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Begging someone for something in his second language has done nothing to improve his migraine. In fact, it seems to be making it worse. Nevertheless, he keeps at it; let nobody say that Magnus Hammersmith is not resilient.
“Just let me talk to her,” he mutters to the library payphone, in slow, clunky Norwegian. “Just one talk.”
Not that it’s achieving much. “No, Magnus,” says his uncle on the other line, “She wants nothing to do with you.”
“She’s my fucking mom. She doesn’t get to cut me off, she’s my mom.”
“She’s not cutting you off. Mind your language.”
“It sure sounds like it!”
“This is for the best, Magnus. We won’t enable your lifestyle.”
Pain: it’s been the only constant in his life. His head hurts like someone’s left a knife behind his dead left eye. “My lifestyle?” Magnus echoes. “This is about me being gay?”
“No, Magnus, this is about the drugs.”
“I’m taking them for a medical reason. I have… uh, what’s the word? Head damage. I told you this.”
“We’ve heard your excuses before.”
“I got hit in the head. You want to talk to my doctor?”
“When you’re ready to get sober, we will happily talk to you.” The way his uncle says it is all business. “Until then, I ask that you please leave her alone. You’ve made her suffer enough.”
“I’ve made her suffer? She’s the one who let her piece-of-shit husband beat her kid up! She’s the one who— who--” The words don’t come in Norwegian, so Magnus switches to English, “She’s the one who abandoned me. Fucking sent me to live with that psychopath! She owes me, for all the shit she put me through! Give me her fucking phone number!”
The line goes dead, and suddenly Magnus is just the lunatic who’s been shouting in a public library. He snarls and slams the phone back into its receiver.
You would think, in Tampa, that the sight of a homeless junkie screaming into a payphone wouldn’t arouse so much attention, even if the homeless junkie in question had half the conversation in Norwegian. The librarian at the front desk is eyeing him suspiciously, and the other homeless who’ve come in to escape the humidity are either gawking or looking ashamedly away. A grubby teenager curled up on a couch is staring at him with big wideset eyes.
Magnus’ head hurts; at that moment he hates every single person looking at him. He has a knife in his belt, and he wonders how long it would take someone to stop him if he just started going around stabbing faces. Could he get two in, three, five? He’ll go for the grubby teenager first. That kid’s eyes are very far apart from each other, it’s kind of unsettling.
While lost in his spontaneous violent fantasy, he’s accidentally let himself glower at the grubby teen for a little too long. The little vermin seems to interpret this as an invitation, for suddenly he springs off of the couch and approaches Magnus, wringing his hands fretfully in front of his chest. He would be well-built if he weren’t emaciated; he has to be at least sixteen, but the way he holds himself, and the badly-fitting filthy clothes he wears, make him seem much younger.
And he greets Magnus, unexpectedly, in Norwegian: “You’re from Norway too?”
Magnus has a migraine. It’s like someone’s shoved a wire in one temple and out the other, and his left eye is throbbing softly. The last thing he wants to do is have a conversation in Norwegian, which made his head hurt even before Nathan gave him literal brain damage, and entertaining a pathetic urchin doesn’t seem like much fun, either. So it’s to his own surprise when he answers, also in Norwegian: “I lived in Bergen for a few years.”
The kid has a very wide mouth, and at the answer this breaks into an impossibly broad grin. “Oh, cool!” he says cheerfully. “I’m from Lillehammer.”
“Cool.” Magnus turns away from him.
“I’ve never met another Norwegian here,” says the kid, completely missing the hint. “I heard you speaking Norwegian on the phone. That’s how I knew you’re from Norway also.”
“Mm.”
“I hate my parents too. My mom’s real mean to me.”
“That sucks.” Magnus is already walking towards the door. “Well, I’ve got to go, so.”
“Oh, wait, I’ll come with you!”
The kid disappears from his side. Magnus has almost made it through the door when he reappears, now with a ridiculous-looking blue cap perched on his overlong tangled hair. He appears to be carrying a (homemade?) guitar case on his back.
It’s like being trailed by a stray dog. When Magnus emerges into the hot Tampa morning, the kid is close on his heels, still chattering away in enthusiastic Norwegian:
“I haven’t gotten to talk to anyone in Norwegian since I’ve been here. I learned English before I moved here, but it’s hard. Like, I never know where to put -s on things. And what’s the difference between am and is? Also, what’s faen in English? Also, I can’t write English. The spelling’s hard. So I just write things down in Norwegian.”
