Mortality Bridge

by Steven R. Boyett

  THE BLACK TAXI cruises empty Sunset Boulevard in the middle of the sunny afternoon. From the spacious passenger compartment Niko looks in wonder at lighted traffic signals, storefront neon, motionless streets. Somehow Los Angeles has evacuated ten million people but left everything running as if they will return at any moment. An urban Marie Celeste. Not a car in sight. Litter-free streets. Clear air. Unnerving quiet. The only sound the deep gargle of the Franklin’s engine.

  Niko looks away from the window. Beside him Phil texts on his iPhone and ignores their surround. Between them lies the guitar case. There’s plenty of room for it on the facing seat but Niko prefers it close at hand and between himself and Phil.

  Straightbacked and unwavering the Driver steers them east through Hollywood not half a mile from where the Checker Cab pursued this very car through Friday evening traffic a thousand years ago when mortals ruled the earth. They pass the Hollywood Palladium. Amazing how fast you travel in an empty city.

  Niko leans back on the leather seat. Smells of leather, lemon oil. Birdseye maple sidepanels polished to a liquid gloss. The ride quiet yet surprisingly rough. Well, fortyfive hundred pounds of car on an old leafspring suspension on illkept L.A. roads. But apart from jostling the car itself is unaffected by the world. The ridged rubber siderunners bear no hint of wear or even shoeprint. No trace of blemish mars the paint. The spotless chrome displays no pitting. The windshield glass so clear it’s hard to see the frame holds glass at all. Bugless prow of huge front grille. Clear and spotless rings of whitewall tires. Beehive hinges on the suicide doors. Deep maroon upholstery pristine. Thick layered glossy paint like liquid holding shape through some miracle of surface tension. The Franklin’s utter black is even more amazing in the sunlit day. They travel like a carshaped hole along the boulevard.

  Niko bolts upright.

  The smooth white balls of Phil’s blank eyes peer over the top of his shades. “Forget something, Niko-lirium?”

  Niko sits back and looks out the window. “No. Nothing. This is all just too strange, that’s all.” In truth he hasn’t forgotten something, he’s remembered something. In his coat pocket is a little box and in the little box is the spare key to this very car.

  Niko tries to quell his sudden urgency. What’re you gonna do, cowboy, wait’ll they stop to take a leak and boost the car and drive it home? Sure your house is less than five miles from here, but look around you. This might be L.A. but it sure as hell ain’t your L.A.

  Nonetheless the knowledge of the spare key on his person reassures. An ace up his sleeve.

  At Western they turn left and head north toward the Hollywood hills. Western hooks right to become Los Feliz Boulevard and they speed along the undulating road. Before Hillhurst Niko sees a sign and realizes where they’re headed.

  Phil sees the sign as well and frowns. “Aw, Niko-lizer. It was supposed to be a surprise.”

  The sign whips past.

  GRIFFITH OBSERVATORY

  GREEK THEATRE

  Niko leans back in the seat again and shuts his eyes. “It still is. Heck, I haven’t been to the observatory in years.”

  A long quiet pause. The Black Taxi hangs a left and begins to climb the hill in earnest. Then a hand claps Niko’s thigh and a sharp barking laugh opens his eyes. “Niko-median. You had me going for a second there.”

  Niko turns away again. “You’ve had me going a lot longer than that,” he tells the window.

  IT ISN’T THAT the show will start soon. It’s that it never stopped. Phil was right. All that changes are the masks we wear. I was born for this moment. Have been borne toward this moment many times before. Chained to the turning of the wheel. And what brings me round to this point every time, what makes the wheel turn in the first place, is my belief that I can free myself from its vicious circle.

  Then why bother? What’s different this time around?

  In the cradle of his nemesis he rocks toward his culmination as the Franklin climbs and climbs the winding way.

  Jemma. Jemma’s different this time round. She doesn’t belong here chained to someone else’s story. She deserves better. She always did. And if I can only get her out of this it doesn’t matter what becomes of me. I will have broken the circle. Sometimes victory and success are not the same.

  Can you do this?

