Deep Blue

by David Niall Wilson

  When Shaver slipped out Liz’s bedroom door and back into the main room of the apartment, he found Dex stacking again. Coffee cups. At least a dozen, pyramid sequences of white porcelain and colorful logos rising toward the ceiling and then descending, one cup at a time. As Shaver entered, Dex looked up with a grin and shrugged.

  “You should see my place, man. Stacks everywhere. Counted, organized. Can’t help myself. Sometimes it makes things easier, sometimes it keeps me from losing my lunch over the pressure of just being here. You know?”

  “I wish I did,” Shaver answered, stepping closer, snagging the top cup and heading for the kitchen. “All I can do to release is play.” He paused for a moment, and then continued. “Can’t play right now. Don’t know what else to do.”

  The sound of liquid pouring drew Dexter’s concentration from his incomplete pyramid. He rose, grabbing a second cup from the monument to nothing, and joined Shaver in the kitchen.

  “It’s fresh,” he said as he slipped through the door. “I made it, right after I made and drank the last one.”

  Shaver eyed his friend, poured both cups full, and started laughing. “You don’t fucking pile the cups to ease tension. You do it because you’ll explode if you don’t.”

  “Well,” Dexter grinned, “that too.”

  A sound from the next room drew both their gazes to the door, and Liz came in, wrapped in a bathrobe, eyes bleary, but smiling. She ran her hand back through her hair slowly, letting it fall over her shoulders.

  “There better be enough for me,” she said.

  Shaver laughed. “You’ll have to get a cup from in there,” he pointed with the coffee pot. “Dexter was—anxious.”

  Liz went back into the other room for a cup, and Shaver stared at the pot, held at arm’s length. He winced slightly at the pain that grip cost him, but that pain brought a smile. He couldn’t have lifted the pot at all the day before. Flexing his fingers and biting his lip against the sharp pain, he held the pot still as he waited for Liz to return. When she did, he very carefully poured her a full cup and set the pot aside. Shaver tried to hide the wince, but not quite.

  “Oh.” Liz moved quickly, at his side before he could raise a hand to negate the sympathy.

  “It’s okay,” Shaver said. “Really. It’s better.”

  Liz nodded.

  Shaver grabbed his cup, lifted it to his lips, and drank quickly. The coffee had cooled enough to allow a long swallow.

  “So what now?” Dexter cut in. “You don’t want to listen when Brandt calls; what do we do next?”

  There was a bitter, hollow emptiness in the question. An emptiness that Shaver wasn’t sure he could fill. He poured a second cup of coffee and moved back into the other room, setting it carefully on the table and plopping heavily on the couch.

  “It isn’t like I told Brandt to fuck off,” he said, exhaling the words slowly. “I just want to understand before I make any choices that screw up my life forever. Don’t you?” Shaver turned to glare at Dexter. “I mean, fuck, he is a drunken asshole most of the time. Why do you all of a sudden see him as some kind of messiah? Why do we need a messiah?”

  Dexter slid back onto the couch, setting his cup aside and reaching for those that remained, subtracting the three and beginning a new pyramid, shorter and more squat, fingers moving quickly and surely. Shaver watched, mesmerized. The silence spread, broken only by the soft clink of porcelain as the cups were carefully placed, meticulously arranged.

  “How many?” Liz’s voice from the doorway.

  “Thirty-five.” Dexter never looked up.

  Liz stepped closer, swinging and spinning down beside Shaver, curling in close. It was a territorial motion, a question. No words, just emotion. Shaver slid his arm around her shoulders and drew her gently against him. It was all the answer she needed.

  “We need a singer,” Shaver said. “We need a singer, bass, maybe another guitar.”

  Dexter looked up very suddenly, almost dropping the cup he was stacking. He met Shaver’s gaze for a moment, then looked away, returning to his stacking. After what seemed an eternity, he answered. “Don’t know if I can do that. Don’t know if I can play with someone else, listen to them gab about contracts and record deals and gigs. Don’t even know what we would play. You think we could do the old stuff without Brandt? Look at how it ended up with Calvin.”

  Shaver shrugged. “The old stuff worked for them. They found something, we didn’t. I’m not really worried about playing the old stuff.”