Magnus has parked his truck a few blocks away. Because it seems like he’ll only ditch this kid by driving off, he makes a beeline for it.
The kid remains in hot pursuit. “Can you spell things in English?”
“Yep.”
“Oh, wowee. And you can read it?”
“Sure.”
“Wow-wee. You can be my English teacher! You can teach me all the spellings, like how to spell… spaghetti. S-K-F-O-K-K-A-T-T-Y.”
“Spaghetti is Italian.”
“Oh, faen. Really?”
“Really.”
“What about hamburger? Is that also Italian?”
“German.”
“Helvete. Didn’t know that. I love hamburgers. I thought when I came to America I’d have hamburgers for every single meal. Hamburger for breakfast, hamburger for lunch, hamburger for dinner, and then if I want a snack, I can have a hamburger for my snack, too.”
Magnus glances back at the kid, who is, bafflingly, still following him. They’ve walked two blocks more quickly than anyone with a migraine should be expected to and still this guy remains undeterred. “Why are you here?”
“Oh, I’m going to join a band and become a rockstar.” He says this with the complete confidence that only the truly stupid are capable of. He’s even grinning at Magnus, absolutely thrilled by his bright future. “That’s why I moved to America. I can meet the best ever band here, I just know it.”
Magnus’ question had been more along the lines of, why are you following me, but he’s never been good at expressing himself in Norwegian. The answer is so blithely optimistic that it makes him want to retch. He scowls, snarls, and tries walking a little faster.
“I’ve been going to auditions,” the kid continues. “I play the guitar. I’m really good at guitar. I taught myself mostly everything. Except I had a friend back in Lillehammer who taught me lots, too, all about the black metal stuff, but I like death metal more, so that’s why I came to Tampa. Cause this is where all the good death metal bands come from.”
The best damn death metal bands, Magnus wants to correct him. Prime example: Magnus’ death metal band, the one he’s been so recently and ruthlessly exiled from. He scowls at a pawn shop as they walk past it, and catches a glimpse of them in the reflection of the window: he, with his ghoulish dead eye and his old-beyond-its-years smoker’s complexion and the clothes that get dirtier by the day, and a bizarrely cheerful Norwegian kid who looks like he’s only ever slept in dumpsters.
They reach Magnus’ truck then and it can’t come soon enough. “Hey, well, good luck with all of that, man,” Magnus says, switching to English out of convenience. “It’s a good city to be a musician in. Just uh, keep practicing and all that.” He unlocks the truck and climbs into the passenger seat. Finally, solitude—
“I practices all the times!” the kid says in thickly-accented English as he climbs into the passenger seat.
Into the passenger seat.
“Oh,” comes Magnus’ dumb reply.
“Yep, but it’s hard without de amps what to makes the guitar louder.” He’s still grinning, positioning his guitar carefully between his thin legs. “Wowee, you’ve gots the real cool trucks. Why’s it so talls?”
“It’s lifted—” Magnus breaks himself off, and blinks a couple of times. “What the fuck do you want?”
The kid gives him a blank look.
“Seriously, the fuck are you after, here? Food? Drugs? What’s your fucking angle?”
He grins again. “Oh, foods! Okay, we goes gets some foods.”
It’s Magnus turn to stare blankly.
“How’s about hankburgers? Boy, I really loves hankburgers—”
“Fine. Hamburgers. Alright, let’s go.”
It has to be loneliness, Magnus concludes. From his own time in Norway, Magnus understands the sheer relief that comes from meeting someone who speaks your language in a foreign country. Maybe it’s loneliness, too, that compels Magnus to start his truck and start driving in the direction of the nearest Dimmu Burger; though he’s an unwilling participant in this conversation, it’s already the most attention anyone has shown him in months.
At any rate, he doesn’t seem to be escaping it any time soon. “What’s your name?” the kid asks, switching back to Norwegian.
“Magnus.”
“Magnus.” He repeats it with nothing short of reverence. “That’s a cool name. Sounds like what someone who casts magic spells would be called. My name’s Toki.”
“That’s weird. What is that, Icelandic?”
