The Musician and the Monster

by Jenya Keefe

  “It is?”

  “Even on TV, it’s not so bad, but still. A little. In person . . . But your voice. If people could just hear you talking—if they could get to know you, without having to see you—”

  “Are you suggesting I do radio interviews?”

  “Easier,” said Ángel. “A podcast. It’s low tech, it’s so damn simple to do. You wouldn’t have to go to New York to get shot at. We could do it here. People could learn who you are.”

  “What would I talk about?”

  “We could talk. Like we already do. We could talk about music, and the lyrics you don’t understand, and, oh my God. We could talk about the project you’re working on. How you’re sending our music back to your people. How you decide which pieces you’re going to send home to the Otherworld. Maybe we could talk about one piece of music per week.” He paced. “Not the Ramones. The entire city of New York will unite against you like a hive of bees if you dis the Ramones.”

  “The Ramones are simplistic to the point of idiocy,” said Oberon, “but I can’t imagine that they would have been troubled by controversy.”

  “Yeah, nope, let’s not go there. But . . . anything else. Really. Marissa’s brother has a podcast about motorcycles, which could not be more boring, and he has hundreds of listeners. But everyone is interested in you.”

  Oberon was silent, but Ángel’s mind continued to whir with possibilities. “I could get some books from the library about how to do it,” he said. “We could listen to some podcasts, decide how we want it to sound. I think the best ones are short, like twenty minutes or a half hour per episode, max, and sort of off-the-cuff and casual. The DOR could make a nice website, do promotions. And get permissions from the artists so we could play the music and then talk about it.”

  “Do you truly believe people would listen to what I have to say about Rachmaninov?” Oberon sounded doubtful.

  “Yes!”

  “You’ve had Rachmaninov for a hundred years.”

  “Maybe you have fresh perspective on Rachmaninov that we never thought of,” said Ángel. “I mean, obviously. How could you not? And how will people know, unless they listen to what you have to say?”

  “I suppose.”

  “But the music, the music wouldn’t really be the point. People would listen because it’s you.”

  Oberon was watching him intently. “You are enthusiastic about this idea.”

  “It could work. What could go wrong? If it doesn’t, we’ll stop doing it.” Ángel smiled at him, bouncing on his toes. “Want to try?”

  Slowly, Oberon said, “You think if people learned who I am, they would be less afraid of me? Not more?”

  “No, of course not more. Absolutely. They’d get to know you. They’d get to know you, not the elf-lord, not the monster from another world, not the scary face. Then they’d learn that you’re just a—a person. Who loves music. Not a threat. And then maybe you could go places and not be stuck here all the time.”

  “That would be welcome.” Oberon’s voice had gone soft. “I’ll talk to the DOR. What we’re doing now isn’t working.”

  Ángel grinned and headed for the door.

  “Will you come back?”

  “I’m just gonna go to the kitchen. I left the tablet there.”

  “Yes. When you’re done, come back?”

  Ángel hesitated. The fae must be really craving company. “Okay,” he said. “Let me go get it.”

  So he fetched the tablet and came back to the office and curled up on the couch. First he went to the library’s website and reserved some books on podcasting. Then he began surfing how-to blogs.

  Oberon started the Rachmaninov again. This time maybe a different performance, with a different orchestra and pianist, though Ángel wasn’t sure.

  When the concerto finished, Oberon broke the silence. “What sorts of books does Lily bring you?”

  “Um, novels,” said Ángel. “Stories.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’m reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.” He sensed the expectation in the air, and went on, “It’s about a family. How generation after generation they keep making the same kinds of mistakes. It’s good, but it’s also super-sad.” He looked up at Oberon. “Do you like to read? You could send books back to the Otherworld too.”

  “I am, but without the annotations. I find reading English rather tiring.”

  “Really?”

  “I can read,” clarified Oberon. “But your alphabet starts to blur after a while. I prefer to listen.”

  “I know a guy who can barely read at all, although he’s very smart. He has dyslexia. His brain has a hard time interpreting written language. He can read music, though, which seems weird. Does our musical notation blur for you too?”

