Fiction

Apart from the echoes of white noise sifting through the tall wooden doors, there was not a quiver of motion outside the pillars of the great hall; not even the flag swayed from its place halfway up the pole. The day’s drizzle had retracted into a brittle glaze of ice at the corners of the pavement. The air was just as thin and somewhat electric, a burning cold stillness in its breath.

A mile or so away in any given direction, there were people—deep within the insulation of their dwellings, wrapped in sleeping bags, in front of the television, alive—but there, in the blackness of the old downtown, the only sign of light or life radiated from within the auditorium.

Anxiety roiled in each and every stomach inside the hall, though few paid the feeling any mind; acknowledging one’s dreams had long held consequences, and despair threatened to spill from behind the blinds one might draw in search of brightness. Nevertheless, it was the anticipation of the music which had compelled them to brave the streets on that frigid November evening, and which now fueled the hushed excitement that grew as the people shuffled toward their musty velvet seats.

William Clark, a forty-year-old critic, sat crossing and uncrossing his legs near the aisle of the second row. He was becoming impatient. From this close to the stage, he would be able to see and hear everything: each pious strum and every unpredictable lyric, uttered against the grain, a challenge to the forces of oppression, a rebirth of the passion—he stopped himself there. It was going to make for a rich write-up. For the first time in over thirty years, the man known as Peter Frye was to emerge from the abyss of anonymity, to play a single show. No one quite knew what to expect.

This was the city in which the troubadour had found a voice, first by singing the songs of the poets who had come before him, and later by molding them into his own. His raw voice pierced any pretense; his lyrics captured the subtleties of the common citizen’s life while it growled at the privileged; his bright and heavy guitar sound was unforgiving; and always, his harmonica rang with a youthful cry. That was one winter before the first trenches were dug. In a violent blur of time that hardly resembled a year, Frye was immortalized on the screens of the media, swept into the centrifugal whirlwind of the growing counterculture. That autumn, when the momentum reached a head, there was a march on the capitol city, concentrating around the government building, which was dubbed the “White Mountain” amongst the crowd. Millions chanted “Brave the tide, shake the Mountain”—it was half defiance and half reverence, an obvious allusion to Frye’s song, “Are the Tides on Your Side?”

The country had adopted Peter Frye’s voice as its own. His face became the ever-changing face of the people, his song the symbol of a nation. He was called by several names— Troubadour of the Tracks, the Thracian Challenger; he would be the one, above all others, to demolish the mountain, and with it the threat of war. But while his reputation preceded him wherever he went, while his image was omnipresent, the mortal being became reclusive, and before anyone noticed, the world lost track of Peter Frye. Stories spread of how he’d been killed —stabbed and drowned by fanatics or swallowed by the Mountain, as good as dead—they might as well have been true. His disappearance was baffling to most, although ceaseless speculation attempted to demystify it. In the depths of February, the first launches were ordered, to the nation’s horror. Its voice was silenced, the wind swindled from its sails, and the face of its savior all but forgotten. The man was gone, and the people, abandoned, interrogated his ghost.

William Clark had not made a reputation out of writing about ghosts or gods. Sure, to most people Frye was either a runaway or an exile, but tonight he was a man with a responsibility, a destiny which he had returned to fulfill—but he was late, and the audience leaned ever closer to the front of the hall. Clark’s pen found a beat on his notepad sixty times, his heart forty, before at last the curtain jerked, swayed, and parted. The house lights cut out as if they had been swiped by a wave, and a dim glow followed like smoke from the stage. People heard the music’s first gesture before they could see anything. But it was neither a chord nor a note—it was the dull crash of a symbol. It rang twice, and then a third time.

Clark was beside himself. A band? This was Peter Frye, playing with a—a fourth crash interrupted. Then all at once, a clamor of strings rang out; bass, guitar, steel guitar, mandolin, banjo. The progression began, a folksy ¬one, two, three chord strum, then falling back to the tonic, each time lingering there a few beats longer. The writer could now make out six figures on stage, each draped over their instrument. As best he could tell, Peter Frye was in the middle of them, his head toward the floor; with a tilt of his neck, the shadowy musician sang into a black microphone. The voice resonated from a distant place within the man’s twisted, aging body; by the time it stretched over cables, squeezed through the huge speakers, and trickled into William’s ears, the words were nearly unintelligible. Pondering what he could put together of the verse, he realized it was a song he knew—not Frye’s at all, but a plain, authorless traditional! Not a masterpiece charged with inspiration, but “A Wind in the Clouds:”

Would I could, I’d be a wind in the clouds,
Would I could, I’d be a wind in the clouds,
Yes, a wind in the clouds, ain’t no more mountain now…
Fly high away from those mountain towns

Absorbing what he heard, Clark was as dazed as he was angry. Belligerently he scribbled to himself. What meaning could he derive from this? “A flop, a fraud! Spineless performance, inscrutable, washed up—and this trivial song, why? Where is the voice, the command? Where is Peter Frye?”

