“So.” The words are easier now. “Your limited edition. How many times have you listened to her now?”
For Captain Spooky everything to do with computers was feminine. Our Lady of the Digits.
“Enough for it to be exciting like a lover, not so much that it’s become a wife.”
“Jesus man, you need to get over that. How long ago was it?”
“Eight years five months.”
“We’ve all been through it. It’s a life stage. Well, all except John the Idiot, and he’d welcome the chance for an agonising divorce.” The circles of sweat on the front and back of his T-shirt are expanding to meet the ones under his arms. It is not a good look. Captain Spooky squirts water from the Action! bottle over his face. He says, “I mean, have you thought about doing anything with it?”
“What, you mean, copy it? Distribute it? Release it?” I think I keep the sudden crackle of rage out of my voice, but I feel my muscles clench and tense. “Do you know what I call those? Blasphemy records. Once they have you, those companies will release every half-baked idea or whistle you ever recorded, every coffee-bar twang. If they could make money they’d put out Seu Alejandro singing in the shower. Bastards. The entire reason I tracked down and bought that disk was to keep it out of the hands of those vultures.”
I feel my face is now the red one, and Captain Spooky’s pale at my anger. He holds up his hands in supplication.
“Okay okay okay man. It’s your music. What I meant was, you say it’s full of holes and drops out and incomplete tracks.” He leans forward. It’s not a good smell. “What if you could fill in those holes and finish those part songs?”
I shake my head.
“It’d be guesswork. It’d be someone else either fitting their own ideas in or, which is worse, doing a bad Seu Alejandro impersonation. No no no, keep it the way it is. I’ll always be imagining what it would have been like. That’s okay. That’s the price.”
Captain Spooky purses thumb and forefinger; a scientist of the very small’s gesture of precision.
“What if we could take imagination out of it? What if we could finish the collection exactly as Seu Alejandro intended? With his own music?”
“Short of a medium I can’t see how anyone could do that.”
“I could. Just give me a copy. I don’t want your masters, you hold on to them, just give a decent OMFs. A disk would do, or email them over to me.”
I want to ask him what spooky macumba he intends to work but the ball has gone out and Carlinhos, the other, real captain, is sending Bastard Max off and signing for me to come on. My muscles have gone tight as a virgin; I will play like a drain but with the Tuesday Afternoon Boys everyone gets a turn on pitch. I can suffer for it later.
The room, the chair, the beer, the sunset. My hand on the remote but my finger wavers over the play button. Three weeks and three days after I sent him the files of Pretty Petty Thieves they came back to me. Captain Spooky hadn’t been at the Lagoa since the day we talked about the good music, the pure music. The chest pains and the overheating had got worse so he’d been to see his doctor and the man had gone berserk. Running around kicking a ball at his age at his weight in this heat. Of course, the doctor still knew nothing, but he’d take his advice—purely precautionary—until the pain went away. Sorry it took so long, he said in the email. The quantum mainframe gets booked pretty solid. I could see alone from the attachment details that they were changed. Fatter, fresher. Frightening. I dithered, I hovered over the files. I didn’t want to open them. I didn’t want to hear them. I wanted to rip them on to my system then and there. I wanted to hear them like my daughter’s voice on the phone.
The sky is lilac but won’t hold it much longer: indigo’s coming. There’s a high jet, night-bound up out over the Atlantic: it’s gold in the caught twilight. The streets and the cars are twinkling and I watch the glow of the cable cars slide like pearls between the pendant lights of the stations. Rio has always, irreducibly been she.
I hit play.
There is a ritual so I give it the three listens though from the very opening bar I can hear the difference. The first time is still the whole thing. I listen to Pretty Petty Thieves straight through. It’s some time before I hit the play button for the second listen. I’m floored, I’m on the ceiling, my heart is racing and at the same time I shine like a child at a first communion. It’s all there. Entire and full and rich and more ambitious, more playful, more daring than I could ever have imagined. No holes, this is a smooth highway of sound. And it’s Seu Alejandro, unmistakably Seu Alejandro though everything is new and strange and wonderful like falling in love. It sounds like the greatest thing you ever heard. I must listen again. I must dive in and swim down deep between the tracks and the layers and the individual notes.
The second time I deep-listen. That’s a Senegalese guitar with a deliberately primitive noreste four-part harmony: it’s Mother Africa but with Seu Alejandro’s signature English trip-hop beat. But there’s invention: musique concrete from Rio traffic noises fluttering as delicate as bird song over “Miracle of the Fishes”, and a dazzling, hilarious two-step of dub bass with Nacão Zumbi death-guitar thrashes on “Angela and Angela”. “Kicking” is so totally different I almost did not recognise the song on first pass, now on second listen the changes are so radical I feel them as a physical shock. It had been faux fun, now it’s a shimmering, shadowy dubstep, dark and melancholic. And then there is [a ghost samba]. It is still the same simple cello line and heartbreak acoustic guitar but it has words now, Seu Alejandro’s unearthly but diamond-clear, diamond-sharp falsetto and a twitter of four-a.m. electronics so ethereal it might come through a radio telescope. The breath catches in my chest. I can hear my heart. It’s some time before I touch the play button again.
And now I listen to taste, to eat the music and make it part of me. This time I break my rule, I’m impatient to get to the final track. I want to hear Seu Alejandro’s words from whatever place Captain Spooky summoned him. That’s a Tuesday Afternoon question. Now I need it to be just me and Seu Alejandro high over the circling city lights. It’s a song about a moment of wonder and the sweetness of loss, like many of the best Brasilian songs. Take her face out of the mornings. I’ve seen that face. Imagined glimpses in a car across the highway, a figure passing on the street that might just be a wish. If our lives were like songs we would hear the harmonies, we would live a chorus. On the street. We are older but no wiser and in a flicker we’ll be gone.
Full dark. I’ve forgotten the hour. My chest is heaving, my face wet with tears. I drove away the women who loved me. I let my children go. I’m not a bad man, I just loved the music with all of my heart. I always knew that the radio played just for me. The songs never let you down. They would always rhyme with your heart.
The cleaner finds me the next morning, still in the chair in the yellow morning light.
“Your macumba is strong,” I say to Captain Spooky and slide the caipiroska across the table to him. I’m one down already and it’s hit hard like a bailiff’s knock.
“I wield the power cosmic,” he says. He takes a big draw from the drink. He winces as the vodka goes down, a grimace of pain. “Jesus.” He thumps his fist against his breastbone, gasps twice. “The laws of the multiverse bow down to me.”
He looks like shit, the kind of pale and pasty shit you get if you feed a dog too much dried food.