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and of every other soul could be seen in that eye, that I could look down to Earth through the haze and
scum of the ocean air and see Bill where he stood looking up and trying to find us in that mottled sky, and
I felt all the eerie connections a man feels when he needs to believe in something more than what he
knows is real, and I tried to tell myself he was all right, walking in his garden in Novo Sibersk, taking the
air with an idiot woman so beautiful it nearly made him wise. But I could not sustain the fantasy. I could
only mourn, and I had no right to mourn, having never loved him -- or if I did, even in the puniest of
ways, it was never his person I loved, but what I had from him, the things awakened in me by what had
happened. Just the thought that I could have loved him, maybe that was all I owned of right.
We were heading back toward the East Louie airlock, when Arlie stooped and plucked up a male
barnacle. Dark green as an emerald, it was, except for its stubby appendage. Glowing like magic, alive
with threads of color like a potter s glaze.
That s a rare one, I said. Never saw one that color before.
Bill would ave fancied it, she said.
Fancied, hell. He would have hung the damned thing about his neck.
She set it back down, and we watched as it began working its way across the surface of the barnacle
patch, doing its slow, ungainly cartwheels, wobbling off-true, lurching in flight, nearly missing its landing,
but somehow making it, somehow getting there. It landed in the shadow of some communications gear,
stuck out its tongue and tried to feed. We watched it for a long, long while, with no more words spoken,
but somehow there was a little truth hanging in the space between us, in the silence, a poor thing not
worth naming, and maybe not even having a name, it was such an infinitesimal slice of what was, and we
let it nourish us as much as it could, we took its luster and added it to our own. We sucked it dry, we had
its every flavor, and then we went back inside arm in arm, to rejoin the lie of the world.
-=*=-
A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC
First published in Omni, March 1992.
Dead men can t play jazz.
That s the truth I learned last night at the world premiere performance of the quartet known as
Afterlife at Manhattan s Village Vanguard.
Whether or not they can play, period, that s another matter, but it wasn t jazz I heard at the
Vanguard, it was something bluer and colder, something with notes made from centuries-old Arctic ice
and stones that never saw the light of day, something uncoiling after a long black sleep and tasting dirt in
its mouth, something that wasn t the product of creative impulse but of need. But the bottom line is, it was
worth hearing.
As to the morality involved, well, I ll leave that up to you, because that s the real bottom line, isn t it,
music lovers? Do you like it enough and will you pay enough to keep the question of morality a hot topic
on the talk shows and out of the courts? Those of you who listened to the simulcast over WBAI have
probably already formulated an opinion. The rest of you will have to wait for the CD.
I won t waste your time by talking about the technology. If you don t understand it by now, after all
the television specials and the (ohmygodpleasenotanother) in-depth discussions between your local
blow-dried news creep and their pet science-fiction hack, you must not want to understand it. Nor am I
going to wax profound and speculate on just how much of a man is left after reanimation. The only ones
who know that aren t able to tell us, because it seems the speech center just doesn t thrive on hypoxia.
Nor does any fraction of sensibility that cares to communicate itself. In fact, very little seems to thrive on
hypoxia aside from the desire... no, like I said, the need to play music.
And for reasons that God or someone only knows, the ability to play music where none existed
before.
That may be hard to swallow, I realize, but I m here to tell you, no matter how weird it sounds, it
appears to be true.
For the first time in memory, there was a curtain across the Vanguard s stage. I suppose there s
some awkwardness involved in bringing the musicians out. Before the curtain was opened, William
Dexter, the genius behind this whole deal, a little bald man with a hearing aid in each ear and the affable,
simple face of someone whom kids call by his first name, came out and said a few words about the need
for drastic solutions to the problems of war and pollution, for a redefinition of our goals and values.
Things could not go on as they had been. The words seemed somewhat out of context, though they re
always nice to hear. Finally he introduced the quartet. As introductions go, this was a telegram.
The music you re about to hear, William Dexter said flatly, without the least hint of hype or
hyperventilation, is going to change your lives.
And there they were.
Right on the same stage where Coltrane turned a love supreme into song, where Miles singed us with
the hateful beauty of needles and knives and Watts on fire, where Mingus went crazy in 7/4 time, where
Ornette made Kansas City R&B into the art of noise, and a thousand lesser geniuses dreamed and
almost died and were changed before our eyes from men into moments so powerful that guys like me can
make a living writing about them for people like you who just want to hear that what they felt when they
were listening was real.
Two white men, one black, one Hispanic, the racial quota of an all-American TV show, marooned
on a radiant island painted by a blue-white spot. All wearing sunglasses.
Raybans, I think.
Wonder if they ll get a commercial.
The piano player was young and skinny, just a kid, with the long brown hair of a rock star and
sunglasses that held gleams as shiny and cold as the black surface of his Baldwin. The Hispanic guy on
bass couldn t have been more than eighteen, and the horn player, the black man, he was about
twenty-five, the oldest. The drummer, a shadow with a crewcut and a pale brow, I couldn t see him
clearly but I could tell he was young, too.
Too young, you d think, to have much to say.
But then maybe time goes by more slowly and wisdom accretes with every measure... in the
afterlife.
No apparent signal passed between them, yet as one they began to play.
Goodrick reached for his tape recorder, thinking he should listen to the set again before getting into
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