by Mark All
Jessica narrowed her eyes. “Fuck it, I’m going to the bar. Want anything?”
Charlene inspected her beer, waggling the bottle. “Another Heineken. I’m going to have to get trashed to deal with you tonight.”
“Har, har.” Jessica dropped off her stool and began threading her way through the crowded club. The back section of the room was filled with high tables and tall bar stools arranged to cram in as many people as possible while still leaving half the floor in front of the stage open for dancing, stage diving, and whatever sexual antics drunk headbangers got up to in the public privacy of a mosh pit. Weaving through the tables, stools, and wobbling partiers was like navigating an obstacle course in a maze, but the round trip to the bar and back would still be faster than waiting on their server. Jessica regretted being irritable with Charlene, but she had a gut feeling she was wasting her time tonight. She needed a significant new act to save her career, and she had an irrational but strong intuition that Penumbra was it. The three occurrences of the word, the third being a band with promise when she desperately needed one, haunted her, and an irrational feeling of giddy expectancy had replaced her initial panic over Sage’s ultimatum, even though Penumbra appeared to no longer exist.
Having only a vague notion of what the word meant, she’d looked “penumbra” up to find it was an astronomical term. In an eclipse, a penumbra was the partially lit area between light and absolute darkness. The word could also denote indeterminacy, a state of uncertainty. All of this meant nothing to her, but she was intrigued and hopeful, in fact, fixated on the idea of Penumbra being her salvation.
Someone banged into her from the side and she turned to find Bobby Sykes beaming at her.
“Jessie! S’up?”
“Bob-eee!” She hugged him briefly in a be-nice-to-your-contacts way, careful not to press her boobs against him. “Big crowd, you’re doing good business.”
“For real,” he shouted. “Black Chasm is getting a good rep, this is a better crowd than I’ve had in ages. You’re gonna like them. Take my word, sign them before somebody else does—or they decide to produce themselves.”
“I can’t wait!” she lied as loudly as she could over the din. Black Chasm wasn’t ever going to be big outside Atlanta. “Bobby, ever heard of Penumbra?”
“Hells yeah. They played here, opened for Gonadatron when they were promoting their album. Good guys. That CD was so-so, but I think they coulda gone somewhere. You know about the wreck, right? Happened the night they played here.”
Jessica nodded. “Checked their web site. So they were pretty good live?”
“They kicked ass,” Bobby replied. “Actually sounded better than their recordings. Why do you ask? I don’t think they exist any more.”
“I found their CD going through my old submissions. You know how it is, always looking for talent. Which is as hard to find these days as a virgin in the Hellfire Club.”
Bobby snickered, then frowned and looked around the room as if he were ashamed of what he was about to tell her. “They had talent, and it’s a shame what happened. Tell you the truth, though…their keyboard player was, well, not an asshole precisely, but kind of creepy. Like he knew a dirty secret about you, and he planned to use it. Wasn’t just me, he made my girls nervous.” He waved at the waitresses struggling through the tables with drink trays. “When it happened, I almost figured they’d be better off without him.”
“Hunh.”
“I guess he was the main songwriter or something, or they just lost their taste for the business after he died. I haven’t heard anything from them since.”
There was usually at least one asshole in every band. Especially the good ones. The real talent often knew how good they were and became insufferable. Maybe losing the keyboard player was a good thing for Penumbra, in the long run.
“They are an Atlanta band, right?” she asked.
“Athens, I think. Yeah, Athens. I remember thinking they weren’t the typical college-town type band.”
“Have you got a contact number for them?”
“From a year ago? I doubt it. We get so many bands’ demos and promo packages, we wouldn’t have room for the liquor stock if we kept it all. We computerized the cash registers, but info on the talent, too much effort. I don’t have the time or people to maintain a database of all the wannabes in the ATL. Don’t you have it?”
