Then Again

by Rick Boling

  “Just follow me,” I yelled, dodging a UPS truck and hitting the far sidewalk at a full run. I glanced back to make sure she was with me, then stopped dead. She had followed me, alright, directly into the path of the truck. The driver slammed on his breaks, but not before her trailing leg disappeared into his left front fender. Fortunately, the broad body of the panel truck obscured his view, and since he felt no impact, he drove on, honking his horn and shouting something unintelligible. Worried someone else might have seen what happened, I picked up the pace, pausing only when we approached the house.

  Mom’s car was parked out front, so I headed down the driveway to the old recording suite. I fumbled through the dozen or so keys I’d accumulated since moving to the new complex, found the one I was looking for, jammed it in the lock, and swung the door open. After locking the door behind us, I spun the rheostat and waited while the fluorescent bulbs flickered and came to life.

  The squish of my sodden shoes echoed in the silence as we made our way through the empty reception area and into the abandoned studio. I adjusted the track lights, bathing the room in a dim saffron glow that illuminated the checkerboard of carpet-covered sound baffles Sam had strategically positioned around the walls. All that remained in the dusty chamber were a few scattered pieces of obsolete equipment: a microphone stand, a broken bass pedal, a hi-hat with one warped cymbal, and a wooden stool standing alone on the stained and mildewed Persian rug. I caught a glint of something metallic in the shadows near one wall, and when I went to investigate, I saw it was a reflection off the gold tuners of my old Ramirez flamenco. Thinking how strange it was that I hadn’t touched my favorite instrument since before the move, I lifted the guitar and cradled it reverently, as if handling an ancient artifact from the museum of my past.

  “How long has it been, Rix?” Aurie asked.

  I set the instrument back on its stand and held my left hand up in the dim light, examining the smooth, uncalloused fingertips. “Too damn long,” I said.

  “Maybe you should do something about that.”

  “Wish I could,” I sighed. “But I don’t have the time or mental energy anymore.”

  “Really?” she said. “Seems to me someone in your position should be able to make the time. Surely there are key people you trust enough to delegate some of your responsibilities to.”

  “A couple,” I said. “Problem is they don’t have the time either. Sam’s up to his neck managing the computer group, and Jimmy’s working so many hours coordinating the studios I don’t know when he finds time to sleep. The rest of my top people are specialists in their fields. None of them know enough about the parent corporation, nor could they command the respect my job calls for. Not that I deserve that respect—it’s the position, not the person. But there are people—CEOs, politicians, industry leaders—who would be insulted if they were asked to deal with anyone other than the president of Blue Note Enterprises.”

  I picked up the guitar again and played a quick arpeggio on the open strings. “What’s funny,” I said, “is that all I really am is a glorified PR person, an executive inkslinger. I sign papers and move money around, deciding which projects to fund and how to invest the profits. My phone literally never stops ringing, and half my life is spent massaging egos and pretending to be someone I’d hate if I met him on the street. Doris does the important work, coordinating things and handling all the details. She’s the glue that holds the company together. Without her I’d be dead in the water.”

  “But Rix,” she said, “look at what you’ve accomplished. Think of the people you’ve helped, the fortune you’ve amassed. Those things have to count for something.”

  “Sure, there’s a certain amount of satisfaction,” I said, tuning the strings in rapid succession. “Although it has nothing to do with being rich. You know I’ve never cared about money. But now I have to because so much depends on me. I make decisions every day that could affect the lives of hundreds of people. It’s a vicious circle, Aurie, a trap. And once you’re in it there’s no way out. For a while in the early days it was fun, then it seemed to take on a momentum of its own, and all I’ve done since then is hang on for dear life. It’s almost as if I’m being punished for having known some things in advance. After all, that’s what set the stage for everything.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I’m sure it’s just the natural outcome of the choices you’ve made. And I still say you could find a way to reduce your workload. In fact, if you don’t you’re liable to end up dead anyway, and I don’t mean metaphorically. Have you thought about selling off some of the company so you can get back to the things you love—the music and working in the studio?”

  “I have, but I feel like I’d be letting too many people down.” I wandered over and stared up at my reflection in the darkened glass front of the mixdown booth. “Besides, I’m no longer needed in the studio. We’ve got a dozen of the best producers in the business on staff now, along with some excellent writers and extremely talented session people. Even when I do steal a few minutes to spend down there, I only get in the way. Everybody stiffens up when I’m around, as if I’m there to judge them. I don’t think I could ever recapture the laid-back comradery of those early days.”

  “I’ll bet you could if you acted the part,” she said. “Stay out of the booth. Pick up your guitar and work as a sideman. Play some local gigs. Go on the road with Patsy or Jackson. You know they’d love to have you.”

  “I’ve thought about that, believe me.” I turned and walked to the center of the room. “In fact, Jackson asked me to sit in back when he was laying down the tracks for Running on Empty. Everything was all set when I got called away to New York for a conference about a possible acquisition. From there I had to fly to LA and meet with the principals of this independent film company, then fly back to New York for a bargaining session with a bunch of lawyers and accountants in order to finalize the deal. By the time I got home, the album was in post-production. Talk about running on empty. I don’t know, Aurie, things are too damned complicated now. My whole goddamned life is too complicated. Hey, you should sit down,” I said, nodding at the empty stool.

