Little God Blues

by Jeffrey M Anderson

  “You’re not one of my students,” he said levelly, barely looking up from a notepad. He had darker hair than his brother, near black, oiled, combed straight back as if to give his nose more prominence. It had been broken, then badly set, a kink in its thin British ridge. His main feature was his eyes, the left one sized you up disturbingly while his right eye was off doing calculations. I was never sure whether he was looking at me, through me, or somewhere else completely.

  I told him who I was, that I was wondering about Kirk’s last days. I confirmed my legitimacy by telling him I hadn’t seen him at Kirk’s funeral.

  “No, I wasn’t there.” He out-stared me. “Henry went to America and didn’t come back all that often. Not until the year before last, when his marriage fell apart. Saw quite a bit of him for a month.” He sized me up with that one sharp eye. “I’m afraid we’d been apart for too long.”

  He didn’t offer much insight into his meeting with Kirk in late September. “Doing his duty” was how he described it.

  I was standing in front of his desk, not invited to sit down. I had a good view out the window to a vast, tarred roof with air-conditioning units and pools of frozen water. I asked if Kirk had mentioned anything about plans.

  He couldn’t remember anything specific. “He did ask a question or two about someone, a “Castle,” I think. How could he go about finding him? I’m afraid my only thought was the Internet.”

  “All he had was a last name?”

  “It might have been Castle. I’m not certain. He may not have known himself. I didn’t inquire all that deeply. Back then, you see, I didn’t know he was about to…‌die.”

  There was something else I wanted to ask him, but just then a female student appeared in the doorway. She was on the tall side of medium, with jet-black hair and lively, incisive green eyes.

  “Progress?” Howell asked her.

  She nodded tentatively, yet her smile was full of confidence. “I shall wait outside.”

  They hadn’t finished. Professor Howell gave her both his eyes. She reflexively clutched her notebook to her chest. She stood there blinking for a long second, as if in too-bright lights. The professor nodded. She closed the door on us.

  We took our individual time to let that apparition clear. I remained standing before him like a schoolboy in trouble.

  “It must be a shock, to have seen him after so many years, then gone…”

  “A death in the family is invariably sad. Henry was his dad, I suppose.”

  I knew all about British understatement—those war movies where a devastating artillery bombardment is described as a spot of bother—still, it sounded excessive. I filed it away for future consideration.

  “I hardly knew the boy, and yet…” He shifted tone here, and subject, “you are like him, a musician. Rather a lot of scientists are excellent musicians. There is a connection with that left brain analytical tendency, and music is quite mathematical. Look at Niels Bohr, first-class pianist.”

  “Well, Kirk was an extraordinary musician; you and your brother are scientists…”

  “Yes. I am no Bohr, though.” I don’t think he meant this as a joke.

  “Bohr, is that your field, quantum mechanics?” I knew the basics from some For Dummies book I had read on the road to try to keep up with Kirk. That brought him up short.

  “Yes. We’ve come a long way since Bohr. It is the most accurate theory ever, and yet it makes no sense. There’s a certain wildness at its heart. Maybe you would understand that.”

  “Me? I was never any good at science.”

  “Well, stick with your sex, rock and roll and drugs.” He managed to sound jealous. Then he flared up again. “No good at science,” he said, mocking me, adding a ‘what is the world coming to’ head shake. “Well, stick with your media studies, if that’s what turns you on.” A dry bitterness to that last phrase.

  “It’s just the Second Law of Thermodynamics,” I said. “Over time it all turns to shit.”

  With that he stood up, gave me a dismissive head nod. “No good at science!” he yelled theatrically at my retreating frame, more for the benefit of the black-haired student entering.

  I found this funny, the context in which the girl heard such a brusque accusation. I smiled to her, a “good luck, you’ll need it” one. We did an awkward dance, her entering, me leaving. All I wanted to do was get out in the fresh, cold air.

