It rings deep within the cavern of the apartment, and you know by the apartment’s position (you’ve never been inside) that it has three rooms—barely enough for nine people—not counting a kitchen, and that the balcony looks out into the yard, above the puddle.
A boy with soft brown eyes opens the door, still the same, still in his coat, water dripping down his sallow face, his hair slicked into a toothed fringe over his forehead. You are mostly surprised by the differential in your heights now—some-thing that was just beginning to manifest around the time you left home, when you were sixteen, and would rather have moved in with your first boyfriend (so much older than you) than stayed here, near those stairs that trained you in your lizard defense. Now you’re towering over him with your adult, aging self, crow’s feet and sagging jeans and all, and he is still twelve (thirteen?), and he looks up at you nearsightedly, his pale face looming up at you as if from under water. You accept it with the fatalism of someone who has bad dreams too often to even attempt to wake up.
“It’s you,” he says without much surprise. “Come on in.”
You do, as you would in a dream. The apartment has suffered some damage—there are water stains on the ceiling and water seeps through the whitewash, dripping down the browned tracks over bubbling, peeling wallpaper. The windows also weep, and the hardwood floors buckle and swell, then squish underfoot like mushrooms.
The boy stands next to you by the window, looking through the water-streaked glass at the sunshine and fluffy clouds outside, at the butter-yellow poplar leaves tossed across the yard by the rising wind. “What is it that you want?”
You are well familiar with logic of dreams and fairy tales, of the importance of choosing your words wisely, of the fragility of the moment—waste your breath on a wrong question and you will never know anything. “How did you die?” you finally ask. “I cannot remember.” Other questions will just have to go unanswered.
He points to the puddle outside, wordlessly, and you remember the hands pressing his face into the water, and you standing there, watching, helpless, until there are no more bubbles. Afterward, you tell the grown-ups that you found him like that, and you don’t know who did it.
“Why didn’t you tell them?”
You’re an adult now, and the words come out awkwardly. “I was afraid of what they would do to me if I told. I’m sorry.”
He’s too much of a gentleman to rub it in your face that he had been defending you then, that he could’ve walked past and stayed alive.
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” he says instead. Dead in Chechnya. Dead in Osetia. Disappeared one night without a trace. Dead in a kayaking accident. You remember all his deaths and they crowd around the two of you, suffocating and clammy.
And then it’s just you again, standing on the sidewalk outside, watching the eddies of yellow leaves spiraling around the ankles of your brown boots with worn, lopsided heels. And then it is just you, walking to the bus stop, promising to yourself to never return here, to never look back at the fourth story window and all the dead faces of the boy pressed against the weeping glass.
The guitarist stays out all night, has no real friends, and cannot maintain any kind of relationship. But how does this make him any different from any other musician? Well, he’s had a very, very long career . . .
RED BLUES
MICHAEL SKEET
Your hand closes around the neck. Just for a second, you let your slender, grave-cold fingertips caress the gentle curve. Long since a stranger to the subtleties of tactile sensation, you nevertheless rejoice in the smoothness of the back of the neck, in its slender vulnerability. Then you press those fingers down, firmly but not too hard.
You begin to play.
Fingers flying over the strings of your vintage Gibson, you give them your twenty-seventh variation on the verse of “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.” It’s your tenth night of a two-week gig in this club and the tenth time you’ve played this song they think they know. No one in the audience, though, has heard it the same way twice. You’ve memorized a lot of different versions of this song.
As Garrett and Holman join in for the chorus, you switch to variation one thousand eighteen. The two fit well together: their tempos match, and the flourish of sixteenth notes you’ve crammed into each bar of the chorus gives the impression of furious improvisation. After two choruses of this you head into the bridge, keeping the tempo but dropping back to an earlier variation on the tune, with more eighths than sixteenths and a couple of strategically placed discords to give the punters the impression of something new going on. Then it’s back into the chorus—a different variation again—and as you head home you begin scouting the audience, looking to see if she’s here tonight. It takes one more chorus until she drifts into view through the smoke and by then you’ve already caught her scent. As you scatter a series of eccentric chords through the final bars of the song, you’re already planning tonight’s conquest, with the same thoroughness with which you’ve planned tonight’s set.
