Play Dead (29 page)
“Thanks,” I said. “I owe you. Again.”
“Anytime. How are you feeling, other than that?”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ve been having a lot of headaches lately, though. That’s not usual for me.”
“Let me see,” she said.
She walked behind and put a hand on each side of my head. Her hands were warm and pulsing with energy as her fingers probed gently. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the feel of her hands.
“Hmm,” she said. “You’re just fine, as far as I can tell.”
“Why the headaches, then? Stress?”
“I doubt it. You’ve had stress before—lots of it. Have you ever had headaches?”
“No.”
“I think it’s something outside you, not inside. Something’s affecting you.”
“You mean like a trigger?” I asked.
“Not exactly. All sorts of things can trigger a headache, but that just sets off what’s already there. I’m thinking something more direct, something you have no control over, like if your furnace was leaking carbon monoxide.”
“I don’t have a furnace.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” I said. Campbell grabbed me by the arm.
“Oh, and I almost forgot. I want you to take a look at something. It might interest you.”
She led me over to the garden of plants that had grown up almost to the front door and pointed toward the middle of them.
“What am I supposed to be looking at?” I asked.
“You see that plant in the middle, there? The one that’s peculiar?” I gave her the kind of look she usually gives me. She laughed, bent down, and showed me which one she meant. “Look at this.”
“Looks like a plant,” I said.
“Yes, but it doesn’t belong here. It’s like a yarrow, but it’s not, and it just shot up overnight. I’ve never seen anything like it and I’ve seen a lot of plants.”
That was an understatement. But this was significant. A plant that wasn’t quite normal, like an odd squirrel or a peculiar cat. Whatever was going on, it was spreading.
“Interesting,” I said.
ANOTHER BONUS OF A PRIVATE PARTY GIG WAS that I could bring Lou along. Which was important; with all the magical mayhem going on lately, a problem could crop up anytime.
The company had rented a downtown club called Park Place for the evening, and since the head honcho was that rarest of creatures, a jazz buff with money, I was in. Originally it was just going to be my trio: me, Dave from Oakland, and Roger Chu on drums, but at the last moment I called Bobby, the organ player. A three-way split is better than four, and he’s basically an asshole even if he can really play, but I knew he was hurting for money and hadn’t been playing much. He’d burned too many bridges with too many people the last few years. But I felt bad for him even if it was his own fault, and anyway that B3 sound is a big hit with crowds—maybe we’d get another gig out of it.
We set up early, and even by that time half the crowd had a good buzz on. There must have been four hundred people there, with an open bar. Even in a down economy Novasca had had a good year—they’d patented some new drug, or discovered a virus or something.
Park Place is basically a rock club, and they have a raised stage, a large semicircular space with all kinds of room. For once Bobby’s Leslie speakers wouldn’t be blaring in my ear, drowning out Dave’s bass. A tiered balcony runs all the way around, from almost over the stage to over the bar in back, with stairs at each end.
“This is more like it,” said Dave. “No more tiny little clubs for us—we’ve hit the big time.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Just don’t give up your day job.”
Actually Dave’s the only one of us who doesn’t have a day job. Roger works at a skateboard shop, though he’s getting a bit old for that—all of nineteen. Bobby’s been fired from as many jobs as he has from gigs, due to his sparkling personality and congenial demeanor. I don’t think of working for Victor as a day job, but without the money it brings in I’d have trouble making rent each month.
Dave, however, is a fine player who’s as comfortable playing electric in a funk band as he is playing stand-up in a jazz setting, and good bass players are always in demand. There just aren’t enough of them. Guitar players, on the other hand, are a dime a dozen.
Plus, he has the look—urban black hipster, ready to get down and party at the drop of a hat. The right look is important to a band’s success—an unfortunate truth. People who see him grooving up onstage don’t know he’s a family man with two kids and a wife who keeps him on a short leash.
We played mostly jazz standards for the first set, nothing too out there, and mostly up-tempo tunes with a swing: “Well, You Needn’t”; “Four on Six”; “Straight, No Chaser”—stuff like that. Toward the end of the set, people’s alcohol intake had risen along with the party mood, so we played some jazz/funk tunes like “Walk Tall,” taking full advantage of the B3. We couldn’t play any real funk because Dave hadn’t brought his electric bass, but we got the crowd dancing anyway. And Roger was my secret weapon. He could get people dancing with nothing but a drum solo.
During the break, I altered the set list to include more tunes people could dance to, including some tunes not usually seen as jazz. Jazz purists may scoff, but they sometimes forget jazz was originally dance music. Which doesn’t mean you can’t play ballads; it just means that after you strip away all the altered chords and clever riffs, the heart and soul of jazz is all about movement. Duke said it better : “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing.” A deceptively simple statement. Bobby of course was annoyed at the changes.
“What is this crap?” he said, poring over the list. “I thought we were here to play jazz. This shit is way boring, way uncool.”
Dave shook his head and flashed a grin at me. He was used to Bobby.
“Cashing his check for the evening might mellow him out a little,” he said.
“I doubt it.”
You’d think after the financial and creative mess Bobby had got himself into, he’d be slobberingly grateful for the gig instead of carping about the set list. He’d never change. I couldn’t complain, though. I know what he’s like, but I’d hired him anyway. People are who they are. But his complaining gave me an idea.
“You want interesting?” I said. “Tell you what. I’ll write out a chart for us.” I scribbled for a few minutes and handed him the chart. “Chords are simple, but the time’s a bit tricky.”
