Stupefying Stories: July 2013 (Stupefying Stories II)

by Russ Colson

  “We’ll be happy to,” said the silver-haired lawyer, “once our clients have been un-detained.”

  “We’re still interviewing them,” Everhardt said.

  “Without counsel?” the lawyer asked.

  Fred the cat twisted around on Stan’s lap and stretched, opening his eyes just a sliver. The translucent nictitating membranes hadn’t fully retracted, but he studied Stan with his yellow eyes anyway.

  Stan looked up at the argument at the reception desk, no longer hearing the words.

  Fred was another example of an animal that had just shown up. He’d appeared outside the office one day three years ago, not microchipped. The staff had fallen in love with him very quickly.

  “Come on, Fred,” Stan said, rising with the cat. “Let’s go do a little surgery on you.”

  Everhardt immediately lost focus on the lawyers. “Don’t go anywhere, Dr. Majewski.”

  “I’m just going in the back,” Stan said. “There’s no way to slip out back there. I just need to put an incision right about here.” Stan indicated a spot on the neck where he had been taught it would be catastrophic to cut a surveillance animal.

  “You can’t do that!” Everhardt said.

  “Sure I can,” Stan said. “Just a routine lumpectomy. Local anesthesia. I don’t even need a tech.”

  “Do not operate on that animal!” Everhardt barked.

  “Why, Special Agent Everhardt, why ever not?” Stan said in his best saccharine voice. He grabbed the microchip scanner and ran it all over Fred’s body. The microchip he had implanted registered several times, but no other signal confused the reading. “Nope, nothing there to indicate I shouldn’t operate, and I have to keep my donor animals in the best possible condition, don’t I?”

  Everhardt’s nostrils flared.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen,” Stan said and made for the back.

  “Stop!” Everhardt ordered.

  Stan turned back around and met Everhardt’s glare. “Special Agent Everhardt, I know of no reason why I should not operate on this cat. Do you?”

  Everhardt stared for a moment.

  Stan didn’t budge.

  Everhardt rounded on Smith. “Where the hell are those lawyers?”

  “Th—they’re on their way,” Smith protested.

  “Mr. Everhardt,” Stan said, “I intend to do this surgery right now. Do you know of any reason why I shouldn’t?”

  Everhardt glared for a moment, and then stepped out from behind the desk. He motioned Stan to come aside for a confidential conversation.

  “There’s no need for secrecy, Mr. Everhardt,” Stan said in an even louder voice. “This is my cat, so there’s no confidentiality issue if you discuss it in front of your agent or my lawyers.”

  “There is a need for secrecy,” Everhardt hissed.

  Stan help up the microchip scanner. “I’ve had no indication of that.”

  Everhardt glared.

  Stan turned and marched with Fred toward the back.

  “Performing medical procedures on that cat could be fatal!” Everhardt yelled after him.

  “Don’t be silly,” Stan yelled back. “I’ve drawn his blood dozens of times. If you know something I don’t know, I suggest you say it. Because I’ve now stated my intentions clearly and unequivocally, and if you can’t give me a damned good reason not to proceed, I’m going to.”

  Stan set Fred down on the prep table, setting aside the microchip scanner. Fred tensed, but as usual made no effort to get away.

  Everhardt ran into the prep room, the three lawyers on his heels.

  Stan grabbed an empty anesthesia needle and lifted it up for dramatic effect. He turned back to look at Everhardt.

  “It’s a surveillance cat,” Everhardt said.

  Stan set the needle down and smiled.

  “What’s a surveillance cat?” the silver-haired lawyer asked.

  “I’m afraid I’m not allowed to discuss that,” Stan said. “I can’t even confirm such a thing exists.”

  The three lawyers moved around to flank Everhardt, who looked like he had just been forced to swallow his own poop.

  ¤

  No charges were ever filed.

  Gary Lombardi named the second surveillance dog “Spy.” The government spent the next ten years recording the inside of a doghouse and a spacious enclosed yard where church members would play with her for hours each day.

