There were levels of chaos swirling in Nat that had pushed or allowed him to land. One was created by the storm itself. The training that was to enable him to ignore it was as shoddy as any of the training he’d received.
The other source of chaos was more tinged with hope. That, of course, came from the Singer. Fragmented and tangential to all of that was a story in his head—a story that must have come from an old external screen or a grandparent. The parts of the story he could recall made him want to be the first person the Singer saw when she emerged from the wreck. But, when daylight touched the Singer’s eyes, the sky was what she saw, and it lifted her past the tears she’d shed thinking of her Grandmother.
Even in her sweaty disheveled state, or because of her sweaty disheveled state, the Singer was beautiful. She looked like she had barely escaped from deep inside a burning building or had just swum away from a vehicle that had crashed in the water or had done something else that demanded every ounce of blood, will, and focus to accomplish. Nat realized that was what he’d heard in her voice when he’d been flying over the wreckage of the transport—a desperation he’d thought belonged to him alone. It was the echo of that desperation in her voice that had made the unfamiliar song seem familiar and made him want to be with her and her music.
People were offering the Singer food, drink, and light wraps. She took the aid, smiling and thanking the people, all the while looking up. It wasn’t until Nat spoke that she looked at anyone for any length of time.
“I’ve heard that song. What was that you were singing?”
“You couldn’t have heard it before. But that’s a wonderful compliment and I’ll be sure to tell my grandmother.”
She felt the need to sit down, to gather herself. Her sweat dried and cooled her even through the light wraps. Time began to pass again. She could feel her own weight. She looked up just in time to see police hog tie Nat and all but throw him into a transport. Then she realized she and Nat were some of the very few dark-skinned people in the area and that she had been the only dark person on the transport.
***
The first part of the story that brought the Singer a bit of celebrity was that one of her fellow passengers had blood dripping from one ear. It had been damaged by the volume of the song the Singer sang in the transport. The person with the damaged ear wanted to take the Singer to court until the other passengers vehemently protested. What was one impaired ear compared to them all dying slowly and horribly buried beneath rubble? That surely would have been the outcome had the Singer not sang so loudly.
Reporters began to hound the Singer. She decided to use one of her Grandmother’s names and told them she was Tina. She repeatedly asked reporters if they knew the prisoner who had heard her singing from beneath the rubble.
***
Tina’s notoriety increased when they found the prisoner. The sight of him, knowing he was not dead, gave her a rush of relief. She embraced him even though his clothes were inexplicably damp.
She learned his name was Nat. Inevitably, someone suggested they form the Nat and Tina Turner Revue, but also suggested that, unlike his namesake, Nat should not murder white men, women, or children in the course of Black Liberation. Nearly every media outlet suggested they could, like Ike and Tina Turner, “make a killing with their music.” Many people thought that was a stupid thing to say even when they wrote it. But the media is filled with people paid to say stupid things, and this was one of those stupid things that spread like the flu.
Their high profiles and public curiosity actually gave Nat and Tina enough cover to circumvent the law and perform live without the usual bureaucratic nightmare of meeting virtually impossible qualifications. Even so, the Recording Institute for Public Safety (RIPS) was just biding its time before intervening. Their legal and public persuasion people decided their reputations could, as usual, use a little boost. So, they would let Nat and Tina go without hologram agreements for at least a little longer. The musical duo did keep up appearances by appearing in news grams, but for free, and as preludes to live performances.
Those performances, all of course in small, low-tech venues, were packed. Everyone wanted to hear the woman who managed to sing her way out of what should have been her grave. Some even thought they wanted to hear a voice that could damage their ears. What they got was blues updated by the Revue with a group of musicians that were drawn to Nat and Tina. Every show ended with an a cappella version of “River Deep, Mountain High.” Many in the audience heard things they’d never heard before, never knew they could hear, things they didn’t know were there to be heard.
The most affected members of the audience were unable to speak or move for a few moments after she was done. The silence after her sound fell out of time. A warm clear gap filled the listeners’ heads. After the show, they would sit at home in the quietest rooms they could find for unspecified moments. They would, at first unintentionally, disrupt work sites by sitting still. They began to congregate and create more serious disruptions.
***
Tina danced provocatively to every number except the last one, and that is one of the things that made it Nat’s favorite besides the fact that it reminded him of meeting her, seeing her emerge from the jaws of death like Venus the Warrior.
After a practice session that had left everyone sweating, the two of them had wandered off, talking. Nat asked her about her dancing during the show. Didn’t she think it was a distraction? Wasn’t it too much of a contrast with the last and most powerful number?
“There’s all kinds of power, don’t you think?” she said, noticing they were alone. She gyrated slowly towards him and then away. He followed her.
***
A Producer saw the smiling couple on video that was passed to him on the company implant from an underpartner desperate to keep her job, and so discreetly slipped the intel through her home implant. The Producer fired her even though he instantly recognized the couple as being marketable. He would have to find some way to bring them into his stable.
