The Wild Harmonic

by Beth W. Patterson

  Tonight’s gig is The Wild Hunt, which I’m not in the mood for. I hate Bourbon Street, and my head still feels like an exploding spaceship after last night’s self-pity party. But the club had provided backline, so all I have to do is find safe parking and stroll through the throngs with only my padded gig bag strapped to my back. Tonight, people don’t care that I didn’t write or record any of these hit songs. When I play these covers, the crowd comes to life. It’s a crying shame that most people are afraid to try new things and explore new original music, but a gig is a gig, and I’m going to milk it for all it’s worth.

  Going alto unleashes the beast and lends me a commanding beauty for the night. I stare the crowd down, toss my hair, and sling my bass in front of me as if parrying a sword. The façade is a ritual mask that I wear: not innately a part of me, but when I don it, I am one with the role. I am a shaman of bullshit; I am a harbinger of cheap messiahs. Pace yourself, my instinct warns me, knowing that I will be extra-tired tomorrow. I am prepared to go in for the long haul between downbeat and pulling into my driveway many hours from now.

  The crowd sways with our parroted repertoire. The tourists want to touch me, they want my attention, or they want a piece of me. It’s as if I were the divine creator of this pop cultural echo, and that the guys on the gig and I are the only rock stars in existence. But as soon as they turn their undivided attention away from us, we will be reduced to particles where we were once waves.

  But there’s a major downside to this simulated glory, especially for a werewolf. Into the fourth hour of the gig the smells of pent-up frustration, vomit, smoke, and ill intent assault my nostrils a hundred times harder than the stench that already makes humans sick. A piercing two-finger whistle emitted by a tourist that wouldn’t be out of place in a giant arena slashes at my eardrums in this small club. Musicians rely on their ears, and most of them I know hate this unnecessary sound when done at close range, but for me it’s infinitely more excruciating. I wince in pain, much to the delight of the whistler, who does it again. Glaring at him, I bark at him off of the mic, “Dude, that really hurts!” I obviously should have tried ignoring him, because he only repeats the offense longer and louder, grabbing his crotch.

  Oh yeah. This is why I hate Bourbon Street.

  About three songs later, he wanders up to the edge of the stage with a fresh drink in hand. “Sorry, ‘bout that,” he smiles. “Me and my buddies are just having some fun. Come on, lighten up! You’re in New Or-leeeeeens, baby! Have a drink on us!” I carefully take the plastic cup from his hand and unapologetically assess his eyes, his posture, and the way his buddies are all clustered together watching us. I tune into my heightened senses and give the drink a light whiff. Date rape drug!

  I want to destroy this man. I want to make him suffer in ways that no human can fathom. I want to slowly disembowel him with one claw, a vertical dissection cut that starts with his most secret places. I want him to beg for absolution for crimes he has probably committed over the years to both musicians and females. A burning sensation crawls over every nerve. Breathing through the fury that threatens to consume me, I barely manage to tame the human within. Nothing would please me more than tearing this guy’s body into bloody shreds, but I still have forty-five minutes left to play. I whisper my discovery to the drummer before calmly announcing over the microphone, “We need security over here, please.” I don’t know if security consists of more than our bartenders and bouncer, but this gesture is effective. The drunkard and his posse bolt for the door, leaving me with a glass of potential criminal evidence in my hand. The other band members stare him down, quietly discussing his description amongst themselves. Word of mouth warning is as quick as social networking among the music tribe.

  The prickles on the back of my neck cling like burrs for the duration of the gig. Was he a misogynist out to violate a woman, or one of the unknown enemies out to abduct a shifter? I’m not sure which would have been worse. The overtones of his piercing whistles still ring in my ears.

  Before tearing down for the night, I explain to the bar staff that I happened to have a drug testing strip handy, and no one questions me, especially when I leave the untouched beverage in their custody for anyone to analyze. Date rape drug test strips are so easily found online, I don’t doubt that several other people working here have some handy for verification. In his hasty escape, the would-be perpetrator had left his credit card behind the bar, so he is guaranteed to suffer some sort of repercussions if he wants it back. I always make a point of tipping the bartenders on any gig, even if drinks are free or I don’t drink anything. But tonight I make certain that I give them a little more than normal. The automatic gratuity added for cards left behind won’t begin to cover someone having to deal with this miscreant in the morning—or later tonight, if he’s really stupid.

