean you have to . . . it means they need . . . Christ, Xander, I don’t know. This shit isn’t an exact science, it’s guesswork, mostly, always trying to stay one step ahead of the message boards . . .”

“Speaking of the message boards . . . I have a confession to make, too.”

“Mine wasn’t a confession, stop being so melodramatic about everything," Bobby replied. But he was still in overall good spirits, willing to listen. “But what is it? Are we finally here? Is this the moment?”

“What moment?”

“No, go ahead, let’s do the whole thing.”

“Did you think I was going to say I wrote The Letter?”

“So close. We were so close!” Bobby collapsed back onto the bed. “And I screwed it up at the last minute. This must be how - Christ, I don’t know - Napoleon felt. Julius Caesar. Robert E. Lee?”

“And I’m the dramatic one? But no, what I was going to say was, that’s where I got the idea that you wrote it,” Xander said. “That didn’t come out of nowhere. Those kids on there, they were speculating within minutes of it being posted. They must have pulled your name from one of those interviews I did. It’s nuts. I can only tolerate the place for a few minutes at a time. It’s one of those things where, you think you’re interested in something, and then you go online and you find out there are millions of people who are, like, obsessed with that thing. Except in this case the thing is me. Well, the idea of me, anyway.”

“What’s the difference?” Bobby said, on cue, lazily, not really meaning it.

“But yeah. That’s all I was going to say. They’ll devour this shit.”

“Good. It deserves it. Speaking of devour---”

“--yeah, starving--”

“But can we . . .?” They looked around at the room; there was a sense that the album lived here, that something would be shattered if they left. Could it survive in the real world? Was there even still a real world - traffic and restaurants and people going about their ordinary days, oblivious to what had happened here?

“I think we have to,” Xander said finally. “But before we do. Before we break this . . . whatever this is. Can we just, like, really, truly, deep-down, be honest with each other, like, human-to-human, no ulterior motives, no bullshit, no anything, and acknowledge that we both know who wrote The Letter?”

Bobby sighed. “Yes. Sure. But--”

“--let’s not say it.”

“Right.”

For one last time, before the real world returned, Bobby and Xander made eye contact, and they both had that fleeting, transcendent, simultaneous experience: understanding.