He felt for a few seconds that he couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t draw a breath. Something in his brain was so hit with the electric pleasure prod, and so deeply, that his automatic life-functions had gone on the fritz. But then he figured he really should concentrate on drawing in a long lungful of air, to clear his head and keep himself from passing out, because there never ever in his life would be another moment like this.
He went through a quick assessment of what he was looking at: a Vox Continental UK Version 1 with the cool black keys from about 1962; a fire-engine red Vox Jaguar 304, built to start a blaze on a dance floor; a silver-top Rhodes electric piano from 1968; a 1975 Rhodes Mark 1, a battered warrior; an ARP synthesizer…no, two ARPs, one opened up to show its internals and probably being cannibalized; a beautiful Roland Jupiter 8; a Minimoog Voyager and a Moog Sonic 6; a Prophet 600 with some missing keys on the high end; a Rhodes Chroma; an unknown thing labelled ‘Sonick’ in a suitcase with a blue keyboard and a control board with different colored knobs and what looked like a pegboard to chart the ocillators; a gorgeous wood-grained, double-keyboard early Mellotron; a glossy black Panther Duo 2200, the stage instrument of ‘The Partridge Family’ but capable of doing the nasty in any biker bar; an elegant, slightly arrogant gray Doric; two of the weird slabs of Kustom Kombos, the Naugahyde-padded “Zodiac” combined keyboard-and-stage-speakers, one in blue and the other yellow.
He saw sleek Farfisas and Cordovoxes with the ‘AstroSound’ effect. He saw a hundred-and-thirty-two pounds of double-keyboard vintage Yamaha, circa 1972. He saw the Gems: a Caravan, a Sprinter and a Joker 61. And then he came to the instruments he did not know, the ones that held no names or trademarks. The ones that were born from the acid-stretched mind of Eric Gherosimini.
He saw a sleek silver keyboard with wings, like a fighter jet awaiting takeoff. On the wings that curved back on either side of the player were dozens of rocker switches. Next to it stood a hulking black synthesizer five feet tall and about four feet wide. Above the blood-red keyboard were many banks of toggles, multi-colored cables plugged from one connection to another, knobs by the dozens and—ominously—a single broken wine glass sitting on a metal foil tray atop the brutish instrument’s ledge.
He saw an instrument shaped like a hand, with rows of gray circular buttons designed to be pressed or played or whatever by each finger. A one-handed symphony. He saw a thing that looked like a harp crossed with a washboard. He saw a five-note keyboard, three whites and two blacks, with a control console that resembled a peacock’s fan. Next to it was a red-painted upright acoustic piano with garishly-colored keys and desert plants and cacti bursting out of the open top. Was Gherosimini experimenting with organic sound-dampeners? Trying to create a naturalist sound using elements from nature?
“What’s this one?” Terry asked.
Gherosimini craned his neck to see. “Oh, that’s my planter,” he said.
And there…right there…only fifteen feet away, on the other side of the planter, she was standing white and pure on four shining aluminum legs.
Gherosimini crossed to the wall, opened a metal box and pulled a lever. They couldn’t hear the second generator kick into action, but they could feel its vibration in the floor. Green lights came on in a central command box. Lights of many colors, some steady and others pulsing like heartbeats, began to appear on the instruments. And there was a glorious hum of life.
“My brother,” Gherosimini said to Terry, “you can play anything you like. This is your home.”
Terry lowered his head.
Silently he wept tears of joy.
“Mr. Gherosimini?” Ariel was speaking from across the studio, where she’d wandered over to the typewriter to see, curious and writer-to-writer, what he was doing. “You have a new project?” She remembered the letter Terry had read. I’m working on something real, Gherosimini had told him.
“I do.” He walked to her side through the maze. He knew every taped-down cable on the floor, and every plug pushed into every multi-plug floor unit; he could walk through here in pitch dark and not be tripped up. “It’s something I’ve been writing for a while.”
Ariel didn’t want to look at what was typed on the paper, or what she’d glimpsed was typed and struck-out and retyped in the agony of creation on some of the other papers. She didn’t want to be influenced by anyone else’s lyrics, not with their song still unfinished. Mike had given his part, George had given his, Terry and Berke theirs. But not John. Not yet. And though she’d already added a line she felt it was going to fall to her to complete the song, to put it together from the different elements. To find a meaning in it, if a meaning was to be found. So far, in her nightly study of the words, nothing had come to her. Terry had tried to write a few more lines, but he’d ended up scratching them out. It seemed his part was done. Or was it? Berke was having nothing more to do with it, though she’d wished Ariel good luck.
Ariel thought John was afraid of the song. He didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t want to even look at it. He had told her this morning that today, the 10th of August, was the seventeenth-year anniversary of the death of his father in Louisville, Kentucky. He’d said that he missed his father, and that Dean Charles had been a very good musician. Dean Charles had known how to play to a crowd. How to give them their money’s worth. Dean Charles had known his role as a musician, he’d told her. But, John had said, his father had never quite figured out how to be a very good person, at least not to the people who’d cared about him the most.
I am not my father, John had said to Ariel.
I know you’re not, she’d replied.
He’d said that someday he would tell her the whole story, and she’d said she would wait until he was ready to tell it.
But that song… John, who feared nothing, feared that song.
Yet he didn’t say throw it away. He didn’t say crumple the paper and burn it, or tear it into strips and leave it in a motel’s trashcan when they drove away.
No. Ariel understood he was giving it to her to finish.
But she had fear too, and her fear was that she might make a mistake, that she might mess it up in some way, that the meaning and purpose of it might be ruined because of a slip of the human hand, or an imperfection of the human mind. Nothing created by a human was perfect and nothing could be perfect. But what did the girl at the well want this song to say? What did she want it to be?
“It’s called Ground Zero.”
“What?” Ariel asked.
“That’s the title of my new project. My rock opera.” Gherosimini was standing beside her, and a few feet away Nomad stopped in his inspection of all this old junk to listen, and True walked over to hear, and Berke had been scowling at the presence of a drum machine in the effects rack but she too cocked an ear in the old hippie’s direction, and across the studio Terry had been about to touch the cool white beauty of Lady Frankenstein when he heard the words my rock opera. He turned away from her, and walked nearer her creator so he might hear.
“It’s a work-in-progress,” Gherosimini said. “I’ve got some bits and pieces done. You want to hear them?”
“No,” Ariel said, and Terry almost hit the floor. But he understood when she added, “We’re working on something very important. I don’t think we should have anyone else’s lyrics and music in our heads right now. Thank you anyway.”
“Okay.” Gherosimini looked disappointed, but he shrugged. “I understand. You don’t want to muddy up the well.”
“Yes, that’s right,” she answered.
“Ground Zero,” said True. “It’s about Nine-Eleven?”
“Oh yeah, man. It’s about Nine-Eleven, and Nine-Ten, and Nine-Twelve, and Nine-Nine, and every day.”