Fiction, S.A. Greene

Brian Wilson Is Dead And Why Can’t I Stop Crying?

You’re walking through the dust, alone, dry-throated, following the Sun. You think you’ve survived something but you can’t remember what. No matter. 

I wasn’t even a huge fan of The Beach Boys. 

You almost collide with something rising in front of you. A tower. A tower, strangely, that is made of smartphones. The phones are cased in shades of red and purple and pink you haven’t seen since the desert last bloomed. You’re standing there wondering when you hear Wouldn’t It Be Nice chiming out in electronic notes. The tower trembles gently. 

I’m too young for the Beach Boys to be the soundtrack of my adolescence. But, God, yes – it would have been nice to have been older. 

Your instinct is not to answer, but something in you feels you should. Which phone is ringing? Do any belong to you? Do you really want to speak to a stranger? But maybe it’s Brian Wilson calling. So you scan the tower for escaping light, but there is no light. Not in the way you understand it. It seems there never is. Do you pluck out a phone at random and risk destroying the tower? Yes. You do. (Destruction comes easily to you.) You send the phones flying, but whichever one is ringing must be lying face down in the sand because now you can’t see any light at all, and your mouth is so dry, apart from the tears, and it’s water you need, not a conversation. A stranger might ask something of you. A stranger might ask you for some water. 

‘Wouldn’t it Be Nice’ fades out and ‘God Only Knows’ fades in. This throws you a little. You feel it but you can’t quite relate it to anything you’ve ever known, so you turn away and head for the freshwater spring at the foot of the citadel, but the melody won’t let go of you, reels you back to where the phones lie scattered in the sand like limbs in shades of red and purple and pink you haven’t seen since the last slaughter. 

It feels like the end of sunshine. You never held sunshine yourself, but Brian Wilson made you feel you might someday, made you feel that perhaps you did once, if you could only remember, and it’s true that part of you remembers – not holding sunshine itself, but the feeling that someone might have, that you might have, when they’re holding sunshine, and even if you never did, he understood this and wanted you to, was rooting for you. Now he’s dead he seems to have taken so much from you that you weep from the place you always kept partially open for sunshine.

You’re hovering there, wondering if the phone cases would crunch if you trod on them when they all nudge away from you, radiating away from your feet as if they’re afraid, and you say ‘oh!…’ out loud because God only knows you were in a Brian Wilson-coloured mood and your guard’s down and you understand it all now: how the desert bloomed and fruited inside them once, all the unseen voices trapped in their phones, just as it did inside of you. So you kneel in the sand among the phones and you try not to count them or sort them into colours or divide them and you promise you will find the next one that rings and you will speak to the next voice you don’t know and you silently urge them to make a noise, a Beach Boys song, one of the more famous ones that you’d easily recognise because you never really were that much of a fan,  just as you never were that much of a fan of your own feet but when it comes to it they’ve always been a part of you, and you’d probably cry if they died too.

‘Sloop John B’ rings out and I yearn for something like home. 

You wipe your tears and instinctively reach for the one phone that’s singing and trembling and giving out a soft blue light. ‘Sloop John B’ stops when you press ‘answer’ but you still want to go home. 

You say hello and hear an unknown voice crackling in an unfamiliar language. It’s not Brian Wilson but even so you feel slightly less homesick. In your friendliest tone you ask the voice if it likes The Beach Boys. If its throat is dry. You ask it if it wants to share your water.