by A. Sparrow
For one thing, these people weren’t trained jazzers. If prior experience was any indication, the improvisations would be spacey and self-indulgent, a bunch of hippies glorifying any twang or bleat that emerged from the collective.
At least with jazzers, you had the Real Book to provide a standard melody and chorus, and a foundation of mutually agreed to chord changes. Play the head once through and then go nuts, touching base once a while to tighten the threads. Free could work, but not without some underlying structure and discipline.
She wished she had resisted the urge to play out and used the time instead to take a nap or see a movie. A busy week at Moosewood had worn her down.
Then again, as her mother might have said, it wouldn’t kill her to meet some new people. She was halfway there, might as well see it through.
The sinking sun struck the landscape with a glancing light. Tendrils of mist rose from the hayfield like captive spirits, tails tethered to the earth. Fairy jewels and rain drops glinted on dripping foliage. The storm that spawned them receded over Dryden, growling and flashing its fangs.
After weeks of doldrums, the air felt pure again, but bereft of life, as if winter had exhaled over a late summer landscape. Still, it made inanimate mists dance in the fields.
She turned onto Connecticut Hill Road, crossing some flats and then climbing straight up the side of a steep ridge. This shortcut had looked good on her Thinkpad screen, but the road tapered abruptly into a virtual cow path—cracked and potholed and cordoned with big, old trees. The next road was little better. The deeper she drove into the shadows, the more she questioned the wisdom of her excursion.
She slowed to a roll, wondering if she had made the wrong turn. There were no houses anywhere, only their remains—collapsed chimneys, cellars, rose bushes stranded under pines.
Things improved once she reached the next turn—Summerton road, which had been recently paved and had a reassuring bold yellow stripe down its center, not to mention a sign. Here at least were signs of activity—clear-cuts and dirt heaps, framed houses under construction beyond a fringe of trees.
On the main road, a house popped into view, a strange one, with two wildly contrasting architectural visions grafted to each other—on one side a starkly modern ranch, on the other, a bulbous, wooden-clad thing that bulged out like a tumor. She passed a man pushing a double baby stroller along the shoulder, oddly devoid of babies.
Aerie pulled up and squinted at the mailbox. It indeed bore three eights, so she parked beside the car already occupying the driveway.
The screen door flew open. A man emerged, grinning. He didn’t seem particularly avant garde. He was fortyish, wearing black jeans and a rugby shirt.
Aerie got out of the car, butterflies churning. “Aaron?”
“Aerie, is it? So glad you could make it. Come on in.”
“Sorry, if I’m late.”
“Not at all. We’re just finishing up practice in time for your audition.”
“Audition? I thought this was just a jam.”
“Well … that’s true, for those who don’t pass the audition. You see there’s an opportunity for … well, I’ll explain later.” He crinkled his eyes at her. “My, you’re … shorter than I expected.”
“Is that a problem?”
“Um, no. Just expected someone less petite.”
Aerie bristled. Typical reaction. Why did everyone think that all female bass players had to be Amazons? She lugged her bass up the walk.
“Need help with that?”
“I can manage,” said Aerie.
She followed him inside. A hall split the two halves of the chimerical house. To the left were the living quarters, to the right, a cavernous music room with a loft connecting to the rest of the upstairs. Four other musicians, all quite young, gathered in the center of the room, lounging on a leather sofa and some arm chairs. They tossed glances Aerie’s way, exchanged looks with each other.
The room was littered with objects that were apparently musical instruments, both wind and string but few that Aerie could identify. High ceilings blended with the walls, curving all the way to the floor, clad with bent wooden planks, like the hull of a sailing ship. Blocks of contoured wood crossed the seams like the braces in a guitar. The two skylights were shaped like f-holes.
Aaron’s pocket vibrated. He pulled out a smart phone and peeked at the screen. “My daughter. I’d better get take this. Make yourself at home. There’s some IPA and Riesling in the mini-fridge.” He went back out into the hall.