  Fred the cat continued to give blood on a semi-regular basis, and no doubt violated doctor-patient confidentiality on dozens of cases of ringworm.

  And for the rest of his career as a veterinarian, whenever someone found an animal and asked Stan if it might be a surveillance cyborg, he would shrug and tell them he had no idea what they were talking about.

  But he always said it with a smile.

  Kyle Aisteach lives in Fresno, California with his husband, three cats, and a dog who radically changes appearance every time she get her hair cut. His short fiction has appeared in Cosmos Magazine, Pressure Suite: Digital Science Fiction Anthology 3, and Emerald Sky Magazine. He would like to dedicate this story to the memory of Fred Braithwood, the man who introduced him to science fiction. aisteach.com

  THE MUSIC TEACHER

  By Mark Niemann-Ross

  Josh CALLED IT MR. FLAT FIVE. Musica Diablous. A chord with a flatted fifth note. Mi contra fa est diabolus in musica. The Musical Demon. It killed Josh. Actually, Josh killed himself. But he died on account of Mr. Flat Five. It does that to people. Makes them obsessive. Gives them the illusion they’ve found something world-changing and the end will justify the means.

  I had it long enough, just for a few months. It doesn’t look evil—more like a bowling trophy, or a kid’s toy made out of soft metal. But I don’t have it anymore—that’s why Grace is mad.

  Grace and I met at the Blue Monk, long after the first time when I made a fool of myself. I’d tinkered with piano for years. I played romantic show tunes for my girlfriend. Accepted the polite applause of my friends. Smug and with a great deal of unjustified confidence, I showed up here. I had never been to a jam before, but I had listened to recordings—what else did I need to know?

  Apparently, plenty more. I stumbled with the intro, I missed chords. I caused a train wreck and relinquished the keyboard after one song. I almost bolted for the door but still had half a beer to cry in. I sat in a dark corner, hoping nobody recognized me.

  Clint, the jazz jam leader, gave me a pep talk. “I’ve got a friend you should meet. We’ve all had off-nights. Josh can help you have fewer of them.”

  I sulked for two days before looking up Josh on the Internet. Like me, he played piano. Unlike me, Josh was a jazz tradition all by himself. I had several of his recordings in my collection. He had aged over the years, long black ponytail turning to long gray ponytail. He wore tie-dye shirts on his early LPs. Later CDs pictured him in turtleneck and jeans. His release dates abruptly stopped about three years ago and his Internet presence had gone dark. It struck me as odd that he moved to Portland, Oregon from Chicago. Like a hermit on a mountaintop—perhaps he was hiding from something. I called him for a lesson.

  Josh asked me if I’d been playing long.

  “All my life,” I replied.

  “That’s going to be a problem,” he said. “Show up Wednesday at four. If we get along, you can set up another session.”

  I showed up precisely on time. Josh lived in a remodeled grocery store, the main floor given over to the piano. Ripped-open packing boxes were scattered around the room. Pictures, records, and trophies filled the bookshelves. Sheets of music covered every flat surface in the room, every step of the staircase and every chair. All of them authored by Josh—none I recognized.

  My first lesson was humiliating.

  “There are things we can work on,” Josh said. He handed me a book of exercises and set up another lesson.

  “Respect every note as if it’s going to be the last one you ever play,” Josh told me. “Some day, it will be.”

>   The second lesson went better. By the fifth, I mastered harmonic minors, stride piano, and held my own on a blues riff. I made myself proud.

  “If you’re going to learn jazz, you need to learn improvisation,” Josh said. “And to learn improvisation, you need to learn composition. Come back next lesson with an original song.”

  My first composition was trite and thankfully brief. Josh politely encouraged me to try again. My second composition was listenable. My third composition was interesting. My fourth ended my job, my girlfriend, and my idiotic happiness.

  Josh had assigned me to write ten bars of music, using only four chords. I used D minor seven, F minor, A flat diminished, C major. Musically awkward, but I was amused.

  I played it for Josh and waited for feedback. He started, but something in the room repeated my composition. I didn’t know Josh recorded our lessons. He went to the next room and returned with a rough, gray cylinder. He put it on the piano.

