Terry saw a man emerge from the house. The man stood on the porch, watching them climb out of the van. He looked as if he were trying to decide if he knew them or not. True clutched his leather bag close to his side.
Over the dog’s barking and the generator noise, Terry called out, “Mr. Gherosimini? I’m Terry Spitzenham! You remember? From The Five? You wrote me a letter saying I could come—”
“My brother!” the man shouted, and lifted his hands in the air. He had a gray beard that hung over the chest of his overalls and was decorated with what appeared to be small metallic beads. His deeply-seamed face grinned. “Finally come home!” He came striding off the porch with the gait of an energetic younger man. The barking dog put itself between him and the visitors in a posture of defense.
Eric Gherosimini was making music as he walked, though they couldn’t hear it. Tied in his beard with white and gold-colored cords were little bells. He was barefoot. Nomad thought the soles of those horny-toed feet must have been an inch thick to survive all the wicked edges. Gherosimini was thin and stoop-shouldered and bald on the top of his scalp except for a few remaining wild sprigs of gray, while the hair on the sides and back flowed down over his shoulders like opaque curtains. He wore wire-rimmed glasses that were not very different from Terry’s.
My brother. Finally come home.
Oh my God, Nomad thought. This dude’s going to ask Terry to change places with him so he can go out and paint the world red, and Terry will have to be the guardian of the secret fucking keyboards until the next sucker comes along.
But Eric Gherosimini raised his index finger to the dog and said sternly, “Stereo!” The mongrel stopped barking. Then the frail genius of the 13th Floors looked Terry full in the face, blinked his electric-blue eyes and touched Terry’s shirt, which today was black-and-purple paisleys on a background of dove gray.
“Boss shirt,” he said with admiration. “Vintage, ’66? H.I.S.?”
“You got it.” Terry remembered who he was talking to. “Sir.”
Gherosimini put an arm around Terry’s shoulder. “Come on inside. All of you. Come see the madman’s dreams.”
They followed him, with Stereo sniffing at their shadows.
TWENTY-EIGHT.
“I didn’t know if you’d be here or not,” Terry said, when he didn’t know what else to say.
“Usually here, man. Don’t get out much, but…how do you guys say it?…it’s all good.”
“Can I ask something?” True waited for Eric Gherosimini’s eyes to focus on him. It looked to True as if the man had some difficulty in that department. “Why do you live so far from town? There’s just nothing around here.”
Gherosimini’s gaze floated down along the creases of True’s slacks to take aim at the black wingtips. An impish smile worked at the corners of his mouth. “Man, I know I’ve been out of action a lonnngggg time, but they sure don’t make road managers like they used to.”
They were sitting in what passed as the man’s living room. It contained inflatable chairs in Day-Glo colors and a plaid sofa that must have come all the way from Scotland’s Salvation Army. On the woodplank floor was a blue rug with the image of the moon and sun woven into it. Some type of scrawny leafless tree in a rusted metal pot stood in a corner, its limbs bearing a strange fruit of several different kinds of multi-colored glass windchimes. A fan powered by the generator continually stirred the chimes into musical tinklings. A blue cone of incense burned in a metal cup on a table made out of what True thought might be compressed telephone books. The faintly sweet smell of the incense reminded Ariel of the way the air smelled at Singing Beach, in Manchester, after a summer rain. Several unlit candle lanterns in an ornate Moroccan style stood about, indicating that the generators were not always running. Stereo sprawled on the floor at his master’s bare feet, chewing on a green dental hygiene bone.
And it was not every living room that had walls covered, every inch except the front window, with white sound-dampening acoustic tiles. Bamboo blinds hung over the window. Tacked up in several places on the wall tiles were posters of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, the rugged majesty of the Big Sur coast and the skyline of Seattle showing the Space Needle.
Gherosimini had brought them small ceramic cups of reddish-hued water that he’d said was sent to him by a fellow shapeshifter from the Lion’s Head Fountain at a place called Chalice Well, in England. He offered a part-toast, part-prayer that the world should be healed by the power of mystic waters, and that it should begin right here in this room.
