Planet on the Table

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “Weary Blues” ended and again the applause was triple forte. I stepped over to Hook and shouted, under my breath, “Let’s do ‘I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plans.’ ” He couldn’t hear me, so I said it louder and the mikes caught me, “ ‘I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plans.’” I announced. There was a long flurry of laughter from the audience. Hook started the intro to “Plans,” as calm as though he were playing to a crowded bar. We slid into the song and I realized how much easier it is to play fast when you’re nervous. Hook was doing fine, but his backup was trembling, barely hitting the chords. With the leisure of playing accompaniment I could look up and see the silver line of boxes that held our judges, hanging high above us; and that didn’t help either.

  We moved quickly into “That’s a Plenty,” and I could tell we’d calmed down enough to think about the music; after your body pumps full of adrenaline, soaks you in sweat, and shakes you like the ague, there’s not much more it can do, you’ve got to calm down some; but that maybe wasn’t helping us, since now we had to make the music ourselves, rather than leave it to instinct. I was still shaky enough that when I got to the triple-tonguing in the trumpet break, it actually seemed slow to me, and next time around I fitted in another note, hammering them with two double-tongues. This seemed to perk up the band (“Put chills down my spine,” the kid said later), but we still sounded ragged; I knew if we continued like this we were in trouble. And Sidney was still missing phrases. I don’t think I’d ever heard him miss more than a note or two in my whole life, and here he was squeaking through bars at a time, playing like he had a crimp on his throat.

  When we finished the kid waved me over to him. He raised a hand in the air and lowered it, which was apparently the signal needed to get the mike men off us. The kid was completely relaxed. He looked like he was having a good time.

  “Your clarinet player is dying,” he said. “Does he know ‘Burgundy Street Blues’?”

  “Sure,” I said,

  “Maybe you should have him play that. If he had to play a song by himself he’d be sure to calm down some.”

  I turned around. “Sidney, you ready to play ‘Burgundy Street’?”

  He shook his head vehemently.

  “Come on, Sidney,” Hook said from beside him. “That’s your song.” He turned to the audience, and the kid quickly lifted a hand, “ ‘The Burgundy Street Blues,’ ” Hook announced.

  Now “Burgundy Street,” like “Just a Closer Walk With Thee” or “Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” is a single-strain tune, just an eight-bar melody; and it’s the variations that a clarinet player works in as he repeats it, again and again, that make the song something special. The first couple of times Sidney went through it, I could barely hear him. He was playing the melody, as simple as possible, and the sound he was making was more breath than tone. I didn’t think he’d finish. He shifted toward us as if he wanted to turn his back on the audience, but Hook threw in a couple bars of harmony to bolster him, and when he started the strain a third time he took hold of himself and bore down; and that time, though the notes quivered and never got over pianissimo, he could be heard.

  The kid was hopping up and down beside me as if he couldn’t wait to start playing again. “Damn that man plays fine clarinet,” he whispered to me. Suddenly I realized that if you didn’t know Sidney you might think he was playing warbly on purpose, in which case it sounded all right. Apparently this occurred to Sidney too. Each time around he played a little louder, tried a few more variations, gathered a little more confidence. The fifth time around he usually played a variation filled with chromatic runs; he went ahead and tried them, and they came out sharp and well articulated. Amplified like he was, he could hear as clearly as anyone how good he sounded—he was learning what I’d already discovered, that even though you’re scared, the notes come out. He began to take advantage of the new acoustics, building up till he filled the auditorium with sound, then dropping back so fast the mike men were lost, and he was as silent as piano keys pushed down.

  And as he went on, I could see him begin to forget his surroundings and become what he was, a musician working on the song, putting together phrases, playing with the sounds he could make. His forehead wrinkled and smoothed as he carved an especially difficult passage; he closed his eyes, and the notes took on a life that hadn’t been there before. He was lost in it now, completely lost in it, and the last time around he bent the notes like only a fine clarinet player can bend them, soaring them out into the cavern; a sound human and inhuman, music.

