Stupefying Stories: July 2013 (Stupefying Stories II)

by Russ Colson

  “Go away!” he shouted. “I’m calling the police.”

  Grace hammered at the door and screamed. They apparently knew each other and as Grace predicted, Josh was surprised to see her. I let the hysterics continue for one minute, thirty-three seconds before I dragged her to the car.

  “That’s mine, you son of a bitch!” Grace was not behaving in a fashion becoming her name.

  “You have to help me get it back,” she said. I squealed away from Josh’s, hoping he hadn’t called the police. “He took it from me!”

  Grace insisted for days, but breaking and entering—and assault—was still beyond me.

  Instead, we played music. There are stories about gamers obsessing on a new release, existing on pizza and soda. That was us. We passed out from hunger. I lost ten pounds in a week. Food, water, sex, urination—they became annoyances. Nothing was more important than the music we were creating. If we weren’t deep in chord changes, Grace plotted ways to regain possession of Mr. Flat Five. She knew how to keep me interested, but she never explained why she thought it belonged to her. I would ask the question and she would play another chord. Never an answer.

  I lost my job and didn’t care. Friends stopped calling. Emails stopped arriving. My social life was going to jazz jams with Grace, listening to inept musicians. I heard discordant melodies everywhere. Birds. Trees. Traffic. Mr. Flat Five had changed something in my head.

  One night at the jam, Clint announced that Josh had killed himself. Stroked out, worked himself to death. Grace and I drove to Josh’s studio. Streetlights provided illumination through the window and I saw the stacks of music. Mr. Flat Five rested on a bookshelf. I’m not athletic, but I found a way onto the roof, down the fire escape and in through a second-floor window. I grabbed Mr. Flat Five, Josh’s mp3 player, and a handful of compositions from his piano. Threw everything in the car and tried not to look guilty-as-hell driving down the back alley. I didn’t think about Josh.

  We serenaded Mr. Flat Five as a duet and it responded. Ecstasy! I pulled out the compositions from my lessons. I restarted back at the beginning. I retraced my steps leading to the fourth composition. I performed my latest pieces. We performed Josh’s latest pieces. We talked to it, collapsed in exhaustion next to it. Grace and I did nothing else.

  The more we learned from Mr. Flat Five, the less we knew. Mr. Flat Five always promised more, but demanded more. Grace grew irritable and frustrated. It was only a matter of weeks before Mr. Flat Five again repeated the four chords: D minor seven, F minor, A flat diminished, C major and shut down.

  Grace cried herself to sleep on the couch. I stared at the happy people outside my window for hours. Grace alternated between sleeping until late afternoon and manic guitar performances in front of a non-responsive Mr. Flat Five. For a week, we were strangers to each other, awkwardly occupying the same apartment. Conversations were monosyllabic and rare.

  While Grace slept, I played Josh’s mp3 player and learned two things.

  One: Josh had been recording our sessions without telling me. Every session, including the first one. He recorded all his students, probably hoping to catch Mr. Flat Five waking up. The favorites playlist of his mp3 player included my session and two other students, a man and a woman, who triggered Mr. Flat Five. I never heard their names, but somewhere there were two more like me.

  Two: Josh had unreleased recordings of him with a bassist, drummer, guitarist, and Mr. Flat Five responding in the background. I heard their names on the recording: Clayton Overfield, Matthew Vante, and Grace Douglas. Brief research turned up their discographies, including sporadic sessions with Josh. Their public releases stopped three years ago, the same time as Josh’s mp3 recordings began. Vante had dropped off the map shortly before Josh moved here. Overfield had just appeared on a CD of a live session in Chicago. Grace Douglas was asleep in my bed.

  Grace and I had burned out our time with Mr. Flat Five. It only responded to groups and only for a while. Grace and I had to split up, find new partners. Only one of us would be able to take Mr. Flat Five. I realized why Josh had left Chicago and hid from Grace.

  Without waking her, I threw Mr. Flat Five, my computer with recordings from Josh’s mp3 player, and a change of clothes in a gym bag. I took a train to Chicago. Buying a ticket on impulse would seem reckless, but religious fervor provides logic for almost anything. A spontaneous trip to solve the riddle of Mr. Flat Five was easy to justify.