Nomad thought the water tasted like it had been soaking rusty nails. He took a couple of sips and decided, mystic waters or not, he wasn’t going to run the risk of getting lockjaw.
“So far from town,” Gherosimini said, repeating a portion of True’s question. He was lounging in a bright orange inflatable chair. The windchimes tinkled softly as the fan’s breeze touched them, and Stereo gnawed on his chewie. “Nothing around here. Why do you think that, Mr. Manager Man?”
“Because I have two working eyes.”
“You sure they’re working?”
“Pretty much.” True took another sip of the water stained with iron oxide. It wasn’t so bad, but what he would pay right now for a glass of iced tea!
“How about you?” Gherosimini’s attention turned to Ariel. “You’re very quiet. Do you think there’s nothing around here?”
She shrugged, not sure how he wanted her to respond. “I guess I—”
“No,” he interrupted. “Say what you really think.”
“I think…” She saw he was forming an appraisal of her, and she decided to tell him what she really thought. “I think there’s the wind at night, and when you walk in it you can hear music, or voices, or both. I think there’s a silence that asks you who you are. I think there’s a sky of stars that would knock a person’s eyes out. I think the colors of the sunset and sunrise are never exactly the same. I think you could swim in the moonlight if you wanted to. I think you could stand in the blue cool of the evening and smell the ocean waves that used to roll here.” She could smell those right now, from the smoky cone of incense. “I think the rocks might move when you’re not looking, but if you keep looking one day you’ll see it happen. I think you could see a hundred thousand pictures in the clouds and never the same one twice. I think maybe you could see angels out here, if you tried hard enough.”
“And devils?” Gherosimini’s thick gray eyebrows shot up. “Could I see those too, if I tried hard enough?”
She nodded. “Yes. But I wouldn’t want to try that hard.”
He looked at his other guests with a smile that told them the quiet ones always ran the deepest. “What do you think about that, Mr. Manager Man?”
“I think I must be nearsighted,” he said, which really was the truth.
That made the genius of the 13th Floors laugh. The sound must’ve been unusual, because Stereo looked up from his chewie and made a weird questioning noise between a whine and a growl. Call it a whrowl. Then he went right back to chewing.
“My turn for a question,” Nomad announced. He realized Terry was looking at him with fear on his face, not knowing what John was going to throw at his hero. Nomad had heard of the 13th Floors before, sure, and Gherosimini had earned his respect for blazing a trail, but this bell-bearded sixty-something-year-old bag of hippie dust was just plain ol’ Jack to him. “You called Terry your brother and said he’d finally come home. What was that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t have a computer here,” Gherosimini answered, and then he sat there so silently and for so long that Nomad thought the tons of acid he’d swallowed back in the dark ages had come back to drop a psychedelic bomb on his brain. But then the man finished his cup of weird water. “After I got Terry’s letter, I went to the Internet room at the library in town. I went to your website. Nice site, man. Very cool, easy to navigate. I watched your videos. I wrote Terry that I bought one of your CDs. They’re hard to find. But…you know… I kne
w you before you were born.”
“Really?” Uh huh, he thought. Acid bomb, bigtime.
“Really. You were the lead singer of the Mojo Ghandis. And you were the lead singer of Freight Train South. You were up on stage fronting The Souljers, and man did you work your ass off for Proud Pete and the Prophets. Oh yeah, I knew you. Watched you burn up a stage, work up a crowd, many nights. Many, many gigs.” The wispy-haired head nodded, the blue eyes fixed on Nomad and unyielding. “I knew Ariel, too. She was the girl you went to when you needed to come down to earth. When it got real floaty and spooky up there in the high dark, and you needed a safe place to land. She was the one who told you what you didn’t want to hear, because she was one of the few people—the very few—who gave a shit whether you lived or died. And Terry…oh, yeah. He was there. In how many bands and behind how many keyboards, who can count? But he was always where he needed to be, when he needed to be there.”
