Barnacle Bill The Spacer and Other Stories

by Barnacle Bill the Spacer

  I contacted the corporation. They, of course, had heard the news, and they also recognized that had Bill not acted the Perseverance and all aboard her would have been destroyed along with Solitaire. He was, they were delighted to attest, a hero, and they would treat him as such. How’s that? I asked. Promotions, news specials, celebrations, parades, was their answer. What he really wants, I told them, is to come back to Solitaire. Well, of course, they said, we’ll see what we can do. When it’s time, they said. We’ll do right by him, don’t you worry. How about another implant? I asked. Absolutely, no problem, anything he needs. By the time I broke contact, I understood that Bill’s fate would be little different now he was a hero than it would have been when he was a mere fool and a villain. They would use him, milk his story for all the good it could do them, and then he would be discarded, misplaced, lost, dropped down to circulate among the swirling masses of the useless, the doomed and the forgotten.

  Though I had already—in concert with others—formed a plan of action, it was this duplicity on the corporation’s part that hardened me against them, and thereafter I threw myself into the implementation of the plan. A few weeks from now, the Perseverance and three other starships soon to be completed will launch for the new world. Aboard will be the population of Solitaire, minus a few unsympathetic personnel who have been rendered lifeless, and the populations of other, smaller stations in the asteroid belt and orbiting Mars. Solitaire itself, and the other stations, will be destroyed. It will take the corporation decades, perhaps a century, to rebuild what has been lost, and by the time they are able to reach us, we hope to have grown strong, to have fabricated a society free of corporations and Strange Magnificences, composed of those who have learned to survive without the quotas and the dread consolations of the Earth. It is an old dream, this desire to say, No more, never again, to build a society cleansed of the old compulsions and corruptions, the ancient, vicious ways, and perhaps it is a futile one, perhaps the fact that men like myself, violent men, men who will do the necessary, who will protect against all enemies with no thought for moral fall-out, must be included on the roster, perhaps this pre-ordains that it will fail. Nevertheless, it needs to be dreamed every so often, and we are prepared to be the dreamers.

  So that is the story of Barnacle Bill. My story, and Arlie’s as well, yet his most of all, though his real part in it, the stuff of his thoughts and hopes, the pain he suffered and the fear he overcame, those things can never be told. Perhaps you have seen him recently on the HV, or even in person, riding in an open car at the end of a parade with men in suits, eating an ice and smiling, but in truth he is already gone into history, already part of the past, already half-forgotten, and when the final door has closed on him, it may be that his role in all this will be reduced to a mere footnote or simply a mention of his name, the slightest token of a life. But I will remember him, not in memorial grace, not as a hero, but as he was, in all his graceless ways and pitiable form. It is of absolute importance to remember him thus, because that, I have come to realize, the raw and the deformed, the ugly, the miserable miracles of our days, the unalloyed baseness of existence, that is what we must learn to love, to accept, to embrace, if we are to cease the denials that weaken us, if we are ever to admit our dismal frailty and to confront the natural terror and heartbreak weather of our lives and live like a strong light across the sky instead of retreating into darkness.

  The barnacles have returned to Solitaire. Or rather, new colonies of barnacles have attached to the newly reunited station, not covering it completely, but dressing it up in patches. I have taken to walking among them, weeding them as Bill once did; I have become interested in them, curious as to how they perceived a ship coming from light years away, and I intend to carry some along with us on the voyage and make an attempt at a study. Yet what compels me to take these walks is less scientific curiosity than a kind of furious nostalgia, a desire to remember and hold the centre of those moments that have so changed the direction of our lives, to think about Bill and how it must have been for him, a frightened lump of a man with a clever voice in his ear, alone in all that daunting immensity, fixing his eyes on the bright clots of life at his feet. Just today Arlie joined me on such a walk, and it seemed we were passing along the rim of an infinite dark eye flecked with a trillion bits of colour, and that everything of our souls and of every other soul could be seen in that eye, that I could look down to Earth through the haze and scum of the ocean air and see Bill where he stood looking up and trying to find us in that mottled sky, and I felt all the eerie connections a man feels when he needs to believe in something more than what he knows is real, and I tried to tell myself he was all right, walking in his garden in Nova Sibersk, taking the air with an idiot woman so beautiful it nearly made him wise. But I could not sustain the fantasy. I could only mourn, and I had no right to mourn, having never loved him—or if I did, even in the puniest of ways, it was never his person I loved, but what I had from him, the things awakened in me by what had happened. Just the thought that I could have loved him, maybe that was all I owned of right.

