NARCOTIC SOUND

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NARCOTIC SOUND

A Novel by Judah Skoff

CHAPTER ONE

She was gripped by narcotic sound which arrived from nowhere, an overture without an orchestra, notes without instruments, no audience. That was, no audience but herself, as she walked along the Riverwalk. The music was dislocated, untethered, sweet like candy in the ear, high-pitched, melodic. It couldn’t be touched but was everywhere present.

The sound evaporated, gone as quickly as it came.

Her mind settled. She was in Providence, wandering the city, her first time back since graduating. She gazed across the narrow canal of the Providence River as it weaved downtown in a loop bordered by cobblestone walkways, looking for the source of the sound. The canal was empty, no musicians, not even a guitar player strumming for change. There was only her, as she walked along the quiet stone path arrayed with fake metal gas lamps and covered archways, the Riverwalk, reminiscent of Venice, superimposed on a slowly gentrifying city. ‍

Her eyes lingered on the iron fire pits spread out within the canal. It made her think of WaterFire, a civic performance of music, flame, smoke and ash that she often attended in college. During WaterFire, the fire pits were filled with burning logs, tended to by gondolas which added wood and stirred the flames. Now the pits were empty. The season was over.

WaterFire would return at the end of summer, just as students returned to campus. She imagined going with Brad, perhaps as a newly engaged woman. They could skip along the cobblestones, fingers interlaced, thighs brushing, sharing an ice cream cone and exchanging hints about a wedding date. Solene leaned against the iron railing to gaze at burnt embers seared into the welding of the fire pits. She sought answers in patterns of ash, as if they could tell her how the summer would end. A tiny drop of water splashed against her knuckle.

The gorgeous, dislocated sound might have been a daydream, a distraction from her obsession with that awful conversation with Brad. The mundane particulars grated. It was the summer between his first and second year of business school. He had an internship in Boston with a private equity firm, he did not want her to come. He was not breaking up with her. He just needed to focus on the opportunity.

An interruption. Some kind of note or song, scrambled, distant, a voice, an echo, a whisper, all combined. She wanted to touch it or at least find it.

again

a beat

a tremor

early summer air punctured

again

the sound

absent, again, absent

Melodic, sweet, enticing, she was overcome with an involuntary desire to evaporate within it.

It stopped.

She looked again, eyes scanning the street, no people around her.

a voice

deep and breathy

something from the mountains

Appalachia, perhaps

She couldn’t find it, couldn’t see it, only pulled to it, pulled in. She scanned the nearby stones, the footbridges, the empty spaces beneath the archways, nothing. Again, it faded.

Restaurants had sprung up on both sides of the canal, covered in neon signs, turned off in daylight. She imagined what the atmospheric neon wash would look like at night as she passed a diner, bars, new gastropubs.

She reached a circular stone enclosure of grey water at the end of the Riverwalk below the sloping stone steps of Waterplace Park which led to a massive plaza in front of a shimmering unfinished glass office tower, its reflecting walls a watchful gaze turned on the city. Construction crews secured the façade. A banner announced a grand opening at the end of the summer. The sound remained absent.

A poster board was covered with advertisements for dog walkers, babysitters, musicians and there was one black piece of rough, heavy cardboard with elegant brown lettering, almost old-fashioned in a stylish cursive. It said, “Upcoming at Reem” and it listed a bunch of bands Solene had never heard of. She remembered Reem. It was an alt-music venue in a no man’s land near the financial district, built into the side of an old building which was probably once a factory. No one was sure. No one mainstream played at Reem. They featured local, roving underground groups who played shoegaze, dream pop, post-funk, folktronica. ‍ ‍

Ione loved that music. Solene heard some Mazzy Star copycat playing in the background when she dropped her bags off that morning. She could tell that Ione was disappointed when she didn’t stay for the afternoon but Solene needed to walk, wanted to see the city again and get reacquainted. After all, they had all summer to spend together, plenty of time for a proper catch-up.

“It will only be a short while,” Solene told her.

But Solene had lost track of time, no grounded sense of when she had left.

 It surprised Solene that Reem was still open. No one knew if they operated legally. It was always in danger of being shut down, always at risk of being demolished by the unstoppable march of new construction. She was filled with the sudden and unexpected anticipation of going to Reem that summer. She would talk to Ione about making sure they went. If she wasn’t going to spend much time with Brad, at least she could distract herself, at least she could hear underground music.

