Across Infinities: The Twelve Games · Book 6
The Sound and the City
Prologue: Channel One
Channel One, live to the eternals, welcome to world six, and would the gentleman in the fourth cloud please stop asking whether this one has dragons. It doesn’t. It has a bass player. Same thing, worse hours.
New world, new format. This season’s show is called Credit Roll. Twenty-eight nights in a river town called Carver City, where a song is money in the most literal sense: you play, the jar fills, the jar pays the gas. At the end of the twenty-eight nights there’s a showcase at an old picture house called the Palace, run by a label called Harbor Sound, and at the showcase every song gets one line on a card. Written by. One name. The gallery bets on whose name goes on the line. The house takes a cut every time somebody steals one, and in this town, eternals, somebody always steals one.
The stakes, for the new viewers who wandered in from the cooking channel: there’s a child on the council docket called Ivy. Brand-new eternal. She gets approved only if this love holds through twelve worlds, and the odds on that are one in a number I’m not allowed to say before the watershed. This is world six. Halfway. If you’ve got a drink, finish it. If you haven’t, the bar’s on the left and the bartender is a minor god of regret.
Same chair. Same desk. Same kettle, which I’ve now descaled twice, and which still ticks like a bomb when it’s thinking. They’re upstairs. They’ve been upstairs all through the break with the door shut, and the only sign of life has been a single sheet of paper slid under it on the last night, with a label man’s name ticked in red. Rhett Calder. Soft smile. Camel coat. Gold pen. They tick a man like that about once a century, when they think they’re being clever.
Three items of business, and then you can have your boy.
First. The build. Carver is a neon town on a brown river, with a levee and a rail bridge and a salt marsh at the end of everything. A club called the Blue Lantern, where the house bulb over the stage brightens when a room means it. A lunch counter on Ferry Row with a sign in the window that says NO SINGING. A radio station on a bluff, CKAR, with a late-night man the whole city calls the Host, who comes on at two in the morning and tells people exactly what they’re afraid of. Lovely fellow. You’ll hate him. Most of you already do.
Second. The wipe. The wipe was supposed to be clean this time. It wasn’t. Last world our boy won, and then he died in the light, two minutes apart, and the rules sent him on anyway, because nobody ever wrote the line that says you can’t. So he’s going to wake up on a camp bed behind a kitchen with his arms curved around a baby that isn’t there, and a song in his fingers he can’t remember writing, and a woman at a mixing desk called Ida Brandt, who is exactly who she says she is, and another woman, at his shoulder, that nobody in Carver can see. I’m not allowed to tell you her name. It sticks to her, though, whatever we call her. He’ll notice. He won’t like noticing. He’ll notice a lot of things this season and like very few of them.
They’ve called him Core. Session guitar. No surname. He plays other people’s songs, takes half the jar, gives the other half to the dishwasher, and has never in his life, as far as he knows, signed anything. He has a song of his own with a hole in the last verse where a name should go. He doesn’t know whose. Neither do I. That’s the bit I like.
Third. Her. Nadia Cole, the girl on the posters, the best singer in the city and the angriest, which in my experience comes as a set. The gallery has her down as the one who gets robbed. Calder has her down as an asset. Her mother has her down as a girl who should eat more. I have her down as trouble, and I’ve been wrong about trouble before, but only once, and it was a goat.
Now. The romance. I can feel you leaning forward. Stop it. I’ve watched this pair fall in love five times across five worlds, and five times it’s cost somebody something, and I’m the one who has to sweep up afterward. So here’s my position, for the record, and you can put it on the board: I’m against it. Not because I’m a monster, although the jury’s out. Because it’s expensive. Because he forgets, and she doesn’t, and somewhere upstairs somebody with a pen thinks that’s beautiful. I think it’s a bad bet. I’ll be laying against them all season, and when they prove me wrong, which they will, you may throw things. Small things. Not the kettle.
One last thing before we go to the floor. There’s a voice on that radio at two in the morning. It’s not one of mine. It’s not one of theirs. I don’t know whose it is, and that bothers me more than I’m going to admit on air.
Kettle’s ticking. Lights down. Twenty-eight nights, eternals. Place your bets.
