Free Thank You, Goodnight by Andy Abramowitz

some way to thank her.”
    “All of these nice peoples at my home,” he called out, hammering away at the darkness with his flashbulb. “Must to take pictures, Teddy. But this time I tell you I taking pictures, yes? No secret! Ha!” He beamed at his own cleverness, the Scooby-Doo smile too big even for that moon face of his.
    “Tell me something,” I said. “Everyone else around here speaks perfect English. Why does yours suck so bad?”
    He let out an exuberant laugh, which I interpreted as incomprehension, and patting me hard on the back, started for the house. Then he froze, pivoted, and pointed to the sky in a stroke of excitement.
    “Look!” he bellowed, presumably meaning listen .
    The song wafting from the boom box was “Troubleshooter,” a slushy puddle of a ballad I’d written in a fever of melodrama after the death of my English lit professor. I heard my double-tracked voice whining through the verse—“The old school walls fall down like rain / With ghosts of Shakespeare, Poe, and Twain.” Why couldn’t I have just rhymed rain with pain like a normal person?
    “This song I love it!” H-P shouted, striding away and singingalong. He couldn’t form even the most grammatically basic sentence in English, but damned if he didn’t know every last lyric.
    “I’m not the only person ever to take a swing at that guy, am I?” I posed the question to a pair of boys shuffling skittishly on either side of me, bottles of local ale in their clutches.
    “He’s quite entertaining, but a good man,” one said, his wire-rimmed glasses glimmering in the waning light. “And he really is a big fan of your music. A lot of people around here are.”
    “You people scare me,” I said. “This place is like some kind of lost colony. You have no idea how alone in the world you are. There’s real music out there. I can show it to you. You’ve got the Internet in Switzerland, right?”
    The kid with the glasses grinned up at me. “So what did Heinz-Peter do to make you so angry that you came all this way to fight him?”
    I snorted; it hadn’t been much of a fight. Then a tiny itch of pride ripened inside me, and for some inexplicable reason I felt hesitant to elaborate.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess he captured a moment.”
    *       *       *
    At some point, it fell to me to man the grill, to poke and prod sausages and burgers, nudge them off their charred bellies and onto their backs. The affair had quieted down from a raucous backyard party into a subdued evening picnic replete with the easy murmurs and cinder-like aromas of a campfire. Tereza, a cagey ally at best, kept me company, and together we allowed our lungs to fill with mesquite as the charcoal hissed under the gridirons.
    “You’re getting more comfortable with all of this, aren’t you?” she said, smiling. “You’re once more adjusting to your fame. I can see it.”
    “Why aren’t you listening to Dr. Dog? Where’s your Pernice Brothers? Your War on Drugs? There’s all this good new music out there.”
    “Don’t let all of this go to your head,” Tereza teased. “We don’t only listen to Tremble.”
    “You realize that some bands actually deserve to be forgotten,” I went on, sliding a spatula under a sizzling mound of beef and hoisting it onto a paper plate. “Charles Darwin is alive and well in the arts.”
    “I don’t think you really believe that your music deserves to be forgotten,” she said. “If you do, then you’re not the artist everyone here thinks you are. You’re certainly not the artist that my father is.”
    Of course I wasn’t the artist that all these delusional castoffs took me for. They had no idea how utterly bizarre it was to have moved on with your life, to have changed directions in everything you did, and then randomly discover a lunatic fringe on the other side of some lost mountain that was still grooving to your music years after the rest of civilization had wised up.
    Maybe