Nashville Chrome

by Rick Bass

Then they went home. They each gave him another hug and went on through the gate, and none of them ever went back to Graceland while he was living. If any of them saw him three times after that, before he died in 1977, they can't remember when they would have been. He was mostly somebody else by that time, and Maxine thinks he didn't want them to see that that was how it was.

  It didn't change how any of them felt about him—there was nothing that could make something like that, so deep-rooted, go away—and Maxine has to believe that even when he was lost, even after he had gone so far away that he could never get back, he still always felt the same about each of them, that nothing had changed. But that was the last time they spent with him that had even a trace of good old days to it, there when he was tapping out that song on the hood of that hideous gold brick of a car. Just for a second, and then he was sad again.

  What could any of us have done? Maxine wonders. He had everything in the world, but he still needed them. Why did he call them up there? All he had to do was ask and they would have done anything for him.

  He wouldn't ask. He just wanted to see them again. He called them to come up there but he could never say why he wanted to see them.

  By 1962, the Browns were running out of money, and out of ambition. As bad as Maxine's agony was in beginning to suspect that their music was no longer relevant, Bonnie's was far worse, knowing that every time she went away from her home, she was trading away precious days she could have been spending with her girls, and with Brownie: days that were priceless and could never be gotten back.

  Even Jim Ed was starting to feel some wear and tear; after all his hundreds of conquests, he had met a woman, Helen Cornelius, with whom he was in love. She was a singer, too. It made things a little crowded, a little complicated.

  The most constant thing in the world is change. Rare and valuable are the periods in a life when it does not seem to be happening. It is always happening.

  They made the decision together. Bonnie had brought it up first, but they all three soon were in agreement: the harder they worked, the more broke they became, and then had to split three ways that which was already not enough. They could never again be as poor as where they had come from, but somehow, after having briefly had a little money, it seemed worse now that it had gone away.

  It made no sense to them to be trading away their time for nothing. At one point in their lives it had made sense—they had pursued that path unquestioningly—but now they each just wanted to be in three separate places, home, or the three places where they were attempting to build a home.

  Even Maxine allowed herself to imagine days of domesticity, providing loving attention to the sustained applause of her needy children.

  The Browns simply couldn't hold together anymore. "It's been a good run," Jim Ed told them, the night they committed to the breakup. "It seems like longer than ten years." His own new life opening before him.

  "We have to tell Chet," Bonnie said quietly. They were all back home, checking in on Birdie, who had had a dizzy spell and fallen down the steps. She had not hurt anything, but was still dizzy. It was not yet midnight but already she had gone to bed, a thing they could never remember her doing before. They knew she had to wear down at some point, but still it caught them by surprise. They were adults now but they were still her children. Perhaps they thought that with their own strength, as strange and unvanquishable as it was unrequested by them, they could remain in control of that, too; that she would never wear all the way out—would grow old and diminish slowly, but that she would never completely vanish.

  Chet never slept; he loved nothing more than to be working in his studio on either side of midnight, and further on, while most of the world was asleep, and when it was so much quieter, and sounds had more space in which to stretch and unfold, flowing around him in currents and waves that at times touched him with such intensity that it seemed he could see them, luminous in the night, and could breathe them, like smoke. He was always working, but he never called it work.

  "Let's call him now," Bonnie said, "before we change our minds." She felt relief for herself, but bad for Chet, who would miss them so much.

  "We won't change our minds," Jim Ed said, his voice rolling gently through the cabin, so that the words seemed to seep into the logs themselves, penetrating the wood with an authority that would render them into sacred text, with no renegotiation possible after that utterance. They were logs that their father had felled and limbed and milled, in a cabin he had built, and their mother was asleep in the other room, with those same words drifting over her as she slept—and an era was over, their work was done. The greatness was still in them, but their work was done.

  Maxine was stunned, could not understand why she was agreeing: as if some larger truth was giving counsel and she was being carried along by it.

  Listening to her brother and sister talk, she felt a ringing in her ears, an echo in the stillness. She felt as she did sometimes late at night when she had been drinking. It won't let me quit but I am going to quit, she thought, and then, a bit desperately, I'm going to pretend I'm quitting, but I can't quit. I'll just go along with them, but they don't know what they're talking about. You can't quit something like this.

  Chet answered the phone on the first ring. The initial concern in his voice, and then the relief of hearing that everything was all right, and then the relaxation into the pleasure of having them on the line—all of it upset Bonnie. She had to hand the phone to Jim Ed, who calmly explained to Chet that the end had arrived—that they were out of money, and homesick all the time. That they wanted their lives back. That they were grateful to him for all he had done for them, and felt that they were letting him down.

  Chet was silent for a moment—he had not been anticipating this—and he held his disappointment to himself, and tried to gather his thoughts, tried to remember that he only wanted what was best for them.

  "How's Maxine?" he asked quietly.

  Jim Ed looked over at her and paused. "Fine."