“I’m named after the Viking my family’s descended from.” Toki says this with a bashful smile, as if it’s something he’s used to impress Americans before. Which is funny, because he doesn’t look remotely ‘viking’—appearance-wise, he’s sitting at the intersection between ‘girl’ and ‘Victorian chimney sweep’. “Toki Víg-tönn. That’s ‘Toki Wartooth’ in English, I translated it.”
“And you want to go into death metal? That’s a black metal name.”
“Faen. Should I get a stage name?” Toki seems genuinely concerned by this. “Maybe I should call myself an American name. Like… Tommy?”
“Nah,” Magnus shakes his head. “That’s lame.”
“How about Magnus!”
“How about you just use your own name?”
“Oh. Okay. I’ll keep being Toki, then.”
The conversation comes to a natural, blessed lull, in which Magnus focuses on driving and trying not to crash his car out of migraine-induced inattention. Unfortunately, Toki proves to be irrepressible, because he’s silent for only a few seconds before he starts up again:
“Where are you staying?”
“Here.”
“In the…” Toki turns his head, looking at the shops around them, “In the mattress store?”
“In my truck. I live in my truck.”
“You must get sore legs a lot. You’re really tall.”
“Yep.”
“I bet sleeping in a mattress store would be nice. You’d have so many beds to choose from. I’d sleep on a different mattress every night.”
“Mm.”
“I sleep in a dumpster.”
Magnus glances at him. “I can tell.”
“What does that mean?”
“You smell bad.”
“Oh, fuck you, you smell like a dog that died.” Toki says this rather cheerfully. He turns his head, taking in the interior of the pick-up that’s been Magnus’ home ever since Dethklok kicked him out: empty cigarette packs and dead lighters, a duffel bag full of clothing, a threadbare blankets, and enshrined in the back—
“That’s a guitar!” Toki gasps, pointing to the space in the back. “You play that?”
“Gibson Les Paul,” Magnus says modestly, “Yeah, I’m pretty good.”
“But it’s kind of a lame guitar. It’s like, if a grandpa’s guitar was electric, it’d be that guitar.”
“Come on, kid.”
“You have an amp for it?”
“In the back, yeah.”
“I want to hear you play. Oh, we can jam out together! I’ve got a Flying V.” Toki pats his homemade guitar case proudly. “What do you like to play?”
For a moment, Magnus debates lying and claiming that he’s a jazz guitarist—he’s starting to worry that if he reveals he and Toki share anything in common, he’ll never get rid of the kid. His ego intervenes, however, and he admits: “Death metal.”
If Toki smiled any wider, his jaw would fall off of his slightly misshapen face. “No way! We both play guitars for death metal and we’re from Norway! We’re gonna be best friends!”
Magnus will sooner throw Toki out of a moving car than make him his best friend. He hasn’t spoken Norwegian for this long since he was a teenager, and his head is protesting violently. He leans over and fumbles around the centre console for a non-empty packet of cigarettes.
“Are you in a band?” Toki fills in the silence.
“I’m, uh, between bands.”
“Maybe we can join a band together. I’m going to lots of auditions. You can come with me and we’ll be a guitar duo.” Toki gasps, then, his eyes going wide. “Oh, we can start our own band!”
“I’m taking a break from music.”
“Why?”
Magnus has to hesitate over this one. He finds one carton with a stray cigarette in it, grabs it, and pops it in his mouth.
“Cause I’m…”
He searches for the word in Norwegian, fails to find it, and answers in English instead:
“I’m blacklisted from the scene.”
“What means that?” Toki asks in his clunky English.
“Means nobody wants to work with me.”
“How come?”
Here, again, Magnus hesitates. He has one hand shoved in his pocket, searching for his lighter. He still hasn’t come up with a plausible lie to explain to people why he left Dethklok—and then he realises how ridiculous it is, to worry about what this little parasite will think of him.
“… I stabbed the lead singer of my band.” Magnus finally finds his lighter.
“Wowee,” Toki breathes, “Dat’s brutal.”
“Yeah.” He lights his cigarette, inhales deep. The hit of tobacco does nothing to relieve the headache.
“Why you does it?”
“He called me crazy.”
“You sounds crazy. Stabs a guy just what for callings you crazy.”
This doesn’t sound like admonishment at all, but Magnus shoots Toki a glare regardless. Magnus’ withering scowl cows Toki for all of three seconds; he shrinks back in his seat, looks away, and then immediately brightens up again.