  “Not at all. But I find it quite incomplete. There are qualities of sound it cannot capture.”

  “Is that because we can’t hear as much as you hear?”

  “Only partly.”

  Oberon switched the music to something atonal and chilly. They fell into companionable silence.

  Ángel was unable to focus on podcasting best practices, but it wasn’t because of the Schoenberg. It was because of Oberon, of course, sitting there all scholarly at his desk, black shirt sleeves rolled up to expose pale sinewy forearms, typing on his weird keyboard and smelling, faintly, of toast and black pepper and butterscotch.

  Ángel shouldn’t have told Oberon about Conner Marr. Too many memories, memories he didn’t want to associate with Oberon. The relationship had ended in a confusing series of arguments and accusations and hurt, neither of them seeming to understand each other. But Con was great in bed. So good that Ángel had kept going back for more sex even after they broke up. Even after Con hadn’t liked him anymore. He was sort of ashamed of that, but also aware that if Con were here he’d totally have sex with him.

  If Con were here, he’d pin Ángel down on this couch. Tickle him, pinch his nipples, grab his ass. Con knew Ángel liked it just a little rough, knew to pull Ángel’s hair, to use his teeth, to dig his fingers into Ángel’s flesh a little too hard. Con would perspire when he was excited, which was hot. He would talk dirty and laugh at himself doing it, would kiss him like he wanted to eat him, until Ángel was moaning and desperate to come.

  Ángel wasn’t really thinking about Con.

  He shifted the tablet in his lap, glad that the long tail of his shirt concealed the ridge of his cock, solid against the placket of his jeans.

  What would sex with Oberon be like? How did he do it? His species reproduced itself somehow. Exchanged genetic material. But. Maybe . . . Surely they wouldn’t laugh or tease or savor. Oberon didn’t play, and his sweat was—his skin was—

  Ángel shivered. He didn’t think he’d made a sound, but Oberon immediately glanced at him.

  Was Oberon feeling him? Feeling what he was feeling? Did he understand?

  The idea of Oberon sensing Ángel’s arousal sent a zing down his spine—not fear, but excitement. Horrified, Ángel blurted, “Sorry. I think I need to go for a walk. I’ll see you at dinner,” and escaped.

  “Welcome to the first episode of The Oberon Podcast,” said Ángel. “I’m Ángel, and I’m joined by the cultural envoy from the Otherworld, Oberon.”

  “Hello,” said Oberon.

  The okay from the DOR had come in so quickly, Ángel suspected that someone there was a podcast fan. They’d sent the equipment right away, and now, only a few days after having had the original idea, Ángel and Oberon were speaking into brand-new microphones on Oberon’s desk.

  “Oberon, please tell us your real name,” he said.

  Oberon sang his name. It really was beautiful.

  “Does your whole language sound like that?”

  “Yes, very much like it,” said Oberon. “The words, the syllables, carry meaning, and so does the pitch of each syllable. I understand it is a little different from tonal languages here on Earth, because the absolute pitch, rather
than the relative pitch, is what’s important. But I have not studied any tonal human languages, so I’m not sure.”

  “You have perfect pitch?”

  “I do, of course. In the Otherworld, not to have absolute pitch would be quite a serious disability, like, perhaps, a severe hearing impairment. A person would have great trouble communicating without accurate pitch.”

  Ángel encouraged Oberon to describe his project. They talked about the criteria he used to choose which music he’d send back to the Otherworld, and Oberon admitted that, while he took artistic and cultural significance into account, his final arbiter was simply what he liked.

  Throughout their conversation Ángel kept his eyes focused on the window, away from Oberon, just listening to the smooth, deep voice. It was fluent, easy, warming sometimes with humor. A charming voice.

  This is going to work.

  “So why do this?” asked Ángel. “Why do the people of the Otherworld want to know about our music?”

  “The Otherworld is . . . We love to study. We love to learn new things. When I was a child I began to devote myself to learning music, to learning about other people. And so when the opportunity arose to travel here, naturally I was excited to come.”

