Then Again

by Rick Boling

  “I give up,” I said.

  “Well,” she said, “how about a little thing called religion? From the earliest chants in primitive societies, to the songs of Jewish cantors and hymns of Christianity and other organized religions, music has served as the single most effective way to embed spiritual and religious concepts in the minds of the people. And that continues to this day. In fact, the majority of songs that have been committed to memory in the history of humankind are religious in nature. Even rock & roll had its origins in religious music. The emotion of gospel gave rise to the blues, which was then combined with country and folk to create the genre you and thousands of others have made your living on. And how about Woody Guthrie’s music and its impact on the labor movement and the proliferation of unions? Or the so-called folk revival of the ’60s and ’70s and its pervasive influence on politics and various social causes?”

  She had me there. I’d run out of arguments and was about to admit she was right, when she hit me with the clincher.

  “Anyway, let’s put all that aside for a moment and get back to the current situation, which is that not only are you in need of some creative activity to counteract the depression you’re dealing with, but we’re offering you one of the most complex and interesting challenges you’ve ever faced. And, if you need any more incentive, there’s the fact that you and I will be spending more time together over the next nine months than we have since you’ve been in this dimension.”

  The Getaway

  I need to think about this,” I said, though I didn’t, really. At least not in so far as the decision was concerned. What I needed was breathing room: mental space to allow the idea to gel and give me time to adjust to the new reality I was facing. Again, Aurie seemed to read my thoughts.

  “What you need,” she said, “is to get out of this mausoleum of a house and go someplace that doesn’t constantly remind you of what happened to Doris.”

  “Get away?” I said. “Where? How?”

  “The how is easy. Money’s not a problem, so you can go wherever you want. Isn’t there someplace you’d like to go other than to the nearest bar?”

  “Haven’t thought about it,” I said.

  “Well, you need to start thinking about it.”

  “Damn!” I said, “Why is it that all the women in my life have suddenly gotten so bossy?” I put my hands behind my head, leaned back in my chair, and closed my eyes. I was trying my best not to give in, but I couldn’t keep my mind from working; and after a minute or so of silent contemplation, it became clear there was only one place that fit the bill. “Georgia,” I said, shocked at my sudden candor.

  “Georgia,” she repeated.

  “There’s this secluded tract of land up there north of Atlanta. About a hundred acres of virgin hardwoods with a cabin—”

  “I know all about Georgia, Rix.” I caught a hint of petulance in her voice, but it quickly disappeared. “It’s perfect,” she said. “So, what should we do?”

  “I don’t know. Find it, I guess. See if it’s still like I remember. If it hasn’t been run over by urban sprawl, maybe I could rent the cabin.”

  “Better yet, why don’t we just buy the whole thing?”

  “Get serious,” I said. “Even if the land is still undeveloped, it would cost an arm and a leg.”

  “So? It’s not like we can’t afford it. Whatever the cost, it would be a drop in the bucket for us, certainly worth it if it provides you with an environment where you can work in peace. Besides, it would probably be a good long-term investment. Do you know who owns it?”

  “Friend of Jimmy’s,” I said.” Or they were friends. We both knew the guy back in junior high, but things have evolved differently here. Jimmy doesn’t even resemble the drugged out musician he was in my first life. That all changed when he fell in love with Sarah. Chip, on the other hand, was a drug dealer, and he probably still is in this dimension.”

  “But you both knew him in school?”

  “Sort of,” I said. “Jimmy more than me. I don’t even remember his last name.”

  “Well then, you should talk to Jimmy. Meanwhile we can have someone from the foundation’s legal department check on the cost of undeveloped land up there. Do you remember anything that might help us locate it?”

  “I never had an address for the property. I got my mail through General Delivery at the post office in Lawrenceville. But even that was over thirty miles south. I’m telling you, the place was really isolated back then. That’s what was so great about it.”

  “Back then would be what, around 1974?” She said.

  “Yeah, ’74, ’75. Something like that.”

  “Okay, I’ll get Ellie on it as soon as she’s back from Canada. Meanwhile, you give Jimmy a call and see if he knows where to find this Chip character.”

  I called Jimmy the next day, but when I mentioned Chip, he drew a blank. “My friend Chip?” he said.

  “Not your friend, exactly,” I said. “We knew him back in junior high. I think he did a lot of drugs.”

  “You don’t mean that sleazebag Chip Salazar, do you?”

  “Salazar,” I said. “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “What’s this about, Rich?”

  I didn’t want to get into a long explanation, so I dodged the question. “Nothing, really. It was just one of those tip-of-the-tongue things. I got to thinking about him and I couldn’t for the life of me remember his last name. Didn’t the two of you used to hang around together?”

  “I guess we did, a little, but I haven’t spoken to the guy in over twenty years. What do you want with him anyway?”

  “Long story. I’ll fill you in later. Thanks, buddy. Talk to you soon.” I hung up before he could answer.

  I decided to put off my search for Chip until I’d heard from our lawyers about the relative value of undeveloped land in north-central Georgia—which, they said, varied widely depending upon its proximity to highways and the northern tendrils of Atlanta’s rapidly expanding suburbs. Best they could figure from knowing the property’s general location was that it would probably sell for one or two thousand an acre. With that information in hand, and wishing for the umpteenth time that the Internet was up and running, I flipped clumsily through the tissue-thin pages of our local phone book.