“That just makes you the extra brutals metals guitarists,” Toki says confidently. “You’re like Burzums. If they doesn’t sucks. So how comes dey bla… blaskliskted you?”
“Cause Americans are posers, Toki.”
“What means that?”
“It means they’re fake, man. Pretending.” Magnus takes a long drag of his cigarette, savouring this chance to dwell in his own bitterness. “They wouldn’t know real brutality if it stabbed them in the back.”
Toki blows air through his lips as he considers this, sounding rather like a contented horse. “… They must be real nice, though,” he finally says, in a dreamy voice. “Can’t waits to meet them all and be friends…”
It takes Magnus several seconds to identify the pang of emotion in his chest as pity— he’d initially mistaken it for acid reflux. Toki is annoying, and he has the disposition of a particularly aggressive black mold, but he has something that’s terribly rare in this godforsaken country: he seems nice. There’s a glittery optimism about him, and Magnus doesn’t get the sense that it comes from naivete, the way that Nathan’s closely-guarded softness fatally belies a sheltered upbringing. Toki’s a homeless immigrant who’s obviously seen some shit and yet he’s just... plain goddamn nice. That’s almost worse, somehow. There are bands here that will eat him alive.
They pull off of the street and into a strip mall, where one of the less shady Dimmu Burgers sits like an island among an ocean of potholed concrete. Magnus has all of thirty dollars to his name, which was ostensibly supposed to be used for food, but pain and opioid dependence have robbed him of his already modest appetite, and besides, feeding a starving kid might give him a much-needed karmic boost. He pulls up to the menu board and turns to Toki.
“Alright, kid,” he says, in English, “What do you want?”
Toki’s staring at the board with wide eyes, and there’s colour rising to his face, a bit of sweat beading on his brow. He blinks several times, then stammers, “Um.”
Still smoking his cigarette, Magnus waits for several seconds, watching as Toki stares at the board and grows gradually redder, like a ripening tomato.
“Um,” Toki finally says again, voice small, and switches to Norwegian: “Magnus? I can’t read it.”
“Ah.”
“Can you tell me what it says?”
If speaking Norwegian gives him a headache, translating is going to cave his skull in. Magnus gives the board a cursory glance. “Hamburger, hamburger with cheese, uh—potato sticks? Chicken… chicken blobs. And… what’s the vegetable with layers. That as rings. ‘Onion rings’. What do you call that.”
“Oh, yeah, I want all of that.”
“Toki, that’s the menu.”
“Do they have something sweet? Milkshake! Can I have a milkshake? Oh, and how much?” Toki reaches into his pocket, and extracts a handful of change: a few quarters, a dime, a bouncy ball with a plastic horse inside of it. “Is this enough?”
Magnus glances at the handful, then waves it away and pulls up to the speaker.
A few minutes later, Magnus is accepting a paper bag veritably dripping with grease from a cashier that looks like as much of a junkie as he is. He hands it to Toki, who’s gone uncharacteristically quiet, and pulls into a space in the parking lot.
Silence is a weird thing. After prolonged exposure to the chatty, sentient ray of sunshine that is Toki, it feels like an ominous cloud has passed over the sun, offering not a pleasant shadow but a promise of a storm. Magus stares out of the windscreen for a minute, waiting for Toki to speak, and when he doesn’t, he finally turns to look at the kid.
Toki is hugging the bag to his chest, staring down at it bashfully, and—God help them all—he looks like he’s tearing up.
“You good?” Magnus asks against his better judgement, in English.
“This my first foods in two days,” Toki whispers.
“Ah, shit, kid.”
Toki looks up at Magnus with big misty eyes. “Nobody’s ever boughts the hankburgers for Toki before...”
“Oh, God, just eat, man. You’re making this weird.”
Toki doesn’t need to be told twice. He eviscerates the bag, tearing it open in his haste to get to the greasy feast inside. As requested, there’s a hamburger, a cheeseburger, a box of chicken nuggets, fries and onion rings, and a milkshake nestled in on top of that all. He doesn’t stop to ask Magnus whether Magnus wants any of the feast, but sets in without hesitation, shoving greasy food into his mouth as if Magnus might at any moment jerk it away from him.
There’s that indigestion-like pity, again; Toki eats like he’s starving. Magnus himself, despite being tall, has always had his appetite dulled by drugs and the various malfunctions of his brain, but many a time he’s watched Nathan put away five jumbo burritos in a row and still have room for dessert. The metabolism of teenage boys is a force of nature unto itself, and Toki is ridiculously, embarrassingly, teenaged.