  I walked up to the Royal Albert Hall, wondering whether the Eyebeams would have eventually played there. I crossed over to the park and stood on the steps of the Albert Memorial, a garish tribute to a fallen prince. I watched the red double-decker buses coast by as if driverless; I stared at that red circular Hall across the road. Two policemen, one a diminutive woman, walked by in yellow mountaineering jackets. I was in London, most definitely. I walked into Hyde Park and its endless, flat, green lawn, spare trees, complicated pathways. My meeting felt incomplete. Some question I hadn’t asked, some comment of Howell’s I hadn’t taken in. Maybe that was inevitable since I didn’t know what my visit was about.

  CHAPTER 6

  “Coerced Volunteer” from De Minimus (Second Album) 3:32

  Kirk’s signature song. His cross. At our concerts (until it was banned) Kirk always sang it. He could hit the notes, but with a thin, reedy tenor that had to be parceled out. When he sang I had to scale back the punk-developed muscle of my baritone. Of course Kirk had to lead on “Coerced”: it’s mainly about him and the Eyebeams, after all.

  The Eyebeams have been described as a West Coast band. I think that’s from our early days when we easily filled 3,000-seat venues in San Francisco and Seattle. It took several years before our following spread east, first via the university circuit. Years after that we got to arena level. The West Coast was always the harbinger of good attendance to come.

  Our international following was erratic. They loved us in Australia, but we struggled north of there on our one Asian tour. We were popular in Scandinavia and Germany, not so much in the rest of Europe, including Britain. We managed to fill our concerts, though.

  We were in the middle of a swing through the upper Midwest when news came of a suicide near Seattle linked to “Coerced Volunteer.” Then two more in quick succession. Two more after that. It got so we started to expect the next one.

  Kirk and I had agreed to a prime-time interview with a major TV news magazine. Our label demanded a charm offensive to atone for our alleged role in these teen suicides—two were in their twenties—in a small town south of Seattle called Puyallup. Nevertheless, they were known as The Seattle Five. There was no arguing that a line from “Coerced” was in the first suicide’s note: “I am always looking for a way to get away.” Or that a phrase from the bridge, “outward ho,” was in a text message sent shortly before the fourth suicide shot himself. Or that the Five were big Eyebeams fans. Oh, the cruel irony! Seattle then was Grunge Central. Local songs about cancer and blackness; rape and drugs. But these junior lumberjacks go for our arcane words. I mean, how?

  The interview was guardedly combative. The TV personality, Amy Leung, had an annoyingly over-modulated voice. She kept politely steering her questions back to the fact that without our song, these five kids would still be alive. We had to sit there on national television and strike the right blend of compassion and denial. “Well, good life practice,” Kirk had muttered backstage.

  Towards the end Kirk made his big mistake. “It’s a drag. There are better songs—”

  Leung (interrupting) “Better? For what?”

  All three of us were trying to command the floor. Finally, Kirk won.

  “No, no, I’m going to say this. Five kids in some sort of circle took their lives and it’s big headlines. Why? Besides us, it’s because it’s not the story of one kid, or even two. It’s a mini-Jonestown. However, there are 20,000 teenage suicides in this country. Twenty thousand! They are all individual tragedies, and a single death just isn’t news. So here’s what I’m s
aying. By all means beat us up if you want to about these five kids. Jim has just said we’re sorry about it. Speculate about the connection between our song and their deaths, but don’t lose sight of the real story here. Those individual ones. Here’s another thing. Those 20,000 kids; how did it happen? Obviously they were desperately unhappy. They just might have grabbed onto something, a song, our song, not to tip them into oblivion, but to explain to those who remain behind, like, here, this captures why I’m doing this. I mean, most suicides leave notes. Why? Must be to explain something. Must be hard to do that yourself in such circumstances.”

  Afterwards the media chose to focus on Kirk’s flip comment. Like most infamous quotes, it was not exactly what was said. There were many different versions; they all distilled into: “if you’re planning on killing yourself there are better songs to do it to.”

