by Tom Stern
They both fell silent, conceding nothing.
“Look,” Wallace eventually began, attempting to be the bigger man. “I need you to perform tonight’s scheduled show. But after that we can stop playing shows for a stretch, if that’s what you really want. My numbers show we could probably go as far out as three months and it would still drive up demand. But after that point, we’d plateau and then recede, so we’re going to need to engage our audience…”
“Why would I stop playing shows?” asked Walter, confused.
“You just said you didn’t want to follow the schedule.”
“Yes. But I’m not going to stop performing.”
“So you’re… Look, I don’t understand. You want to perform but you don’t want to perform. Whatever. At the end of the day, you need to rarify your product. Your best options are to follow the modified schedule I created or to set out on a broader tour encompassing, by my calculations, at least twenty-four states and thirty-nine cities therein. But if you want to just stop playing public shows for a few months, then I can make that work, too. You would then return to performing with new material. Preferably at least half of the new material being original. If you do this, I predict that it will increase our revenue by approximately ten times. And that’s a conservative estimate. Granted, we would need to somehow introduce scarcity to the ticketing and attendance process so that we can increase the unit price of a ticket, but we can figure that one out in a tactful manner that doesn’t degrade the democratic messaging of the brand itself.”
“I’m not going to stop performing!”
“Your revenue has started to recede while your average ticket cost has remained static!” yelled Wallace. “Do you understand what this means?”
“No! And I don’t care.”
“It means your customer base has started to recede and I believe this is the beginning of a larger trend. I believe that if you keep playing these shows, you will see your audience atrophy and dissipate significantly. All the way back down to nearly nothing. You’ll be a fad, not a business.”
“I don’t care!” Walter repeated, emphatically.
“Of course you do,” Wallace grimaced, which looked more like a shy smile of sorts.
But Walter knew how to interpret it. He also knew that this conversation could go on unresolved forever. So he decided to stop talking.
He took a seat on a nearby curb.
But Wallace did not follow.
“How is Veronica?” Walter asked innocently as he looked back over his shoulder.
Wallace sighed nervously before explaining, “I wouldn’t know.”
“Oh,” answered Walter, genuinely sympathetic. “I’m sorry.”
Wallace shrugged.
“I need to get back to Boston,” he explained. “I’ll take all of your tour dates off of the website except for tonight’s. And I won’t update it again for three months, unless I hear differently from you.”
Walter shrugged right back.
“Please,” pleaded Wallace, “for your own well-being and professional longevity, perform tonight. Then give me three months.”
Wallace tottered over to his brother who, still seated on the curb, was at more or less eye-level. Wallace wrapped his arms around Walter’s back and shoulders and gave his brother a goodbye hug.
“I filed the expanded permit for tonight,” Wallace added before turning and starting along the sidewalk away from Walter. “I handled all of the details. It’s all legal.”
As Walter watched his twin brother totter away, he could not help but feel a kernel of appreciation for the little genius bastard’s efforts.
“You are not a man,” a familiar voice sounded from a distance, pulling Walter’s attention up from his crumpled pages of notes and into the expanse of Mayne Ridge Park that surrounded the bench upon which he was seated.
“You call yourself a man,” the voice had drawn closer and angrier before Walter was able to pinpoint its approaching source in the familiar face of Mr. Sheprick, his expression creased sour with bitter anger, “but a man does not run away from a business agreement!”
Mr. Sheprick’s presence in this particular place and moment required of Walter a mental, temporal, and expository shift of context before he could even begin processing what, exactly, was happening. But before much of any of that had time to happen, Mr. Sheprick was bearing down and proclaiming, “Stand up!”
Walter couldn’t quite comprehend this simple directive either, as doing so seemed contingent upon the prior contextual questions being resolved first. So instead of standing up, as instructed, Walter merely watched, puzzled, as Mr. Sheprick came to stand but a foot in front of him.
“I said stand up, you spineless prick!” Mr. Sheprick reiterated, adding a touch of choice diction for emphasis.
Walter could think of nothing to do right now, other than to follow the man’s injunction. So Walter shifted his weight and leaned forward to stand. But somewhere between Walter’s concession to and completion of the request at hand, Mr. Sheprick must have lost his patience. Or perhaps he simply changed his estimation of the importance of this imperative being carried out. Either way, the typically impeccably mannered man could contain his fury not a second longer, so he cocked his fist back and sprung it forward with an ardent punch intended squarely for Walter’s jaw. The blow strayed well off-line, however, surely in part due to Mr. Sheprick’s impatience, which caused him to pounce on a target still in motion. But it still resulted in a half-landed blow on the side of Walter’s forehead. The punch made enough impact, largely due to its unexpectedness, to push Walter staggering from the bench, but it did not carry enough heft to cause much pain or any disorientation. In a way, however, the diminished impact of this shot was an inadvertently strategic masterstroke on Mr. Sheprick’s behalf as it led to Walter’s erroneous presumption that his opponent was not terribly stalwart, an assumption immediately dispelled by the subsequent delivery of punches two through six, each of which landed cleanly and with the pop of a decades-younger man.