After a moment of contemplation, watching him dispatch burgers is too much—Magnus switches on the radio, finds himself another cigarette, and glowers out of the window, as his head is filled with the staticky roar of local death metal and the faint slobbery sounds of a famished kid inhaling junk food.
It really is a shame, he finds himself thinking around a pull of cigarette smoke. Maybe this is the post-concussion syndrome speaking, but the Tampa death metal scene can be rough, and Toki seems so nice. Just a dumb, nice kid—
“You’s a hairy bitch.”
Magnus’ gaze jerks back to Toki. “What?”
“You’s a-bitch-hairy,” Toki says. It sounds like it’s meant to be English, but he has no fewer than six French fries hanging out of his mouth, so it’s a little hard to tell.
“Say that again, you little shit—”
Toki’s eyes widen. “A-bitch-wary?” he utters, before swallowing several French fries whole. “What’s on the car sound thing! You’s—no, they’s—they’s Abitchwary.”
“Obituary?”
“That’s what I says!” Face red, Toki switches to Norwegian: “This band is called Obituary, right? I love them!”
“Yeah—yeah, Obituary.” Magnus presses a hand over his eyes. “Never say that to anyone.”
“Were you in Obituary?”
“Nope.”
“What band were you in?”
“Just finish your fucking food.”
“All the good American bands come from Tampa,” Toki observes wistfully, fishing out the last of his French fries from the greasy packet. “Like Morbid Angel, and… don’t know any others, actually, I don’t listen to American bands.” He looks up at Magnus then, beaming, “But I bet the band you were in was the best band.”
They are—they were. “You’re getting your hopes up. Tampa isn’t all that.” Magnus peeks out from behind his fingers, giving Toki one of his more menacing glares. “People here aren’t nice, Toki.”
The glare does absolutely nothing to deter Toki. “You’re nice,” he rebuts. “You drive me around, and talk Norwegian to me, and you bought me food… you’re the nicest guy I’ve ever met, Magnus.”
Magnus needs an antacid, or to be shot, or to lay off the drugs; his stomach is burning. “Yeah, well,” he says gruffly in English, looking away, “You owe me.”
“Owes you what?”
“Huh?”
“What I owes you?”
Magnus glances back over, “It’s a figure of speech—”
“I don’t gots no moneys,” Toki admits, eyes wide. “Whats to give you. You means—” and he pitches his voice into a whisper, “You wants me to sucks your d—”
“Fuck no.”
“But I don’t gots nothing!”
“Do you know what a figure of speech is?”
“Nopes.”
Magnus, speechless, takes a long drag of his cigarette; Toki looks despondently at his lap for all of two seconds before his indomitable sunny nature triumphs.
“I gots it!” Toki declares. “I gets you a new band!”
Magnus blinks at him. “I don’t want a—”
But Toki’s already pulling a crumpled flyer out of his fanny pack. “This band’s having an audition today,” he says in Norwegian, pushing the colourful scrap of paper towards Magnus. “They’re looking for a new guitarist. You’re a guitarist. You should go audition and be their new guitarist!”
Magnus takes the piece of paper. “Aren’t you trying to become a guitarist?”
“Yeah, and I was going to audition, but I owe you, you just said so. So you should go to this one.” Toki gives him a vague smile, “I have a feeling they’ll like you.”
Magnus’ head hurts. His head hurts, and he’s cursed, or otherwise God really exists and hates him personally. On top of it all, his life is a bad joke, and this is confirmed when he un-crumples the flier:
newly signed crystal mountain records
DETH metal band
DETHKLOK
summons GUITARIST for their DETHLY MISSION
And four faces that used to be familiar suspended below the jagged-font red ink. Below their image, the word ‘AUDITION’ blazes, along with today’s date and the location of their old rehearsal space.
Magnus must have blanched, because even the remarkably oblivious Toki notices something strange in his expression. "Do you know them?”
Magnus’ finger grazes Nathan’s face, deformed by creases and grainy with cheap ink. He towers like a mushroom-cloud in the centre of that flier, flanked on either side by his band—sans Magnus, who has been conspicuously edited out of this promotion photo. Hell, he remembers taking the photo, now that he thinks about it, and when he looks to Skwisgaar’s side he finds a conspicuous sharp edge of pixels: the place where they edited Magnus out.