  To the extent they covered Kirk’s point on all the other teen suicides it was to show how wrong he was on the numbers: 2,000 not 20,000—although there are something like twenty-five attempts for each successful one.

  So we were banned from radio stations in the Midwest and South; part of our tour had to be cancelled or rearranged. For several months poor Kirk was Mr. Evil, a threat to all right-thinking citizens. I wasn’t exactly untainted, either.

  You write these songs in a vacuum and the world fills it. After the Five, those lines from the bridge came into brutal focus:

  Outward Ho! I wanna go

  I’m outta here, I’ll miss you though

  CHAPTER 7

  I kept looking at Kirk’s book of my father’s poems sitting just there on the dining room table, placed like a chess piece pinning my options. I was no closer to understanding how Kirk could have wound up with it. Claudia Steyning ran her own publishing company, mainly women’s romances and issues, according to Natalie. It was the world of books; maybe it led somewhere.

  I had been steadily going through my checklist of tourist London. On a visit to the British Library to see the autographs—Scott’s faint last page, one the Bard’s alleged signatures, John Lennon’s doodled lyrics—I asked at the information desk about researching newspaper articles. Within fifteen minutes I was sitting before a computer terminal getting a quick tutorial. I found a pithy two-inch column in the Financial Times about my landlord. “Director convicted in Polychrome scandal.” Managed funds had gone missing, as had most of the managers. My landlord, Sir Clive Wormsleigh, was left holding the bag (of depleted cash). He was sentenced to two years. Okay, now Claudia Steyning. The most comprehensive article was in a trade journal called Publishing Weekly under the heading “Iken Owner Missing.”

  “Claudia Steyning, owner and Managing Director of women’s romance publisher Iken Press, remains missing from her flat in Kentish Town. According to police sources she was last seen on Friday 12 October at her office near St. Paul’s, and last heard from that evening in a mobile phone call to her daughter. Police are treating her disappearance as suspicious.

  According to our sources, the police have not been able to find any trace of Ms. Steyning at airports, train stations or ports. There is no evidence of her packing for a trip. Her passport was found in her flat. Her car was parked nearby.

  Ms. Steyning was reported missing on Monday by her ex-husband Matthew Steyning, acting on the suspicions of their daughter. “They talk on the phone every day. For Claudia not to call for days—it’s hard to think of a good reason why that should be,” said Mr. Steyning.

  As of this Thursday there has been no word from Ms. Steyning. “We are keeping an open mind,” said Det. Supt. McLintock of the Metropolitan Police. “We are concerned that the daughter has not heard from Ms. Steyning, however.”

  Ms. Madeline Crowe, Iken’s best-selling author, said in a prepared statement: “I hope and pray that Claudia is all right. She is a friend and a mentor. It would be unbearably sad if anything has happened to her.”

  If you have any information, no matter how trivial, please call the police hotline on (800-number).

  It was creepy to think there might have been foul play just beneath my floorboards.

  ***

  The next day I requisitioned Frank to drive me to the remote outskirts of northwest London to visit Sir Clive Wormsleigh. I had never made a prison visit; unless you counted a jail I had visited myself.

  There’s a strange vibe living in a place that is so palpably someone else’s. You are a pretender to their life. I couldn’t help knowing many details about Sir Clive, mundane and intimate. He was an Italophile with exotic biscotti packages, homemade jars of sun-dried tomatoes and pesto. Olive oil with the private label of someone called Greenhaugh. His wine rack, too, leaned toward the Italian; Barolos, Amerones, Gavis, and more exotic vintages. Then, the intimate. I gathered Sir Clive had a recrudescent hemorrhoid problem from the various half-squeezed unguents and lotions in the bathroom cabinet. There were lubes and jellies, more in his nightstand drawer, which also held condoms and a packet of pills “to be taken one hour before intercourse.”

  I was still having problems with the lack of heat. Onslow Mansions had a central boiler. I needed Sir Clive’s written permission to approach the building management. According to Mrs. Upton in 3A, the pump wasn’t robust enough to send the hot water to the radiators on the top floor. My natural allies, Mr. and Mrs. Hauptmann in 5A, had turned to a more efficient form of heat. They were wintering in Haifa.