  Ready to just get the hell out of the Quarter, I amble down to my parking place on Rampart where I can see a clump of frat boys by my little Honda a block away. My nerves catch fire before this even fully registers. No! My territory! Somehow I make it over there in a heartbeat and catch an idiot in the act of trying to snap one of my windshield wipers off. This time I had no concern for stage etiquette and let fly a growl that surprises even me. “Party’s over, asshole! Let someone trash your vehicle while you’re trying to get off of work!” I have my unfolding police baton “Thumper” handy, but I’m still trying to decide whether I want to hurt these people—and I want to hurt them very badly indeed—or just make a lasting impression.

  The guy holding my windshield wiper is sprawled across the hood of my car, purple baseball cap set tightly backward, oversized beads akimbo. Still determined to get his trophy, he slurs, “Dude, c’mon … we’re just havin’ a good time!”

  That settles it. I shouldn’t do this, but just for the barest moment, I go into tenor phase. My stage clothes rip as I suddenly grow two feet in height, grabbing the vandal by the shoulder and lifting him as if he were a doll. Swinging him around to face me, I stick a snout full of teeth in his face, letting some saliva drip for added effect. The terror on his face makes this outrage almost worth it, and I savor the stench of his fear before dropping him to the pavement like a bag of trash. The revelers screech and take off down the street like deer after the first warning shot. And in the next instant I am in full human form, loading my bass into my car. No one bears witness to any of this but a lost-looking mourning dove sitting on a nearby wrought iron fence.

  Let those obstreperous wastes of human flesh tell the police. Between my shredded clothing, the impossible thing that they have just witnessed, their blood alcohol level, and the fact that they were trying to vandalize my car, who are the authorities going to believe? Unless some of the authorities are among those out to enslave us shifters.

  I make it home in record time. My friendly porch light has never looked so good. My bed, however, no longer seems like a safe place to sleep. Only a civilized human would rest easily on a soft platform, so readily exposed. Comfy pajamas and soothing tea are the last things I need to feel secure right now.

  Yanking the covers off of my bed, I throw them in a pile on the floor in a corner, my new location giving me the advantage of feeling vibrations through the floor. Going into bass form, I prepare my bedding by turning three times. Survival sleep mode kicks in: restful for the body, one tiny section of the mind always on alert. Complacency is dangerous for a wild animal to feel.

  A dark hunger, a visceral urge ruled by a cycle is what urges me awake. I alternate between walking on two legs and four, snarling all the way to the refrigerator. I care nothing for the repercussions as I feed. Ahhhh, chocolate …

  I try not to delve into self-pity too often, but I can’t ignore the fact that being a werewolf with PMS sucks big time. I go through some yoga asanas to try to relieve the pain, but nothing seems to work. My soprano-form human shell feels like it’s going to burst. I wonder if I would still be cramping if I changed forms.

  Tenor phase comes more easily to me
this time. My fingers are tipped with claws, but I still retain the opposable thumb. The pain begins to fade, and I breathe with my whole body in relief. My mind is still more ego-driven human than instinct-based animal, and curiosity gets the better of me. Walking bipedally to my instrument cases, I choose my Music Man, loving the increased capacity of smelling wood and polish and sweat and metal strings. I have to adjust my strap to be able to hold it in this larger form, and it takes me a while to be able to stand upright holding it, as I’m already top-heavy with broader shoulders and heels off the ground. My short tail helps me to balance.

  I finally check myself out in the full-length mirror. Hot damn! I truly am a monster. My elongated face—neither human nor canine —can’t conceal dagger-sharp teeth, even when I try to close my lips around them. My eyes are an unnerving yellow; no wonder we come across as evil. My ears are pointed, and a downy dusting of whitish fur springs along my arms, legs, and down my spine. I am fearsome. I am hideous. I am awesome.

