Short Story: “Welcome to the Deva Realm”
Tasha’s credit card was worn to a raveling. The tour paid good money for a roadie like her, certainly better than acts like Oblivion Godhead and Penetration Grid had back in her death-metal days, but Hunter Berkeley’s tours tended to pass through some of the most expensive cities in the world, and bring even more money in during their sojourns. The current one crawled through the world like an old-style traveling circus or a military campaign in the Chinese Civil War. They were in Milan now. Next up was Zurich. Things in Switzerland cost so much that even Milan people struggled there.
Tasha’s favorite tour city so far had been Kyoto. Kyoto, not Tokyo—a city that Hunter Berkeley might have preferred, had it not been for the Incident (as Hunterworld old-timers were wont to call it) that had sunk her Budokan show on the Clear Your Name Tour in 2017. This tour was her first since Clear Your Name, on account of the pandemic, and the people in Kansai had seemed proud to have Kyoto as the Japanese stop, to have Sanga Stadium as the Japanese venue. The Japanese produced a lot more of their pop music domestically than did most non-Anglo countries these days. Hunter was the only Anglo artist a lot of them listened to—men and women alike; it made fascinatingly little difference compared to the gender politics of Japanese artists, or for that matter the Gender Politics of Hunter Berkeley in the West. Supposedly the Kyoto crowds were “more normal about” Hunter than the people in Tokyo six years ago had been. This was according to the same old hands who talked about the Incident and Tasha did not have a great idea of what they meant by it. Most of her time in Kyoto, except during the concerts, Tasha had spent at temples. Tenryūji and Kokedera had been her favorites. They had attracted a different crowd and by going to them Tasha had been playing a different game to many of the other roadies who would look for bars or swipe on hookup apps.
Tasha’s only hookup on the tour so far had been in Arlington, Texas, on the especially circuslike, ludic American South leg of the Seasons of Life Tour. It had been with a woman with a tongue stud and nails groomed the way Hunter would sometimes groom her own nails when she wanted the entertainment press to talk about something other than her friendship with that guy from Patriot News and his wife. The girl in Arlington, Concepción (which was almost too good), had known what she was doing with the tongue stud but not with the fingernails, which had been a mere way of signaling a type of subcultural loyalty, like flashing a gang sign or eating at Chick-Fil-A in a Northeastern state. It had been disappointing but not surprising, like a stupid storyline in a Batman comic. Tasha had had to put way too much effort into getting herself off, like a Mormon housewife seeking to build a pyramid-scheme downline.
Bad sex in Arlington, blow in Fort Lauderdale, shot after shot in Nashville and then Gatlinburg for some special event that Tasha was too black and too Jewish to wrap her head around, then on to Indianapolis and other regions of the ambivalent-summered North. It was at that point that she had started speaking regularly with one of the old hands, a man only slightly older than her named Ryan McIntyre. Ryan had a mind as self-contained and seemingly impenetrable as a mussel shell that boiling had not opened, and he came across as only slightly ensouled more often than not, but in a very different way to what life had taught Tasha to expect from cisheterowhatever men. She didn’t know if what made the change there was age, line of work, both, or something else entirely, and it was not that she was really all that fond of him, but he was perversely fascinating to talk to. The first thing of real personal substance that Ryan McIntyre ever said to Tasha Seligman had been, in these exact words and with utterly guileless yet somehow still emotionally deadened intonation, “I wonder what would happen if you took a tenderloin sandwich and put it in a blender and drank it like a milkshake.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever wondered that myself,” Tasha had told him, “but I also can’t imagine it tasting very good.”
He nodded and said “The mouthfeel would probably be even worse than the taste. And thus had gone the Seasons of Life Tour’s stint in Indianapolis. The takes on things that he had expressed in Detroit, Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, and San José had been scarcely better. Assuming, that was, that “better” was the relevant category here. Had the problem with the tenderloin smoothie remark been that it was “bad,” exactly? Tasha wondered.
