Beyond Paradise

Billie lowered his head into his hands. Max's words repeated in his mind over and over, like the mournful tolling of a funeral bell. He closed his eyes, and the faces of Adrienne and his boys looked back at him, sad and afraid. He wondered if he would ever see them again, and felt as if his lungs had collapsed in his chest.

Jabril laid a hand on his back, and his face was soft with compassion. "You aren't alone in this. Don't feel you have no one to help you."

"I know," he replied, lifting his eyes. "I can't thank you enough for everything you've done for me. All of you," he said wearily, looking around at Max and Sabeil. "But if what you're telling me is true, if he's capable of something like this, I don't see what any of us can do to stop him. He's some kind of--of demon or something, and what chance do we stand against that? I'm a dead man." He shook his head in despair.

A look of concern passed between Max and Jabril, and the old man leaned forward in his seat. He took Billie's hands between his withered old ones and patted them gently, like a beloved grandfather. "Everything you need to find your way home is right here, in your hands," he said, and then extended one crooked finger to touch the center of Billie's chest, "and here, in your heart. It's what makes you different from him. He knows cruelty and greed. You know something else. Use it. It's the strongest weapon you have against him."

Billie straightened up, his hands on his thighs, and sighed in resignation. "Tonight, huh?"

Jabril nodded solemnly. "He won't wait any longer."

"Will he even give us that long?" He thought of the Zieleter, the hissing sound like a swarm of a million locusts, the enormous dark shadow that had fallen over them as they fled, and he felt a cool sweat break out on the back of his neck. They might show up again anywhere, and if he was alone this time...

A low growl rumbled from Sabeil's throat, and Jabril's eyes hardened in defiance. "He won't have a choice. We have an agreement, and if he decides to disobey it, then he'll have to deal with us." He glanced toward Sabeil, whose lip quivered in a snarl. "All of us."

"Don't think about that now," Max said kindly. "You have to decide what your music will say for you tonight, so choose what you say carefully. The message you send to him will either open or close the door. Give him what he wants, and he has more strength to use against. you."

So many songs tried to crowd their way into Billie's mind, lyrics white-hot with hatred and contempt, songs he had written when he had no idea what an enemy really was. Which one would show that son of a bitch who he was dealing with? As he contemplated, he felt his jaw tightening, his chin lifting stubbornly, hands curling into hard fists. If the evil motherfucker wanted a fight, then he would get it, guaranteed.

When he looked up at Max again, the old man's eyes were burning into him intently. "Chose carefully," he repeated in a husky whisper, as if he had been reading Billie's very thoughts. "Anger will only feed him and make him stronger."

"It's about all I have right now," Billie replied between clenched teeth. "After being pulled away from my family and sent to some acid trip version of hell, what can you expect? I'm only human, I can't kum ba yah myself through everything that sick monster decides to do to me."

Max looked over at Jabril, who had risen to his feet and stood leaning against the file cabinets, his back to them. "Perhaps you can ask your friend," he said to Billie. "He's had a long time to think about that same question."

Jabril didn't move. "What is it, man?" Billie asked. "What do you think I should do?"

The boy slowly turned to face him. "Do you think anger and hate are where your music comes from?"

"It's punk! Being pissed off is the whole point!"

Jabril shook his head patiently, trying hard to figure out how to explain what he needed to say. "That's not what I mean. You write about anger. But what do you write from? What is it inside you that drives you to create?"

Billie could see Andy again, the big man's eyes crinkling as he laughed loud and heartily, lifting his curly-haired, giggling son high over his head. And then, in a moment's cruel flash, he saw the pale, beloved face, loose and expressionless, resting on a gray satin pillow, the white starched collar unnaturally snug against the thick, strong neck. He tried to speak, but found his throat too tight.

"You didn't lose the most important part of him, Billie," Jabril reminded him. "Do you understand that? You still have the most precious thing he gave you. Find it," he urged.

"He taught me to play, he taught me about music, but that's exactly what I'm fighting to get back. I can't use something against him that I don't have anymore!" The frustration rose again as he found himself caught in the same whirlpool of vague riddles, all of which led to a place he didn't want to go.

"No, Billie." Jabril spoke calmly, hoping to smooth Billie's ragged emotions. "Your father gave you something much more important than music lessons, something far more lasting and precious. He gave you love. Unconditional, complete, self-sacrificing love."