“My business,” Mr. Sheprick proclaimed as the aforementioned blows landed and sent Walter sprawling semi-limp to the ground, “was my life!”
Mr. Sheprick then straddled his flailing adversary and positioned himself to finish with authority the fight he had started.
Walter found himself, rather than fighting back, debating whether or not it was okay for him to punch a man of Mr. Sheprick’s age. Especially in such a public place, he wondered what exactly this would look like to passersby. But the next few punches, each with the weight of concrete behind them, sparked an ire in Walter that immediately superseded any logic and before Walter knew it, he was working Mr. Sheprick’s ribs with a succession of quick, sharp blows that toppled the septuagenarian to one side. Walter pushed his former mentor off of him and onto the ground before scurrying to put some space between them.
“If you had even a shred of a soul,” Mr. Sheprick barked, pulling himself right back up to his feet, either unimpeded by or flat out ignoring the pain in his trunk.
“I was in a bad place,” Walter found himself yammering as he maintained his distance only to be bum-rushed by the surprisingly scrappy man.
The two men spilled back to the ground where they wrestled for leverage.
“I trusted you!” Mr. Sheprick yelled in between grunts and strains. “That contract was my last hope.”
“Bergamot?” asked Walter, innocently enough and just before Mr. Sheprick landed an uppercut that shot stars throughout Walter’s vision.
“Yes, Bergamot! What the fuck else do you think this is about?” yelled Mr. Sheprick, finishing his sentence but a second before Walter connected with a right cross that sprawled Mr. Sheprick out.
Walter scurried to his feet once again, this time doubling the distance he had previously placed in between the two of them.
The distance meant nothing to
Mr. Sheprick, though. Nor did the cut over his eye or the blood pouring from it. He just kept coming right after Walter, as if to demonstrate the ironclad tenacity that a man who respects himself and his business should possess.
“You don’t have the right to shutter my Goddamn business, you fuckhole!” Mr. Sheprick declared, as though a battle cry, as he lunged and took Walter down once again, grappling his way atop and continuing to pummel his enervating foe. “That was my life’s work, you son of a motherless cunt!”
Perhaps it was one of these punches.
Or perhaps it was the sum total of all of the punches.
Or perhaps it was just the unexpectedly fiery man’s words.
But something came loose. Right then. Walter did not understand it, but inside of him, something came loose.
His resolve drained.
His punches softened.
For a moment he wondered if he might be blacking out or otherwise growing too weak to carry on, but it wasn’t that. He was depleted, sure, but he was not beaten. He was just suddenly, and perhaps inexplicably, unwilling to fight back.
“Fight, you louse!” Mr. Sheprick yelled as Walter’s punches receded from pulled to held altogether. “Fight back, damn it! This isn’t over! I’m not done!”
But Walter found his arms falling to his side, unwilling or unable to so much as protect himself any longer.
“Come on!” Mr. Sheprick yelled right into Walter’s face.
Walter could feel only his breath now. And the burgeoning transition, throughout his face and trunk, from numbness to pain.
“No!” the old man yelled. “No!”
Walter went limp. His eyes were wide open, but his body simply surrendered.
“Well…” insisted Mr. Sheprick, disgusted, “that’s the difference between you and me.”
The old man opened his hand and slapped Walter one last time, straight across the cheek, and hard. Then he extracted himself from his possum of an opponent and dropped down on the bench where the fight had begun, leaning forward with his forearms on his knees to catch his breath while defiantly refusing to take stock of any injuries he might have sustained.
“I taught you better than that, you fucking wimp,” Mr. Sheprick grumbled before turning and spitting blood onto the ground.
In between hyperventilated breaths, Walter attempted to explain, “I didn’t…mean anything…by leaving.”
Fed up with the implication of mortality inherent in recuperation, Mr. Sheprick willed himself to his feet. “Well, it sure as shit meant something anyway, now didn’t it, you fuck?” he barked as he started limping off through the park, each step firing off a proud, satisfied wince of pain streaking through his body.
Walter had no real reason to move. So he laid limp on the earth. He had no real plan for how long he would stay there, but eventually people began walking past and sneaking glances just to make sure that he was still alive. And even more eventually these glancing passersby turned into people stopping to stare.
“I’m pretty sure that’s him,” one muttered to another.
“We’re coming tonight,” another one explained before turning to her friend and explaining, “Tonight’s his last show.”
“Why are you stopping?” a different one called out.
“Will you play again someday?” someone else called out.
These questions and their accompanying looming stares accumulated, feeling caustic and intrusive even if they were intended in earnest. It was this that finally pulled Walter achingly up off the ground to gather his scattered papers now sullied with dirt and stained with blood, which could have been either his or Mr. Sheprick’s.
“You can’t really stop, Walter,” a teenager insisted. “We need your music.”
“Yeah,” an adult agreed. “You give us hope.”
Walter crammed his pages into the bottom of his bag and headed off, out of Mayne Ridge Park.
