Vexation Lullaby

by Justin Tussing

  “What do you call the bus we were on?”

  “I think it’s just the bus.”

  They came to a wide steel door set in a featureless brick wall. Albert tried to pull it open, but it was locked. He pushed a buzzer.

  A damp wind funneled past the building; Peter, in a thin corduroy jacket, dress shirt, and khakis, shivered. He hoped someone would answer so they could get inside.

  “They might be taking lunch,” the drummer said.

  “Should we try another door?”

  Albert shook his head. He plugged a cigarette into his mouth and lit it. “I tried quitting,” he said, “but my girlfriend smokes and if I stop I can’t stand the way she smells. Now I have one a day, like a vitamin.”

  “Bluto said she’s Polish.”

  With the same hand that held the burning cigarette, Albert reached out and straightened the lapels of the doctor’s jacket. “Is there a part of the body you favor?”

  It took Peter a moment to untangle the question. “I’m not a specialist, if that’s what you mean.”

  The kid turned and beat his fist against the door. “So what’s wrong with him?”

  “I can’t discuss a patient’s health. It’s against the law.”

  Albert dropped his cigarette and ground it under the sole of his shoe. “So he’s your patient.”

  Peter heard a bolt slam, then the door swung outward.

  A doughy guy, dressed in filthy black clothes and dark aviator sunglasses, smiled at Albert. Except for his forehead and two semicircles beneath his eyes, the man’s whole head was covered uniformly with salt and pepper stubble. “Who’s your boyfriend?”

  “This is the Big Man’s doctor,” the drummer said. “Bluto’s paying me to show him around.”

  The man raised a pink, tender-looking hand in greeting. “Welcome to our corner of the quotidian. I’m the Blister.”

  Peter introduced himself.

  “Is there a name for the band’s bus?” Albert asked.

  “You guys stay in the Toolshed, the gear rides in the Attic, and the Big Man rides in the Taj.”

  “Where is the Taj?” Albert asked.

  “It’s being converting to run on fry-oil,” said the Blister, “because of all the carbon-footprint Bolsheviks.”

  “We fly most of the time,” added Albert.

  “That’s what they call the royal we,” the Blister said. “Now, if you gentlemen don’t mind, I have to get back to work.”

  PETER FOLLOWED ALBERT across a cement-floored staging area. They pushed through a curtain of heavy translucent plastic, past crates and boxes, and onto a black-planked stage. The houselights were off. Peter could make out only the first few rows of seats, but the sound of their echoing footsteps gave him a sense of the space. On a battered plywood riser, tilted cymbals, tom-toms, and a bass drum crowded around a yellow leather stool; the arrangement reminded Peter of a device his middle-school science teacher had used to demonstrate the orbits of the planets. Albert picked a yardstick off the stage and went about measuring the height of the leading edge of the drumheads, the separation between the hi-hats, the distance between the pedals on the floor. Then, after making some minute adjustments to the setup, he mounted the stool and measured everything again, this time with a pair of drumsticks in his hands.

  At any moment, Peter expected the kid to uncork a little flourish, but he didn’t play.

  “I imagine this is a dream job, playing with Jimmy.”

  Albert squinted. “You see my name on the tickets?”

  “Point taken,” said the Rochester Memorial/Tony Ogata Ambassador for Wellness.

  Albert pointed his toe at a metal-reinforced box sitting on the corner of the riser. “Take a peek in there.”

  Peter was reminded of those black-box data recorders designed to survive plane crashes. He flipped a pair of chrome latches and lifted the lid.

  “It’s like seeing Dorothy’s ruby slippers, huh?”

  Peter activated his phone’s camera. Clasping his wrist with his free hand, like a pistol marksman, he took a picture and forwarded it to Martin.

  A moment later, Peter’s phone rang.

  “I’m with a patient,” Martin said.

  “You called me.”

  “She has a question for you.”

  A woman’s voice came over the line. “Are those Jimmy Cross’s harmonicas?”

  “They are.”

  “That’s so cool.”

  Martin got back on the line. “If you didn’t need this so bad, I’d probably be jealous.”

