Deep Blue

by David Niall Wilson

  The lights dimmed. Some bright-boy behind the bar found a single black-light spot and focused it on the stage, on Syn and her white-makeup, now brilliant and glowing. The eerie blue illumination removed even more definition from her features, a purple-haloed ball of captured moonlight floating above the glistening sheen of the sunburst finish on her bass. Energy. Synergy. Sound and motion blurred to wipe her from their sight and minds.

  Syn couldn’t see this. She felt it. The sound started, at first no different from a hundred other nights. Soft shimmer of cymbals, rippling to snare and back to cymbals. Dexter, the one constant in the band, the rhythm behind the rhythm. Dexter and his “skins,” who never said word one to anyone but Shaver, who just showed up, played, and left. Syn’s fingers moved to the strings of the bass, slipping into a slow, pounding thud of notes, overgrown-heartbeat rhythm rippling from the strings, winding down the wires and out through the speakers to shimmer through the air.

  No one moved in the audience, no hips matching the swaying pulse of Syn’s own, no feet shuffling. She knew they were watching her. They always watched her. It was different. She felt them seeking her face, her eyes, trying to pierce the black-light glare and the blinding white of the paint to meet her gaze. They seldom let their attention roam that high when she played. They were usually too occupied with their own fantasies to hear the lyrics, and too ashamed of them to let her catch their gaze. Tonight they were denied, so they sought the reasons in her eyes.

  The band followed her lead. Calvin found a way to make his following seem like leading. That was his way, but everyone knew. The bass wrapped its notes around the music and wrestled it to submission, and beyond. The rhythm drove the melody. The lyrics hung from a backdrop of resonant harmony so deep and soulful that the air/floor/room shook with the power of it. The angels shimmered around the edges of the bar, stood nonchalantly in doorways, staring into eternity. Nothing. They were everywhere, and nowhere, and Synthia felt something inside her slip hard, falling away. A layer of—need, closer to the raw pain beyond. Her fingers had begun to ache, but she twisted the notes deeper. She played to the angels, the room slipping away and the band towed in her wake.

  She played the usual songs. The band knew the chords, the rhythms. It wasn’t like when Brandt had just taken over the stage and silenced them all with his pain . . . their pain . . . the world’s pain. She didn’t change the music fundamentally. It was the subtle shifts of emotion, the infusion of her frustration, and her hunger, that drove the notes deeper into the minds and hearts around her. Somewhere in that crowd were the record execs, or not. It didn’t matter anymore.

  Surrounding them, filling in gaps in the crowd, the angels stood, impervious, and the tears flowed down Syn’s cheeks as she aimed her notes at their ethereal hearts.

  She had never played to them before. She had watched them, all her life she’d watched them as they ignored her. Now she needed to know. Who were they? What were they watching that was so damned important they couldn’t see her . . . hear her . . . comfort her? Who the fuck were they and why wouldn’t they hear?

  The songs shifted, one to the next. Syn caught short glimpses of Calvin’s eyes, begging her to slow, to stop, to take a break. She turned to the side and saw that Shaver’s fingers bled. He ignored it, as she ignored Calvin, but the music could not go on indefinitely. She felt as if she could play forever—close her eyes and drift into the music and not return. Syn didn’t look at her own fingers, or think about them. The pain was there, but it didn’t matter. The crowd shifted.

  A figure wound slowly through the eerily quiet crowd toward the dance floor. Syn’s eyes were half-blind from the spotlights, and the black light. She saw strobing, half-formed images, the one moving closer and the others that surrounded it. She concentrated. She couldn’t tell if it was a man, a woman, or an angel, but she played to that figure. It was the last song of the set, maybe the last song of her life, and she played it with no remorse. The sweat and tears blurred her sight and she blinked, fighting to see, to know who would share that moment.

  There was something achingly familiar in that swaying gait. Syn could make out long hair, but no features. She played. She felt the resonance of the bass through to her bones, felt the growing fire that was her fingers, and the strings, and the slickening of both, but the notes did not falter. No way. Not this time. There might never be another chance, and the face became clearer with each step, narrowing the gap between them, and the years. Syn’s voice wavered, just for a second. Between verses, when she should have breathed, she spoke.