  When he was done everyone was clapping, even me, and I realized that I had only thought the earlier applause was loud because I’d never heard that many people clap at once before. Now it was louder than when a ship takes off over a tunnel you’re in…

  We played “Panama” next, and the difference was hard to believe. Sidney was back in form, winding about the upper registers with quick-fingered ingenuity, and as he pulled together so did the band. And the kid, as if he’d only been waiting for Sidney, began to let loose. He’d abandoned his steady oomph-oomph-oomph-oomph and was sliding up and down the bass clef, playing like a fourth member of the front line, and leading the tempo. Normally I set the tempo, and Crazy and Washboard listen to me and pick it up. But the kid wasn’t paying any attention to me; his notes were hitting just a touch ahead of mine, and if there’s anyone who can take the tempo away from the trumpet it’s the tuba. I tried to play as fast as him but he kept ahead; by the time he let Washboard and me catch up with him we were playing “Panama” faster than we’d ever played it, and excited as we were, we were equal to it. When we finished, the applause seemed to push us to the back of the stage.

  We played the “St. Louis Blues,” and then the “Milenburg Joys,” and then “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and each time the kid took over, pumping wildly away at the tuba, and pushed us to our limit. Sidney responded like that was the way he’d always wanted to play, arching high wails between phrases and helping the kid to drive us on. And the audience was with us! Maybe the earlier groups had been too modern, maybe too many of them had been playing to the judges; whatever the reason, the audience was with us now. An hour ago none of them had even heard of Dixieland jazz, and now they were cheering after the solos and clapping in the choruses; and we had to start “Sweet Georgia Brown” by playing through the applause.

  Then we were set for the finale. “For all of you music lovers in the house,” I said, knowing they wouldn’t get the reference to Satchmo but saying it anyway, “we going to beat out ‘The Muskrat Ramble.’ ”

  “The Muskrat Ramble.” Our best song, maybe the best song. We started up the “Ramble” and the band fell together and meshed like parts of a beautiful machine. All those years of playing in those bars: all the years of getting off work and going down and playing tired, playing with nobody listening but us, playing with nothing to keep us going but the music; all that came from inside us now, in a magic combination of fear, and anger, and the wild exhilaration of knowing we were the best there was at what we were doing. Hook was looping his part below me, Sidney leaping about above, the kid pushing us every note; and to keep up with the weave we were making I had to play hard and fast right down the middle of the song, lifting and growling and breaking my notes off, showing them all that there was a man working behind that horn, blowing as clear and sharp and excited as old Dipper-mouth Satchel-mouth Satchmo Louie Louis Daniel Armstrong himself. When we played the final round of the refrain everyone played their solo at once, only Fingers and Washboard held us down at all, and the old “Muskrat Ramble” lifted up and played itself, carrying us along as if it made us and not the other way around. Hook played the trombone coda and we tagged it; then the kid surprised us and repeated the coda, and we barely got our horns back up to tag it again, then we all played the coda and popped it solid, the end.

  I motioned the band off, We were done; there was no way we could top that. We started for the wings and the roar of the audience soared up to a goo
seflesh howl. We hurried off, waving our arms and shouting as loud as anyone there, jumping up and down and slapping each other on the back, chased by a wall of sound that shook the building.

  We waited; tired, happy, tense, we waited:

  And God damn me if we didn’t win one of those grants, a four-year tour of the Solar System; oh, we leaped about that waiting room and shouted and hit each other; Fingers and Washboard marched about singing and smashing out rhythms on the walls and furniture; Hook stood on a table and sprayed champagne on us; the kid rolled on the floor and laughed and laughed, “Now you’re in for it.” he choked out, “you’re in for it now!” but we didn’t know what he meant then, we just poured champagne on his head and laughed at him, even old Sidney was jumping up and down, wisps of hair flying over his ears, singing (I’d never heard him sing) a scat solo he was making up as he went along, shouting it out while tears and champagne ran down his face:

  “bo bo de zed,

  we leaving the tunnels!

  woppity bip,

  we going to see Earth!

  yes we (la da de dip)

  going (ze be de be dop)

  home!”