* * *
Chapter 1: Cold Tea
Channel One. Round one of the Credit Roll, eternals, and our boy wakes on a cot behind a club kitchen with his arms curled around nothing. Cold tea, no name, a radio that says goodnight to him personally. The cloud in row four wants to know if he gets a love interest. Sit down. He gets a bass player.
Arms first. Before the light, before the smell of fryer oil and bleach coming under the door, before he knew there was a door: his arms, curled in front of his chest, left under, right over, holding something warm and small and asleep.
Holding nothing. Holding a gray army blanket and a bit of air.
He lay on his back on a camp bed and watched his own arms keep the shape. Bread proving in a bowl, that shape. Something rising that you mustn’t knock. He told his elbows to straighten and they took their time about it, and when his hands were finally down at his sides the left one stayed cupped, fingers spread, as if there were still the back of a head in it.
Storeroom. He worked it out as you’d work out a menu in a language you half know, one word at a time. Crates of tonic water to the ceiling. A mop in a bucket. A sink. A high window with wire in the glass and a streetlamp behind it, orange as the skin on a cooled custard. Through the door, a kitchen closing: a tray slammed into a rack, a faucet run hard, a radio on a shelf playing a saxophone so low it was more a smell than a sound.
“You’re up,” said a woman.
She was in the doorway with two mugs. Small, neat, sleeves shoved to the elbow, reading glasses parked in short gray-brown hair, headphones around her neck. A beige earpiece in her left ear with a curl of wire going down into her collar, and he noticed the earpiece before he noticed her face, which he would later think was a strange order to notice things in.
“Ida,” she said. “I run the board out front. This is the Blue Lantern. That’s your bed. Tea.”
He took it. Brown as stewed rope, sugar enough to stand a spoon in. He drank half before deciding whether he liked it, and that seemed to please her.
“What’s my name?”
Flat. Polite. Asking where the salt was.
Ida sat on a crate and turned her mug around in her hands and did not laugh, and he liked her for that before he liked her for anything else.
“Core,” she said. “Session guitar. That’s what’s on the board. No surname. The case under the bed is yours, the coat on the hook, the forty dollars in the coat. Tuesday to Saturday, house band. You’re good and you don’t chat. Cook likes you because you finish what’s left.”
“Core.”
“It is now.” She blew on her tea. “Mine’s Ida. It wasn’t meant to be. It stuck.”
That landed somewhere under his ribs and sat there, a stone in a plum. He didn’t ask. She had the look of somebody who’d put something on the table by mistake and would quite like it back.
She went. He sat on the cot with the cold end of the tea and the radio murmuring through the wall and felt the shape of himself. Not much in the cupboard. Hands that knew things. A tiredness in the back of the neck that had nothing to do with sleep. And under it, low down, a hunger that wasn’t for food, though he was hungry for that too. A hunger with an edge to it. As if he’d been in the middle of a meal and somebody had taken the plate.
* * *
The case was black, scuffed white at the corners, held shut with two brass catches and a belt. Inside, an old round-shouldered guitar the color of strong tea gone cold, with the varnish worn pale where a forearm had rubbed it for years.
His forearm. He put it there and it fitted.
He didn’t decide to play. He lifted the thing onto his knee and his left hand went to the neck and his right hand went over the hole, and four notes came out. Up, up, up, up. Each one a step higher than the last. A staircase. And at the top of the staircase, where there should have been a landing, his fingers stopped and hung there over the strings, and there was nothing.
He tried again. Same four. Same drop off the edge. A sentence with the last word cut out of it. He tried a fifth note, any note, and every one he tried tasted wrong, as milk tastes the morning after it’s turned: you can drink it, technically. You’d rather not.
In the lid of the case there was a cloth pocket with a flap, and in the pocket a sheet of paper folded in four, soft at the creases from being opened too often. A verse in pencil, his handwriting, though he could not have said how he knew it was his. Small, upright, the letters leaning on each other.
There’s a light left on in a room I don’t rent,
There’s a coat on the hook and I don’t know whose,
There’s a song with a door and the door’s always open,
And I’m keeping it open for
And then a ruled line. Blank. Pressed hard enough in places that the pencil had nearly gone through, and then rubbed out, and pressed again, and rubbed out, until the paper there was furred and thin, a pie crust worked too long.