Gherosimini looked at Berke. “I’m not sure,” he said, “if I ever knew you. Not in my era. The female drummer was a freak. Shit, you may be a freak too. But I do know one thing: you can bust it up with anybody who ever sat behind me. So take that compliment from a gator who drove drummers so fucking crazy they’d do anything to get out of the band, including jumping out of windows. And that guy you’ve probably heard about, who jumped into a pool at a Holiday Inn and broke a woman’s back?” Gherosimini grinned. “That spaz thought we were on the parking lot side.”
A frown suddenly surfaced. “Your bass player. Where is he?”
It hit them all, at that moment, that Eric Gherosimini had no idea what The Five had been through in the past twenty-four days. Without a computer, without the Internet, possibly without a television or a radio, maybe adverse to reading newspapers and magazines…he truly had decided to put many miles between himself and modern civilization. Maybe, Nomad thought, he just didn’t like the music anymore.
“Mike’s not with us,” Berke said. “But we’ll catch up with him later on.”
“Outta sight,” was Gherosimini’s comment, with an upraised thumb. “Oh, yeah…your question.” He focused on Nomad. “Terry’s my brother ’cause he feels the love. Of what we do. What we feel when we’re playing. And I say he’s finally come home, because he’s wanted to come here for a long time. Not necessarily this place, man, but to wherever I am. I know what I’ve done. I know who I am. Terry’s like family. He’s finally come home, and I know the why of that, too. He wants to meet the lady. Isn’t that right, Terry?”
The question made Terry’s heart race. The moment was near. “Yes,” he said.
Gherosimini stood up, and so did Stereo. “Let me introduce you.”
They followed him into the small kitchen and then through a sliding metal door into a larger room at the back of the house. He flipped a light switch. When the fluorescents came on, Terry thought this must be the first step on the stairway to Heaven.
It was another room whose walls were covered with the white acoustic tiles. The floor was of gray concrete. Within the room were several sets of speakers of different sizes, a twenty-four-track mixing board on a desk, a chair for the board rider, and cables connected to an item True certainly recognized, a multitrack reel-to-reel tape recorder. Next to the console was a wooden rack holding what the others knew to be echo and effects boxes, compressors, limiters, and other studio necessities. None of the equipment looked very new, and most of it was definitely vintage, from the late ’60s or early ’70s. If any of this stuff still worked, Nomad thought, gear collectors would piss their pants with excitement in here. Various vintage microphones were on their stands waiting for use. A plastic crate held a rat’s nest of cables, wallwarts and power cords.
On the left side of the studio stood a second desk, smaller than the one holding the mixer, on which sat a typewriter. A piece of paper was held in the rollers, with typing on it. Near at hand was a sheaf of paper, a tin cup holding some pens and pencils, and an ashtray with half of a plump brown cigarette in it that True decided he wouldn’t stroll over and examine. On the right side of the studio was a workbench with various pieces of circuitry and wiring lying atop it.
Terry was focused straight ahead. Nothing in Eric Gherosimini’s studio pulled at him but the array of mind-blowing vintage organs and electric pianos on their stands that dominated the space.
He felt for a few seconds that he couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t draw a breath. Something in his brain was so hit with the electric pleasure prod, and so deeply, that his automatic life-functions had gone on the fritz. But then he figured he really should concentrate on drawing in a long lungful of air, to clear his head and keep himself from passing out, because there never ever in his life would be another moment like this.
He went through a quick assessment of what he was looking at: a Vox Continental UK Version 1 with the cool black keys from about 1962; a fire-engine red Vox Jaguar 304, built to start a blaze on a dance floor; a silver-top Rhodes electric piano from 1968; a 1975 Rhodes Mark 1, a battered warrior; an ARP synthesizer…no, two ARPs, one opened up to show its internals and probably being cannibalized; a beautiful Roland Jupiter 8; a Minimoog Voyager and a Moog Sonic 6; a Prophet 600 with some missing keys on the high end; a Rhodes Chroma; an unknown thing labelled ‘Sonick’ in a suitcase with a blue keyboard and a control board with different colored knobs and what looked like a pegboard to chart the ocillators; a gorgeous wood-grained, double-keyboard early Mellotron; a glossy black Panther Duo 2200, the stage instrument of ‘The Partridge Family’ but capable of doing the nasty in any biker bar; an elegant, slightly arrogant gray Doric; two of the weird slabs of Kustom Kombos, the Naugahyde-padded “Zodiac” combined keyboard-and-stage-speakers, one in blue and the other yellow.
