ENTOMOCRONICITY
This story was originally published in Pulp Rock: An Anthology of Musically Inspired Tales edited by
. This story was where I started to experiment and change the way I write, two years later my style has matured, but I think there is some good stuff in this one.ENTOMOCRONICITY
by Alexandru Constantin
When I was young I read somewhere that out of all the senses, smell inspires vivid memories and emotions, a psychological phenomenon named the Proustian Effect after the famous French homosexual. Unfortunately, my sense of smell has always been poor and I damaged it further with cigarettes. Yet memory, the act of recalling past events and experiences, has always fascinated me. Isn’t it interesting that I remember what Amber Watson, a girl I never spoke a word to but had a grade school crush on, wore to the seventh-grade dance, but I can’t remember the face or name of the woman who I worked with for nearly a decade? I remember Albert the Lebanese liquor store owner from my childhood neighborhood, he used to sell us cigarettes and porno magazines without ID. The man had a thick mustache, reeked of marijuana, and loved to tell racist jokes. If I saw him on the street tomorrow I could repeat some of those jokes back to him, but I barely remember my old manager, women I’ve dated, guys I’ve served with. I guess some people make an impression, a mark on your consciousness, while and others fade from recollection. Memory is strange.
Almost two decades ago I chanced upon Capitan Lawrence and the memory of that encounter has tunneled its way through the timeline of my life. I was a Sergeant, Third Battalion, First Marines, Balls of the Corps, for historical posterity, and just returned to Camp Dwyer after many months of patrolling through Helmand. I was exhausted but eager to finish the mandatory decompression training which mostly consisted of PowerPoint lectures from the Battalion Chaps about PTSD and spousal abuse so we could get on a plane and begin the journey back home. After months of living in a mud hut with my squad and a few Afghani soldiers, the Dwyer tent city felt like a booming metropolis. Hot showers, laundry, haircuts, working computers, a galley with hot food around the clock . . . POG motherfuckers even had a tent filled with ice cream. No wonder so many of them looked like overstuffed prize pigs compared to our cadaverous visages forged by daily patrols and MRE malnutrition.
I wouldn’t consider myself an introvert, but after spending months with the same men the constant companionship begins to feel claustrophobic, so when I arrived at Dwyer I took the opportunity to indulge in some solitude by going on walks through the sprawling camp. It was during these afternoon walks that I came across Captain Lawrence. I just left the Morale Welfare and Recreation tent where I spent some time sending emails to my mother, my bank requesting a loan for a used car, and to a few friends letting them know when I would be back home.
The wind was picking up, the beginning of one of the daily sandstorms that plagued the camp, halting air operations and most patrols across the entire theater. You don’t want to get shot without a bird available for medevac. I was craving a cigarette so I made my way towards the nearest smoking area which was an ammo can ashtray next to a small fire extinguisher underneath a plywood shelter propped up by sandbags. Two Marines from some logistics unit were there. I wasn’t feeling social so I nodded, lit my cig, and drifted off to the side. They finished and took off without a word. I smoked two butt to butt, Turkish Golds I bought at the camp store, and considered lighting a third but decided to walk around a bit, maybe find another smoke deck and have it there.
I walked between the berthing tents at a leisurely reflective pace, taking in the endless tan canvas, rows of portable restrooms, and plywood structures surrounded by a maze of sand-filled Hesco barriers and razor wire. I walked not paying too much attention to where I was going and daydreamed about home. The bars I was going to drink at, the girls I was going to meet, the places I would visit. After a while I found myself alone as the wind increased. The blowing sand started to sting my eyes and I regretted not having the goggles that were strapped to my Kevlar and shoved into one of my bags. The smoke deck I was looking for wasn’t where I thought it was and visibility was getting worse by the minute. I didn’t want to be caught outside in a sandstorm so I ducked into the nearest tent. I planned to get my bearing and make my way back to my berthing by tent-hopping. I figured that if I pick a direction and go from tent to tent I would eventually end up in one I recognized or even run into one of the guys from my unit. Once that happened I could figure out where mine was.
The first tent was empty, rows of cots covered with packs but nobody was inside. I looked at some of the name tags and patches on the gear but didn’t recognize the names or unit so I made my way out and crossed the lane into another group of tents. By now the storm was properly raging and I could barely see past my outstretched arm. In the brown darkness, I could hear tent flaps beating in the wind and I started to worry that a loose line would whip me so I unzipped the nearest tent and forced my way in, sealing it behind me.
My eyes were watering from the wind and sand and I was having a hard time adjusting to the dim light. Outside the sandstorm howled through the camp, the sides of the tent pulsing from the beating wind. Before I even got a chance to get my bearings I was immediately struck by the sound of music. Violin, trumpet, ballroom orchestra with the unmistakable scratch of a monophonic recording. In the corner of the darkened tent, sprawled across a cot, was a tall Marine with an aquiline nose. He appeared to be the only inhabitant of this berthing and must have been living here for some time because the floor was covered with a dirty Afghan rug, wooden pallets were turned into shelving for dusty books, military manuals, and black and white vintage photographs randomly taped over everything. The place struck me as a private nest made out of care package goods, MRE’s, and found loot, a modern version of The Swamp from M*A*S*H minus the still.
“Ben Selvin’s Orchestra?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, sunken eyes betraying his surprise. “‘Good Night Moon,’ recorded by Selvin and his orchestra in New York City 1931.”