  There were seven Salazars listed, but no Chip. I was hoping the name hadn’t been short for a chip off the old block, but even if it wasn’t, I didn’t have any idea what Chip might be a nickname for. The closest name among the seven was a Christopher, so I called that one—and hit the jackpot. He didn’t remember me until I mentioned Jimmy and Blue Note Enterprises, and he was skeptical when I asked him about the land. I finally convinced him I’d heard about it when I ran into some old classmates at a party.

  “Okay,” he said, “So?”

  “Do you still own it,” I asked.

  “Yeah. What the fuck do you care?”

  “I want to buy it,” I said.

  “People in hell want ice water,” he said, laughing.

  “I’ll give you half a million cash.”

  That did it. Not only was it over twice what the land was worth, but I knew how fond drug dealers were of cash transactions.

  It took Ellie a few days to put the money together, and the closing was a little awkward because the payment was in cash. But we eventually got things wrapped up. We were leaving the attorney’s office when Chip pulled me aside.

  “You’re fucking nuts, you know that, don’t you?” He said. “It’s hard to figure. I mean, guys as rich as you don’t get that way making bad deals like this.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “But I always try to look on the positive side. And that side says rich guys like me get to do whatever the fuck we want.”

  So now I owned 100 acres and a cabin in the north-Georgia woods. That was nice, but I still didn’t know if things were going to pan out like I wanted them to. The last time I’d seen the property was in 1975—over five years ago in this timeline—and for all I knew it was now s
urrounded by tacky housing developments. Ellie had shown me a few photos taken by some of our ‘people’ so I knew the cabin was still there. And the land itself seemed to have changed little if at all. In fact, she said, there were several thousand acres of mostly wooded property surrounding it.

  Later that night, I was sitting alone on the patio, sipping the last of the fake Jack, when the trees began to sway violently. The abrupt blast of icy wind reminded me of those freezing nights in Georgia—of chopping wood and shivering under threadbare blankets. And I thought how, in this life, I’d become a sedentary slug, taking for granted the comforts of civilization. Did I really want to do the Walden-Pond thing again—the back-to-nature trip I’d already been through once? Ellie had suggested I build a comfortable, weather-tight house to replace the broken-down cabin. But somehow that seemed like it would be an insult to the primitive setting, or at least to my memories of it. Maybe I could just fix up the cabin a little; plug the leaks and install a decent heating system. Or … maybe not.

  Whatever I did, I would still have to deal with the problem of solitude. Aurie had promised she would be spending more time with me, but that wouldn’t be right away. Before we could start working on new material, I needed time to get my hands and voice back in shape, and that was something I had to do on my own. Not only would her presence be of no help, it would be a hindrance, at least until I’d regained some degree of confidence in my ability to entertain anything other than an audience of chipmunks and squirrels.

  A Buddhist monk would no-doubt advise me to see this as a perfect opportunity to seek enlightenment. But other than practicing transcendental meditation, I’d never given much credence to that kind of stuff. During my first go-’round, when Robin was there to support me and cheer me on, I’d used the solitude to get in touch with nature and write. This time, however, I would be on my own much of the time.

  Thinking of Robin, I couldn’t help but wonder how things had turned out for her without Rix Vaughn around to screw up her life. Maybe she would still be waiting tables at the Black Orchid Lounge in Roswell, where I was working when we met. That was doubtful, but if I was going to hone my new act, I would eventually need a place to perform in public, and the Orchid seemed like an ideal venue.

  Georgia

  The room’s ambience was familiar: subdued light, a crisp aroma of broiling steak, the clink of glasses and silverware—all overlaid with a combination of soft piano music, stale tobacco smoke, and the muted fragrance of expensive perfumes and colognes. The familiarity wasn’t from my time at the Black Orchid—I’d been far too wasted back then to remember much of anything—but from wispy memories of a hundred other supper clubs, the last being LeMusique, where I’d first encountered Heyoka. Other than the architecture and a murmur of southern-accented conversations, the atmosphere here was essentially the same.

  Unlike LeMusique, where the restaurant and concert area were separate, here they occupied a single expansive room. Semicircular in design, the two-tiered floor plan centered on a cozy, amphitheater section with a small stage set in a domed alcove. A perimeter of booths surrounded what was originally a dance floor, but that now held a dozen or so tall cocktail tables. The restaurant and piano bar occupied a second tier that rose above and beyond the booths, creating an acoustic configuration that helped insulate the amphitheater from the clatter and conversations of dinner guests. Two short staircases allowed diners to migrate to the lower level after they’d finished their meals, and on a busy night the vacated tables could accommodate additional spectators.

  At the piano bar, a white-haired gentleman, imitating Dean Martin in both vocal style and liquor consumption, fielded requests from a few old timers. On the lower level, the stage stood empty, awaiting the 9:00 arrival of the night’s featured performer. This would probably be some up-and-coming local talent with a small backup band, or maybe a single doing cover songs and repeating jokes from yesterday’s late-night TV shows.

