Doppler Effect

Doppler Effect

Fuck. Another bullshit day. Who’d have thought?

You wake up, push aside the bottles, fingers just a foreign extension of your body and your guts work pain against you. At some point while you slept, your body smothered the hamster. Sammy the Eighth. Fuck Sammy. Pick another one up at the store, four bucks—blood money.

Somewhere, an alarm blares vaguely. In time, its horror-song would grow to a crescendo sure to split your skull, probably long after you have smashed it into a trillion spiteful pieces against the window. You think briefly of the box in your closet filled with these fuckers, good little soldiers waiting their turns in line to scream incessantly before they die to your predictable fury each morning. Something about this ritual pleases you, brings calm to your storm – the order of routine amidst the chaos.

The room is chaos; the lingering pall of stale smoke and unwashed humans hangs heavy over the prostrate bodies of your band and lucky fans. There’s blood on the wall, less than a liter, and in a slightly artistic arrangement. A kind of macabre polka-dotting no doubt the result of intentional idiocy. You smile a hollow smile and try to remember what it was like not living your life on fire.

A hideous roar erupts from under what’s left of the bed you slept on, and you take note of the naked woman passed out next to you. She has the number seven written in blue marker on her forehead, her closely cropped blond hair playfully dancing around it. The roar grows louder, and your friend Markus bolts upwards and above you, stark naked save but bruises and a half dozen snake-bites all over his body. You assume the snake died as well, and you decide against replacing any more of the animals.

“I told you to turn on the fucking humidifier!” his emotional state is not the kind based on coherency of mind. “You know this fucking air fucks me up, man!” his fist crashes into the wall, another significant splat of blood marking the event. You push Miss Seven off your body; massage the feeling back into your alien fingers. This body does not belong to you.

“Shut the fuck up, Munk!” yells an irritated voice from deeper in the jungle that your bedroom has become. Evan’s face rises from a pile of bodies, he has not slept. You take stock of this pile, accounting for two, three, five, and six; however the several unmarked women quickly illustrate how useless attempting to add order to your life really is.

The first album was a celebration of how comfortable your chaos was, how motivating and brilliant and enthralling it felt. The subsequent success and drug fueled energy catapulted the second album to a new plateau, the naked and bestial twilight of your humanity - you’ve all been living each day since trying to keep that feeling alive.

“Jarod, we have to come up with something. I’ve got shit in me and I’m going to fucking die if I don’t get it out.” Your eyes dart to the doorway where Rebeccah stands in her panties, a Queen “The Works” shirt hanging loosely off her awkward-skinny frame. The shirt is strategically several sizes too large, picked precisely for the ’just laid’ impression it gives. This coordinated incoordination bugs the shit out of you, and you turn the idea around in your head as you consider that you cared about her enough to be annoyed again.

“Bathroom’s free, bitch,” states Jeremy, as he grabs her waist from behind and drives his body against hers.

Rebeccah thrusts her butt backwards violently into Jeremy’s stomach sending him reeling. “Fuck off, Chewbacca,” she says, and the others begin howling in mockery.

There is a sleeping juice vendor in the corner of the room. This young woman you hired to dispense random beverages is slumped across the top of her cart with desiccated lemons and oranges in her hair and clothing. You assume she fell victim to the allure of the orgy, and at some point forgot to continue charging for her product. You are a lot of things, but ungenerous is not one of them.

Your feet hit the floor and the sensation of standing in a pool of glass shards surges through you. Despite weakened knees you pull yourself along the room, making little ground until your legs start to remember what it was like to be whole again. You nudge a dead lobster out of your way and lament the loss of your nephropidae friends.

“I’m with Rebecca, we gotta make something today.” Markus says. Like everyone else, he too is feeling the weight of expectation growing heavier with each day, the unacknowledged fear that you partied too hard, too long, and the genius is gone.

You know that I’m just a few pills away.

“I agree,” you say in irritation that the fear has now formally been voiced and empowered. You reach the vendor and place a few hundred dollar bills on the vendor’s head, one down the back of her shirt just for the fuck of it. Maybe she’ll find it later in the day and be pleased at the surprise. Maybe she’ll be offended instead. Either way, she’ll feel something, some tangible emotion without the aid of chemicals. “Let’s fucking go.” you say.

Faculties mostly returned, you exit the room and stride down a dramatic hallway filled with elegant oriental furniture and portraits of such things as Mozart, Beethoven, a few English Kings, and a unicorn. Random items you’ve picked up over the years and have chosen to adorn your estate with in order to both please and offend your artistic senses. You briefly consider that you may be overdoing it, and quickly cast aside such obvious thoughts.

The maid you hired during the Portugal leg of the last tour sees you and hastily approaches from further down the hall; you make a brisk right into an open doorway leaving her to chase.