  It was an uncomfortable pilgrimage, I was hungry and cold, but I had my god to guide me.

  ¤

  I stumbled off the train in Chicago and figured out the bus route to Clayton Overfield’s house. From his front step, I heard him playing bass riffs. They stopped when I knocked.

  Clayton came to the screen door. “I already voted. Go away,” He looked more like an overweight banker than a bass player. Glasses, balding, button-down shirt.

  “Josh sent me,” I yelled before he closed the door.

  “Why would Josh send you to me?” he asked.

  I was tired and a bit muddled from the train. I stared at Clayton, waiting for my brain to formulate an answer. Nothing showed up except the truth.

  “I lied. Josh is dead. He killed himself last month.” I improvised. “It’s about Mr. Flat Five.”

  Clayton paused for a beat, but pushed open the screen door. “I’m not surprised. Come in, I guess.”

  Clayton’s living room was big enough for a collection of basses, a recliner, couch, and TV. He kept it tidy—no stacks of sheet music. To the left was a kitchen. No dishes in the sink, countertops clean. Clayton had spent time with Mr. Flat Five, but he’d shaken off the obsession.

  “I wondered if Josh had killed himself,” Clayton had said. Whenever he sat, he had a bass in his lap. His fingers were separate from the rest of his body. They played riffs on the fingerboard while he talked. “That thing is a demon. It would have killed all of us. I figured Josh had it. Where is it now?”

  “Right here,” I answered. I opened the gym bag and lifted it out.

  Clayton jumped up like a fat man on a spring, lifting the Fender over his head like a battle-axe. Mr. Flat Five lit up and began playing a riff. The same riff Clayton had been playing when I knocked on the door.

  “Take that damn thing out of here. Take it with you or I’ll smash it to bits. It messed me up once and it doesn’t get a second chance. Move on!” Clayton punctuated his cursing with the Fender Precision-Axe. He didn’t move towards me, but ten pounds of solid ash at the end of a three-foot piece of maple is serious intent. I suspected my head wasn’t what Clayton would aim for, but angry people are unpredictable. I stuffed Mr. Flat Five back in the bag.

  I walked back towards the bus stop. Mr. Flat Five repeated the bass line. It called for Clayton.

  ¤

  I rented a dead-end flat and hung around jazz clubs in Chicago, thinking I might run into another student of Mr. Flat Five. One night Clayton showed up.

  “Did you get rid of it?” Clayton sat and stared at me. “Tell me you didn’t bring it here.”

  “I came alone,” I told him. I dodged his question about disposing of Mr. Flat Five.

  “That thing isn’t healthy. It killed Matt.”

  “Vanton? The drummer in your group?”

  “Vante. Yea. How’d you know about us?”

  “The recordings on Josh’s mp3. Searched on the Internet. That’s how I found you.”

  “Damn Internet. I don’t like being stalked. You should get rid of Josh’s mp3 player too. Bad mojo stored in there.”

  “Josh recorded two other students with Mr. Flat Five. Do you know who they are?”

  “No idea,” Clayton said. “Josh never talked about them with me. Makes sense they would be from your city, not here.”

  I thought about the other two. Were they going through the same agony? They hadn’t surfaced at the jams. Where were they? Maybe they were dead?

  “How did it kill Matt?”

  “Matt died from exhaustion. How’d you
get it?”

  Clayton had an honest face. Yes, I had stolen it from Josh’s studio. Josh didn’t care and I wasn’t willing to discuss it with Clayton.

  “Why was it playing your bass lines?” I asked. I hoped he wouldn’t detect the diversion.

  “It’s not done with me yet. Matt brought it into the group; coolest thing you can imagine. Didn’t say where he got it from. Probably some ‘mysterious artifact’ store. Probably stole it. But Matt spent too much time with it. It stopped talking to him, just talked to me and Josh and Grace. Things got really uncomfortable—Matt was the odd man out. He stopped showing up. When Matt collapsed, Josh left town. Grace—I don’t know. I suspect you can tell me what happened next.”

