The Voices of Martyrs

by Maurice Broaddus

  Shakes hustled into the skating rink. His name rang out as soon as he entered. The neon pink words Sugar Shack bathed the back corner of the rink. A mural of the solar system covered a full wall of the building, lit up by the cascading lights. George rapped with some of his boys, slapping palms and clutching hands in the secret handshakes of the initiated. The DJ raised his fist in salute, the rhythmic bobbing of his head persistent.

  “Our very own star child, Shakes Humphries, is in the house. Show him some love, boys and girls, ’cause this is an aaaaall skate!”

  The strains of the Bar-Kays bumped from the speakers. With a series of crossover moves to remind them of who he was, Shakes eased into a groove, and his boys fell in step with him. They soon formed a train, imitating the intricate dance routine of The Temptations in precise lockstep. They made that rink grunt.

  A series of figures stepped from the shadows. It took Shakes a few seconds to process what he was seeing. The brother at the front was protected by a hard plastic shell adorned with panels of little neon lights and buttons. Everything was fiery pink. Despite the seeming bulk of the suit, his movements were smooth and natural. Where a face should have been, Shakes saw only his reflection in the obsidian sheen of the orb fastened to the raised neck of the armor.

  Who is this dude? Some kind of spaceman?

  The others emerged from the darkness, their suits identical but for the yellow color. Each held what appeared to be a child’s toy, like Nerf guns except with hard purple polymer for their carapaces. Despite the resemblance, Shakes knew that playtime was over.

  “Sweet Christmas,” Shakes muttered.

  Two of them covered the front door, another stood by the rear exit. No one reacted to them, as if only Shakes could see them. Three more emerged from the shadows by the wall of lockers muttering a low chant. “Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop. Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop. Psychoalphadiscobetabioaqua-doloop.”

  The rink was covered by a thin layer of mist that rose like a flood, reeking of lemon-scented Lysol.

  The leader spoke behind his mask, the voice modulated to sound high by an otherworldly theremin. “Your time’s up, sucker. High time you come with us. Make it easy on yourself. You don’t want it getting tough out here.”

  The head spaceman fired into the air. The rink erupted in chaos. Tables overturned as people scurried for cover. People tripped over one another, rushing about blindly. Screams drowned out the music except for the throbbing bassline.

  A hand clapped down on Shake’s shoulder. He turned to find a fine sister wearing a fox fur coat and pink hot pants, revealing her bare midrift. Her matching pink sunglasses, trimmed with glitter, tucked into her Afro puffs. For all of the surrounding panic, she was ice.

  “My name is Mallia Grace.” She held her hand out to him. “Come with me if you want to funk.”

  §

  Mallia melted, her skin sloughing like wax giving way under its own weight. Shakes raised his hand, but it pooled, rain streaking a windshield in a hundred rivulets. He tried to take Mallia’s hand, but they merged together, their bodies falling into a commingling mess. He tried to hold onto her, find some grip on her reality, knowing they’d mix into a single bowl of cosmic slop to be poured down the drain, discarded and forgotten. He resigned himself to their ultimate dissolution, hoping, maybe this time, the light hanging at the end of the darkness would be kinder …

  Shakes opened his eyes. His head pounded, his stomach queasy, but he tried not to throw up on the chair. His throat tight and dry as the pants clinging to Mallia’s behind. And with that image jolting him to full consciousness, he forgot his thirst and tried to find his cool. His chair faced out over a throng of people in the club beneath him. He wasn’t in the Sugar Shack anymore. The place was too packed, too clean. The building seemed like a hollowed-out warehouse. Metal gleamed along each of the three tiers of space like the polished rib cage of a huge beast. Gaudy lighting—fuscia, olive, purple—flashed, pouring over the sea of bodies beneath him. Every last person was dancing, moving, loving, and grooving. Far removed from judging eyes, they were people who knew they were out of sight. Everything was sweating, even the room beaded with condensation from the rising heat. Shakes realized the room he was in was a huge, clear bubble, suspended somewhere above the third level.