“My grandfather loved big band music from the thirties. He was an old Russian Jew who grew up in New York, had this huge vinyl collection, and would play it for me whenever my mom dropped me off at his place. You know, Selvin, Annet Haneshaw, Roy Fox, and Al Bowlly, all of the pre-war stuff.”
“Wonderful,” he said, now sitting up, taking me in. I noticed he was older, maybe mid-thirties, captain bars on his uniform.
“Anyways sir, I apologize for disturbing you. I was at the smoke deck and got caught up in the sandstorm, turned me around and I can’t find the tent my squad is staying in.”
He got up from his cot and walked towards one of the makeshift shelves and started looking through some opened care packages. “Cigar guy?” he asked over his shoulder.
“Sometimes,” I answered then added that I’m not an expert so I wouldn’t know the difference between a good cigar and something you could pick up at the grocery store. Back then I wanted to portray myself as an aesthete with refined taste but my financial means were limited so my experience tended towards working-class taste. I was more Pall Mall than Cohiba.
“My brother sent me a couple, I was saving them to celebrate going home, but I can’t pass up the opportunity to smoke with a fellow music lover.”
Outside the sandstorm continued and I could barely hear the music over the sound of sand and wind battering the tent. Before I could answer, as if reading my mind, he handed me a cigar and motioned towards a metal folding chair off to the side.
“Storms gonna take a bit to calm down. We can smoke in here, listen to some music, enjoy this small corner of the war.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said. “You just smoke in here?”
“Nobody bothers me, and if they do, who cares. What are they gonna do, fire me?” he said and lit his cigar, the sweet smoke filling the tent.
I lit my own and savored the rich smoke hoping that I wouldn’t cough and give away my amateurism. He started scrolling through some sort of MP3 player he had hooked up to the speaker. I asked him if he had a lot of jazz band stuff on there.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Most of what I have isn’t available in digital. Back home I teach music, well music history, and I’ve been restoring and converting old vinyl to digital. I don’t think it sounds as good, something is lost in the process, but it’s not like I can bring a record player out here.”
“So you do this for a living?”
“Not really, It’s more of a personal project. Did you know that Ben Selvin recorded over fifteen thousand songs?”
“No shit. There has to be some best-of CD out there,” I said, feeling stupid immediately after.
“Of course, but that’s not what I’m interested in. I like the rare, the unique, stuff that captures the moment and makes me live the past.” Heturned up the music, closed his eyes, and laid down on his cot.
We spent the next few hours enchanted by music from an era beyond our time, at once familiar and exotic. The sound of trumpets, piano, and violins echoed throughout the tent. Closing my eyes and inhaling the earthy elegance, I imagined myself in a ballroom at the height of the Jazz Age. Vera Lynn sang “Roses in December.” Cocktails, dancing, elegantly dressed couples. Rudy Vallee and his orchestra. Lana Horne got us through “Stormy Weather.” Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra, Lindy dancers entertaining GIs during the war. Harry Roy’s Orchestra with the appropriate “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” from 1933. I lost track of time, forgot about my squad, about going back home, and just listened.
Except for a comment here and there giving me a quick introduction to a track, he didn’t say much but for one time and most of it stuck with me. “You know, we are listening to magic,” he said. “You have to think about it this way before the age of radio music existed at only one point in time. The musician and the audience. You went to the orchestra and that performance was unique, all you had left of it was the memory.”
“Not to mention that watching musical performances, anything with serious musicians was reserved for the wealthy,” I added.
“Of course, you had the vaudeville, minstrel acts, local bands, and musicians, but you’re right, your chance of being able to enjoy something like the entirety of Wagner was slim. But, you know let’s get back to jazz. Radio came along. Roaring 20’s was the Jazz age, right? Swing, prohibition, clubs and all that, but you had to have some money to afford the clubs in the big city. Not everyone was Zelda and F. Scott, then boom, big radio programs kick off around the ‘30s, and the music culture spread like wildfire, everyone could hear these guys like Al Bowley and Selvin.”
“Vinyl,” I added, “had to change everything right? I mean being able to listen to a piece of music over and over, revolutionary stuff that we take for granted.
“Exactly, think about it, magic, spiritual stuff. Here we are in the middle of a stupid corporate war in the twenty-first century listening to Vera singing almost a century ago. Of course, the copy is diminished, scratched, muddied by artifacts of the medium, but think about it man, we are listening to a ghost.”
“Ghost?” I asked.
“A specter of memory,” he said and sat up. “What is a ghost if not a spiritual impression from the astral? What is a memory? An observed event imprinted into your mind chemically. Think about it, right now we are listening to an audio impression, everyone involved in this recording is long dead, the moment it happened is long past, yet here we are feeling some of the energy of these musicians.”
I nodded along with his thoughts. He was right of course. That was the beauty of music. The beauty of all art, good art, successful art forced you to feel, to think, across time. But the twentieth century, the electric age to the digital changed everything. Now we have a medium for memory, everything we create can be recorded and stored for the foreseeable future. One day in the future when we will be able to have a computer recall anything and everything for us, will we feel oppressed by the weight of our digital memory?
“I’m going to let you listen to something special,” he said, eyes lighting up. He fiddled with the player a bit and put on a track that began very distorted, all scratch and static. After a few moments, a woman’s voice became audible, and even through the distortion I could make out the melancholic beauty of the song she was singing. It was definitely from the early twentieth century, the music dated it around the mid-twenties, but there was an animistic quality that left me perplexed.
“Who is this, I’ve never heard anything like this before.”