She shook her head. “No, same story. I put them in a contact file if I try to sign them, otherwise, I have to toss everything. I’ll just have to use the Contact form on Penumbra’s web site.” She hadn’t thought it worth the effort earlier, but hearing another generic thrash metal band tonight—and her curious compulsion—had convinced her she needed to give it a try.
“Good luck with that, Jessie. Look, I gotta go press the flesh with some of your competition—so look sharp if you want to sign Black Chasm. I’ll introduce you after the show.”
“Thanks so much, Bobby! I appreciate your looking out for me!”
So, another Penumbra connection. True, she’d sought this one out, but there it was just the same. She returned to her quest for alcohol, heading for the bar like a salmon struggling upstream. The band finished and people got up and started wandering around, getting in her way, screaming in her ears louder than the house PA, which was now blaring recorded music.
Ten minutes later, with half of Charlene’s beer coating her left hand, she made it back to the table with their drinks. Her friend had a sly smile on her face.
“What?” Jessica asked. “Did I spill beer on my crotch?”
“Listen,” Charlene said.
Puzzled, Jessica set down the drinks, wiped her hand with a tiny bar napkin, and tilted her head, listening.
When she recognized it, her mouth dropped open and she pulled herself weakly onto her stool. “That song.”
Charlene nodded, still smiling.
“That’s ‘Ass Over Teakettle.’ The song that passed for the only ‘hit’ from Penumbra’s CD.”
“Sign from above?” Charlene asked.
The words, “Or below,” spontaneously emerged from her subconscious, and almost passed her lips, but she kept her mouth shut. This Penumbra business was beginning to creep her out. She took a long pull from her drink and hoped Black Chasm of Eternal Sorrow would pleasantly surprise her. ‘Ass Over Teakettle’ transfixed her. Who was she to deny Fate, especially when it seemed intent on handing her a career-saver on a platter?
Chapter Seven
Friday night
David coughed and turned up the near field monitors. The band sprawled around the studio control room, uncharacteristically quiet, looking thoughtful as they passed a joint around while the first track of Oblivion filled the space like a tangible physical presence.
Mike had relented and brought the remainder of Penumbra with him: John Emory, the bass player, and Alan Dillehay, the singer. With the mind-bending new music playing, they seemed less intransigent than they had at first.
When they’d arrived, John had entered the control room warily, looking around as if something dangerous lurked in the shadows. “We’re only here because this is the first sign of life from you for months,” he’d said. “We’re worried about you.”
David suspected they were here only as a gesture of friendship and would try to convince him to drop it and get a life.
Alan hadn’t looked any more receptive than the bass player. “I don’t know how Vince had time to do anything remarkable with these tracks between when we recorded them and…the wreck. Besides, you know what he was scheming to do while he was at it.”
Mike had grimaced at the mention of Vince’s treachery, which had directly caused the wreck.
“Frankly,” John had said, “the idea of us contributing to Vince’s vanity project, after what he did, makes me ill.”
Alan had grunted in agreement. “What he said.”
David had sat at the mixing desk and gestured to the chairs. “I understand how you feel. Trust me. I’m not wasting you
r time. Sit down, fire up a joint. Alan, I know you brought one.”
Alan then whipped a number from his shirt pocket as fast as a magician producing a coin from thin air, stuck it in his mouth, and lit it. He set a cooler down and opened it to reveal a dozen beers on ice. “One last listening party, for old times’ sake.”
John had retained his skeptical expression, but accepted the joint Alan proffered, took a tiny hit, and passed it to Mike.
The drummer toked hard, coughed a little, and said, “Okay, man, we’re here. Show us what you got.”
Now with the music washing over them, John huddled in a corner between racks of equipment, arms folded except to take a brief toke off the joint when it came around and pass it on. A freelance programmer contractor and sort of a spooky introvert, he looked the most pensive of them all. The crease of his brow indicated an intense concentration on the music, but he looked troubled.
Alan sat perched on the edge of his barstool, the cooler on the carpeted floor beside him already accessorized with three empty cans. A house painter by day, he was the only member of the group who still played out, fronting a cover band in half-filled local bars by night. He stared into space, bobbing his head to the beat, but David couldn’t read his expression.
