by John A. Karr
A hollow version of the man Arthur Zaslo had been eight hours earlier — might as well call it eight years earlier — powered down the laptop docking station and the linked flat panels. No more figures or characters to manipulate, no more windows to double-click open and minimize and finally, at the end of the day, gratefully close. Monitors fell dark as midnight. No longer did a flat unseen arm access the hard drive for input and output. The hum of the tiny fan, noticeable only when the office was void of human activity, fell silent. The final click of the laptop made him wince.
Dead computer.
Not the only lifeless thing around here, Arthur decided.
Friday night. Jam night in the old days. Post work-week stupor in front of the tube now.
A sliver of remembered inspiration pierced faded hopes. Arthur placed his hands on the strip of laptop cover that jutted beneath the docking station shelf. Warm. He arched his fingers and raised his wrists like proper players do at the keyboards. Digits rose and fell as he ‘played’ the chord of a tune — a past jazz great that used to snatch him from the real world and transport him to the Mellifluous Realm at the speed of thought. He carried on a while, longer than he had intended, until reality stole him back.
His efforts waned. Fingertips pressed flatly, uncertain of their purpose … finally halted altogether. He paused and tilted his head, strained to recall the remnants of the fading tune.
Gone.
He blinked a few times. What did he think he was doing, anyway? His hands slid back to the cold hard desk. Probably for the best. No doubt he had looked ridiculous, particularly in a joint like this, a honeycomb of corporate cubicles. Not that there was anyone around to see.
He walked stiff-legged through a dim lobby new enough to smell of carpet and glue. Another day, another flip of the Jazz Greats Daily calendar. Today had belonged to Dizzy Gillespie, dark-rimmed glasses, massive cheeks fully inflated, signature forty-five degree upswept trumpet. Friday. Another week, slow to get through, now vanished. Another five-day stretch of trend-analysis, past performance profiles and quarterly forecasts while trudging through a minefield of lowered expectations, cover-your-ass job justification and office politics.
His mind was getting crowded again. An image kept firing off: a jack-rabbit munching grass in a meadow as winged shadows pass overhead. How many times can you duck and dodge before you guess wrong? Took him too long after the last breakdown to work his way back to a regular paycheck. Insanity? Maybe. Incapacitation, certainly.
The upcoming workout would settle his nerves, but where would he find something more than mere relief at displacing the mental staleness of the office? And, as a follow-up, where was it written that a middle-aged guy had to surrender the creativity and spontaneity that had been a mainstay in his younger days?
Wasn’t written anywhere. It just happened.
The urge to play the keyboards had been compelling enough to grind past the disappointments of the first post-college decade. He could morph weekend band-guy into business hours corporate-guy while also maintaining a good marriage.
The first two were always at odds, but Annette almost always came to see him play. Annie liked seeing him enjoy himself, and wanted that big break to happen as much as he did. Maybe more.
But the bands and trios eventually split up, and the thought of forming new ones grew less and less appealing. Arthur soloed at various bars but it was just a smooth background drone with some jumpier stuff introduced closer to midnight. Didn’t take long before he lost the urge to serve as mere auditory backdrop to diners. Soon he didn’t call the managers for more bookings. He retreated. Played only on the upright in his modest house. Tried to write a few tunes of his own. They weren’t bad, just uninspired. Then he walked past the ivories more and more, finding other things to do around the house. He cried out in protest when Annette suggested perhaps they should move it to storage since he played so rarely.
The music had lifted his spirits, beat back the doldrums, made the world flow.
Realm of the Mellifluous, he explained to Annette. Playing music created a deep satisfaction vibe that tamed a small part of the world. It sent the petty stuff packing and laid him back for a little while. Very cool mellow.
But bills don’t get paid from a heightened sense of contentment. He envied musicians who could make a living at it. Obviously he didn’t have what it took to be one of them — but hold on. That was harsh. Maybe not even true. He had talent. Just didn’t have time to wait for that big break. Hell, he’d be glad for just a modest crack at the jazz scene. Let his recordings sell regionally. National would come afterward and if not, at least he could live with the fact that he’d gotten a legit shot. Annette had her own profession and offered to support both of them. Thing was, he didn’t enjoy contributing only token amounts to the household. Couldn’t let Annie bear the burden all on her own.
Hence the day job.
Lacking though it could be, it wasn’t all bad. Interestingly, he could at times find a rhythm in the data. Sometimes enough to carry him through the work day. Data came to him in bulk or channeled from numerous outlets, and he sliced and diced it with new Excel formulas that became routine too quickly. But that’s what the business world wanted. That’s what got him paid — most of the time — over the last twelve years. Except for those occasions when the resume of a financial analyst with a habit of jumping from gig to gig didn’t float to the top of the electronic slush pile.
