The Wild Harmonic

by Beth W. Patterson

  My strings. I may have survived the silver brooch breaking my skin, but the metal alloy of my strings is like poison to me now. Did Naj plan this demise for me as well?

  Panic sets in. What am I going to do if I can’t play? I’ve never had any other form of income: never clerked in a store, served up a drink, waited a table, nothing. And what if I’m useless to the pack?

  I have to overcome this. Every day, I grit my teeth in agony as I reacquaint myself with my old friend and coax the sounds out of my Fodera. Every day the strings burn me and I struggle with my lost sense of pitch, having to bumble around the blank fretboard and guess at the accuracy like a commoner. And every night I fall into bed in hopeless weeping.

  Teddy comes over with assorted instruments to troubleshoot. I try to see if the reaction is due to electronics, electrical currents, or string substance. We try his upright bass, and acoustic bass guitar, and even a bass ukulele with no pickup and nylon strings. All produce the same excruciating effect. This is some sort of dark magic that makes no logical sense.

  One morning Raúl brings me a CD of chakra mantras. Each chakra corresponds to a musical note of our Western scale, and I slowly being to retrain my ear as I do my Kundalini.

  My healing comes in baby steps. Some days I make a little progress: able to touch my strings and play through the pain, able to shift, and able to sing. And some days I am so full of despair I crawl into bed, too depressed to move. If I am going to hold the pack back, I would prefer that they move on without me.

  Journal entry, September 1st: Biding my time, biding my time. It’s amazing how the mind can go into sleep mode when there is nothing else to do. Unfocus the consciousness and see what magical images await you on the other side. Most of them are obscure, but it is a relief to let go regardless. Fall in, sink down to the bottom of the pool and rest indefinitely. It’s pure meaninglessness, but it’s my meaninglessness.

  My phone buzzes. It’s Sylvia.

  “Get the hell out of bed!” she says firmly. “We’re going shopping.”

  “How did you know I was in bed?” I mumble. “I could have been deeply engrossed in practicing for the big showcase. Rowan told me that as one who survived the betrayal, I am to step out and convey my story through a bass solo before the rest of the pack starts. I could have been channeling my muse!”

  She snorts. “Not with that heavy energy you’re radiating. We can all feel it from miles away. Now get in the shower before a normal human being can smell you. First, I’m taking you for a nice breakfast, and you’re going to eat something. Then we’re going to Victoria’s Secret.”

  “Where?” I’m not sure I’m hearing her correctly.

  “Victoria’s Secret,” she repeats firmly. “You absolutely cannot play the most important gig of your life in a plain bra.”

  “Don’t you think it’s going to be kind of weird for a nun to be traipsing around Victoria’s Secret?”

  She cackles. “You know how Jesus ate with sinners and all that? Well, imagine the places He’d have gone if He had been a woman! I’ll be there in forty-five minutes. Pick some good prog rock for us to listen to on the way. The weather is beautiful today, and we’re going to take the scenic route.”

  Sunlight through the oak trees dapples the River Road as we take what appears to be the longest route possible. I roll down the passenger window to feel the air on my face, grinning to myself at how utterly canine this proclivity is. It’s good to feel some sunshine at long last. Motion is another thing I’ve been missing.

  I’ve assembled an impressive playlist for her car. She may be a nun now, but she’s a progressive rocker forever and she lightly taps out every complex rhythm on the steering wheel. King Crimson, Genesis, Van Der Graaf Generator, Rush, Yes, Gentle Giant, and Kansas shuffle their way through her stereo. “Time Waits for No One” by Ambrosia pops up as I finally crawl out of my mental shell at last and let some sunlight kiss my skin.

  My black-hooded companion and I are regarded with mild curiosity at the Dante’s Kitchen brunch as we stuff our faces with bacon praline cinnamon sticky buns, shrimp and grits, and bread pudding French toast. Passers-by display an increased interest as we wander the Lakeside Mall. But when we enter Victoria’s Secret together, bystanders begin to gawk shamelessly. Sylvia feigns oblivion to their curiosity, although I notice that she’s humming Pie Iesu Domine to herself a tad too loudly to be strictly for her own benefit. She never once cracks a smile, but her eyes are positively twinkling with mischief.