The first song ended and David thumped the spacebar on the computer, stopping playback. The band had recorded the majority of this song as a group shortly before Vince’s death as rough scratch tracks just to get the ideas down, but Vince had polished his own parts and added two new sections, as well as overlaid synth melodies and special effects, and done a little post-production so it sounded more finished.
David looked around expectantly for a reaction. The guys sat in silence for a moment, glancing at each other, then Alan said, “Fuck me.” John looked shell-shocked, and Mike appeared pleasantly surprised.
“I’m impressed,” Mike said.
John Emory nodded. “I have to admit, it has a certain je ne sais quoi it lacked before. The way the new sections incorporate motifs from the intro and bridge…”
“Just wait,” David said. He closed the file and opened the next song. This one was also one of the band’s preexisting tunes, something slow and dreamy. It was still melodic, but now sounded sinister, as if something lurked beneath the surface rhythm of the piece, a mysterious instrument so low in the mix it was subliminal. David saw no suspicious tracks on the grid, though. The song finished and he stopped playback again.
For a long moment the group sat in silence, then Alan said, “I am so stoned.”
“Seriously?” David asked. “That’s your reaction? You say that when you get up in the morning.”
Alan shook his head. “I mean, I’m finding that song heinously intense. He’s taken it to the next level, no doubt about it—but I don’t like it. It disturbs me.”
“What do you mean, it disturbs you?” David asked.
Shrugging, Alan said, “I dunno. It’s just kind of creepy. Like that’s us playing, but it’s not us. Like it’s zombies of us or something.”
David suppressed a flash of anger. “What the hell does that mean?”
Alan frowned at the joint, which had gone out in his hand, and set it gingerly in the ashtray on the console beside him. “I just don’t like it.”
“It’s fucking incredible!” David looked at John and Mike.
“I know what Alan means,” John said. “It reminds me of that Dream Theater song about somebody drowning. Beautiful, but I don’t want to listen to it again.”
“Mike?”
The drummer shrugged. “I guess I can see that. Even so, it is incredible. It’s like Vince took a rough sketch and turned it into a masterpiece.”
Alan and John looked at each other, obviously sharing a distaste for what Vince had done to their song. The were forming an alliance, shoring up their defenses. David felt pissed off.
“This music is brilliant,” he said, forcing his voice to be calm and controlled. “It would be a crime to just throw it in the trash. We owe it to Vince.”
Alan snorted. “We don’t owe that bastard shit.”
“So he was an asshole. So he betrayed us. This music is qualitatively beyond anything the band ever did before.”
John fidgeted. “The band is over. It was good, he ruined it, and it ended tragically. It’s time you moved on, like we have. Let the dead stay buried.”
David banged his hand on the mixer. “I can’t fucking believe you people. This music needs to be heard! It wants to be heard!”
“Chill out, dude,” Alan said, scooping a beer from the cooler and offering it to David, who took it reluctantly, glaring at the singer.
“Let’s look at this logically,” Mike said. “It’s a shame to waste the last songs we recorded if they’re salvageable.”
Alan groaned and John huffed.
“I didn’t want to reopen old wounds either,” Mike continued, “but maybe it’s time. It’s been a year. Yes, Vince ruined everything, and he’s a strong presence in this music. So are we. All we’d have to do is record our parts to replace the scratch tracks. I don’t know about you guys, but I could use any money this might generate.”
“It’s mostly Vince, we’d just be sidemen,” John said. “Just like he planned. I don’t want to be part of it.”
“John, you are part of it,” David said. “You wrote your bass parts, and sections of three of the songs.”
“You can’t use my parts,” the bass player said, a slight tremble in his voice. “I’m pretty sure you can’t if I don’t give you permission. Do I really need to talk to a lawyer before you get it?”
David's jaw dropped. “A lawyer? After all we’ve been through?”