  The stage was at the far end, the six-piece band on it wove through an uptempo rendition of “Pop That Thang.” A double stack of what appeared to be Marshalls, triple stacks of Ampeg SVTs, a chorus of speakers pulsing as one great wall of music. On a separate stage above the fray was an oversized set of drums—but like no kit he’d ever seen before. Nearly translucent, each pounded kick produced rhythm as color. It had been the bassline that brought him back around, a defibrillator shockwave through his chest. Like the thump-thump-thump of a brand new heart.

  He knew Mallia watched him, so he strapped on his cool again and turned his head back slightly. “You didn’t have to drug me. I’d have come quietly.”

  All business, she passed on the lingering innuendo. “Oh, baby, I didn’t do a thing.”

  “My man, you flat-out fainted. You missed all the action,” a brother in a pink coat and chartreuse bell bottoms said. Stars and crescent moons had been shaved into his head, as if his skull streaked through the cosmos as he bobbed his head. But the rings on his bare feet seemed too affected, as if he were trying too hard to create a look he wasn’t entirely comfortable with. He was slick with perspiration and trying not to show that he struggled to get his breath back.

  “Don’t make it sound so glamorous. It got thick in a hurry. We lost one of our own back there, and we don’t have many of us to spare,” Mallia said. “Shakes, Weary Nation.”

  Weary gave him a head nod. “You look a little rough. You may have caught some of their steam. That shit’ll fuck you up like a blast of LSD.”

  Shakes caught his next words in his throat and turned back in full toward the people below, whooping their appreciation as the tune ended. “Who were they?”

  “Afronauts,” Mallia said, with a matter-of-factness to her voice. “But don’t you worry, sugar, the man’s gonna be up to see you in a minute. Just sit tight and it’ll all be explained.”

  The lights changed, stayed there, bathing the masses in an otherworldly green. The band wasted little time, the horns bleating out, jumping right into some Tower of Power.

  “Aw, I love this song, man. Love it.”

  Shakes turned toward the heart of the bubble room, toward the figure striding to the long zebra-print sofa in the middle of it. He was lithe and graceful, majestic in a shimmering golden vinyl jumpsuit that seemed painted on him. The platform shoes he glided in on made him tower like a golden titan.

  “How’d it go?” Mallia asked.

  “They tightened that ass,” the golden man said.

  “Yeah, I bet they were stroking on that,” said a man in a buccaneer hat from which long braids snaked. He wore matching buccaneer boots, but the only other items he sported in between were a diaper and a smile. In a long chain of motion, smooth enough to have been rehearsed, the golden man snatched a drink from the hand of the buccaneer, knocked it back, and flung the glass away before reaching the couch. When he got there, he stopped and looked it over like it was offending him, shook his head in disapproval, and turned to face Shakes. The table between them sat low and was covered in LPs. Hot Buttered Soul. Mother Popcorn. Stand! Innervisions. The essentials.

  “It’s a fitting tune, ya know? For this situation we have ourselves here. So, I just gotta figure it out. You drunk as a skunk? Maybe you’re loose as a goose? Or maybe, maybe, maybe, you’re high as a fly?”

  “I don’t have a damned clue what you’re talking about.” Shakes swallowed the saliva pooling in his mouth from his still-sour stomach.

  Hands on his hips, the golden man leaned over the table and inspected Shakes. Something in his face softened. To Shakes, it almost looked like surprise or maybe relief. “Or maybe you’re the real deal.”


  He turned to the buccaneer who had taken to inspecting his own muscles in the doorway mirror and shooed him out. When the door closed, the golden man reached behind his back and yanked a string from the vinyl jumpsuit, releasing the hidden girdle built in. His midsection bloomed, a full belly pressing hard against the gold and stretching it to its limits. He sighed and plopped himself down on the couch, throwing his feet over the stack of records and sending some spilling to the floor.

  “So, you probably want it straight. You have no idea. Yeah, I can dig that.” The golden man stroked his belly as if in his final trimester, still getting used to his bulge.

  “What the hell is going on here?” Shakes asked. At the steel of his voice, Mallia took an aggressive posture, but the strange man waved her off.

  “Shoot. You really have no idea who you are, brother?”

  “I know exactly who I am. Never been in doubt.”