❦
Like many people who made of their presence in Hunterworld a lifestyle choice of sorts, which included even much of the fandom and a fortiori professionals like Tasha and Ryan and their ilk, Ryan had a very, very high opinion of the woman Hunter Berkeley. Tasha thought that treating Hunter as any kind of moral exemplar was ridiculous, even though the few times they had actually exchanged words had gone well. In Kyoto: “Ryan tells me you visited that moss temple? It looks so pretty; I’m jealous! Send me some pictures, okay?” Tasha had tagged Hunter in her Intstagram post about Kokedera, and Hunter had liked and commented on the post. In Sydney: “You know, it really surprises me it took me so long to come here. Growing up Daddy would always be threatening or promising to move us all to Australia, if things were bad at his work or if the Harrisburg weather was doing something he didn’t like. It always sounded so exciting to me. Not sure why I’m telling you this. Tasha Seligman, right?” In Durban: “That book you’re reading looks interesting.” It had been an old copy of one of Tasha’s older sister’s favorite books from her Asian lit major at UMass, The Karma of Words by a William R. LaFleur. Probably, Tasha thought, Hunter Berkeley found it interesting because it was in large part about poetry, a subject near and dear to any halfway decent singer-songwriter’s heart—and Hunter Berkeley was a more than halfway decent singer-songwriter, whatever else she was. And finally they had spoken very briefly in the Seasons of Life Tour’s first European city, Barcelona. “Looking sharp,” Hunter had said about Tasha’s coat and tie.
“You too. Break a leg.”
“I always do.” That had been the whole conversation.
Hunter Berkeley’s critics, of whom there were many because she was a hot white woman, often said that it seemed fake of her to set up these brief but attentive conversations with the little people. Tasha did not feel that way, exactly. Partly it was gratitude that Hunter at least did not adhere to the life philosophy of Dan Gaudry from Penetration Grid, who had grabbed Tasha’s ass in dress pants and made crude guesses about what kind of underwear she had had on underneath, or Axel Nilsen from Oblivion Godhead, who was gay and had the libido of a Baroque-era castrato but made up for it by constantly telling people in Tasha’s position to go get him local delicacies that were not local to the place in which he was playing. (She had been unable to find him, for instance, durian or betel nut in Sao Paulo in 2019.) Getting even somewhat calculated-feeling positive attention from one of these people was a lot better than many of the most obvious and plausible alternatives. Tasha’s sister always told her to expect and demand better, and she did, since Hunter Berkeley was better than Dan Gaudry or Axel Nilsen.
By the time the Milan shows had gotten underway, Tasha had read about two-thirds of The Karma of Words. She understood why Becca thought so highly of it, all things considered. She tried to read more of it backstage, some extended point about, perhaps appropriately, Zeami. Ryan kept talking to her. He was more insightful than usual; Milan, he said, was a city that “got the grey juices flowing,” in a way that few other major cities did. Tasha could respect that since she guessed the same could be said of her and Kyoto. “I think it’s impressive she’s nice like you were saying in Barcelona, since the rules don’t apply to her,” Ryan was saying. “I mean, defamation law works for her the way it works for English people. She gets trashed or makes out with, you know, whoever, she doesn’t want it on the internet, it’s not on the internet. Trump almost apologized to her once.”
“I don’t know that I’d say that that’s impressive,” said Tasha, “certainly not in the sense of being a reason why we like her.”
“No, no, no, that’s not what I’m saying,” said Ryan. “It isn’t impressive that she can do this kind of thing. It’s impressive that she treats us so well even though she can do this kind of thing. It isn’t even hard to make asshole stories go away if you’re rich and famous. How often do you hear that, I don’t know, Science Steve is actually a big ol’ jerkoff to fans? Not often. But he is.”
“I have actually heard that,” said Tasha. “It’s disillusioning. But okay, yeah, I get what you were trying to say now. Thanks.”
“If Hunter wanted to be a complete bitch and pull sick power moves on everyone around her,” Ryan said confidently, “then Hunter would be a complete bitch and pull sick power moves on everyone around her.” He sat down in the chair across from Tasha in her part of the little roadie launch bay, without asking—which she supposed was fair because it was not actually her space. Abruptly he asked “You ever been with a guy, T?”
“Uh, why the fuck are you asking?”