  “Mother?”

  For that eternal moment, the band sustained her. Those she had dragged swelled up behind her, Shaver’s notes, still crisp and rippling, so technically perfect they seemed magical, and Calvin, his usually weak rhythm crunching suddenly, as he sensed her near-falter. Dexter, solid, bolstering the rhythm and jumpstarting her fingers. They sacrificed themselves to that moment, held together, bonding and transcending the bar, and the mediocre, blues-cover melody to join in something more powerful. Syn breathed deep and sank to her knees on the stage . . . staring as her mother’s form moved closer. Her fingers moved with the sound, her arm shifting, the bass a part of her, held close and tight.

  The notes were winding down, but it no longer mattered. Synthia had no idea how she knew, but the thrumming of the notes slowly gave way to the thudding of her heartbeat, and the bass, still clutched tightly to her chest, grew silent. The room receded, sucked into a vacuum that left nothing but Syn, white-faced ghost girl and the angel/spirit of her past, faced off in a duel of eyes and silence.

  Somewhere in the distance, the music continued. Syn knew it wasn’t the band. The crowd was silent, staring. The magic of the band’s moment was fading. She couldn’t tell if they saw, finally fucking saw the angels, but they knew that she saw . . . something. Someone. Why now?

  Her eyes raised to meet the milky-white, cataract-glazed gaze of yesterday. Syn felt something lift free of her soul, but it did not make her feel better. She felt bare, naked before the crowd, nasty secrets and mother’s love dragged to center stage in black-light synapse-strobed images.

  The angel reached out dim-white hands, veined in deep blue, as if to stroke Syn’s cheek, but falling short, always falling short. Syn nodded. Just like all those years before. Just that much short of all right. Syn held still, strained forward inside and gritted her teeth, rigid on the outside. No way she leaned into that touch. No way.

  The moment passed, and a soft sigh escaped the angel’s lips, first sound, only sound, Syn had heard from one of the apparitions other than the music, Brandt’s music. That sigh, nothing more. No apology. No words could have mattered. No touch could have mattered. Syn lifted her gaze to her mother’s, held it for a long moment, and watched through a sudden flow of salty tears as that face, so long gone from her life, melted once more, as the lights haloed. Syn’s lip quivered.

  Syn slithered back and away suddenly. Her head drooped and her eyes closed. She clutched the bass and she rose in a stumbling lurch. She felt the drums topple as she backed into them, microphones tilting and stands trapping her feet. Somehow she remained upright as her world crashed in a metallic heap. She was vaguely aware of the others, cursing, calling out to her, and touching her shoulders. She shrugged them off. She heard the voices of those who’d watched from the audience.

  She moved through them, away from the stage toward the door. The crowd parted. Some of the braver among them stretched out their hands, brushing her skin, tugging at her clothes. One woman stepped into Syn’s path and tugged at the bass, as if she would take it for her own. Syn rocked her hip forward quickly, and the woman stumbled back with a soft, surprised cry, coming to rest against the wall beside the doorframe as Syn slid sideways through and into the night, careful not to crack the bass on the wooden frame.

  She knew they were calling out to her. The others: Shaver, Calvin, the bartender, maybe Sid himself. A hand grabbed her suddenly by the shoulder as she turned away f
rom the club and started down the walk. Syn spun in a daze, meeting a set of too-bright eyes. Her own turned down to where his hand held her arm.

  “. . . wonderful,” he was saying. “Exactly what we are looking for, what the scene needs, you know?” His voice was too fast, the words slipping from sincerity to business to sleaze in increments so obvious Syn could barely follow the progression. “. . . just sign, and of course the band, though they aren’t a deal breaker, you know, because I can see who is the talent here. . . .”

  Syn pulled her arm back violently, glaring at the man. “Get away from me.”

