On the Night Border

A Song Left Behind in the Aztakea Hills-3

“Why? What do you hear? I want to hear it too. Help me hear it.”

The music sounded like Jack said. All the mouths in the world blowing across an infinite number of empty bottles. In the vibration, and the whisper of discordant notes, and the weight of their sound swaddling my flesh and throbbing against my skull, I knew those mouths came from a place much vaster than the world. They blew not across bottlenecks, but pipes, flutes, horns, and more as alien and disordered as the sitar-like thing the Sultans had played that night.

I bolted for the trail. Fenton grabbed me, crushing my arm.

“Wait a goddamn minute!” he shouted.

He shoved me. I tumbled into the center of the clearing, hitting my head on the ground. Fenton stood over me, a spread-legged, hunkered-down wrestler, hands opening and closing.

“Hold on, dammit! I didn’t mean for you to fall. I’m sorry about that, but tell me what you’re hearing. Describe it. Please! I have to know. You’ve got to tell me. Help me listen. Why can’t I hear it too?”

I tried to stand. Pain exploded in my skull where it’d struck the ground.

Dizzy, I fell.

Amber and white flashes filled my sight.

I closed my eyes tight then opened them onto the night peeling back like skin and visible waves of muscle curling up the way the edges of burning paper do. Jack’s ghost stood nearby, handsome, burly, and grinning drunk. I saw right through him and found the Sultans, who had never left that hill but become part of the clearing, petrified with their instruments frozen in hand, embedded to trees and stone, fused to this forlorn place. Blood dribbled from their ears, cold-syrup slow. Their eyes stared as wide as coffee mugs, funnels of dark motion tugging on me with pinches of gravity and widening as I watched. Through them I gazed at musicians playing complex, asymmetrical instruments carved of unearthly materials, piping blistered melodies and hypnotic notes with an urgency that made my hands shake.

The musicians spun and hopped from foot to foot in ragged, arrhythmic steps. Sinuous dancers, stretching mottled skin of indigo and ebony, scaled limbs raised, pressing mouthpieces to inhuman lips, a dancing circle orbiting an immense, churning, incomprehensible confusion on the edge of wakefulness, one best left to slumber and dream. Its naked pulse bled into the music, the universe, the world and every part of it, a hidden beat beneath all things like Jack had once sought, but nothing like the grace he’d searched for all his life. He heard and saw this that night we walked into the hills. We both did. The dancers ringed around the madness at the center of all existence. The words, the beat, the drugs, the travels — they had opened Jack’s mind to what the Sultans showed him while mine rejected it even in the form of words on paper given me by Jack. Rejected it until grief and loneliness shredded my barriers and opened my ears.

I rose to my feet. Fenton stood rigid beside me.

The Sultans’ paralyzed faces glared. Trapped awarenesses. Not petrified but slowed to its appearance, part of this place now, simultaneously part of all places, joined to the gyrating ring and the eyeless pipers, linked through the music, and the dance, and the revel that sated chaos until some inevitable day came when it grew tired of the melody and awoke.

Jack and I didn’t walk back down that hill that night in ‘64. We stepped through the doors the Sultans opened into the shadow of a throne made of night and stars, the cosmos molded like a mother’s hand cupping the skull of her mad son filled with cyclones of conceptions and notions shredded like words on cut-up paper scattered into a maelstrom. The scraps streamed and flowed to form a brutish man, with skin as lightless as empty space and eyes like carven black obsidian. He approached us, a word stillborn on his lips that cracked like old blacktop, a name Jack and I refused to hear as we turned away from the music, sought the trail, and then —

— the maelstrom ejected us —

— and I awoke in the parking lot behind my apartment, wedged between a dumpster cockeyed against the back alley wall, and Jack returned in an odd crook of the gazebo in the harbor-side park. Nightmare’s end, except here in the hills, where the song we left played on and forever as if we’d never departed and I’d never lost Jack or Gregory, leaving me to return tonight alone. A tiny, drawn-out voice, a whistle among the din of a jet engine cacophony, drew me to the Sultan playing the sitar-thing, which now seemed ancient and derived from musical traditions long dead and forgotten in other worlds. I picked out his voice, like a record slowed down to the barest spin, taking what seemed an eternity for him to whisper: “Help me!”

“I don’t know how,” I said. Then I closed my eyes.

Frigid breath blasted my face. A stony, cold hand gripped my chin.

For the moment between two shuddering breaths, I felt wanted again. A monster desired by other monsters.

A demon fit only to dance in madness, enslaved to hideous music.

What other planet, the sounds of an entire world now swimming through this window, and who knows but that the universe is one vast sea of indifference, the veritable cruelty and apathy, beneath all this show of compassion and yearning? Microbes warring in the innards of Mercury, microbes dreaming, and oh, the void, oh, Hozomeen, great mountain, the void to my eyes, blinded then, before the mountain Mien Mo, and the mountain Coyocan, lush with sacred darknesses, hungers, and temples burnished with gold, opened my sight, my graceless soul craving salvation, non-existence, or the winding-down of experience to having never known the infinite roads upon which nothing ahead, nothing behind, and all the false idols of life and living receding to specks in the easy leaving, unexpected, bleak, and necessary, a dreaming which ultimates outward to the endless vast empty atom of this imaginary universe, never born, ending nowhere, never significant, the hollow beat, the deceitful beat, music that hesitates death rather than inspires life, fickle, mad, desolate, and the true life of all things that dwarfs our tiny souls, so fragile, hobbled, meaningless, and lost…

Jack’s words on those pages I read so long ago rushed back to me.

The cold hand’s wanting died. Its fingers lifted from my face, my monstrous nature unfit even for madness and despair.

Jack’s words ended. My mind refused to remember anymore.

All the doors in the universe slammed shut around me, all but one.

I stepped through and fell into absolute cold, ice, my bones cracking with impact, frigid water embracing me, and gray light stabbing my eyes. Liquid silence, sloshing bubbles and air, yelling voices, knives of winter stabbing me, hands and feet numbed to oblivion, and then finally warm grips raised me and dragged me onto hard-packed earth and rocks, a crowd of foggy masks staring down at me with gasps, prayers, and swearing, a familiar face among them.

Spence. And he said, “Holy s**t, Sal, where the hell have you been?”

Then came a flurry of recovery and reorientation and questions for which I had no answers, and my body and mind aching for anesthetic booze, and then finally obtaining it after the town decided to let me be, my disappearance of more than a month and no sense of what had happened to me written off as another in a long history of occurrences without explanation in this town full of witches. My December deadline for Saul Norris had come and gone, but when life returned fully to my body, I finished painting the Martinson cliffs, with the unwanted shadows and uneasy textures, and Saul grimaced when I showed him, and Spence told me I needed more rest. When Fenton Grive turned up, banging on my door, calling to my window for me to tell him where I’d gone, how I’d simply blinked out of reality that night in the Aztakea hills, I took my painting and Jack’s pages, meaning to burn them all in the kitchen sink. I got no further than piling them up and opening a window to let out the smoke before I sat drinking whiskey by candlelight, smoking with winter air trickling in, and staring at the jumble of canvas and paper, the sharp white corners losing focus as warm alcohol haze kicked in, understanding, maybe, why Jack never strayed far from the bottle after that night, and fearing if the truth of the universe at the height of the hills and the end of his search had killed him, what it might now do to me.