CHAPTER 21 - NO SAVIORS

Part 2

On the drive back to his house—between comforting the increasingly distraught Cassandra as well as Victory, who burst out, “Bard, we have to take the Self-Terminator machine piece out of the show! Bloody hell, that would—or would it be better to leave it in? To not avoid the subject?” Bard thought about what he did not speak about to Kai. The Wastes Murders. If anyone wanted to find something dark in Milton, they should start with them.

When Bard was seven, the children began disappearing. They had been older than he was, old enough to be sent on errands alone or to roam on their own, exploring. They never had come home from the store or never had arrived at their grandparents’ house or had been lost in the crowd at the fair. There had been five in all, two girls, three boys. 

Bridget had tried to keep the city’s worst fears from Bard, but he had known something was terribly wrong. He and Cassandra, who was hardly more than a baby then, were no longer allowed to play out in the front garden alone. On rare sunny days, they would sit gazing out the sitting room window. That was when Bard had begun reading to Cassandra, as a way to pass the time. The first book he tackled had been The Little Prince, coming immediately across two words that he had needed Bridget to help him decipher and were instantly sources of fascination: magnificent and constrictor. More new words followed quickly: abandoned, discouraged, exhausting. These, from both their context in the book and their meanings, Bard had associated with his father. Roger’s visits had grown more frequent as Bard had, as Roger put it, “started to become a person.”

This was when Roger had begun driving Bard to school, since Bridget hadn’t wanted him to walk or take the bus on his own. Roger would hold forth on the subjects of discipline and hard work, and how the country had “gone to pot” since the Labour government had made everyone think that they were “owed a living.” Bard hadn’t been happy with the arrangement. Personhood seemed more like a burden than a privilege.

Two years after the first disappearance, the abductors and—as everyone had feared—murderers had been found when a would-be victim, a boy of fifteen, had escaped and rung the police. They were a young working-class couple, barely older than Bard was now—the young woman to lure the children, the man to capture and kill them. Their cold, hard faces had looked out from newspapers as they confessed to ever more atrocities that Bard only learned about a decade later. Police had found the children’s bodies buried in the Wastes Moor that stretched from Milton’s east edge and nearly curved completely around it to the south. It was vast, but the shallow graves were just where the moors began, not too far from the highway that wound through.

By then, when he was nine, Bard was afraid to go outside on his own. Everything about his world had shifted. He was aware of danger. He was aware that his father wanted him to be something that he was fairly certain he could not be. He was aware that somehow these two things were related.

He was aware of a darkness in Milton.

At home, Bard, Cassandra, and Victory went to his room and listened to Unknown Pleasures. They sat side-by-side on the bed, leaning against the wall, heads tipped back, eyes closed. As he listened to Ian Curtis’ voice, Kai’s baritone as he sang in New World came back to Bard, but he shifted his thoughts away from it. He had a duty to hear the voice of the dead man, to bear witness.

The album opened with “Disorder.” 

Disorder, Bard thought. The opposite of what his father demanded—order, hierarchy, discipline.

Could these sensations make me feel the pleasures of a normal man?

Ah, thought Bard, there is what I am not. Normal. I am put together wrong. Disordered.

He had seen a psychiatrist the summer before, after the fire and Jake’s abandonment, and that is what he had been told. He had major depressive disorder—not mere moods, not temporary reactions to circumstance. It would come cycling back every few months, and the disorder was permanent, a lifelong companion. Disordered was a constant state. You could choose to live with it or you could choose not to live with it. Perhaps Ian Curtis had chosen not to live with it any longer.

But that wasn’t Bard’s subject. His editor stressed that he was not to focus on aspects of the story that were, in his words, “tawdry.” This article was to be about the music. So Bard took mental note of the lyrics, of the thrumming bass lines, the slightly off-kilter drums, the guitar that reverberated behind it all, then traveled to the front of the sound as if emerging from darkness.

There was a conceit there. The album was trying to tell him something. It always had been, but he had been content until then to merely hear it, to work out the elements of its whole, but he realized now he had never let it penetrate. Even attending their concerts, watching Curtis twitch and flail, he had missed some essential despair—or he had purposely not let it touch him. His write-ups of those shows in MMW seemed, as he thought back to them, strangely distant—it was as if he had known he was witnessing something that he could not quite encompass with his mind, with his self.

Cassandra began crying quietly during “She’s Lost Control,” and when Bard nudged her with his shoulder as if to say I’m here, she turned and buried her face in his shoulder. Victory reached across Bard and squeezed Cassandra’s hand. But they said nothing, listening to the fading echoes of the dirge “I Remember Nothing” and holding the silence even after the needle was circling the inner edge of the record. 

The album was just shy of forty minutes. When the trio had sat thinking for another twenty, Bard stood and crossed to his desk, and, without a word, sat down and began typing. He didn’t notice when Cassandra glanced at Victory and they both slipped out of the room. His hands seemed separate living things as they tapped out words. The letters themselves became almost invisible—the words were clear in his mind; he didn’t need to see them take form on paper. He poured out everything he had not been able to say about the music before—what it inspired and the suppressions it spoke about—and about the sight of an audience, enraptured and ecstatic as a young man pulled his heart from his chest and danced.

He was so lost in the images, in the sounds, in his own words, that he forgot to ring Kai.