And the air was filled again. Now it was closer. It was near. She heard the string of notes unfolding in harmonious tension she recognized as a voice, a strange, unique voice, a human breath filled with vibrato, tonally arranged air. This voice moved and shook her, this voice from somewhere else.

Down the stone walkway she saw the back of a large man, the shape of a football player, as he belted out words without any self-consciousness or care as to who might see or hear him. She did not recognize the song and couldn’t make out the lyrics but it sounded like a jazzy melancholic take on an Appalachian folk song. She followed the singer as he moved along the Riverwalk, under a covered archway, where she lost sight of him for a moment but the sounds got louder. Finally, she heard words,

the lost pages, pages, pages.…

The sound of that final pages rippled out across and around him. It seemed to reach the unfinished, gleaming glass tower at the end of the Riverwalk. Solene felt paralyzed, disoriented, pulled. She stumbled closer to the singer, trying to reach him without being noticed. She followed along the cobblestones, over a footbridge and beneath a stone overpass. She pressed forward until she was close behind, her eyes transfixed by the folds of his shirt which was partially translucent, probably a light summer fabric, like linen. Several buttons were open revealing hair and fleshiness around his body. His waist strained the fabric as the belt loops of his pants slipped down his body as he walked.

In the evening as the sunlight faded

 She was close enough to make out individual words.

The sunlight faded over oaks and pines

 And the children laughed as they do sometimes

When it’s good, when God grants his helpful favor

 And it’s good….

On that final good he reached his arms out, waving them above his head and then lunged forward as if to grip someone in a bear hug. No one was there.

 Would he have kept singing if he knew she was there? She wondered.

She kept following, feeling that she was doing something illicit, predatory. He had a dark scruffy beard and was balding up his forehead. Maybe in his late thirties, the years had been hard on his body, a very different body from Brad, who had the basketball player’s physique, tall and wiry. She couldn’t say she was attracted to the singer, not in a conventional way. If she saw him in a crowd, she’d hardly notice him. But there, moving along the Riverwalk, looking out at the dark canal among the stones, as he stood, broad, tall, confident, the charisma and gravity of an opera singer performing for a crowd of thousands, she was entranced, spirit gripped. The beautiful notes rattled in her head as he rose with a full breathy, deep high note, as if accompanied by banjos and harps and cellos and electric guitars and a grand piano, a constellation of musical form which did not belong together but somehow did.

My grandmother’s face calls back to me

Back to me

The woods that have cleared show the way

 To the world that is lost

But my soul longs to see

A world that must come back and stay

His voice rose again to reach and stay and he continued

In this world foreverrrrrrr……..

He held the word forever for an endless moment of rapture. For a second, her body let slip its essence which trembled and glimpsed at something secret, something which couldn’t be seen, that wasn’t there but was moving through her. And she gazed at this beautiful singer bellowing out to an audience of no one, no one but her, as she saw it, witnessed it, was moved by it, just her.

And then it trailed off, the song. He turned and glanced over his shoulder and their eyes caught. He realized she had been listening. She was seen, exposed in her cream grey sundress with thick black hair down to her shoulders and she held the gaze. How long? A second? Ten seconds? A minute? An hour? She had no sense of time, only a desire to be surrounded and engulfed in this man, to lose herself inside his broadness and to hear his voice always, enabling her to glimpse into the ecstatic world he had opened for her.

Then she looked away. Embarrassed. Scared. Confused. What had she done? He saw her looking, God, she was a fan girl. Flustered, she turned and walked to the edge of the pathway to kneel and look at the ripples in the canal, as if that had been her plan all along. Through her peripheral vision she could see he was still there. She slowly turned her head and looked back at him. He was still staring. They locked eyes again. He held it, she held it. But then she broke the gaze, flushed, aroused, confused, Brad was her boyfriend, she would marry Brad, of course, probably, she wondered if the singer was married, if he had a girlfriend as she scurried back towards the stairs leading up from the Riverwalk.

© Copyright, Judah Skoff

‍ ‍To continue reading request a full copy from Judahskoff@gmail.com.