There was never a wait at Smythe’s Diner, their typical smattering of customers the mere result of not being able to afford any better. But today a line stretched out the door and around the corner.
Walter made his way to the window and looked inside to find his usual table mobbed with kids in their late teens eating the daily special. All of the other tables were sparsely populated by their scant pockets of regulars. Walter spied Smythe staring him down with a disgusted glare and a shake of the head from behind the bustling order window.
“It’s good for your business,” Walter yelled, knowing full well that this was all, albeit indirectly, his fault. His words were eaten up by the plate glass window in front of him, though, reaching nowhere near the seething Smythe. These same words, however and unintentionally, traveled pristinely over to the first thirty or so people in the line reaching around the block, triggering a flutter of gasps and hoots and declarations upon the realization that the actual Walter Braum had arrived.
“It’s him,” someone called out.
“Oh my God!” several others replied. “He’s here!”
“I told you he would come!”
“Don’t stop, Walter! You can’t stop!”
“It’s our music, too!”
“We need the beauty!”
As the line morphed into an amoebic mass descending upon Walter, he hurried around the corner and away, as fast as his aching, bruised, and bleeding body could carry him.
At the YMCA, Walter found a padlock on the back door through which he normally entered.
“There he is!” someone yelled.
Walter turned to find a gawky, un-hip, teenage girl standing at the end of the alley and pointing directly at him. Her words conjured a flood of pounding footsteps that swelled nearer and nearer to where she stood, unseen but rapidly expanding to include shrieks, yells, chants, screams, and demands.
“You can’t stop!” the teenage girl pleaded with Walter from her deepest heart, adding, “We need you to keep going, Walter Braum!”
Just then the crowd surged into the alley led by a woman in a blue, short-sleeved collared shirt emblazoned with the YMCA logo across the left breast.
“Memberships aren’t free, Mr. Braum!” the woman called out as a mass of people of all ages, shapes, and sizes charged right behind her calling out now familiar refrains.
“Music! Music! Music!”
“It’s our music, too!”
“Keep going, Walter! Don’t ever stop!”
Seeing no other option before him, Walter turned and, once again, ran.
Back at the mouth of Mayne Ridge Park, Walter discovered a crowd of well more than two hundred people already gathered for the concert even though it was only 2:47 p.m. City workers had already begun putting barricades along the street while a light police presence kept an eye on the human and vehicular traffic passing through the area. A separate team was assembling a raised platform and speakers in the spot that Wallace had deemed ideal for performing at this venue.
Walter looked around for a quiet place to rest, his face, hands, and ribs aching from the morning’s altercation. His feet were tired, too, from all of the running. And his heart was heavy.
Someone from the crowd must have spotted him because the chants and calls began again…
“Music! Music! Music!”
“Don’t stop, Walter! Please don’t stop!”
“You give us the courage, Walter!”
As the cheers and declarations swelled, Walter realized he had absolutely nowhere to go for the next four hours. And then he had equally absolutely nowhere to go starting another two or so hours after that.
III.
The Twin
1.
“You want me to help you out?” Veronica scoffed as the sights and smells of the doorway to Walter’s old apartment brought him flooding back to a very different time in his life, even if that time wasn’t really all that long ago.
“I’m in a bit of a situation,” Walter explained of the massive crowd clamoring in Mayne Ridge Park, but she simply stared back at him in disbelief. So he went on, “And this was my home, too, for a long while. I just want to come in for a few hours. Then I’ll go. I have a commitment. I just need somewhere I can think and focus for a bit first.” Walter wasn’t sure how, exactly, to explain his current circumstance beyond this. But he hoped Veronica would nevertheless feel some modicum of sympathy for a person she used to care for so deeply, and during a time that wasn’t really all that long ago.
“What the hell happened to you?” she asked, more caustically than concerned.
There were, admittedly, countless ways in which Walter could have interpreted this question. But inasmuch as his externally observable person was currently bruised, bloodied, filthy, and wincing in pain, he opted to presume that she was inquiring about his physical state of being. Nevertheless, he did not care to answer that question.
“I’m sorry for leaving like I did,” he offered instead, surprised to find his sentiment heartfelt, even if he was also still angling for a moment’s respite.
“You think I want an apology?” Veronica derided under her breath as she shook her head and pushed the door closed.
By reflex, Walter pushed back on the door with his hand, stopping its forward movement.
“What do you want me to say?” he asked in earnest.
“I don’t want you to say anything to me, Walter,” Veronica replied plainly, clearly uninterested in Walter’s earnestness.
“What was I supposed to do?” he insisted. “Tell you that I wasn’t in love with you anymore?”
“Of course!”
“You can’t just say that to someone!”
“Yes, you can. You just did.”
“Now. But you can’t say that to someone when you’re still supposed to be in love with them.”
“Great seeing you again, Walter,” Veronica said snidely, this time swatting his hand from the door, resentful that she had been dragged even this far into this conversation. “Continued happiness to you.”