  They break from the treelined residential section. Niko looks at his guitar case. In the light of day it’s really beat to shit. He sets his hand upon it as if feeling for a pulse.

  Phil looks up from his cellphone. “Flop sweat, Niko-star?”

  Niko looks at him and marvels that he doesn’t feel a thing. Out there on that empty plain he really did surrender something. “Weapons check.”

  THE BLACK TAXI pulls up smoothly to the curb beside the unattended box office near the entrance to the Greek Theatre. The Driver gets out and holds open Phil’s door. Niko grabs his guitar and gets out of the big black car. He stares pointedly across the roof at the Driver but the Driver looks into some middle distance that renders Niko invisible.

  The Driver shuts the door and takes up station beside the Franklin.

  Niko faces the theatre entrance. The hot and steady wind feels cleansing on his face. Phil comes up beside him, hands in pockets and smacking gum. “Nice venue.”

  Niko shrugs. “Never played it.”

  “You kidding? You’ve played the Greek for ages.”

  “Cute.” Niko heads toward a turnstile.

  Phil stops him with a hand on his arm. “Make you a deal.”

  Niko does not look back. Through the gate he sees the scalloped rows of open air seats. “Blow off the gig,” Phil says. “Get in the car and go straight to your front door. The real one in the real L.A. No strings, no catch. You go home no worse off than when you started, you don’t come back, and we call it even and the original Deal still holds. No harm no foul. What do you say?”

  Niko imagines it. Going back home to his life and picking up the pieces and plunging back in to the remainder of his mortal days. With Jemma left down here. He shrugs off Phil’s hand and walks toward the turnstile.

  “Okay. Final offer.”

  This time Niko doesn’t even slow.

  “Blow off the show and go back home and I tear up your contract. Null and void. We don’t owe you and you don’t owe us. Even steven, just like we never met. How about it?”

  At the turnstile Niko stops. “And Jemma?”

  Phil looks around as if asking Do you believe this guy. “Niko, buddy, be reasonable. While you’re at it why don’t you ask me to go back in time and make sure Eve is herpephobic? We can’t walk away with nothing. Just like you don’t go back to nothing. She’s dead and that’s forever, like the songs all say. Let it go.”

  Now Niko turns around and looks at Phil and Phil’s expression falls as Niko slowly, coldly smiles.

  NIKO ENTERS THE South Terrace near the stage. The bowl of empty seats curves up before him. The proscenium has been built to suggest a classic Greek design. Niko has been here many times, or at least been to its doppelganger on the populated earth, but only to attend shows, never to play one.

  A large band on the stage stands mute with silent instruments. As Niko climbs onto the stage they do not look at him but stare blankly outward. Niko recognizes most of them. Some he’s met before, others he knows from grainy pictures on old album art. A bony man wearing halfrim glasses and a shapeless fedora sits before a battered upright piano. A man with a pale and angular face shadowed by his broadrimmed black hat wears a serape over one shoulder and his guitar on the other. A ruddyfaced man with a hangdog look holds a harmonica limply in his gnarled hands. A heavyset man stands like a zombie with his alto sax before him. Motionless behind their mic stands are a very dark woman with a rotting orchid above her ear and a small pale woman with long kinked hair. There are many others, fallen stars and great unknowns now summoned forth from their torments to hear one of their own howl out his pain and so compound their own.

  One tall thin man wears a
large and unkempt afro, a bright drum-major jacket, purple elephant bellbottoms. Thick and sensuous lips, large and liquid eyes. Niko met him just the once, a drunken allday jam that took his music places it had never gone and ended with an introduction to his great white hobby horse, but he has always looked back on him as a friend. It breaks his heart to see him here. The man just stares through Niko like the others, leaden and abandoned and emptied and wanting. The light of mischief in his eyes extinguished. At his hip a Fender Strat slung lefthanded but not restrung.

  Feeling like an uninvited guest Niko passes before the blank yet watchful faces and thinks he feels their silent reproach. Perhaps it is only expectation.