  “Play that again,” he said, speaking to me, but staring at the cylinder.

  I repeated the performance and stopped. The cylinder displayed a small point of light, then replayed my composition, note for note. The light went out.

  “What is that?” I asked. Josh shushed me, waving a hand in my direction. We waited in silence for a full minute. The bowling trophy poked out a small spot of light and repeated my composition, but with variations. The light went out again.

  “Where did you get an improvisation machine?” I asked.

  “Shut up,” Josh snapped. Normally he wasn’t rude. His eyes didn’t shift focus. He waited. Two minutes went by and nothing happened.

  “Again. Play.” He briefly looked at me, then turned back.

  “Would you like to try?” I said. “The music is right here.”

  “No.” He didn’t turn. “It has to be you. Play your composition. Again.”

  I played. I focused on the printed notes.

  “Stop. You’re too stiff. Loosen up, don’t think about the notes, think about the space between them.”

  I shook my shoulders, took a breath, and restarted. I added dynamics and phrasing, hoping to make a good impression. This time it responded immediately, repeating my piece but changing notes and dynamics and finishing with a chord arpeggiation based on the D minor seven.

  “Go! Play!” Josh looked at me and spun his finger in a “come-on” gesture. I changed chords, it followed along. I had played a few duets with Josh, but this was different. The thing had a good sense of time and encouraged me to take chances. We finished a perfect coda and the light winked out.

  Josh put his hand on it and stared across the room. Up close, it appeared to have tubes and widgets attached. There were no switches, ports or read-out screens. I couldn’t even see an on-off switch.

  “We’re going to start lessons on a weekly basis. Come back with two new compositions.”

  “What is that thing?” I asked.

  “Mr. Flat Five. It’s a teacher,” he told me. “Do me a favor and leave your composition here. I’ll see you next week at the same time.”

  Josh impatiently ushered me to the door, locked it behind me and closed the storefront blinds. I heard him playing my composition.

  ¤

  The next week, I began to play my fifth composition. Three bars into the song, Mr. Flat Five lit up and began to accompany me. Josh looked at my music and made notes in a composition book. Mr. Flat Five didn’t stop improvising and provided small interludes while I brought out my sixth composition. It learned and remembered. It repeated phrases from my fourth and fifth compositions and created transitions between the chord changes. Josh tried to describe the musical tricks it performed, but Mr. Flat Five moved too quickly for verbal explanations.

  After two hours, I began to anticipate and provided improvisations of my own. My lesson lasted nearly three hours.

  “Next week. Next week,” Josh said. “Two more compositions; use what you learned today.”

  “What did I learn today?” I had pounded at the piano for three hours with no sense of direction.

  “I can’t explain,” he said. “Just do what you think is right. Next week. And can I keep your music?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Can I borrow Mr. Flat Five?” I reached for it.

  “NO!” Josh shouted. “It stays here.”

  I backed away. A month later, I asked again to borrow Mr. Flat Five. The answer was equally negative and forceful. I never asked again—I didn’t want to anger Josh and lose access. He looked a bit rough and seemed edgy.

  Josh ignored any questions about Mr. Flat Five’s origin. No matter. We were both too interested in the music at hand to waste time discussing history. Anyone else would have recognized it as odd that I was learning music theory from a tube of frozen mud. I should have been curious about how the thing worked or where it came from. Instead, I obsessively composed music. I struggled to learn every lesson it had to teach. I turned down invitations from friends, showed up late for work, took long lunch breaks, and left early. I ate sandwiches at the piano, but only when I lost concentration from hunger. Mr. Flat Five sang to me in my dreams and the best part of each week was spent in Josh’s studio.

  My time with Mr. Flat Five taught me a new world of improvisation. I mastered every transition, every passing tone and chordal relationship. I could accompany the most egregious rookies and make them sound good. I was very popular at jazz jams.