He saw sleek Farfisas and Cordovoxes with the ‘AstroSound’ effect. He saw a hundred-and-thirty-two pounds of double-keyboard vintage Yamaha, circa 1972. He saw the Gems: a Caravan, a Sprinter and a Joker 61. And then he came to the instruments he did not know, the ones that held no names or trademarks. The ones that were born from the acid-stretched mind of Eric Gherosimini.
He saw a sleek silver keyboard with wings, like a fighter jet awaiting takeoff. On the wings that curved back on either side of the player were dozens of rocker switches. Next to it stood a hulking black synthesizer five feet tall and about four feet wide. Above the blood-red keyboard were many banks of toggles, multi-colored cables plugged from one connection to another, knobs by the dozens and—ominously—a single broken wine glass sitting on a metal foil tray atop the brutish instrument’s ledge.
He saw an instrument shaped like a hand, with rows of gray circular buttons designed to be pressed or played or whatever by each finger. A one-handed symphony. He saw a thing that looked like a harp crossed with a washboard. He saw a five-note keyboard, three whites and two blacks, with a control console that resembled a peacock’s fan. Next to it was a red-painted upright acoustic piano with garishly-colored keys and desert plants and cacti bursting out of the open top. Was Gherosimini experimenting with organic sound-dampeners? Trying to create a naturalist sound using elements from nature?
“What’s this one?” Terry asked.
Gherosimini craned his neck to see. “Oh, that’s my planter,” he said.
And there…right there…only fifteen feet away, on the other side of the planter, she was standing white and pure on four shining aluminum legs.
Gherosimini crossed to the wall, opened a metal box and pulled a lever. They couldn’t hear the second generator kick into action, but they could feel its vibration in the floor. Green lights came on in a central command box. Lights of many colors, some steady and others pulsing like heartbeats, began to appear on the instruments. And there was a glorious hum of life.
“My brother,” Gherosimini said to Terry, “you can play anything you like. This is your home.”
Terry lowered his head.
Silently he wept tears of joy.
“Mr. Gherosimini?” Ariel was speaking from across t
he studio, where she’d wandered over to the typewriter to see, curious and writer-to-writer, what he was doing. “You have a new project?” She remembered the letter Terry had read. I’m working on something real, Gherosimini had told him.
“I do.” He walked to her side through the maze. He knew every taped-down cable on the floor, and every plug pushed into every multi-plug floor unit; he could walk through here in pitch dark and not be tripped up. “It’s something I’ve been writing for a while.”
Ariel didn’t want to look at what was typed on the paper, or what she’d glimpsed was typed and struck-out and retyped in the agony of creation on some of the other papers. She didn’t want to be influenced by anyone else’s lyrics, not with their song still unfinished. Mike had given his part, George had given his, Terry and Berke theirs. But not John. Not yet. And though she’d already added a line she felt it was going to fall to her to complete the song, to put it together from the different elements. To find a meaning in it, if a meaning was to be found. So far, in her nightly study of the words, nothing had come to her. Terry had tried to write a few more lines, but he’d ended up scratching them out. It seemed his part was done. Or was it? Berke was having nothing more to do with it, though she’d wished Ariel good luck.
Ariel thought John was afraid of the song. He didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t want to even look at it. He had told her this morning that today, the 10th of August, was the seventeenth-year anniversary of the death of his father in Louisville, Kentucky. He’d said that he missed his father, and that Dean Charles had been a very good musician. Dean Charles had known how to play to a crowd. How to give them their money’s worth. Dean Charles had known his role as a musician, he’d told her. But, John had said, his father had never quite figured out how to be a very good person, at least not to the people who’d cared about him the most.