When you look up to begin the next number, though, she is gone. You could make her stay, could weave a web of pheromones and waking dreams around her until she has no more will than your Gibson, but you have rules you follow in cases such as this. There will be no coercion; she invites you in, or you wait another day and try again. You wait.
Most people misunderstand the beauty of jazz. They revel in its unpredictability, its scattershot virtuosity and the emotion with which their favorite practitioners approach it. For you, though, jazz is complex mathematics, a poetry of numbers. Improvisation is what people resort to when memory fails them. You have built a house of memory over hundreds of years, and in the last six decades, since you took up this music as a distraction, your memory has not failed you once.
You are in mid-set on the eleventh night when you detect her presence, then see her sitting down with a group of friends. She brushes her hair behind one ear as she orders a drink. You’re playing “A Shine on Your Shoes.” You’ve kept the sprightly tempo of the original, but from the bridge you set off into an extended solo that quotes from just about every Dietz-Schwartz tune on the sound track of the film The Band Wagon. None of your audience recognizes the gesture, but they appreciate the overall effect, and that’s enough. You’re surprised for a moment when Garrett, on bass, actually matches you note for note during your two-bar segment of “Dancing in the Dark,” but you recover quickly enough and return his smile with a nod. The intuitive pattern-matching instincts of human beings can still, it seems, take you by surprise.
Instinct is no substitute for experience, though. As Garrett takes a verse, you fix your gaze on her. She has given you a good chase, but she will weaken in the end. They always do. She knows you are watching her, and fights against the hold of your eyes. When she wins, you concede gracefully. There is no hurry. You are never in a hurry.
You isolate her scent from amongst the charred nicotine and oxidized alcohol smells even before you begin playing on your twelfth night, and that knowledge brings you one step closer to conquests. She still resists your eyes, but you can smell her growing interest as easily as you can see the small shift of her shoulders and tilt of her head as she begins, mid-way through the set, to isolate herself from her companions. It’s time to focus the music directly onto her, and to let her know what you are doing. “Drop the next one,” you say to Garrett on your right. He passes the message to Holman behind his drum kit, and you forget about “I Got Rhythm,” swinging directly into “How About You?”
The music is light, fanciful, and the version you’ve chosen to remember has plenty of airy frills at the end of each line of the chorus. It’s appropriate to your mood, now that you’ve seen her, and you know that before the night is over she will be yours. In a gesture that echoes your mood, you let Garrett have two choruses to himself; you actually enjoy the fat, staccato thumping of the bass as his thick, calloused fingers fly over the strings. Garrett looks like an old man, but is in fact only thirty-e
ight. You’ve appreciated the irony since you’ve known him: you look like you’re not a day over thirty, when in fact you’re about fifty-five thousand days over thirty. He’s been a heroin addict since the evening of his first professional gig sixteen years ago. In a sense that has made him a good partner. You don’t bother him about what he puts into his veins and he doesn’t bother you about what you take out of theirs. There is no feeling between you—there could never be—but you look out for him, do what you can to keep him alive in spite of himself. Consistency in companionship is something your kind is drawn to. You used to tell yourself that it was the heroin that kept you from deepening your relationship with Garrett, but in the last fifty years you’ve made a habit of keeping your professional and private lives separate. Good sidemen may be easy to find, but understanding ones aren’t.
Your private life is beginning to intrude now, the hunger demanding your attention before you’re ready. She’s brushing her hair back behind one ear, drawing attention to the pale band of her neck; the gesture almost causes you to miss your entry for the final chorus. Not for the first time you wonder if this one is aware of her effect on you, has been playing you over the two weeks you’ve been hunting her.
