Wilde Stories 2018

by Steve Berman

  He couldn’t really say who that someone was, and after a moment’s reflection, he realized that he couldn’t even sort out if killing was something he had decided to do or if it was the gun that had made up its mind. His confusion only grew as he stepped out of the car to discover that he could no longer tell where he ended and the gun began, and that the feeling extended to encompass the cracked pavement beneath his feet, and the car, and the splintering telephone poles, and the boarded-up storefronts, and a nearby oak tree, and a finch perched on the branch of that oak tree where it watched a strange man standing in the street with a gun. The finch quirked its head and Malik fell out of the trance with a gasp. He had to brace himself against the side of the car so that he wouldn’t keel right over.

  He took a minute to breathe and realized he didn’t even know where in the world he was. It could have been any small town anywhere in the English-speaking world, judging by the faded signage. His plates said California, and there were hills in the distance, but that didn’t mean anything definite. There was only one other car in sight, and it was just a shell, with the engine and tires missing and the windows broken. The plates had also been jacked, so no clues there. He decided he had to be in California.

  Malik had parked out front of an old theater building on the town’s main street. The ticket booth and the right-hand set of doors were boarded up like everything else, but the left-hand doors opened easily.

  Malik found the lobby empty, though not abandoned. He noted the clean floors, the sharp smell of ammonia, and the sun streaming in through gaps where boards had been removed strategically from the windows. His attention shifted to what must have once been a gift shop, now empty. A door to one of its back rooms swung open on squeaking hinges. Malik raised the gun.

  A woman stepped into his sights, considering him and the gun without concern. She was tall, nearly six feet, her hair tied back into a decidedly utilitarian ponytail, and she wore crisply pressed, professional attire. The woman didn’t speak as she crossed the lobby toward Malik, her stride quick with what seemed to be impatience.

  “Stop!” he shouted, the gun trembling. “You hear me? I said, stop!”

  She finally did stop, just a few feet shy of the barrel. Malik almost pulled the trigger when she reached into one of her pockets, but all she pulled out was a pad of paper and a pencil. The scratching of her writing and Malik’s heavy breathing echoed in the lobby. She turned the pad toward him.

  It read, “Are you here for the performance?”

  Malik stepped forward, pressing the gun to her forehead. “Do I look like I’m here for a goddamn performance?”

  The woman didn’t flinch, and as Malik stared into her calm gray eyes, he wondered why he felt so angry; and then, inexplicably, he didn’t feel angry at all. The gun sagged until it pointed to the floor, and he was the gun and the floor, just as he was the woman who wrote something else on the pad, and he was the pad and the pencil.

  “You’ve heard the recording,” he wrote with himself upon himself. “You’re here for the performance.”

  Malik nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I’m here for the performance. I want to meet him. The performer.”

  “You can,” the pencil wrote on the pad. “You will.”

  Then the woman took one of his hands in one of hers, and both hands were theirs, because there was no woman and there was no Malik—there was only a pair of bodies—and between them there was a grip, gentle and warm. One body tucked the gun into the waist of its pants as they walked to the inner theater doors. One body held a door open for the other body, and with a grateful nod to the one body, the other body stepped through.

  Some time ago—exactly how long, it’s hard to say—Malik had found the slightly warped record in Josh’s living room on the turntable, while Josh sat dead on the couch next to his boyfriend, a nice enough fellow whose name Malik could never remember. The boyfriend was dead, too. The two of them seemed to have just sat down and decided never to get up again. Dark stains had formed in the fabric of the couch around the bodies, which were bloated almost beyond recognition. As much as Malik had once loved Josh, or perhaps because of it, he couldn’t bring himself to go near the corpse. He couldn’t even bear to look at it.

  Malik hadn’t seen or spoken to Josh in almost a year. It had taken a week-long flurry of concerned texts, emails, and all-hour calls from mutual friends to convince him to dig up the spare key that he still hadn’t thrown away. He was going to hand it off to their friend L’il Lee, but for whatever reason, he wound up taking the bus straight to Josh’s place instead. There, he found the front door of the house unlocked. No one had bothered to try it.

  As soon as he opened the door, the smell shoved itself down Malik’s throat so hard he threw up all over the front stoop. He’d never had a good gag reflex, much to his embarrassment with the occasional lover; though Josh had only ever smiled and stroked his cheek and told him to take his time. He would always be grateful to Josh for that.

  After he’d cleaned himself up a bit, he entered the house and found what he found. He wasn’t sure afterward why he decided to take the record from Josh’s turntable, and he didn’t see any need to tell the police about it.

  The record’s sleeve was a blank grayish thing, the same exact shade as a northern city’s late-winter slush that you’d stomp off a boot. There wasn’t a single letter of type on it.

  Malik didn’t own a turntable, so he couldn’t play the thing. It just sat there on his desk where he left it, soon buried under unread magazines, outdated to-do lists, and bank statements.

  Malik didn’t attend the funeral. Not many of Josh’s friends did. They couldn’t bring themselves to stand quietly by while Josh’s so-called family pretended to have loved him. Instead, Josh’s friends held their own memorial sometime after.

