"I can't tell you exactly why I went in. Maybe it was some creeped-out nostalgia for all that audio candy. Maybe it was self-flagellation. Maybe I just thought the place would be air-conditioned, and I could get out of the heat--boy, was I ever wrong about that. Or maybe it was the sign over the door."
"What did it say?" I asked.
Hugh smiled at me. "You Can Trust the Rev."
*
He was the only customer. The shelves were packed with equipment a lot more exotic than the wares in the window. Some stuff he knew: meters, oscilloscopes, voltometers and voltage regulators, amplitude regulators, rectifiers, power inverters. Other stuff he didn't recognize. Electric cords snaked across the floor and wires were strung everywhere.
The proprietor came out through a door framed in blinking Christmas lights ("Probably a bell jingled when I came in, but I sure didn't hear it," Hugh said). My old fifth business was dressed in faded jeans and a plain white shirt buttoned to the collar. His mouth moved in Hello and something that might have been Can I help you. Hugh tipped him a wave, shook his head, and browsed along the shelves. He picked up a Stratocaster and gave it a strum, wondering if it was in tune.
Jacobs watched him with interest but no detectable concern, although Hugh's rock-dog 'do now hung in unwashed clumps to his shoulders and his clothes were equally dirty. After five minutes or so, just as he was losing interest and getting ready to walk back to the fleabag where he now hung his hat, the vertigo hit. He reeled, putting out one hand and knocking over a disassembled stereo speaker. He almost recovered, but he hadn't been eating much, and the world turned gray. Before he hit the shop's dusty wooden floor, it had turned black. It was my story all over again. Only the location was different.
When he woke up, he was in Jacobs's office with a cold cloth on his forehead. Hugh apologized and said he would pay for anything he might have broken. Jacobs drew back, blinking in surprise. This was a reaction Hugh had seen often in the last weeks.
"Sorry if I'm talking too loud," Hugh said. "I can't hear myself. I'm deaf."
Jacobs rummaged a notepad from the top drawer of his cluttered desk (I could imagine that desk, littered with snips of wire and batteries). He jotted and held the pad up.
Recent? I saw you w/ guitar.
"Recent," Hugh agreed. "I have something called Meniere's disease. I'm a musician." He considered that and laughed . . . soundlessly to his own ears, although Jacobs responded with a smile. "Used to be, anyhow."
Jacobs turned a page in his notebook, wrote briefly, and held it up: If it's Meniere's, I might be able to do something for you.
*
"Obviously he did," I said.
Lunch hour was over; the girls had gone back inside. There was stuff I could be doing--plenty--but I had no intention of leaving until I heard the rest of Hugh's story.
"We sat in his office for a long time--conversation's slow when one person has to write his side of it. I asked him how he thought he could help me. He wrote that just lately he'd been experimenting with transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, TENS for short. He said the idea of using electricity to stimulate damaged nerves went back thousands of years, that it was invented by some old Roman--"
A dusty door far back in my memory opened. "An old Roman named Scribonius. He discovered that if a guy with a bad leg stepped on an electric eel, the pain sometimes went away. And that 'just lately' stuff was crap, Hugh. Your Rev was playing around with TENS before it was officially invented."
He stared at me, eyebrows up.
"Go on," I said.
"Okay, but we'll come back to this, right?"
I nodded. "You show me yours, I show you mine. That was the deal. I'll give you a hint: there's a fainting spell in my story, too."
"Well . . . I told him that Meniere's disease was a mystery--doctors didn't know if it had to do with the nerves, or if it was a virus causing a chronic buildup of fluid in the middle ear, or some kind of bacterial thing, or maybe genetic. He wrote, All diseases are electrical in nature. I said that was crazy. He just smiled, turned to a new page in his pad, and wrote for a longer time. Then he handed it across to me. I can't quote it exactly--it's been a long time--but I'll never forget the first sentence: Electricity is the basis of all life."
That was Jacobs, all right. The line was better than a fingerprint.