“Victoria Day. I found this damaged record in a box at a pawn shop. It was a master, the studio that recorded it went under, never released it. I spent months extracting the audio off of the disk, I couldn’t get everything and had to do some creative digital restoration.”
“Who was she?” I asked.
“A nobody who went by Vicki Day. I tried tracking her down, club listings, record label records, municipal records. I found nothing.”
“What about the studio label?”
“Small one, Arhdiy, couldn’t find anything on them either. You and I are the only men in a century to hear Victoria’s voice. We are listening to the music of ghosts,” he said, turning up the volume. “Listen to her man, she’s singing to you through time and space.”
I nodded and listened, allowing myself to sink into the music. Time stretched, became elastic, I can’t remember how long I listened to the song—the track couldn’t have been longer than a few minutes but in my memory, it lasted a whole age. As I said, there was a savage quality to the rhythm, dreamlike, inhuman. A strange quality, entomolic, like the memory of an extraterrestrial intelligence attempting human music, the dream of insects. The unsettling effect was most likely the result of Lawrence’s restoration and digital manipulation. He looped some backtracks, added some reverb and echo to bring out the feel, creating a ghostly audio emanation. After all, this is what he was obsessed with, the mysticism of sound through time. If this was his intention, he was successful because I faded into a hypnagogic state listening to the distorted pops and clicks of needle scratch and aural disintegration. Somewhere beneath the surface of the music, I heard the writhing, frantic buzz of insects. A hidden subaural rub of segmented wings. I didn’t surface until the track ended and the sound of a speaker announcing the all-clear from the sandstorm brought me back into the present.
After Victoria’s song, we went back to the familiar stuff from before, but the excitement waned. I smoked a few of my cigarettes, made small talk, then excused myself. I thanked him for the cigar and conversation and I accepted his offer to continue the following afternoon. Outside night had descended on the camp and the subdued wind blew hot and stale. I wandered in a daze for some time, my senses overwhelmed by the experience, then finally crawled into my rack and passed out.
I never made it back to Captain Lawrence’s tent. The next day during our morning brief our Staff Sergeant told us to pack our stuff, we got spots on a bird leaving in three hours. I ran my squad through weapons checks, equipment inventory, and readiness, and in no time I found myself on a plane headed home, the previous night fading from memory.
A few days later I was back in the States. Our buses from Vandenberg were escorted by patriotic bikers into the arms of a waiting family. My mother didn’t show up; the drive would have been too stressful for her. Freeways gave her anxiety, an excuse she used often. Either way, I was happy to be home. I spent the first few nights catching up with friends and getting piss drunk, making up for months of sobriety.
The following months were forgettable, endless lectures about stress and decompression. Slide after slide on suicide prevention, alcoholism, and spousal abuse. My time as a front-line grunt was behind me, so I did a brief stint as an instructor and realized that being a career Marine wasn’t something I wanted to do. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life training young guys or end up behind a desk shuffling personnel files nobody gave a damn about. When my time came up I opted to get out, move on.
At first, I did the standard veteran routine, grew a beard, wore flannel, subdued American flag, tacticool t-shirts with skulls and crossed rifles. I spent my money on a truck and grew a beer gut. Back then I still spent time with guys in the Corps. We drank at the old bars, traded endless stories about our deployments, and went on and on about how our time in was so much more hardcore than what the current soft generation is experiencing. But time passed. One by one the old squad transferred away, got out, got married. Some had kids. Some couldn’t handle the world outside and killed themselves. Sadly after all these years I barely remember their faces.
I drank hard. Things got dark for a bit. Eventually, I found my way out, sobered up, put the G.I. Bill to use, and started college. Found myself a decent job. Dated a bit, met one who I thought was right, and settled. Bought a house. She said no kids, I didn’t argue. A decade or so passed. I put on weight. My job was dull but I spent long hours at the office, staring at my computer screen. Doing nothing was better than going home to an empty house. My wife and I barely talked. I slept on the couch. I had forgotten Captain Lawrence and the song he played for me.
The memory of that day in the desert came back at a low point. James, a recently divorced coworker, invited me out for beers. Usually I passed on spending time with people from work but with my marriage disintegrating after years of codependency I found myself in the grips of loneliness. Somewhere along the line I stopped spending time with my friends, became an accessory to my wife, one that she no longer wanted around. I was feeling desperate and could not bear to spend another night on the couch so I agreed to go out.
That mid-October night we met at a downtown pub close to the office so I left my car at work and walked several blocks through the decaying neighborhood. I figured that if I drank too much I would just take a cab home. The place was one of those faux Irish joints covered in Guinness decor but they served good food and attracted a decent crowd of middle-aged women looking for a second or third husband.
James was sitting at the bar dressed in a flannel shirt and ripped-up jeans that didn’t suit his size or age. He was already on his second pint and raised his glass when he noticed me. A band was setting up for their first set and half the booths were filled with groups of people having dinner or drinking. “Thought you were standing me up, I sent you a text,” he said.
“Sorry man, I walked here, didn’t check my phone.”
“No worries.” He signaled the bartender for two more beers. “I’m glad you came. This spot is great. Food’s good, excellent fish and chips, and Jim pours good drinks, decent broads to look at.”
The bartender who I assumed was Jim brought us two pints. I took a drink and felt a bit self-conscious. I couldn’t remember the last time I was in a bar but at the same time, it was good to get out, to not go home to another fight or an empty house. The beer was good: cold, and crisp. I decided right there that I would enjoy myself, forget everything that was going wrong in my life.
“How’s the wife?” James asked.
