This story was written about 35 years ago. I used The Moody Blues Band as my band model, but there is no factual correlation to them. But it was great fun to write.
I Am The Band
By
Dick
Morgan
We wait. The damp sub-floor locker room smells like used
hockey jerseys. Cement walls push back
the sounds of our movement, even our breathing, and compresses them into
layers. Four of us twist and stretch in
silence, warming the fires within. One
of us dances and pirouettes in front of his mirror.
We
are the Mystic Mountain; our music has studded the charts
for more than two decades. We have
played before royalty, and toured nations, in front of an ocean of faces that
recedes beyond the horizon. Our music is
heard on television and movie theaters, in commercials and even in shopping malls,
mutilated beyond recognition. The Chronicle called our performance “The
ultimate musical experience.” Tristan,
who laughs and flits about in front of his mirror like a butterfly, has said he
doesn’t like that phrase. “We do not yet
know the meaning of ultimate,” Tristan says.
Up two flights of stairs, a sell-out
crowd stomps and claps to the rhythm of our warm-up band. They are only passable except for Tanya, who
leads with a rich voice, a pitch-perfect sound full of echoes, waterfalls, and
birds. But the audience does not
care. They have come to see us. They have stood in lines several blocks long
to fill this colossal cement bowl, to watch us sustain the act of being
ourselves. Sometimes I used to feel the
audience was an imposition upon musicians, as though pleasures shared by so
many were thinned out, diminished. But
when I listen to the sounds of computerized music, and the faked
instrumentation of multiple-band synthesizers, I know that we can play in front
of these people with deep pride; we play our own instruments as we have done
since the beginning of our climb. Oh,
there were a couple of years that we didn’t play together, when our instruments
were mixed one track at a time as we passed through the studio on our separate
ways to London, or the Bahamas.
“Uninspired,” Rolling Stone
said; “Such a great band making records the same way a hash-house makes
eggs: over easy.” And, “If Mystic Mountain continues to occupy
their plateau of mediocrity, we suggest they change their name to Mystic Mesa.”
No.
That same dissatisfaction drew the five of us together again. We were not at the top of the mountain
yet. There was more we could do, more to
reach for, to write, to sing. We are the
Mystic Mountain.
Tristan said it best. The only
guys who are perfect are all dead. Well,
we live, and we’ll play one more concert in search of that final peak. I believe there will be a deep joining
tonight, a synchronization of our minds into a single unity such as we have
never reached before. I can feel the
power, the seduction of that moment even now.
We wait with quiet resolve.
I am Clayton St. John; you may have
heard the name or seen the poster. I’m
second from the right, the same as I am on stage. Of course I’m a little heavier now, and my
horse-mane of dark hair a bit thinner.
And I tell myself the grey is not really noticeable yet. But the poster is more than twenty years old. I know my long collared open-front shirts doesn’t
hide the toll of those years. But then,
twenty years ago, I was a back-up singer and a fair flutist. Now I am Clayton St. John, and I’ve played
the Philharmonic, twice. But tonight is
another Philharmonic, for each movement in the shadows holds a face, and a
threshold to a joining spirit. I feel
them waiting. I can already hear the
flutes inside their brains anticipating The
Quest or Lucifer’s Hammer. I hear the waves of disjointed sounds, tiny
bright dreams awash with them, like boats foundering in a thrashing sea. Again I remember Tristan’s words; last night,
dizzy with scotch, he spoke of this:
“Their fantasies won’t survive us,” he said. “We’ll break in and blind them. I want to be… I want to be like a hand on the
throat of the soul!” His grin did not
diminish the apprehension I felt—the desire to hoist sail and tack away from
the harsh spring-steel of his words.
I put on my back support and
Christopher pulls the laces taut for me.
It will hold in my gut and improve my wind, but I feel like a
transvestite in a corset until I put on my shirt. I jump up and down and shake the muscle kinks
out of my limbs, wave my fingers and make faces to work blood into my cheeks
and lips. When I am warm, I let my mind
reach out for the others.
The one on the far right of the
poster is Christopher See. You may have
read we are good friends. In truth, we
are the best of friends, a special congruence of joys and sorrows shared over
wine every week, and sometimes shared without speaking at all. Christopher has put on thirty pounds since
the poster shot, and wears long flowing shirts to hide his paunch. He refuses to wear a cummerbund; he says it
restricts his movement over the keyboards.