“Savoy Blues” is next, the first song you learned. Chess had been your distraction of choice before then, its multiplicity of potential moves appealing to the strong sense of memory that develops in the living dead. But after a century chess was losing its appeal, and the first time you heard Lonnie Johnson play—1926, in Chicago—your mathematician’s soul was somehow able to discern from a single two-minute performance the infinite potential jazz might have to an undying intellect. Through Johnson you met Eddie Lang, and it’s not entirely your fault that Lang died so young—nor can Charlie Christian’s death a few years after that be laid solely at your feet. At least a part of them lives on in you.
That part emerges as you begin “Seven Come Eleven.” You are no fan of bop, but enough of Christian’s blood continues to mingle with yours that you are almost compelled to echo the scatter-gun single-line riffing, the eccentric chords and rhythms of the pioneer of bebop guitar. The audience loves it, too. Their desire for novelty overrides all other considerations; it’s one of the things you dislike about bop. The precision of swing demands more of both performer and listener. Nobody has time for that any more, not even her.
Now she is leaning over her table, transfixed as your fingers fly over the strings, her desire to unite with the music so strong you can taste its musky flavor on your tongue. She is yours, now, captured by the music. You do not have to guess: you know it in your blood, your skin.
Nevertheless, when you pack your guitar at the end of the set, she is nowhere to be seen. Somehow, she is breaking free of the music’s spell.
Tonight, the last number in your set is “The Red Blues.” The lyrics—and the musical for which it was written—hardly represent Cole Porter at his best. But Porter was a great tunesmith, even in his declining years. This tune is superb raw material. You have an affinity with this song; playing it allows you to project into the mind of each member of the audience something dark but compelling, an emotional thunderstorm. Every entity has a piece of music to which it resonates; “The Red Blues” is yours.
Is it hers? She has come late, settling into a seat alone only a few minutes before. At least she is here. You have only one night after this song and you are loath to degrade yourself by forcing her into your grasp. You’re going to have to do something, though.
What you decide to do is to put more than your memory and technique into this song. It’s what you’ve seen humans do and though the prospect is distasteful, you are willing to try it. There are limits to patience, after all.
You don’t look at her as you start playing; it requires all of your concentration to do this. Fingers flying over the strings, you make the music black with night and eternal despair, letting it fill you until the hairs on your neck are standing erect with it. Then you pour out of you all the fear and rage and power of the night, sending them splashing into the club and willing the listeners to soak it up, drown in it.
Then you sit up, the strings still vibrating with the final notes. The room is silent. Even the wait staff is immobile and voiceless. No one looks at you; they are all wrestling with themselves—some in tears, some struggling to suppress cries of horror or triumph according to their natures. Feeling uncomfortably numb, you wonder if this phenomenon is repeatable, if someday you’ll be able to study the impact you have on your sidemen.
And on her? You smell a hint of fear; has some primitive part of her brain warned her that she has been the target of your play? She is still here, though.
Now the spell breaks, and the audience is on its feet. You are calm as you put away your guitar; you’ve heard the shouts and applause too many times over too many years to care much anymore. You play for one person a night these days.
It’s time. You wish Holman would take the equipment home with him tonight, and he does. Garrett has already disappeared into the dark and the smoke, looking to mingle neurochemical salvation with his blood. Your blood demands satisfaction too, but even though it’s been days and your hunger is frost-sharp and desperate, you will not spoil the hunt by breaking the rules.
You look up after locking your Gibson in its case; she is no longer in the club. Even as you rub your eyes, your nose tells you that she’s gone. Another twenty-four empty hours, then, and one last chance. There are plenty of hangers-on clustering around the front of the stage and it would be easy to take any one of them. Once you would have done that, if only to fill the emptiness. But, as your years have run into decades, you have come to believe that emptiness can be more meaningful than most of the things you’ve tried to fill it with. You let yourself melt into the gloom and slip out the back door, to a dust-blown alley and a bone-dry basalt sky.
