by Tom Stern
Initially Walter did not recognize the overly thin man, but after a moment he recalled the brusqueness with which the man had previously fled possible interaction.
The man now stared directly into Walter’s eyes, a stupid, open-mouthed smile on his face.
Walter looked around to verify that the man was not speaking to someone else, albeit whilst staring directly at Walter, before conjuring something, anything to say just to cease the painfully awkward silence that now permeated the shower room. “What is that supposed to mean, exactly?” Walter asked, a newfound sympathy for the fat man he had previously attempted to force into a naked shower conversation.
“I know,” answered the man. “Right?”
While Walter’s expectations of this dialogue were decidedly nominal, this response certainly failed to clear even that modest bar as it made no coherent sense to him at all.
“I don’t understand,” explained Walter. “What are you saying?”
“Ha!” answered the naked man, whom Walter could not help but notice out of the periphery of his vision had a particularly long, thin penis that sort of jangled with the man’s laugh. Walter could not help but figure that the man’s significant height presumably only diminished the relative perception of his manhood, making its significance all the more impressive. “I really admire you, Walter. I love what you do. I’m coming to a show.”
“How,” Walter asked of the thin man, but also de facto of the kids in the park, “do you even know what I do in the first place?”
“Ha!” the man laughed even harder.
That night, on a street corner in what Wallace had designated sector twenty-seven of the city, a crowd of more than twenty people had assembled a good twenty minutes before Walter had even arrived for his performance. As he approached, the crowd erupted with cheers and applause and “woo-hoos” and random shoutings of his name.
“Music’s ours, too, man,” several of them demanded.
Walter was not sure what to make of this. So he made nothing of it.
He focused instead on just settling in and following Wallace’s instructions for finding the best spot for a performance practically, acoustically, and economically. As Walter weighed these factors, an eager and well-coiffed man, perhaps in his early to mid-twenties, scurried up and used his cell phone to snap a picture of himself with Walter.
Walter did not know what to make of this, either. But he felt compelled to make something of it. So he found himself speaking the first thought that came to his mind, even though it was, at best, only tangentially relevant to what had just happened.
“I’ve never played here before,” Walter declared.
“I know,” replied the almost giddy man. “So dope.”
The man then pushed back through the small crowd, jumping up and down and making an excited, high-pitched hoo-ing sound as he went.
Before Walter got too far into puzzling over what had just transpired, a woman approached him. She seemed to be well into her forties but still deeply committed to an emo aesthetic. “I really admire what you’re doing,” she said as she, too, snapped a picture of herself with Walter.
“What is this about?” Walter demanded.
His words triggered in this woman a response that Walter could only discern as predominantly reverential mixed with tinges of intense arousal. “I know,” she said. “You’re so right.”
“No,” Walter attempted to rephrase… “Where did these people come from?”
“We love your music.”
“But how do you know my music? How did you know I was playing here tonight? I’ve never played here before.”
The emo lady’s face crinkled with confusion.
She lowered her eyes to her cell phone, pushed a few buttons and then turned the phone’s screen to face Walter.
What Walter saw next took a moment to unpack, but less than an instant to attribute.
The small screen glowed with a meticulously and impressively designed website, fully optimized for mobile viewing, mind you. Through simple and sparse yet bold typographic, color, and layout choices, the site somehow managed to present what Walter could only describe as a profoundly appealing musician and artist, a rugged ideal of a man equal parts sensitive and tough, a down-home but evolved individual living out his dreams whether or not anyone paid any attention, a self-reliant but vulnerable human with the courage to live out loud while at a modest volume befitting his priorities, a man who just so happened to be named Walter Braum. He looked just like Walter, too. Only airbrushed of all blemishes and with skin tones warmed to the perfect ruddiness.
Quotes from notable music critics described this man as “a raw voice reclaiming music from the aesthetic ramifications of corporate culture,” and “someone who would be singing his heart out whether or not any of us were listening,” and “the heartbeat of this country’s love affair with song.”
Walter clicked through to Walter Braum’s bio page, which further detailed the artist’s commitment to his city, his deep-seated passion for public performance, and his past as a highly successful salesman which he “bravely and heroically abandoned” to explore his life-long love affair with music. It described his passion for an array of music and musicians of all types, the common thread being a passion for “the way that deeply felt truths impact the world when expressed with all of one’s heart.”
Walter also found the site presented an interactive map of Walter Braum’s tour schedule that just so happened to be identical to the tour schedule that Wallace had given to Walter. For each performance, one could buy virtual tickets, which the site made clear were “not required for entry but are nevertheless a simple and meaningful way to support the music and the musician that you believe in.” Along the side of this same page was a feed in which a photograph suddenly loaded with two familiar faces in it: Walter’s own as well as that of the slightly hip man who had just taken his picture with Walter.
“I’m the first one!” the man shrieked from somewhere within the small crowd that was getting bigger every time that Walter looked up. “I’m the first official fan! I’m patient zero!”
