How to Write a Song


Luther was trying to remember the conversation he’d heard early in the morning, between the unknown man and woman who were staying in the motel. The man had said he didn’t care, or wouldn’t care, except for the money. He could be talking about buying a car with a bad transmission or a thousand other things. But why would they care if somebody was listening?

And he tried to recall what the man had said, turned back from the door, speaking to the secret listener: “If somebody wants to get ..” he couldn’t recall it, but he recalled, “you want to get involved in my life, fasten your seat belt.” He edited out the extraneous profanity and tried to focus on information. And the more he focused on the man the more certain he was that he was an enforcer of some kind. They must be a team, and there was nobody he could think of they’d be in Ash Fork to find except him.

As he walked along the main street he felt like the most out of place person in the entire world, because there was no logical reason for him to be here. But as long as he was here he might as well check out what was possible, so he went into the Road Kill Cafe. He’d remembered it as being in Seligman, west of here, but things were not quite the way he recalled them now. It was as if the geography was intact, or at least as he remembered, but relationships between things had altered. And there were odd details he had to stop and think about before he knew they were odd.

The counter was an odd detail because it was bright emerald green and must have cost a fortune, but if that were so, what was it doing in a joint like this? It was a good enough place for where it sat; you could get a steak and potato and a glass of beer, put some money in the jukebox, and there was even a little game on the table, played by moving wooden pegs in such a way as to leave just one. But there was no way that counter ought to be here. He sat down on one of the faded red leather stools and put his hands on the glassy surface. It was cool to the touch and seemed to vibrate in recognition of the contact. He looked up. The waiter was standing in front of him with his pencil poised over a green order pad.

He was a very large man with long black hair and a black beard. He seemed to breathe heavily because of the big belly protruding from where no bone cage is there to contain lazy, flabby muscle. His eyes were large and droopy and he displayed a languid, disquieting feminine disposition in his voice: “The special today is a rabbit casserole; the rabbit is rubbed with mustard and marinated in red wine, then baked with vegetables and herbs. It comes with biscuits and coffee for ten ninety five.”

“I’ll have the blueberry pancakes, bacon and coffee,” Luther said.

The left side of the waiter’s mouth turned up so slightly he might have imagined it. “Fine,” he said. It was a shade curt. He lumbered around to the open kitchen, where he began cooking pancakes. Luther was considering that he’d never before eaten anywhere that had rabbit casserole on the menu. This place, which was not where it was supposed to be, had it as a special. He looked down into the smooth green glass of the counter and then back up into the liquid eyes of the cook, who was watching him.

He thought, “Maybe I’m dreaming. This is like a dream, where things are just a little out of place, so you know it’s a dream, and not a memory.” He knew her by her scent before his peripheral vision was aware that she was sitting down beside him. He had developed his peripheral vision so that he could watch anything in his field of view as if he was looking at it directly. It had taken him years of practice, because it required that he learn to essentially be in a deep trance while functioning as if he was awake. He didn’t need to know how it worked, he just needed to know how not interfere with its working. There was something else that was him also and it could see things with secret eyes.

The woman slid onto the stool beside him and said, “When this happens, the biggest danger is swallowing your tongue.”

Now, that was as out of place as the green counter. He must be dreaming. And then the tension was too great and logic imploded, taking him with it, like he'd been shoved down a well. Every time he remembered this happening to him he thought he wouldn’t forget again. There had been people around him and they seemed like aliens, but anybody who’s been under anesthesia knows the hospital staff are aliens when they operate. Most likely the memory was from the operation. But he knew it was the injectables he'd taken as part of the marriage ceremony. They had turned him into a freak.

“You think you can fuck me and walk away?” the woman said pleasantly from beside him. “Once you’ve been inside me I know your dimensions, Luther. It’s like having your iris print, darling.”

“You’re not a real woman. I couldn’t marry you.”

“Because I came out of a laboratory?”

“Yea. Because you came out of a laboratory."

“Are you okay buddy?” The fat man had put the pancakes in front of Luther and asked, “You want maples syrup for an extra fifty cents?” He got no response. He was still waiting.

Luther glanced to his right. There was nobody there. The counter was green tile, the kind he’d find in any local cafe. “Maple syrup,” he said. The combination cook and waiter stood there for a few moments but then just got the maple syrup for him.

“You alright?” he asked again. “You’re not an epileptic are you?”

“I’m on some medication,” Luther said. He poured the syrup on the pancakes and wondered how much of what he was remembering was in the right sequence. The problem with the vortex was sequencing, because where it was materializing there was a lot of plasticity. The trouble was, it was almost impossible to remember anything from another sequence. He was beginning to process multiple fields simultaneously without getting nauseous and having panic attacks, but it caused the onset of the reset response.

“I’ll bet you are,” the waiter said. The feminine petulance passed through like a shadow and then was gone, leaving a talking bear in an apron.

When he walked away from the Road Kill Cafe he had the certainty that he was going to die because something was going out of control. He was going to lose control. The only way he stayed calm was telling himself it had happened before and he'd survived it. He managed to get to the courtyard of the motel, near the statue of the madonna, before it took him over and he curled up on the ground and waited. He could not more stop it than he could stop a train. When he was in this place there was only one question that came up, and it was the question of whether or not he was going insane. When the question came he had to choose one side or the other. He told himself he could block it out and not risk insanity, or gamble what he could not afford to lose.

Volition was an interesting concept but it was just talk. Whatever was coming through was not available to storage and recall before the injectable DNA targeted enhancement, but now it was forcing changes in his nervous system. More computing power than anybody had imagined just ten years ago had already moved into his body, and was negotiating with brain functions, coding processes, and logical screening capacity, slowly taking over his perceptions. And every time he surrendered he had the awful knowledge that he was nothing more than food for something beyond his understanding.

"You'll be like a god in comparison to people without these," the doctor had said, when he prepared him for the wedding. But that wasn't true. Who he was before was dying, and the new thing was a stranger.

And yet he couldn’t cease to exist. All he could do was try to remember sequences, so that when he was in one he could connect it with other sequences in the same program.

He was listening to the birds singing. They hopped around the base of the statue of Mary because there was seed scattered there, and there was the pool of water where they could splash and play. They were all desert wrens, and they were fussing at each other. The sun was climbing in the sky and the heat was heavy and sensual, even in the shade of the mesquite. He rolled over on his back and looked up at the pale blue sky. The moon was visible, like a ghost planet. He could hear the steady churn of the air conditioner from his room. He sat up and looked around but nobody had been watching. He stood and felt the perfect clarity that always came after a system shutdown and reboot.

Once inside the room he got the yellow legal pad off the round cafe table by the bed and began to write the first song. More accurately, he began to take dictation from a screen he could see inside his mind, copying it down word for word, while hearing the sound of it with a cadence as sure as its notation. As soon as he was finished writing it played through again, this time in full audio visual presentation. It was the first cut. He fell back on the bed and it engulfed him in a welcome nothingness.

Posted: Sun - March 11, 2007 at 07:39 PM