  I tune my bass down to the recommended slightly lower pitch and immediately feel the difference. Hooked up to my amp, I feel the notes all the way up my spine and flowing out of my throat. The vibrations oscillate in such a way that everything feels inherently right. The tones caress and massage me, a giant purring cocoon of sound. I try playing in tenor form, which is cumbersome at first with my longer, thicker fingers. My claws are a hindrance, so I try changing the angle of my picking hand. Mercifully, I still have callouses on my digits. I can’t quite sing the way I am accustomed to, with lips that can’t quite touch each other to form certain consonants, but I believe that I can eventually manage with enough practice.

  The new tuning unlocks something powerful within and my creative juices start flowing. My claws serve as picks, even thought I don’t normally use picks for bass. My fingers become a bit more nimble, improvising a quick mantra over the steady drone of my growl. If only my pack and I could play out like this. Who needs a cosplay gimmick when you’re in an all-werewolf band? The musicianship alone would put us on the map. We could be famous if only the majority didn’t fear us. I raise my growl to a crooning note.

  There’s a knock at my door. My upstairs neighbor Bob calls, “Buzz! Hey, are you okay?”

  Shit, I forgot to ward! “Rust a rinute!” I call, sounding like some demonic Scooby-Doo. I retract my body into soprano form as quickly as parahumanly possible, pull on my sweats and t-shirt, and answer the door as casually as I can. “I’m fine. Just practicing. Why?”

  He looks at me askance for a fraction of a second. “Just thought I heard something … weird.” I assure him that I’m trying to learn some avant-garde new music that all the young people are playing these days, and then we ease into small talk about local politics. And he leaves it at that, and I close the door. Whew!

  That’s enough practice for one day. Calm and pain-free at last, I step into the shower and prepare for another lesson from Rowan.

  Rowan somehow knows that I have gone beyond alto phase in public even before I say a word to him. He cuts me some slack, but warns me about doing such a thing. Not that the frat boys would have been plausible witnesses, but had our mysterious adversaries been watching, they could have followed me and traced me back to the entire pack. “I can’t really blame you,” he muses. “The Quarter is getting out of hand, perhaps as bad as it was before Hurricane Katrina. This is why I don’t even make that twenty-minute commute if I don’t have to.” I forget that he’s the only pack member who doesn’t live in Orleans Parish, choosing instead to hide somewhere in the suburbs of Metairie. He is a little removed from the rest of us in more ways than one.

  I’m back at the studio, learning a few more techniques from Rowan before he has a session. It’s probably unhealthy, but in times like this I can pretend that we are an item. After all, how many girls does he know who can get genuinely excited about new microphone preamps or can appreciate a three-way analog splitter?

  We take a moment to discuss energies of not only people, but the tools of our trade. He talks about vintage boards and mics. “Why do you think people covet them? Why do you suppose they wouldn’t just prefer some new state-of-the-art piece of equipment instead?”

  I shrug. “The history? The energy?”

  He beams, and I try not to melt. “Precisely. It’s already been proven that sound imprints itself on the walls, even if there’s no way to play it back. But microphones have consciousness. Mics don’t just transmit sound. They ‘hear.’ They receive and retain highly concentrated energy, more intensely than any historical buildings that project ghosts. People prize vintage equipment, sometimes without even knowing why. Microphones especially retain memories, breath, emotions, and the unfiltered things between takes that never even get recorded. They hear all, and only convey the hard cold truth … or the raw, undiluted magic. Consoles, too, are like computers that become self aware. The circuitry comes to life, a literal ghost in the machine.”

  It makes perfect sense to me as I suddenly remember a session I once played at one particular studio where everyone was cooing over a vintage Kohl mic. It was a strange piece, resembling the underside of a horse’s hoof, but it was revered for its history with Abbey Road—and thusly named “The Abbey Road Mic” with a kind of hushed reverence. And then I recall historical consoles that engineers covet. There is state of the art equipment being made every day, but everyone wants the ones from C-Saint, from Le Studio … the studios that made history.