A smattering of the crowd responded with a flutter before grabbing for their cell phones and starting toward Walter. “Fucking Wallace,” Walter muttered under his breath as the Emo lady extended her hand sheepishly.
Walter looked at her, confused.
“I want to post mine,” she muttered, star-struck.
“What?” said Walter.
“Our photo,” she explained. “I’ll be the second one. I can prove I was here from the beginning. When you’re huge…”
“Huge?” Walter muttered. “I’m not going to be huge. That’s not what this is about.”
His protestation merely fanned the flames of adoration in the woman’s heart, causing her to all but swoon as she waved both hands at her cheeks in an effort to remove, or at least stymie, the blush that his words had provoked.
“This person…” Walter insisted, indicating whomever it was that was represented on the website and, in turn, all throughout the Internet everywhere, “…that’s not me. That’s not real.”
As these words landed, they turned the woman’s already ocean-deep infatuation with Walter Braum into a bottomless, unending adoration. The crowd, now well within earshot as they snapped countless photographs, also reacted with fervor to Walter’s renunciation of whatever the hell was going on here, erupting into something in between a yelp and a cheer which caught like wildfire and spread throughout the crowd.
“Music! Music! Music! Music!” the crowd chanted, punctuating each syllable with claps and stomps.
The Emo lady respectfully pulled her phone from Walter’s hand, feverishly tapping buttons as she pressed her way back into the crowd that was still snapping photos and had begun sharing random, personal sentiments with the man they had come to see.
“Your courage in
spires me to live my truth,” someone called out.
“My father would not let me pursue my passion for music,” another proclaimed.
“You make me a better person.”
“I will fight on because of you.”
Walter knew that they were not really talking to him, but to some character, some imaginative ideal on the Internet, some admittedly beautiful construct. But the real Walter Braum understood that they were all here to see a performance by the fictional Walter Braum. And he understood that, technically speaking, the real performance was scheduled to occur at the exact same time and place as was the fictional performance. And Walter further understood that therein the similarities ended, that whomever and whatever they were here to see could not possibly be whomever he was and whatever he had to offer, so much so that Walter kind of wanted to join the crowd to see the Walter Braum that they were there to see. He wanted to see him as they would see him, bringing his amazing sound and story into the world. He sounded like a true artist. The real Walter was just a man, not so good at life, standing now on a street corner. The real Walter understood all of this, every last ounce of it, down to its innermost core. But still, the real Walter could not help but ask the question, albeit quietly and in the most reptilian part of his brain while swearing to himself that he was merely posing it rhetorically when he absolutely wasn’t, “What if I actually am more like the fictional Walter Braum than I give myself credit for?”
“I’m number two!” the Emo lady yelled out, lost somewhere in the cluster of people now numbering probably somewhere near seventy-five.
Walter looked up to the sun, as he did before all of his shows now. Per Wallace’s instructions he gauged its position in the sky to calculate the ideal start time for the performance.
And the crowd went nuts.
“Music! Music!” they yelled out as if they were yearning for it so deeply that they could not keep it in any longer. “Music! Music!”
Heart in throat, Wallace surveyed the landscape. Based on Wallace’s metrics, the ideal spot for his performance just so happened to be smack in the middle of where the crowd had formed. Walter took momentary solace in this small consequence not anticipated by Wallace, minute though the oversight may have been.
He considered asking everyone to move.
He considered finding another spot from which to perform, something along the crowd’s edge.
He considered turning and leaving for one of the other various sectors of the city, performing an impromptu gig tonight.
But the real Walter Braum knew full well that the fictional Walter Braum would not do any of these things. The fictional Walter Braum would march right into that crowd, claim his spot, and start singing. The fictional Walter Braum wouldn’t give a shit where the audience stood. He would let the audience figure it out. Just for safety and reassurance, the real Walter Braum allowed himself to further reason that Wallace was likely not wrong at all, that the spot he had designated for sector twenty-seven probably continued to be the ideal spot for tonight’s performance and that the size of this crowd was exactly the right size for a performance from such a spot. Moreover, the real Walter Braum began considering the subsequent possibility that a crowd this size might never form for him ever again, that this moment right now might very well prove to be the defining pinnacle in a career that would go God knows where from here.
“Music! Music! Music! Music!”
Before he knew it, Walter found himself placing one foot in front of the other until the crowd was upon him. And he did not stop there. He forged right into the middle of the crowd, displacing them effortlessly. His presence ramped up their fever pitch fervor somehow even further. They grabbed and clawed at Walter as he passed. Once he hit the exact spot per Wallace’s instructions, he stopped.
He put his head down.
He took a deep breath in.
And without even really making the conscious decision to, he just started. He was singing a song he had always been a bit embarrassed to like. It was poppy and electronic, a club song. But stripped down to just his voice, it didn’t quite sound like that anymore. It just sounded like a song about the unexpected small joys of being broken-hearted. The crowd was completely silent and still, hanging on each sound as it left Walter’s mouth and stretched and rose and settled into words.