  "Can I ask you one thing?" Chet said. "One favor?"

  "Yes," said Jim Ed, "anything."

  "There's this song I've been thinking about that I've been wanting to do," he said. "I think it's perfect, and I can't get it out of my mind. Please," he said, "I'd like to do just one more."

  "All right," Jim Ed said, "we'll drive up tomorrow."

  "Thank you," Chet said.

  The song was called "Mommy, Please Stay Home with Me," an old sentimental Eddy Arnold ballad from the 1940s, about children who are missing their parents. The three Browns were determined to give their all for Chet in this last recording, and the song was so intense for Bonnie and Maxine that what came out was a purer, rawer sound that went all the way past sentimentality and into some further, wilder place, a keening or lamentation, so that even Chet was tearing up, behind the glass.

  There was no need for a second take.

  The song went to number one in the first week of its release and stayed there for nearly two months. There was just enough money to make work viable for another year. Few leave-takings of immense power are ever clean and final, and the conditions of the going-away cannot be fully controlled: the world does not want to easily release its hold on such contracts on the rare occasions when genius emerges and finds favor in and chooses an individual or individuals to carry it.

  Birdie died a few months later, further into their rebound, their swooping recovery. The world loved them again, all was briefly as it had been before, and Birdie never knew of their turmoil, their plans to abandon their blessing and their curse.

  They came home, buried her, broken further inside—there is no such thing as a fully balanced family, the harmonies yearned for within can only be accomplished for brief moments, which then burn bright in the remembering—and then they went back out on the road, following the same paths as before, paths they had made and which they were now trying to extend just a little more, orphans who knew in their hearts they had been loved deeply, but who wanted more
.

  THE DIVING BELL

  JEFFERSON EADS HAS been busy, viewing and cataloging the rough cuts of his film over and over. The quantification, the inventory of every external item in his world, soothes him; from order comes control, and he is no longer uneasy.

  He's not always uneasy. At many points in the day he knows a great peace, sometimes earned through his work and other times descending on him like the weather, not generated through his own efforts but bestowed from afar, and unrequested, like grace.

  Other times, however, it's as if a switch flips, and his agitation comes not from all the external factors he seeks to know and control, but from within. There is a disynchrony between him and the world, one that can only be calmed by numbers and their smooth, intricate, dependable precision: the way they always interlock and balance, no matter how challenging the enumeration may seem, or how difficult the equation. An equity can always be obtained, and once it is, no further changes can occur: the problem is balanced, and in that balance, the problem is controlled.

  Whenever he is focused on one problem, he stays with it until it is solved, working through his agitation and unknown fear until the end; and when the problem is solved, he knows a deeper and more satisfying peace, one that cannot be gotten any other way than through his committed labor, and the feeling of control and relief is as sweet and powerful as it is brief.

  Some of the other children in his school pity him his isolation and eccentricity, which seem to them to be willful, a rejection of the homogeneity toward which the others aspire and labor, and that therefore he is deserving of their ridicule and abuse—though there are not as many of these kinds of children as might be imagined.

  Some, as the world begins to open before them, are beginning to realize they're a little afraid of him; not that he would alarm them, but simply afraid of what they're just beginning to understand might be an almost limitless depth, a bottomless difference—that already he knows and does things that they will never be able to. As if in his genius he has purposely chosen to distance himself from them, choosing his mind over their companionship.

  He doesn't have any friends. This is not unprecedented in the other children's experience, but what is unique is that he doesn't seem to want one. He's not just pretending; he is happier when he is alone, reading up on whatever his next subject of inquiry might happen to be. Rockets, paleontology, military history, it doesn't matter; every few months, he sets up an encampment in a new land, usually one of the hard sciences, and then inhabits that territory with the commitment of a new lover.

  He is happier when he is alone, or if not alone, safely distant from all others. The people he tolerates best are the ones who don't try to get too close to him. Often these are individuals who are either focused on themselves or do not want him around. It's complicated and entirely neurological, and he understands that he is different, and understands why, and accepts himself the way he is, and is grateful to have his intellect.

  Later in his school career—and soon—his classmates will get over both their teasing and their fear and will accept him as he has accepted himself, and will come to take a huge pride in him, and will come in some ways to think of him as their captain. But not quite yet. Right now, they are mostly afraid, and he knows this, though it does not touch him, exists instead only at the perimeters of his consciousness. He perceives and understands that other people are concerned with what people think of them, but that simply isn't his world.

  What it feels like to him sometimes is that he is in the service of another master, one whom he cannot see and about whom he knows precious little yet seeks to approach. Some master who lies far below, and whom—if only enough knowledge can be gained—can one day finally be met, and the master's power and essence more fully ascertained. It was a surprisingly long time before his parents realized more fully the nature of his gifts: his hunger for the facts, his insistence on being precise. For a long time they considered their love for him as being only their own special perspective, distanced from the world's; it was not until he was four or five that they began to understand that the indulgence of their perceptions was actually accurate, and that if anything, they had underestimated things. His recollections of all events and utterances was profound, as was his capacity to connect facts and in that manner proceed further into the depths of knowledge.