  “What then?” Dexter asked, placing the final cup on the new, shortened version of his pyramid. The cups were aligned perfectly, each exactly the same distance from one as from the others. Patterns.

  That pattern clicked in Shaver’s mind, synapse-flash burst of inspiration. The clink of the last cup echoed in his mind. Eyes closed and leaning back, he let his mind drift into that sound. He vaguely felt Liz tensing in his grip, realized he had squeezed too hard, ignored it, and drifted deeper. So close. He was so close to—something.

  Liz shook him and he tugged away from her. She didn’t release, but she didn’t shake him again either. Shaver could hear Dexter’s voice, far away, drifting. He heard another clink and knew the pyramid was unraveling. Something in that was wrong. He lurched, dragging free of Liz, hand outstretched to stop Dexter from undoing what was done, reaching and brushing the cups and then losing his balance.

  He felt Liz gripping his arm, leaning back against his motion. He felt the cups, smooth, shifting, tumbling, and bouncing off his wrist and forearm. He heard Dexter’s voice, loud, insistent, and incomprehensible. He heard Liz screaming. He heard the clatter of the cups, the shattering, and the reverberating pattern of that sound.

  The table was hard, and Shaver landed across it, arm stretched back and held, chest smashing into crushed cups and shattered shards as his mind peaked on a chord and blanked, leaving him to dangle and finally fall into a dark pit of silence.

  Shaver woke to new pain. Not his hands, or his fingers. His jaw ached. His lip was puffy, and his shoulder felt at if it had been kicked hard by a steel-toed size nineteen work boot. Both shins were sore. He opened his eyes and, seeing Liz, he smiled.

  “Damn you,” she breathed, slapping him lightly on his sore chin and eliciting a soft moan. “Stop that, Shaver. No more. Stay with me, or I swear to God I’m out of here.”

  “Where am I?” Shaver asked, drawing his fingers to his chin, rubbing gingerly and trying to sit up. The room came into slow focus. He was on the couch, dragged/lifted/who knew. The coffee table lay canted on one side, the tower of cups a shattered wreck.

  Dexter stood over Shaver, behind Liz and to the side. His eyes were full of questions he couldn’t quite form. His fingers were in constant motion, in his pockets, out, slapping lightly on his thighs.

  “Sorry I broke the cups,” Shaver said. He turned his gaze to Liz. “Sorry because they were yours,” turning back to Dexter, “and sorry because you are going insane with nothing to stack.”

  “I don’t care about the cups,” Liz said. Her voice broke slightly, and she dropped closer, leaning across his chest and wrapping him in her arms. “Just don’t leave me like that again. What happened, Shaver?”

  Shaver sat up slowly, all the new aches and pains gripping at his arms and legs and face with icy little bug-fingers, distracting his thoughts. “I’m not sure. I heard something, that much I know for certain. And I saw things, patterns.” Shaver glanced at the pile of rubble on the floor that had been the coffee cups and frowned. “It was when you started to unstack the cups, Dex. Don’t know what, but something in the pattern, the numbers, hit me right between the eyes. Then I saw you reaching out to undo it, piece by piece, unraveling the pattern. I needed to see it, to understand. When I tried to stop you, that’s when things got crazy.”

  “They were just cups,” Dex said, frowning. “A fucking pile of cups.”

  Shaver nodded, bringing his hand to his forehead and closing his eyes. “I heard something to
o. It rose out of the pattern.”

  “The pyramid?” Dex asked.

  “Not sure if that’s it, exactly. You were so precise. Every one of those damned cups was exactly the same distance from every other. The designs on the sides blended, the motion of your hand as you placed the last one. Fuck . . . I don’t know, man.”

  Liz stood and turned toward the kitchen. Shaver leaned against the back of the couch, his legs sliding off the side. His stomach lurched crazily, and he nearly lost what little coffee he’d managed to retain. Liz came back, broom and dustpan brandished like weapons in a medieval joust. Shaver swung his legs back up, out of the way. Liz attacked the pile of rubble that had been her cups in silence.

