More from Marnie. If you missed part 1, it’s here
What with one thing and drinking and another and masturbating, it was a while before I turned my attention back to Larry and his “music of the spheres”.
For the first few days after meeting him at the studio, I kept checking my e-mail to see if Matt the record guy had forwarded the list of people to me so I could start interviewing them about their impressions. The e-mail never came, though, and other things came up, and eventually it slipped from the back burner to the little shelf over the stove and then finally all the way behind it.
It was a serendipitous coincidence that reminded me of the case, when I was shifting some shit around in my storage unit and dislodged a box from the top of a pile, sending a bunch of my old college papers down on my head. These included a book report on The Demolished Man that I’d written for Professor Sandberg, complete with a tiny sand dollar doodle in the corner by the grade and three bigger ones on the back of the last page.
The sight of them jarred my memory and got me moving. I tore off the top page, dug out all the Sandberg papers from the pile, and hit the bank. The pages, minus the one, went into a safety deposit box. Paranoid? Maybe. Only a few people had any reason to think my old college papers might be valuable, but if there’s anything in life that should strike you as sinister, it’s serendipity.
When everything comes together like the cogs of a well-oiled machine, look out. There’s just no telling how much damage a well-oiled machine can do before it breaks down.
Once I knew the other papers were secure, I gave Larry a ring on my cell . He picked up so fast I thought I’d been dumped straight into voice mail.
“Larry, hi,” I said. “It’s Marnie, I’ve…”
“Marnie,” he said. “You got something?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Hey, listen, did you ever give Matt my address? I never got the list of…”
“I took care of them,” he said. “Did you find any sand dollars?”
“I’ve got one,” I said. “I’m not sure how good it is, but…”
“Just one?” he repeated. He said it like I’d just told him he could have just one kidney or just one lung. He said it like an addict who was told there was just one pill left in the bottle. “Jesus, Marnie… I thought you saved all your college shit.”
“I might have lost some when I moved,” I said. “Trust me, I tore my storage unit apart looking for them, and this is all I came up with.”
“Okay, well, bring it in to the studio,” he said.
“When can…”
“NOW,” he said.
“Are you there now?” I asked.
“I’m always here,” he said. His voice seemed to punctuate every sentence with “(you stupid bitch)”. I needed to get close to him, to get a better idea of what was happening to him before he managed to do it to a bunch of other people, but I had a feeling if I walked in and gave him the useless tiny scribbling, things would go from ugly to horrific in no time flat.
He already had enough of the sand dollars to do an album. A few more wouldn’t make things worse.
“Hey, this is only one page of a paper,” I said. “I just got an idea where the rest of it might be. If you don’t mind giving me fifteen minutes…”
“No, I don’t mind!” he said. “We need these, Marnie!”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll get the rest and come right there.”
It didn’t take fifteen minutes to head back into the bank and get the rest of the book report out of the vault, but when telling an impatient crazy man how long something is going to take, it’s always better to pad things out a little bit.
Safer.
When I got to the Echo Creek studio, Matt was in the booth with a couple of guys, arguing. I assumed they were a band. There were no instruments in sight, but they had that look. Larry was at the computer desk, fiddling with something on a piece of paper. He had the headphones on. There was something like a snowdrift of Pepsi bottles, empty noodle cups, and energy drink cans around the desk.
Nobody had noticed me coming in. I crept over to the sound board mixing thing. Inside, Matt was yelling something that looked like “I don’t know!” He looked angry and frightened and sad. I looked for a slider that said “turn on volume on microphone in other room without being obvious so you can eavesdrop”, but I didn’t see anything like that. I did see a thin layer of dust on the board.
The argument could have been about anything… money, promotion, editing decisions, money… but my guess was that the single-minded pursuit of the sphere-music was causing Matt to neglect the rest of his business.
I cleared my throat and then started walking towards Larry, making as much noise as I could with my footfalls. When I was halfway there, his head whipped around and he glared at me.
I held up the back page to show him the sand dollars.
“Oh, thank God!” he said, tearing the headphones off and lurching from the chair to stumble towards me and take it out of my hands. “You don’t know how much I need these.”
I didn’t, but it was disturbing to contemplate how much he needed.
