The Night Marchers and Other Strange Tales

by Daniel Braum

  “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.

  I kept playing. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, the last of the musicians were disappearing up the stairs. My cadences slowed. I rang out fat chords, and with each of them I thought of something true. My first love. My parents. My brother. My newborn niece. Jack. The girl from the music store I wanted to make it with so badly. These things were true. These things were expanding, racing into the future. I kept playing, letting each chord ring out until it was no more, then replaced it with another. Noah Sol watched, then too he was gone and I was left with the fading sustain of my last chord and the settling dust in the last of the sunlight.

  When I stopped I was alone with a dead guy in an abandoned building. I felt I had done something, but wasn’t sure what. Some decision had been made but I wasn’t sure what, or even what all the choices had been.

  ****

  The next night I received a call from Jack.

  “I’m going to Jupiter,” he said. “I want you to come.”

  I just listened, didn’t say a thing. He knew my answer was no.

  “I’m going to be okay,” he said. “Maybe after Jupiter it will be a new galaxy.”

  “Why don’t you stop by before you go?” I asked.

  “I can’t, dude. That’s why I’m calling. Got to go.”

  And that was the last I ever heard from him. The world didn’t end. Obviously. I wouldn’t be writing this. Part of me hoped Jack would turn up a few months later, living with his sister in North Carolina, or with some fling of the month in Jersey City or Amsterdam, all of which had happened before.

  But it’s been six years. I don’t think I’ll ever see him again.

  I finished the CD. It’s cool. Not what I envisioned. So be it. But I think of Noah Sol’s song all the time. I hear it in everything. Everywhere. In the dark of night when Jupiter is shining and especially on late August afternoons, when the cicadas are singing and I go in the basement to continue my endless tinkering with that old guitar I never got to give to Jack.

  HURRICANE SANDRINE

  Like a spirit given substance, the gentle humidity of the Caribbean air touched everything, creating an unseen bond, as certain as breath, between the creeping growth crowding the runway, the locals hustling a living, and the mockingbirds scavenging near the taxi stand.

  Steven tramped down the metal stairs pressed against the side of the plane. Walking to the terminal with the other passengers, he opened the top button of his short-sleeved white shirt. The sun’s heat on his exposed neck made him more aware of his body and the elemental nature of the Caribbean, even in the airport in the heart of Belize City.

  Vacationers filed by as he entered the terminal, their forgettable faces bronzed by the touch of the sun. Relaxed and courteous, they waited in line to return to the States, where more likely than not their newly found Caribbean goodwill would fade with their tan. Seeing these people so full of this spirit emphasized the emptiness in his bones. He yearned to be filled, to feel the completeness, the optimism, he knew when Elise was still alive. Here, in Belize, it seemed the elements were trying to find their way in to fill that void. The sun sought to burn his skin, the air to fill his lungs.

  In his mind’s eye he pictured Elise on the beach, her dark hair streaming in the wind. Six months ago they were together, sharing a carefree day on the Malibu coast. He couldn’t shake the image of her hair spread out almost the same way as when they pulled her, lifeless, out of the water.

  Outside customs, a dozen Belizean men hungry for work greeted him at the taxi stand. Steven pointed to a quiet man in the back of the group who smiled, took his pack, and led him to a dark blue sedan. They drove out of the small airport, leaving its manicured lawns, flourishing palm trees, and well-tended flower gardens behind. He started to outline the picture in his mind, but since Elise died, he could no longer bring himself to paint.

  As the image of the painting faded, he read the taxi license on the back of the seat. Fredrico Reyes.

  “Thanks for the job, man, it’s been slow,” Fredrico said. “Where you going?”

  “The Water Taxi station. I’m heading to Caye Caulker.”

  “You a diver?”

  Steven almost said, “My wife was,” but a harsh, “No,” left his lips.

  “Too bad. It’s good place to dive,” Fredrico said.

