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No sun, no moon, no stars, no clouds. No crisscross of contrails or swarms of startled city birds. Just a white nothingness above, a vast absence like unused sketch paper up beyond the near colourless brick townhouses looming overhead. It was the most vague and unreadable sky he had ever craned his neck to contemplate. The world made no sense.
Maybe it was morning.
No breeze to tussle his hair or gooseflesh his forearms, no lingering scents of burning breakfasts or coffee being ground, no drifting fumes from idling cars.
Nothing. No deliveries being made, no quickwalking young professionals, no trams or buses being boarded by queues of commuters. No cyclists or joggers or anyone on this street which looked like a distorted and off kilter amalgam of the many middle European cities his tour bus had cut through- Budapest, Zurich, Vienna, Berlin, Prague.
This place made no sense. The proportions were all wrong, all craning expressionist angles and harsh lines. The colour of this world was turned down to near monochrome, and the street signs as he veered down one street and then the next in this maze-masquerading-as-a-city were written in a counterfeit and illegible alphabet, an alien series of glyphs.
His feet walked themselves, soundless, and he glided as though on an airport travelator heading from one terminal to the next, one country to the next, one gig to the next. Maybe he would chance across someone who recognised him, someone who could point him towards the venue, the tour bus, the train station, something, in exchange for a photograph, an autograph and a story to tell their wide-eyed friends.
You’ll never guess who I saw wondering around lost and confused and bedraggled the other day.
But there was no one. No one around to whisper about him from the side of their mouth, no one to do double takes as they caught his eye, or to size him up from a safe remove, or to stare him down or to admire or envy or resent him or to wonder aloud to their girlfriend what all the fuss was about or to remark on how tired and worn out and skinny and pale the lost singer looked.
He glided on, the cobbled path travelator carrying him to a street that didn’t belong. He was led to a New World dilapidated row of taverns and bars, to a weeds-growing-through-paving-slabs shithole of a street unfathomably jettisoned in this Old World storybook city. He glided to a single story flat roofed dive, the kind of place where the last of the hard living go to get blackout drunk on weekday mornings, the kind of place he sometimes sang about and obliquely glamorised. The dive had blacked out windows and a leaning and peeling wooden bench to the left of the wedged open black entrance. The whole outer edifice of the place was painted fire engine red and had Twenty Seven written across the wooden awning above the door. The letters were yellow, in bold relief, three dimensional. And they were in English.
The singer entered.
‘Thought you’da got here sooner.’
The bar was dead quiet, dark and deserted save for the one soul sat in silhouette on the farthest edge of the row of leather and chrome barstools. The silhouette coughed and spoke again in a strained and rasping near-whisper, his back still turned from the light of the doorway.
He said ‘Ain’t nobody to stop me and you associatin’ here. Reckon you’re wanting a drink.’
‘Huh?’ The singer rubbed his eye with a fist as though he’d been woken from a long sleep. He glided to the voice, to the hand that was patting the cracked leather of the vacant barstool to its lefthand side.
‘Sit.’
The singer settled into his stool and glanced at the stranger in his periphery before scanning the room and the back of bar. Head craning and eyes hunting for a barman or a waitress or a friendly face that could give him a phone to use or a scrawled napkin-map pointing him back to the band and the bus. Back to his life.
‘‘Fraid it’s jus’ you and me, youngin.’
The singer spun on his stool a quarter turn. The stranger wore an old man’s hat with a matching band and a brim that cast shifting shadows over his darkened face. In one instance the stranger had the look of a long-faced, lean, strong-jawed late twenties black man and in the next he looked to be in his eighties and darker still and his face wore the lines of decades of poverty and injustice and abuse. He was ancient, ageless, youthful, worn out, wry, jaded and as blank and unreadable as a stonefaced young hustler. All of these contradictions played out in a slow kaleidoscope as the stranger smoked down a cigarette that the singer never saw him light.
‘Help y’self.’ The stranger held out a soft pack of a brand the singer had never once seen in all of his young years of smoking in greenrooms and outside nightclubs and while leaning against the tour bus. He’d bummed every kind of cigarette in existence from every kind of fan and crew member and hanger-on but he’d never seen this old-timey vintage packaging. The box looked close a hundred years old and brand new all at once.
‘Thanks.’
‘Whiskey?’
The singer thought it over for all of a half-second before answering with a hard nod and a too-loud ‘hell yeah’. Ideas of health and responsibility and promises made faded before they had even formed.
The stranger free poured from a heavy bottle with a silver spout where the stopper should go. The bottle and the two rocks glasses were soundlessly, motionlessly conjured up from somewhere and as the whiskey flowed the bottle never became any less full.
‘How’d you do that?’
‘One of the considerations of this ‘stablishment. Comes a time you don’t even pay it no mind no more.’
‘Huh.’ The singer frowned but nodded as if he understood.
‘S’yer name, young man?’
The singer looked at the stranger dead on with a sideways tilt of his head. Maybe he was serious, maybe this weird old guy or young guy or whatever he was with this weird old pinstriped suit really had never heard of him.
