Universe Between

by Dean Wesley Smith

  “Caleb—”

  “You don’t believe me any more, do you?”

  “Of course I do!”

  “No, you don’t. I can tell. You don’t.”

  Maria was silent for a while, then she sighed and sat up in bed. She patted the empty space next to her. When he didn’t go, she patted it again, looking at him imploringly. With a sigh, he sat, the sheets still warm from her body. She placed her hand on his knee and it was even warmer. Ordinarily, this touch alone would have gotten his body to respond, but he felt limp and cold and dead inside.

  “I know how he died,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You always said he just disappeared. You said you were watching him, and he just vanished.”

  He cleared his throat. “That’s right. He was—he was practicing one night. And he disappeared. And never . . . never came back.”

  “But I talked to your mother.”

  “You did what?”

  She winced. “Don’t be mad. I was worried about you. You said she lived in Hoboken, so I just did some looking on the Internet. There aren’t that many Mertzes really. Caleb, you said she didn’t want to talk to you any more. You said she was angry at you for choosing music.”

  “I can’t believe—I can’t believe you—”

  “But she sounded like it was the other way around. Like you cut her off.”

  Caleb felt tears forming in his eyes, and he fought to keep them at bay. “Why did you do this?”

  “I was worried about you. And—and I love you.”

  Her eyes were dark and luminous, brimming with tears themselves, and Caleb looked away, at the floor. “It happened just like I said,” he insisted.

  “Caleb—”

  “Just like I said.”

  “She said she found him at the piano one morning.”

  “She doesn’t—she doesn’t know—”

  “He’d drank too much,” Maria said. “He was always drinking too much. Your mother said she’d had to call an ambulance more than once. This time, it was too late.”

  “She’s lying,” Caleb insisted.

  “She said it was the drinking that cost him his career. It was the drinking that ruined their marriage . . . that made him, that made him such a lousy father . . .”

  “Crazy stupid lying bitch!” Caleb screamed.

  He didn’t remember jumping to his feet, but he must have done so because the next thing he knew he was looming over her with his fist raised. She raised her own hands defensively, and he saw how much fear was in those luminous eyes of hers. He’d seen that look before, on his mother’s face. All at once, the rage fled him, and he was just this perverse statue of a young man, naked, muscles taut, snorting through his nose like a bull ready to charge. He’d tell himself later that he hadn’t come close to hitting her, not really. He’d never be like that. Not like that.

  “Caleb,” Maria pleaded.

  He spun away and hunted for his clothes, found his jeans at the foot of the bed and hopped into them. Then his Birkenstocks. Maria reached for him, but he dodged away. He found his suede jacket, but where was his polo shirt? It didn’t matter. He slipped on the jacket over his bare chest.

  “Caleb, don’t—don’t do this,” Maria said.

  “It happened,” he said.

  “Caleb—”

  “Like I said.”

  “I love you,” she insisted.

  He was at the door, hand on the knob. She’d said the words many times over the past few months, and strangely, this was the first time he’d felt the impulse to say them in return. He’d always resented the way she could say them so casually, as if she was just saying hello. Didn’t they mean anything to her? But now he saw that it was the reverse; that they meant everything to her, which was probably why she said them all the time. It was a kind of breathing. By not saying them in return, it was as if he’d been kneeling on her chest.

  Without turning—because if he turned, he knew it would probably change everything—he spoke softly.

  “It was a girl,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The friend I met at the bar. She was a girl. And—and she believes me.”

  Then he left. He hurried down the hall, but not quite fast enough. Before he reached the door at the other end, he heard her muffled crying.

  ***

  The final notes of Mozart’s Moonlight Sonata had long since faded into silence, and yet Caleb still sat with his eyes closed and hands poised over the keys. A bead of sweat trickled down his forehead, but he didn’t attempt to wipe it away. The piano bench felt as hard as concrete against his bony bottom. He was eight years old, but already he didn’t care about little annoyances. He never turned on the box fan in the corner, either. It would hurt the music. He didn’t want anything to hurt the music.

  It was at least a minute before someone standing behind him cleared a throat.

  Caleb, pulse quickening, spun around. He’d had his eyes closed for so long that it took a second for him to focus, starbursts in the air, and for a moment he saw only a dark black shape looming over him like the Grim Reaper. Then he saw his father, dressed in black as usual, his long hair masking half his face. The one eye Caleb could clearly see peering through that veil of hair was bloodshot.

  “You’re getting better,” his father said.

  “You’re—you’re home early,” Caleb stuttered. He didn’t know what was more surprising: his father’s appearance, or the words he’d spoken—the closest thing he’d ever uttered to a compliment.

  “The bar was slow. Manager sent me home. Where’s your mother?”

  “Store,” Caleb said.

  His father nodded. Caleb had been prepared for a burst of anger, and he felt a flood of relief that it hadn’t come. His mother had said that it was all right to practice in the studio when his father was gone, that his father had given his permission, but he still felt guilty for being in there.

  “Your mother has done a good job,” his father said, “but you will need a new teacher soon.”