  Sylvia herds me into a fitting room and runs the task of throwing an assortment of bras in the most outrageous patterns she can find at me over the dressing room door. Occasionally she joins me in the tiny pink-lined booth to lend an objective eye. For the first time since my hospitalization, I can feel myself start to laugh. I finally get into the spirit as one of the young sales ladies tentatively approaches her asking, “Um, can I help you … Sister?” It doesn’t go unnoticed by me that at this very moment Sylvia is holding a lacy G-string and still maintaining a placid smile.

  “Yes you can, my child. Do these come in leopard print?”

  I am surprised to see the stag still grazing in my dream. I circle it cautiously. It flicks its ears at me impassively. I sniff thoroughly, but catch no scent this time, only a distinct feeling or energy. The creature tilts its head almost inquisitively before trotting away, gradually picking up speed into a graceful lope.

  Shall we dance?

  As I resume the chase, I am the flow of a song through time. I have no body because I am music. My quarry is likewise made of music. The distance between us is always some sort of interval, the tension and release between dissonance and harmony. And I can never really catch that stag, because if I do the song is over.

  It is not in the felling, but in the chase, I remember from my moon run with my pack. Of course. There was a time when the creation of song was like this. There were no material possessions and no ego.

  Loop it, put it on endless repeats, and I will forever be an event, not an artifact. Ever eternal, ever transient, I leave no tracks.

  When I open my eyes I am slightly surprised to discover that it is early morning, and that I have actually slept the entire night for the first time since my snakebite. I smile to myself. Because I am my own incessant company, it’s usually difficult for me to see if I’ve made any progress. I give myself a mental pat on the back for this tiny thing, and a phrase comes back to me: You have to build yourself up. I chuckle to myself at the irony. Enemies and other unlikely messengers sometimes deliver the most useful truth. Okay Naj, I think to myself. Here comes my best revenge: I’m actually going to take your advice. I go through my stretches and decide that I could use some sunlight.

  I emerge barefoot while the day is still relatively cool and just stare quietly. The back end of the Audubon Zoo is only a few paces away from my front door. Stepping from pavement to lawn, I try to feel the energy of the earth, but I’m only aware of the fact that I could use some coffee. The only activity from its resident fauna that I can ever see without the price of admission is the occasional passing giraffe, huge reticulated neck bobbing like moving scenery behind the trees. I listen to the sounds of sleepy creatures demanding their morning fare. Monkeys and seals, and some sort of bird that I can’t identify. Their myriad energies are mixed, but the message I’m receiving is universal.

  Run.

  Minutes later, I’ve donned my running shoes and find myself trotting to the edge of the adjacent Audubon Park. The joggers present all seem to be in their own little worlds, a warding of their own. I do a few slow stretches, trying to wake my kundalini energy, and hit the track gently at first. No earbuds for me—the only music I need is birdsong and the mantra of my footfalls and heartbeat.

  Run it off. Run it all off.

  I feel the burn, I skirt the edge between agony and adrenaline. Doubt begins to melt away; I sweat poison out of my pores.

  Run it out of your system. Run it out of town.

  The s
un begins to rise, baking the mist away, glaring through the canopy of heavy oak branches. Familiar humidity starts seeping into my pores.

  I will do this. What other choice do I have?

  The beast within me knows instinctively that we will fight, not flee. The human within me gathers courage. We are in agreement.

  *One*

  A sharp ripple of energy smacks me, and I change course in an instant, bolting toward one of the live oaks out of raw instinct. Someone was careless—having neither warded nor shielded—and is about to be killed.

  On a thick root of the massive tree is a purple martin with a struggling walking stick insect in its beak. I growl and the bird briefly flickers to the image of a beautiful brunette before pulling its form back to avian. With a speed I didn’t know I possessed, tenor form flows over me. I pounce on the little bird in a savage attempt to swallow it whole, but it slips from my clawed hands and disappears into the air.

  The stick insect now stands before me in human form like an El Greco painting, a sad-eyed ectomorph that I recognize as Ronnie Twigg, the piano player from the brewhouse gig. I try to avert my gaze from his concave chest and sharp hipbones and address the problem with exaggerated eye contact, bowing backward to glare up at him. “What the hell were you doing?” I snap. “Don’t you know that we’re in danger, and here you are in flagrante delicto! What were you doing in public with another shifter in your animal forms?”