  They would not have classified him as a loving child, but again, the indulgence of their own love for him made that disparity insignificant; they protected him with it, sent him out into the world with it, and though they knew the odds were long that he would change the world, they knew without a doubt that the world would not change him whatsoever, and that in that obstinate fixity, there was rarity and beauty, as there was in their own acceptance of that fact.

  His mother, Louise, had been a schoolteacher for a few years before retiring; his father, Brad, managed a construction company. He, Jefferson, could have come from anywhere: he was as sudden and remarkable as their own lives had been unremarkable.

  He and his mother had been shopping at the Piggly Wiggly when he had seen Maxine's note. He had been standing off by himself while she pushed her cart up the aisles. There had been nothing about the note that would have given any clue as to its provenance with greatness—no syntax or diction, or even, really, any boldness—but he had gone straight to it, had been standing there in his own reverie, looking up at the bulletin board while his mother shopped. Out of boredom, he had been mentally arranging and cataloging all the various hand-lettered postings, inventorying them by subject and their chronology, but no matter how he looked at the board, to him there had been no question. The small blue note might as well have been illuminated: somehow, he recognized it for what it was and was drawn straight toward it, with the same assurance and certainty with which he addressed all of his decisions.

  The bonds of his affinity for such shared isolation, and such gift or talent, were as invisible as those of any other affinity—the call to shared companionship between two lifelong friends or the unseen but irrefutable bonds between hydrogen and oxygen, or mother and daughter, father and daughter—and he stood there for a long time beneath the note, comforted simply by being in its presence.

  To have been so unremarkable in their accomplishments—and so lacking in notoriety of any sort—his parents were remarkable in other ways. They had learned to support wholeheartedly his ventures, whatever they turned out to be. They had learned to trust him and his place in the world.

  Jefferson Eads returns five days later, with a clipboard, a storyboard, in hand. He informs her that her task that day is to go back to the grocery store—films her palsied efforts, successful at least one more time, to get the car backed out of the garage and onto the sunlit street, and then, like a great schooner setting out on the most intrepid of journeys, off into the heart of traffic. With some humor, amazement, fear, and grim satisfaction, he films the near misses, and the faces of the other motorists.

  Everything he's filming is from the now, which makes Maxine uneasy; she wants to tell about the glory days. Even though it's a documentary, she wants young people to dress up and reenact the good years, though simplifying the journey—omitting the depression and alcoholism, which she has not told him about. "Couldn't you do a regular movie, too?" she asks. "Don't you know some young people you could cast as us?"

  Jefferson shakes his head. "No," he says, "actually, I don't have many associates. It's just you and me. I do have some ideas, though."

  She listens carefully, thrilled by his attention. All she had to do was wait; her every wish has always been delivered to her.

  Totally unselfconscious, Jefferson Eads films her shopping: the slow hitch of the walker, her clumsiness with the frozen foods. The cold brick of a chicken slips from her grasp and skitters across the linoleum like a hockey puck rapped sharply across the ice. The rock-hard bird slides into a stacked display of soup cans, crumples the pyramid with the efficiency of a bowling ball striking tenpins, and the expression on Maxine
's face when she looks back to see if the camera is rolling is one of guilt tinged with confusion.

  How is this a movie about greatness? she wonders, and wants to quit—not just the movie, but everything.

  To his credit, Jefferson Eads puts his camera down after the chaos has come to a rest, and he picks the chicken up and puts it in Maxine's cart, then begins restacking the soup cans. He holds one up and asks if she wants one.

  What passes for trivia or minutiae in the lives of others—bonds so hair thin as to be irrelevant, utterly insignificant—are sometimes as strong as a bond gets, for him: as if too much electricity flows through him along some circuits and almost none at all—just a sporadic trickle—in others. For him, this is one of his bonding moments, or as close as he gets to such things: helping an old lady.

  It's new territory for him; it was not his instinctive reaction. It was almost as if he had to analyze the situation, watch himself watching her, and then direct himself to offer assistance, in the manner that he would direct a character in one of his short films to block into a certain position.

  He did it, though, and now he feels the faintest shimmering of electricity along those unused pathways. For him, the trickle might as well be a roar, and the two previously separate and unrelated elements are merged, the pleasure of reassembling the disorganized soup cans and his relationship with Maxine: the kindness in his heart finding some outlet. He's grateful to her for giving him that opportunity. Sometimes his coldness is a little like being in a jail.

  On the way out, he stops and films her bulletin board note, which is still posted, and now it's her turn to bond a little further with him, and to give him what is her own rarest thing, trust.

  "Do you want to take it down," Jefferson asks, "now that you've got a movie being made?"