Finding Abbey Road (17 page)

“He's had our whole lives to get a grip,” says Val. She starts toward the door.

“Where are you going?” Caleb asks.

She whirls. “I'm going to turn him in,” she says. “Because you know what? Eli doesn't get to run again. He doesn't get to be
absent
, to live his dream life recording thirty minutes of music, over and over. It's time for him to
take responsibility for who he is.” She holds up a business card. “I'm calling Kellen.”

“Wait, where did you get that?” Caleb asks.

Val doesn't answer. She's pulling her phone from her pocket. I can see that her fingers are shaking. “He can't walk out on us if we're visiting him behind bars.”

“Val, don't,” I say, but I can barely muster the energy.

As she stabs at the phone, the tears run down her cheeks.

“Val . . .” Caleb glances at me as he steps toward her. He gently takes her wrist.

She tears her arm away. “Don't!”

But Caleb grabs her arm again. Hard this time. “Stop, don't do it, we have to give him another chance!”

“No!” she shouts, yanking her arm. “Why should we give him another chance? He's just going to fuck us over again! Let go!”

“No.” Caleb holds firm, and they are nearly wrestling.

“Guys!” I shout, standing there, useless.

Val lurches away, Caleb falls into her, their heads colliding.

“Give me the phone!” Caleb shouts. He's clawing at it.

She hits him hard across the jaw. A full-on punch. Caleb nearly falls over, but keeps holding on to her.

“Stop it, you guys! Stop!” I run and shove against both of them. It sends them staggering, enough to separate them as they catch their balance. Just that little bit of distance snaps them out of their fury, so misplaced.

Val looks at me, seething, but then at Caleb, then at her phone in her hand. Her eyes are gushing. . . . She slams the phone to the floor. A splintering sound of cracked glass and plastic. “Uhhh!” She hits both her fists against her temples. Drops to the floor, legs crossed, and sobs.

Caleb, breathing hard, walks numbly away into the shadows, staring at the ceiling.

I want to run to him. But I go to Val first. It's for the worst reason: I want Kellen's business card safely confiscated, but,
oh my God, Summer
, what Val needs right now is her family. And if not Caleb, and not her father . . .

Then me.

I sit beside her and rub her back. Her slight frame. The xylophone of her spine. She cries, her breaths hitching, but gets it under control quickly.

She's Val, after all.

“Now what?” she whispers.

“I don't know,” I say. The comment makes me glance at my watch. A day and a half until we fly home. I wish it were in a few hours. We all need to get safely away from the Eli wreckage.

“I remember the night I was hanging out in Ithaca,” Val says. She raises her head and speaks a little louder, so Caleb can hear. “I saw those tweets from around your birthday. I'd been watching you your whole life, and I knew that right then, you finally knew who your father was. I remember when I was driving across Pennsylvania, rehearsing
what I was going to say to you, and I was so excited because we were going to be a family. But then when I got there, I couldn't do it. Came at you through the bass player ad instead, too scared that I'd overwhelm you. But I was afraid of more than that. . . .”

Val rubs her nose hard. “I think, the whole time, what I feared most was this: that the more we learned about our father, the worse it would get. That if we really knew . . . we wouldn't want to know. That actually, our family totally sucks. But even then, I never imagined this.”

“Me either,” says Caleb. “Can't believe we came all the way here to be yelled at for caring. Please don't call Kellen,” he says. “I'd rather have Eli disappear again than have to see him, or hear about him, or anything. I don't want to read the stories about him. Testify about him. Any of it. All that will do is remind me of tonight.”

I almost open my mouth and say that it isn't over yet, that there's still a chance things might improve, but I'm not sure they're ready to hear it.

I'm not even sure it's true.

We all stand there, silent. I'm trying to think of what to do next, my exhausted brain trying to find a good option.