  The man held her arm a moment longer. He blinked, as if struck, as if there was no possible way in the universe he could have heard what he just heard.

  “You don’t understand,” he said more slowly.

  Carefully, not wanting to break his fingers . . . yet . . . she gripped his wrist and yanked his hand free of her arm. “Get the fuck away from me.”

  He started to say something. He even reached for her again, but something in Syn’s eyes must have warned him away. The man stood, looking very foolish in his power suit and expensive jewelry, Rolex gleaming under the soft glow of street lamps and a small crowd gathering at his back, pouring from the mouth of the club in a slow, curious stream. Syn turned without a thought, bass sliding to her hip, dangling from the strap. She saw the angels, lining the streets. They did not ignore her, nor did they speak, or move. They watched, and she walked, steps as steady as her heartbeat.

  Behind her she heard Calvin’s shrill, whining voice, begging the idiot in the suit, selling what little soul he had left and trying to include hers as if it were his to sell. It meant less than nothing. So close, she’d been so close to letting the answers slip away. She wondered if the angels would have faded if she’d signed that paper, if she’d never seen her mother, and the music had carried her in a different direction. She wondered if Calvin would ever understand. She wondered where the music was coming from that dragged her on.

  She moved through streets of dim light and scattered shadow. No one else moved, slow-traffic parade, coming and going in a rise-to-fade shimmer of sound and headlights. Synthia passed no living soul, but the angels lined the road, translucent sentinels tracing her motion with their eyes. She felt them as she never had before, and the sound, the music, swelled up around her, gripping her heart and twisting. It was her. The music was her song, her pain, and she felt the march of angel after angel, ghost after ghost, not speaking to her, but acknowledging, each moment where they’d slipped away silently brought back in a wash of images, and pain.

  She reached 37th Street and turned, winding down Elm, knowing what was ahead and shivering. Her arm snaked down, drawing the bass to her like a lover. The music was louder, and she knew. Somehow she knew who it was. There were the sweet-soft strains of harmonica, the soul-deep song of a lone guitar. A thousand voices sang deep harmony in soft, half-whispered tones that led her on. Syn felt like the star in a bad horror flick, angel choruses leading her home.

  Then the voice sounded, so close to her ear she couldn’t understand why she didn’t feel the warm brush of breath.

  “Ain’t no angels, sugar,” the voice grated rough and sweet as the whiskey and honey cough remedy Syn’s Grandma had given her when she was a child. “Just those dead and gone, and those just dead. You come to sing, you come to da right place, little one.”

  Synthia trembled, but she didn’t turn. She knew that voice. She’d heard it once before, the night Brandt had disappeared. For the first time in as many days as she could imagine, she wasn’t concerned with the angels. She followed the guitar, stepping through the entrance to the graveyard and feeling the gravel crunch beneath her feet. The gates were open. No security for the dead.

  Syn wound down familiar trails, through a maze of white-stone markers and pretentious monuments to those beyond caring. White marble angels watched her progress, and the moonlight patterned the trail with crosses, shadows from the graves that lined the way.

  She didn’t stop until she reached a familiar plot and a dingy, off-white stone, rectangular and low-slung. Insignificant. One forgotten bit of granite in a garden where memories grew—this bit forgotten.

  Synthia fell to her knees in the soft earth, letting the bass rest against her thigh. Tears trickled down her cheeks, but she wiped them away. The words were still clear, etched in stiff, final precision across the stone. Syn reached out, long black-painted nail tracing the final tribute to her mother’s life.

  She half-expected her mother’s angel to appear again. Or ghost. Or whatever. She expected to hear the scolding tones of her mother’s voice. Out so late, and in a graveyard. It’s what comes of hanging out with no-goods and playing that music. What happens to girls who talk about seeing things that couldn’t be. Angels. The tears streamed, and the gravestone rippled, but she stared, stubbornly, blinking against the salty pain.

  “She loved you, you know.” The voice rippled with her vision, slipped through her senses, and gripped her heart. Brandt. His fingers still worked the strings of the guitar, the strings of her heart.