He pushed through the doors and took a deep breath as he followed the concrete path through the manicured landscape to the parking lot. Dark. Winter’s early dark. Makes a body want to stay inside and not do anything. Another reason for a workout … too much sitting. Humans weren’t made to sit all day. Hell, he used to get tired of the piano stool and do a jazz man’s impression of Jerry Lee Lewis’ Boogie-Woogie.
At least the car started without too much protest. He let it warm up a minute before setting in motion for the twenty-five mile commute home. Traffic light showered him in green. With a press of the gas pedal a traffic vein absorbed him, carried him along, spilled him into the artery that led home.
Like so much arterial plaque, traffic ran thick and ugly on the freeway. A bit of a surprise there since it was normally late enough to avoid such aggravations. All three eastbound lanes slowed to a crawl, then went faster, then slowed again. Brakes lights glared on and off in a constant barrage. Powerful headlights flooded his vehicle with glare from behind. Bad enough, worse was when he couldn’t see their headlights in the rearview anymore because they were inches from his bumper at speeds ranging from twenty-five to seventy miles per hour. Fools. Must think accidents only happen to other people.
He brake-tapped to get the latest bumper-lover off his tail, then shifted in his seat. Irritation played like sandpaper on the flesh beneath his collar.
On a whim he scanned through the radio channels. Picked up some sounds off the deep end of the spectrum. Didn’t recognize the station id on his read-out; probably one of the local universities not chained to a corporate play list. Notes flew to him. A tune from long ago. He cocked his head. Loooong ago.
What were the chances …? First at the work station and now the real deal.
Take Five.
Freak coincidences like this made his arm hairs stand up.
Distinctive snare and bass drum lead-in, with hits to the cymbal. Joe Morello. Clean hits, perfect rhythm.
Light and jumpy piano chords from Dave Brubeck merged with the drum rhythm. A twinge from the fringe. Some part of Arthur’s repressed soul stirred. Took notice. Levitated with amazing speed and began to expand and writhe.
Bahn-ahm bahn-ahm bahn-ahmmm. Bahn-ahm bahn-ahm bahn-ahmmm …
Eugene Wright on bass, filling in, readying the scene for the lead man.
Hey, yeah.
Rising. Look … rising already. The lightness of being?
There. Sinewy alto-sax from Paul Desmond. Climbing. Snaking snaked back and forth and up and down.
Yeah.
Back bass. Drums keeping time, fading and fronting between the solos.
Arthur’s head bobbed slightly with the rhythm. His gaze skimmed the bumper ahead and the stream of red lights flowing for miles eastward.
Man, yeah ….
In discord with the smooth music, traffic ran raw and fast now. All the way to seventy miles per. These thousands of drivers of hurtling vessels, compact tons of metal and glass and volatile fuel ready to ignite, all running on tight rubber sacks filled with air, all depending on brake pads and worse, human reaction to keep them alive. Tight and narrow and he navigated it every damn work day with repressed anger and fear but what’s a commuter to do. Can’t stay at home and earn money unless you’re lucky. Arthur was anything but lucky.
Except right now.
Right now he had Take Five. Jazz played through him like he was wired for it again. All up and down his nerve circuitry.
Paul’s saxophone notes fluttered around him like musical butterflies. The piano moved the ensemble on, provided a stream upon which it all flowed. Then did some crazy solo stuff that he hadn’t heard in the recording before … maybe his mind was improvising.
Bahn-ahm bahn-ahm bahn-ahmmm. Bahn-ahm bahn-ahm bahn-ahmmm. Bahn-ahm bahn-ahm bahn-ahmmm …
The screech of brakes from a nearby vehicle attempted to rip through his bubble of peace then was squelched, compartmentalized and relegated to a distant place. Arthur heard a little of it; it sounded small and the tune thwarted most of it, or his focus on the tune did.
Ladies and gentlemen, he thought, for the first time in years Artie Zaslo is on auto-pilot and journeying through the Mellifluous Realm.
No big deal about the claustrophobic traffic. No big deal about the back end of the pick-up with the dim brake lights and smoking back tires and growing in size way too fast. Arthur slowed in time. Adequate pressure on the brake, like the foot pedals of a piano. Firm. Don’t want to slam them down. No problem.
A bump from behind made him lurch. A flash of pain in his neck just as Take Five sealed him from the rush of the rat race around him.