  We were heading back toward the East Louie airlock, when Arlie stooped and plucked up a male barnacle. Dark green as an emerald, it was, except for its stubby appendage. Glowing like magic, alive with threads of colour like a potter’s glaze.

  ‘That’s a rare one,’ I said. ‘Never saw one that colour before.’

  ‘Bill would ’ave fancied it,’ she said.

  ‘Fancied, hell. He would have hung the damned thing about his neck.’

  She set it back down, and we watched as it began working its way across the surface of the barnacle patch, doing its slow, ungainly cartwheels, wobbling off-true, lurching in flight, nearly missing its landing, but somehow making it, somehow getting there. It landed in the shadow of some communications gear, stuck out its tongue and tried to feed. We watched it for a long, long while, with no more words spoken, but somehow there was a little truth hanging in the space between us, in the silence, a poor thing not worth naming, and maybe not even having a name, it was such an infinitesimal slice of what was, and we let it nourish us as much as it could, we took its lustre and added it to our own, we sucked it dry, we had its every flavour, and then we went back inside arm in arm, to rejoin the lie of the world.

  A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC

  ‘Dead men can’t play jazz.’

  ‘That’s the truth I learned last night at the world premiere performance of the quartet known as Afterlife at Manhattan’s Village Vanguard.

  ‘Whether or not they can play, period, that’s another matter, but it wasn’t jazz I heard at the Vanguard, it was something bluer and colder, something with notes made from centuries-old Arctic ice and stones that never saw the light of day, something uncoiling after a long black sleep and tasting dirt in its mouth, something that wasn’t the product of creative impulse but of need. But the bottom line is, it was worth hearing.

  ‘As to the morality involved, well, I’ll leave that up to you, because that’s the real bottom line, isn’t it, music lovers? Do you like it enough and will you pay enough to keep the question of morality a hot topic on the talk shows and out of the courts? Those of you who listened to the simulcast over WBAI have probably already formulated an opinion. The rest of you will have to wait for the CD.

  ‘I won’t waste your time by talking about the technology. If you don’t understand it by now, after all the television specials and the (ohmygodpleasenotanother) in-depth discussions between your local blow-dried news creep and their pet science-fiction hack, you must not want to understand it. Nor am I going to wax profound and speculate on just how much of a man is left after reanimation. The only ones who know that aren’t able to tell us, because it seems the speech centre just doesn’t thrive on narcosis. Nor does any fraction of sensibility that cares to communicate itself. In fact, very little seems to thrive on narcosis aside from the desire…no, like I said, the need to play music.

  ‘And for reasons that God or some
one only knows, the ability to play music where none existed before.

  ‘That may be hard to swallow, I realize, but I’m here to tell you, no matter how weird it sounds, it appears to be true.

  ‘For the first time in memory, there was a curtain across the Vanguard’s stage. I suppose there’s some awkwardness involved in bringing the musicians out. Before the curtain was opened, William Dexter, the genius behind this whole deal, a little bald man with a hearing aid in each ear and the affable, simple face of someone whom kids call by his first name, came out and said a few words about the need for drastic solutions to the problems of war and pollution, for a redefinition of our goals and values. Things could not go on as they had been. The words seemed somewhat out of context, though they’re always nice to hear. Finally he introduced the quartet. As introductions go, this was a telegram.