  L’il Lee arranged the affair, and she hosted the after-party in her damp armpit of an apartment. Nearly fifty bodies managed to pack themselves in. Malik found himself stranded too far from the sangria pitchers with a chattering straight girl who claimed to have worked with Josh at the bank in his final year of life. Josh had always suffered from a weakness for fruit flies. A veritable swarm of them had been present at the ceremony. This particular midge was deliriously drunk, to the point that she’d lost all ability to discern his team colors, and all of Malik’s subtle attempts to clear up matters merely had the effect of encouraging the poor creature.

  Just when Malik had resigned himself to causing a scene, a man built like a Brutalist high-rise pressed up next to them. Malik didn’t recognize the man, but then he didn’t recognize half the faces at the party. The man wore his size like a badge of office, as if it gave him permission to do anything. The stranger winked at Malik before tossing a casual compliment in the girl’s direction. She turned her attention to the newcomer, providing Malik with the opportunity to slip away.

  He decided to step out for some fresh air and shoved free of the party, finding himself on an empty landing at the top of a steep, narrow set of stairs. The apartment was a walk-up from a busy downtown street. Even sober, it seemed a long and treacherous way down, and it didn’t help that the single bare bulb that normally lit the staircase had burnt out at some point in the night. The only illumination came from the headlights of the passing cars strobing through the frosted safety glass door at the foot of the stairs.

  Malik felt along the wall for the railing and began to descend slowly. He lowered both feet to a single step at a time, realizing that maybe he wasn’t as sober as he’d thought. He was about halfway down and in the midst of lowering his lead foot when a car passed. Someone stood backlit at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at Malik. Their silhouette struck Malik as somehow familiar. Then the hallway went dark again. Malik felt himself tipping too far forward, his foot sinking lower than it should have, as if the stairs had given way to a deep chasm in the Earth, and from the bottom of the chasm he swore he could hear a distant roar that he would have thought was rushing water except
for the strange crackling quality to the sound, which made Malik think more of static than water just before he caught himself on the railing with both hands and hauled himself back up. He took in a sharp breath and squinted to peer through the darkness.

  “Hello?” he called out.

  No reply came, and he felt like a complete idiot when another car passed, revealing that no one stood there, and there was certainly no chasm, and the only roar came from the passing car.

  Safely outside, Malik laughed it off, though his hands trembled as he lit a cigarette. He blamed the cold. It was the beginning of winter, and his fingers and ears had already gone numb after only a minute of smoking and watching the gaggles of clubbers pass him by. His nerves had quieted down by the time he’d finished the first cigarette, and as he lit a second, the massive stranger from the party appeared next to him. The man asked for a light and they smoked together in silence for a while, more awkward than companionable. The stranger watched Malik as if waiting to see whether he’d speak first.

  When it became clear the man wasn’t going to leave him be, Malik gave in. “So are you another one of Josh’s work friends? I don’t think we’ve met.”

  “I work at a record store,” said the man. “Joshua used to come by.”

  Malik shrugged as if this didn’t mean anything to him.

  “You know what Joshua was into?” asked the stranger. “I mean, just before he died?”

  Malik shook his head.

  “You ever hear of The Love Song?”

  “Hell, I’ve heard a lot of love songs,” said Malik. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

  “Not any old love song. This is The Love Song.” The stranger raised his eyebrows at Malik’s blank stare. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s hard to keep up with this kind of hipster shit. Well, anyway, it’s a song.”

  “I guessed that.”

  “No need to get cute. You wanna hear this or not?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “All right, then. You at least know the album L’Amour, by Lewis?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, Lewis—not his real name, of course—he appears in California in the early nineteen-eighties. Drives a white sports car and only ever wears white suits. He shows up at all the big Hollywood parties, and everyone who’s anyone pretends to know him. Anyway, he records this one album, pays fucking Edward Colver to take pictures for the sleeve. You know, the guy who took all the pictures of the American hardcore scene back in the day? Then, just like he appeared, Lewis vanishes. Colver tries to cash his cheque and it bounces. The album, no one knows what to do with it, so they chuck the whole lot in the trash. But a copy, this one copy, somehow winds up surviving, and it makes its way to a flea market in Edmonton. Some fellow from Seattle discovers it in twenty-fourteen, realizes it’s brilliant, and it becomes a surprise hit with the critics. I’m pretty sure people started calling The Love Song ‘The Love Song’ as a nod to that Lewis album. The Love Song is like L’Amour but even more of a mystery. See, they tracked down Lewis in the end. Turns out he was just some Canadian stockbroker named Randall Wulff. He took a vacation to California. No big mystery there, really.

  “Long story short, a rip got leaked on the internet. Those Soho Clubbers were shitting lavender-scented bricks. There was a real witch hunt for the bootlegger, but I don’t think they ever found the culprit. And rumor has it, all of the copies of the twelve-inch went missing soon after. You couldn’t even find it on the black market.”

  The stranger chuckled behind a cloud of smoke.

  “Out of the hands of the elite, into the hands of the masses,” he said. “The torrents dry up pretty fast, though. No explanation. Seeders just drop off all of a sudden and you have to wait for someone to put up a new torrent. Someone always does, of course, but it’s hard to know when, and it’s never up for long. You want another?”