It was indeed. I’d written down a variation of one of the tunes I’d heard back at Carver’s tavern in Richter’s singularity. It was in simple 7/8 time, but divided oddly and switching every eight measures to a differently accented rhythm. Bobby was a great player with real heart and soul, but technically a bit weak. He’d have to scramble to keep up. Dave would have no problem, and Roger has ears the size of elephants—one pass through and he’d be grooving with it and adding his own spin.
I saved the tune for the last of the set. If you get people engaged with the music, they’ll listen to anything, at least for a while. When we started off with it, people stopped dead in midswallow, put down their drinks, and looked up at the bandstand. They’d never heard anything like it and couldn’t decide if they approved or not. But the melody was strong, and when we settled in, people started nodding their heads and smiling. Bobby was lost at first, which served him right, but he caught on after a while and found a repeating riff that really worked.
I was having a great time until I started feeling queasy. The room blurred, like I was experiencing double vision. Bobby lost the time completely and even Dave, who’s rock solid, stumbled. So it wasn’t just something happening to me; it was something happening to the room.
My vision blurred even more, and the faces in the crowd flickered and shifted. The room shrank and became smoky. In the back of the room I now saw a fireplace with brightly burning logs superimposed over the bar that I knew was really there. Shadowy figures dressed in heavy wool shirts moved languidly through the mist.
I was back in Carver’s tavern, back in the singularity, except I wasn’t, not entirely. But it was growing stronger every second, and Park Place was receding into memory. The music ground to a halt as we all stopped playing and the singularity receded for a moment, then strengthened. My attention wandered as I stared into the fire, now closer and more real, giving off waves of heat. The party crowd noise dimmed, replaced with the quiet hum of conversation.
A volley of sharp barks brought me out of it. I looked down with some surprise and found Lou up onstage, angrily barking his head off. Everything rushed back into focus—Park Place, the bandstand, Dave and Bobby and Roger, the crowd.
A roar of laughter surged up from the audience as Lou continued his barking, not sure if I was all the way back yet. One of the crowd yelled out, “Everybody’s a critic,” and almost fell off his chair at his own wit. Actually, it was pretty funny. I bent over the mike.
“We’ ll be taking a short break so I can beat my dog.”
That got another laugh from the crowd, this one kind of nervous. They weren’t entirely sure if I was joking or not. Besides, some of them had experienced that same dislocation. Not as bad as ours, because they were on the floor of the room looking up at the stage. From their vantage, all that had happened was that the music got weird for a moment and the band suddenly grew dim. But they just attributed it to the lights and the alcohol consumed. What else could it be?
When we sat down for our break Bobby wasn’t laughing, though.
“Some motherfucker dosed my drink,” he said. “I almost wigged out in the middle of that tune.”
“You too?” said Dave. “I thought I was having a stroke or something.”
“You guys all right?” I asked. “How are you feeling now?”
I knew the answer, of course. Dave stretched carefully and turned his head from side to side.
“Okay, I guess. That was weird, though. You didn’t feel anything?”
“Just a little woozy for a second. Maybe it was a gas leak or something.”
“Maybe.” Dave looked dubious.
“That was no fucking gas leak,” said Bobby. “We got dosed.”
“Maybe it wore off.”
Bobby looked at me as if I was nuts, but didn’t pursue it. He’d seen a couple of things he shouldn’t have in the past, things involving me, things he couldn’t explain. So he’s understandably a bit wary of upsetting me. I’m probably the only one he feels that way about, which is why I can keep his antisocial tendencies in control most of the time.
“I didn’t notice anything,” Roger said.
That figured. Roger lived in a world of his own, one made up almost exclusively of drums, gigs, and skateboards. He didn’t do any drugs. It wasn’t that he had anything against them; he once explained that he didn’t see the point. They didn’t have much of an effect on him; that was all.
“Dave, can I borrow your cell phone?” I asked.
When Victor picked up I asked him if the Richter meter had shown anything.
“Definitely. There was a huge surge about twenty minutes ago. How did you know?”
“Things suddenly got a bit thin. I might have helped trigger it, at least as far as it concerned me specifically.”
“How thin?”
“The veils of reality as we know it were lifted from my eyes.”
“Yeah, I hear that can happen. Keep an eye out. When things get thin is when visitors push their way through, remember.”
We played one more set, but our heart wasn’t in it. My head was pounding again and both Dave and Bobby were nervous, waiting to see if anything else odd was going to happen. Luckily by this time the party was in full swing, and we could have been playing kazoos for all they cared.
After the gig I handed out the checks and loaded up my van. I was a bit on edge, not exactly jumpy, but close to it. I’m not much of one for superstitions, but over the last few years a lot of unfortunate complications had occurred immediately after gigs.
It wasn’t until I’d unloaded my gear at home that I realized there was nothing to eat in the house. I didn’t feel like going out again to eat, so I walked the couple of blocks to one of the ubiquitous corner markets that dot the city. Half of their shelf space is devoted to alcohol, and fresh fruit and vegetables are scarce and not all that fresh. But it’s fine for emergency rations, though about 50 percent higher than supermarket prices. That’s how they stay in business. I didn’t begrudge them their markup; they provide a service for stoners and other late-night denizens, for which you pay a premium. That’s all.
On the way back to my place I felt a sudden twinge in my head. Mildly painful, but more than that it was weird, like a soundless explosion. It was like what I imagined a small stroke would feel like. I stopped, a bit worried, but it seemed to have passed with no effect. Still, it was unsettling. Especially after the incident at Park Place.
When I started walking again I saw two pigeons in the middle of the sidewalk, aimlessly pecking. Not an unusual sight, but uncommon after dark—pigeons, like most birds, roost after dark.
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