  “Fuck you,” Syn said through her tears, voice tearing roughly from her throat. “She didn’t even know me.”

  “That is why it didn’t work,” Brandt said. “Doesn’t change the love, only the outcome. She saw them too, you know.”

  Syn whipped around, finding Brandt lounging back over a mausoleum to her left. His fingers moved as he spoke, stroking the strings. The soft melody echoed the bittersweet march that had led her to the graveyard, to the stone and the memories.

  “What do you mean?” she asked, knowing the answer but praying it would not come.

  “She was afraid too,” Brandt said. “She saw them, knew them. They even spoke to her. She knew one thing you didn’t.”

  Syn gripped the bass more tightly, gazing into Brandt’s eyes, searching now. For answers. For peace. “What?”

  “She knew they weren’t angels,” Brandt said softly. “She didn’t want you to know.”

  Syn’s chin dropped to her chest, and her tears trickled down and off her cheeks, wetting her blouse, the ground, the white makeup running to a thin film. Brandt’s fingers picked up the pace, drawing the moment around her and pulling tight the drawstrings on her soul. Her shoulders shook, her mind blanked, and deep inside, she drew her mother’s angel tightly to her heart, holding and breathing apologies into the soft chorus of the blues.

  Three

  Shaver stared at the wall. His fingers itched for the strings, for the rippling notes and patterns, but he could not play. He’d tried twice since the morning sun had slid through his blinds and dragged him into the day. The first time he’d screamed as the ruined flesh that had been his fingertips met cool metal. He couldn’t press tightly enough to bring a clear note from the instrument, and the strings were still rough from the blood that had dried over and into them.

  Cursing had not helped. Coffee made it worse. Wide awake, more aware of the pain than he’d been aware of any sensation in his life, Shaver had picked that guitar up again. A simple chord. Teeth gritted so tightly they ground together and challenged the pain in his fingers, muscles taut in his arms and his chest constricted with the effort of ignoring that searing, mind-blinding agony. A single chord, and only blind luck and the fear of losing the one thing close to his heart had kept the guitar from striking the floor. He’d caught it, managing somehow to avoid gripping it with his fingers. Clutching the polished wood to his bare chest, he’d lain beneath it, trembling on the floor.

  The patterns raged through his mind, arranging and changing, shifting and drawing his thoughts one way, then dashing them back the other to shatter against his inability to seek release. Crawling from that heap, he’d slipped the Fender back into its case with a soft breath of relief and frustration.

  Now he watched the walls, saw the patterns on the faded paper winding and swirling, and soaked his fingers in Alka-Seltzer, bubbles long gone and the sting faded to a dull t
hrob. Even that throb, his heartbeat in counterpoint to the motion behind his eyes, whispered of new progressions of chords to his fevered brain and hinted melodies, left still-born as he forced his thoughts away from them.

  The phone rang. Shaver watched it, eyes narrowing. He didn’t move to answer it at first. It would hurt. He knew it would hurt, everyone with his number knew it would hurt. The ringing continued, jarring and loud, and Shaver slowly slipped his fingers from their lukewarm soak, growling and swinging his legs over the side of the bed.

  “Fuck you!” he growled at the phone. He staggered to his feet and lurched across the room. Leaning in with a curse, Shaver trapped the receiver between his chin and his shoulder and lifted. It rose half an inch, then dropped. The ringing stopped, and he stared at the phone, locked into that gray area between maniacal laughter and mindless rage. Shaver drew back his arm, already feeling the sweet release of slamming the phone into the wall when the silence shattered again, and the insistent ringing returned.

  Shaver drove his palm down over the receiver, held, waited, and gripped, doing all he could do to keep the tips of his fingers from touching and finally he gained enough purchase to lift the plastic handle from its cradle. He slid his hand sideways quickly before the receiver could drop back over the phone and cut off the ringing, only to bring it again. Another pattern, this one broken.

  He gripped the phone, gathered his thoughts, and lifted, letting the receiver slip to his shoulder.