The Night Marchers and Other Strange Tales (2 page)

“Man, he can really shred,” Jack said. “And he’s heavy. Makes sense.” 

But he didn’t make sense and I didn’t like to think Jack had been buying into all of it. I sensed a heartfelt disaster coming on.  

**** 

Jack was late for the next rehearsal and flat out didn’t show for the one after that. He didn’t even call.  

Instead of working on the tracks, or returning long overdue calls or going to see my new niece, I spent time in the basement. I had been building Jack a guitar. He’d picked out the body and the paint job a few months ago and probably thought I’d forgotten about it. I’d bought two sets of pick-ups and a new solid one-piece neck. I shaved the frets down so the action was real nice, so even I could play the high notes easily. When it was done it would sound like an old Gibson, real warm and resonant, but without the two grand price tag.  

I was worried about Jack and I kept working on the guitar. Though all the elements were there, I just couldn’t get it together. Couldn’t get the wiring right. Finally I put it away after a few days and kept calling Jack until I got him on the phone. 

He hemmed and hawed about being busy and told me everything was fine. I could tell it wasn’t, so I told him to please just talk to me and to cut the shit. 

“Alright, alright,” he said. “I’ve been jamming with Roger and Noah Sol.” 

“How’s it been going?” I asked. I’m sure it came out a bit angry, but I was genuinely curious too.  

“Going pretty good,” he said. “All things considered.” 

“Like what?” 

“Demanding precision from imperfect machines. Using flawed formulas, you know, but we’re trying.” 

“What kind of shit is that?” 

“Yours,” he said. “It’s one of my favorite lyrics of yours from the Dawnstar sessions, five years ago.” 

I was flattered to be quoted, but embarrassed I had forgotten my own lyrics. The song was about unrequited desire and imaginary relationships. But, I still didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.  

“Thanks man, but what’s the deal? You don’t show up. You don’t call. Is it the record? You think we can’t pull it together?” 

“All right, sorry, man. I mean, I’m sorry. I don’t want to bum you out. You know that? Right? Tell me you know that.” 

I did. And I told him. 

“It’s like this.” He paused and sighed. “It’s kind of hard to explain. He’s got a band. Anyone can join. Dude, you could, if you wanted. There are lots of members, they rotate in and out. But it’s one song. One massive, super-long song. I’m going to be rotating in soon.” 

“What about the record?” 

“Yeah. Well, this song man, if he’s right, the record isn’t going to matter anymore.” 

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” 

“Sorry, I gotta go.” 

“Hold on. You can’t say shit like that and just go—” 

But he’d already hung up.  

I went online and looked up Noah Sol. The first hits were newspaper articles with pictures of him in a robe on the streets of New York. He was really odd looking. Tall as hell. Long, spindly arms and legs and a really big head. It almost looked elongated, like one of those odd-ball pharaohs I’d seen on the Discovery Channel. 

The caption read, “Spaced-out jazzman on NYC walkabout arrested by New York’s finest.” 

The next article was his obituary. Noah Sol had died nine years ago. So who the fuck was Jack jamming with? 

**** 

I called around to the record shops, the ones that still sold LPs and had big jazz collections down in the Village. Some kid told me his boss did a weekly jazz show on public broadcast and probably knew a boat-load about Noah Sol.  

I jumped on the LIRR and an hour later I was in the city and on the subway to Bleeker Street. The record shop was bustling and I asked a portly man with a bad comb-over if he had any Noah Sol. 

“So, you’re the cat that called about the Shepherd? You look a little young, but right on.” 

“The Shepherd?” I asked. 

“Noah Sol. The Cosmic Shepherd. His nickname. And one of his signature songs, from Sixty-two, sorry, sorry Nineteen Sixty One. ‘We tra-vel…the space-ways…’” he crooned in a croaky falsetto. “Sol used to be a straight up be-bop guy, if you can believe it, until he started getting into that fucked up mysticism shit. He was new age before there even was any new age. Music of the Spheres, is what they call it. Pretty far out philosophy. Complicated stuff.” 

“Try me.” 