  “I needed lessons and Josh was recommended.” I said. “I started writing compositions and it talked to me. I think Josh was just as surprised as I was. But it stopped and Josh went into a blue funk.”

  “Which is probably why he killed himself. Just like Matt,” Clayton said. “You going to kill yourself?”

  “Hope not,” I said. “But if Grace tracks me here I suspect I’m a dead man.”

  “You know Grace?”

  “Yep. Slept with her once. Before we started playing music together.”

  “That’s bad,” Clayton said. “Grace tried to get that thing from Matt. I thought they had something going on, but when Matt died and Mr. Flat Five went missing, all she cared about was where that damn thing had got off to. She didn’t even show up for his funeral. Some kind of love.”

  “What is it? Did Matt ever explain what it was doing?”

  “Matt had crazy ideas about it being the voice of God and how it taught us the language of the heavens.” Clayton swirled his beer and considered the group on the stage. He returned his gaze to me. “That’s pretty much b.s., as far as I can figure. For my money, it’s just a glorified metronome. Or maybe just a kid’s toy, left behind by Martians on a space-picnic. What it does is make people crazy. There’s no glory, or purpose. I don’t understand it, doubt anyone ever will. Best to get rid of it.”

  I did get a chance to jam with Clayton, but it was the oddest musical session I have ever known. We’d start a song and slip into playing the way Mr. Flat Five had taught us, but Clayton would panic and break out with a different pattern. He’d throw in a jarring Latin rhythm or quote something from a Top 40 song. The groove shattered and we’d be left struggling to find the pocket. We tried two songs then gave up. Clayton actively resisted being dragged back to Mr. Flat Five, even if it was a kid’s toy.

  My money was running out and Chicago was a dead-end. Except for playing Clayton’s bass riffs, Mr. Flat Five had remained mute and disinterested. At least the train ride home was meditative. The active, searching part of my brain shut down, dazzled by the scenery. Like a younger sibling, my quieter, contemplative mind spooled out its stored observations. It prompted me to pull out Josh’s mp3 player and replay the recordings of the other two students. The creation dates were both within the last two years—not long before I had my lessons. Josh must have been ecstatic—or manic—to have this kind of success in a town ignored by the national jazz community.

  Internet on the train is slow and made searching online mp3 stores tedious. Even filtering for jazz artists from Portland with releases within the last two years left me with one-thousand, three-hundred and twenty-seven songs to parse. I previewed the first thirty-seconds of each song. If the mystery students on Josh’s mp3 had released anything, I would recognize it within the first few seconds.

  Havre, Montana isn’t much of a town, but I will always remember that I was looking at the west side of the rail yard when I heard Mr. Flat Five’s influence on preview number 305. My ears were sore and I had drifted off, but the opening notes snapped me back like a spilled cup of hot coffee.

  Eric Mosphere was an inexperienced jazz pianist in Portland, Oregon and had released an original composition six months ago. His neglected website gave me enough to find his address on the east side of the river, not far from the Blue Monk. I realized Grace had appeared shortly after that recording had been released. She was better at this than me, but I was stumped at why she hadn’t pursued Eric like she pursued Josh or me.

  Finally stepping off the train, I hurried back to my apartment. The mail consisted of shut-off notices and warnings of pending eviction. Grace was gone, but had obviously been living here until recently. Housekeeping had never been one of her endearing qualities; the sink was full, the refrigerator was empty, and every flat surface was a scattered mess of music. I should have gone shopping for food, but that was unimportant. I had to talk with Eric.

  ¤

  Mosphere lived in a walk-up above an Ethiopian restaurant in the Belmont district. Broken mailboxes hung on the wall next to shattered doorbells. Someone had labeled the apartment numbers with names. The ripped label for “Mosphere, Er ...” tenaciously hung next a faded doorbell for apartment 2B. I pushed the button. Waited. Pushed again. No response.

  For two days I hovered near that door. Ran up a bar tab across the street when it was dark and cold. Camped at the bus stop until the driver called Social Services to harass me into moving on. Annoyed enough people ’til I finally knew everyone and their apartments. But no Eric Mosphere. If he lived here, he never ventured out, or never returned and never answered his doorbell. Grace must have given up. Grace was not graceful and she certainly wasn’t patient.