“No,” Magnus answers, face stony, “I don’t know them.”
Toki’s brow creases. “Really?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I just thought you’d know them. I don’t know why.” A brief cloud of consternation crosses Toki’s face, but then he grins again. “You should audition for them!”
“No.”
“Yeah, you should! I bet they’d like you! I have a feeling they’d like you.”
“No.”
“Oh, I bet you’ve got performance fright. You know what I do when I have performance fright? I bring my deaddy bear and I pretend I’m performing for him.” Toki gasps. “I’ll give you my deaddy bear! Then you won’t be so scared to audition—”
“I SAID FUCKING NO.”
Magnus screams it—the shout echoes around the interior of the truck like a whip-crack.
Toki’s cowering, flattened against the truck door, his blue eyes big and bewildered. That’s right, Magnus thinks, Toki doesn’t yet know that Magnus Hammersmith is crazy, and that shout had come out of nowhere. His broad dumb face is blank, uncomprehending, as if Magnus had just slapped him across the cheeks and then taken a shit in his milkshake. Abrupt cruelty from a man who’s been so unexpectedly kind to him.
Toki’s fear earns him no mercy from Magnus. “I said no,” Magnus repeats himself, in English, through gritted teeth. “I’m not auditioning for those—those dildos.”
“What means that?” Toki asks in a small voice. “Dildos?”
“It’s a bunch of fake plastic dicks.”
“Like whats the lady fucks herself with?”
“Yeah, Toki, like what the ladies fuck themselves with.”
“And the gay guys, too,” Toki contributes, in a terrified whisper.
Magnus thrusts the flier across the car; Toki takes it and puts it on his lap, staring down at the crumpled faces. There’s a ketchup stain on Murderface’s torso—what’s new?—and Skwisgaar’s beautiful blond hair has been amputated at the shoulder by a minor tear in the paper. The flier itself is printed on nice paper, the Crystal Mountain Records premium stationary; without having recorded a single full album, Dethklok is selling out. There’s a bitterness churning in Magnus’ stomach that no drugs or cigarette smoke can quash.
Still visibly rattled, Toki closes his eyes and takes a few timed deep breaths in a way that Magnus can recognise from experience as an attempt to dispel a building panic attack. When he opens his eyes again, his fear has been tempered by determination. He locks gazes with Magnus, undeterred by the bloody colour of Magnus’ dying left eye.
“I auditions for those dildos,” Toki declares.
Magnus blinks. “Alright, bud. Good for you.”
“Oh. Thanks.” Toki glances down at the flier, then sheepishly back up at Magnus. “Can you reads to me the directions to the auditions place?”
Magnus glances down at the address, though he already knows by heart exactly where it is. “I’ll do you one better,” he says, stubbing out his cigarette on the windowsill, “I’ll drop you off there.”
“Really?”
“Sure, it’s not far from here.”
“Thanks, Magnus! You’re the best!”
It’s a blessing in disguise that they’re seated in a truck, because Toki looks like he wants to fly over and tackle Magnus in a greasy, hamburger-scented hug.
Dethklok’s old rehearsal space really isn’t far from here. A mile down the highway and a couple of turns right would have them there in fifteen minutes. Magnus has made the drive a hundred-thousand times before—a pre-rehearsal chicken nugget run, a procrastinatory aimless drive, picking up Nathan from his part-time job, picking up Pickles from a last-minute drug deal, picking up Skwisgaar from his old guitar teacher’s house down the street. Drunken snack-shopping sprees at the nearby strip mall or chaotic, destructive rampages through the neighbouring suburbs; Tampa is his adopted home, by now, he knows these streets like the back of his hand.
Was his adopted home. He’d given years of his life to Dethklok and they’d gone and booted him out of the band just as they were starting to get big. And, looking at Toki, it makes sense: he would be perfect for them, a dumb little doormat they can stamp all over. Magnus is too old, too experienced, too willing to stand up for himself in the face of Pickles’ insubordination and Nathan’s constant criticism. That’s the real reason he’d been kicked to the curb, why Nathan had deliberately pushed his buttons until he’d had an episode and stabbed him—and now he’ll be replaced with a younger, stupider, more Norwegian guitarist. The world is cruel indeed.