“Okay, for starters, it was the dominant worldview before the renaissance. As in what everyone believed in as to the nature of everything. The big thing was sacred intervals. Had to do with the space between the planets, and some sort of correlation to the space between everything. You ever see those books where they show telescope pictures of far out galaxies side by side with pictures of cells under microscopes and they look the same?” 

“Nope.” 

“Of course not, you’re some punk-ass kid and this is Nineteen Ninety-nine. Don’t feel bad, I only know ’cause I’m so into the Shepherd. You know I do the jazz show Sundays, midnight to four on WNGO?” 

“The kid told me.” 

“Right on. All right then, check this out.” 

He fumbled through a box of video cassettes under the counter, then went over to the VCR beneath the wall-mounted TV and took out the Sarah McLachlan video and put another in. The screen filled with a full brass orchestra assembled in the Hollywood Bowl. 

Noah Sol stood before them in long, colorful robes and what looked like a cheap foil crown. He conducted, danced, babbled, and played his piano. The players were out of their chairs, some dancing solo, trance-like, and others marching off the stage, and into the crowd. It was wild.  

“You dig it?” 

“Yeah,” I said. “Not what I expected,” I admitted. “But it’s cool.” 

“You into jazz, taking a class, or what?” he asked. 

“Research, honestly. Helping out a friend.” 

“Right on. Okay, okay, here’s one more fucked up thing about him, then. Sol claimed to be working on a song based on the sacred intervals that would bring about the end of the world. The rumor among Music of the Spheres purists is that such an end-all song is possible, but the debate is whether it would lead to the end of the world or a gateway to a new reality.” 

“Is it real?” 

“Stupid question—we’re still here. But he did die before he could complete it, so who knows? Supposedly his old players have resurrected the ensemble and are still working on it. But that’s all bullshit.” 

I wandered out of the store and into the street feeling dazed. It was all bullshit like the guy had said, but I still had a bad feeling. 

I phoned Jack’s place. One of his roommates told me he had left hours earlier with his guitar. Of course. I knew where he was going. I headed towards Tenth. 

**** 

Saint Robinson was a tiny side street right at the base of the Meat Packing district where renovated warehouses, now chic and trendy lounges and eateries, mingled with meat and fish distribution centers. 55 was an old walk-up plastered with faded paper flyers advertising shows and parties with dates long past. I went up the steps and found the front door unlocked and ajar. Then I heard the music. 

A soprano sax played a whispering refrain, like a bird waking up in the dark of night. You could hear the darkness, and the bird singing despite it. Roger. Congas moved the beat beneath, and then I realized dozens of other instruments had joined in, their simple parts together forming a complicated whole. I walked inside. 

The front room was packed with black music stands and folding tables. Notebooks covered the tables. Musical scores. Star charts. All annotated in a wild, flowing scrawl in a language I did not recognize. The music was louder, more layered, but I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. 

I cut through the room and into the kitchen. Two construction workers, who looked like they had just come off work sat at the table, strumming guitars. Their playing was sloppy, but they were intensely focused and didn’t bother to look up at me. As I realized their amateur chops somehow fit into the song, the bad feeling I’d been carrying around began to vibrate like noise through my body. I can’t explain it, but these two amateurs playing sloppy chords was the scariest thing I’d ever heard.  

I backed out of the kitchen and into a hallway off the main room. They never looked up. A trio of girls, NYU students or wanna-bes were high-stepping down the hall banging pots and pans with wooden sticks. An old lady in a cocktail dress grabbed me by the wrists, forcing me to dance with her.  

“Which way do you see it?” she implored. “Infinitely expanding, or someday collapsing back from a lack of force, to just become another super black hole to explode and start again?” 

“What?” 

“The universe! The universe! We’re all tracing the steps of this dance, we just don’t know which one.” 

“Infinitely expanding,” one of the girls said, with tears in her eyes. “I just know it.” 

I saw an open door and stairs leading down at the end of the hall. I broke the old woman’s grasp and dashed down the stairs. 

Batik tapestries covered crumbling brick walls. Brown water stains blended into the crude diagrams of the solar system drawn in black magic marker over the batik’s yellow and orange designs. Light filtered in through dirty cellar windows onto the forty-plus musicians sitting on folding chairs playing their hearts out.  