  Her Majesty’s Prison Chiltern looked like a WWII intelligence base, a cluster of one-story bungalows around a central yard all encircled by a wire fence, higher than expected and angled back at the top, back towards the inside, making it clear it was meant to prevent exit rather than entry.

  I had been prepared for a two-way glass-barrier interview booth with Bakelite phones from the ‘40s. Sir Clive was waiting for me in a small room just off the main entrance to what must have been the admin building. He was in a blue jumpsuit, doing a crossword puzzle, like a mechanic on a break. We were left alone.

  There were no introductions or handshakes. I squeezed into the other side of a circular table that filled the room’s width. A travel poster for Bath hung on the wall behind our prisoner. There was a tabloid newspaper on the table, opened to a splashy football spread.

  “I’m getting rather good at these,” Sir Clive said, nodding at his crossword. If so, he must have just started. He was a British barrister out of central casting. Average height, overweight, owlish glasses, prison-cropped gray hair robbing him of a part of his theatricality, his wine bar discourse and florid gestures. He knew my name from my visit request. I gave him a brief bio, told him why I was in London.

  “So I am your landlord?”

  “Dear landlord, dearer flat.”

  A long pause followed, sudden awkwardness. I was new to prison visits. Was it untactful to talk about the weather? In England, without that subject, all conversation dries up.

  “You came here for a reason. So, out with it!” Yes, the man in a hurry. Things to do; places to dream about. Or maybe he was a tad defensive about his present circumstances.

  I explained my heat challenges. Wormsleigh signed the letter I had drafted, advised electric heaters would be a quicker solution. The problem was only noticeable when it dipped down towards freezing. So far, it had been a cold winter.

  That was that. Propriety called for more conversation. He asked me how I found London. What was I doing over here? I told him about Kirk. Only fair, since I knew so much about him. I brought up the question I had finished Jack Ross with: a possible connection between Kirk’s death and Claudia’s disappearance. I pointed out that it was probable they had met.

  Wormsleigh went opaque. I waited. “Probable they met?” He appeared to be thinking. “Jack Ross. My flat. Your mate arrived when?”

  I told him, September 19th.

  “The 19th? Were planes flying then?” It took me a moment to catch up with him. It had been eight days after the Twin Towers, what would come to be known
as 9/11.

  “Hmm. I gave Jack the go-ahead in early September, just after the Bank Holiday. So, the timing fits.”

  “What do you think happened to Claudia?” I asked.

  “Nothing good.”

  That abrupt answer needed a pause.

  “I hear the police think it’s a man from your club. NE1?”

  “That’s been disbanded.” He showed no surprise at my knowing about it.

  “Disbanded? That’s me.” I explained the joke, then asked about the name.

  “NE1? It’s our nickname, a play on, well, on several things. NE1 as in anyone home, yes? Open to NE1. It could also be a fictitious London post code. You are in NW; there is no corresponding NE sector. Newcastle beat us to it.”

  “So, it’s all dinner theater?”

  His lower lip became tremulous, then his face eased. “Yes, great fun.”

  “Always a man and a woman?”

  “Yes, mainly. That frisson of the hormonal invariably assists with the drama. Over time it becomes a limitation, however. Rather too easy to fall back on sex in all its guises. It becomes the default narrative, and default is the enemy of creativity.”

  “How do you fight that?”

  “More detailed instructions.”

  “Claudia was a super-user?”

  “Super-abuser, more like. I was never paired with her. I knew her already, living on top of her as I do. The club is strict about that. Three inviolable rules: can’t know your date; can’t talk real details during din dins; and never, never must you ‘share a taxi.’ That’s NE1-speak for going off together afterwards, meeting, dating, tango lessons, what have you. It sounds harsh, I know, but the club works better without wolves circling these allegedly tender lambs.”