"The rest said something like, Take your heart. It runs on microvolts. This current is provided by potassium, an electrolyte. Your body converts potassium into ions--electrically charged particles--and uses them to regulate not just your heart but your brain and EVERYTHING ELSE.
"Those last words were in capitals. He put a circle around them. When I handed his pad back, he drew something on it, very quick, then pointed to my eyes, my ears, my chest, my stomach, and my legs. Then he showed me what he'd drawn. It was a lightning bolt."
Sure it was.
"Cut to the chase, Hugh."
"Well . . ."
*
Hugh said he'd have to think it over. What he didn't say (but was certainly thinking) was that he didn't know Jacobs from Adam; the guy could be one of the crazybirds that flap around every big city.
Jacobs wrote that he understood Hugh's hesitation, and felt plenty of his own. "I'm going out on a limb to even make the offer. After all, I don't know you any more than you know me."
"Is it dangerous?" Hugh asked in a voice that was already losing tone and inflection, becoming robotic.
The Rev shrugged and wrote.
Won't kid you, there is some risk involved in applying electricity directly through the ears. But LOW VOLTAGE, OK? I'd guess the worst side effect you'd suffer might be peeing your pants.
"This is crazy," Hugh said. "We're insane just to be having this discussion."
The Rev shrugged again, but this time didn't write. Only looked.
Hugh sat in the office, the cloth (still damp but now warm) clutched in one hand, seriously considering Jacobs's proposal, and a large part of his mind found serious consideration, even on such short acquaintance, perfectly normal. He was a musician who had gone deaf and been cast aside by a band he'd helped to found, one now on the verge of national success. Other players and at least one great composer--Beethoven--had lived with deafness, but hearing loss wasn't where Hugh's woes ended. There was the vertigo, the trembling, the periodic loss of vision. There was nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, galloping pulse. Worst of all was the almost constant tinnitus. He had always thought deafness meant silence. This was not true, at least not in his case. Hugh Yates had a constantly braying burglar alarm in the middle of his head.
There was another factor, too. A truth not acknowledged until then, but glimpsed from time to time, as if in the corner of the eye. He had remained in Detroit because he was working up his courage. There were many pawnshops on 8-Mile, and all of them sold barrel-iron. Was what this guy was offering any worse than the muzzle of a thirdhand .38 socked between his teeth and pointing at the roof of his mouth?
In his too-loud robot's voice, he said, "What the fuck. Go ahead."
*
Hugh gazed at the mountains while he told the rest, his right hand stroking his right ear as he spoke. I don't think he knew he was doing it.
"He put a CLOSED sign in the window, locked the door, and dropped the blinds. Then he sat me down in a kitchen chair by the cash register and put a steel case the size of a footlocker on the counter. Inside it were two metal rings wrapped in what looked like gold mesh. They were about the size of those big dangly earrings Georgia wears when she's stylin. You know the ones I mean?"
"Sure."
"There was a rubber widget on the bottom of each, with a wire coming out of it. The wires ran into a control box no bigger than a doorbell. He opened the bottom of the box and showed me what looked like a single triple-A battery. I relaxed. That can't do much damage, I thought, but I didn't feel quite so comfortable when he put on rubber gloves--you know, like the kind women wear when they're washing dishes--and picked up the rings w
ith tongs."
"I think Charlie's triple-A batteries are different from the ones you buy in the store," I said. "A lot more powerful. Didn't he ever talk to you about the secret electricity?"
"Oh God, many times. It was his hobbyhorse. But that was later, and I never made head or tail of it. I'm not sure he did, either. He'd get a look in his eyes . . ."
"Puzzled," I said. "Puzzled, worried, and excited, all at the same time."
"Yeah, like that. He put the rings against my ears--using the tongs, you know--and then asked me to push the button on the control unit, since his own hands were full. I almost didn't, but I flashed on the pistols in all those pawnshop windows, and I did it."
"Then blacked out." I didn't ask it as a question, because I was sure of it. But he surprised me.