He was used to having leverage, but what kind of leverage could he manage with an ex-con and this woman who had survived an incredible crash by singing loud enough to be heard through collapsed buildings? It would have to be through the prisoner and the prison system, somehow. Having barely escaped serving time himself, the Producer had some familiarity with how things worked versus how things were supposed to work.
He was able to persuade prison officials to rescind some of the musical prisoner’s freedom, and Nat and Tina found themselves in the Producer’s office with two linked agreements on portable parchment before them. One cut Nat free of prison, sort of. The other made the Nat and Tina Turner Revue the virtual property of the Producer for one year and gave them a huge bonus for signing both parchments. The fact that it was only a year, that it took prison out of the picture for Nat and gave them a huge bonus, led Nat and Tina to sign.
“When do we hit the studio?” Nat asked with a slightly forced smile after his biometrics scanned through the last agreement.
“I just need her, I just need her to sing the song,” the Producer said without looking up. “But she’s got to sing it perfectly.”
“I’ve been singing it since before I knew what it meant,” said Tina, her smile fading as the last word left her. “Nobody else can touch it. I’ve rehearsed the hell—”
“You,” the Producer said looking at Nat, “can rest up while she records.”
***
After much back and forth, Tina arrived without Nat at the Producer’s lair to record the song. The Producer’s ideas seemed both strange and right to her. With most recordings, errors were corrected with the hologram. The Producer, however, made “live” corrections, whole corrections, at least for a while. When even the slightest thing went wrong, all of the musicians—she had never been in a room with so many: dozens of people with real wooden and metal instruments—would play the whole song from the beginning through to the end.
The sound he was able to garner from the
musicians was such that she wondered why he bothered with grams. Surely, he had the wealth and clout to go live with what could only be described as a towering vortex of sound. It swelled and ebbed like a story even when there was no singing, and when there was singing, the sound became a beast with wings.
She was so fascinated by the process that it took her a while to notice that her voice was slowly deteriorating from the long, relentless days of singing. When she pointed this out to the Producer, the room fell silent. Most of the people in the room had worked with him before and dreaded his reaction.
It began with him banging his fist on the recording interface and ripping the monitor nodes from his scalp. His assistant was used to the small splatters of blood that came with this as the Producer insisted on using the older, more primitive nodes.
“You think he was in prison when he was sent out to rescue you, is that what you think?” the Producer shouted as his pale face flushed with blood. “I can send his black ass to prison, do you hear me? Old Testament style, no fucking holds barred sho’nuff prison. You want him in a game complex, is that what you want? Because that’s where he’s going if you think you’re going to fuck me over. You signed a contract! I’m spending money, you spend your voice!”
No one dared speak or move for a few moments. The Singer flashed back to her Grandmother singing an old song. Then she closed her eyes and swallowed her tears.
***
It was weeks before she saw Nat again. She could barely speak. Her eyes were vacant and rimmed by puffy skin. The Producer had arranged a private transport. The door stood open as passersby stared at them holding one another, rocking slowly.
***
Tina did not listen to vocal music for some time after her sessions with the Producer. As her voice began to heal, she told Nat the story of the recording: about the threats and how, towards the end, she was actually happy that the Producer barely spoke to her, how raw her throat was and that it only worked with sample correction, how the Producer insisted that she supplement the hologram with her live voice even though it was clear that the gram would be mostly sample. She’d been run ragged.
On the rare evenings she had not gone straight to bed after the sessions, she’d tried to program things to watch. No matter what she programmed, there was always a short gram on a prototype prison where the inmates fought modified versions of one another for entertainment—whose entertainment she was unsure. But the point was made.
Nat was almost lost in remorse. While she was gone, he dreamt of her singing beneath the rubble of the storm. But, in the dream, the sound would fade just as he got close. He had to fight with the Warden to get permission to dig, all the while insisting there was someone there. But when the site was clear, there was only an empty transport in a cavernous hole.
***
“I was still glowing, so happy to not be dead in that hellhole without air, that I would have agreed to anything. If there’s a next time.”
***
“The only thing I wanted to hear was your voice pushing through the storm and all the junk that had piled up.”
***
“He was the mirror image of you, to say nothing of my grandmother. She could hear me in her sleep.”
***
“I can’t remember anything I dreamed while you were gone.”
***
The gram of Tina singing “River Deep, Mountain High” from the Producer’s sessions was a mammoth success. The final version even had Nat fixed into it post-production, and he looked quite natural, none of the usual ashen skin of likenesses. Nat and Tina imagined the Producer must have spent a small fortune for it.
Ironically, the gram played venues for high-end private affairs where those who, like Nat, had re-entered society were scanned and questioned before they were allowed in. The fact that the holograms played at these venues gave the real Nat and Tina even more cover to play live.
Still, the experience with the Producer haunted them. Tina wrote about it to try to purge it from her gut. Nat tried not to blame himself for the way the Producer treated Tina. But he had only been out of prison a short time before the Producer made his “offer” and brought back the feeling of being incarcerated, not for Nat himself, but, he feared, for someone he loved. It felt like prison was a virus he had somehow managed to pass on to Tina.