‘I’m Robert. Bobby most people call me. I-’
The stranger shook Bobby’s offered hand. ‘I’m a Robert too. Now ain’t that a strange thing?’ Robert smirked as he said this but he didn’t smile and his eyes registered no delight at the coincidence.
‘You know what Robert means, son?’
Bobby shook his head and took a long swig of the drink that had no taste and no fire whatsoever.
‘A woman once told me it means shining with glory. Fame like a flame that burns bright. She said it flames like a comet across the night sky yonder ‘fore it burns itself out. She was one of them fortune tellers out on the road, one that studies their ‘strology right smart. Like Melchior and them kings looking for the manger. I gave her some of my folding money one night and she told me how the whole thing was set to play out for me. And she was right too. But shit, I didn’t listen.’
Robert stopped speaking and took a drink and then considered his glass.
‘You should always smell your whiskey before you imbibe. If it smells like garlic you know someone’s got it in for you. That’s how people do, you scorn ‘em.’
Behind the two drinkers the entrance door slammed shut, a cavernous thud disproportionate to the size of the opening Bobby had earlier drifted through. Bobby spun to the noise, startled and wide eyed. Robert didn’t even look up from his glass and his dark whispering.
‘Ain’t nothin’,’ he said, ‘Ain’t nobody set to come up in her for a long time ‘sides you.’
Bobby came down from fight-or-flight nerviness to a restless and edgy boredom. The whiskey was doing nothing, this weird guy wasn’t making any sense, the day was wasting. This place was all wrong. He rose from his stool said ‘thanks but I’ve gotta be going’ all one word, one breath as he advanced to the closed door. He found it was stuck as though sealed shut, as though he was pulling on a handle that had been cemented into a solid brick wall.
‘Ain’t nothing doin’,’ Robert said from over his shoulder. ‘You’re gonna make a fool of yerself darting round every time you’ve got a mind to do something. Sit.’
Back across the room, back to his stool.
‘Look,’ Bobby said to his shadowy faced drinking buddy ‘I’ve got to get the fuck out of here. People’ll be looking for me. I’ve got a show tonight. They’re waiting on me. People have paid their money. I’m not supposed to be here.’
‘Yeah y’are.’
Bobby took a short breath, frustration raising his voice to a higher, more indignant pitch ‘Look-’
Robert set his glass down hard. Hard enough that it should have shattered. Bobby stopped talking, frozen, his mouth open.
‘Now, you look, you stupid junkie motherfucker. Ain’t you worked out what this is yet?’
Bobby shook his head. Frightened, confused, sorrowful, lost.
Robert calmed, his pinstriped shoulders sinking back to a centred neutrality. He dusted down each sleeve from bicep to wrist with the opposite hand, his fingers impossibly long and calloused and sinewy. Musicians’ hands.
‘I want to apologise,’ Robert said ‘I can get lonesome, you know? Ornery. If we’re gonna be here together it’s important we get off on the right foot.’
‘Okay, fine, fine, whatever, but I’ve got to go now, you understand that? I’ve got to get going.’
Robert sighed. He pointed to the ceiling. ‘Listen.’
Bobby looked up at the too-distant ceiling and listened. There was the faintest murmur of a faraway voice or a conversation, all vague consonants like white noise.
‘Yeah, what is it?’
‘You need to listen closer, son.’
Bobby stood up on his stool and strained to the sound. It grew louder in increments, in jumps like someone was turning up the volume on a television.
A voice, female, youngish, panicked saying ‘ohgodohgodohgodohgod’ like an incantation.
‘You hearin’ it now?’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Bobby said looking down at the crown of Robert’s fedora or trilby or whatever it was. ‘There something happening upstairs?’
Robert laughed, a single one note ha. ‘Yes’n, you could say that. Now sit back down and keep listenin’.’
Bobby did as he was told, his eyes all the time fixed on the ceiling that shrank down lower and lower as he sat. It went from being a cathedral-like distance beyond him to being so close and foreboding that he could almost reach up and touch a fingertip to it from his seated position.
The incantation broke and gave way to sobbing and loud jagged breaths.
Ohgodohgod what do I do, what do I do? He’s blue, he’s blue.
He’s not breathing.
Bobby felt something like small interlinked fingers pushing on his chest over and over. Robert watched him with one giant hand around his rocks glass and the other clasping a new cigarette. He took a deep drag.
BobbyBobbyBobby don’t do this. Please. Please!
Bobby felt as if he was being shaken on that barstool- shaken, slapped, crushed, held onto too tightly by loving and terrified arms.
He knew what this was now, dimly.
He knew what was happening.
Robert exhaled a long grey cloud of smoke. ‘You’re gonna be here a while.’ Another long drag ‘Doesn’t look like you’re set to be going anyplace else anytime soon.’
Bobby looked at the ceiling and felt the rhythm of the invisible hands pushing on his chest becoming slower and weaker. The voice, her voice, receded to a stream of consonants too distant to decipher.
Robert gave a quarter-smile, a look of knowing and of clear-eyed understanding. Of commiseration. He hovered the spout of the whiskey bottle above the singer’s glass.
‘You want another?’