  “No, you don’t. Not even close. You just one of them cats. You practically glow. You ain’t Shakes. Yeah, I know about that name. Know your momma called you George, too. But that’s not how I know you, oh no. No, you are the inheritor of the Funkenstein spirit. Intergalactic Master of the Funk, Emperor of The Groove, Ambassador of The Rhythm, The Heart and Soul of Rock and Roll, Martian Prince Come Down From His High Obsidian Tower on Mount Bump, Dr. Funkenstein. And I’ve been looking for you for a long, long time.”

  “You higher than a mug,” Shakes said.

  “We don’t have much time.” The golden man planted his feet firmly in the shag carpet, stiffened his spine, and leaned forward.

  He was going for serious, Shakes knew, but the whole act played just an inch shy of cornball. It was when the strange man took off his star-framed glasses and Shakes saw it there in his eyes that he shut his mouth and opened his mind.

  “I’m tired. Every night I go out there to that crowd, tripping off the music. We’re out there, doing our thing, every night making promises. All about that sanctified testimony. They never ask questions, you know, because they want to believe it. So they believe us, believe the things we say, and we let it grow. When we hit the break, we let the whispers start. ‘I think I hear the mothership coming.’ But I’m just out there faking the funk, man. All hype, no love. Was a time when I could hear that mothership coming, too. But that’s been a long time now, and now I’m an imposter. All because we need them to believe.”

  “Believe in what?”

  “In all of it. In the mothership connection. The funkentelechy. In the Star Child. In you. Their groove powers us. We want to go home, and we need you to lead us there.” He pointed a multi-ringed finger out to the bouncing masses. “They’re the fuel. You’re the engine.”

  Prophetic pronouncements never went down well on an empty stomach. Shakes never thought there’d come a time where he actually craved Sugar Shack’s chili fries. He didn’t know how he was supposed to feel. Hearing the story reminded Shakes of this one time at the barbershop when he was a kid. He’d listen to all the older men, huddled in a corner as if they all belonged to a club he wasn’t a part of, discussing mysteries of life he’d never understand. Mostly women. They’d said things with such certainty, like how ladies loved full beards. All George wanted to do was grow a full beard, to prove that he could hang. But his hair came in patches. He’d study his face in the mirror, lift his chin, examine his soul patch on the side of his face. “Next time you have to go to the bathroom,” the men at the shop said, “dab some pee on your face. Hair’ll come in thick then.” Of course, he believed it. He came out stinking of piss to peals of laughter from the men. Wasn’t often that he was taken for a sucker after that.

  “Look here, Agent Double-O-Soul…”

  “We can’t explain it to you.” The golden man looked tired all of a sudden. “You have to experience it. I’m into something I can’t shake loose. Mallia?”

  “Don’t be scared. You ain’t no punk.” She motioned for Shakes to follow, and he’d follow her shake anywhere.

  Mallia led him toward the crowd below them. The buccaneer moved to the golden man’s side, cinching him back up into his suit in preparation to take the stage. When they reached the smaller bubble that would transport them to the first floor, Mallia leaned into Shakes’ ear.

  “I can see why he believes in you. The Star Child’s been talking you up, and I didn’t really believe it. But now? Yeah, okay, I’m on board.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Fo’ sho.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s just one of those things. Can’t explain it. You just know when you know.”