Images played in strobe. He figured he must be blinking a lot. The rusted back-end of the pick-up loomed impossibly close, shuddered, then lurched away with a crumpled bumper. Spray of headlight glass shot to the side. Weird, but Arthur was cool and the tune had him grooving …
Silver moon showered light through his sunroof. Turned the skin of his hands and face into something fantastic. Pleasantly eerie.
A long green sign stretched halfway over the highway. He’d passed under it a thousands of times. But now, up there, a silhouette strode from one side to the other. A guy in a black suit and black tie and carrying something impossibly shiny strode along the access grate … getting plastered by the up-angled lights. He and his shadow eased across the long green sign with its boring white letters proclaiming Leesville Road.
The crease between Arthur’s brows went slack. His jaw dropped. He searched short-term memory for a playback, even as he hummed the Brubeck chords, then improvised a bit while the sax worked its notes up and down, back and forth.
Something crashed behind him. Made him wince despite the cool sounds flooding his senses. He almost drifted off.
Smoke around him. Traffic halted before he realized it. The distant wail of sirens cut through the melody so he turned the radio up louder. Had to be a crash somewhere; probably a bad one with all this stoppage. Not just another case of the Temporary Unknown Slowdowns.
That shadow drifted over the face of the green sign, toward the housing community off to the side. Off Leesville Road. On a whim Arthur searched for somebody cutting through the short pines on the shoulder to the houses. Didn’t see anyone. That glimpse of somebody striding like it was nothin’ on the exit sign grate had to be the product of one bored, middle-aged dude’s imagination.
He blinked at a row of houses, had trouble getting them into focus.
Wait.
There. The same dude in a dark suit, only now the suit shimmered with moonlight on the shoulders and arms and shoes.
On the roof.
A frost-covered roof.
Blowing into a gleaming silver saxophone.
Given the angle of the structure, he should have slid to a painful conclusion. A blink of Arthur’s eyes revealed two more figures. A guy on the simple snare, bass drum and cymbal combo, and a bass player. All three should have gone tumbling some thirty feet to the ground. Instead they stood on the roof, playing their instruments like they were on stage at the Raleigh Memorial Auditorium.
Playing Take Five.
Not your normal hallucination, Arthur decided.
The windshield spider-webbed into a million threads. Arthur found this irritating, as it blocked his view. His seat belt held but his head whipped forward and back with the impact with the stopped pickup in front him while the car behind that had bumped him into the truck and now tried to swerve and instead clipped Arthur’s fender, sending his Focus spinning.
Except he wasn’t in the car anymore.
He stood at a downspout of the residential home, looking up two stories to the V-shaped roof. The guy stood there, playing the sax softer now but still carried the basic ingredients of Take Five.
A hand freed up while still playing. Now a grin. The show off …! The free hand waved Arthur up.
“How?”
Another wave.
He looked around for a ladder, put a hand on the downspout and felt himself pull before he realized it … climbing the downspout like it wasn’t nothin’. Like he was Spider Man or something. A palm on the first shingles beyond the gutter was all it took. Before he knew it he was hoisting frame on the roof, all in one smooth motion, like he was climbing a simple chain link fence of his youth.
“This is crazy, man!” he said to the piper that was Paul Desmond.
Desmond had died in 1977.
Paul withdrew the mouthpiece and the sax somehow kept playing, albeit a more restrained set of notes, like background. He indicated the highway with a somber face. “Come on and jam, Artie.”
Artie. That’s what he used to go by when he was still a player.
The other guys on the roof called to him as well.
Over on 540, a snarl of traffic. Two different crash sites. Fire engines, cops, an ambulance, all with crazy lights flashing. Not much sound, though. Arthur was grateful for that.
When he looked back at Paul, there was an upright piano balancing on the apex of the roof, air on both sides, contact with the roof of about an inch or so. But it didn’t move, like it was rooted to blocks of granite.
“What about Dave?” Arthur said, looking around. “Brubeck owns the keyboard on this classic.”
“Dave’s not here yet, man. You go ahead.”
Paul started to put some new wind into the sax, and accompanying notes begged to be released from the piano beside him. With strange, airy steps he moved over to it, fingers already in position. Stand and play. Feet on other side of the roof ridge but not touching the frosted shingles.
The quartet played and played, improvised and backed off time and again to allow each man to solo twice. For what must have been an hour they jammed. Arthur, with Paul Desmond, Joe Morello and Eugene Write … all dead, up on a residential roof off the highway.
He wondered that the gawkers of the accident didn’t look up and notice them, jamming on the roof in the moonlight — but he didn’t really care.