  “I am sitting, remember? And the hologram doesn’t need any rest. Why don’t you sit down and play something?”

  I shrugged, then sat on the stool, hooking my heels on the second rung and resting the guitar on my knee. I fooled around with some chords, but my heart wasn’t in it. “Fingers don’t work so good anymore,” I said. “Anyway, let’s forget about me and try to figure out what to do about stopping this Chapman character.”

  “I don’t know what to do, Rix,” She said. “Except try to look out for John and Ellie. Maybe you could hire some bodyguards.”

  “I seem to remember reading that John fired his bodyguards shortly before the shooting, so maybe he has a philosophical problem with that. Besides, as determined as Chapman was, I doubt a few musclemen would stop him. He’s probably nuts enough to try a suicide bombing.”

  “You’re right about John firing his bodyguards,” she said. “It was three weeks before the shooting. And another thing, Chapman may be nuts but he’s not stupid. He has an IQ of 121, which is considered in the superior range, a couple of notches above normal.”

  “Yeah, I—wait a minute. You looked him up. You looked both of them up. That’s how you knew the date of the shooting. You’ve been thinking about this all along.”

  “So I did some Googling,” she said with a smirk. “That doesn’t mean I came up with anything useful. Even if I had, I don’t think it would be a good idea to use the information in order to conduct some kind of history-changing intervention. John’s death was a major event and the reverberations were felt worldwide. Who knows what might happen if we interfere and he lives another thirty or forty years?”

  I noted she was now using the word “we,” which suggested that the hard line she was taking probably wasn’t quite as hard as she wanted me to believe. “Look,” I said, “if it was anyone else—a scientist
, say, or a political leader—I might agree with you, because someone like that would have a chance of changing the world for the worse. But Lennon? I can’t see how prolonging his life could possibly lead to a negative outcome. He’s a pacifist, for Christ’s sake, a peacenik whose philosophy is centered around love and tolerance. If anything, his continued presence should have a positive impact on the world.” I played a few bars of Give Peace a Chance to emphasize my point.

  “I know that, Rix,” she said. “But there’s still no way to predict what would happen. He’s already a controversial figure, and Yoko even more so. People change, you know. John’s living proof of that. What if his next revelation turns him into a religious fanatic? Remember what happened with Cat Stevens? What if somewhere down the line John decides to embrace Islam and support the Taliban? Think of how his influence could affect world opinion.”

  “I seriously doubt that, Aurie,” I said, transitioning smoothly to an instrumental rendition of Imagine. “Look at what he’s planning with Ellie. From what I gather it will be similar to Live Aid, and it’s going to happen long before Bob Geldolf comes up with the idea, before the famine in Ethiopia gets out of hand. Bob’s efforts were commendable, but they addressed situations only after they had become critical. Ellie and John could end up confronting the same problems in their early stages, focusing world attention on the famine and other matters in time to keep them from becoming full-blown disasters.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I still say it’s a risky proposition”

  “Maybe so,” I said, “but given the circumstances, I think the risk to Ellie makes it imperative that we do something. And with your help, we should be able to come up with a plan that will minimize that risk, if not eliminate it altogether.”

  “My help?” she said. “Oh, no. Anyway, what could I do? Have you forgotten that I’m not really here?”

  “Have you forgotten where you are, the tools you have at your disposal? All I have is a name and a date we can no longer rely on. You, on the other hand, have access to a huge store of historical data. I would bet there have been books written on Chapman, or at least news articles and published papers that include interviews with him and transcripts of his psychological evaluations. With that type of information we could not only locate him, but we might be able to figure out what he’s going to do before he even knows for sure himself.”

  “Heyoka won’t like it,” she said.

  “You can handle Heyoka,” I said. “All you have to do is put on your stubborn-little-bitch persona—your words, not mine. Even if it takes a while, we’ve still got two years. Although I will need some time to come up with a plan. All you’d have to do is compile as much information on Chapman as possible and get it to me as soon as you can.”

  “Mmmnn,” she murmured. “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.”

  “Think about it all you want. Just make sure you don’t wait too long, because with or without your help, I’m going to do something. And if I’m wandering around in the dark, the possibility of disaster increases exponentially.”

  Homecoming

  Aurélie didn’t agree to lend a hand in researching Chapman. Instead, she steered the conversation back around to me and how disappointed she was that I’d decided to sacrifice my musical career for the business.

  “It makes no sense to give up what you love in order to do things you hate,” she said.

  She was right, of course, but the fact that it made no sense didn’t change the situation; I was still caught in a trap from which there seemed to be no escape. I did, however, promise her I would give it some serious thought. And when she again asked me to play something, I decided it would be a good way to get her off the subject.

  Ignoring the pain in my fingertips, I managed a fair rendition of Parable, and was winding up the closing guitar riff on The Lady Left Me With A Song when she began to shimmer and disappear. In the short time we’d been together I had allowed myself to get lost in the fantasy of her presence, and seeing her dematerialize before my eyes was devastating. I was staring at the empty space, dreading a return to the harsh reality of my life, when a crack of thunder shook the building and the room was plunged into darkness.