  Caleb waited for the offer to come, the one he’d been desperately hoping for the past few years. I will teach you, son. But instead, his father brushed the air with his fingers, motioning for Caleb to move aside. It was such a casual gesture, yet Caleb had never felt so crushed.

  Steeling himself, Caleb scooted off the bench. His father—the Great Philip Mertz—plopped himself down, swaying a little. Caleb felt disgust at the drunkenness, then a wave of shame for feeling this way about his father. He could only hope to be such a great piano player someday! His father cracked his knuckles and lifted his hands over the keys. He stayed that for a long time, then bowed his head and sighed.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Oh,” Caleb said. “I, um, I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Go ahead, then.”

  Caleb had been waiting for this moment so long, rehearsed the words many times, but now that the moment was here, his mind was blank. He blinked furiously, trying to remember what he was supposed to say. His eyelids felt sticky with sweat.

  “Come on, I don’t have all day,” his father said.

  “How—how do you do it?” Caleb blurted.

  His father turned and looked at him, eyebrows raised. “What?”

  “That thing you do,” Caleb said.

  “I’m afraid I don’t—”

  “Disappear. I saw you. I saw you do it. You were playing, and you disappeared.”

  His father stared intently. Caleb waited for the puzzled expression or the laughter, but his father’s reaction was simply to nod.

  “I will tell you,” he said, “but then you must ... you must promise never to tell your mother I told you this. It would make her very upset. Do you promise?”

  “Yes,” Caleb said.

  “There is something in the Mertz blood,” his father said. “A special gift. It does not happen in every generation, but it happens a lot. You’ve probably noticed most of us become musicians. Your grandfather, you nev
er met him, but you know he played in the New York Philharmonic. Your great grandfather was in vaudeville—a fiddler. And then there’s me.”

  And me, Caleb thought, but didn’t say it aloud.

  “So a knack for music is part of our genes,” his father continued. “But that’s not all. Sometimes it’s more. Sometimes we can open up a ... rift.”

  “A rift?” Caleb said.

  “Yes. What I’m going to say is going to sound very strange, and your mother hates when I talk about this. But if you play brilliantly, if the notes are perfect and your soul is in it, if other conditions help rather than hinder, the audience, the atmosphere, the energy pulsing inside you, who knows what else—if it all comes together just so, you will tear the thin fabric that separates our universe from the others around it. And there is a gap, you see. There is a gap between our universe and the others, and it is in this gap when time has no meaning. It does not obey our rules.”

  “I—I don’t understand,” Caleb said.

  “No, of course you wouldn’t. You’re quite young. But think on it, and when you are older, perhaps it will make some sense. I want you to know. Because someday I may not be here any more, and you should know where I went.”

  The thought of his father leaving him terrified Caleb. “But why? Why would you want to go there?”

  “I already told you. Because time does not obey our rules in the gap. If you can get into the gap, and stay there . . . You can live forever. Because you see, Caleb, in our universe, in any universe that obeys the rules, every song has to stop eventually. But not in the gap. Not there. The music never ends.”

  “But—”

  “No. That’s enough. It won’t make any more sense no matter how I explain it to you. But when you’re older, it might. Just don’t tell your mother.”

  With that, the great Philip Mertz turned back to the piano. Caleb knew that it was a risk to say anything further, but there was one more question that he was dying to ask. Do I have the gift? He didn’t think he’d actually spoken the words aloud until his father, sounding weary and distant, answered him.

  “I hope not,” he said.

  Then he began to play.

  ***

  There were drugs. There were women. There were the years of missed classes, feuding with instructors and classmates, the blackouts behind the bars. He dropped out of Julliard—not because he didn’t play, but because he didn’t practice. He hated to practice. Practice was not performing. He played for hours and hours, the songs of his choice, not theirs, played until his fingers were so chapped they bled. Each song was a bravura performance, even if the audience was only the walls. Each song was another attempt to open the rift, to get into the gap, to find that place where time had no meaning.

  Where he could see his father again.

  He ended up sleeping at the YMCA. He cleaned up his act, a retired professor who’d been an addict himself helped him through AA, and another AA contact was friends with a guy who was friends with a guy who owned this old hotel in Brooklyn. They needed a piano player in their lounge. Wage was crap, tips weren’t much better, but it was a job. Was he interested? He needed to eat.

  It was the second night on the job when he caught another glimpse, the first in years. Leaning against the back wall, arms crossed—then gone in a blink. Three weeks of mindless pop songs later and there was another flicker, this one even more brief. Then four months of nothing and Caleb was off the wagon, blowing his meager savings on cocaine until he woke up in the hospital. This close, the doctor said, holding his fingers a hair’s width apart.

  His boss gave him one more chance. Then one more. Just one more. Then he was fired. Then he was on the streets. He saw his mother once and he hid behind a phone booth. Wandering, shuffling, sniveling, he drifted from alley to alley, rifling through trash cans, his beard long, his clothes smelling of mold and dog shit, people crossing to the other side of the street to avoid him. The morning frost stuck to his eyelids. Snow, a tiny glaze of it, greeted him on the streets. It matched his hair now, which had lost most of its red and gone white. People thought he was three times older than he really was, still a young man in years if not in body or spirit.