Aerie found an empty spot to lay down her bass and unzipped the cover. The echoes sounded like a chainsaw. It was uncanny how the structure of the room propagated any little noise. All those flat, reflective surfaces and zero acoustic damping made the place boomier than a church.
The other musicians remained huddled on the other side of the room, but their whispers carried. She could hear almost every word they said, and they were mainly talking about her. She looked up from adjusting her end pin.
“How’s that little peanut expect to play that big old thing?” said one of the guys.
“Sexist.”
“Not cuz she’s a girl. Cuz she’s so small.”
“Staturist!” said the other guy.
“Fuck off, Mal.”
“Maybe we should go and say hi?” said one of the women.
“I don’t know,” said the first guy. “You know what they say on the front lines. Never befriend the new recruits. They’re always the first to fall.”
“Yes, but we are not quite at war, are we Ron?” said a girl with sleek black hair. She had a sophisticated, sub-continental lilt to her voice. Her hair swirled as she vaulted over the back of the sofa and trotted over. “Hello, I am called Sari.”
Aerie, kneeling beside her bass, reached up and took Sari’s soft and elegant hand. This was not a girl who washed dishes or played a string instrument. Aerie couldn’t help staring at her coppery skin, small-pored, even-toned with nary a mole, pimple or scar. She seemed almost superhuman.
The other girl came over. Stockier, with dull brown hair, she made up for in flaws what Sari lacked. Her grey eyes were warm but pitying, like a surgical nurse greeting a patient with a poor prognosis. “Eleni,” she said, her hands rough and callused. “Those fools over there are already placing bets on your demise.”
“Hey! You know we can hear you over here,” said the red haired fellow who had insulted Aerie’s size and femininity. He wore a goat-like tuft on his chin. Tattoos covered one forearm.
“C’mon Ron. Let’s get our asses over there and say, hi,” said the other guy, doughy-faced with black frizzy hair that pointed skyward in natural spikes.”
The two plodded over in their work boots.
“I’m Malachi but you should call me Mal. Only my mom and Sari call me Malachi.” His eyes went blank. “Uh … what’d you say your name was?”
“Aerie.”
“Short for Airhead?” said the tattooed redhead, Ron.
Sari rolled her eyes. “You see what juveniles I have to deal with?”
“Fuck you, Sari. It was just a joke.”
Aerie waved her hand across the strange menagerie of musical instruments that littered the floor: things that looked like eviscerated pianos, twisted harps, plumbing gone awry. “What’s up with all these? Did Aaron build them?”
“Ever hear of Harry Partch?” said Sari.
“Vaguely,” said Aerie.
“Fifties weirdo composer,” said Eleni.
“Genius,” said Mal. “The master of microtones.”
“He used to live in Ithaca,” said Sari. “These things were in a barn in Brooktondale, all broken up. Aaron found out about it and bought them all, outbid an LA museum, rehabilitated them. These are Partch’s failed experiments.”
“Except for that one,” said Mal, pointing to a bulky, trapezoidal box with strings that looked like the offspring of a lyre and a coffin.
“The kithara?” said Eleni.
“That was o
ne of Partch’s successes,” said Sari. “Aaron bought that one outright from a collector. It’s fretted at 43 pitches per octave. Mr. Partch liked it so much, he took it back to LA with him when he moved. You must realize, these instruments are extremely valuable.”
“So is he rich or something?”
“Uh … duh,” said Ron.
“What does he do for a living?”
Ron snickered. Sari’s eyes met Eleni’s.
“There are certain things we don’t speak of here.”
“Especially not with the acoustics as lively as they are,” said Mal, whispering.
“But what about you?” said Sari. “Where are you from?”
“Here,” said Aerie. “I grew up around here.”
“Get out,” said Ron. “A native Ithacan who plays upright bass and Aaron’s just now sussing you out?”
“What do you mean?” said Aerie.
“Anyone within a hundred miles who could pluck a bull fiddle has been up here to audition,” said Mal. “Middle schoolers. Octogenarians, you name it. We had some guys come from Manhattan, Montreal. Beyond.”