He knows what works best for him.
But as my mind reaches out to him, I pass through a thin membrane of
composure and feel again his anguish. I
see the image appear; it is Tanya, come to taunt him again. She is standing close, but not smiling. She is pulling away from him, a comet soaring
in her own night sky. Does it always
have to be like this? I hear his mind’s voice say. And another sensation, a stinging high in the
cheeks. I cannot hear her answers
through him, but it doesn’t matter. She
has said them all to me once as well.
And Christopher was with me then, as I am with him now.
Tanya’s voice rises like a mating
call-to-combat and resonates through the ceiling. The number ends and we hear
the applause like a hard rain.
Christopher does twenty push-ups, ignoring the eyes and lips in his
brain. He calmly tapes his wrists
against the pounding of the keyboards.
He catches my gaze, and I feel the smile that does not appear. In the end, it’s, you know, the music, he
thinks; I nod.
Mark Kreutzer works his shoulders and
arms in the expert circles cross-country skiers use before a race. For a moment, I feel the rarified wind on his
cheeks, the fir branches brushing his sides.
Then a burst of white silence slopes away into soft blue, a breathless
lunge into air above the tiny lodge and cabins… after a quarter century of alternating
between the ski slopes and the drums, Mark has developed an enormous neck and
shoulders, and a hearing problem he compensates for with ear-phones plugged
directly into the main amp. He grins at
me, wild-eyed, the way only those people can who live their lives stuck in one
gear—overdrive.
Peter Martin sits in a lotus on his
cushioned mat. Peter is the hermit of
the Mountain, the lost mystic. It was
Peter who brought us together and who named us, and then who hung back in the
shadows to the far left of the poster like a stage-hand, his bass guitar behind
his back. It is Peter’s gift for the
words which describe the terrain within while observing from without which
lifts our music above the mere simple melodies of the rock-synchers. Peter is the quiet one, the seeker, the
dancer. He has taken up Yoga with both
hands of his soul. He has even traveled
to India under another name to study with his
chosen master. I do not feel as close to
Peter as I do to Christopher, But I tune into his mind as though opening a
favorite book. I sometimes have more
empathic tone than I can control, and Peter has pulled me from the whirlpools
of turbulent emotions many times. I
reach for him now, for calmness, and for a better grasp on that which remains
my own when I have given all I have. I
breathe with him as he bends and stretches his thin body into impossible
angles. Of all of us, Peter has changed
the least. I believe it is because he
has in his own gentle and deliberate way stopped allowing age to affect him.
It is Tristan I worry about the most.
Tristan Bell, the one in the center, the
sharp focus of the poster and the stage.
Tristan is the only one of us who has had a solo poster. He is posing in front of his full length
mirror. He has bleached his hair again
so that it looks as close as possible to that famous image. I watch him puff up, turn this way, then the
other. He seems to prefer the right side
forward, so the belly of his guitar will cover his round middle-aged stomach,
and he can flex his right bicep, the one he has been working on. He snugs his black silk pants tight into the
bulges of his crotch by pulling and tying laces above his butt. He smokes a cigarette and views himself in
the mirror again. He is dreaming of
hanging suspended from his Rogallo wing, soaring like a giant hunting bird
above the jagged cliffs of Big Sur.
I feel a wind blast through his brain, far colder than Mark’s ski
slopes, a wind that freezes the blood in my face and rips open my chest like a
hungry beak.
Tristan sees me in his mirror and
blocks me out of his mind as the others have never done. Now I feel nothing from him but a blankness
full of pin-holes, like the eyes of endless faces, through which that icy wind
blows. The others feel it too; I feel
them feel it. But Tristan just smiles
and says he’s fine. In fact, he’s going
to shine, he says. All I feel from him
is blackness. He explained it once. He said he holds back on the final synch like
pulling tension on a bowstring, so that when he finally does join our minds,
he’ll project all of us far out into the audience, an overwhelming magnetic
presence. I don’t know about that; all I
know is what I feel.
Again there is the hard rain, and a
thunder of stomping feet. The audience
is with Tanya all the way to the end.