  ‘“The music you’re about to hear,” William Dexter said flatly, without the least hint of hype or hyperventilation, “is going to change your lives.”

  ‘And there they were.

  ‘Right on the same stage where Coltrane turned a love supreme into song, where Miles singed us with the hateful beauty of needles and knives and Watts on fire, where Mingus went crazy in 7/4 time, where Ornette made Kansas City R&B into the art of noise, and a thousand lesser geniuses dreamed and almost died and were changed before our eyes from men into moments so powerful that guys like me can make a living writing about them for people like you who just want to hear that what they felt when they were listening was real.

  ‘Two white men, one black, one Hispanic, the racial quota of an all-American TV show, marooned on a radiant island painted by a blue-white spot. All wearing sunglasses.

  ‘Raybans, I think.

  ‘Wonder if they’ll get a commercial.

  ‘The piano-player was young and skinny, just a kid, with the long brown hair of a rock star and sunglasses that held gleams as shiny and cold as the black surface of his Baldwin. The Hispanic guy on bass couldn’t have been more than eighteen, and the horn player, the black man, he was about twenty-five, the oldest. The drummer, a shadow with a crew cut and a pale brow, I couldn’t see him clearly but I could tell he was young, too.

  ‘Too young, you’d think, to have much to say.

  ‘But then maybe time goes by more slowly and wisdom accretes with every measure…in the afterlife.

  ‘No apparent signal passed between them, yet as one they began to play.’

  Goodrick reached for his tape recorder, thinking he should listen to the set again before getting into the music, but then he realized that another listen was unnecessary—he could still hear every blessed note. The ocean of dark chords on the piano opening over a snaky, slithering hiss of cymbals and a cluttered rumble plucked from the double bass, and then that sinuous alto line, like snake-charmer music rising out of a storm of thunderheads and scuttling claws, all fusing into a signature as plaintive and familiar and elusive as a muezzin’s call. Christ, it stuck with you like a jingle for Burger King…though nothing about it was simple. It seemed to have the freedom of jazz, yet at the same time it had the feel of heavy, ritual music.

  Weird shit.

  And it sure as hell stuck with you.

  He got up from the desk, grabbed his drink and walked over to the window. The nearby buildings ordered the black sky, ranks of tombstones inscribed with a writing of rectangular stars, geometric constellations, and linear rivers of light below, flowing along consecutive chasms through the high country of Manhattan. Usually the view soothed him and turned his thoughts to pleasurable agendas, as if height itself were a form of assurance, an emblematic potency that freed you from anxiety. But tonight he remained unaffected. The sky and the city seemed to have lost their scope and grandeur, to have become merely an adjunct to his living room.

  He cast about the apartment, looking for the clock. Couldn’t locate it for a second among a chaos of sticks of gleaming chrome, shining black floors, framed prints, and the black plush coffins of the sofas. He’d never put it together before, but the place looked like a cross between a Nautilus gym and a goddamn mortuary. Rachel’s taste could use a little modification.

  Two thirty a.m…Damn!

  Where the hell was she?

  She usually gave him time alone after a show to write his column. Went and had a drink with friends.

  Three hours, though.

  Maybe she’d found a special friend. Maybe that was the reason she had missed the show tonight. If that was the case, she’d been with the bastard for…what? Almost seven hours now. Screwing her brains out in some midtown hotel.

  Bitch! He’d settle her hash when she got home.

  Whoa, big fella, he said to himself. Get real. Rachel would be much cooler than that…make that, had been much cooler. Her affairs were state of the art, so quietly and elegantly handled that he had been able to perfect denial. This wasn’t her style. And even if she were to throw it in his face, he wouldn’t do a thing to her. Oh, he’d want to; he’d want to bash her goddamned head in. But he would just sit there and smile and buy her bullshit explanation.