Jack was there, crammed in between Roger and a trumpet player, strumming his old Ovation with the absent look in his eye I knew so well. The look that told me he’d been struggling to catch the groove and had finally locked in. His shaggy hair was a bit longer and his boyish face covered in stubble, but it was him all right. I loved him like a brother, and musical moments, like the one I knew he was having now, (fleeting glimpses of gentle true spirit, he had once said), were what we lived for. And yet I had come to bring him away. 

A heavy reek of sweat and old guitar strings, spit and valve lubricant oil hung in the air like ozone. I could feel in my bones, as sure as the ringing when Jack and I locked pitch while harmonizing, that something was brewing here, something was being birthed in the music. I wanted to join in, get behind a piano and add the fat syncopated chords that the song was just crying out for. They belonged with Jack’s guitar part which, along with the drum and bass, was weaving a basket, tightly wrapping around the snaking cadences blaring from the mad cacophony of horns.  

Then the player next to Jack trembled and dropped his horn. I saw the whites of his rolled up eyes as he slumped forward. In the seat behind him sat a sax player, dead and rotting, his horn still hanging around his neck. Whatever it was that I had heard in the music was gone. I dashed across the room. Song or no song, I was getting Jack out of here, now. 

I pictured my hand closing around Jack’s wrist. I pictured myself yanking him out of that chair, pulling him across the room, up the stairs and out of this mad place, but I didn’t actually do any of these things. I couldn’t move. 

The music went on. Dust circled like planetary rings. Jack was locked in the groove. The cadences and circling phrases deepened, widened. In my mind’s eye I pictured two serpents entwined in the double helix shape of infinity. The song was calling out for a piano part to bridge all these parts together. 

“Noah Sol, join us,” Roger said, his voice pitched to carry over the music. “Your spirit is in this place.” 

There was an old piano against the wall. I could sit there for a moment. Play a few chords just to see what they sounded like and then I could do whatever it was I had come to do.  

I sat at the bench and stretched my hands across the keys, let them hover there waiting to catch the downbeat, to come in. My hands tingled, like they had been asleep and were now waking up. I thought of Noah Sol, asleep at this very piano, groggily waking up to the jamming refrains of his beloved band. 

My hands were on the keys. A big fat chord, my thumbs grabbing the black keys, augmenting the seconds, filled out the tones with a slight dissonance that rang over the drums. The band had cut to just the percussion, the bass, and me. Then Roger and Jack came back in, trading a soft, fast trill that reminded me of Sacred Spiral. It was powerful. Thrilling. It felt right. It felt like home. Jack smiled. Not at me. To himself, but I knew what he was feeling. I felt the same way. 

My hands moved up and down the keyboard; in my head I was still watching Noah Sol, his hands moving with mine until I was unsure if he were following me or I following him. They were right about the song. There was power here, something real, something alive, and they were very, very close. 

To what, I didn’t know. But I knew in my bones that there was still something missing. Noah Sol knew it too. My playing had brought them closer—I could feel it. I knew it as sure as I knew that rain would fall from the sky, as sure as the cicadas’ summer symphonies would cease come fall. I was far too familiar with the maddening feeling of being so close. Was that why he brought me here? To search with them? Was that what I brought to the equation? 

They were ready for the next movement. I didn’t know where it would lead us. But I wanted to know, so I played on. 

The band came back in hard. Roger and the other sax players stood in their seats, swaying and bopping like in the video. The construction workers had come in from the kitchen. They were pounding on their guitars like drums. The girls from the hallways danced with the conga players. The old woman had some weird three-stringed instrument in her grasp.  

After a few more measures half of the band was on its feet, marching around the room in interweaving orbits. I stayed at the piano. I couldn’t see Jack anymore. I craned my neck and saw a trail of musicians marching up the stairs. The dead guy was on the floor in front of his chair. 

We flung the song outward with all of our intent, and in that instant, I knew what the crying girl had meant. The universe was either going to infinitely expand into the blackness of the void, in an eternal wave of creation, or when we stopped it would finally collapse back onto itself. Which one it would be, I didn’t know. No one knew, but the song, the song was hot on the trail.