  His long, angular jaw clenches in an attempt to grin. “The timing could not be worse. I hope you’ll see the humorous side to all this. I didn’t know this chick was working for the enemy. We were on a date, and things … happened …”

  I sigh, falling back into soprano. “Come on,” I growl. “Get back into your insect form, and I’ll take you to my place and give you some sweatpants before you get arrested. Then get the fuck out of here.”

  He turns his back on me and I flinch. I really could have gone without seeing his backside. It would have been a disappointing day in nautical archeology, I muse, to discover a sunken chest but no booty whatsoever. When I glance back, he is nowhere to be found until I look down. He is almost completely camouflaged against a dry stick. Designed to blend in with his surroundings, his antics could have gotten him killed.

  I take him on my shoulder with the care of transporting a newborn infant and head to my apartment in a smooth rolling gait, as if a hard step might dislodge him. If we ever have to play a gig together again, I certainly won’t tell anyone he’s a shifter. The hard part will be forgetting what he looks like naked.

  Back at my apartment I flip through some of Father O’Flaherty’s comics. He has a very strange selection, ranging from Woody Woodpecker to the Mutants. Some appear to be quite valuable, and some are possibly rubbish. I still can’t figure out what on earth is wrong with any of this unlikely contraband.

  It’s one lone booklet that catches my eye, called The Stygian Mode. Devoid of a recognizable publishing company and drawn fairly crudely, it depicts people changing into sea creatures, mammals, birds, and unrecognizable hybrids typically seen in medieval art. There is a scene in which a man is being attacked by a dove that suddenly has my alarm system going off. Father O’Flaherty thought it was the Holy Spirit. Shifters attacking their own … Something clicks into place. That damned dove in the rectory was the thing that attacked Father O’Flaherty. It may have also been the same dove that watched me go tenor on the drunken tourists trying to vandalize my car near Bourbon Street. According to everything Sylvia has taught me, doves are no holier than wolves or snakes. It’s the archetypal labels forged by humans that are deceptive, certainly to me.

  I call Lydia with the new revelation. She thanks me profusely and I tell her that she is welcome to the book for further analysis. We have to win this war.

  Journal entry, September 20th: The hole in my heart grows smaller. This means that either my heart is becoming smaller too, or I am filling it up with music.

  We have pack rehearsal, the last one before Howlapalooza, and I am utterly sick with nerves. The poison is either still in my system, or it’s been replaced by genuine self-doubt.

  Am I the weak link of the pack?

  But I show up in my jogging suit, bass in hand, and am moved to tears at the warm reception with which I am greeted. I am scooped up in a sea of human hugs and human tears along with yips and whines. Oh, my pack! Every member is important. Even with wolves, the loss of one member can throw the whole pack out of balance. Whether in musical groups or true wolf packs, there must be some sort of hierarchy. And yes, there is sometimes tension, and sometimes there are power plays and struggles for dominance. But everyone has a role.

  I am shy about meeting Rowan’s eyes, but his embrace is so full of genuine warmth, I steel myself against inwardly gushing. I will always be in love with Rowan. I don’t know whether or not he’s seeing Aydan, but he is still part of my pack and we have an irrefutable bond, regardless of his personal choices.

  Moving toward my usual spot in the room, I am not sure what to say now. But this is no longer about me. Now that there is no man down, an issue bigger than me has to be urgently addressed. Sylvia cuts right to the chase about the Stygian Mode. Encrypted in the graphic novel I’d discovered, she and Lydia had put their heads together and found records of a musical structure bearing this name, also called “the Death Mode.”