As he drives, he watches Toki from the corner of his eye. Toki is slurping down a milkshake, face pressed to the window, grinning stupidly at the passing world. His legs are wrapped around his home-stitched guitar case, his dumb-looking cap sits askew on his badly cut hair. When he catches Magnus staring, he turns around and offers up an enthusiastic smile, face gaping open like a catfish begging for bread.
“Can you comes with me?” Toki asks in English. “I’ll feels better with a good pals like you to hears me play.”
Magnus shakes his head. “You’ll do fine, kid. You don’t need me there.”
“You really thinks so?”
“I knows so.” Magnus takes an exit, makes a left turn, and rolls into a parking lot. “Well, here we are.”
Toki looks out the window and his face falls. “This ams a…” He squints at the sign before them. “Mad…. Dress…”
“It says ‘mattresses’,” Magnus finishes for him.
“They’s auditions in the store for mattresses?”
“Weird, right? But a lot of Americans do it.” Magnus shrugs. “It’s cheap rehearsal space or something. Beats me. But yeah, that’s what it says on the flier.”
“Wowee.” Toki looks at the mattress store, then back at Magnus. There’s the faintest hint of suspicion on his face.
“Tell you what,” Magnus leans back, “I’ll wait out here for you. You go in, do your audition, and then come out and let me know how it goes. Alright?”
The suspicion melts into gooey whole-hearted relief. “Okay,” he agrees, pulling open the door, “I goes auditions and you waits for me. Boy, I feels better knowing my pal Magnus is right heres.”
“Mm.” Magnus looks away, staring pensively at the mattress store as Toki climbs out of the truck. He waits to see Toki skipping his innocent way towards the door—
The driver’s side door of the truck is wrenched open, and suddenly, Magnus is, as he feared, trapped in a greasy, dirty, vaguely hamburger-scented hug.
“You’re the best,” Toki mumbles in Norwegian, voice muffled in Magnus’ shoulder. “I’m gonna do my best guitar playing ever, just for you!”
The aroma coming from Toki leaves no doubt that he has, in fact, been sleeping in a dumpster. “Uh,” Magnus coughs, “Yeah, good luck.”
Toki springs off of him, lands unsteadily on the pavement, and then turns to give Magnus a big, sappy grin. With no further ado, he turns and, as predicted, skips towards the mattress store, his adorable hand-crafted guitar case swinging on his back.
Magnus waits until Toki’s halfway through the door. Then he starts his truck’s engine and goes peeling out of the parking lot with a squeal of rubber. He floors it, shooting around the shopping complex and back towards the highway, shaking his head all the while.
What idiot would believe a death metal holds auditions in a mattress store?
Somewhere, buried deep below the migraine and the drugs and the churning tar-black bitterness, Magnus feels a little pang of guilt. Toki seems like such a sweet, dumb kid, dumb enough to actually trust Magnus. He’ll probably be crushed when he realises that Magnus has betrayed him; and then he’ll learn the lesson that people are never simply nice, and he won’t let himself be fucked around with.
Nice kids like Toki don’t survive long—they need to be hurt, the way you hurt your fingers on guitar strings to build up the callouses, and Magnus is one of the only people with the guts to do the hurting. It’s not malicious, really. It’s just a fact of life, a lesson he’d tried to teach Dethklok, too.
Besides, Magnus reasons, he’s doing Toki a favour. Toki is genuinely sweet, caring, he has an optimism to him; a band like Dethklok would chew him up and spit him out. In the long run, when Dethklok is revealed to be a bunch of selfish, backstabbing, petty, lazy cowards, Toki can look back at this encounter and be glad to know that Magnus had his best interests at heart. Maybe by then the world will know how Magnus has been wronged—yes, he’ll be the benevolent, mysterious saviour of this encounter, intervening to spare another talented guitarist from the musical meat grinder. That’s what friends do, after all; Magnus is kind like that.
But the weird pang of guilt remains, and the migraine is worse than ever.
He’ll find a place to park, take one of his last oxys, try and get a nap; he’ll think once or twice about Toki Wartooth, that incomprehensible niceness and the hug he’d given Magnus. But then he’ll go on to brood about how his band kicked him out and how his bitch mother cut him off and how the rest of the world has so cruelly wronged him, and for the foreseeable future, Toki will be little more than a glimpse of sunshine that failed to interrupt a shitty, overcast life.