  Malik looked down at his cigarette and realized with some surprise that it had burnt down to a stub already. Malik declined and the stranger continued.

  “Anyway, Joshua was obsessed with the song. Said he’d listened to it a thousand times. You know how he was.”

  Yeah, Malik knew. Josh had always fancied himself something of a modern Gnostic, and Malik had always liked that about him. Maybe that was just because Josh—he of such discerning tastes—had chosen Malik for a time, and that scratched Malik’s entirely unspecial itch to feel special.

  “Joshua was convinced that there was more than just one song, though,” the stranger went on. “See, rumor has it that the twelve-inches weren’t the only vinyls out there. Some people say there’s a full LP.”

  “So you’re saying Josh was looking for his own L’Amour?”

  “Oh, I think he found it.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Well, one day, he comes into the store all excited. He didn’t come out and say it, but I could tell. He didn’t buy anything. Just came in to talk about the weather.”

  “The weather?”

  “The metaphorical weather. The winds of sonic fashion. That was the last time I ever saw him. He found it. I know he found it. He really never told you about it?”

  The stranger looked a little too expectant, as if Malik had just been playing dumb this whole time and now was the moment to come clean.

  “We weren’t really on speaking terms,” he said.

  “That’s a real shame.” The stranger handed him a card. “Well, if you do hear anything—you know, while the family’s sorting out the will and all—you’ll give me a call? I just want to know that he found it before … Well, before.”

  “I thought you knew he’d found it.”

  The man just shrugged.

  Malik didn’t get home until well into the morning, but when he did, he immediately booted up his computer and ran a search for “The Love Song.” There were whole message boards devoted to it, plenty of folks lost in the echo chambers of obsession, but all of the links provided to the song itself were dead.

  Malik called in sick to the office and picked up a used turntable, receiver, and speakers the next day. He suddenly had to hear it: the soundtrack of Josh’s death.

  He sat on the squeaking leather sofa and listened. The record was warped and the needle didn’t have the weight to resist its rise and fall, bobbing like a buoy on choppy waters. It began with the hiss and crackle and occasional pop of static, drawn out for such a long time that Malik couldn’t help but fidget, wondering if the record was just that, if he’d somehow been duped. But then, gradually, the static seemed to coalesce into a muffled roar, and out of the roar emerged a faint pulse that one might call a rhythm; maybe brushes on a high hat, but maybe just a trick of the mind. Malik missed the exact moment that the piano joined, hesitant at first, but soon more forceful, though washed out and in some unrecognizable key. Finally came the voice, moaning breathy sounds that weren’t words but rather seemed to dance just beyond meaning.

  Malik couldn’t move, couldn’t even—

  He startled awake on the couch, hearing only the sound of his heart battering itself against his aching chest. The record had ended. He checked the clock on his phone. Hours had passed, and it was nearly midnight. He must have dozed off and missed it, perhaps not realizing how much he’d really needed that time off work to catch up on his sleep debt.

  He should try to listen again, he thought, but the idea brought on a bout of intense nausea that didn’t begin to subside until he’d finally stuffed the vinyl back into its sleeve and stumbled out into the night. As he walked the familiar streets, though he no longer felt the urge to puke, he noticed that the air felt strange on his skin, as if it had begun to bleed into him, seeping not just through his pores but through the gaps between the very atoms that comprised his cells. What’s more, every now and then, when his mind drifted and he lost hold of himself for a moment, he’d catch the occasional scrap of a ragged melody trying to take shape between the oscillations of his vocal chords. As soon as he became aware of it, the t
une would vanish, and all he’d be left with was a frightening feeling that he was far from anyone, that the streets and buildings of the city around him had long been abandoned.

  “You look off today,” Malik’s manager told him.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you getting enough vitamin D? I used to feel like shit all the time. Like shit that’s been walked on and smeared all over the sidewalk, you know? I wasn’t sleeping. I was working all hours. My wife nearly divorced me. Then I started taking vitamin D, and, well, look at me now.”

  Malik nodded slowly. He had opted not to take another sick day, though he regretted it now. “Vitamin D did that?”

  His manager nodded vigorously. “Oh, yeah. Vitamin D. Think about it.” He rapped his knuckles on Malik’s desk and sauntered off, leaving Malik to stare into the glare of his screen with little motivation to work. There was a backlog of design projects, and the marketing department was short-staffed, so Malik couldn’t afford distraction, but all he could think about was rushing back home to try listening to that damned record again. That morning, the same idea had driven him to his knees at the toilet, but now the idea of having to wait was driving him mad.

  After an hour, in which time he’d managed to open a blank document and save it somewhere on his hard drive, he decided to take a break. He dug the record store clerk’s business card out of his wallet and ducked into a washroom stall. The phone had barely rung once when the man answered.

  “You found it?” he asked, not even bothering to say hello.

  “I have it.”

  “That’s great, man. That’s great. Bring me the album and I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

  “I don’t even know what I want to know.”

  There was a pause, and Malik imagined the man shrugging on the other end of the line. “Then figure it out.”