  “In spite of the name, it’s certainly not a mode, and it’s not a scale. It’s more or less a rough framework of ascending and descending pitches in a subtle but confounding order,” Sylvia tells us. Her voice is calm, but she isn’t shielding around us, and the scent of her creeping terror has us all on edge. “I’m going to give you guys a tiny demonstration, just enough to show you what it can do. Somehow the frequencies of each note create an energetic collapse when played in this sequence …”

  She shuffles reluctantly to her keyboard, shudders, licks her lips, and hacks out a pattern of notes. We all recoil in unison. It’s more than a discordant, unpredictable, and unstable melody. It’s as if something has just sucked all the light out of the room. For a moment, my brain is seized by an unprompted thought that the world would be a better place if only I would just die—right now! Rowan gives a low grunt and the music drops dead in its tracks. The room brightens again, and all five of us search each other’s faces, damp and tight with fear.

  “That was the most unnerving … excrement I’ve ever heard!” moans Teddy. “Never mind the violins in the soundtrack to Psycho. That was beyond creepy.” He breaks the tension, but his lips are still pale even as he rushes the keyboard, nudges Sylvia aside and bangs out “Chopsticks.”

  Our token funny Omega, so essential to our survival, brings us back to earth with the latest news about the Maestro. In this new chapter of “Teddy to the rescue,” our comic relief had to drive Yngschwie Holstein home from the hospital. Details are vague, but it appears that the flaxen-haired guitar fop got intoxicated at a dive bar and picked up a beautiful large-breasted woman—who later turned out to be a beautiful large-breasted man. Teddy was not privy to the hospital records, but the ensuing incident involved a can of olive oil cooking spray and a string of Christmas light bulbs. We all have a much-needed laugh, and are ready to play now.

  We sing together to strengthen our bond. We express healing, we prepare to send our message, and we sing Waheguru. The howl over, we pick up our instruments. This time, we are deadly serious. We go over the music to be played at the showcase. I play in fits and starts, ignoring the pain as long as I can until it grows too much to bear. The pack keeps holding down the groove whenever I intermittently drop out and shake my hands to cool them. I stop worrying about being a hindrance and start focusing on the magic of our vibe.

  Once we have all of the kinks ironed out of our song, a jam develops in a funky little 5/4 groove. Raúl gives it a jazzy snap, Teddy opting to put down his bass and blaze a solo on his mandolin. And then something miraculous happens, something crucial to wolf society and to musicians everywhere. W
e dissolve into ridiculousness.

  Teddy starts it, of course. Why didn’t it occur to me sooner? Play is vital to the pack.

  This is basically the musical equivalent of a food fight. Teddy starts a riff in a weird Balkan meter, and each time Raúl and I figure it out and join him, he switches again. Sylvia decides to throw a wrench in the clockwork and smashes some dissonant chords on top of it all, and Rowan is somehow soaring above the whole mess with his guitar, actually making it sound good … until he throws in a cheesy lick from a cartoon theme.

  Teddy is laughing and holding his mandolin in an outrageous parody of every hair metal guitar hero we’ve ever seen. He loses his balance but manages to fall on his ass, saving his precious mandolin. And he swears like the good-natured, foul-mouthed Teddy I have always known and loved. Oh, gods, he’s swearing again! He’s back! Maybe there’s hope for me yet!

  Before we adjourn, Rowan gives us the logistics and the skinny on our showcase. Every single person to be involved is a shifter, from the bouncers to the bartenders. I don’t know how Rowan has managed to pull these strings, but I am not surprised. Nor am I surprised that this will indeed be taking place at The Howlin’ Wolf. We will sing healing into the hearts of our fellow shifters and warn the parahuman populace worldwide that there is an agenda threatening us all. And we will howl to announce our territory.

  On my way home, I reflect on an old memory, my college mascot. We were not called the Wolves, not a bunch of individuals. We were called the Wolfpack, a single unit, a complex organism. I never attended a single basketball game while attending Loyola New Orleans, but something clicks into place nonetheless after all these years.

  I absolutely have to get some sleep. I wish I’d paid better attention to Raúl’s advice about resting. I was beginning to make some pretty poor choices right up to getting bitten. I meditate and try to wind down, but my entire body feels fidgety. Then I realize that I am too restless and that this feeling is more than just apprehension. There’s something outside, hanging out in the tiny backyard that I share with the other tenants. I begin to silently bristle, listening for anything unusual besides the night sounds. The only noises in the foreground are cars going by, frog music, and the soft coo of a dove. Son of a bitch! Why didn’t it occur to me sooner?