“Why? Are some of the others not working for the album?”
“I’ve heard them too many times,” he said. “I’ll get these decoded and Matt can start setting up the instruments.”
“So, they get old after a while?” I said.
“No, but I want to hear something new,” he said. “Something more. I want to know more.”
“Know more what?” I asked.
That one was a stumper. He stood there, his face scrunched up like a constipated chipmunk, and then he finally said, “More music. This will do for a start, but we really need to get in touch with the others and find out if they have any more. I’ve been trying to write down everybody I know who was in our astronomy class.”
He handed me the paper he’d been working on and I saw it wasn’t just a list of names, but a seating chart written in Larry’s own brand of chicken scratch. All the spots from the front row on back, up to halfway across the third row from the back, where Larry had put his own name, were filled in. Other names were filled in haphazardly behind that.
“Where’d you get the names from?” I asked. They were mostly first and last. Some of the ones that were past him were only last name or first name.
“My memory,” he said. “We did go to class with these people. Help me fill in the rest.”
I would have bet money that Larry hadn’t known that many people his entire time at college, the antisocial git.
“I don’t know anyone you don’t have here,” I said.
“Well, that’s no good!” he said. “I did most of it… I’ve done most of the work so far. Can’t you help at all?”
“I brought you new sand dollars,” I said, looking at his chart.
“Three of them,” he muttered, but I ignored him. His chart was bugging me out.
I recognized enough of the names to be pretty confident that he’d gotten it right. Where had he pulled the names from? They weren’t likely to have been encoded in the music, which meant they really had come from his memory. It was possible he’d recovered buried memories while under the influence of the music, but for that to work, he’d have to have had the memories to begin with. You couldn’t reconstruct what wasn’t there, and I doubted that many of our classmates had just happened to introduce themselves to him. He’d gotten more names of the people in front of him than behind… had we worn nametags one day?
Nametags on our backs?
I probably would have remembered that.
A lot of people want to believe that the brain would work like a combination of Daredevil and Sherlock Holmes if only you can unlock its hidden potential, but there would be no evolutionary survival value in an organ that functioned like that. It would be like building a massive supercomputer to run a DOS emulator. He had to have seen all these names somewhere, in some context where they would have been matched with the seats, like a list or a roster or…
Or a seating chart.
Duh.
On the first day of class, Professor Sandberg had handed a piece of paper to Ms. Jaclyn Higginson the corner of the front row and had everybody fill in their name and pass it on. Larry had recreated it, in the state it had been in when he’d seen it, and then filled in the few names he remembered from other places.
I picked it up and held it like a menu, so he couldn’t see it.
“Let’s see what I can contribute I said,” I said. “Well, the front row looks right. You’ve got Jackie Higgins, Carol Anders, Bill Hicks…”
“I know I got the first row right,” he said.
Okay. As Mr. Hicks had definitely not been in astronomy class with us, that narrowed things down. Either it had been a one-time boost, or it was only his visual memory that had been stimulated… his visual memory and his ability to reproduce things visually. That was interesting. What had he looked like when he’d drawn the chart? I imagined it was a lot like Professor Sandberg, doodling his sand dollars.
Alternately, though, he might not have been listening.
“Can you make me a copy of this?” I asked. There was no copy machine in the office. There might have been a scanner somewhere under the pile.
“Why?”
“If I take it with me, I can start calling around while I’m trying to think of more names,” I said. “Start pulling my weight.”
“Yeah, okay,” he said, and he pulled out another double sheet of paper. “You take that one. I’ll make another.”
“Thanks,” I said, and I watched him start to work.
Yeah. It was a lot like Professor Sandberg. He wasn’t even watching his hands.
So the “music” did something more to his brain than make him think it was wondrously transcendent. Of course it would. What was the point of making itself appealing? Plants grew big bright fruits with delicious and nutritious flesh so that animals would spread their seeds far and wide.
Why did I have a feeling that metaphor was more apt than I wanted it to be?
Leaving the studio, I decided I would start calling some school chums… but a teacher, not my fellow students.
No, I wasn’t about to call up Professor Sandberg… if a suicide didn’t leave behind a ghost to begin with, that was pretty much the equivalent of a “Do Not Disturb Any Further” sign. But I thought another one of my professors who was still very much among the living might be able to provide me with some insight, in a way.