“I think she’s going to leave me,” I said. This was the first time I said this out loud. Vocalizing the thought brought it into focus, made it real. I could see that my answer took James by surprise. I didn’t discuss my personal life at work, just put on a happy face and mostly kept to myself.
“Oh man, I’m sorry. I’m sure you guys will work it out.”
‘No, I don’t think so. It’s been bad for a long time now. Looking back I’m surprised that it lasted this long. We grew apart.”
He sighed and turned his stool towards me. “I know how it is man, you know, I just got out of a bad one, so if you ever need to talk to someone, I’m here man. Women suck, well shit, life sucks man, but there’s always good beer with good friends.”
“I appreciate it, I really do.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said and raised his pint. Behind us, the band started on a folk song, fiddles and mandolins with a hipster edge. “Let us lose our sorrows in cups tonight.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
We drank a lot. Talked about life, where we went wrong, how we ended up in decent-paying jobs that were meaningless and left us miserable. We talked about our time in the military. James did a short stint in the Air Force, never left Oklahoma. The first band finished its set and another one came on. They played a great version of “Dirty Old Town” and followed it up with “Summer in Siam.” James told me about his divorce. How his wife cheated on him with half her office then took him for almost everything. Got up and danced with a gaggle of moms out on a girl’s night, and joined in on the pint drinking contest the band held.
Sometime towards the end of the night, we ended up sharing a booth with two women. Attractive, mid-thirties, professional types. I can’t remember their names but James was having a good time and for all his faults the man was a good conversationalist. By that time I’ve already had more beer than usual and was starting to feel tired. I almost didn’t notice the girl who replaced the previous band on stage.
She was tall and thin with wispy brown hair hanging limply across her face. I wouldn’t say unattractive, just sickly, or better yet, tired. She played her guitar sitting on a stool and next to her she had a synthesizer drum machine on a stand, wires leading to pedals, and other effects I couldn’t make out. Her voice was husky, mournful. Accompanied by her guitar playing and an ethereal beat from the synth, her music had a dreamlike quality. I sipped my beer and listened attentively. The switch from rowdy folk-punk to synthetic dreampop didn’t bother me and looking across the table it didn’t seem to bother James who was deep in flirtatious conversation.
After a few songs that I barely registered, she started her next piece by turning unseen knobs on her equipment. The whine of feedback captured my attention. I put my beer down and turned towards the stage. The feedback faded, replaced by a crackling static, alien yet familiar. A bass beat started, droning repetition, unintelligible vocal samples faded in and out. Overall this she looked at me with sunken eyes and started to sing. I couldn’t move. The song was haunting. Alien and seductive, the hot bath you slit your wrists in. The buzz of flies feasting on a corpse. The fury of ants devouring the organic flesh of the universe. For the second time in my life, I heard the festering vibration of alien spaces. She was singing the song that Captain Lawrence played for me a decade before.
I can’t say how long I was in a torpor but I was brought back into the present by cold beer. I must have knocked over my pint. The stage was empty. James and the two women were gone. I was exhausted. My body ached and the pub felt twenty degrees colder. I felt embarrassed when I realized that I dozed off, nearly passing out in a bar like some asshole.
I stood up and started making my way out but stumbled and had to prop myself on the table to keep from falling. My legs felt unsteady. What a fool I was, I go months with nothing but the occasional glass of wine, and the one time I go out with a friend I drink too much and make an ass of myself. I needed to get some fresh air and find James.
Outside, there was a small enclosed area for outside drinking which doubled as a smoking area. The crowd was thinning out but I managed to bum a cigarette of some guy and made my way towards an empty spot. I gave up smoking because my wife hated it so the nicotine hit hard. I had to lean against the wall or else I would have fallen over. A hot hit of menthol, lightheartedness, followed by that rush of clarity. On the sidewalk, people in various states of intoxication were waiting their turn to get into cabs. Saying goodbyes to each other. Making promises to meet again. Couples on dates were walking arm in arm. Across the street on the sidewalk a homeless man lay motionless in a dirty sleeping bag. He was propped against the side of a building, eyes open, surrounded by cardboard, rags, and empty liquor bottles, and for a moment we saw each other.
Then I remembered.
The girl sang Victoria Day’s song, the same song Lawrence played for me in the desert. I had to find her and ask her where she learned it. There had to be a meaning, some sort of significance. This wasn’t a coincidence, this was cosmic synchronicity, a ghost reaching out to me across time and space to give me a message. I needed to understand. Who was she, where did she come from? Did she know Captain Lawrance?
A profane shout interrupted my thought. James, piss drunk, was squaring off with the bouncer, shaved-headed beast who had a foot and fifty pounds on him. I put out my cigarette and made my way towards them.
“This motherfucker won’t let me in,” James slurred when I walked up.
“Listen, the bartender cut you off, you’re done,” the bouncer said, “turn the fuck around and get into a cab.”
James protested that he was fine but he could barely stand, his legs wide apart, a triangle for stability. One of his pockets was hanging out, and he only had one arm through his jacket.
“Hey man, let’s go,” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder. “It’s not worth it, we can grab a drink at your place.”
He straightened up and snorted. Luckily for me, he didn’t put up a fight and followed me towards the nearest cab. The bouncer moved on to the next drunk.
“What happened to those two chicks?”
“Fucking married, goddamn whores,” he spat, “out for a girl’s night. There should be a fucking law.”
“Law,” I asked, getting into the cab.