  “If that’s true, why are you the only envoy who’s ever come? Wouldn’t others like to come and learn?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Oberon. “The Otherworld would like to send other envoys, to learn more about this planet’s life forms and chemistry and history, but it takes an enormous amount of energy to send someone across the veil. I am not a master spell-caster, so I cannot explain this—there was only enough energy to send one.”

  “How did you get the job?”

  “I was selected from among many candidates. It was a competitive process.”

  “And they chose you—a musician, rather than, like, a scientist—because the Otherworld wants to know about our music that much?”

  “Among other things, yes. Very much.”

  “Why? Why go to all this expense to send you here, so that you could send back music? It seems kind of frivolous.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Maybe,” said Ángel. “I mean, I love music. I make my living playing music. But for most people, it’s just entertainment. There are people who think you’re actually here to find out everything you can about our military defenses, so that the Otherworld can invade us and steal our resources and—I don’t know—eat us. You say you’re really here for the music?”

  “Well, yes. We don’t want to eat you or invade you, and if we did, they wouldn’t have sent someone like me. I am not a soldier. I don’t know anything about military defenses—I would not know how to assess those if I saw them. We want to learn about you.”

  “About our music?” prodded Ángel.

  Oberon paused long enough to make Ángel wonder if he needed to pause the recording. Finally Oberon said, “Think of it this way. We have many species of large and lovely trees, but we don’t have redwood trees. No redwoods live in the Otherworld. Perhaps someday we will find a way to bring redwoods back to the Otherworld, and to plant them there and make them thrive. But until that time, I am the only living fae who has ever seen one in person. The Otherworld has beautiful birds that wade in the water and hunt, but I am the only fae who has ever seen a great blue heron. Which I think is a very beautiful and very strange bird. Strange, because no such thing ever lived in the Otherworld, and never will.”

  Ángel waved a hand, encouraging him to keep going.

  “So in the same way,” said Oberon, “the Otherworld has many varieties of music, but we do not have jazz. John Coltrane’s music could never have existed on the Otherworld. But I sent recordings home, so now the Otherworld, the people of the Otherworld, have John Coltrane’s music. Now we can listen to jazz, and learn from it. We can play it in our own way, and make a new kind of music that we could never have had without John Coltrane. And that is wonderful to us, as wonderful as redwoods and herons.”

  Perfect.

  It wasn’t going to get better than that, so he began to wrap up the interview. “We’d like to thank the Department of Otherworld Relations for making this podcast possible. On future episodes, we’re going to discuss specific pieces of music that Oberon has chosen to send home, and why. If you have suggestions for future episodes, or questions for us, please send an email to OberonPodcast-at-DOR-dot-gov. I’m Ángel.”

  “And I am Oberon, the cultural envoy from the Otherworld.”

  “Thanks for listening,” said Ángel, and killed the recording.

  The first episode of The Oberon Podcast went live on October second, edited and hosted and with professional artwork provided by the DOR. It was just over eighteen minutes long, and it ended with a resonant clip of Oberon singing his fae name. That day it got over nine thousand downloads.

  The next day the download count was up to nine hundred thousand.

  Ángel, bleary-eyed from obsessively refreshing the tablet and watching the numbers climb, said, “I guess we can do episode two.”

  They went ahead and recorded three episodes the next afternoon. In the first, Oberon disassembled a Chopin étude like a carburetor, discussed its constituent parts, and put it back together again. Occasionally he illustrated his point by singing the melody, clear and true. Ángel asked questions and made no effort to disguise that Oberon’s understanding and musicality took his breath away.

  The second podcast they recorded that day centered around the Otherworld’s storytelling musical tradition, and they played and talked about “On My Own” from Les Misérables. Oberon said that he had never actually seen Les Mis live, and confessed that he would like to do that. Ángel admitted his resistance to show tunes, which he found melodramatic and emotionally manipulative. He could concede, when questioned by Oberon, that “On My Own” had good qualities, but he still found little pleasure in it.