He was here, these guys were here, and they were jamming.
Finally the music drifted into progressively softer tones.
It was sad, but cool. You can’t play forever. Get exhausted.
Paul grinned, and with the sax balanced across his chest, bowed to his piano player. “Thanks, AZ. Was a gas, man.”
Arthur bowed back at Paul and the others, stepped back from the upright. “Wild, man. Just full-out wild! Let’s keep her going.”
“Nah, man. Not right yet.”
“We’ve got to stop?”
“For now, but not forever, man. You keep with it … play to the pines in the backyard if you have to. That way you’re ready when your chance comes.”
“Think you’ll come around?”
“It’d be cool to step in now and then, man, but it won’t be for a while.”
“Yeah, it would be cool … not for a while? This was good stuff, guys, good stuff.” Arthur cast a wary glance to the traffic accident, where sparks flew from where a fireman with a circular saw cut through twisted metal. He stepped aside and white-jacketed EMT guys moved in. They carefully pulled someone from the twisted hull of a small sedan that could have passed for his own vehicle. Guy’s shirt was bloody. As was his nose. “What do you say we jam just a little longer?”
“Not this time, man. You’re wanted. A wanted man, dude.”
“By whom?”
“Some honey in the ICU.”
“ICU has terrible acoustics. A terrible place to jam.”
Paul smiled sadly. “We’ll pick back up again when the time comes. How about it?”
“Yeah, all right.”
The other guys nodded
The glittering rooftop beneath the moon and stars melted into the florescent glare of a hospital room with nurses and doctors and one familiar face brimming with tears.
“Arthur! I was so worried …” Annette said. Tears fell from her puffed eyes and onto her red cheeks. His wife of twenty-five years. With him here at the hospital. Made his heart ache, seeing her cry.
“Hey, hey … it’s … it’s okay.”
“It is not ok, Arthur Zaslo! This is Intensive Care. They don’t bring people here unless it’s not okay.” She squeezed his hand
“Weird being here. I was … just jamming.”
“You mean on the radio?”
“Naw, with the guys from the Dave Brubeck Quartet. We took Take Five and extended out like an hour, man.”
“They said it took them that long to get you out of the car.”
“Don’t know ‘bout that. Just that we kept jamming up there on the roof under the moon.”
Now she really bawled. “You love that song. Did you get carried away, Arthur? Not pay attention?”
“Just jammed on the rooftop with the dudes. Except … not Dave himself. He wasn’t there. I stood in for him. Funny he wasn’t there, unless … ” Arthur looked up over the patient at the opposite wall, over the oxygen hook-ups and IV bags. “He’s alive. He’s the only surviving member of the original quartet. That’s why they said I couldn’t join in for a while. I was going to live through the crash.”
“Arthur, you took a hard hit. They said you might be delirious.”
He focused on his pretty wife and smiled. “Don’t worry, Annie. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Annie!” she laughed, through her tears. “You haven’t called me that in years. Not since you stopped playing. God, Arthur, you look so horrible!”
“Well, thanks, babe.” He laughed and it hurt and felt good at the same time. “Annie and Artie … like we’re teens with a crush on each other, you know?”
She kissed him gently on the cheek that wasn’t swollen. He started humming and she dabbed her eyes with a tissue and sniffled.
“Hey, don’t be sad. Take Five, babe.” He raised his hands and pressed imaginary keys that were real enough for him. Bahn-ahm bahn-ahm bahn-ahmmm.
“I was afraid you were leaving me,” she whispered. “They didn’t know …”
“How could I leave my number one fan? I was jut shrugging off my shadowed self, is all.”
Fresh tears as he squeezed her hand.
“Annie, I’m gonna write some new songs. Play ‘em in some clubs again.”
She eyed the bandage circling her husband’s head. His leg cast and cable restraint.
“Oh yeah,” he assured her, smiling crookedly and humming again.
About the Author
Fiction writing each day helps keep the demons at bay. October, 2001 saw the publication of John A. Karr’s novel, Dark Resurrection (small press). Samhain Publishing, LLC has released new electronic and print versions (October 2007). Asylett Press is scheduled to publish his medical thriller, Hippocrates Shattered. Short stories have been published on webzines, including the current issue of Allegory . Raleigh, North Carolina, is home. It’s also where he day-jobs as an IT Analyst and does his best to balance family life with his need to write. Other works are in the marketing queue, and the first volume of the RHONE series (heroic fantasy) is complete. Currently he is working on a mystery with paranormal leanings.
©2009 John A. Karr