  Peter thanked his friend before hanging up. He felt as though someone had breathed on a coal inside his chest, as though some dull and ashy part of himself suddenly gave off light.

  His phone vibrated as a text came in: Asshole.

  29

  Some people kill time, but I prefer to fill time. That’s why, instead of reading the newspaper or ducking into a bar, I choose to head over to Buffalo Airfield.

  Before 9/11,23 a person could drive right onto the runway at most executive airports. Airstrips were tranquil, dreamy places; I never had any trouble getting copies of flight plans or manifests. I’d eat my lunch and watch a local orthodontist practice touch-and-goes in a kit plane he’d assembled in his garage.

  Now there are gates and guardhouses. If I park outside the perimeter fence, sooner or later someone will come by to make sure I’m not part of a sleeper cell.

  DRIVING AROUND THE airfield, every dirt turnout has a sign reminding me that the area is under surveillance and I need to keep moving. I wind up a quarter mile away, in the parking lot of a Jo-Ann Fabrics. It’s farther away than I’d like, but it’s under the approach path and no one is going to give me trouble for being there.

  Cross is just one person, but he’s surrounded by a huge, grinding machine and that machine sometimes telegraphs its intentions. I think that’s why, some nights, I can guess which song he’ll play next—it doesn’t happen often, but when it comes to me I’m never wrong.

  Sitting in the parking lot, I get the feeling that Jimmy is about to appear.

  I glass the runway with my binoculars; my eyes pass over the Cessnas guy-wired to the ground, the tiny little control tower studded with radio antennae, and one of those whirligigs they use to gauge the wind. A man stands beside a Piper Cub; the engine cowling is folded back. An orange pickup makes a slow circuit inside the control fence. Near the tower, an old-timer astride a girl’s bike rides circles around a tied-up mutt. I check my watch. It’s a little after six. The doors open in less than an hour.

  MY PHONE RINGS. It’s Patricia. She knows I have to answer because we have a child together.

  “Hello, Arthur.”

  “Did you have another dream?” Back in August she called to tell me that she’d dreamed that I’d died “alone in a hotel room” and she wanted me to make arrangements so, if I did pass away, Gabby wouldn’t be the one to be notified by the police—in Patricia’s dream, the police had called our daughter at work.

  “Don’t be a curmudgeon. Are you in Buffalo?”

  “Is that why you called, to ask where I was?”

  “Promise me you’re going to see Gabrielle when you get down to Kentucky.”

  “I talked with Gabby yesterday.”

  “I know that. Why do you think I called you? I want you to promise me that you will see her. Don’t screw this up.”

  Two blocks away, I spot a black limousine waiting at a traffic light.

  I promise her that I’ll see Gabby.

  “It appears you were off for a couple days. How’d that go?”

  She’s needling me.

  “Yesterday I told someone I was married.”

  I have her attention, because all of a sudden she’s quiet.

  “It was a slipup.”

  “I hope you’re not losing your marbles.”

  The limousine pulls up in front of the airfield’s gate. I watch the gatekeeper pedal ove
r.

  “Is there anything else?”

  “Give Gabrielle your approval.”

  “Don’t I need to know what I’m approving?”

  “No,” Patricia says, almost yelling.

  The orange truck jounces across the infield.

  “Repeat after me: I will give her my approval.”

  “I will give her my approval.”

  “You sound distracted.”

  I recite my line again.

  “I got my hair cut last week,” Patricia says. “I’m too old to wear it long. Maybe if I were a public intellectual.”24

  I tell her she’s not that old.

  “You’d probably say I look like a lesbian.”

  “That doesn’t sound like me.”

  A small jet roars overhead. The tires kiss the runway and leave a puff of white smoke. I tell Patricia I have to go.

  “For a person who does nothing, you stay awfully busy. Aunt Liddy would be so proud.”

  Patricia specializes in the parting shot. Sometimes it feels as though she’s giving herself an alibi in case anyone ever accuses her of caring about me. It doesn’t escape me that she knew I was in Buffalo—she bothered to check.