  Steven knew. He and Elise honeymooned at a resort on Ambergris Caye twenty miles away. She dove the reef. He painted. They shared lazy afternoons. Matt even showed up once for dinner.

  “I’m going to find my wife’s brother. He’s a diver,” Steven blurted out. “She’s no longer here.”

  Matt wasn’t at the funeral. Elise had always wanted to seek out and reunite with her rebellious brother, who had spurned America for the Caribbean life, but now she never would. They hadn’t heard from him in over a year and all Steven had was this address. In the rear view mirror, Fredrico looked at him sympathetically.

  “Such a nice place for so sad a task,” Fredrico said. “Go slow. That is the first thing they tell you.”

  Steven noticed dead flowers, a chicken bone and an incense holder at the base of a trinkety Mayan statue on his dash. Fredrico watched him look.

  “I tell you, use common sense and mind your own business,” Fredrico said. “Caye Caulker is a strange place, like an island of lost souls. Pirates used to hide in the coves and the Maya once had shrines out in the jungle. If your girlfriend’s brother doesn’t want to be found, he picked the right place to disappear to.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “There is nobody to answer to. No church, no police, and no governor, though I guess the island is somebody’s responsibility somewhere in Belize City. When a problem gets bad enough, they take it in their own hands. Someone will go to the mainland, to the jungle, to find a medico de selva.”

  Steven shifted uncomfortably in the back seat.

  “Don’t worry. Most of the bad people are either in jail or kicked off. Now it’s just a five mile strip of mostly fisherman, dive boat captains, and few drug dealers,” Fredrico said. “Just don’t buy any smoke and you’ll be fine.”

  The taxi drove past foundations and rubble. A haggard man with short frizzy dreadlocks stumbled across the road, uncaring of the speeding car. He spat as they drove past.

  “What happened here?” Steven asked.

  “Iris. Last year. Hurricane Iris.”

  They passed two kids playing kick the can outside a broken-down house with no windows.

  “Does the city get hit often?”

  “Sometimes near the shore. Some places get hit hard, some places not at all. Caye Caulker, where you are going, lost many houses, restaurants, and most of its palm trees to Iris.”

  Steven noticed the broken tops of the big palms lining the
road.

  “Did Iris do this?”

  “No, Keith. Two years ago. Remember the one where twenty-two divers drowned? From Virginia, I think.”

  Steven felt water filling his throat. Since Elise died, he’d been dreaming of choking. When he decided to come to Belize to find Matt, the dreams had stopped.

  “Looks bad,” he said, viewing the devastated city block.

  “It is bad for us when a hurricane comes.”

  Steven didn’t know what to say.

  “I hope the weather stays good,” Fredrico said. “The weather says tropical storm Sandrine is moving towards the coast. I hope she blows away. Business can’t handle another hurricane.”

  “Isn’t it late in the season for a hurricane?” Steven asked.

  Fredrico didn’t answer. He maneuvered the cab through the narrow streets. Steven remembered when he was a child a hurricane had hit New York. He had stuffed his and his brother’s pockets with pennies to avoid being blown away, till his father told him not to worry. That was the only hurricane he could remember other than the quickly forgotten names on the news that alternated, girl-boy, alphabetically. Here, the threat was real and came not once in a lifetime, but dozens of times a season.

  “Just before Iris came, I went to see the beach,” Fredrico said, his concerned look disappearing for an instant. “The tide was so low. I never saw it so low. I walked out on the sand. Far, far out, man. My boy asked ‘where is all the water?’ We didn’t stay around to see it come back.”

  They drove over a drab green swing bridge. Steven glimpsed the ocean at the end of a channel lined with boats.

  “Station is there,” Fredrico said. His smile retreated inside him like a frightened ghost. He stopped just out front of the low stone building housing the Water Taxi station. Six rough men sat on the uneven curb. Weathered brown skin absorbed the sun beneath faded t-shirts, their faces a mix of broken teeth and cold watching eyes. Steven handed Fredrico an American twenty and two singles.