“I can't believe we're standing in the spot where the Beatles recorded,” Caleb finally says, looking around into the shadows. “Just try to picture that,” he says. “They were right here in this exact spot, filling this place with music.
Creating those songs, playing them before the world had ever heard them.”

Caleb flicks the standby switch on the guitar amp, then sits down on the stool and picks up one of the electric guitars. He strums a chord. The warm, glassy tone fills the room like a bright bubble. He picks up a thick black set of headphones, holds one side to his ear, and taps the microphone in front of him. When he looks back at us, there's a resurgent gleam in his eye.

“Everything's live, ready to go,” he says.

Val moves slowly toward the bass. Almost like she can't resist. She picks it up, hits a low note. The room vibrates, recoils, desires more.

We all feel it. Ghosts. Leftover notes still hanging in the air. The energy of a million melodies sung, strings vibrated, drums slapped, all like they want is to form more melodies, more rhythms, to move as one. Like if we play, they will follow.

“Do you think we could figure out how to run the board?” I ask. “That reel of tape is waiting.”

Caleb smiles. He glances toward the dark ceiling. Do we dare?

Hell yes.

“Let's go figure it out,” says Val.

We hurry up to the control room with a heady mix of excitement and guilt, elves in the workshop. This is probably
against the rules. But what hasn't been at this point?

“It looks like she's got it all set up,” says Val, surveying the channels. The board is massive, a cityscape of sliding faders and tiny knobs. But only the first ten faders are pushed up.

Caleb peers back into the studio, counting. “Yeah, two drum tracks, two vocals, three guitar inputs, one bass. And these two are room mics, I think. Not sure which track is which, but as we play, you can solo each one quickly with this row of buttons to figure it out.”

He and Val give me the quick amateur's guide to the board: how to watch the peak meters to make sure they don't hit the red. The vertical line of three EQ knobs above each fader that control bass, mids, and treble. The channel send knobs that link to sound-sculpting units, like compressors and reverb, the patch bay that I should probably not touch.

“We can't play everything at once,” says Caleb, “but we can overdub tracks, so only arm the channels we're actually using, here.” He points to orange buttons at the bottom of each track.

There's a small unit that connects the board to the old tape player. The unit is attached to the console by a thin wire. When you hit record and pause, the tape machine whirs and clicks.

“I've got it,” I say, which isn't even remotely true, but also I can feel the seconds of our secret session ticking by, so my five-minute introduction to sound engineering will have to do.

Caleb and Val hurry back to the instruments. They grab guitar and bass, slip on headphones. “Summer? You there?” Caleb asks.

It takes me a second to figure out what button lets me talk to them through the skinny microphone beside the board. “Hey,” I say. “What do you want to start with?”

“Let's warm up with something we can really nail,” says Caleb. “‘Catch Me'?”

“Definitely,” says Val. “Don't tape this.”

“Okay,” I say, and hit record as they begin. You'd have to be crazy not to get every second of this moment. Plus, I know Val. First takes are when she's at her most electric, even if she feels like it's when she's most exposed.

They start, and at first it's disorienting to hear the song with only bass and electric guitar. Val counts it off a little slower, which makes it a little more sultry, a little more two-in-the-morning.

Within seconds I realize that while the sound from all the individual microphones are cool and vital, what is the breath, the soul, are these two room microphones. Giant, ancient-looking artifacts on tall stands, each placed in the shadows about ten feet from the action. They are as much about the movement of air as anything, but they also provide the sense of depth, of a real universe. And they make the space for you to enter.

I twist knobs and slide faders like a mad scientist. I find that I like the room mics high, the bass medium, the guitar
low . . . Val's vocals slightly wet with reverb while Caleb's are dry, a little quieter so it seems like he's standing behind her . . . I like compressing Val's voice so that her most forceful notes distort. I like turning up the high EQ on Caleb's guitar, turning down the mids on his vocals.