“I’m sorry,” John said, though he did not sound sorry. He sounded a little like a petulant but frightened child. He got up. “I’m behind on a contract, I need to get back to work.”
David jumped to his feet as well. “No, wait, you’ve got to listen to the rest of it. At least hear one of the new tracks.”
John hesitated and looked to Alan, who seemed more stoned than the rest of them. He doubtless carried a subsistence level of THC in his system that never had time to get flushed out.
“Look,” Mike said, “let’s check out one more track. I want to hear one of his originals. Do it now, then say to hell with it and move on if we don’t like it.”
“You’ve got to hear this,” David said. “It’s one we didn’t write together.”
Alan sighed and relit the joint, taking a huge toke and passing it to John. The bass player rolled his eyes, took the joint, and sat back down.
“This one’s kind of long,” David said, “but it’s practically symphonic. You won’t believe this shit.”
He pressed the spacebar.
* * * *
David blinked, trying to remember where he was.
The studio. The room was thick with smoke and the intoxicating, sweet, spicy smell of homegrown Sinsemilla, and his mind was just as hazy. Had he gone to sleep? What had he been doing? He blinked when realized that the old band was gathered in the control room with him, looking as bemused as he felt. What were they doing here?
His gaze wandered to the computer monitor and he watched the time marker marching on into endless cyberspace. After a moment it occurred to him to stop the song.
They’d been listening to the longest of Vince’s songs, he recalled. Getting high. He’d drifted into a kind of dream state, not surprising for being stoned and listening to music. It was a form of hypnosis, an engrossing experience in which the soul was lost in the audio landscape, the mystical world of the art. He didn’t even remember the song ending.
“Whoa,” Alan said. “Did we…did we black out?”
“Oblivion,” John muttered.
Mike looked dreamy. “It was beautiful.”
“Mesmerizing,” Alan said in a hushed voice.
John stood shakily, his expression tense, glancing worriedly around the control room again. “This is freaking me the fuck out.”
John headed for the door. “No fucking way, man.” He turned back. “This is exactly what the son of a bitch wanted. I’m not playing on ‘his’ album.” He shook his head vigorously. “Plus, this shit is fucked up. You’re not using my parts, or the sections I wrote.” He jerked the door open and exited swiftly. David heard his hurried footfalls on the steps to the main level of the house upstairs.
Alan laughed weakly. “Yeah, I don’t know about this shit, man. I’m a pretty heavy drinker, but I never blacked out before. Especially on…” he counted the empties littering the floor around his cooler, “five beers. I’m afraid I’m going to have to decline to be a part of this project.” He gathered up the empties, threw them in the cooler, and picked it up. “I guess you can use my existing tracks if you give me a cut on the sales, but I’m not recording anything new.” He nodded to David and Mike and left.
David felt Godsmacked. Blown away by the music, then blown off by his band. How could they not be compelled to finish this album? They weren’t his band any more, they’d all gone their separate ways, and he’d overestimated the depth of their friendship. They were just band mates after all.
He looked questioningly at Mike.
“What he did with our tracks was brilliant,” Mike said. “I’d hate to throw it all away.” The drummer sighed. “On the other hand, I have grave misgivings about the vibe. I’m going to have to think this one over, bro.” He tossed his own beer can into the recycling receptacle under the console and walked out, leaving David alone in the smoky control room.
Chapter Eight
Friday night
John Emory hurried around his house turning on all the lights. His own home seemed threatening, as if the night outside were seeping in through a process of supernatural osmosis, bringing that damned music with it.
Hands trembling, he poured himself a tall Scotch and gulped it, coughing as it burned its way down his throat. John didn’t drink often, and he wished he’d turned down the pot earlier. Two or three tokes would do him these days. He’d been so on edge, he’d partaken every time the joint had come around, hoping the weed would relax him, although he knew better. These days pot agitated him more than it had when he and the band were on the road partying their asses off, oblivious to any outside reality that might intrude on their rock and roll fantasy world.