“Oh, it isn’t like—I mean, someone asked me that recently—”
Tasha pinched her nose high up near the bridge of her little round wire-rimmed glasses and said “Ryan, I swear to God, if you play the autism card…”
“The…the what?! No, Tasha, I am not going to ‘play the autism card.’ I’m sorry. Random question and I’m sorry.”
“Gay sex on the brain?” asked Tasha, who had a revealed preference for fucking women who said things like “the cowboy grit and rugged independence so engrained in the Texas spirit” over fucking men of any description.
“I’m a dude who works for Hunter Berkeley. Of course I have gay sex on the brain.”
“Uh, okay. I don’t want to discuss it with you.”
“Duly noted.” Ryan stood up. “Showtime’s in an hour. Last call for Italy. You have somewhere you gotta be? I do.”
Tasha thought unpleasantly, in a derivative, regurgitatory, online-class-discussion-platform sort of way, of what had been said about living in a ten-foot-square hut, retiring from public affairs, the ease of keeping promises and laws when there was no way to break them—hadn’t Hunter Berkeley had a song like this on Forever Hold Your Peace?—and then about herself and how much she was always having to do. “I’ll be busy starting in fifteen, twenty minutes,” she told Ryan after checking her watch. “Till then I think I’m going to go for a walk.”
❦
Tasha walked out on the streets of Milan, which was far from her favorite Italian city. Tasha’s family went back, on her mother’s side, in Italian Jewry—she was a distant relative of Giacomo Segre—and she had been to the country many times before, with family or with friends or with her borderline ex-girlfriend Silvana Rossi. She loved Siena and Assisi and for some reason Reggio Calabria, she liked Florence and Rome and Venice okay, and she felt about Milan apparently the way Hunter’s pre-Incident roadies had felt about Tokyo going into 2017. Yet still it had a ssense of age and time and space and awe that was a far cry from DFW’s mesothelioma-riddled cloverleaves and almost as far a cry from the self-imposed historical limbo of Tasha’s native Mid-Atlantic states. (Hunter Berkeley’s native Mid-Atlantic states as well; it was not lost on Tasha; how could it be?) So there she stood and looked around and paced nervously a bit and tried to take in some sense of time and essence of history that was not the bare time and self-iterating history of the Seasons of Life Tour’s fourish-hour run time. She wished the stadium was closer to the duomo, or to the gallery with that last pietà on which Michelangelo had wrung out his mind like a wet bikini. She checked her phone. H. had sent her something on Speckle. Why Speckle? She had had an issue with the garters for one of the big sexy numbers towards the end of the show. She wanted slightly different lighting to make the fix her costumer had made, a fix that Hunter seemed not to feel the need to describe to Tasha, less visually apprehensible from the audience. Tasha was needed to move some of the heavier equipment that they had to use to contain the chemical fires that produced some of these lighting effects. She guessed it was fair enough; that was barely spitting distance from her regular duties, after all. Having to do it so soon before the show started was concerning, but Hunter herself would be as concerned as anyone about that—more, even. And so it was that without really walking or going anywhere after all Tasha hied back to the stadium and to the backstage and to where the great pop star was giving hurried, stressed-out direction to colleagues of Tasha’s who, indeed, seemed much less anxious than she was.
People would sometimes derisively call superfans of Hunter Berkeley “barkers or “hounds” because her name reminded one of hunting dogs. She pronounced Berkeley “Barkley,” Britishly, and apparently so did the rest of her family. The “barker” name struck Tasha as apt as Hunter strode around the backstage in high panic, or what passed for high panic from someone as poised as she was, personally directing—micromanaging—where the people around Tasha were putting boxes and cauldrons and spotlights and firecrackers and hunks of magnesium and strontium nitrate and nitromethane and boric acid and butane and barium chloride and copper chloride and saltpeter and salt. They barely outran the clock.