  Shaver watched her, noting the tight, scrunched muscles in her shoulders and the set of her lip. He slid his legs off the couch again and rose shakily, moving toward her. Carefully making his way around the shattered bits of porcelain and pottery, he moved up behind her, wrapping her in a hug. Liz froze—for a moment Shaver thought she would pull away—then melted back against him with a moan.

  “What are we going to do?” she asked. “What if you keep falling, and going away? What if something’s wrong with you, Shaver? Have you thought about that?”

  Shaver spun her gently, meeting her gaze. “There is nothing like that wrong with me. I am not going anywhere without you. This,” he tapped his forehead with one finger, “is fine. We all three know there is some strange shit going down, and this is all part of it. So Brandt finds his peace in a song, and Synthia freaks out on stage, walks out of the bar and the band and our lives. I see things, they hit me harder. Doesn’t mean I’m losing it, or you.”

  Liz nodded gently. She tugged herself free of his grip and finished sweeping up the cup fragments, avoiding Shaver’s gaze. She brushed the last of the dust and debris into the plastic mouth of the dustpan and turned away again, moving to the kitchen. Shaver took a seat on the couch and watched her, letting his mind drift back. He could see Dexter’s hand reaching for the cups, could feel himself shifting and stretching in futile negation. The world shifting.

  Deep inside he heard it. The chord. The blending of note over note and back again, winding softly through the sounds of Liz in the kitchen and Dexter, who had found a bag of paperclips, snick-snick-snicking them into a huge chain, winding one to another and blending the chains. Creating a pattern.

  Shaver closed his eyes and brought his hands to his ears. The world shimmered around him, wavered, then grew still. He heard Liz returning, her footsteps too loud, reverberating in his head. He fought the nausea and won, rising with a lurch.

  “I need more coffee,” he said.

  Dexter grinned sheepishly, waving his paperclip dream catcher in an arc that dramatically brought the attention of all in the room to the coffee table, where the cups no longer rested.

  Shaver started laughing. “Not here,” he said. “My treat at the Bean & Buzz. We still have a lot to talk about.”

  Liz eyed him suspiciously. “You gonna stay with us this time?”

  Shaver nodded. “I have to.”

  Liz left the room then, moving to her bedroom with purposeful strides. Shaver watched, confused, and Dexter returned to his paperclips. The pattern he’d created was circular, growing, concentric ring within concentric ring. Long, trailing chrome-plated feathers dangled. A glittering Christmas tinsel dream catcher, incomplete, as though there was room for things to slip through.

  Dexter glanced up at Shaver, shrugging helplessly. “There aren’t any more paperclips.”

  “We’ll find some more,” Shaver replied.

  Liz reentered the room then. She had a small case in her hand. It was black, covered in stickers with the names of bands so closely placed and overlapping that Shaver couldn’t make out more than a jumble of letters. Liz’s knuckles were white on the handle, but she walked with purpose.

  “Let’s go get that coffee,” she said.

  Shaver started to ask her about the case, stopped himself, and nodded, turning toward the door. Dexter moved ahead of them, removing paperclips from one feather of the dream catcher and weaving them carefully into the next, rippling the design around the perimeter of the circles. Shaver stepped in front of his friend, gritted his teeth, and turned the knob on the door. The pain was only a soft ghost of what he’d feared, and he smiled. Already his mind was shifting ahead to his guitar.

  Seven

  Brandt sat in front of the one low window in Syn’s apartment, staring through the rain-spattered glass. His fingers slid idly over the strings of his guitar. Syn lay curled on her bed, blanket death-gripped about her. Brandt turned now and then, his gaze tracing her curves beneath the covering and his eyes seeing only what played across the inner tragedy screen theater in his mind.

  He played, but was not aware of the notes. His fingers walked pathways of their own, drawing notes in slow, painful strings and rippling eddies of emotion. Beyond the rain-washed window, the sun was rising over the skyline. Brandt couldn’t see it through the storm, but the darkness faded by degrees to shades of gray.