  The topic of the third podcast was “Magpie to the Morning,” which gave Ángel the opportunity to pull out his guitar and demonstrate Neko Case’s chord progression. They discussed the lyrics and Oberon’s difficulty understanding figurative language. This conversation led (naturally) to the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok,” and to Ángel laughing breathlessly as he described the plot.

  “See, the guy is from a culture that can only communicate in references to old stories, basically, so he keeps saying ‘Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.’ But because Picard has never heard that story, he has no idea what the guy is talking about.”

  “That is exactly how I often feel,” said Oberon, his voice warm with amusement. “They call me the elf-lord, but they should call me Picard at Tanagra.”

  The DOR put the podcast up every Tuesday, ending each one with Oberon’s song-name. By the end of October they had over seven million downloads per week. The DOR was barely able to cope with the floods of emails it was getting—everything from lavish praise, listener requests, artists’ campaigns to get their songs included in the Otherworld Project, and, of course, hate mail and death threats. It was difficult to tell if the podcast was having its intended effect of making Oberon more popular.

  But the Oberon Podcast definitely did have one unintended effect: it made Ángel a star.

  “Oh my God,” said Ángel, clutching his hair. Chandler Evanston had brought some laptops from the gatehouse, and, along with Lily and Oberon, they were clicking link after link on the internet. “Oh my fucking God.”

  “Who is Ángel From the Oberon Podcast? We Found Out” screamed the headline at The AV Club. Their writer had done her homework, finding his full name and the professional website where he advertised his services as a session musician. Also featured was his long-inactive Facebook page, photos from high school and college, and the gull video.

  “How did they find out?” he asked Chandler. At the DOR’s insistence, for security, Ángel had never mentioned his last name on the podcast, and Ángel wasn’t a terribly unusual name, at least among Latino men.

&nbs
p; “I don’t know,” she said. “We didn’t tell anyone; it makes our jobs twenty times harder.”

  “Maybe someone just recognized your voice,” said Lily.

  Ángel clicked another link. “Quiz: How Well Do You Really Know Ángel Cruz?” was on TigerBeat, along with the cutest of the old college pictures.

  “Father of Elf-Friend Ángel Cruz Convicted of Fraud.” The Huffington Post had Victor’s Ponzi scheme plea bargain. Thankfully, they didn’t seem to know that the plea had resulted in Ángel working for the DOR and living with Oberon, but the fact that Ángel was the son of a crook was now generally known across the globe. Ángel bit his lip, looking at a blurry photograph of his father leaving the Duval County Courthouse.

  How humiliated Victor must feel, having his dirty laundry splashed around like that. It wasn’t Ángel’s fault, but guilt still clotted around his heart.

  Artists he’d collaborated with over the years had been quick to advertise which songs featured Ángel Cruz on guitar, perhaps hoping for a jump in sales. Including Conner Marr.

  “The DOR has been getting a lot of phone calls from the media,” said Chandler. “I mean, they’ve always gotten a lot of press questions, but ever since you came along they’ve tripled.”

  “What do they want?”

  “Confirmation of your identity. Who you are, how you met, what your relationship is.”

  Ángel looked up at Chandler. “Are your people protecting my friends and family from the, um, the paparazzi?” It seemed bizarre to use the word paparazzi in the context to his own life, but here they were. “And my brothers?”

  “As much as we can,” said Chandler. “Some people will eventually talk, of course. It’s good that no one knows where you are.”

  “Ángel Cruz: Oberon’s Companion Is Fiery as a Chilli Pepper.” Ángel grimaced. That was a British gossip site; the chili pepper metaphor purportedly referred to his guitar-playing, but the sexual innuendo was not subtle.

  Another site cut right to the heart of the matter that all the others were dancing around: “Is Ángel Cruz Gay?” They didn’t know, but they managed to whip up an eight hundred-word think piece anyway, based on the available evidence: on the one hand, Ángel didn’t like show tunes, but on the other hand, Ángel laughed like a girl.