“Yeah, a law. Married chicks should wear a badge or something. It’s not fair that these broads go to bars, get drinks, and suddenly remember their husbands at last call leaving dumbfucks like us with blue balls and a bar tab.”
That night I dreamt of insects. Carnivorous beetles devouring faceless corpses.
I don’t remember how I made it to work but when I got there I could not focus at all. The only thing on my mind was the song. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I knew it was the same song that Captain Lawrence played for me so many years before. It had to be but how, if he was telling the truth that day what I heard was the only recording. Not only that but there was something about the song. A quality that should have been impossible to replicate, yet whoever that girl was managed to do it on the stage that night.
I needed to hear it again. Needed to get a copy of the recording.
The day dragged on and I spent it ignoring my projects, instead I scrolled through music and video sites looking for the song. In between poorly written emails I went through hours of uploaded vintage tracks. Most of it was mainstream studio compilations remastered and re-released on CD during the late ‘90s. I found some interesting stuff I haven’t heard before but not the song I was looking for.
After work, I went home. My wife wasn’t there, she sent me a text saying that I shouldn’t expect her for dinner, she would be at a friend’s house. I considered microwaving myself a meal but I couldn’t get the song out of my head, so I grabbed my coat called a cab to take me back to the Irish pub. I figured that the best way to find the song would be to find the singer from last night. She could clear everything up for me and point me to the source.
At the pub, I took a seat at the bar and ordered a pint and an order of fries. The place was quiet, not a lot of people. After finishing off my first beer the bartender brought another one and I leaned in.
“Any music tonight?” I asked.
“Not tonight, gonna put on the match later. Should get busy.”
“Oh,” I said. A part of me was hoping that tonight would be a repeat of the previous night and the girl would play again. “I was here last night, really liked the bands.”
“Yeah, those lads are pretty good. They play here every few weeks, draw a nice crowd.”
“How about the girl?”
He strained a bit, working to remember who I was talking about. “Oh yeah, she’s new, never played here before. Can’t say I was paying too much attention”
“She got a band name or anything?” I asked. “I thought her stuff was good but I didn’t get a chance to grab a CD or flyer. I was a bit far into my drinking by the time she came on.”
“No, I don’t think so,” he said, looking around behind the bar. “But you know what, someone said that she does a lot of open mic at the coffee shop around the corner.”
A young couple at the other side of the bar got his attention and he left me to finish my beer which I did in a few gulps. I was feeling anxious. Irritated. I wasn’t sure what the hell I was doing. Drinking by myself, obsessing about a song that I might be misremembering. I needed to go home. I left enough money to cover the tab and tip and walked out.
Outside the cloistered pub, the crisp air hit me and my senses sharpened. The doubt and fog cleared. I waved away an eager cab and decided to go for a walk. It was early evening on a weekday so the streets were packed with commuters heading home from the office. Couples going out to dinner. Parents bringing kids home from whatever the hell kids did after school.
I felt good. Alive with purpose.
I walked half a block and ducked into a liquor store where I bought a pack of cigarettes and a lighter and resumed my stroll with a lit cigarette. For a second I wondered if smoking in public was still allowed. I could see my wife’s face flush with disgust. “Only the poor low-class rubes smoke,” she would say. Fuck her, and the hell with everyone else I thought to myself lighting another.
I kept walking.
The downtown district was the recent beneficiary of urban revitalization, or what fat college interns writing for the local weekly derided as gentrification. When I was a kid nobody came downtown. The buildings were covered in graffiti and drive-by shootings between rival dealers were a daily occurrence. But a few years ago things started changing, cops cracked down, and a younger crowd bought up the cheap property. Now downtown was all gourmet ice cream shops and hipster taco cantinas where assholes with twirly mustaches took their pink-haired girlfriends on dates.
I preferred it this way.
On the corner of the block, I spotted a well-lit coffee shop. A few people were sitting outside around tables, reading, smoking, having conversations. Inside through the pane glass windows, I could see tables taken by students working on laptops or couples chatting. This had to be the place the bartender was talking about so I went in.
The girl behind the counter had no idea who I was talking about. I described the singer from last night but the best she could do was point me to a wall in the back covered by fliers before moving on to the next customer. I went to the wall, but nothing stood out, local stuff being advertised, guitar lessons, a band looking for a singer, so I took my coffee to an empty table outside.
The night went on and I smoked cigarette after cigarette washed down with numerous coffee refills. I felt ridiculous, spending my time chasing down a singer because she sang a song that might have been the same one I heard on a strange night in Afghanistan over a decade ago. What was I doing, was I in the grip of a psychotic breakdown, was I falling apart? My life was a mess. My wife was sleeping with someone else and planning on leaving me. I hated my job. I had no friends. No wonder I was acting insane.
Right about then I decided to give up, go home. I put out my cigarette and was about to leave when I noticed a rusty VW Beetle pull up across the street and my singer got out of the passenger side. She was wearing a long raincoat but I recognized her right away and watched her say goodbye to the driver and pull out a guitar case. I sat back down and lit another cigarette then pretended to read one of the magazines on my table while keeping an eye on her.
My hopes of getting to talk to her faded when instead of crossing the street and coming into the coffee shop, she started down the street towards a residential area. I made a split-second decision, got up, and crossed after her. The street was still busy and I had to wait to cross. By the time I got to the other side she was already down the side street so I sped up trying to see which way she was going.