Then there is quiet, and we know the stage is bare and the crew is
moving the sets around, checking the lights, turning on our main amps, sound
mixing, and eliminating the last of the feedback. Vern comes down the stairs and asks if we are
ready for the black-out. He looks straight
at me, and I know he is remembering my visit to his office a month ago…
I see myself standing by the picture
window through Vern’s darting eyes, amused by the bird’s nest my hair resembles
from the rear. I remember my hand on the
window, the cold, thirtieth-story air on my palm. Woven into the fibers of that sensation were
the salt air from the Golden Gate, the traffic noise, joss and burnt rice from Chinatown, sun-ripe grasses from the Sacramento hills. Below, an accident in the
street sent a sensation I felt as pain under my fingernails. I removed my hand from the window.
Vern sat gingerly into his thick
cushioned chair like a man mounting a bronc in a rodeo chute, biting his cigar
so as not to lose it on the first jolt.
“I’m against it, Clayton,” he said with a final rush of blue smoke.
“This may be our last gig, Vern. I’ve talked with the others. We’re all of one mind on this.”
“You want to do a full mind
synch. Jesus.”
“We’ve been playing hard again. Our regular hours. You remember.
It used to drive you crazy watching us play all night. Technically we’re ready, as good as we’ve
ever been.”
“Listen, listen, listen,” Vern said,
as he almost always did when he was going to give his agent-to-renegade-client speech. I’d heard it a hundred times. Vern took the cigar all the way out of his
mouth. “We’ve come a long way together,
Clayton. You guys writing and singing,
my booking and promos. We made it, you
and I. We got the townhouses and the
beach houses and ski chalets, not to mention that sailboat of yours. We’re there, baby.” Vern leaned toward me as though he intended
to tweak my cheek-flesh. I turned from
him toward the window again.
“We are never there,” I said.
“That’s Peter talking, or Tristan,”
Vern said. You’re older, more mellow. You know what I’m talking about. Why the risk-taking?”
“We’ve got the sound, Vern. It’s like a single vibe again. A meditation…”
“I know, Clay. I was worried at first. But I see that glow in your face. I’m not worried about the music at all. You know what the hell I’m getting at. I’m talking about the mind-synch. It’s more dangerous than you think.”
“So’s mountain climbing. But without the climb, you don’t ever get the
view from the peak. Tristan says it’s
the ultimate experience.”
“Yeah. Like falling off a cliff.”
I see into his eyes; I see paper,
stacks of paper. Some of it is grey and
green. Then there is steel and glass and
velour. That is all. “Others are trying it,” I said. “The Stones, Moody Blues, The Who, Nautilus…”
“Yeah, Nautilus,” Vern
interrupted. “A keyboard tekkie, a
programmer, and a speed freak. It’s all
electronics, Clay. It’s not flute, it’s
not guitar, not even real drums. It’s
just typing into a black box. No
variables, no need for talent.” He
stopped shaking his head to draw on his cigar.
“Nautilus puts out good sound and
damn good vibes. You know they synched
last week in Seattle.”
“Yeah, I know all about Nautilus in Seattle.
I was there. In the first place,
there were riots inside the Dome all night long. In the second place, those guys are young and
brainless. And in the third place, the
drug they took is completely unpredictable.
Not to mention illegal.”
“We’re going to play the Palace next
month, and we’re going to try a synch.”
“Listen, I was front row in Seattle,
Clay. I didn’t synch, but I felt the
energy. I saw the shudders sweep over
people’s heads like a damn wave. I saw
the sweat, and the tears. And those boys
are only in their twenties. They try it
a couple of times a year and still it gets out of hand, like in Seattle.
One mind on a bad trip can bum out the whole vibe. Risky enough for three young guys with some
experience at it. But five guys without
experience to try a high-tech synch in front of fifteen thousand people? They say even a three or four way synch wipes
out any ability to control it. You know
how many weirdos, not to mention weak hearts, the Palace can hold?
“Yeah. About fifteen thousand, give or take a few
stray normal people who get in by mistake.”
“You know in Seattle, a man actually died?”
“An old guy, I read.”
“Fifty-nine is how old. How old are you, Clay?”
“Not fifty.”