  At center stage is a wooden stool, a mic stand and effects pedals and the bare end of a jack leading to a rack. Monitors around the stage emit a faint electric hum. Niko glances at the empty benches as he walks toward the stool. Sitting tenth row center Phil waves obligingly and grins. How many times before how many thousands have I walked onstage guitar in hand? Yet I have never felt the weight of eyes upon me as I do now. Am I afraid? Of course.

  He sets the guitar case beside the mic stand and kneels beside it and looks up at listless faces staring outward like Easter Island statues. Singers and musicians all. Mostly living hard and dying old when they were young. One day I’ll count myself among their anguished number, take my place among them as some other poor damned soul steps up to his last stage.

  The silver locket hot against his throat. He opens it and the ring spills out and rolls on the stage. He picks it up and kisses it and slips it on his little finger. Unlatches the hardcase with nerveless hands.

  “Haven’t got all day,” reverberates from the stands.

  Niko opens the case and reaches for the Dobro resting in its plush coffin. His hand stops. He stares. His breath catches. His stomach turns to ice. Oh. Oh no. Of all the things that could undo him. Oh no.

  Niko pulls the guitar from the case and limp strings loop like entrails as the neck falls away in his hands, broken where it joins the body.

  When could this have happened? He played before the bonfire at the demon Onyx’s request. Serenaded Franz to his sick fate at the head of the convoluted line. Played on the rattling boxcar with his demon’s howled accompaniment. And after that, and after that?

  After that he threw the case out of the train and jumped off after it. And never opened it. Never checked it.

  He rocks back on his heels and looks up at the clear blue sky and shuts his eyes.

  Behind him Phil’s laughter echoes in the empty amphitheater. Well that’s it then isn’t it? Show’s canceled folks. No refund, do not pass go. You lose you lose you lose.

  A shadow falls across him. He opens his eyes to see a slight and darkskinned man with closecropped hair and yellowed eyes. One of them drooping. A battered pawnshop acoustic guitar on a frayed strap like an albatross around his neck. The man looks down at Niko with a face that reveals nothing and then raises up his arms to show his fingers have been fused into a single mottled mass of useless flesh.

  The rage that smolders deep behind those Louisiana bluesman eyes. Eyes that have regarded him from blurry photographs on fraying covers of crackling recordings that had tried to capture a way of playing that had made men glare into their beermugs with a killing hardness, raw notes that had widened women’s pupils and made them walk pulled by their hipbones. A music that could turn a jukejoint to an orgy and a brawl. A blues nailed to the earth with iron brought back from the crossroads by a hard and young man taken down again in 1929. Young and hard and taken down and standing now above him rudely carved from ebony and rooted to the stage and rendered mute by his ruined hands.

  He lifts his mangled hands and shrugs from his guitar and offers it to Niko.

  Who at first can only stare.

  The face impassive as the dark head nods.

  Niko accepts the gift in startled wonder and puts the strap across his shoulder.

  “Nigger,” comes Phil’s reverberating voice, “you are gonna hurt for that.”

  Robert Johnson slowly turns toward the seats and gives a little shrug. Then backs away to take his place among his mute and watchful band of fellow sufferers.

  Stunned to silence Niko stares and hopes his gratitude shows in his eyes.

  And then looks down at the guitar. All the finish worn away. Wood gouged as if illiterates have tried to carve their names. He strums a G. It’s badly out of tune. The tone is awful. Bottom strings rattle on worndown frets. In short the guitar of a blues player.

  Niko opens the storage compartment of his hardcase and removes the metal slide. He slips it on his finger and pulls out a broad tortoiseshell patterned pick. He perches on the simple stool. No pickups no mics no rack no effects. Bare bones. He mutes the strings, his fingers ready. All that’s left now. Heel hooked on a rung his foot counts off, five six seven eight.

  He plays.

  SHE SAT IN on a few numbers at their regular gig one night. She was a friend of Joel, their bass player. He had never heard a voice like that. Graveled, sexual, muscular, feminine, and assured. Halfbagged he flirted with her through his guitar.

  And that is minor chords low down on the neck, brown tones rasping as the metal slide wavers on the frets.

  Wearing a stained apron and a pensive look she watched him take his first taste of the first meal she ever made him, a secret family recipe she claimed. He had no idea what was in it but couldn’t get enough. She said I told you I could cook and he said I didn’t think you were talking about food.