  He was going to die. Winter would kill him, he knew it.

  He was limping along in the shadowy gap between two brick buildings, maybe Brooklyn, maybe Harlem, maybe another planet, what did it matter, when he suddenly came upon an old upright piano with a dark walnut finish. It was right there in the alley, next to the dumpster, the light snow on the ground mostly hiding the crumpled tin cans and piles of rotting cardboard. A Baldwin, it looked like. Incredible. His father had used a Chickering, but it was very much the same.

  There was no stool. A crow landed on a fire escape ladder above his head and cawed at him. The alley smelled of spoiled milk. Somewhere distant, muffled by hard alley corners, cars hummed and screeched and honked. Caleb opened the piano’s lid, hovering his fingers over the keys. His fingers were so stiff that he didn’t even know if he could play.

  He played anyway. He didn’t even know what song, he just went with it, but he knew at once that it was the same song he’d heard so many years ago—like Beethoven’s Fifth, but not quite, a riff on it his father had invented all on his own. Yes, of course! Caleb, swaying on his feet, closed his eyes and released himself to the song. His fingers warmed up. The song was better. It went very well, the perfect notes echoing off the brick walls.

  “I’m here,” a man said.

  If it had been anyone else, Caleb might have kept playing, he was so immersed in the music, but he knew this voice. He stopped and spun around, and just as he expected, there was his father—standing by the dumpster, black T-shirt and black jeans, shoulder-length black hair flecked with gray, his face marked by the lines of age and hard living. Caleb had to swallow three times before he could speak.

  “Why?” he said.

  “Why?” his father said. “Why am I here? Or why did I leave?”

  Caleb nodded. His father shook his head sadly.

  “I can’t answer the last one,” he said, “and there’s—there’s no time even if I could. I have to make this count, son. I have to make you understand. I love you, Caleb. I need to tell you that first. I made a lot of mistakes. But I love you.”

  “Oh God,” Caleb said.

  “It’s all right. Don’t cry. It’s all right.”

  “I just—I just didn’t know what I ... what I did wrong ...”

  “Nothing. Nothing, son. You didn’t do anything wrong. In the gap ... There’s time. There’s so much time to think. I should have been there for you. I should have ... well, what’s done is done. But I’m sorry.”

  His father was so real, so substantial, the shadow on the ground, the moisture in the air glimmering on his pale skin, that Caleb desperately wanted to hug him. But when he took a step toward him, his father held up a hand.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  “But I want—”

  “I don’t know what would happen. Believe me, I ... I wish I could. But listen. Caleb, we have only a minute. The girl from Harvard you were seeing, Maria. Clean yourself up, then find her. That was a turning point for you. She was a turning point for you. Win her over. Don’t make my mistakes. Can you do that, Caleb? It’s your only chance.”

  A gruff voice interrupted: “Hey, pal, what do you think you’re doing?”

  It was a man behind him. Caleb turned and saw a fat man in a blue bathrobe and pink slippers emerging from the metal door beneath the fire escape, what little hair he had slicked straight back. He was smoking a cigar and holding a piano stool, a small one.

  “Um, nothing,” Caleb said.

  “Moving truck gonna be here in a second. Beat it.”

  Caleb turned to his father, but there was nothing there but an overflowing dumpster.

  ***

  It happened just as his father said it would. It was not easy, of course. It took months of false starts to get even a semblance of a life back, then nearly a yea
r before Maria would even consent to go on a date with him again, but eventually they were married. He went back to school, Columbia this time, played in cocktail lounges and bars part time, got his degree, got another, became a music professor back at Columbia. Maria didn’t want children, no matter how often he asked. She wanted to focus on her career. Law school, a practice, then a county judge. She was on the fast track. Caleb was despairing until one day in her late thirties she rolled over in bed and said she wanted a child. It took a few trips to the fertility doctor, but the son came two years later. Jonathan. Caleb was forty years old.

  Life was good. Late at night, when he practiced in his studio, he sometimes felt a momentary presence behind him, but he never looked. Now and then, he played a few cocktail lounges just for fun, and so he had a little extra money to buy nice things for his family (a professor’s salary being what it was). Every so often, if the song was right, if the notes were perfect, if he happened to glance up at just the right moment, he caught a glimpse through the shadows and the sea of faces of a man with long black hair and dressed in black clothes. A flicker, really. Hardly even there.

  He made amends with his mother, thankfully a few years before she died of lung cancer. They weren’t many years together, but they were good ones, and he cried openly at her funeral. It was during this time when he felt the greatest temptation to stray, to reach for the drugs or the darker path, but he always turned back to his family. He spent night after night standing in Jonathan’s room, observing the rising and falling of his son’s chest, marveling at how red his son’s hair was, even in the pale yellow glow of the night light. As red as the reddest apple.

  On one such night, when the first snow of winter graced his son’s window, Maria joined him. She put her arm around his back and leaned into him. She smelled of red wine and lavender and other lovely things.

  “Isn’t he beautiful?” she whispered.

  “Impossibly so,” he said.

  “His hair is getting so long. Did he tell you he wants to grow it out?”