“Not for a few months. Or is it a few weeks? Look at yourself. Sure you’ve got your long layered hair, but
look how far it’s receded. And your
shoulders slump, and your gut sticks out, and the top button on your pants is
always undone. You eat too much for
lunch, Clay? Or are you just getting old
along with the rest of us real people?
And now you’re worried about it.
You want a last fling. You want
to convince yourself the woman of your dreams isn’t opting for younger meat, am
I right? You want to climb into her body
and into her brain, quicken the breathing…”
“Yeah, yeah, sure. But maybe there’s more. Maybe it’s because we’re getting older and we
want to resist the slide, but maybe it’s because it’s a challenge, to get into
as many heads as we can and carry them to that peak, the ultimate climax. Anyway, we’re musicians, not tekkies. Nobody has ever done a full mind synch with
actual instruments, and Mystic Mountain is the band most likely to pull it
off. I don’t know, Vern. It’s like a magnet, the audience, the lights,
the applause. It’s like spirit food,
baby, and being away from it, well, it’s like a hunger that gets worse and worse
like you wouldn’t understand. It’s a
coming together, take that any way you want.
A celebration of a single moment.
Tristan says it’s kind of a moth-in-the-candle thing. I can’t explain it.”
“Tristan again. You know, sometimes he scares me, Clayton. He’s got no sense at all of holding
back. He’s over the edge all the time,
if you know what I mean. You know how
bad he was hurt the last time you played live.”
It was more true than he knew;
Tristan had gone over that edge last time.
It was during our longest hit song, The
Portal, during the final chorus, when his voice and mine had joined into
one sound. I felt it happening, but I
could not resist it. Our voices poured
into the words as though from a single mind, singing, Our bodies are the moon and sea, they rise and meet, flowing and
free,,, There was a partial synch;
Tristan and I, and I could feel the first few rows of the audience coming in
with us. I could see them pantomiming
Tristan on the guitar. When Tristan
played a long slow run and his fingers caressed the frets like a lover’s thigh,
I could see invisible guitars in the hands of spaced-out synchers half a dozen
rows back, their fingers jerking into the exact same run. And there were flutists, too, oh yes. There were those arms flailing to the side,
elbows bouncing off their neighbor’s faces, swaying up and back exactly as I
did… I reach to you and give you my all,
the crash of the waves, the shoreline’s fall,” we sang, and there was a
moment when Tristan reached for the high notes of As we pass through the portal, I felt the tightening in my vocal
chords even though I was playing the flute.
It was as though I had become a tube through which his voice flowed like
hot syrup; I felt it spread down through my body and I let it happen. I felt it again as the chorus repeated, As we
pass through the portal. I couldn’t
resist it. I’m a natural, but Tristan, I
knew at once that he had taken the drug.
I could feel the tension in his spine, see the seascape of faces in his
head, felt his high notes flow down my chest and out of my belly, down into my
cock, and on the peak note I started to pass out, but Peter broke the bass
rhythm by slowing the tremolo. I knew he
did it on purpose because he saw the synch happening and tried to stop it. I came out of it immediately, but Tristan
climaxed and went down; so did three people in the first row. The thunder of the standing ovation covered
the confusion as the coliseum guards sprinted down the aisles with their oxygen
kits.
“Tristan’s okay,” I said. “He’s with us now. He won’t synch unless it’s unanimous.”
“And it is, then?”
“Yes.
With or without you.”
Vern held his head, then brushed his
sparse hair flat with the palm of his hand.
“Okay, you have my official disapproval, for what it’s worth. But I’ll want to be there.” He paused, motionless for a second; I saw
those grey-green piles of paper again behind his eyes. And there was a woman. Young-- a groupie. So, Vern still had ambitions in some ways.
“I’m late for practice.”
“Take care.”
I heard him say those words with all
the emotion a gambler musters when he speaks to his dice. I saw him, saw his greasy strands of hair
that he combed from one side to the other to try and hide the bald spot. It didn’t, but Vern knew this and did it
anyway, a sort of futile rebellion. He
pretended to be young, but at least he didn’t pretend to feel the music in his
soul. I’d never seen Vern picking at an
invisible guitar, or worse yet, a flute.
That’s why I liked him.