As the tape spins, and Caleb and Val sing and play, I consider that maybe this has been the secret goal of the universe all along. To get us here, to create this moment, through sacrifice and loss and everything else. And it makes you wonder . . . maybe all the pain of tonight, of this week, of this year, has all actually somehow been worth it, purposeful.

Because this is pretty fucking cool.

Also, OH MY GOD I love running the board. I've thought about music and bands my whole life, and I've thought so much these past three years about what makes bands stand out to people in the crowd, what sets them apart, how the little things they do affect the way they move people. But in all that time, I've never seen something like this: this sea of faders and dials in front of me so perfectly represents how I experience music, and how I want to live inside it, twisting its guts and poking at its borders.

A little more bass, a little more Val. Nudge a slider.

A little more thump in that bass drum. Twist a knob on the compressor.

A little less icicle on that guitar, a little more tropical reef. That has something to do with EQ. I can't say that I
understand the finer points of kilohertz, but I know now that sound has color.

All of this, the hues, the textures, my fingers flitting around the board, twitching with ecstasy . . . but also we must be cautious. You could do great evil with such power, taking a band's soul and twisting it to fit your agenda. But if you just think of it like a sculptor, revealing the best version of what's already there . . .

Every trip through the song has new possibility, and I'm lost in it. And I am starting to wonder . . .

This is not the sexiest dream, I know.

And I might become a vampire living in these dark studio rooms.

But this is maybe now part of my dream.

They finish “Catch Me.” Move on to “On My Sleeve.” I pause the tape, start it again just in time to catch Caleb saying, “Okay, we ready?” A little human voice that beckons you.

Halfway through the song, the control room door opens. Susan enters. Followed by Eli, hands in his coat pockets. He glances at me quickly, then at the floor.

They don't speak, hear the song in progress . . . Susan steps behind me and rubs my shoulder.

Eli moves around the board so that he can see through the window. Puts a hand against the glass. In silhouette he is so frail, standing there, slightly hunched. I realize that he will never fully heal from those damaging years, the
hurt that he did to himself, but that pain was also the consequence of being an open nerve in a world full of knives.

And yet now he is seeing them, Val and Caleb, beings who share a part of him, good and bad. He's hearing them, and I suppose at this point it is too naive to think that this night can save him, but I find myself thinking at him anyway:
Come on, dammit, feel this. It's not too late.

The song ends. I pause the tape.

“What do you think we should do next?” Caleb asks me.

Eli turns from the glass. “I'll tell them.” He glances at Susan, a look that says
you were right
, that he finally knows it. “I mean . . . I'll ask them.” He heads down the stairs.

My pulse races, listening to the hiss of the microphones. They catch the faintest echo of footsteps as Eli approaches.

I can't see him enter the studio, but Val and Caleb do. Neither of them say anything.

Eli steps into the circle of instruments and picks up the acoustic guitar. He checks the tuning. Looks at them. They look at him.

Finally, he says, “Would you guys do a song with me?”

“Sure,” says Caleb, his voice heavy with emotion.

“Duh,” says Val.

1:55 a.m.

Eli sings over strumming guitar. Sings from beyond the
grave, from beneath the Pacific, from across the country, through time:

Packing the last of my worries

One last walk on streets I've known forever

Now they're new
.

Caleb and Val play along on electric and bass. Eli nods to Caleb, who joins with a high harmony:

I told you I needed new scenery

Before I stopped telling anyone, anything

Anymore.

Now he turns to Val, and she moves to the mic, standing right beside him. They double the next section, their voices sliding together in knife-edged symmetry:

One last time, so we can smile

And give the best we've got, no matter what's been lost

And at what cost no we won't go back . . .

And then Eli rears back and belts the chorus. It distorts the vocal mic and I rush to lower it just a touch. Through the room mics, he sounds like a pure rock star.

And now I'm finding . . . that road home

Sure I'm finding . . . that home is the moment, not the destination

Everything you leave behind

It hurts so much to say good-bye

But that's because you know