  30

  Albert and Peter had taken up seats in the front row of the auditorium. Tilting their heads back, they watched the new Kev as she crawled around the catwalks above the stage.

  “What happened to the old Kev?” Peter asked.

  Albert shook his head. “Vertigo. He couldn’t climb a stepladder.”

  “Did he see a doctor?”

  “Bluto diagnosed him as unemployable. We left him in Boston. You don’t know how to play mah-jongg, do you?”

  Peter conceded that he didn’t.

  “He and Sutliff used to play before we’d go on.”

  “Figuring out things to do with your downtime must be a challenge.”

  “You’re talking to a musician. Downtime is my preferred medium.”

  People walked across the stage, flaking out coils of electrical cable, arranging guitars like weapons in an armory. A guy in camouflage cached water bottles beside every piece of stationary equipment.

  FLETCHER TAPPED PETER on the shoulder and asked if he wanted to sit behind the boards while the band ran through their sound check.

  If he stayed where he was, Peter thought he would feel a lot like an audience member, so he followed the technician to a control booth at the back of the room.

  “Welcome to the doghouse,” Fletcher said, holding the door for the doctor.

  The room reminded Peter of a poster that had hung on the wall of his boyhood home, a fish-eye perspective of the space shuttle’s cockpit. But while the space shuttle required a pilot and copilot, Fletcher flew solo.

  Judith had given Peter the poster as a birthday gift and then hung it in their living room among her things. Judith didn’t care about boundaries. All their clothes shared a closet, for example. And she refused to close the door to her bedroom, because she thought that on some level he would perceive that as a rejection. They’d been inseparable. Judith had always been his best friend, even when it was embarrassing. She let him know that his favorite things to do were her favorite things. On spring days, while the whole town smelled of ferns, she would take him down to a stream where they’d turn over rocks and hunt for salamanders. He remembered summer afternoons in the town’s arcade, the parquet floor slippery with sawdust from the tabletop shuffleboard, his mother bumping her hip against a pinball machine. He’d been seven and ten and fourteen and Judith was always there. She used to wear a leather bracelet with his name tooled in red. No museum is better guarded than the human heart.

  •••

  WHEN THE SOUND check started, the band played on top of one another, a tangled dissonance. Fletcher moved over the board, tweaking the settings on his switches, slides, and dials. At times he’d ask the band to take five while he investigated the source of a particular buzz or echo. When they weren’t playing, the musicians basked in the stage lights, as cold-blooded as lizards.

  Fletcher wore a pair of headphones around his neck, not unlike a stethoscope. Every so often he’d lift them to his ears.

  He made a hundred inscrutable adjustments to the board before asking the band to move on to another song. The musicians barked requests in jargon: cool it down, less edge, drop the ceiling, add some rust. After repeating the opening, they lifted their thumbs. The guys swapped guitars before repeating the process.

  “How do you know what to adjust?”

  “Before this gig, I ran the boards for a Monsters of Metal tour,” Fletcher said. “Back then I had to reinvent the wheel every night, but these guys are professionals. If I’m feeling bored I’ll tweak one of the midrange frequencies and we’ll play our version of Battleship. Dom can usually pinpoint the issue after two or three notes.”

  Peter confessed that Albert was the only band member he knew.

  “Don’t sweat it,” Fletcher said. “I ran the board for fifteen months before anyone bothered to learn my name.” He pointed to a thickset man wearing a brown, flat-brimmed fedora. “Dom’s the one who looks like a Cuban exile. The skinny tree next to him is Sutliff.”

  At the back of the stage there was a guy wearing two guitars, one almost up to his armpits and the other down over his knees. “Who’s that?”

  “James Blonde is a tech. He stands in for Jimmy during sound checks.”

  “Mr. Cross doesn’t do sound checks?”

  Fletcher reached under the soundboard and grabbed a soda fountain drink. He had a long pull on the straw. “Are you asking me as a doctor or as a curious person?”

  “As a doctor, I guess.”

  “The doctor is in,” said Wayne Shiga. Bluto’s assistant must have joined them while Peter was watching the band.

  Peter couldn’t remember what he’d been talking about.