  It was my first visit to the club since I’d taken up residence in the cabin where Robin and I had spent that glorious but ill-fated year together. Despite my objections, Ellie had insisted on making several improvements to the cabin, though I had managed to convince her that I did not want it torn down and replaced with a comfy example of modern, suburban housing. I’d eventually agreed to a compromise, settling for a new roof and paint job, plus a few modest pieces of furniture salvaged, at my insistence, from local thrift shops. I had patched most of the leaks myself and installed electric baseboard heating, along with a slightly-used stove and refrigerator. In spite of these upgrades, the structure retained a somewhat unpolished, woodsy charm, insulated from the outside world by dense forest and accessible only by negotiating a long and somewhat treacherous dirt road.

  When I wasn’t working on the cabin, I spent most of the daylight hours sitting in my favorite spot: a diving-board-shaped granite outcropping overlooking the fast-running stream, where I’d come up with most of the ideas for the songs that had eventually filled my three albums. This time, however, instead of writing, I’d concentrated on mundane tasks, like running scales on the guitar to rebuild the callouses on my tender fingertips and regain the dexterity I’d once had. As for my voice, there was a lot of work to do there. Lack of practice had severely reduced my vocal range, and the break between tenor and falsetto that I’d worked so hard to eliminate after puberty was once again pronounced. I’d asked Carol Henderson for some exercises to help me reestablish a smooth transition from the lows to the highs, and when I wasn’t working on my guitar technique, I would sing at the top of my lungs to an audience of curious wildlife.

  Evenings were spent in the cabin, refining the lyrics and music to some of the songs I’d never published in this dimension, and creating new fingerstyle arrangements for the hits I’d written while at Blue Note Studios. When I tired of these activities, I would call Jimmy to discuss recording ideas, or Sam to talk about his progress with the 3D printing technology, which, he said, was coming along faster than they had originally anticipated.

  “We’re getting closer every day to equaling the capabilities of the printers Heyoka and his team have developed,” he said. “We can now print everything from microscopic circuitry, to advanced composite materials, and even organics—plants, foodstuffs, and the like.”

  “Living organisms?” I said. I was thinking, of course, about humans, Aurie in particular. “What about animals—mammals?”

  “We haven’t gotten that far yet. Actually, Heyoka says there’s been a problem with printing higher life forms. They print fine, but the copies are inanimate—perfect duplications, just not alive. They can be jump started electrically and brought to life, but even though the brain is functional, the mind, or maybe I should say the personality, disappears. It’s like they start over from scratch, having to learn everything as if they’d just been born.”

  “That’s … disappointing.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess we’ve all been thinking the same thing. The good news is they haven’t given up. Hey, how about that tour? Looks like Ellie’s setting the world on fire.”

  Ellie had been calling me several times a week ever since I moved into the cabin, so I knew about the tour. It was obvious that these calls were her way of checking to make sure I wasn’t slitting my wrists or drinking myself into oblivion, but she always tried to cover that up by giving me detailed progress reports on the tour.

  Other than that, my only respite from the loneliness and solitude was when Aurélie showed up to provide encouragement. As if she thought seeing her might be too intimidating, she would often revert back to the voice-in-the-head thing. Sometimes, though, when I was wandering through the woods, she would appear beside me, saying little and seeming to enjoy our being together in a setting not unlike the forest surrounding Heyoka’s villa. It was during one of these visits that she broached the subject of my getting back in front of an audience, and she surprised me by suggesting I take my first shot at the Black Orchid.

  �
�It’s a perfect spot, Rix,” she said as we approached the cabin. “Besides, I know you’re curious about Robin, so why not at least stop by some evening and talk to her?”

  “Talk to her?” I said. “How do you know she’s even there?”

  She looked off into the trees, where a few lightning bugs twinkled among the budding springtime leaves. “Don’t be mad at me,” she said, “but I did a little investigating.”

  “Oh, really?” I said. “And?”

  “She’s still there. In fact, she’s managing the place now. It was really weird. You know, like seeing myself in a mirror. I didn’t let her see me, of course, but you were right about us looking alike. I followed her around for a while, watched her interact with employees and customers. And, well, she seems really sweet and kindhearted, so I can understand why you fell in love with her.”

  I was a little freaked out by this; it sounded almost like she was encouraging me to hook up with Robin, which I had no intention of doing.

  “What’s going on, Aurie?” I said. “You know as well as I do there are dozens of clubs around Atlanta I could try. I may be curious to find out how Robin’s doing, but curious is all I am. If there was anything more to it I would have checked out the Orchid myself a long time ago.”

  It wasn’t like Aurie to show nervousness or lose her composure, but my question had obviously made her uncomfortable.

  “I wasn’t suggesting anything of the kind!” she said, her defensive tone indicating that, in fact, she was. “I just thought since you were familiar with the club and all …”

  “And all what?”

  “Like I said, it seems perfect to me. It’s a nice-sized room. Not too big, not too small. And it draws a more laid-back clientele than the fancier clubs in Atlanta. Plus, they often feature little-known singer-songwriters. The fact that you’d get to see Robin would just be a bonus.”