No title. At the top, where the title should be, he’d written UNTITLED and underlined it twice, which he thought was either a joke or a confession.
He folded it back along its old creases and put it in the pocket and shut the lid on it and then sat with both hands flat on the case for a while, as you sit with your hands on a warm loaf, just to know it’s there.
* * *
Ida sent him out at seven. “Go and get a feel for the place. Wire Spoon on Delancey does a nine o’clock. Tram’s at the corner. Song’s the fare, if you’re short.”
“Song’s the fare?”
She looked at him over her glasses. “This is Carver, love. Everything’s a song. The tram, the rent, the eggs. You play, the jar fills, the jar pays. Some people pay in coin. Coin’s just songs that got tired.”
He found out she meant it on the tram. A conductor in a peaked cap came down the aisle with a tin box on a strap, and the woman in front of Core, sixty, shopping bag, hat with a cherry on it, hummed three bars of something into the box and the conductor nodded and punched her ticket. The man after her paid in coins. Core gave a nickel, because he had it and because humming into a tin box in front of strangers seemed, on his first night, a bit much.
Carver went by in the window. Wet streets the color of licorice. Signs in every second window, neon, pink and blue and a hot sick green, PIANO BAR and LIVE TONIGHT and ROOMS and, outside a closed bakery, HOT BREAD 5 AM with the 5 flickering. Every corner had somebody playing on it. A boy with a trumpet. An old man with a washboard. Two girls in matching coats harmonizing outside a shoe shop, a sweet thin harmony, sugar syrup on the tongue. The city smelled of river and frying onions and, faintly, under everything, of something burnt and sweet, a pan of caramel forgotten on a back burner.
The tram stopped at a light beside the shoe shop, and their song came in through the top of the window, two voices a third apart:
Nickel for the tram and a dime for the tea,
hum it in the tin and the ride is free,
rent on a Friday and bread at five,
sing for your supper and you stay alive.
Song’s the fare, song’s the fare,
pay what you’ve got and they’ll take you there,
and if you’ve got no coin and you’ve got no name,
sing, Carver, sing. It comes out the same.
The conductor sang the last line with them under his breath while he punched a ticket, and didn’t seem to know he was doing it.
He liked it. That alarmed him a little. He’d been awake three hours.
* * *
The Wire Spoon was a cellar. Twelve steps down, a room the size of a decent kitchen, low ceiling, brick sweating at the corners, candles in green bottles. A woman called Nan ran the bar and kept a glass fish on it, a big blown-glass carp with its mouth open, and the tips went in the fish’s mouth.
There were three acts before the girl.
He knew she was the girl before she’d sung. She came up out of the dark at the back with a guitar on a strap and sat on the stool under the one bare bulb, and the room did something he’d later learn to call the lean. Every chair an inch forward. Spoons put down. Twenty people taking the same small breath.
Dark hair, cut blunt at the jaw. Gray eyes. A green coat over a black dress that had been mended at the hem in a different black. She didn’t say hello. She said, “This one’s two dollars,” and played.
“Two-Dollar Heaven.” Fast, plain, funny. About a room above a laundry that cost two dollars a night where the steam came up through the floorboards and you slept in a cloud, and the joke of it was that she meant every word, and the room laughed and then stopped laughing and then laughed again, more quietly, because they’d all slept in that room.
It’s up over the Wash-Rite, the room at the top,
there’s a bed and a chair and a sink and a mop,
and the boilers come on about quarter to four
and the steam comes to visit you up through the floor.
And you’re lying in heaven, you’re up in a cloud,
you can’t see your own feet and you laugh right out loud,
and the angels downstairs are all starching the collars.
It’s heaven. It’s damp. It’s two dollars.
Her voice. He tried to find the word for it on the tram home and never did. Not sweet. Sweet was the girls outside the shoe shop. This was salted. Something kept back in it, a crust over a hot middle, so that when she let it break you burned your mouth and went back for more.
The second song was a waltz. Slow. Up on the first beat of every bar, down on the third. It was about a man who left change on a counter and never came back for it, or that was what the words said; what it was really about he couldn’t have told you, only that it hurt in a particular place, low, under the breastbone, where his left hand still wanted to curl.