***
Prison was where Nat had learned a lot of things, including the details of slavery in the US. Discovering that had been like discovering the name, cause, and details of a low-grade fever he’d inherited and had all his life. Being of African descent, the subject was one he’d heard mentioned since he was a child. It was made most clear to him when his seventh or eighth grade class actually had the same teacher for six consecutive months in what he now realized was a history class (though he couldn’t recall the official name).
As with most of their teachers, the class was desperate to know what she did for a living outside of the classroom, and how and if they could learn whatever she knew that earned her money. They saw that as the most pragmatic use of their time, though few of them had any idea what the word pragmatic meant.
The woman had been trained as a musician. She claimed to play a type of music where only some of it was planned or written down. The most important parts were made up by the musicians based on how well they listened to one another and on their personalities and life experiences. This seemed funny and crazy to him and his classmates. Music, like writing and movies, was mostly the work of machines. None of them had heard of any of the people the woman said were her role models. Some thought she was making a joke, perhaps even making fun of them even after she snuck her instrument, a “trumpet,” into the classroom. It had three moving parts on it she called valves. She stuck something into the opening (she called it the “bell”) of the thing where the sound came out so that it wouldn’t be so loud.
He could not recall the name of anything she played, but whenever he remembered her playing, whatever room he was in dissolved with the sound. He remembered how he couldn’t wait for the next note but felt that he knew what was coming. The experience and what the woman had told the class about it split his head open. He thought what he heard was something dark that she alone had created, something that could only be created alone. At the same time, he could not imagine that what she played had not been touched and built up by many people before her. It seemed impossible for one person to have created what felt like a huge building, a skyscraper of sound. It seemed equally unlikely that it ever occupied space where they were, a dim low ceiling of a room, in a building where the hallways had even less light and the only movement allowed was from room to room. The sound she made with her eyes closed was its own light.
A mere few days after he’d experienced the music, it troubled him that he had no idea how such people could have existed in the numbers necessary to create the sound his teacher had played for them. Who could these now dead musicians have been? Almost nothing he’d been taught or had screened over the years supported what the woman, teacher, musician had said or done. It left him skeptical of his own experience.
It wasn’t until years later that Nat realized how deep and true the woman’s lessons had been. He still had tattered “magazines” of real paper she’d given him. She’d handed them to him with a sad, pleading smile.
“I hope you can give these a good home,” she’d said one day after school.
She couldn’t tell him it was the last time he’d see her. She’d learned her sleep unit had been probed and it would not be wise for her to return to it.
The magazines had articles about her heroes—Billie Holiday, Pops Armstrong, Bird, Duke, Miles, Sarah, Mingus, Sun Ra, Cecil, on and on. There was one, Max Roach, who had a group of songs that were all linked together by an idea, the enslavement of people of African descent in the US by primarily wealthy white people in Europe and the Americas, and the aftermath of that enslavement. Strangely, the work never mentioned white people as such. Clearly, the overseers an
d slaveowners had been white. But that word didn’t surface. The authors assumed their audience had a modicum of knowledge about who had dragged whom in chains across the ocean in the bottoms of rat-infested, corpse-riddled boats.
Nat noticed that a lot while he was looking up stuff about the Max Roach record. If you didn’t do the research—and why would you?—it seemed that the racism used to excuse slavery was a thing that just happened, like a disease that afflicted you most likely if you had dark skin, and though the phrase “free labor” was prevalent throughout the various texts, the serious economic drivers and outcomes were rarely probed in depth. You could almost conclude it was an affliction with no human cause.
When Nat’s research on the Max Roach record corroborated what the teacher had said about slavery, many things fell into place. He could see or at least imagine a vague outline of the group of people needed to create music that could drive everything else from the mind, music whose foundation was a cathartic shout—“make me wanna holla” one text proclaimed—wrapped in a moan.
Jazz became an obsession, albeit a latent one. It took him a while to realize it wasn’t exactly safe to discuss his findings in public. Fortunately, the police didn’t frequent his neck of the woods, or they had much bigger fish to fry than subversive cultural material. He exhausted video references for the music pretty quickly, and though his curiosity was great, his need to find a way to make a living was greater.
One day, he began toying with the bizarre idea that he could earn money playing music in drug emporiums. It would be a way to directly engage the roots of jazz, the antecedent blues. The police rarely showed up at these places. The patrons were engaged in legal activity and were often dead to the world in any event.
He found the plans for a guitar at some underground site with temporary implants that seemed barely clean and cajoled some gangster printer into making the instrument. Why a guitar? It could play chords as well as the usual single notes and yet, unlike a piano, was cheap, portable, and low maintenance, and, unlike a violin was easier to play and keep tuned. It could play jazz and it could play popular music. He’d seen lots of pop musicians from the old days playing guitar even as the video avails were dwindling. He’d also seen pictures of a player named Charlie Christian, a guitarist. He’d never heard Christian’s playing, but imagined it was different than the wild gyrations and feedback he screened from the pop musicians.
The Official Report on Human Activity Page 12