“Yeah, take care,” I said, and let
the door close on its own…
This passes as a kind of secret
between Vern and me as our eyes lock for an instant into deep probe. I hold nothing back from him but give nothing
in return. He guesses correctly that I
have no secrets from the others; he breaks and stares around the room.
“Okay, Blackout,” Vern says, and
claps his hands twice for punctuation.
Time to go onstage. As we leave
the locker room and climb the stairs, even in the blackness, a reverberation of
thunder mixed with screaming sweeps backward through the bodies. Yes, the crowd seems very receptive. I hope our minds will synch seamlessly
tonight. I don’t know what will happen,
but I already begin to give myself to it.
I have no concerns. Since I don’t
take the drug, I can control my entry into the collective mind. I can even hold some thoughts of my own
instead of losing them all. I don’t know
why more people don’t cultivate their empathic tone—so much safer, so much
easier on the body. But it’s none of my
business what others do, nor is this the time to dwell on it; we have reached
the top of the stairs.
In the darkness I can see movement,
and hundreds of tiny flames as cigarette lighters are held overhead. The audience can see our silhouettes in the
darkness, and their applause becomes the sound of an avalanche. I find my way to the right-hand mike just as
the lights flick to a brilliant blue, with white circles on Peter, Tristan, and
me.
We begin with the biggest hit from
our first album, Dreamseed, a song
cut before many of the younger faces in the audience were born. But there is a roar of recognition by the
third note. Christopher is hot tonight;
he throws in a few riffles that aren’t on the original cut, and sticks out his
tongue at me. I feel his vibrations like
an old friend tousling my hair, and he smiles.
I take up the flute and rush right into the focus of the song, and when
the refrain comes, I mimic Christopher’s keyboard improvisations as best I can,
which I can say is pretty damn good. The
flute is mine, all mine. It’s what I do best
in life. And when I finish, there is
applause and stamping feet in the bleachers; yes, I feel very good too,
Christopher.
When our intro is over, Christopher
comes out of his keyboard cubicle (he has to move one of his four keyboards to
exit) and slaps me five, but very lightly, like a cat’s paw. We know the music that is in our souls has to
pass through our hands, and it will be a long, hand-sore night.
We play our entire second album while
the lights shift slowly from the ultra-blue spectrum to the rich solid red glow
we are bathed with as we play the title song at the end, Blood from the Soul. I pace
myself so that I don’t tire. There is no
flute in Blood, so I take up a
tambourine; at least I can look like I am contributing an essential part of the
sound.
The lights shift to greens except for
me. We’re going to do Lucifer’s Hammer now, and I am the lead
vocal. I take the mike off its stand,
and Christopher leads me into it. I
begin slowly, softly, like a motor warming up, and then I feel the vibrations
of Christopher’s notes pushing me onward like a wave beneath a surf rider. But suddenly I realize the notes are not
coming from Christopher, that he actually has his arms folded as if to say,
look—no hands. And I know that it is
Tristan, cool distant Tristan is warming up, and he mimics Christopher’s
keyboard run so perfectly, so gently, that it gives me a sensation of pleasure
in my spine. I reach a high voice summit
and glance at Tristan and he smiles, then takes off on a brilliant riff all his
own. Christopher cuts in to support me;
I am overwhelmed at our timing and our compliment. We are extremely hot tonight.
At the end of the number the audience
rises to its feet, clapping and shouting.
I am starting to fatigue, and my throat is dry, almost raw. We take a thirty-second break and share a
cola drink while the audience sits back down.
It is time to do our most popular album; we decide as we drink to play
the whole album. There are only four
songs, but they are all ten to twelve minutes long. We will do the title song, The Quest, first. Then, Resurrection,
then The Fires of Eden. Tristan wants to do The Portal last. We understand without speaking that that will
be the time for us to try to join our minds.
I take up the flute; I am ready. The
Quest is the most exhausting number for me.
I make the flute reach notes and split notes and warble notes that I
have never before mastered, but they are here in this version, for this crowd,
tonight. And for myself. The lights gleam an iridescent opal-blue off
my wet fingers. I know I must appear
like a blue flame; that is the way I feel.
I can see would-be flute players as far out as the twentieth row swaying
with me and working their fingers in the dark like so many spastics. Go for it, I say to them with the music from
my flute: I am.