  Wayne bumped fists with Fletcher, then, looking at Peter, he said, “You ready for your date?”

  People like Wayne, the perpetually blasé, annoyed Peter. It wasn’t enough that they thought he was square, they wanted everyone else to think so as well.

  “Ready and raring,” Peter said.

  “Try not to get wood.”

  Act dignified, thought Peter.

  Wayne led him through the lobby, out the front of the hall, and helped him into a waiting cab. “When you get to the restaurant, make sure your phone is off. Listen to Cyril.”

  Peter said he understood.

  “Good cowboy,” Wayne said, like an asshole.

  The cabbie pulled away from the curb. Where, Peter wondered, was he going to meet Cross? He imagined a private dining room, a dim enclave where surfaces were walnut or leather. He took his phone out. No calls. No messages. Anyone who emailed him would receive an autoreply explaining that he was unavailable. He’d been on the tour for seven hours, but it felt like he’d slipped the bonds of time.

  •••

  THE CAR STOPPED in front of a red vinyl banner announcing “New India Palace Takeout/Delivery.” A yellow Heineken sign blinked in the window.

  “This is it,” said the cabbie, an otherwise unremarkable man who had the Union Jack tattooed on his forehead.

  “What do I owe?”

  The driver shook a hand in front of the rearview mirror. “It’s been taken care of.” Peter was relieved—he needed to stop by an ATM and get some cash.

  Cyril waited beside the door to the restaurant. “This way, doc.”

  As he jogged toward the bodyguard, Peter noticed his reflection in the restaurant’s plate-glass window was bent over like a person getting out of a helicopter.

  Cyril set a hand as heavy as a saddle on the Peter’s shoulder. “The Big Man’s waiting for you in back.”

  Peter walked past a gilded Ganesh and a stone pagoda studded with silk flowers, past empty two-tops and four-tops, to a booth near the bathroom. The table was set for four, but Cross was by himself. He wore a wh
ite cowboy hat and a shirt as pale as a winter sky.

  Cross smiled, extending a hand toward the empty spot opposite him. “Grab a seat.”

  Peter slid onto the bench.

  “You been to Buffalo before?”

  “Once or twice.” Peter looked around the empty restaurant. “Is the food good?” The question glittered in its stupidity. How much would Martin pay for the chance to eat bad Indian food with his hero? Five grand? Ten?

  Cross locked his fingers together and set them on the table. “It’s going to be good for me to have you out here. I can feel it.”

  “You’ll have to let me know what I can do to help.”

  The singer sucked in a deep breath. “See, you’re already helping.”

  “Have you had any more problems with slippery time?”

  Leaning forward, Cross said, “Hey, I hope Tony didn’t cause you too much of a headache.”

  Peter sipped his water. “It’s all cleared up.”

  Cross set his hat down beside him. “I wanted to introduce you to someone, but it looks like we’ve been stood up.”

  Who would have the nerve to stand Cross up? Maybe the singer meant something else.

  Two waiters burst out of the kitchen carrying crowded trays, the food hidden beneath aluminum domes. The waiters lifted the lids, releasing puffs of cottony steam. Potatoes, lentils, and curry in every combination. Green beans and golden onions. One of the waiters set two sweating bottles of Kingfisher beer on the table, then poured them silently into the tilted necks of pilsner glasses. Peter had shared a Kingfisher with Lucy once, at a Malaysian place where the waiters whispered around in slippers.

  Cross ladled things onto his plate. “I can never remember what I like, so I got us a bit of everything.” He pointed at a sauce. “Watch out for that stuff. India’s full of contradictions—they make red food that tastes cool and green stuff that can strip paint.”

  Though he couldn’t imagine eating, Peter loaded his plate.

  “So, what made you decide you wanted to be a doctor?”

  Most of the people Peter met in med school had familial connections in the profession—medicine happens behind closed doors, and the same mechanisms that protect the privacy of the patient protect the privacy of the practice. For Peter, becoming a doctor wasn’t the fulfillment of a dream, so much as the culmination of a process. He said, “People kept telling me I ought to look into medicine. Eventually, I listened.”