"There were blackouts, all right, and what I called prismatics, but they came later. Right then there was just an almighty snapping sound in the middle of my head. My legs shot out and my hands went up over my head like a schoolkid who's just desperate to tell the teacher he knows the right answer."
That brought back memories.
"Also, there was a taste in my mouth. Like I'd been sucking on pennies. I asked Jacobs if I could have a drink of water, and heard myself asking, and broke into tears. I cried for quite awhile. He held me." At last Hugh turned from the mountains and looked at me. "After that I would have done anything for him, Jamie. Anything."
"I know the feeling."
"When I had control of myself again, he took me back out into the shop and put a pair of Koss headphones on me. He plugged into an FM station and kept turning the music down and asking me if I could hear it. I did until he got all the way to zero, and I could almost swear I even heard it then. He not only brought my hearing back, it was more acute than it had been since I was fourteen, and playing with my first jam-band."
*
Hugh asked how he could repay Jacobs. The Rev, only a scruffy guy in need of a haircut and a bath, considered this.
"Tell you what," he said at last. "There's little in the way of business here, and some of the people who do wander in are pretty sketchy. I'm going to transport all this stuff to a storage facility on the North Side while I think about what to do next. You could help me."
"I can do better than that," Hugh said, still relishing the sound of his own voice. "I'll rent the storage space myself, and hire a crew to move everything. I don't look like I can afford it, but I can. Really."
Jacobs seemed horrified at the idea. "Absolutely not! The goods I have for sale are mostly junk, but my equipment is valuable, and much of it in the back area--my lab--is delicate, as well. Your help would be more than enough repayment. Although first you need to rest a little. And eat. Put on a few pounds. You've been through a difficult time. Would you be interested in becoming my assistant, Mr. Yates?"
"If that's what you want," Hugh said. "Mr. Jacobs, I still can't believe you're talking and I'm hearing you."
"In a week, you'll take it for granted," he said dismissively. "That's the way it works with miracles. No use railing against it; it's plain old human nature. But since we have shared a miracle in this overlooked corner of the Motor City, I can't have you calling me Mr. Jacobs. To you, let me be the Rev."
"As in Reverend?"
"Exactly," he said, and grinned. "Reverend Charles D. Jacobs, currently chief prelate in the First Church of Electricity. And I promise not to work you too hard. There's no hurry; we'll take our time."
*
"I'll bet you did," I said.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"He didn't want you to buy him a moving crew, and he didn't want your money. He wanted your time. I think he was studying you. Looking for aftereffects. What did you think?"
"Then? Nothing. I was riding a mighty cloud of joy. If the Rev had asked me to rob First of Detroit, I might have given it a shot. Looking back on it, though, you could be right. There wasn't much to the work, after all, because when you came right down to it, he had very little to sell. There was more in his back room, but with a big enough U-Haul, we could have moved the whole kit and caboodle off the 8-Mile in two days. But he strung it out over a week." He considered. "Yeah, okay. He was watching me."
"Studying. Looking for aftereffects." I peeked at my watch. I had to be in the studio in fifteen minutes, and if I lingered longer in the picnic area I was going to be late. "Walk with me down to Studio One. Tell me what they were."
We walked, and Hugh told me about the blackouts that had followed Jacobs's electrical treatment for deafness. They were brief but frequent in the first couple of days, and there was no actual sense of unconsciousness. He would just find himself in a different place and discover that five minutes had gone by. Or ten. On two occasions it happened while he and Jacobs were loading equipment and secondhand sales goods into an old plumbing-supply panel truck Jacobs had borrowed from someone (maybe from another of his miracle cures, although if that was the case, Hugh never found out--the Rev was closemouthed about such things).
"I asked him what happened during those times, and he said nothing, that we just went on moving stuff and conversing like normal."
"Did you believe him?"
"I did at the time. Now I don't know."
One night, Hugh said--this would have been five or six days post-treatment--he was sitting in his fleabag hotel room's one chair, reading a book, and suddenly found himself standing in the corner, facing the wall.