He pieced together another verse:
Would I could I’d stand on my hands,
Would I could I’d stand on my hands,
I would rest my calloused bones, I could stand on my own,
Join me a steel-pickin’ band…

Not a word had been rewritten, not a syllable reimagined. This was nowhere near the performance Clark had envisioned: it was supposed to lift people’s heads from the slump of hardship. ¬His leadership was supposed to return expression to a faceless nation, one person at a time. Instead he was mocking himself, mocking a need. Nothing would come of this, any way William looked at it. Not a spark. Forever, the verses seemed to drone on, until he realized that nearly twenty minutes had passed.

Oh I ain’t no hammerin’ man
No I ain’t no hammerin’ man
He’ll hammer what he can, there’s nowhere left to stand
He’ll die with just a hammer in his hand

He lifted himself from the seat, and resolutely made his way toward the exit, so dismayed by his inner void that the idea of the frozen air outside could not deter him. He would go on to write a review which would be noticed scarcely more than a fire in the sun.

Clark did not see the face of the man sitting above him as he passed beneath the lip of the balcony. Nor could he have seen it, had he tried: the face belonged to a hardened, older man by the name of John Lunsford, who did not occupy the same room the young man had just left. As far back as he sat, John couldn’t make out any words, and his eyesight didn’t help either; but none of that mattered to him.

John Lunsford had lived in a small town most of his life, where Peter Frye was the name of something which existed in a mythical place, along with the great poets and the people of folklore. When he came to the city for work, along with countless others, Frye’s music was everywhere, as the troubadour had only just vanished. John had no personal acquaintance with the man behind the music, but had felt that they were, somewhere along the line, related. Now, as the memory of those first years in the city began to take on a faded amber hue, his own hands cracked from years of labor, John had finally reached that place of myth, where men breathed the same air as legends. Tonight, the auditorium was the only place he could be.

The band strummed away at the same song, verse after verse, tireless. The singer’s voice was twisted and inscrutable. His face, sunken with age, was not the same as the one which had been stolen for the posters of revolution. His guitar sounded distant, the wood dry. Everything about him seemed to be covered by a thick film, as if he’d walked for thirty years through a desert to come here and sing this song.

Then he raised a harmonica to his lips, drew a long breath, and blew a shining, dissonant chord that illuminated the room. Instantly, all the dust and obscurity fell aside as the hall began to change; the high ceiling and walls swelled and fell away, and the icy sidewalks and skyscrapers beyond evaporated. John felt long grass underneath, even longer than it grew at his childhood home. Still one could hear the harmonica’s wail, rising and falling, but where Frye had stood was no longer a dilapidated old man: to see him was impossible, for one could not capture a clear image. John looked and saw a dark man in ragged coveralls. He had never seen the man before, but all the same he understood that this was the author of “A Wind in the Clouds.” Straining for a better look, he discovered not a man, but a woman, wearing heavy coats and a black veil over her face. Even through her moth-bitten layers, John knew she was the Russian painter and revolutionary Adriana Amatova, who had been imprisoned and executed. Then, his eyes burning with curiosity, he thought he glimpsed someone he knew better than all the rest: he saw himself, dressed in a long, white robe. But while the man onstage seemed to be the mirror image of John Lunsford, the figure was Orpheus, the ancient poet, lyre in hand, his body whole. Just then the harmonica reached the end of its breath and subsided, catapulting John Lunsford back into his seat with the rest of the crowd.

All at once the song ended on the same chord with which it had begun. The symbol hissed, and the room stood firm around once again. Everyone sat in silence for a moment, before surging to their feet with applause. It was for John as it was for everyone else in the room. The Thracian Poet had never fully existed until that moment; he had truly become the wind, and for a short time lifted the people with him, above the oppressive steel city and the world around it—away from fear, away from the White Mountain. An old man stood motionless on stage, in the middle of the band, and what appeared to be a smile passed over what once again resembled a face.

Apart from the echoes of applause sifting through the tall wooden doors, there was not a quiver of motion outside the pillars of the great hall. Suddenly, a lone figure broke the stillness. His strides, steady and swift, resounded on the concrete, heading straight for the great hall. Behind him followed a strong wind, born from the loins of an autumn long past. The figure was William Clark, and he brought with him the knowledge of the momentous events which had come to pass since he had exited the same doors not thirty minutes before. As he passed the flagpole before the steps, he thought of how he would break the news. He imagined how the relief of the war’s end would sweep over the people like a rushing tide. But they already knew.

-After Ovid, Akhmatova, Yevtushenko, Lunsford, Dylan, and those voices which are never heard.