  —1975

  om Finn got on the Greyhound bus intending never to get off. He had purchased a month pass in Chicago and gotten on bus 782. He planned to take the southern route to California, go up the Pacific coast, back to the Great Lakes, and on to New England. Or wherever. When he bought the next pass he would think about it.

  In the bus it was cool. The air from the vent played on his arm. All the windows except the windshield were tinted dark green, polarizing the light and reducing the outside world to a wash of grays. Tom liked it that way.

  They stopped in the run-down parts of towns where the bus depots were, to change passengers and eat meals. Joplin, Missouri; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Amarillo, Texas, Half an hour for lunch, an hour for dinner. He fell into the routine with relief.

  He got on a New York-to-Los Angeles bus, and a group of passengers stayed on it for two or three days. He watched them as they lived their lives on the bus, talking and getting to know each other. Finn never introduced himself to anyone, or talked. At night people slumped in their seats, unselfconsciously sleeping. Some kept on their little overhead lights and talked all night long. Tom Finn could not sleep in a sitting position, so at night he unobtrusively crawled under his seat and slept curled on the floor, using his tennis shoes for a pillow. It was comfortable enough. In the mornings he scrambled up onto his seat and stared back at the few bleary-eyed strangers who were awake at dawn. A thin-faced young black man. A girl with stringy hair and dirty clothes. An old couple. The poor, in all their variety… Then back to the little toilet room, which grew more fetid by the hour.

  As they crossed New Mexico he looked out at the parched gray land, dozed, observed the occupants of the seat ahead of him. A fat young woman struggled vainly to control her four sons, slapping them and threatening them with worse. The boys—aged eight, seven, four, and one, Finn guessed—ignored her, except for the infant, who cried or slept or sucked a bottle. The mother had scarcely slept in the three days Finn had sat behind her. He watched the oldest son, who tormented the four-year-old incessantly, and wondered if the boy was naturally evil or if his meanness was the result of his upbringing. Naturally evil?... The boy would grow up to be a runaway, he thought. Finn was a runaway.

  That evening the bus pulled off Highway 8, in the south Arizona desert, for a dinner stop. The offramp circled down to a road that stretched off into the desert to the north and extended to the south no farther than a small group of buildings just off the freeway. Approaching the group of buildings, Tom read a sign: DATELAND RESTAURANT, POST OFFICE, AND CURIO SHOP.

  He joined the file of people getting off the bus. “One hour, now,” the bus driver said. Although it was nearly dusk the air was still hot and dry. Finn walked across the gravel parking lot to the door of the café. There were two middle-aged men sitting at the counter. All the booths were empty. The waitresses were talking to each other. Tom saw that it was yet another restaurant that could not survive without its Greyhound concession. He sat in one of the booths, and a waitress took his order. He ordered a hamburger, fries, and a Coke. While he waited he flipped through the selections listed in his table jukebox console. Country-western, old rock and roll, songs in Spanish. Behind him sat the mother and her four boys. “Stop that. Stop that or I’ll hit you in front of everybody.” When his food came he ate quickly, paid his bill and left.

  The main building was in the shape of an L; the long side was the café, the short side was the curio shop. Finn walked over to the curio shop, thinking to get out of the heat. Beside the door was a thermometer in an old tin Coca-Cola sign. It read 104 degrees. He went into the shop.