Resurrection
is Christopher’s number, and he is unconscious with concentration. Sweat rolls down his brow and drips from his
parted lips as he leaps from one keyboard to another, pounding with his
fingers, and a few times with his fists.
Once he jumps up and lands a loud bass note with the edge of the wallet
bulge on his ass, and the audience roars its appreciation. Christopher’s hands blur in my side vision,
blue and red spots reflecting off his wet arms like night traffic in the
rain. I see his head swaying slowly as
he smiles into the last note, held with one hand and syncopated with the other
like a rippling brook. His matted hair
hides his face almost completely. When
the audience stands, Christopher sits on the floor to catch his breath. He grins at me; I give him the thumbs-down
sign. We both know it’s a lie. Christopher has never been better. He towels his face and waits for the next
number.
The Fires of Eden centers around Mark Kreutzer’s famous drum solo; he and Tristan take it
almost alone. Mark breaks a drumstick
part-way into the solo, and never misses a beat; he double times with one hand
while he reaches for a spare stick with the other. The audience catches that action and gives
him a standing ovation. While they
stand, Tristan cuts in with a melody run, his treble gain on full, ripping into
the heart of the sound like a buzz-saw.
Mark catches the increased tempo and attaches himself to it like a pilot
fish. But Tristan is all alone now. I
just have a tambourine for a prop, and Christopher only touches a key every
third or fourth beat. Peter works the
bass down to its lowest sounds and adds tremolo so that Tristan’s searing runs
seem to have a reverberation from the core of the earth itself. The audience cannot sit down; they are
jumping and clapping their hands over their heads. There are screams—Tristan, Tristan—We can all hear the voices except Tristan, who is
deep into the sounds he creates until the very end.
The ovation lasts almost five full
minutes. I have never had so much time
to simply stand and watch the frantic movement of thirty thousand arms. This is the roar of the fires of Eden; Tristan named that number
well. I am with him now, and I can feel
him smiling, like a man climbing a rope up a steep cliff, just before he
reaches the summit. We have one more
number to do.
The Portal is
our longest piece, and it is Tristan’s theme song. Everyone in the Palace has heard The Portal; they have shouted for this
song more than any other. It is our
platinum, our masterpiece, the song that launched Tristan’s poster onto bedroom
walls all around the world. The audience
awaits us with a growing noise, like an incoming tide. “Do The
Portal!” A high voice screams, then lower voices: “Do The Portal! The Portal!” Tristan smiles, prolongs the suspense by
taking a slow drink of water. Then he
passes the water pitcher, and we all drink.
The water cools my throat.
Mark Kreutzer checks his drumsticks,
then signals Tristan. Tristan’s smile
fades into a tightness through his jaw.
He gives the signal and Mark sets the beat, Then Peter joins in with
that incredible low bass, just above perception level. Christopher joins in with his measured
flourish; he is frisky tonight, but adds nothing to Tristan’s song but the
perfection of his keyboard.
I raise my flute to my lips awaiting
the note of my entry. I begin my harmony
and I hear a voice. It is my own voice,
and not my own. Welcome, it says, and in
that instant I know the drug was in the water pitcher and there is no holding
back for I am the flute and I am the drums and I am the keyboard and I am the
bass, and welcome, welcome, say the voices; I am the band.
My rhythm is a pulsing deep within
the earth and my chorus is a flight of long-winged birds and the sound of the
wind in the valleys, and soaring down through them, and my keyboard touches are
the heartbeats of lovers I have lain with long after the heart has calmed; I am
Peter and I know the loneliness of the dark within the soul, and I am Mark the
drummer and I see those valleys full of birds and below them, skiers, and I
feel the rush of chill against my face, and I am Christopher, oh, this dream so
bittersweet, a woman with dark curly hair who is holding aloft her wineglass to
me, and I click it with my own, and click goes the keyboard, and I am Clayton
St. John, I know the uncharted beaches on which we rest, the taut sails canting
the schooner I dream of, their rigging lines singing in the wind like music
from a wooden flute, welcome, Clayton.