  Unable to see in the pitch black, my thoughts turned inward, threatening to drive me deeper into depression. Desperate for some way to maintain control of my emotions, I tried to channel the anger and frustration through my fingers, attacking the guitar with every ounce of energy I had. I played through the pain with astonishing speed and intensity, challenging the thunder with song after song until the lights flickered and sprung back to life.

  Over the next few days I walked around in a fog, performing my job like a robot and waiting for Aurélie to contact me. But as the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, I began to lose hope. Meanwhile, thoughts of Chapman were once again pushed to the back of my mind by an endless barrage of mind-numbing meetings, ass-kissing negotiations, and financial headaches that threatened to drive me back to the house of Jack Daniel’s. I might have taken that drive were it not for the fact that I had no time to deal with drunkenness or hangovers.

  The only bright spots in the months following Aurélie’s visit were Ellie’s weekly phone calls, during which she would give me a brief update on school (“Dirac is weird … grades are perfect … social life is minimal.”) then light into an excited report on her plans with John. By the summer of 1978, she’d secured commitments from Jackson, Stevie Wonder, and Ray Charles, while cajoling Patsy to use her Nashville connections to draw in Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, and a slew of other country stars. Though she never came right out and said it, I could tell Ellie’s enthusiasm for academia was waning, and it didn’t surprise me at all when she decided to skip the summer trimester and come home to work on the logistics of the charity tour.

  She arrived a week before her seventeenth birthday, full of energy and as feisty and beautiful as ever. I did, however, occasionally catch a glimpse of a more contemplative Ellie, one who seemed restless and a little confused. We hadn’t spoken at length about her personal life since our talk on her fifteenth birthday, so after giving her a few of weeks to get reacquainted with the studio gang and check out what Sam was up to, I suggested we take a walk.

  The air was humid as we strolled hand-in-hand along the waterfront, dodging yellow flies and slapping at mosquitoes in the early twilight. We made small talk at first, but after a while we ran out of trivia and I decided to broach the subject of her future.

  “I haven’t made up my mind yet, Dad,” she said when I asked what her long-range plans were. “I’ve got a lot of ideas, and I need to get them sorted out before I make any concrete plans. The tour is a start, but after that there are so many problems that need to be addressed it’s going to be hard to set priorities.”

  It fascinated me how she’d never lost that little-girl desire to take on the problems of the world. Although, thankfully, she’d matured enough to realize she couldn’t fix everything and would have to do some prioritizing. I didn’t press her on that, but I couldn’t keep from inquiring about her love life.

  “I got the physical kinks worked out a few months ago,” she said, watching my face for a reaction. I managed to maintain a neutral expression, so she shrugged. “Thing is, I don’t have much time to devote to intimate relationships. I’ve had a couple of lovers, but there isn’t anyone special. Finding someone who’s good in bed and who’s also on my mental wavelength is not easy. Especially when he has to deal with my somewhat unemotional approach to lovemaking. For now I think of sex as entertainment, like going to an art museum or listening to good music.”

  Her attitude still worried me, but she seemed so well-adjusted and sure of herself, I couldn’t think of any way to argue. She acted—at least outwardly—like a typical seventeen-year-old girl, shopping with her mother, joking around with the guys in the studio, even flirting a little with some of the newer musicians. And she apparently felt comfortable enough with her own ident
ity not to need the isolation she’d once craved, because she’d moved back into her old room at the big house.

  Dad retired a month before Ellie came home, and after he and Mom spent a little time with her, they took off with Doris’s parents for an extended trip to Europe and Asia. Maybe it was because the house now seemed so empty with only the three of us there, or maybe Ellie and Doris had entered some sort of mother-daughter phase where their relationship underwent a natural change—whatever it was, the two of them spent a lot more time together than they ever had when Ellie was growing up. Before, Doris had always seemed intimidated by Ellie’s intellect, but now they were almost joined at the hip, working together on financial aspects of the tour, and sometimes shutting themselves off behind closed doors.

  This new and seemingly more intimate connection between them, while certainly welcome, was also a little disconcerting, bringing on an irrational feeling of jealousy and sometimes leading me to wonder what they were talking about that required so much privacy. I didn’t have to wonder for long, however, because one day Ellie came into my office, locked the door behind her, and proceeded to knock my socks off with the answer.

  Conspiracy

  I was on the phone with Sam when Ellie showed up at my office. She listened for a few minutes to my side of the conversation, pretending to read the sports page I’d left open on the desk. When her patience ran out, she folded the paper, dropped it in the wastebasket, and walked over to take the receiver from my hand.

  “Hey, Sam,” she said. “It’s Ellie. Listen, I hate to interrupt you guys, especially when you’re talking football, but I’ve got something I need to talk to Dad about, so could you give us a half hour or so? Yes, I understand Doug Williams is going to be out for the rest of the season, but this is a little more important than news about the Bucs. Thanks, buddy, I owe you one.” She handed the receiver back to me, then sat on the edge of the desk.