  Already drawn to him as it is, I struggle fiercely to control my urge to wrap my arms around him.

  He saves me by showing me the drum room, which is another mystery. Not only is there an acoustic advantage, there is also an implication that part of pentagons and pentagrams traditionally are used for protection based on the same principle as the mysticism of acoustics. Even a wolf paw print can be naturally outlined in a five-sided shape. I can’t get enough of this lore, and am just on the cusp of understanding the connection between these tidbits. I am highly tuned to the room, to Rowan, and to the energies surrounding the building. Which is perhaps why inexplicably I feel a lump of dread just before I hear a knock on the door. As Rowan answers, I can sense her, and suddenly will my every emotion under control.

  It’s Aydan.

  When Pandora unleashed the plagues onto the world, I doubt that hope still remained in the box thereafter, because hope is by far the cruelest thing a person can experience sometimes.

  I can smell desire on her. And on him I smell nothing. He is shielded to the nines. He could be feeling anything—and why wouldn’t he want such a beauty?

  Rowan is the one to break the tension. “Aydan is here to record her Anatolian Fusion Project. I suppose it makes sense that a lycan should be the one to produce another lycan.”

  My shield goes up just in time. I nod a polite goodbye to them both, but walking to my car as fast as possible, I can feel the despair catching up with me. It does not clench my chest—rather it tickles at my thoughts, daring me to scratch. And scratching will rip open a thousand wounds of failures past and present. I try to rise above it. I try to tell myself that I am accomplished in my own right. But the second I focus my thoughts elsewhere, it mocks me. Only ten percent of all hunts are successful … It’s a fact about wolves, but their animal nature enables them to handle failure without crippling regrets. This is more than can be said about humans—or werewolves too, it seems.

  So home I drive with my proverbial tail between my legs. I don’t permit myself to fall apart until I reach the sanctuary of my little apartment, but once inside I fall to my knees the second my door closes. My chest feels as if it will crack wide open with grief, so I curl up into a little ball, but the pain doesn’t stop coming. The old, creeping feeling of being utterly alone seeps into my whole being like ice water. I ward myself as best I can, crawl into bed, and cry quietly, howling very softly into my pillow, “Rowwwwwan …” Either no one hears me or no one answers.

  Everyone preaches about safe sex, but no one ever gi
ves a thought to safe love. This is deplorable, for love is the most dangerous of all natural causes.

  Journal entry, May 10th: So much I could tell the greedy-eyed spectators, old flings, and my unattainable love. But if I had to choose one thing, it would be this. Do not attempt to revive me with your waters of condescension. Instead, bury yourself next to me in the soil and ash, twisted branches ever reaching upward.

  I continue my training and rehearsing with my pack mates, and somehow manage to conceal the deep sadness that follows me everywhere. Sometimes I am able to shake it for an hour or two, but it always eventually continues to pull me down like a lead albatross around my neck, making it hard to even stand up straight. Food no longer tastes good to me. I don’t even feel like listening to music.

  I try to physically work off the malaise at the New Orleans Athletic Center, but each sighting of Aydan further taunts me. Plus one of the trainers, Javier Del Toro, has gone missing. He was a big bull of a man with a heart of gold, and his unexplained absence hits me hard.

  I finally switch my exercise routine to the Downtown Fitness Center, which is smaller and far less glamorous, but it is way cheaper and suits my basic needs. Even still, I can’t seem to pull myself up by my bootstraps. Inside my head, my secret sad voices pipe up: Can I make a living just sleeping all day? It hurts to breathe, and it hurts to even exist. But as always, the show must go on.

  The heat and humidity are merciless by now, which means fewer tourists and fewer tips. New Orleans becomes a little more of a ghost town during the peak of summer. This is the time of year when most of the rest of the world is cooler and many bands go on tour or play elsewhere, and I can’t help wondering where I would be right now if Slackjaw were still alive. Showering twice daily is an exercise in futility, as every commute to gigs results in a sodden sweatbath, no matter how close I manage to park near each venue.