Hunter Berkeley’s opening act went onstage at eight o’ clock, or, as the Italians called it, twenty hours. In most cities the proceedings started an hour earlier, but here in Milan they were throwing a bone to late Italian evenings, that supposed national preference of that supposed national character. Who then was the opening act for the European leg of Miss Hunter Berkeley’s Seasons of Life Tour, who the honored second fiddle so impressively abased by having given to her this augustly subordinate task? Who was the Patroclus or the Ismene, the Felicitas or the Valerian, the Olivier or the Sancho Panza, the Harriet Smith or the Diana Barry, the Watson or the Spock, the Henry Wallce or the Walter Mondale or perhaps even the Dick Cheney, to this apparently, if Clear Your Name and its supporting tour six years ago were anything to go by, unbeatable, unkillable, unstoppable titan of pop music and pop entertainment? Who reflected silverly Hunter’s blazing hot-gold sun? It was once and future Amor Fati frontwoman Bethany Bailey, one half of the dynamic duo or in some people’s minds gruesome twosome of Berkeley and Bailey that had polluted the shades of a certain music-industry-adjacent girls’ high school together in the mid-to-late 2000s. Once Tasha had gotten high and watched a Japanese “pinky violence” movie from the early 1970s, called something along the lines of Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom. It had been a very bad movie and Tasha had not expected anything more—or from a certain point of view anything less—when she had pulled it up on GoToAsia-Watch.cx and pressed “play.” That about which Tasha Seligman thought when she thought about the stories still told of Berkeley and Bailey in those days was, first and foremost, although she was not proud of this and did not like to admit it, the memory of lying around a t-shirt and bike shorts stoned out of her gourd and watching Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom. She thus supposed that had someone been able to make her take a side either for or against Berkeley and Bailey as once the pair of them had been, she would have sided against them, as indeed she had at her own high school against the hot popular girls, when she had not instead been thinking of them in terms of how best to get them to corner her in one of the outbuildings between the baseball field and the woods and stick their tongues down her throat and their fingers up her pudenda. This had worked sometimes, but not very often, and by the end of Tasha’s high school career she had been in the “they’re all vapid bitches anyway” sour grapes mode far more often than not. Now she was older and wiser and knew that thinking of them that way had been unfair. It would have been unfair to Hunter Berkeley and Bethany Bailey too, but Tasha was also older and wiser in that she could look back on her teen self with clear pure eyes and know without judgment or self-hatred that it was what she would have done back then nevertheless.
Bethany’s set lasted a perfect down-to-a-science fifty-five minutes, after which it was time to move things, in some cases physically and quite laboriously, into place so that people would get good and hyped up for the living legend Hunter Berkeley’s descent from the heavens and welcoming approach as she graced the stage of San Siro for myriads of nobodies. The multicolored fires started burning. The first notes of Hunter’s 2019 hit “You and I in the Field of Fire” started playing. Ryan, that shirkduty layabout, finally showed his face (admittedly carrying something very heavy, it had to be handed to him) and gave a nervous thumbs-up to Tasha as Hunter Berkeley herself took the stage.
“The sound of horns and hunting, which will bring Actaeon to Diana in the spring,” Tasha murmured to Ryan, but Ryan just grinned blandly at her and hoisted the colors. “The colors” here were a box of pyrotechnics marked to indicate that they were for the part of the Seasons of Life show where a giant “H.B.” monogram got shot up into the sky and then cycled through the colors of the national flag, in this case the green, white, and red of the Italian Republic’s tricolore. This box of pyrotechnics Ryan passed to a guy named Fat Bruce who was legend in his own right among Seasons of Life Tour roadies for having been physically present for the Incident at the Budokan. They said it had been he who had calmed Hunter down in the moment when she had been screaming at the top of her lungs at her parents and at her then-boyfriend about how she was going to leave the music industry to burn and reinvent herself somehow, as some sort of saint or sage. Nobody who had been there had really believed that Hunter had meant that when she had said it, but they seemed to have had all sorts of conflicting stories and theories and ideas about why they did not believe that, and for that matter about what, if anything in particular, she had meant by it. In any case Fat Bruce was way too cool for the likes of Tasha Seligman to talk to, so she didn’t bother. He got the stuff for the flag trick set up; good. Things were well and truly back on track. They were running a bit early now, even.
“Heave to!” Fat Bruce called to someone. He was the kind of person to say things like “heave to,” but along with his other virtues he was so cool that he hadn’t changed his style since 1996, so he could do what he wanted in Tasha’s book. She knew Ryan felt just the same, and she wondered if Hunter Berkeley did too, after what Fat Bruce had done for her in Tokyo. (Had there, Tasha wondered, been a “Thin Bruce” once upon a time, from whom Fat Bruce had had to be distinguished?) “Heave to!” he called again, and “Haul away!,” and “Come on MacIntyre, come on Seligman, let’s see some elbow grease!”