And welcome, you in the audience; I feel you join me, for now I am a
carpenter and I am a seamstress and oh yes a coliseum guard, and I am a student
of mathematics and a student also of economics, and of literature, and a
plumber as well, and I am a retired mailman and a football player and also a
politician; that is to say I am one who is a burglar and a prostitute and a
minister, welcome, welcome.
I reach to you and give you my all, Tristan sings, leaning over the mike like a man about to
perform a sex act. Where is
Tristan? Our bodies are the moon and the sea, Tristan breathes. Come on in, Tristan, I hear the plumber say
deep in his heart, and I say from mine, I am just a teacher, Tristan, but take
me, take meee… Touch me, take me, hear the voice from my soul, Tristan is
taut-necked and his eyes are shut tight as if in pain. I can see from the bass that the left side of
his face is twitching rapidly, and from the flute I see his right side is
covered with sweat which is dark like blood.
Where is Tristan? I ask. I see
the band from back rows; he is so small, so distant… I hear a voice, Where is
Tristan? And we pass through the portal, Tristan is singing; I see his face
slacken, and there is a rush of feeling like a runner passing by a walker, and
I hear a voice that says, follow me,
and I know that it is—
Tristan, welcome, Tristan, welcome,
and I scream and I applaud from the twentieth, the thirtieth, the fiftieth
row. I am in the fifty-second row, oh
Tristan, I want you, my crotch is so wet and here I am oh Tristan, and I play my
flute as though it we a part of my face, and my keyboard is like soft skin to
my fingers upon it as my bass reverbs a sound from deep within the earth and I
rise out of my chair and clap my hands over my head and I am the beat of my own
drums as I sing, Pass through the portal, pass through the portal, and I hear
the run of my lead guitar split into my ears like a wedge in the brain; the run
takes off out of the script of the melody like a bird of prey rising for the
hunt. My eyes are the eyes of the eagle
as I search the highest drafts and I know something is wrong, for my lead
guitar is a hunter now, and I seek the hardest pounding of the heart, the beat
past the one that keeps us alive. I am
the voice of a man falling into that beat; Follow me, the voice says, and I am
with you, Tristan, and I am terrified, and I seek the hole in the temple
through which the soul escapes at the moment of death and my voice is the voice
of screaming and my wind stops in my flute and I hear the words that are not in
the scripted lyrics, And I am shouting, We
shall be immortal! And I feel a
coldness sweep over me from the back of my head; there is pain. I have gone too far and, as we pass through the portal, I hear my voice depart from me, and
the space it leaves behind is blackness, and that blackness expands around me
and settles upon me like a vast, buzzing tunnel…
I awaken slowly into daylight. I am undressed, and there is a white sheet
over me up to my chest. A tube from a
hanging bottle disappears under the sheet, and I can feel something like a
beetle buried in the tissue of my arm.
“Clayton? It is Christopher.
“Where am I?” I say. My mouth is dry, my tongue is sticky.
“Hospital. It was touch and go for you for awhile. You’ll be okay now though.”
“Last thing, I remember is the
concert last night.”
“It was two nights ago, Clay. You’ve been out more than thirty hours.”
“What Happened?”
“Maybe later, when you’re stronger…”
“Tell me now, Chris.”
“It was Tristan. He went too far again.”
“Oh God, no…”
“Four people bought it, Clay. A plumber, a teacher, and a guard.”
“And the fourth?”
“Tristan.”
“I felt it coming, Chris. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t stop him. I knew he’d go past the limits. Why?”
Christopher wiped his face with both
hands as though molding a piece of clay into place. “I don’t know. We have so much trouble with the lead
guitars. They all have a kind of
hollowness that haunts them. They’ve got
to run away as hard as they can from something inside. Peter calls it the Nemo drive, you know, like
the captain in Twenty Thousand Leagues
Under the Sea. He says some guys
just can’t take being, you know, just another regular human. I don’t understand what Peter says most of
the time.”
“What’ll we do? Can we get a replacement?”
“It’s all taken care of, Clay. We have an understudy already polishing his
act. He’ll go through the plastic
surgery tomorrow. Then he’ll be
hair-styled, and that’ll be it.”
“What’s he like? What’s his name?
“He’a a lead guitarist. What are they all like?” Christopher drummed his fingers on my bed
railing. “And after tomorrow, his name
is Tristan.”
* *
* * *
* *