“Mister Jarod,” She does not pronounce your last name easily, and opts instead prefers to place the onus of an awkward title upon you “please, pants?” she calls from behind while thrusting a pair of white shorts in front of her.

You entered an undecorated room containing a massive white sheet suspended against one wall. Heavy drapes block most of the light from the windows, and an ancient street lamp you purchased from London for an exorbitant price is suspended from the ceiling. Markus flips a switch behind you the lamp turns on, bathing the room in a dirty yellow glare. There are a half dozen paint buckets on the floor and you set to popping them open with the handle of a brush.

“Pants, sir!” exclaims your maid.

"Be gone creature! Back to the isle of Moreau!" you scream. She quickly scurries out with a confused squeal at your sudden emotion, still holding the shorts in front of her. Most conversations with her go this way, but she’s well compensated.

“Dick,” Rebeccah flatly states.

“Dick,” agrees Jeremy. He pulls a particularly thick joint from his shirt pocket and lights it. Markus distributes a pill to everyone. “No water. In memory of the lobsters.” he says.

“To the lobsters,” you say, and receive your communion. No one speaks for several moments.

Each member scoops handfuls of paint onto their bodies and hair, then lay down carefully onto the canvas like each time before. As the drugs begin to unfurl your mind you make some semblance of art, but more importantly you begin to feel me. We start to remember each other, learn how to breathe without thinking about it again. You lay there spreading out your arms and legs in a sort of crude paint-angel, thinking about the warmth and the glow.

“I want to be whole again,” you say.

“Whole again,” says Jeremy, pleased. “Whole again.”

Rebeccah turns her head to you, her long, dark hair a mop of scarlet paint. “Buy a Picasso.”

“That’s the song name.” You smile.

“Yeah,” they agree happily.

“Yeah,” says Jeremy, again.

A day is spent building an orchestra of feelings within you; consuming drugs and winding tones and beats, rhythms, and words into a palpable creature and you start to feel a fire inside again. We’ve got a song, and we’ve got a reason. You and I see eye to eye, and it’s time to show the world why.



You can’t see backwards anymore, but it’s nearly dark and Miss Seven is banging out some social media adverts for an impromptu lawn show tonight at the mansion. Probably a highly illegal venue, but you consider that jail is at least good advertisement. Rebeccah has brought in food from a shop, she’s wearing the cute red skirt and black nylons she wore on your first date and you feel another twinge of sadness and disappointment in yourself. You really had wanted to fall in love with her after a while, but even at the end of the relationship you still never were able to tell her - to hurt her like that. You both just sort of drifted away from each other.

From the window of the study you are in, you can see Evan down below directing a pair of water delivery guys where to drop a pallet of bottles on the lawn. You notice Evan glance around and slyly gesture at the flower bed, but somehow can’t find any anger when the load demolishes it. He’s just having fun. You respect that.

Jeremy is out there helping set up a speaker-stack as several visibly excited workers construct a stage and wheel in lighting racks from a semi in the driveway. They are laughing, happy and joyful. You briefly consider what it would be like to simply leave. Deny yourself and these people the rapture and simply go home and ask your parents for dinner. I tell you that you don’t know where they live anymore, and the idea is gone.

The wallpaper is starting to crumble, little brown lines turned to snakes and writhing. You’re not sure how to strip wallpaper so I direct your attention to the carpet underneath your bare feet. Warm. Comforting. Just the right texture.

“Hey,” says her voice. “Jarod?”

“Yeah Beccah?”You ask.

A hand slides across our shoulder, rough skin and uncomfortable. “You seem out of it - you ok?”

Fuck her. We push her hand off and walk to the door. “Is there calm before a supernova?” we ask, and I lift your tongue to let the saliva dissolve the LSD quicker. What a stupid thing to say. Wondering if you meant her or yourself you take a swig from the bottle of whiskey you didn’t even know was in your hand.

“That’s totally not cliché at all, Jarod.” She says.





Several tabs and a bottle later, there’s over two hundred people packed onto the lawn. Your band mates are on stage watching the crowd, idly tuning their instruments and enjoying the moment while you press towards the set.

The crowd is charged—biological electricity pulsing from one body to another, a miasma of energy that makes the hair on your arms bristle. You walk slowly through them and they part reverently for you, they do not know that you are as yet still a lowly thing, a singular entity largely unseen by the cosmos. You reach out each of your hands and touch the people who touch you back and feel the ions charging your soul.

Reaching the stage I take your hand, together you and I we ascend. Grasp the microphone and bathe in the light, shadows and color swirl about your body a cocoon of divinity. We relax together alone for several moments in embryotic warmth. I know you. You know me. With one burst of brilliant white we emerge and are together again, and they can see it in our eyes. We are beautiful, and we have the voice.