❦
The structure of the Seasons of Life Tour show was based on the concept of “seasons” in Hunter’s own career, which she was rumored to have, way back in the mists of antiquity that even Fat Bruce the Vishvakarnam of roadies might not personally remember, “copied” from an artist called Sophie Summers. The seasons of life from “Seasons of Life” were not in any particular order other than what Hunter Berkeley and her closest intimates and collaborators thought the show’s overall aesthetic and thematic thrust called for. It started with Kiss Me Senseless, which was four or five album cycles ago now, but those album cycles had tended to be on the short side. K.M.S. had never been a particular favorite of Tasha Seligman’s, but then, Tasha Seligman had never really been a Hunter Berkeley superfan, only a Hunter Berkeley well-wisher and latterly a Hunter Berkeley employee, neither of which was at all the same thing. The early sets in the show also tended to be relative downtime to her. All of this was to say that she was not currently paying all that much attention to the proceedings. There were a number of other things that she could have, in this moment and under these circumstances, been doing to keep herself occupied, none of which were what she actually was doing, which was staring indifferently at some currently-not-being-used rigging and thinking somewhat darkly about what it might signify that Miss Hunter Berkeley was so preoccupied, unhealthily preoccupied, infamously preoccupied, with being thought to be “good,” being thought, that was, to be “in the right,” come what may, come Hull, Hell, or Halifax.
She thought about God, Who, if He existed, did not do so for any reason exactly, and Who thus would need nothing and lack for nothing and demand everything for humanity’s fundamental good and not for His own, which was past change. Tasha had never been particularly devout or observant, in large part because neither had either of her parents; in her father’s case in particular, growing up in the 1960s as a mixed-race kid in suburban Camden County had made it hard for him to feel as if either the Jewish community or the black church had much for him. He had been tacitly encouraged, even, you might say, to think that they did not, more or less for the whole of his childhood, which he had in certain respects projected onto, or into, the childhood of his only daughter in the 90s and 2000s. So Tasha thought of God, when she did, as a conceptual abstract, a necessary component of her ability to think about the world in the way in which she sometimes liked to think about it, as a place that “meant something” but in which one’s fate was not final, one’s decisions not permanently and irrevocably binding on everyone and everything, one’s capacity for love and hate not stretched to bursting by the ordinary everyday bullshit of normal life and normal problems. She suspected—knew, really, at this point—that Hunter herself felt just the same way much of the time, so that the whole program, the whole mystique, the whole three-hundred-and-sixty-degree Hunter Berkeley lifestyle experience, was meant to create or to sustain an ideal universe nestled cozily within the usual universe like a matryoshka. They renamed cities as puns on Hunter Berkeley’s name, sometimes, for a day or a weekend, when the Seasons of Life Tour rolled on through.
Of course Tasha had no intention of ever sharing any of these musings in any way that really meant something with Ryan or even with Fat Bruce. Confiding in Fat Bruce about this would be almost as mortifying, to say nothing of it also being dangerous to her career, as confiding in Hunter herself. Confiding in Ryan would of course be just plain exasperating, even though she was trying her best to outgrow the belief that that was somehow Ryan’s fault for being a twit. So it was something on which she kept her own counsel and would always keep her own counsel, barring the unforeseeable. Neither was it really at all clear to Tasha that “to be kept” was what her counsel needed. Why, exactly, did she think she needed “advice” here? She had never really answered that, not even in a purely and pellucidly inward way. She merely defaulted to the bare assumption that it was some sort of problem to be addressed, that she associated her boss Hunter so strongly with a delusional but well-meaning theurgy, an ongoing effort, characterized by bizarre spasms and idiotic, egregiously self-abasing sexual exploits on many different people’s parts, to bring heaven to earth, temporarily and as a carnival.