It made his head sag and his hands sink limply, the simplicity of it. It was true. All along he had clung tightly to his fury, believing that it was what sustained him and fed his creativity, made him who he was. But sitting here, with these people who were risking so much to help him, he began to understand the enormous, the overpowering, the devastating power of love.

As easily as taking his next breath, he knew which song it would be.

"I love you's not enough, I'm lost for words..."

It was more than lyrics, it was their story, his and Adie's, a song he had written when he had feared losing her more than he ever had before. And in his despair, he had sung the pain in his heart without any soft filter, naked and bleeding for her to hear, and to feel. It had brought her back to him when nothing else could, speaking directly to her heart about how desperately he loved and needed her.

Now he needed it to bring him back to Adie.

Inspiration and hope welled up in him in equal measures, and he slowly lifted his eyes to Jabril's. "I understand," he nodded, and Jabril smiled back at him, realizing he had gotten through. "I'm ready for him."

The younger boy looked up at Max, and they both nodded. Max pushed stiffly out of his chair, and hobbled over to a drawer near the opposite side of the room. He slid it open, and pulled out a huge, thick folder, so big it was held with a large rubber band around the outside.

"This belongs to you," he said, his eyes twinkling happily. "I think it would be good for you to see it. You had to understand before it would really mean much to you, but I think now you'll appreciate it."

He carefully set the folder down in the middle of the desk, and pulled the band off of it. One frail hand opened the front cover, and Billie gasped as he saw an ethereally beautiful photograph of his lovely wife, done in sepia tones. She leaned her elbows on a velvet pillow, her arms crossed in front of her and her head resting on her hands. The brown eyes, warm as cinnamon, gazed out at him with a sparkle that put the nighttime stars to shame, and her lips were soft and curved in a smile that radiated pure love. He couldn't ever remember seeing it before.

"Where did that come from?" he asked, wondering what else lay inside the pale ivory folder.

"This, Billie, is a picture that exists only in this place. This is the image of your wife's love for you, superimposed on her physical features. Can you see, now, how you draw her to you, how she loves and needs you, how you appear through her eyes?"

He stared at Adie's picture in mute wonder. She was an angel, and she had given him her promise to be his, as long as they lived. Like dawn breaking inside him, the enormity of that began to spread through his mind, driving away the shadows of the Zieleter, the sudden darkness of Stroud's mirages, so that every corner of this thoughts was softly lit and clear. He could do this, for her, he knew it with a certainty that came from his deepest core.

"There's more," Jabril said encouragingly. "A lot more, actually." He reached over Billie's shoulder and turned the page. A faint whimper escaped Billie's lips as Adie's picture folded away, but then his eyes fell on the next image. Joseph's tanned, handsome face grinned out at him, his bright smile teasing dimples out of his cheeks, so like his father's. The picture was taken from an angle slightly above Joey's perspective, so that the boy was looking up at him a bit. It made him feel tall, and strong, and he wanted so much to hug his son, to ruffle his hair and squeeze his broadening shoulders in pride.

Then little Jakob, with his eyebrows lifted in eternal good humor, his little smile spreading across his face from ear to ear. God, he had Adie's sweet eyes, and the hands, still plump with the last traces of baby fat, reached out to him as if to fasten tight around his neck.

His heart was surely going to burst, he thought. Never before had he been so overwhelmed with his love for them, and never had he realized the depth of what they felt for him. He shook his head slowly, not sure what to say. Max continued to turn over one page after another--Ollie, Anna, David, Holly, Allen, Marcy, their children...and the face he had so missed, the laughing face of his father.

Finally, the pictures were beginning to be arranged four to a page, then eight, then tiny rows of thumb-nail sized portraits of people he didn't recognize, faces that grinned, or mugged, or screamed in joy, people who raised middle fingers, or Green Day signs, or their fingers curled into the shape of a heart. The file was inches thick. There must be tens of thousands of them, he thought.

"Who are they?" he asked, but he had a feeling he knew. In fact, somehow he felt a thread of connection to every single one of them.

"They're all the people who love you, for your music, for your spirit, for your attitude, for your compassion. They are the ones who came to your concerts, and those who wished they could; who sat in their rooms for hours listening to your albums, and those with no money who listened to the radio to hear you. They're all the people for whom Green Day--and thus, you--became a friend."

"Wow," he said, in a voice so soft it was almost a whisper.

Max and Jabril were silent for a moment, allowing him to stare at the mosaic of love that looked back at him. Then Jabril's head turned, as if he had heard some sound, and Aden strode quietly toward them, his face grim.