  And that is a bright harmonic arpeggio.

  The sound engineer held a hand on his headphones and looked from her face behind the Neumann boom mic to Niko watching beside him at the board. “God damn, she’s like a beautiful Joplin.” Niko only watched her through the window and felt a white alarming joy inside his heart.

  And that is melody quickening, minor and graceful, an eidolon haunting taut wire.

  Her deep breath and creaking grip on the brass headboard, looking up at him in defiance almost before she shut her eyes and turned her head and pulled him closer.

  And now the ghost of sex walks syncopated on the bottom strings.

  Her voice a chocolate covered cherry. And melody coheres as tempo picks up. Her walk all lazy parabolas like a gently rocking boat. And that is his desire scratching chords. Her face pale and thin above her waterbeaded body wrapped in a white thick towel after he hung up the phone and told her Dr. Abkagian wants you to come in right now. And that is high notes crying as they bend. Her small hand holding his inside the scented CAT scan tube. Upon their bed as they lay cooling. On a roughweather airplane trip as they touched down. Within a lost unlighted cavern. A final clenching time before her final breath.

  And that is deep and gaping sorrow at the loss of her.

  Niko plays and what he plays is simply Jem. Simple music for a simple grief. Notes no talent could call forth without a lifetime’s pain behind them. Like Jem the melody’s direct and pretty with a dark edge lurking, and like her always on the brink of bursting into something more. And like Jem the music slows and darkens to a fading ember that flickers and then dies.

  And that is what was lost.

  The last notes fade across the empty amphitheater. The guitar in his hands. Wood body on his thigh. Warm wind across the hills. No insect sounds, no calling birds in this Los Angeles.

  Niko’s fingers move again upon the strings. Playing of their own accord a coda for a life not his. A sad small wave before the ship sets sail. Look down on him from high up in the stands. A lone man with an old guitar perched on a chair. Shut our eyes and listen. What we hear is just a good man feeling bad.

  Niko rocking back and forth, the guitar silent in his hands. And then he stops. He has no idea how long it’s been since he stopped playing. Isn’t even sure he played at all.

  The musicians still behind him. Poor ruined people brought to silence here. Phil still there beyond the stage, sitting bolt upright with his arms folde
d and his sunglasses like holes in his skull.

  Niko removes the guitar and walks to the front of the stage and stares at Phil.

  Phil’s expression is impossible to read as he reaches down beside himself and pulls his pale leathercased iPhone from out of nowhere and types on it and then removes a white business card and a limited edition Michel Perchin Fabergé Gold Ribbed Columbian Emerald lever action fountain pen. He uncaps the pen and stabs it into his arm and works the little pump, then pulls it out and licks the nib and scribbles something on the card. He caps the pen and returns it to the case and turns the iPhone off and puts it away and beckons curtly to Niko.

  Niko has no idea what to expect as he sits on the edge of the stage and slides off and walks up the steps toward Phil. He holds the guitar out of the way as he sidles along the tenth row.

  Phil continues staring toward the stage. Twin sunlight stars glint from his shades. He holds the business card up like a distracted bidder at an auction. There is only the faintest tremble.

  Niko takes the card. One side is blank, the other has several indecipherable words scrawled in deep purple.

  “Take it to the cashier,” says Phil.

  Niko stares at Phil and Phil continues to refuse to meet his gaze. Niko thinks he sees a glint of sunlight on Phil’s cheek below his sunglasses.

  Phil turns away from Niko. “Come on, come on. You think you’re the only thing I have to deal with?”

  Niko puts the card in a pocket.

  Phil rubs beneath his sunglasses. “I’ll give you five minutes. Starting the second you leave the casino.” He produces his iPhone and begins tapping it. “After that I unload on you. The works. Both barrels. Got it?”

  “Where do I find the cashier?”

  “At the casino you moron. Don’t worry, you’ll have a ride.”

  On the stage the brilliant souls worn to the quick have turned like sunflowers toward the two men in the stands. Robert Johnson motionless as furniture and looking naked with his guitar gone.