"Were you saying anything?" I asked, thinking, Something happened. Something, something, something.
"No," he said. "But . . ."
"But what?"
He shook his head at the memory. "I'd taken off my pants, then put my sneakers back on. I was just standing there in my Jockey shorts and Reeboks. Crazy, huh?"
"Muy loco," I said. "How long did these mini-lapses go on?"
"The second week there were only a couple. By the third week they were gone. But there was something else that lasted longer. Something with my eyes. These . . . events. The prismatics. I don't know what else to call them. They happened maybe a dozen times over the next five years. Nothing at all since then."
We had reached the studio. Mookie was waiting for us, his Broncos gimme cap turned around backward, making him look like the world's oldest skateboarder. "The band's in there. They're practicing." He lowered his voice. "Dudes, they're fucking horrible."
"Tell them we'll be starting late," I said. "We'll give them extra time on the other end to make up for it."
Mookie looked from Hugh to me and then back to Hugh--taking the emotional temperature. "Hey, nobody's gonna get fired, are they?"
"Not unless you leave the soundboard on again," Hugh said. "Now get in there and let the adults talk."
Mookie saluted and went inside.
Hugh turned back to me. "The prismatics were much weirder than the blackouts. I don't really know how to describe them. Like the man said, you had to be there."
"Try."
"I always knew when it was going to happen. I'd be going along through my day, you know, business as usual, and then my vision would seem to sharpen."
"Like your hearing after the treatment?"
He shook his head. "No, that was real. My ears are still better now than they were before the Rev's treatment, and I know a hearing test would prove it, although I've never bothered to get one. No, the vision thing was . . . you know how epileptics can tell a seizure is coming by a tingling in their wrists, or some phantom smell?"
"Precursors."
"Right. That sense I got of my vision sharpening was a precursor. What happened after was . . . color."
"Color."
"The world filled with reds, blues, and greens at the edges of things. The colors would shift back and forth. It was like looking through a prism, but one that magnified things at the same time it was shattering them into pieces." He patted his forehead, a gentle gesture of frustration. "That's as close as I can get. And during the thirty or forty seconds it was happeni
ng, it was as if I could almost look through the world, and there was another world right behind it. A realer world."
He looked at me soberly.
"Those were the prismatics. I've never talked about them to anyone until today. They scared the hell out of me."
"You never even told the Rev?"
"I would've, but he was already gone the first time it happened. No big goodbyes, just a note saying he had a business opportunity in Joplin. This was six months or so after the miracle cure, and I was back in here in Nederland. The prismatics . . . they were beautiful in a way I could never describe, but I hope they never come back. Because if that other world is really there, I don't want to see it. And if it's in my mind, I want it to stay there."
Mookie came out. "They're hot to go, Jamie. I'll roll some sound, if you want. I sure can't fuck it up, because these guys make the Dead Milkmen sound like the Beatles."
That might be, but they had paid cash for their session. "No, I'll be right in. Tell them two more minutes."
He disappeared.
"So," Hugh said. "You got mine, but I didn't get yours. And I still want it."
"I've got an hour around nine tonight. I'll come up to the big house and tell you then. It won't take long. My story is basically the same as yours: treatment, cure, aftereffects that attenuated, then passed completely." Not quite true, but I had a session to record.
"No prismatics?"
"Nope. Other stuff. Tourette's without the swearing, for one thing." I decided I'd keep the dreams of dead family members to myself, at least for the time being. Maybe they were my glimpses of Hugh's other world.
"We ought to go see him." Hugh gripped my arm. "We really ought to."
"I think you're right."
"But no big reunion dinner, okay? I don't even want to talk to him, just observe."
"Fine," I said, and looked down at his hand. "Now let go of me before you leave a bruise. I have to record some music."
He let go. I went into the studio, and the sound of some local punk band playing leather-jacket-and-safety-pin stuff the Ramones did a lot better back in the '70s. When I looked back over my shoulder, Hugh was still standing there, looking at the mountains.