Together we give them what they want. We give them the words they know by heart, the words they feel and know and apply to themselves and have come to love. The meaning itself has long been lost to you, but the words are muscle memory and the power is really what applies. Our voice is power. The bass is power. The drums are power. The guitar in our hands is the tear in the fabric - the rip in order that lets us thrust our voice into the heart of the collective tapestry.

There’s a sweat on your skin and dryness in your mouth, and I whisper to you to drink and you do. The crowd is an abstract being of one singular mind and body, a dangerous beast we feed with the voice—the one pet you have not killed.

Let’s focus and remember. Our time is short. Remember the moment, feel the spirit. We form the words and deliver them, and we are wrapped in the blanket of the music. We stand at the zenith of the sound. We are in rhapsody, we are in rapture. This is an orgasm of mind in spite of the body. It’s time to give them something new.

Time to see their faces change, feel their pulse thicken and the air get just a little bit heavier. Tell them to buy a Picasso. You can’t even afford a Picasso, if one were even for sale. It’s like trying to grab onto a sound, or a feeling—exquisitely futile, and profoundly missing the point. You buy the Picasso and you’ve hit the ceiling, the antithesis of the feeling. Best to leave it on the wall and admire it from afar, it’s carnal knowledge safe from the rape of your own personal possession.

We give them the song, but I can feel you’re hiding something from me. They respond. The beast is in ecstasy, its flesh moves in ways not under its control.

I know you are hiding something from me.



“Something’s up with Jarod.” We could faintly hear her voice behind us. “What else is new, he’s fucking always pulling this shit,” says Evan.

“Hey Jarod!” comes her voice again, more forceful. She lost her power over us many years ago when I saw the dirt under her finger-nails, the truth inside her skin. Intense passion had given away to stagnant, stinging numbness. Her voice felt like a salted wound.

I tell you to look down and you do. You are standing on the railing of the south balcony, three stories above the street below. A Car drives by below at least ten over the speed limit, the benefit of the early hour, and I’m not sure how you got here. We should be spending our time together while we can, resurrecting the spirit of Caligula.

“You can’t hear it?” You asked them.

“Hear what, man?” Evan wants to know.

A convertible zips by below you, and you close your eyes, listening to the rush.

“Dude come down, dude.” Jeremy is here. He wants us, you to come down.

I hear your words now; I see what you were hiding. A chance. A way we’ll never part, to forever hear the sound together.

Rebeccah is coming closer, and her voice calls out to me again. “Jarod, we got an idea for a new song.” She lies.

“No you don’t.”

“Jarod, come down.” Her voice tried to sound casual, not alarmed.

“I can’t.”

“Listen,” and she paused. “Think of all the people who would miss you.” There was a rising sense of urgency in her voice, a panic of uncertainty.

Bullshit. They don’t know you. You don’t know you. I know you. “People won’t miss me; they’ll miss the chance of a new record,” you say.

Evan sidled up to the side of the balcony next to me, looking out at the city. “Fuck it dude.” he said absently, and looked up at me.

“Jarod, just tell me what you’re feeling, ok?” Her voice was a plea, she didn’t want to let go of what was left.

“I feel everything. I’m alive right now and I just can’t hold on to it. I don’t want to lose it. I don’t want it to pass me by again.” There’s desperation in your voice and you find it hard to breathe.

“Then what the fuck are you doing hanging off a fucking balcony?” she snaps, and takes a step closer.

She’s right, you know. This isn’t an answer. Do not fucking do this.

“Hey dude, this isn’t cool man.” Jeremy’s voice is quivering; he’s upset. “I’ll miss you, dude.” Nothing.

“I’ll miss you.” She says. Still nothing.

“Are you twenty seven?” asks Evan, and he looks back to the city.

Stop this now. Stop.

You lean forward. “Fuck Picasso,” you say. I have no part in this.

“Jarod.” Her voices’ lack of urgency compels you to catch your balance; you tilt your head back and catch her eye. “I didn’t feel it either. Back when we were together, you know?”

You stare at her and do not notice Evan tug Jeremy’s shoulder and head back inside.

“I didn’t... I don’t feel anything, really. I wanted to fall in love, Jarod, I really did.” She says. “I feel sick that I didn’t but that’s the truth. I don’t really feel shit anymore when I’m not, you know. Fucked up. I guess.”

You turn your head back to the ledge, close your eyes. Any moment you expect to wake up to an alarm blaring, surrounded in your failure to feel anything short of the sensational. You’d never considered she felt the same thing. She’d never told you how she felt about the world, and especially about how she felt about you, or didn’t feel. She was the same as you.

“I didn’t love you either. I wish I could have but I just couldn’t.” And you place a foot back on the floor. She reaches out and touches your hand and you understand.

“What the fuck are we going to do?” You ask.

“I don’t know, Jarod.” She answers, and somewhere below a car drives by.