“All failed,” said Eleni. “Aaron’s fussy about his bass. Why he didn’t find you earlier—”
“Well I just came back to town … from Tokyo. I haven’t been back here in years.”
“That explains it,” said Sari.
Aerie went over to the kithara and plucked a string. Ten strings rang out in response, sympathetic to the one she plucked. “Wow,” she said. She wandered through the bizarre array. For musical instruments, they were unusually ugly, their curves lacking grace, angles awkward.
One object stood out from the rest. It occupied a table in the center of the room. A wide, clear space surrounded it. It was shaped like a bird cage, cylindrical and domed, sheathed in silky, white cloth. Shelves swarmed with jars filled with colored powders.
“What’s in the cage?” said Aerie.
Ron snickered.
“The birdie, of course,” said Mal.
“Birdie?”
“Don’t ask,” said Eleni.
“It’s not a live bird or a real bird or even a bird bird. It’s just … the birdie,” said Sari.
Aerie reached for the cover.
“Nuh-uh, I wouldn’t touch that if I were you,” said Ron. “Not if you want this gig.”
But her hand was already touching it. Her fingers felt no bars beneath the fabric. Whatever lay beneath was smooth and solid and heavy. She rapped it with her knuckles. It clanked like glass.
“Hey, this isn’t a cage.”
“Get the fuck away from that,” said Ron. “I’m not kidding.”
“But what is it?” said Aerie, stepping back.
“It’s a bell jar,” said Mal.
“Bell jar?”
“Solid glass. See that stop cock coming out of the top?”
What Aerie took for a hanger was actually a valve. “Yeah?”
“He pumps the air out of it. There’s a vacuum inside.”
“Wouldn’t that kill—?”
“Here he comes,” said Eleni.
Out in the hall, Aaron’s voice grew louder. “I’m so glad you called, sweetie. No, not at all. Say hi to your mom. I’ll see you in a couple weeks when I get to Boston.”
Aerie shuffled back to her bass.
Aaron hustled back into the room and picked up his fiddle. “Okay guys, let’s play. Eleni? Man the kithara.”
Chapter 6: The Contract
Aerie had expected the music to bore her. Instead, it filled her with a depth of dread she hadn’t felt since Middle School, when her parents left her alone for the evening at their summer cottage in the Poconos. She had heard grunting in the attic; pacing, scuffling footsteps. Turned out to be porcupines, but how was she to know they weren’t zombies or worse?
The jam started innocuously enough. Aaron tucked his fiddle and played an open D as a reference tone. Mal matched it with a drone from a horn carved from a hollow log. Eleni hammered the strings of the kithara with a pair of mallets. Sari stood still and straight, eyes closed, swaying like a willow in a zephyr, moaning. Ron wandered around the room with an old, cracked Martin Dreadnought, scraping his pick, cricket-like, high up the neck.
Aerie laid down roots where she could find them, sifting through a jungle of melodies that seemed completely unmoored from each other. A spider building a web, Aaron’s fiddle wove connections between them, nudging the proceedings towards the arrhythmic, microtonal and dissonant.
When Sari began to sing—a piercing, haunting wall that would have shamed a banshee—shivers rippled down Aerie’s back. The music converged, pouncing on her vocal like wolves on a lamb, their lines converging, ripping, eviscerating.
The pit of Aerie’s stomach seized. Sweat trickled down her sides. She knew the symptoms. This was a panic attack. She didn’t understand why. It was only music. But what music it was! The soundtrack to the mother of all horror films, a movie to which she was no passive observer but a victim, pursued by unseen and uncanny forces.
Nothing like this had ever happened to her before. She had to fight the urge to lay down her bass and rush outside into the sunlight and open air. She kept at it, adding complexity and chaos to the blend, building a stairway down, down to the depths. The groove kept slipping away from her in the darkness. She got it back by disconnecting her mind from her limbs, letting her fingers go wherever they wanted.