  He knew he had to sleep. Sometime soon, exhaustion would claim him, and he knew from experience that if he passed out with the guitar in his lap, it was a fifty-fifty proposition whether it would be playable when he woke up. Too much was at stake, and most of it seemed to ride on his fingertips, and where he chose to place them. Here, and the pain subsided to a dull ache; there, and he felt everything shift toward a dark, glowing flame. Silent, and the pressure built swiftly, driving his mind one way or the other without the convenience of thought. There was no middle ground, and in the back of Brandt’s mind the upside-down harlequin image grinned at him from the Ferris wheel, taunting.

  He slid the guitar from his lap and rose shakily. Too much coffee, no sleep. The case was still open and he leaned, slipping the guitar in and flipping the lid closed with finality. Nothing he could play now would make a difference. The voices had quieted, and he could only hear the faintest echo of laughter.

  Told you you had to play the pain, didn’t he, son?

  The words came back to him, again and again. What had those words meant? Were they an offer of a solution, or another trap? Brandt walked to the bed and rolled in behind Syn, slipping the sheet and blanket over himself and pressing close to her back. Nothing could erase the sight of her and that bass from his mind. Her eyes, the hunger, the beauty of the sound—the empty, vacant sensation in his heart when he’d seen her crumpled in the mud.

  Had he caused that? If he’d played what they wanted, would the two of them be together, happy and awake instead of cowering and shivering, hiding from the waking world? Was he a fool? Wally seemed so sincere, but what had he brought to them? Pain. He’d brought pain like Brandt had never known.

  Brandt felt Synthia shiver against him, and he wrapped his arm around her, wishing he’d pulled the blinds tight before climbing into the bed. The sun was growing brighter, fighting valiantly through the haze and mist. It would be glaring, soon, high in the sky and sliding across the room to where they lay.

  Brandt wondered where Shaver and Dexter were, what they were doing. He let his thoughts slip back. He’d been a fool to try and draw them to him with the music. All he’d ever offered them was pain. So, his solution to reuniting the band? More pain. Personal pain. Pain that had been drawn from somewhere Brandt didn’t even understand. He had known it as Shaver’s, had known the reaction it would bring. That hadn’t mattered at the time. Shaver hadn’t mattered. All that had mattered was that Brandt had felt the power flowing through him, had known what to play, how to play it, and that Shaver had come.

  That pain had gotten away from Brandt. It wasn’t the same as what the voices brought, long dead and filtered through time. Shaver’s pain was real, and present, and Brandt hadn’t, in the end, known how to play through it. There had been no ghosts to guide him, no visions to make him understand what and why he’d played. Brandt had focused on his own selfish desires, and in the end it had fallen short. Sha
ver needed more than that to answer his pain, needed something real and permanent. Brandt had offered only a return to things past, but without knowing the story, and the conclusion, the song had faltered and died.

  Brandt’s eyelids fluttered and he drifted.

  Could have fixed it, son.

  The words slid from the recesses of Brandt’s mind, barely registering as sleep slowly claimed him.

  Could have taken that pain and owned it, molded it. In the end, pain, no pain, it was always your choice. Depends on the song, boy, only on the song. No past, no future, only you. You are the key.

  The words echoed, then drifted away. Brandt fought a futile war with gravity, trying to keep his eyelids propped open long enough to understand, but it was not to be. Darkness claimed him in a rush, drowning memory and thought.

  In the chair where Brandt had been sitting, Wally watched the sun rise. The light slipped in over the window sill and ate at his image, but the old man ignored it. He rocked steadily, up and back, chin nodding in time to some hidden rhythm. Moments later, he pulled the harmonica from his pocket and began to play softly. Tears ran down his grizzled cheeks, and he closed his eyes.

  On the streets below, the city was coming to life. Cars slid past, leaving a hiss and mist of leftover rain in their wake. Horns honked in the distance, and the roar of city bus traffic rattled the window. On the sidewalk, unheeded, they rose. First one, then another and ten more. Eyes filled with remorse and feet shuffling forward toward the walls of the apartment complex. The music called them, and the sun ate at their existence with relentless fervor, making of them no more than wavering heat-mist hints of human form against a sun-stained backdrop.

  Wally shifted the notes, bending his mind to the task. He slipped easily from standard blues progressions into deep country. He reached across the years to one long gone with mental fingers and drew him forth. Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, it was all the same. Those below watched the window, faces upturned, eyes accusing. Wally didn’t open his eyes.