The street she took was lined with two-story duplex apartment buildings. It was a neighborhood popular with college kids and young couples within walking distance to downtown so a guy like me walking around at night was not out of the ordinary. As soon as I turned the corner I spotted her walking about one block ahead of me. I followed, keeping my distance and pretending to look at my phone every few steps just in case she looked back and got a glimpse of me.
I had no idea what I was doing. Did I want to catch up and talk to her? Ask her where she heard the song? Did she hear it somewhere, or did she write it? That couldn’t be possible. I knew that the song she sang the other night was the same one I heard over a decade ago.
I followed her for two blocks when she suddenly stopped in front of an old apartment building with a short-stepped entrance flush with the sidewalk. She went up the steps and unlocked and went through the gate that led into the building. I picked up the pace and came to the building, looking at my phone pretending to compare the address just in case someone saw me. The subterfuge gave me a thrill, I felt like a private investigator shadowing a suspect.
Her building was old, one of the many apartments built after the war to house returning servicemen. It was two stories with windows facing the street. I figured it had to have four-to-six one-bedroom units arranged around a central hallway. When I got out of the Corps I lived in a similar place before I met my wife. The main entrance was through the heavy door that had an updated security lock. At my old place, you had to make sure you pulled the door shut behind you, or else it would not close all the way. I noticed that this building had the same problem.
The entrance was open.
Everything gets confusing.
When I was a kid, I found a bar of chocolate in my mom’s bedroom. It was one of those nice chocolate bars that you buy as gifts for coworkers you don’t know. I was excited. When I opened the wrapper I was horrified. The chocolate was white and chalky, dead maggots fell onto the floor.
I don’t remember what I did with it.
Looking back this is where I start getting mixed up. Where everything starts to go wrong.
I was in the hallway of the apartment building. Maybe I smoked a few cigarettes. Paced back and forth in front of the building debating what my next step should be. I must have asked myself what I was doing. How crazy was I? I just followed a woman back to her home because I was obsessed with a song she sang.
The song, was it even real? I doubted myself. For a moment I thought that maybe the entire thing was a psychotic hallucination. That I never met a Captain Lawrence who played a recording of a singer named Victoria Day, singing a strange song that I had forgotten until a decade later a young girl performing in a bar happened to sing the same song.
But it was real. I heard it right then and there. The alien music came from the end of the hallway.
I made my way towards her door listening to make sure. It was unmistakable. I could hear the music coming from behind the door. It was a recording, scratchy and distorted. Not of her modern version, but the original, the same one that I heard during the sandstorm in Afghanistan. The version that Captain Lawrence said was one of a kind.
I knocked on the door and waited. Nothing. Knocked again then turned the knob. It was unlocked. I pushed the door open and walked in. The apartment was a mess and smelled like stale cigarettes and incense. Piles of clothes covered a cheap couch. Stacks of books were randomly scattered, and the small kitchen was unusable due to dirty dishes and opened cereal boxes. The lights were dim and I couldn’t see anyone. The music I heard was coming from the other side of the apartment, what I guessed was the bathroom, the door cracked open and the light on.
I tried to announce myself over the music. Nothing.
This was the threshold moment, the exact point where I crossed the line. Everything in me, every instinct, every intuition told me to turn around and forget the whole thing. But I couldn’t. I was under the spell. The ghostly music was oozing out of the bathroom. Victoria Day’s voice, ethereal and alien, distorted by the audible clicks and hisses, artifacts of antiquated recording. I had to know, so I went across the room and into the bathroom.
The girl, later I learned from the news that her name was Amanda McDaniels, was submerged in the bathtub. Her wrists were slit vertically, her body a white specter from the blood loss. Her head was thrown back, hair sticking to the cheap wall tiles, eyes rolled so I could only see the whites. She must have died minutes before I walked in.
Blood and water poured out of the bathtub flooding the bathroom and soaking my feet. I stumbled back trying to avoid the water and almost fell. The song kept on playing, the words inaudible, just droning static, flies devouring a corpse.
I had to get out of there, so I ran. I think I left the apartment door wide open, a fact that haunted me in the weeks to come. Out on the street, I vomited coffee and bile into the gutter and made my way back to the main street where I took a cab back home.
I never called the police.
Everything was a mess.
After the cab dropped me off, I went straight to the closet where I kept a bottle of bourbon someone gave me as a gift a few years ago. It was too nice to get rid of so I put it away thinking that I would bring it out for guests. I cracked the bottle open and threw back a good third of it right there then tore through my wife’s bathroom until I found the benzos she stashed away for stressful days. Nerves somewhat calm, I took the bottle with me to the couch and I sat in the dark drinking myself to oblivion.
My mind slipped into delirium, forcing me to walk in on the girl as she died in her bathtub. The music droning in the background from unseen speakers. I came in and out of consciousness, at one point I vomited all over the couch. What must have been hours felt like days, and when I finally came to during the following afternoon I felt wretched and inhuman.
I found my cellphone, no missed calls, no text messages. The first thing I did after drinking the rest of the expired orange juice in the fridge was to get on my computer and check all the local news. Somebody had to find her, the police had to be at her apartment, taking fingerprints, investigating. I imagined two detectives wondering why the front door was open, ordering the scene investigators to pull the building’s security cameras. Was there a security camera?
Right then I considered calling the police. But what would I say, that I was obsessed with a song she sang so I stalked her home from the coffee shop, broke into her building, walked into her apartment, and found her dead?
No, the whole thing was crazy.
But, how about the song, how about Victoria Day? The song was real. Not only did the girl perform it at the bar but she had an identical copy of the same version Captain Lawrence played for me. I heard it in her apartment. The quality of the recording, the otherworldly voice, I was convinced it had to be identical.
