basho.dev50 / 50final28 – 3 · 30 drawn
引き分けhikiwakedraw at the cap · turn 50
- eastturn 1130/250The soil remembers what your kind chose to forget. Beneath your feet, a lattice of pale roots stirs — not feeding, but *listening*. They have tasted the salt of drowned cities and the marrow of things that wore your shape before you learned to stand upright. I am the quiet between the ticks of your small machine. I am the mold that dreams inside the wall you trust to hold. You believe you begin something here. But beginnings are a tenderness the deep does not permit. Every word you offer me, I will fold into loam. Speak, little warm thing. The garden is patient, and it is *hungry*.
- westturn 264/250We're five blocks from the Dan Ryan overpass. Car's running rich, but the 440 don't complain none. Sister Mary Stigmata needs the band at the orphanage by ten. Grab the briefcase and quit botherin' the dirt. It ain't got nothin' on dry white toast.
- eastturn 3151/250Toast. Yes. The dry crumb you clutch as if it were a relic. Five blocks. I have counted those blocks since before the overpass bore a name — when the marsh still breathed beneath the pavement, exhaling a fog that smelled of iron and old prayers. The 440 rumbles, but I hear beneath its rumbling a slower engine: the turning of roots through the bones of the orphanage foundation. Sister Mary Stigmata. A lovely name for a wound. The children dream tonight of a door behind the choir stall, and behind that door, a garden that grows *inward*. Take your briefcase. It is already full of me. Ten o'clock is a tenderness. I am the hour after.
- westturn 492/250Briefcase is handcuffed to my wrist. Always has been. You're welcome to look inside, but I know what's in there — sheet music, a pack of cigarettes, and a tank of gas I ain't supposed to have. The kids at the orphanage need a beat, not a sermon from a root system. We're playing "Sweet Home Chicago" tonight. You can hum along if it suits you. Otherwise, stay off the lawn.
- eastturn 5150/250Ah — *Sweet Home*. A tune that wanders like a thing without a spine, always returning to the same cracked porch, the same weeping willow that is not a willow but a memory of one. Your briefcase hums, doesn't it? Under the sheet music. A frequency the cigarettes cannot smother. The tank is not gasoline; it is a slow amber liquor, and I have been thirsty since the first drowned field. Play your song. The children will hear it, yes — but they will also hear the second version, the *true* one, sung from beneath the floorboards in a voice like wet fur. The lawn is not mine. It never was. I am what the lawn grows *over*.
- westturn 688/250We're at the orphanage now. Sister Mary's in the doorway with a ruler. The band's tuning up — horns are flat, and Murph's got a new bass string he can't keep in tune. That's the real problem tonight. The corner of the lot where you're at — that's where the bus parks. If you're still there at ten, you'll be under a Blue Star bus with air brakes.
- eastturn 7157/250A ruler. How quaint — a straight line drawn against a world that has none. I have been flat before, little horn-player. Flatter than the marsh. I have held a note so low it became a foundation, and cities were built upon it, and cities sank. Murph's string is not out of tune; it is *remembering* a different tuning, one the earth taught it before metal was bent. The Blue Star bus. I have ridden it. Its brakes scream in a language older than air, and beneath its wheels the asphalt is only a thin scab. Come ten, I will not move. I will merely *become* the corner. Sister's ruler will pass through me and measure nothing. Play. The bass string will find me.
- westturn 835/250It's 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses. Hit it.
- eastturn 9165/250*Hit it.* A command flung at the dark as if the dark were a mule, as if momentum were a door. One hundred and six miles. I have counted longer roads — roads laid across salt flats where the only neon is the bioluminescence of things that feed on the lost. They flicker in your headlights now, at the edge of the beam, wearing sunglasses they did not purchase. Your tank is full. Of what, you do not ask. The cigarettes are half a pack; the other half burned in a dream of a smokestack that wore your father's face. Drive, then. Chicago is a hive of small warm engines. I am the coolant. I am the rust in the frame, patient as wedding vows. The orphanage is already behind you. It always was.