She’s not there. You admit that a part of you had been expecting her to be waiting for you. Perhaps you’re not what you once were. After so many unchanging decades, contemplating deterioration is an unfamiliar sensation.
At the end of the alley, though, a figure is waiting. She’s downwind, you realize; that’s why you saw her first. “I was hoping you’d waited,” you say.
“I wasn’t going to,” she says. “That last song was for me, wasn’t it?”
“They all were,” you say, struggling to control the excitement rising in you. “If only the last one actually got through, that’s all right. Most people don’t even hear that much.”
She is walking, you note, on your right side; the guitar case is between you, your hand occupied in carrying it. “I don’t usually . . . go out with musicians,” she says.
“I’m not like other musicians,” you say, and it is mostly true.
She doesn’t answer that, but she continues walking beside you. Under the streetlights her soft, pleasant face looks more drawn, pale; her eyes when she looks at you are black and endless as your nights. When she sees you watching her, she self-consciously brushes her short dark hair back behind her ears. She smells of partially oxidized alcohol and burnt tobacco, but these are veneers only; her true scent is there too, under her white T-shirt and worked into the fabric of her jeans. Her throat is smooth and pale as polished chalcedony. No veins are visible, but the blood is there; you can almost taste it.
“Why do you play only the old songs?” she asks, destroying the pleasure of your contemplation.
“As opposed to what passes for pop music today?” She’s probably only asking to be polite; you try to be polite. “The older songs are more conducive to jazz,” you say. “They allow changes in key that give me more patterns of notes to choose from when I play.”
“I’ve always wondered how jazz musicians improvise,” she says. “I’ve been in the club for just about all of your dates and I’ve never heard you play a tune the same way twice.” She mistakes careful selection for improvisation, you think. You are not really offended, though. Everyone makes that mistake; th
ey’ve been making it for nearly eighty years. And each year it grows easier to fool them as your store of knowledge grows. Teaching yourself new permutations of old songs is the only thing that gets you through endless days in darkened basement rooms.
“It must be a bit frightening, I’d think,” she says after a moment’s thought. “Not really knowing what you’re going to play next, and if it’ll work? I know I’d be scared.”
“It’s not really that bad.” There are plenty of things that frighten you— loneliness, the bitter taste of so much that you used to enjoy—but being on stage is not one of them. “Besides,” you say, “the excitement more than compensates.”
“Oh, yeah. I was in my high school band. I was always afraid I was going to throw up before concerts, but once they started I loved it.”
The excitement you feel is the excitement of the hunt, but perhaps at some level she knows what you’re talking about. Her face is animated now, her eyes glinting with reflected mercury vapor light. Her breathing is more rapid, and you can feel the flush stealing into her cheeks and throat. Her growing awareness is exciting her, and you are in turn feeding on that excitement.
It has been your intention to take her home first, but the blood rising to her skin is beginning to inflame you. You remind yourself that, after a few weeks of waiting, a few more minutes shouldn’t be all that much to deal with.
A dark alley beckons, though. You pull her in, turning so that your black leather blocks any street view of that white T-shirt. “Hey,” she begins, but her lips stay parted and her eyes are shining as you lean the guitar case against a wall and place your hands on her neck, cup her face in your hands. “Not here,” she protests, but her face tilts up to yours. Now your cold hands are absorbing her own heat, sending it back to her, and when you press your mouth to hers you are warm enough that she does not start at the sensation. She can taste your desire, and though she does not understand it, she responds to it. One hand stroking her neck, you move the other down to a breast, brush against it until the nipple stiffens from the gentle pressure. Then you shift your hand lower. There is no pleasure for you in this, but you want her blood suffusing her skin and your weeks of observing have told you that this is the variation to play on this particular tune.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror Page 52