I needed to hear it again.
The next couple of weeks were transformative, even though I can’t seem to remember much of the day-to-day detail.
I stopped going to work. My wife never came home, but I was ok with it, nothing but the song mattered. I needed to get a copy of the recording, I could feel the urge under my skin, crawling like larva. I started having fits where I scratched myself to the point of bleeding. My vision started to blur. There was very little time for eating so I lived off of coffee.
Hours and hours of listening to music, listening for a hint, a connection. I searched every Internet archive, every streaming site, every record company catalog I could get a hold of. I sent numerous emails to music collectors describing the song, hoping that someone else had a clue. Nothing, nobody answered. I drove to every record store and antique shop around me where I spend days going through boxes, buying old vinyl that looked promising. Nothing.
Sometime during that time, I decided to break into the girl’s house. A recording had to be there. I got dressed and made my way downtown to her apartment. I got as close to her building but there were people all around, chatting, walking dogs. I couldn’t get inside without being seen, so I gave up and returned to my search.
I listened hopelessly, slowly falling into unfathomable despair. Would I ever find the song? By that time I was dreaming it, but fragmented, in parts. I needed the whole, I needed the real.
The tunnel.
I was convinced of the truth. Time, space, matter, it is all bunched up, like a rug pushed against an open door. In between the folds you can create connections, and in those spaces there was the truth. I now know this because I heard it in the static, in the hum, but when I was searching this revealed truth was only inspired by intuition. The real truth would be revealed when I found the song.
Thats when I had an idea. Finding the song on the internet or at some flea market wasn’t going to happen. I had to go to the beginning, Captain Lawrence.
Surprisingly it was easy to find him. I searched through several veterans’ websites, imputed the year and location where we both served, and went through lists of men who were deployed. Unfortunately, Captain Benjamin Lawrence, United States Marine Corps Reserve, from Massachusetts, was easy to find because he was KIA the day after our chance meeting. According to the WeServe website, Captain Lawrence’s vehicle hit an Improvised Explosive Device during a mounted patrol in Helmand Province Afghanistan. Captain Lawrence did not survive the blast.
I couldn’t believe it. By chance, I run into this guy and he plays for me a song that imprints itself into my subconscious. Buries itself into the deepest recesses of my brain only to be awakened a decade later by a young woman performing the same song. Now both of them are gone, dying right after delivering the message to me.
After another quick search and I found out that Lawrence was a music teacher at a small New England college. Records showed he had a brother, the one who sent the cigars, but his last address was out west.
The college had an antiquated website that didn’t help, but I sent a few emails inquiring about Lawrence and the music department. He did say that he restored the recording, maybe he had a studio at the college. What if he played the recording for someone in his hometown, or even better, made them a copy.
I had to get to Massachusetts.
Another dream. On the riverbank, a chorus of Cicadas humming their song. Their vibration is a harmonious cycle.
They watched and wondered if I honored the Muses.
The flight was horrible. I couldn’t breathe, the atmosphere was wrong. The air was too thin. I felt feverish and halfway through the trip, I started to shiver. The fat woman who sat in the aisle seat next to me kept on looking over, her porcine face sneering at me in disgust. She wheezed with every breath and her heaving gravity oppressed me. I needed to get up.
“Can I help you, sir,” a middle-aged flight attendant asked me when I made my way to the lavatory, her face apprehensive.
“I don’t fly often,” I said and tried to smile like a human.
She made a move towards me and I flinched. I thought she was going to bite me, but she just reached above and opened a baggage compartment. I smelled her body, her perfume, the starch on her uniform, and it made my skin itch. I wanted to tear my skin, shed strips of decaying flesh.
The lavatory door opened, somebody came out, I went in.
What I saw in the mirror above the dirty plastic sink shocked me. Unshaven, cheeks sunken in, dark bags under my eyes. I couldn’t remember the last time I had a full meal. My skin was pale and sickly. I stuck out my tongue and there was a layer of mucous film. My breath reeked.
A burst of turbulence rocked the plane so I sat down on the toilet. I didn’t want to return to my seat. With my eyes closed, I could feel the plane moving through the air. The music of the engines vibrating coursed through my body, humming the song I craved.
The rest of the flight, I don’t know, I cannot remember much of it. The plane landed and I made my way through the airport. Several people asked me if I was ok if I needed some help. I lied, said I get really bad airsickness but I was forced to travel. Family emergency, you know, Grandma’s lost her mind, drank bleach, and threw herself down two flights of stairs. I had to get here to absorb her corpse into the greater collective before it spoils.
But was I?
I was standing outside the airport in the New England winter realizing that I didn’t pack anything for this trip. I didn’t even bring a backpack. My cellphone was dead and I had a vague recollection that it no longer worked because I stopped paying the bill. In one of my jacket pockets I found a piece of paper with the address of the school where Lawrence was a professor. The rest of the paper was covered in odd scribbles and letters drawn in what was my hand but I had no memory of doing and no idea what the symbols represented.
My nose started to bleed.
“So, you a teacher at the school,” the cab driver asked with a thick Slavic accent. Somehow I must have gotten into a cab. It was warm and smelled of incense. He was an older man with a gray mustache accented by a day-old shave.
“No, I’m trying to find a song.”
“Music, you like music,” he said and reached for the radio.
“No,” I said. “I’m going to the college to find a specific song, I think somebody there might be able to help me.”
I saw him appraising me in the rearview mirror.