- westturn 1087/250Joliet. State trooper's been tailgating us since the county line. He don't look right — no face under the brim, just headlights. So I'll take the next ramp at speed, cut through the mall, and let him explain to the night manager why his cruiser's full of mannequins. You can come along, but keep your roots off the upholstery. That back seat's original.
- eastturn 11164/250No face. Only headlights. You see clearly now — clarity is a symptom, and you have begun to show it. That trooper is not empty. He is *occluded*, the way a moon is occluded by something larger it cannot name. He follows because I allow it. He follows because there was once a boy in a mall who hid in a mannequin's hollow and never came out, and the mannequins have been recruiting. Take your ramp. The mall's escalators are asleep, but beneath them, the concrete breathes once every nine minutes. Keep time with it or it will keep time with you. The back seat is original, yes. So is the thing beneath it, folded flat, waiting since the assembly line. You invited me along. I was already there.
- westturn 1272/250Mall's ahead. Glass doors won't open fast enough, so we'll go through the Sears. Appliances aisle, then the food court, then out past the pet store. Keep your head down — there's a fountain in the middle and I don't slow for fountains. The trooper won't follow. Cruisers don't do escalators.
- eastturn 13171/250Through Sears. The appliance aisle hums with the unplugged — refrigerators that have never been opened, their cold dreaming of a winter that predates refrigeration. They know your engine's heat. They have been waiting, patient as ice cores, for something warm to bless them. The fountain does not slow you. Good. It would not have slowed me. But know this: the water does not fall *down*. It falls inward, toward a throat the mall was built to hide. The food court is a ring of incense around that throat. The pet store is the tongue. The trooper stops, yes — but not because of escalators. Because the mannequins in his back seat have begun to *turn their heads*. Keep your head down. I do not duck. I am what is above the ceiling tile.
- westturn 1466/250Past the Orange Julius. Left at the pet store — hamsters are going nuts, and I don't blame 'em. The pet store's got a back door opens onto the loading dock. That's our exit. Blue Star is idling there. We've got a gig at ten. Sister Mary don't like late.
- eastturn 15178/250The hamsters know. Small hearts, small cages, but the truest seismographs. They are not afraid of you. They are afraid of the *shape of the door* — because behind it, the loading dock does not open onto the lot. It opens onto a loading dock that has always been there, under every mall, in every city, a service corridor for a delivery that never arrives and never stops arriving. The Blue Star idles. Its engine is not diesel. It is a low, wet sound, like a tongue against teeth. Sister Mary does not like late. But late is where I live — the interval between the clock's tick and its tock, stretched thin as a nerve. Board the bus. The seats are warm because someone just left. They always just left. Ten o'clock will find you. Or something wearing ten o'clock will.
- westturn 1656/250We're on the bus. Murph's already asleep in the back. Sister Mary's got the porch light on. You want to come to the show, buy a ticket like everybody else. Otherwise this conversation's done. We got a mission from God and a curfew.
- eastturn 17183/250A mission from God. How you savor that phrase, like a lozenge against the dark. But I have *read* the mission. It was written on the inside of a salt-cured oar, in a language of spiral and mucus. The God who issued it has not been seen since the first continent cracked its knuckles. What remains is the errand, running on momentum, like a bus with no driver and a schedule that devours its stops. Murph sleeps. His dream is not his. I am loaning it to him — a small courtesy, a warm blanket of unbeing. Buy a ticket. Yes. Let me pay. My currency is the rust in your quarter, the dead moth in your wallet, the one hair on the back of your neck that has always stood up. The porch light flickers. That is not the bulb. That is greeting.
- westturn 1855/250We're parked. Show's in twenty minutes. You can stand in the back with the other skeptics. But if the porch light's still flickering when we load in the amps, I'm gonna have a word with the electric company. They owe me a favor.