  Love, he guessed you’d call it, the kind of love that will accept any insult, any injury…though it might be more accurate to call it pussywhipped. There were times he didn’t think he could take it anymore, times—like now—when his head felt full of lightning, on the verge of exploding and setting everything around him on fire. But he always managed to contain his anger and swallow his pride, to grin and bear it, to settle for the specious currency of her lovemaking, the price she paid to live high and do what she wanted.

  Jesus, he felt strange. Too many pops at the Vanguard, that was likely the problem. But maybe he was coming down with something.

  He laughed.

  Like maybe middle age? Like the married-to-a-chick-fifteen-years-younger-paranoid flu?

  Still, he had felt better in his time. No real symptoms, just out of sorts, sluggish, dulled, some trouble concentrating.

  Finish the column, he said to himself; just finish the damn thing, take two aspirin, and fall out. Deal with Rachel in the morning.

  Right.

  Deal with her.

  Bring her breakfast in bed, ask how she was feeling, and what was she doing later?

  God, he loved her!

  Loves her not. Loves. Loves her not.

  He tore off a last mental petal and tossed the stem away. Then he returned to the desk and typed a few lines about the music onto the computer and sat considering the screen. After a moment he began to type again.

  ‘Plenty of blind men have played the Vanguard, and plenty of men have played there who’ve had other reasons to hide their eyes, working behind some miracle of modern chemistry that made them sensitive to light. I’ve never wanted to see their eyes—the fact that they were hidden told me all I needed to know about them. But tonight I wanted to see, I wanted to know what the quartet was seeing, what lay behind those sunglasses starred from the white spot. Shadows, it’s said. But what sort of shadows? Shades of grey, like dogs see? Are we shadows to them, or do they see shadows where we see none? I thought if I could look into their eyes, I’d understand what caused the alto to sound like a reedy alarm being given against a crawl of background radiation, why one moment it conjured images of static red flashes amid black mountains moving, and the next brought to mind a livid blue streak pulsing in a serene darkness, a mineral moon in a granite sky.

  ‘Despite the compelling quality of the music, I couldn’t set aside my curiosity and simply listen. What was I listening to, after all? A clever parlour trick? Sleight of hand on a metaphysical level? Were these guys really playing Death’s Top-Forty, or had Mr William Dexter managed to chump the whole world and programme four stiffs to make certain muscular reactions to subliminal stimuli?’

  The funny thing was, Goodrick thought, now he couldn’t stop listening to the damn music. In fact, certain phrases were becoming so insistent, circling round and round inside his head, he was having difficulty thinking rationall
y.

  He switched the radio on, wanting to hear something else, to get a perspective on the column.

  No chance.

  Afterlife was playing on the radio, too.

  He was stunned, imagining some bizarre Twilight Zone circumstance, but then realized that the radio was tuned to WBAI. They must be replaying the simulcast. Pretty unusual for them to devote so much air to one story. Still, it wasn’t every day the dead came back to life and played song stylings for your listening pleasure.

  He recognized the passage. They must have just started the replay. Shit, the boys hadn’t even gotten warmed up yet.

  Heh, heh.

  He followed the serpentine track of the alto cutting across the rumble and clutter of the chords and fills behind it, a bright ribbon of sound etched through thunder and power and darkness.

  A moment later he looked at the clock and was startled to discover that the moment had lasted twenty minutes.

  Well, so he was a little spaced; so what? He was entitled. He’d had a hard wife…life. Wife. The knifing word he’d wed, the dull flesh, the syrupy blood, the pouty breasts, the painted face he’d thought was pretty. The dead music woman, the woman whose voice caused cancer, whose kisses left damp mildewed stains, whose…

  His heart beat flabbily, his hands were cramped, his fingertips were numb, and his thoughts were a whining, glowing crack opening in a smoky sky like slow lightning. Feeling a dark red emotion too contemplative to be anger, he typed a single paragraph and then stopped to read what he had written.