  Quite a few people from the bus were already there, wandering about. Tom did the same. The curio shop offered for sale string ties with clasps made of clear plastic that held embalmed scorpions; cactus-growing kits; postcards with pictures of donkeys and cactus flowers and Jackalopes; turquoise rings, the turquoise white and cracked; candy in yellowed cellophane; and stone eggs. Everything in the shop had obviously been there for years and years; all those chill air-conditioned days and long hot nights had desiccated every item. No one from the bus was buying anything. The cashier stared out the window. It reminded Finn of things he could not afford to think of, and feeling that he might scream, or start to cry, he left the shop.

  The heat outside relaxed him. The sun was about to set. Behind Dateland there was an old road leading off over a hill to the east. Finn began to walk on it. He was fascinated by the thin roads, asphalt or gravel or dirt, that crisscrossed the great American desert. He had seen a lot of them from the bus. Who had built them, and when? It was easy to imagine Interstate 8 being built: hundreds of men, huge yellow bull dozers and earthmovers, a whole community, moving along through the desert and excreting the highway behind it. But what about these little roads, stretching from nowhere to nowhere under the broiling sun? Finn couldn’t imagine their construction. He stared down at the faded, cracked asphalt as he walked. Sand silted over the edges of the road. It could have been built a thousand years. ago. These are the ruins of the twentieth century, he thought. Already here.

  The road ended in a settlement of foundations. Rectangles of cement, half covered by sand, with fixture pipes rusting through at one corner of each foundation. The sun was below the hill now, and the settlement was in shadow. It was still very hot. Firm walked around the area, looking at the cement and the dry grass that had overgrown it and died. Wind gusted through the shadows, rustling the grass. In the east the sky was a deep blue.

  Eventually he sat down on a concrete block and let the desert fill him. Occasionally the faint diesel roar of a truck wafted over from the interstate to the north. In the western sky the evening star appeared. This was his life, Tom Finn thought, this desert, this community in ruins before it had ever been occupied… Through his tears it seemed the homes that somebody had planned to put there did indeed stand, as clear glass houses that revealed everything about their owners, brittle things that could be shattered with a blink of the eye. And each blink brought the houses crashing to the ground, and the faint stars with them so that they should have been great pyres burning around him on the desert floor.

  Then the evening star dropped like a stone over the western horizon, and it didn’t come back no matter how hard Finn blinked. As if it had been a meteor. Just a shooting star, Finn thought. But fear rustled through him like the wind, and he got up and walked quickly back over the old abandoned road. Something had happened…

  From the hill he could see the back of Dateland. The parking lot was empty. Finn cursed out loud. He had missed the bus! Sitting out there thinking about his mess of a life he had missed his bus. He hurried down the hill, cursing still. He would have to wait in that café for the next bus, and call ahead to get the Greyhound people to recover his suitcase. Damn it! Hadn’t the bus driver counted his passen
gers? Had no one noticed his absence?

  But when he got to the building, he forgot his anger.

  Dateland was empty. Boarded up, faded, sand-drifted, empty.

  The sun had been down for a while now, and Finn found himself shivering. Absently he walked over to look at the thermometer by the curio-shop door; it was broken. He turned the doorknob and pushed the door in; a gust of wind pulled it out of his hand, and it hit the counter inside with a wooden thwack. Finn stuck his head in the door and looked around, afraid to enter. Everything in the curio shop was the same, except dustier. A handful of Jackalope postcards tumbled to the floor, caught by the wind, and Finn jumped back with his heart racing.

  It took all his courage to open the door to the café. It too was deserted. Parts of it had been removed: the jukeboxes, the kitchen fixtures, the drink machines. The vinyl booth seats were cracked like dried mud. Overcome by sudden terror, Finn rushed out of the café to the safety of the gravel parking lot. But it was getting dark; the vast network of stars revealed itself; Dateland stood behind him dark and empty, like a house in a child’s nightmare. He shivered uncontrollably. The dry wind made little noises against the building. A loose plank somewhere slapped woodenly a few times. He was afraid. “What’s going on here?” he cried out miserably. No answer but wind.