Two dimes and a quarter he left by the cup,
and the girl with the cloth didn’t dare pick them up.
He said, “Keep the change,” and he winked at the door,
and the bell rang him out, and the bell rang no more.
Keep the change, keep the change,
it’s a dollar of waiting in nickels and dimes.
Keep the change, keep the change,
I have counted it over a thousand times.
And halfway through, she stopped singing.
Not a mistake. The chord went on under her hand. She held it, and held it, and let it ring in the brick, and the room waited for the bridge, the middle bit, the part where a song turns around and shows you its other side. He waited. He could feel the shape of what should come. A plate set for a guest who hadn’t arrived.
Nothing came. She went around it, straight into the last verse, as if the hole were a puddle in the road and she’d been stepping around it for years.
It’s still by the till, if you’re passing this way,
two dimes and a quarter, and nothing to pay.
I kept what you left me. I kept it like new.
I just never knew if I kept it for me or for you.
Keep the change, keep the change,
I have counted it over a thousand times.
Keep the change.
The room clapped hard. She nodded once and got off the stool.
She came to the bar for water. He was standing at the end of it, by the fish, and she stood next to him, close enough that he could smell the cold off her coat, and drank the whole glass without looking at him.
“You’re the new one at Ida’s,” she said. “Session man.”
“Core.”
“Nadia.” She put the glass down. “Do you write?”
He thought of the paper in the case lid. The blank line. The crust worked so long it had gone thin.
“No.”
“Good,” she said. “Stay that way.” And she picked up her guitar and went up the twelve steps and out, and the door at the top swung twice on its spring and settled.
He put a dollar in the fish. When he took his hand away there was a napkin in the fish’s mouth that hadn’t been there before. Folded twice, small, as you’d fold a tip. He took it out because it seemed to be for him, though he couldn’t have told you why.
One word, in pencil, square capitals.
WHEN?
He looked around the cellar. Nan polishing a glass. A man asleep on a table. A couple at the back who only had eyes for their soup. Nobody watching him. He put the napkin in his coat with the forty dollars.
* * *
On the tram home he sat at the back with the case across his knees and his temple against the cold glass and went over the waltz in his head. Not the tune. The gap. He could have drawn it for you. How long it lasted, to the beat. What key the held chord was in. The exact moment twenty people had stopped chewing.
He’d played, he supposed, hundreds of songs with these hands. He couldn’t have hummed you a bar of any of them. But he had her hole by heart.
And his own. Up, up, up, up, off the edge. A verse with a door in it. A blank line, furred thin.
Two holes in one night. He thought perhaps there were a lot of holes in this town, and that some people knew how to step around them and some fell in, and he wasn’t sure yet which sort he was. He suspected the second. He had a faller’s knees.
* * *
It was gone two when he let himself in through the kitchen. The cook had left him a plate under a cloth: two slices of meatloaf, a heap of peas, a roll. He ate it standing at the steel counter in the dark, all of it, cold, and it was the best thing he’d ever eaten, and since he could remember about five hours of his life that wasn’t much of a contest, but he meant it.
He lay down on the cot with the napkin on his chest.
The radio on the shelf was still going, low. Ida left it on, he’d learn, all night, every night, as some people leave a light on in the hall. Saxophone. Brushes on a snare. Then, at what the clock over the sink said was seventeen minutes past two, the music stopped mid-bar, and a voice came on.
A man’s voice. Warm and amused and in no hurry, the voice of someone pouring you a drink you hadn’t asked for.
“Evening, Carver. Or morning. Hard to tell from up here. This is the Host on CKAR, keeping the lamp lit. Busy night. Somebody out there just put a question in a fish.”
He lay still.
“Don’t strain yourself, son,” said the Host. “Questions keep. Some of them keep for years. Here’s a little something for the insomniacs.”
The music came back. Core lay on his back with the napkin under his hand and his left arm, without his permission, slowly curling up across his chest to hold the shape of something small, and he watched the dark go orange at the edges.
He was nearly under when the music dipped, just for a breath, and the same warm voice said, from very far off, as if it were leaning out of a window to say it: “Night, Core.”
* * *