So was the first number, a movement from the Bach cello suites, though Christopher forgot to announce it as such. Elegant and coldly precise, it seemed to Keith to steal the energy and enthusiasm from the room. It did not matter that Christopher played it well. The audience settled back into show-me mode, and though that was what Christopher had asked for, Keith wondered if he would be able to bring them back up to the higher pitch when he wanted.
If he wanted. Keith studied Christopher’s face carefully, trying to read his emotions. It wasn’t easy. Christopher rarely looked up, rarely made eye contact beyond the front edge of the stage. It occurred to Keith that perhaps Christopher was so uncomfortable with the audience that he preferred them at a distance, that he had to hold them down to hold himself together.
Ah, Chris, what are you doing here? Why did you let yourself in for this?
At the end of the Bach, the applause was solidly polite, but nothing more. Barely acknowledging the audience, Christopher introduced the next number as an Irish reel, and immediately launched into another instrumental. This one was up-tempo, energetic, and, to Keith’s ears, monotonously repetitive.
Even so, the audience was good-naturedly clapping, more or less in rhythm, when Christopher’s fingers seemed to forget their place. Though he recovered from the muff, he couldn’t conceal it, and when the tune was done there was as much talk as applause. All around him, Keith could hear the registers falling in place, click-click-click. Whose idea was this? Say, where do you want to go afterward? What time is it, anyway? I think I’ll go get another beer. Come on, Chris, just look out here and sing to me, goddammit, Keith urged silently. Pick a pair of pretty eyes and sing to them. You can’t pretend we’re not here.
But Christopher did just that, through two more instrumental numbers. It seemed he did not have enough confidence to win their confidence, or enough concentration to survive being conscious of where he was. And so he withdrew from them, into himself, as though he were alone in his room.
Secure in that place, he played well, tight-jawed and sure-fingered. But to get there, he sacrificed all emotional rapport with what had started out as an easy room. You’re a musician, not a performer, Chris my friend, Keith thought sadly. And you should have known.
Halfway through his set, Christopher won back a few jury points with a bizarre story-song full of flashy harmonics, called “All Along the Watchtower.” He immediately lost half the gains with an endless and mostly incomprehensible twentieth-century love song involving, as near as Keith could figure, a man, a woman, and a taxi.
His one “contemporary” number, the gloomy AIDS lament “Walls Between,” was marred by a memory lapse that stretched out painfully until someone called out the next line from the audience. By that point, Papa Wonders was looking at his watch with an expression that did not promise any return invitations for the man struggling on stage.
And then something curious happened to that man, a kind of transformation. It was as though, knowing how poorly he had done, he suddenly felt no pressure. And he raised his head. He looked out into the room, looked around the audience. And he spoke to them the way Christopher would.
“One more and we’re out,” he said. “This is the song I really came here to do. I wrote the chorus almost six years ago, when I was still living on the Coast and hearing a lot from my father-none of it good—about the Diaspora Project. The funny thing was, even though I wrote this song for him, he still hasn’t heard it. It never seemed quite right or quite good enough. Actually, it turns out, the problem was it wasn’t quite finished. It wasn’t until last night that I realized there was a verse missing. I like it better now. My father wouldn’t, which means that maybe you will.”
He began to play, simple chords, brisk and rhythmic, a cross between sea chantey and Irish folk song. The preamble was short, and for the first time that night, when he opened his mouth it was to sing to them, not for them:
Christopher sang the first few verses with an innocence, his voice shining with the bright joy of the song’s narrator, strong with the narrator’s bold confidence as his youthful dreams come true. Christopher sang of a glorious sailing, a true cause, a steady course, and they sang the refrain with him:
As quickly as that, the audience—or at least the sizable portion from AT-Houston—was with him, caught up at last by something that touched them in a familiar place. Though the song was a romance in a fictional world, they saw, or thought they did, past the disguise. Click-click-click. He’s singing about us. He’s talking about me.
Keith watched with clinical detachment, knowing the turn which was to come. And as Christopher’s voice became harder and the verses darker, the narrator battered by disappointments, disillusionment, the faces of those around him began to be etched by resistance, even anger.
They don’t want to hear it, Keith thought. You can’t tell them that it won’t all be wonderful.
When Christopher sang of a ship destroyed between the stars, he struck them with a body blow. When he sang of hopes dashed by worlds too harsh and too alien, of the survivors wearily searching for a place that might be home, the chorus they had so eagerly taken up had turned on them, its words now cynical and mocking.
The solo riffs that followed had an anger that matched the words. Christopher wrung from the instrument and himself a fury of sound, all ringing strings and hammered notes. He forgot the audience once more, but this time they were with him, whether caught by disbelief or pain.
One crashing chord, and there was a moment’s silence. When Christopher began again, the instrument muted, his voice cleansed of the anger, once more soft with innocence, strong with confidence, as he sang the new verse, the son’s verse: