Case and the Dreamer (15 page)

I got hung up one night and was working on ways and means and especially ifs in a woodstock to compete with Oberammergau, right on the scene. Anything in that much bad taste would be a big plus presswise, but it generated angles that nobody had ever thought of before. I was thinking of those angles—promotional, religious, political. And whether or not to throw the best talent I had into it, to start arguments on taste, or the worst, which would make a group expendable and very likely expended. And how do you word a contract which lets you out clean if the group is mobbed? And all like that, when someone bleeped the front door.

I complain a lot about working at night but actually I like it. No calls, no visitors, and I can take my spats off. Also I can play whatever I want on the equipment without worrying who might spread the word that I was cornball or too far out or maybe planning to steal some other woodstocker’s talent. It is amazing how few people passing by and hearing sounds from a woodstocker’s office are capable of thinking just maybe he could be playing something for his own personal kicks.

So when I get barged in on late at night I don’t like it much no matter who, and I guess I showed it when I answered the bleep. It
was the newsboy. I opened the door and left it open and walked backed to where I was working.

He came in and said, “Got any ice cubes?” And went over to the cooler. I may have sort of waved my hand yes; I don’t know. Not that it would’ve made any difference; I don’t think he looked my way. He was a big man, maybe forty-five, with a sour face. “It’s flat,” he said.

“What’s flat?”

“The Liszt.”

I thought it sounded pretty good. Also I was annoyed by his not waiting for my ok on the ice and, irrationally, by his having caught me listening to “Les Preludes.” “The hell it is.”

He put down the ice cube tray and came back, shoving his way through the gate into the inner office and walking back to my display wall, where my antique Sony quadraphonic was playing. He put the back of his middle fingernail against the tape where it passed between the feed wheel and the heads, and pressed upwards. “Brake’s dragging,” he grunted. “Fix it and the whole thing will come up in pitch almost a quarter tone.”

“Listen, that machine is—”

“That machine is going to stretch your tape, and it’ll be a long cold summer before you find another like it.”

“What have you got, perfect pitch?”

“Yuh.” He went back to the refrigerator. “Can I take some coffee?”

I glanced up. He was already into my stash of plastic coffee packs, was not waiting for an answer. His whole approach was to scrounge penny-ante things in such a way as to make you a miser if you objected. “What are you going to do about that grave robber?”

“What grave robber?”

“Jomo what’s-his-name.” (As if everybody in the world didn’t know what his name was.) “The Scriabin.”

I hadn’t forgotten about it but I’d been trying. Everybody—well, the Bump—kept asking me what I was going to do. I kept asking me what I was going to do. So I got sore and said it was my business what I was going to do.

“Okay,” he said mildly, and picked up his ice and his coffee—eleven packs, would you believe?—and went to the door. “Do you know when Scriabin was born?” He asked, and left without waiting for an answer.

Did I know when Scriabin was born. Did I care when Scriabin was born. I went back to work on the Oberammergau, with a grumble-grumble going on in the back of my head. I should tell that guy off. I should throw him out. I should wait until he was out and burgle into his place and find out if he really did fry bacon on my bill. I got madder and madder at him for making me mad at me, and began to understand some of the Bump’s tirades about him.

It was all of an hour and a half later that I let myself realize that Scriabin and his date of birth were shoving themselves between me and what I was trying to do. In exasperation I dialed the Library computer and asked.

Christmas Day, 1871.

Big deal. I went back to work, accomplishing not very much except the clear realization that it was too late and I was too tired and that newsboy had cost me again. And eleven packs of coffee to boot. Cursing him, I shut up shop and went home.

It takes me forty minutes to get home, so it was eighty minutes before I got back to the office. I don’t think I have ever been so excited in all my life. I started writing do-it memos to stack on the Bump’s desk, placed orders, wrote queries, and kept the computer down at the Library humming.

“Well, you’re up early!”

I looked up. It was the Bump, and around her was a blue haze from my fatigue, and across her face were little moving speckles—the black spots swimming in front of my eyes. And I felt just wonderful. “No, I’m up late.”

“Oh my God.” I don’t know whether she said that because of the mountain of paper in her do-it stack or because the door opened and in walked Jomo Delahanty. “Well,” he said, “you’re up early.”

“I’m up late,” I said again. “Sit down and shut up, Jomo. I want to talk to you. Bump, take a memo. To—”

“Well!” said the newsboy from the door. “You’re up early!” He
put down the paper and went out.

“No, I’m—Bump! Quit that giggling. And cancel our subscription to that damned paper!”

“We don’t have a subscription to that damn paper. He just brings it. He brings it whether I fight with him or not. I hate him a lot. He give you the money this month?”

“Yes, I told you! Jomo—”

“Massacree at Punxsutawney,” said Jomo, and began punching the air and snapping his fingers, punch, snap, punch, snap, which he always did when he was talking to you. He never looked at you either, just off into the middle distance, punch, snap, punch, snap. Pop stars. “We killed them dead by the hundreds of thousands.” He wore a kilt with a codpiece.

“I know what you did at Punxsutawney. You barely scored enough to cover the bribes, with enough left over to buy a peanut for the groundhog.”

“You always sweet talk me, Solly boy.” He closed his eyes, showed his teeth, and went punch, snap.

The Bump said, “What are you going to do about—”

“Shut up, Bump. I got to have words with this, uh, talent. You know where you are on the charts?”

“Four.” Punch, snap.

“And you know where you were last week? And the week before? And the week before that?”

“That’s show biz.” Punch, snap.

“I’ll tell you what’s showbiz. It’s great to be in the top ten but four is special. Up from four and you’re a winner. Down from four is
out
, man. You don’t slide, you fall right off. Well maybe number eight, nine for a week, but then goodbye.”

“I got a new cut that’ll—”

“You got ‘Metaphysical Mope’ that’ll keep you right where you’re at for maybe two more weeks. The other thing special about number four is that the longer you stay there the surer it is that you’ll fall right off. If you even get to three for a week you might have a chance, but every time you score that four after four, you’re closer to the final edge.”

“He’s right,” said the Bump, which is, I think, the first time she ever said such a thing in my hearing.

Punch, snap, punch, snap. “Well don’t you fret Solly boy. I got a trick up my sleeve, something new, something different. I got a whole new sound, whole new trend.” Punch, snap, and the closed eyes and the teeth, the bit that always made the split-tails scream. He opened his eyes and looked right at me for a change. “And I am not just jammin’ a loose riff. I hit that stride a while back and it paid off, and I never went on with it. Now I will. Okay?”

“You mean you’re going to stop stealing from Scriabin and go back to robbing Dvorak?”

No punch.

No snap.

From the corner of my eye I saw the Bump slowly, slowly sitting down. I think she had to. Jomo Delahanty sprawled where he was, speared and bleeding and glassy-eyed. Sometimes it’s a shame to catch a man so dead to rights. Sometimes it does a lot more harm than good. You got to leave the man a place to stand.

He said, “How did you know?”

“Did you take me for a musical ignoramus?”

“Yes.”

I heard suppressed laughter make a scratchy noise in the Bump’s sinuses. I hoped it hurt.

“What you want me to do?” asked Jomo. (Jomo!)

“Go on doing what you’re doing,” I said. “It’s great. The only thing wrong with the Scriabin you’ve been doing is Jomo Delahanty. Give us less of that and more of the real thing. Of course, double the beat and fuzz the sides, and fool around like that all you want, but keep the Scriabin clean.”

“They’ll … find out. They’ll know!”

“Sure they’ll know.… When was Scriabin born?”

“Long time back.”

“Christmas 1871,” said the Bump, looking at my notes.

“Christmas, 1871. Next year, two hundred even. Right?”

Behind me I heard the Bump, in an awed whisper, begin reverently to recite the names of the top deities from three religions. I said,
“You are going to ram hot clean Scriabin clear up to the top of the charts for a whole year, and when the news leaks out it will be countered with a prepared campaign and the biggest woodstock ever seen, for the Scriabin Second Centenary, and the fans’ll be locked in, and the snobs’ll love you for the greatest rediscovery since Mendelssohn plugged J.S. Bach.”

“How did you know that story, Sol?” asked the Bump. “I took you for a musical ig—”

“Shut up, Bump. Now you listen, Jomo. Scriabin wrote—hand me that note, Bump—no,
that
one.… Scriabin wrote five symphonies, more or less, ten sonatas, and a whole bunch of orchestral poems and preludes. There ought to be enough there for you to keep your sticky fingers busy for that year. I want more Scriabin, less Delahanty, and lyrics.”

“Yuh, yuh, what?”

“Lyrics.”

“You mean words?
Words
, to neo-rock? Aw man, nobody writes words no more, except folk, and I don’t do folk. Nobody’s wrote words for forty years, man. I mean an antique dealer I may be, but camp I am not. They used to do that, but more and more the music crowded in, and more and more the words fuzzed down, and everybody likes it the way it is, you listen and feel, man, and you don’t screw it up with ‘wha he say, wha he say?’ ”

“You trust this nose, and Jomo, and do like I said.”

Jomo stirred himself up from three-quarters horizontal to a forty-degree list, which was his code for standing up for his rights. “And if I don’t?”

“Think about it,” I said. I let him think about it for a minute. I let him think about the clause in his contract which called for original compositions, and I let him think about the public announcement that he’d stolen everything he ever wrote. I could see him thinking about “the biggest woodstock ever seen,” too. All this thinking got kind of heavy and he slowly slumped under the weight until he was backed to supine. And I had him.

“But I can’t write lyrics,” he moaned. (“Either,” I heard the Bump murmur.) And he had me.

There was a painful silence for a while and then Jomo stirred. He sat up and punched a couple of times, though he couldn’t cheer himself up enough to snap. “I guess you get words the same way you get music,” he said.

I shared a sick look with the Bump and then told Jomo to go round up the group. “I’ll release ‘Metaphysical Mope,’ ” I said, “and by this time tomorrow I want a call from you telling me you cut tracks on some new Scriabin—your choice—and a draft of some lyrics.”

“Ain’t going to like this,” said Jomo, getting up. “I ain’t, they ain’t, and them out there neither.” He left.

“It doesn’t scan and it doesn’t parse, but it do communicate,” the Bump observed, and “Sometimes you do genius things, Sol.”

“Well, thanks.”

“Statistical necessity,” said my valued employee. “You do so many things, so sooner or later—”

“Soon as you get to work.” I pointed at her do-it stack, wondering when I could get a compliment without a sting in its tail.

The Bump had a hell of a fight with the newsboy. I concede that I got the story from her, and you might think it is slanted her way, and it probably was—but not much. Though she has an ego the size of Mount Washington, the Bump has honesty like the Alps.

Ejler Edgar Aylmer (nobody has a name like Ejler Edgar Aylmer, not any more) once showed me a computerized butler he invented. I’d visited his basement workshop while he was having his lunch, and he said, “I want some mustard.” Before I could finish saying, “Sure, where …” the far wall made a noise like hawking in the antriums, and a great long pantograph sort of thing came whizzing across the room and smacked a jar of chilled Dijon into his open palm, retracting into the wall with a crisp ptui.

“What was that, Ejler Edgar?”

“Butler,” said the inventor. “Of course, that’s an understatement. I’m not about to tell you its real name. I told somebody else the other day, and the consequences were not—ah …”

“You can tell me.”

“Well then, just between you and me and the far wall, I call it Cupid.”

“An acronym.”

“Not an acronym. Cupid is Cupid because nobody really understands how he works. Also, Cupid always did have a way of giving people what they deserved when what they asked for was their heart’s desire. Also there was always something cold-blooded about Cupid with his blindfold and his random shots. Cupid—this one here—is after all a computer, recording all available data, sieving it through the command, and dropping the result out of the chute—in this case, fulfilling the demand.”

“It can give you anything?
Anything?
”

“Certainly. Doesn’t everybody believe that of Cupid? You get what you want, based on every scrap of data that Cupid can discover about you. No matter what.” And he made a peculiar laugh.

“Ejler Edgar, you better tell me why you made that peculiar laugh.
I won’t tell as long as we both shall live.”

And I think all along he really wanted to tell me. “It was that other idiot” (I think that was how he phrased it) “who used to come barging in here at lunchtime. Dendium, his name was, Potiphar Ungwall Dendium, a lubricious type with a pornographic wink and a chuckle out of his right molars. Used to gobble his lunch at Greasy’s and get his dessert to go—gooey puddings and sloppy sundaes, leave the empty containers around the basement for me to clean up. Wormed the name Cupid out of me, found out Cupid could deliver anything—
anything
. Challenged me to prove it. So I said, ‘Go ahead, ask.’ So he said, ‘You know what I want, Cupid. and I want it at home in bed waiting for me.’ He launched one of those winks, and I swear the man’s eyelashes smelled of musk.