During my stint in the honors program, I’d taken an interdisciplinary course co-taught by a professor of comparative religion and one from the music department, called Sacred Songs: The Intersection of Faith and Music. It had been about the intersection of faith and music. It was one of the best classes I’d ever taken. Every class, we listened to recordings or watched videos, and then discussed. Everything from gospel music to Buddhist chants, with indigenous dance from every culture that ever danced indigenously in sight of a video camera.
The class had mostly been sociological in focus, but Professor Rowena Booth had been very interested in the science of the mind and how music could affect it. She was religious, but also of the opinion that not only could the sublime and the mundane co-exist together, they couldn’t exist apart from each other. Studies about “belief centers” in the brain and explanations of spiritual experiences as neurological phenomenon didn’t frighten her or threaten her beliefs. She took them as confirmation that the world fit together neatly.
I didn’t agree with everything she believed in, but her digressions on that subject had had a huge effect on the course of my life.
Even on-topic, she’d been pretty damn enthralling. Not quite transcendent or wondrous, but close. She could talk forever about the way music affected the human mind—the human soul—and not get boring. I didn’t think she’d know anything about alien brainwashing melodies encoded in doodles, but she’d always been good at getting me to see a piece in another light or consider another dimension of it. I was hoping that if I could get her talking, she might say something that would trigger some idea or insight for me.
After all, if things were going to go all serendipitous on me anyway, I thought I might as well let it work in my favor. Sometimes magic was just a matter of figuring out where to stand… putting yourself in the path of good fortune and staying out of the way of bad. You could have some incredible runs of luck in that way.
It was a risky game. A sucker’s game, maybe. If you just sit back and leave things alone, probability says the good and the bad will tend to average out. Once you start messing about with things, you’re taking your life out of the hands of probability and managing things for yourself.
If you can do a better job than the law of averages, bully. If not, watch out. An incredible run of bad luck is incredibly bad.
“Hi, Professor,” I said. “I don’t know if you remember me, but my name’s G.M. Masterson.” That’s what I’d called myself in college. “I was in your honors…”
“Oh, G.M., how could I forget?” she said, with a weak laugh. “Sorry, I’m a little burnt out… I’ve had old students calling me all week.”
Oh? Had Larry been in touch? I didn’t know if Larry had taken any of her classes. He certainly hadn’t been in the honors one.
“It’s just so senseless, so sad,” she continued.
Ah. Somebody was dead. Many things were sad, but few things were as senseless to a living breathing human as the sudden and unexpected cessation of life. I had a pretty good idea what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, and you’d better believe it still gave me pause.
“Oh… I hadn’t actually heard,” I said.
“You hadn’t? Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I assumed that’s why… I mean, I only had you in one class, and that was the one with poor Professor Warwick…”
She choked up and trailed off. I felt a tingle run down my spine. Professor Warwick had been the music professor for the honors course.
I had an apprehension. Not quite a premonition. Nothing supernatural about it, and it wasn’t very “pre”, but there was an image in my head of Professor Warwick, bleeding out while scribbling on the walls like Professor Sandberg.
“How…?” I asked. One word questions was all it took in a case like this.
“They say it was a prowler,” she said.
Oh. No music of the spheres. It was a total, un-serendipitous coincidence.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m terribly sorry. I’ll call back another time, okay?”
“Thank you,” the professor said, and I hung up.
“I took care of them,” Larry had said. Not it… not the list. Them. The people on it, the people who’d heard the music. Took care of. Who had been on it?
Matt’s acquaintances. People in the scene.
I was suddenly even more curious about what the subject of the fight in the recording booth had been. “I don’t know!” Don’t know what? What happened to Bob and Fred and Other Bob… whoever else was on the list?
And could that list have possibly included an old teacher of Matt’s? Mightn’t he have chosen to share his great find with a man more knowledgeable, someone who was interested in the transcendental power of song?
I didn’t know where Matt had gone to college, or even if he had gone. I certainly didn’t know if he’d been in any of Warwick’s classes. It was all speculation… speculation and coincidence.
Considering those were the things I’d built my career on, that wasn’t reassuring.
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