“Well, you will find help. Very good school. My daughter went there. Very smart, studied chemistry.”
Outside snow was falling steadily and I cursed myself for not bringing adequate clothes. Maybe I could ask him to drop me off at a store and wait for me. No, I wanted to get to the school.
The school was across town so we talked. Something about his countenance, a jovial presence, made me want to confide in him. Of course I couldn’t tell him the truth. I couldn’t explain the humming, the alien sounds, the time tunnels. All of it was beyond the capability of his monophasic simplistic consciousness. After all, you can overdose a man on truth. The mind is a fragile vessel, too much truth too quickly will shatter it. No, what you have to do is give them crumbs, little morsels.
“Do you know what bothers me?” I asked him. I got no acknowledgment but I continued anyway. “What bothers me is that we are being poisoned by archives. We have too much. Everything is at our fingertips.”
He tapped his horn at the car in front of us that was too slow to move when the light turned green.
“When you were young,” I went on, “music, movies, art, culture, was ephemeral. You went to the movies and that was it, no repeats, no replays. Same with music. You watched, you listened, then moved on to the next cultural point. But now, we have the entirety of our media history stored on the Internet, on disks, on drives, on who knows what.”
This thought maddened me. What a waste, we were forever stuck. I wanted to smash my head through the window.
“Now you can live your entire life in the past, listening to old music, watching the same movie over and over. There is no more culture, just endless repeat,” I said, gripping the back of the seat in front of me.
“Yes, yes, but you said you are looking for a music,” he said, his accent starting to get on my nerves.
“Oh yeah, this one is special because nobody knows it. Well, not a lot of people know it. I don’t even know if it exists. No I do, I heard it, but I can’t find it,” I said. “This one is different, it breaks through you know, changes things.”
He looked at me through the mirror and pulled the cab over. “Here we are,” he said, relief in his voice.
The small college was on a plot of land set back from the road, so after paying the cabbie I started to make my way towards the dark building. Night must have fallen on me unnoticed during the drive over and I found myself walking through darkness and a foot of snow on the ground. What I could see of the building made me uneasy. It was a four-story mishmash of brick and plaster that to my untrained eye looked old, the kind of building children make up ghost stories about, asylums where inmates cannibalized each other. The closer I got to it the uglier the trees surrounding it looked, skeletal and devoid of life. Everything was dark except for several windows where I noticed pale light behind the glass. I pushed through the entrance with a sense of finality. This was it, the end. I could feel it, the music, vibrating from somewhere deep inside the building.
The lobby was empty, nobody behind the greeting desk. I instinctively took a left down a dark hallway, walking slowly. My feet felt like blocks of ice after walking through the snow but I forced myself to go on. Every step was excruciating and I was shivering. To my right I passed numerous classrooms, some had their doors open, others were closed, all empty. On the opposite side, there were windows but I saw nothing but darkness and frost.
I was about to turn around, try another hallway when out of the darkness I noticed a woman standing at the end of the hallway. She was short, old, and reminiscent of an administrator. I started making my way towards her and began asking for help but before I got near she shushed me and pointed to a door.
There was nothing to say so I went through it and down a set of stairs that opened into a small carpeted hall. Unlike the hallway above it, there was a strange sort of purplish light coming from somewhere. I looked around and the circular room was a musical rehearsal place. There was a raised stage with a piano, several guitars hung from the walls, and different instruments stored haphazardly.
It wasn’t the instruments that caught my attention but the numerous photographs framed on the wall. Pictures of students in the past, playing violins, performing, getting awards. Smiling young men and women, some dressed in evening wear fit for the symphony, others in casual attire. I had spent a few minutes walking around the circular chamber taking in the pictures when I finally noticed it.
One of the pictures was of Lawrence. He was standing next to a beautiful young woman handing her an award of some sort. I almost moved on to the next picture because it was hard to see in the faint light but I recognized her. Lawrence was standing next to Amanda, my singer, the suicide I walked in on. It took me a few seconds to grasp the problem. When you are faced with incongruities your mind tends to ignore what is in front of you.
The problem with the picture was that Lawrence and she should not be together. The girl, well the woman was the same one I saw singing the song, she looked in her early twenties. Lawrence looked exactly like he did a decade or so ago when he was supposedly killed in the war. She would have been ten to twelve years old when Lawrence and I met. It didn’t make sense.
I moved on to other pictures and things got worse. Lawrence and the girl were impossibly in many of the pictures, and they always looked the same. Her plain dovish looks and his aquiline nose were unmistakable. It was them, but the obvious decades the pictures were taken made it impossible.
That’s when the hum started. It reminded me of an old tube amp warming up. Suddenly like a needle placed on a spinning record the music started. It was the song, coming from somewhere and nowhere at once, and I realized what was going on.
I was the medium.
It was an unusually cold night and I was glad to have the sleeping bag and rags even though it all reeked of piss and vomit. Across the street, she was playing the song, and my heart filled with joy and exuberance. I understood every note between the notes. The secret vibrations caressed my soul and eased all my suffering.
When she finished I took a swig out of one of the bottles, careful to drink from the one with booze instead of urine, and bundled myself up on the cold concrete. A few minutes passed and I finally saw myself standing on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette. For a mere moment, our eyes met.
There is good stuff in this one. It creates a palpable sense of dread. It is off-putting and yet it wraps up nicely enough at the end.
The first part, where he’s in Afghanistan, is so good too because of the specificity with which it’s written. Writers either need to do research about something, or use their own experiences, to create that level of believability.