  §

  The crowd hushed, a track on pause, waiting, breath bated as the Star Child slithered to the microphone like a whispered word, his fingers wrapped slowly around the mic stand, taking it as surely as he would his manhood, confidently, sex everywhere, everyone turned on, and his lips moved, forming the hiss, “Shhhh … y’all hear that,” and they roared their approval that they could, oh yes they could, “I … I think I can … yeah, I think I hear something way, way up there,” oh yes, they heard it too, “it’s out there,” finger erect pointing up toward space, “Can’t you hear it moving out there behind the stars, it’s looking, and oh, it’s powerful, but it needs a little help,” they swayed in anticipation, wanting to know how they could aid the cause, “Oh, you see, the mothership relies on a sense of smell, that’s right, and it needs to pick up your funk,” kinetic, the band hummed behind the Star Child, kept them on their feet, the pulse of the bass not giving them a chance to sit down, their words brought to life, their feet stepping with them, sacrifices to the altar of The Funk, “We need this funk uncut if you want the mothership to find us, children,” their eyes rolling back, their mouths moving, like the Holy Spirit falling down on them causing them to speak in tongues, chanting the words, Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop, Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop, Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop, his voice rising, “No, no, I don’t think you understand how far out there it is,” moving faster, “So far out there, so you gotta Funk it up better than that,” the crowd writhing, building toward it, “I wants to get funked up, we’ve been down here for so long, too long we’ve been trapped in the Zone of Zero Funkativity, so long now, from way back, kings and queens and presidents and cabinets and dictators and real fakers and,” the crowd fed it back, thrumming like an organic bass drum, setting the tempo, “OH MY LORD,” he exploded, the crowd swooned, the chant burst forth, Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop, Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop, the words hit Shakes’ ears and found familiarity there, something distant, some far-off place, somewhere proud, the crowd hit its mark, achieving climax and riding it down on the hook of the backing band’s bassline, and the Star Child turned his back to head off-stage with a little more dip to his hip, with a little more bounce to the ounce, picking up a little bit more of what he was putting down, smiling to no one in particular.

  They crowded around Shakes off-stage, maybe without meaning to, maybe on purpose, his gravitational pull absolute. Their eyes tracked his every twitch and breath, their gazes filled with something expectant, as if even to watch him was to be enlightened. Shakes flinched but didn’t buckle. Their scrutiny unsettled him, leaving him with feelings of both vulnerability and being creeped out, like having garden gnomes watch him undress. Like they’d scoop him up and slam him down onto an altar at any moment, plug the knife in, and cut a bit deeper, draw some more blood for the good cause. But he had plenty of practice putting on cool that he didn’t have anymore.

  “You ain’t from around here,” Shakes said.

  “No, we’re not. We’re reality explorers. Funking cosmonauts,” the Star Child said.

  “Afronauts. Like the ones that jumped us?”

  “No. Funkateers. We’re about peace and the groove. Afronauts, they’re a different school of cats entirely. We all access the groove the same way. Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop…” The Star Child closed his eyes, lost in a moment.

  “… to differen
t effect. They take our message for weakness. They see love and dance as a plague … and they’re the cure.”

  “The war crept nearer …” Shakes whispered.

  “At this point, no one remembers what incursion into whose space started things. There’s always been a rivalry between the Star Child and Professor Bereft of Groove,” Mallia said. “They’re both Leos.”

  “Man, we were like brothers back in the day. We came up together in the same band. We had all these hopes and dreams, wanted to make music no one had heard before. And we were good, too. No one could get with us. Then everything got funked up—and not in a good way. We got caught up. We each had a song to sing, had to go solo, do our own thing. It tore up the group. All anybody seems to remember after that is the hurt.” The Star Child’s attention drifted far away, seeing it all again, feeling it once more. For, as accomplished as he was at faking the funk, he couldn’t hide his pain. “Our reality was obliterated. We pushed through what we could, and whatever made it into this world resonates as things of music, of fiction.”

  “There were stories. Rumors of a child, sent down…” Mallia started.

  “Just hype.” The Star Child didn’t want to go into it any further, but Shakes could sense something. “All that’s left is dance and rhythm and making love and partying past your momma’s curfew. That’s all we’ve got left, and we’re hoping it’s enough. There are some out there who are attuned to it. Agents of the Funk. Music, love, the groove, it awakens something way down deep and lets them see glimpses of what we were. It lets them dream of what we could be again.”

  “We make the music to fill in the gaps, like holes in our DNA. To make ourselves whole again.”

  “To believe us into reality,” the Star Child said. “I have a relic from our world that I need to show you. It will …”

  Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop. Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop. Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop. Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop.

  The chant seemed to come from all around them. The lights fluttered. Darkness took shape, spaced folded on itself. Silhouettes shuffled in the night. A thick wave like dry-ice fog swallowed the dance floor, riding up George’s legs and into his nostrils. A familiar smell, like citrus-scented disinfectant. Then a voice, like a wiggle in the ear, spoke.