  At twilight on the second day I lost my resolve. Breaking and entering was easier now that I was twenty pounds lighter. Like Josh’s studio, there was a fire escape around the back and gaining access to Mosphere’s apartment through an old, single-glazed window was a simple effort. I climbed into the apartment and found a familiar nest of music, but without the ornamentation of madness. Sheet music, cds, and instruments were arranged on shelves and covered the massive grand piano in the small living room. Framed maps of Palestine hung on the walls and shelves were filled with religious knick-knacks. The woman standing in the bedroom door drove my adrenal glands into overdrive and I nearly dived back out the window.

  “I can only assume you are looking for Eric or me,” she said. The normal protocol for a break-in is for the woman to scream and the bad guy (me, in this case) to run. But Mr. Flat Five had altered normal for myself and for Beth Elgine, the woman standing before me and the second student on Josh’s mp3. We stared as Eric joined us in the room.

  “I’m a friend of Mr. Flat Five,” I said.

  Beth sighed and Eric put down the baseball bat.

  ¤

  I finished sweeping up the glass while Eric duct-taped a pizza box over the broken window. Beth poured three cups of tea and moved the glass-filled trash can back under the sink.

  “Our friends normally call ahead and come in through the front door,” Beth said. “The doorbell is broken and we haven’t been out the last few days. We’ve been busy packing.”

  “Sorry,” I apologized. “I didn’t know your phone number. I probably should have just knocked, but I’m not operating at 100% right now.”

  “So you know Mr. Flat Five?” asked Eric. “Do you know where it is? When we heard about Josh, we checked the estate sale but didn’t see it.”

  “I know it was in Chicago recently,” I said. Not a lie, but not the whole truth. Mr. Flat Five attracted dangerously emotional people and I wasn’t ready to admit two more into my life. “How long have you two been together?”

  “We met at Josh’s studio,” Beth said. She talked to me but looked at Eric. It reminded me of Josh’s peculiar habit of talking to me, but looking at Mr. Flat Five. “Eric was finishing a session when I came in. Josh never let us perform at the same time, so we met for coffee and talked about what we were learning. Eric had the better piano, so I followed him up to his apartment. Passion for music became passion for each other. Now here we are.”

  “It never occurred to us there might be other students who triggered it,” Eric said. “We were involved in the lessons, but probably more with each oth
er. After a few months I realized I needed to make a choice between Beth and Mr. Flat Five, so I dropped out. Beth gave up lessons a week later. Josh was pretty upset, but stopped calling after a few months. That must have been just about the time you triggered it.”

  “So you said it just stops working?” Beth asked.

  “Yes,” I answered. “It’s heartbreaking. You’re left with an obsession to learn more, but no way to get satisfaction.”

  “That’s odd,” Eric said. He put down his tea and looked at Beth. “We were pretty wrapped up in it for a while, but just lost interest.”

  I realized Beth and Eric had replaced Mr. Flat Five with their own relationship. It was not what I had experienced with Grace. Apparently we never had a relationship with each other, just with Mr. Flat Five.

  “We have wondered a lot about it,” said Eric. “I did some digging and it’s never mentioned directly, but it’s like a religious icon. Like the Bible, or the Torah. I think the music is just a glimpse of what it does, but without the cultural context, it’s impossible to know.”

  “I’ve wondered if it’s trying to do something we don’t have words for,” Beth continued. “Like if Ben Franklin somehow found a cellphone. It wouldn’t work like a phone because there wouldn’t be cell towers to support it. Then if he could figure out how to make it do anything, it would probably play Tetris, but Franklin wouldn’t understand what it was doing because he wouldn’t understand the rules. Then it would run out of batteries and he’d never know what it was really for. It makes me wonder what else is laying around that we might not truly understand.”

  “We’ve been inspired to do some traveling,” said Eric. “We’re leaving tomorrow for a tour of the Holy Lands—lucky you caught us tonight. When we come back, let’s get together and talk some more. Maybe we’ll find Mrs. Dominant Seventh and she’ll be more cooperative.” Eric laughed, but it gave me chills.