For nearly half an hour, they continued. In the middle of it all, the table holding the bird cage began to shake, legs rattling against the floor. Something buzzed beneath the cover, like a phone set on vibrate. The composition didn’t end as much as it collapsed, leaving Aerie with her arms draped around her bass, panting, trembling.
“Hey, not … bad,” said Aaron, regarding her with a cockeyed grin.
“Birdie didn’t sing,” said Ron.
“Yeah but, considering this is her first time, cold off the street …” said Aaron.
“I heard it hum … a little bit,” said Eleni.
“I thought she did great,” said Mal.
“Indeed. Bravo!” said Sari.
“Everyone but Aerie, huddle up in the kitchen,” said Aaron.
Eleni winked at Aerie as she went by. “We’re a democracy.”
“Don’t worry. You’re a shoo in,” whispered Mal.
They set down their instruments and followed Aaron out of the room.
Aerie tried to make sense of what she had just experienced. She felt unclean, as if she had just date-raped herself. She had never been affected by music quite this way and was quite certain she never wanted to feel this feeling again. She just wanted to go home, open up a bottle of Pinot and veg out on some mindless fluff on TV.
She stowed the end pin and zipped the Juzek back into its raggedy black nylon case. The others were still in the kitchen, chattering excitedly. A flutter and a scratch drew her attention to the bell jar on the cherry table. Something was in that thing. Something alive? But how? She sidled up to the table.
Footsteps clattered down the hall. The others poured back into the room.
“Congratulations,” said Aaron. “You passed the audition.”
“That’s … nice,” said Aerie, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. Her head spun. She felt nauseous.
“So?” said Mal. “You gonna sign?”
“Sign what?”
“There is a contract,” said Aaron. “We have certain rules and it stipulates the compensation.”
“Let me get back to you tomorrow, okay?” said Aerie. “I probably should be going.”
“Hang on,” said Aaron. “At least let me tell you the terms of the deal. First off, there’s a thousand dollar retainer, paid monthly.”
“Retainer?”
“Means you get paid even if we do nothing,” said Ron.
“I know what a retainer is,” said Aerie. “But that’s what lawyers get, not musicians.”
“On top of that, you get a hundred for each rehearsal. Fiv
e hundred for what I call ‘productions’, which happen about once a month, every full moon in fact. It’s like a rehearsal, just longer, more focused, without interruptions.”
“You actually play this stuff … for people?” said Aerie.
“Not exactly,” said Mal.
Eleni chuckled.
“No club would book this crap,” said Ron. “Can you imagine us playing at the Haunt? We’d empty out the place.”
“Then what? Do you record?”
“Never,” said Aaron.
“Then … what’s the point?”
“We make the birdie sing,” said Mal.
“The birdie.” Aerie sighed. “I see.”
“That’s why … we exist,” said Eleni. “To make it sing.”
“So … what do you say?” said Aaron.
Aerie sighed. “That’s a lot of money,” she said. “And you’re all good musicians and all. But … this really isn’t my kind of thing. I mean … it was interesting, but I can’t see myself doing this … regularly.”
“Sleep on it,” said Aaron. “I love the way you play. You have great instincts. Don’t care much for your bass, though. She’s a bit of a dullard. Fine for jazz. Nice, meaty fundamental. I can see how she cuts through the horns. But for this project I’d prefer something with a little more resonance.”
“Well, I used to have a better one.”
“Oh yeah? What make?”
“Prescott.”
“Abraham Prescott? One of those New Hampshire church basses?”
“You know Prescotts?”
“Of course,” said Aaron. “His basses are legendary. Three strings, originally. They accompanied choirs in parishes too poor to have organs. He made cellos too, but his basses are special.”
“I loved mine. Got it cheap too, at an estate sale, because it had an ugly finish. It cleaned up nice though. Busette corners. Attached f-holes. I miss playing it.”
“What happened to it?” said Mal.
“Got smashed by a truck in Denver.”
“You kept it, I hope.”
“Well, yeah. I have the pieces in a sack. I couldn’t bear just to toss them in a dumpster.”
“Are you crazy? You could have had it restored.”
“I don’t think so. It really got crunched.”