Walter tried to block the crowd out, but he could not help but wonder, even if just the tiniest bit, how he sounded in comparison to the Walter Braum they had come to see.
6.
Walter woke up groggy to the unfamiliar and not so gentle nudge of a well-worn work boot into his ribs.
“Meester Wall-uh-der,” a voice accompanied the persistent force of the footwear. “Hello Meester Wall-uh-der.”
Walter rolled from his side onto his back and squinted his eyes open against the slicing brightness that had replaced the previous night. He was just barely able to disseminate the squat city worker from the shadow cast over him by the searing backlight of blue, blue morning sky. Last thing he remembered was the starry sky at 3:00 a.m. and adrenaline still coursing through his veins.
“I’m not doing any harm sleeping here,” Walter demanded, an argument he had been preparing and refining for some time now in case he ever needed it.
But the city worker did not protest. He simply held out his hand, a familiar gray envelope in it. This one was puffed and wrinkled ugly by its contents, which pushed the limits of the envelope’s utility.
“He say geev you,” the man explained. “He say I say ‘Ees instrucción there.’”
Walter, confused, did not move. He just stared at the city worker. His eyes strained to adjust.
The city worker stared blankly back.
Walter found himself wondering what the fictional Walter Braum might be doing right about now. Surely he was unencumbered wherever he was, off doing something deeply poetic and even more deeply true. He certainly wasn’t feeling the swells of anxiety surfacing in the real Walter Braum, worrying about what each of those fans last night had thought of him, what memories they snapshot in their minds and would carry with them. And there was no way his back was hurting from yet another night sleeping on the concrete at the mouth of Mayne Ridge Park. No, the fictional Walter Braum was probably waking up in a stranger’s bed right about now. And not just any stranger, but the most beautiful of his fans from last night. Surely he had fallen asleep in her soft embrace after a satiating night of passionate and just-meaningful-enough sex that still somehow remained the perfect amount of anonymous. The fictional Walter Braum was undoubtedly a great lover.
“What is that?” Walter demanded of the envelope in the city worker’s hand, finally conceding and finding something to say because he just could not stand the silence and the thoughts that accompanied it any longer.
The city worker shrugged innocently and inched his hand, and the envelope in it, closer to Walter’s face. That small narrowing of space somehow made the envelope feel infinitely more pressing to Walter, who sighed and lowered his eyes to the concrete, wracking his brain for any suitable reason to leave the item in the city worker’s hand. But he found none. So he decided instead to forego reason altogether. He stood up and gathered his things, ignoring the envelope entirely.
The city worker watched, waiting for a point that involved Walter taking the envelope. But he found no such moment. “Please,” he pleaded with a matter-of-fact urgency, “I have to work.”
But Walter turned and started away.
The city worker was deceptively fast, pulling immediately even with Walter and matching his stride. “Please,” the man added, confused. “He say put your hand.”
The squat man took Walter’s right hand as they walked and pushed the envelope into it. He then took Walter’s left hand and placed it over the top side of the envelope, which felt considerably heavier than it looked. Once satisfied that the object was steadily in Walter’s possession
, the man turned and hurried away.
Walter sighed. He stuffed the envelope, immediately and without opening it, into the bottom of his bag. The city worker did not look back until after he had reached and unlocked the gate, at which point he nodded and hurried back to his truck.
Walter started over to Smythe’s.
On his way, he tried to push from his mind all thoughts about the envelope, last night’s performance, and the fictional Walter Braum by busying himself instead with thoughts of music and what it all meant or didn’t mean anyway.
The crowd at Walter’s next show was twice the size of the previous night’s show. He heard them chanting and whooping from several blocks out as he approached.
The nights after that were even bigger until eventually Walter was approached by a beefy, hard-looking man with nevertheless gentle eyes and a near whisper of a voice who explained, “This well exceeds the reasonable boundaries of the permit you acquired.”
“I acquired a permit?” asked Walter as little flurries of fans swarmed to snap pictures of themselves with the man they thought was the fictional Walter Braum.
Officer Dungy reached calmly into his back pocket and removed a photocopy of a permit, which he showed to Walter. A quick glance at the page revealed Wallace’s jagged, shaky signature: W. Braum.
“We’ve been receiving complaints from different parts of town the past few nights,” Officer Dungy went on. “For something like this, you would need to file several additional items…”
“I’ll just leave then,” Walter explained, turning in the direction of Mayne Ridge Park where he figured he could perform unannounced and for a far more modest gathering of people.
“What about them?” asked the officer as he placed one of his meaty hands in Walter’s path.
Walter stopped, considered.
“What about them?” he asked.
“They’re here for you.”
“Well…” Walter attempted to explain. “They’re here for a sort of version of me that’s on this website, but I’d guess that’s beside the point as far as you’re concerned?”