She stopped dissociating, if that really was what she had been doing, and brought her focus back to her job again. They were now several seasons into the Seasons of Life setlist. Hunter was backstage, mostly naked, being changed into the black-and-gold gown that she wore to perform whatever song was coming right before “Rich People Problems” at this point in the tour’s lifespan. Hunter was hot and wore those laser-cut nude thongs that people who styled red-carpet premiere looks were always praising to the seventh heaven, but Tasha had worked this tour for too long to eat the eye candy with as much gusto as she had early on. That was an obvious source of disappointment for her, at points, but it was also probably a good thing in that it meant that the costume changes did not unduly distract her from her own duties. In this case, at this moment, her duty was to help Fat Bruce’s girl Friday, Susie Womack, lift an amp that one of the backup performers needed for a bass guitar bit that Hunter had had worked into the tour’s arrangement of “Deep Roots.” Okay then; “Deep Roots” was going before “Rich People Problems.” That made sense; it was how things had been done earlier in the tour, and they were two of the big fan-favorite singles from the criminally overlooked Ever On and On album cycle. Putting the bass in was probably not going to go over well, but geniuses were weird like that, especially savants like Hunter and much of her inner circle.
Tasha happened to really like Ever On and On. It and its better-known and more widely discussed companion album The Lore of Living Creatures were probably the two Hunter Berkeley albums that Tasha would go out of her way to listen to on the regular even when she was no longer working for the great woman herself. The title of “Rich People Problems” made it sound like it would be a little out of place on an album whose general style and points of reference were almost medieval or Tolkienian, but in fact once Hunter, or whoever, actually started playing the song, it always sounded just right. That was part of why Tasha did not think that putting in more electric bass was going to help the song very much. It didn’t need any such help, for starters. But of course it wasn’t Tasha’s job to have strong feelings about that sort of thing. She held her tongue, knew her place, and lifted the amp.
About three-quarters of the way through the set Ryan came running up to Tasha and Susie in a high panic and said something that was not easy to make out about somebody in Hunter’s inner circle demanding a glass of a specific type of grappa. Tasha didn’t think the grappa was any better of an idea than putting the bass on “Rich People Problems”—or, no, it was going on the song before it and some of the songs after it as well, probably, which was even worse—but it was even less her business or her job than were the decisions about instrumentation, and so she held her tongue again. Susie didn’t. She halfheartedly said she did not see that any kind of grappa was what the situation or the backstage environment at this point in the tour called for, but she made no attempts, exactly, at stopping Ryan from asking other people and getting the booze elsewhere. Tasha was sure he would do that eventually, and he would definitely win someone’s gratitude for it, just not for any of the right reasons. It made her a little sad to think about that, about how much difference it made to this man’s concept of and ability to be fond and respectful of himself when people like the Berkeley family or Hunter’s terrifying publicist or her ex-best friend Kornelia Klopp thought well of him for things like helping them get wasted. Maybe Tasha was just jealous of him for being thought well of, or of them for being rich, but she did not think so. There were a lot of points about intoxicants that were made in various of the pieces of writing talked about in The Karma of Words. Needless to say, the medieval Japanese Buddhist religious poets had not had much good to say about the practice, still less the habit, of drunkenness—which was not necessarily to say that none of them had ever partaken or been tempted to partake. But one could say that for a lot of people, even Hunter when she was in what the “Hunter Berkeley has borderline personality disorder” people on BerkTok and r/HonestHunter called “wise mind.”
At long last, last album’s hit “Vindication” came on. As was, for better or for worse, tradition at this point, the fireworks started. Tasha liked the song more than she wanted to. It was about how Hunter, discourse and drama aside, always found herself vindicated by events in the end. It was the sentiment of a goddess, of someone free who did not need law or wisdom. There were people who really believed this, even people who were not Hunter herself—but most did not, Tasha thought, take the song that seriously.
The remarkable rockets went up. As Hunter sang, Tasha backstage felt something like clarity, like an important moment, coming on. “None of the gods observes chastity.” “Their haloes of flowers fade.” “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, all is vanity.”
“The body is fated to be broken and destroyed, in spite of being anointed and massaged.” “Grass withers, and flowers fade.” “A god is someone who does not know they need help, or who doesn’t want to believe they could ever need to be nurtured.”
The finale boomed. The crowd exploded. Hunter Berkeley basked in it. Tasha was moved to pity, her body tired and aching and undone.