Dagger Key and Other Stories

  I was fooling around in the studio one evening, ostensibly cleaning up the tape we’d rolled the previous weekend at the Crucible, hoping to get a live rendition of “Stars Seen Through Stone” clean enough for the EP, but I was, instead, going over a tape I’d made, trying to find some ounce of true inspiration in it, finding none, wondering why this wave of creativity—if it, indeed, existed—had blessed Rudy’s house and not mine. It was after seven, Stanky was likely on his way home from the library, and I was thinking about seeing if Andrea wanted to go out, when she leaned in the doorway and asked if she was interrupting. I told her, no, not at all, and she came into the booth and sat next to me at the board, looking out at the drum kit, the instruments, the serpents’ nest of power cords.

  “When we were married, I didn’t get what you saw in this,” she said. “All I saw was the damage, the depravity, the greed. Now I’ve been practicing, I realize there’s more-or-less the same degree of damage and greed and depravity in every enterprise. You can’t see it as clearly as you do in the music business, but it’s there.”

  “Tell me what I see that’s good.”

  “The music, the people.”

  “None of that lasts,” I said. “All I am’s a yo-yo tester. I test a thousand busted yo-yos, and occasionally I run across one that lights up and squeals when it spins.”

  “What I do is too depressing to talk about. It’s rare when anyone I represent has a good outcome, even if they win. Corporations delay and delay.”

  “So it’s disillusionment that’s brought us together again.”

  “No.” She looked at me steadily. “Do you love me?”

  “Yeah, I love you. You know I do. I never stopped. There was a gap…”

  “A big gap!”

  “The gap made it more painful, but that’s all it did.”

  She played with dials on the sound board, frowning as if they were refusing to obey her fingers.

  “You’re messing up my settings,” I said.

  “Oh…sorry.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. It’s just you don’t lie to me anymore. You used to lie all the time, even about trivial things. I’m having trouble adjusting.”

  I started to deny it, but recognized that I couldn’t. “I was angry at you. I can’t remember why, exactly. Lying was probably part of it.”

  “I was angry at you, too.” She put her hands back on the board, but twisted no dials. “But I didn’t lie to you.”

  “You stopped telling me the truth,” I said. “Same difference.”

  The phone rang; in reflex, I picked up and said, “Soul Kiss.”

  It was Stanky. He started babbling, telling me to come downtown quick.

  “Whoa!” I said. “If this is about me giving you a ride…”

  “No, I swear! You gotta see this, man! The stars are back!”

  “The stars.”

  “Like the one we saw at the library. The lights. You better come quick. I’m not sure how long it’ll last.”

  “I’m kind of busy,” I said.

  “Dude, you have got to see this! I’m not kidding!”

  I covered the phone and spoke to Andrea. “Want to ride uptown? Stanky says there’s something we should see.”

  “Maybe afterward we could stop by my place and I could pick up a few things?”

  I got back on the phone. “Where are you?”

  Five minutes later we were cutting across the park toward the statue of Black William, beside which Stanky and several people were standing in an island of yellow light—I had no time to check them out, other than to observe that one was a woman, because Stanky caught my arm and directed me to look at the library and what I saw made me unmindful of any other sight. The building had been rendered insubstantial, a ghost of itself, and I was staring across a dark plain ranged by a dozen fuzzy white lights, some large, some small, moving toward us at a slow rate of speed, and yet perhaps it was not slow—the perspective seemed infinite, as if I were gazing into a depth by comparison to which, all previously glimpsed perspectives were so limited as to be irrelevant. As the lights approached, they appeared to vanish, passing out of frame, as if the viewing angle we had been afforded was too narrow to encompass the scope of the phenomenon. Within seconds, it began to fade, the library to regain its ordinary solidity, and I thought I heard a distant gabbling, the sound of many voices speaking at once, an army of voices (though I may have manufactured this impression from the wind gusting through the boughs); and then, as that ghostly image winked out of existence, a groaning noise that, in my opinion, issued from no fleshly throat, but may have been produced by some cosmic stress, a rip in the continuum sealing itself or something akin.