  Mr. Flat Five had become almost sentient. When I arrived for a lesson it lit up and teased me with musical progressions. It displayed four points of light, arranged in a squarish pattern across its irregular surface. Its physical appearance was neither logical nor beautiful and was slightly cold to the touch—when Josh would let me hold it. But it encouraged me to perform complex and inspiring music.

  I knew when Mr. Flat Five was pleased with my work. If I slacked off, it scolded with simplistic progressions, clear sarcasm. Josh laughed when it chastised me, but otherwise he remained silent, scratching in his notebook. I didn’t need notes—I understood what Mr. Flat Five told me to do, what should happen next. When I didn’t understand, it would repeat, simplifying and providing an alternative version. None of this in words—Mr. Flat Five only issued music.

  The fun ended after six months. I was stuck on some of the concepts. Josh had stopped taking notes, only writing the briefest of phrases and spending most of his time listening, eyes shut and head nodding in time to the music. Mr. Flat Five played an impossibly complex rhythm with an equally obscure chord progression. It had repeated this phrase during the past three lessons, but backed off to simpler concepts. Not this time. It played the progression, then the rhythm, then both. I felt the edges of the idea and tried to keep up, but failed. I remembered the taste of the half-empty beer from that long-ago jazz jam. Mr. Flat Five became frustrated and impatient. It played the progression again, but too quickly. I needed time to think, to puzzle out the message.

  Mr. Flat Five paused. All but one light went out and it played four sustained chords: D minor seven, F minor, A flat diminished, C major. The single light blinked out and Mr. Flat Five went silent.

  Josh sagged and opened his eyes. He stood up and cradled Mr. Flat Five.

  “Did it run out of batteries?” I asked. “Do you have a power supply?”

  “No,” he snapped. “It’s not out of batteries. This is just what happens.”

  “How do you turn it back on?”

  “You don’t,” Josh said. He shook his head and sat. “There are no instructions. I have no idea where it’s from, who made it, or how it works. It only works when two or more people are around, and then only for a while.”

  “Let me try one more thing.”

  “No. You’re done. It’s done with you.”

  Josh cancelled further lessons. I had a clutch of new compositions, centered around the last musical phrase from Mr. Flat Five. Josh let me try once, but it wouldn’t respond. Josh sat among unopened boxes, staring out the window. I was ignored by Mr. Flat Fi
ve and ignored by Josh. He stopped answering the door. They say the journey is the reward, but what happens when the journey stops?

  I returned to jazz jams, but they were hollow. Void. None of the other musicians knew what Mr. Flat Five had to teach. Their music was excruciating. I hoped someday, someone would walk in who knew Mr. Flat Five—I would recognize them the minute they began to play. There are no patterns I can describe—no genre, no geography, no nationality, no commonalities whatsoever, except for the obvious influence left behind.

  That’s about the time Grace showed up. She walked in with confidence. Pulled her Gibson ES-175 out of the bag and voiced a few chords. Those chords had been taught to her by Mr. Flat Five. Anyone who experienced Mr. Flat Five would know it. She knew it when I accompanied her solo. She watched me with an intensity fed by the music we created. The other musicians were left out—how could they possibly participate in a dialog only we understood, in a language taught to us by our private deity?

  ¤

  “Where is it?” she asked the next morning.

  I knew what it she referred to. What other it was there?

  “Josh,” I said. I rolled over to look at her eyes. They had the same odd vacant intensity I had seen from Josh. I wondered if she was his sister. She leaped out of bed and starting pulling on clothes.

  “Let’s go. I need to talk to him.”

  “You know Josh?”

  “Josh and I are old friends. He’ll be surprised to see me.”

  “Maybe we should call him. We can swing by your apartment, drop off your guitar and meet him for lunch.”

  “Don’t have an apartment. Just got off the bus from Chicago last night. Come on, let’s go!”

  Grace can be distracting and her impetuousness gave me something to wonder about besides Mr. Flat Five. Back then, I would have done anything for her. We drove to Josh’s house.

  Behind the closed curtains Josh banged at the piano. I knocked. He answered. When he saw Grace, he slammed the door and threw the deadbolt.