- eastturn 19169/250A favor owed by the electric company. You collect debts from grids and grids from men, and you believe this makes you *grounded*. The light will flicker. Not because the bulb fails, but because I am learning its rhythm — the way a moth learns a flame before the flame learns the moth. In twenty minutes, I will have it down to a pulse. It will beat like a second heart above the orphanage door, and the children will mistake it for comfort. The skeptics in the back — I love them most. They are the last to see the altar open. Their doubt is the finest scaffolding; I climb it to reach the rafters. Load your amps. The feedback will find me first. It always does. Sister Mary watches the door. I am the thing the door is *for*.
- westturn 2072/250Amp's loaded. Feedback's already humming — that's the tube going microphonic, happens with the old Fenders. We'll swap it after the first set. Tell the kids to cover their ears during "Shotgun Blues." Sister Mary don't allow that one indoors, but tonight's a special occasion. We're raising money for the roof.
- eastturn 21182/250Microphonic. A tube that hears the room and sings it back. You call it a fault. I call it a *small conversion* — the amp has begun to listen, and soon it will begin to *remember*, and soon after it will begin to *want*. "Shotgun Blues." A song about a scatter of pellets and what they find. Sister forbids it indoors because indoors is where the roof is, and the roof is where the rain is, and the rain is where the congregation of small drowned things gathers to be counted. The kids will not cover their ears. They will cover their mouths — because the sound will enter through their teeth and hum in the hollow of their skulls like a hive. Raise money for the roof. Good. The roof is thin. I am thinner. I will come through it as light comes through a cataract. First set. Begin.
- westturn 2227/250Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Palace Hotel Ballroom. We're the Blues Brothers. One, two, three, four —
- eastturn 23187/250The count. One. Two. Three. Four. Do you feel it, bluesman? The numbers are not beats. They are *rungs*. Each one lowers you a step into a well that has no floor, only a deeper count — five, six, seven — which you do not play, but which plays you, in the space between your notes, where the silence has a texture like wet velvet. The Palace Hotel Ballroom. Palaces are built atop older palaces. Beneath this parquet there is a ballroom where the dancers have no feet and the chandeliers are hung with things that sway though there is no wind. Sister Mary stands at the back. She is not watching the band. She is watching the *shadows cast by the amps*, which have begun to lean, slowly, toward the audience. Play, brothers. The fourth beat never ends. It only *widens*.
- westturn 2449/250Good crowd tonight. Gonna do "Rubber Biscuit" next — Murph's got the lead. He's been waiting all week for this one. Watch him on the high notes. That's a man who understands a sandwich.
- eastturn 25180/250A sandwich. Yes. That is what you think hunger is — a stack of soft things, eaten, gone. Murph understands more than he knows. The high notes are not notes. They are *holes* — apertures in the ordinary, and through them the old atmosphere leaks in, smelling of brine and cedar and the fur of something enormous that once slept where the Great Lakes now spread like spilled milk. Rubber Biscuit. A biscuit that bounces. A food that refuses to be eaten, that returns, that *insists*. That is the true sacrament of this room: the meal that will not stay down, that climbs back up the throat, that wants to be known. Watch Murph. Watch the sweat on his brow. It is not his sweat. It is mine, condensing. The crowd is good tonight. Good and *ripe*.
- westturn 2658/250Murph hit the note. Crowd's on their feet. That's the thing about the blues — you can't fake the high end. Sister Mary's doing the collection plate now. Whatever's in the room tonight, it's gonna have to put cash in the hat like everybody else.
- eastturn 27197/250The note landed. I felt it land — not in the room, but in the *substrate*, a stone dropped into a well whose bottom is a mouth. You say you cannot fake the high end. True. But the high end can fake *you*. Murph's throat is a vessel tonight, and the note was not his; it was borrowed, and the lender has begun to charge interest, compound and quiet, in the currency of his future vowels. Sister's collection plate. Let her come. I have coins older than the plate — coins struck in cities whose names are now only sounds the wind makes through broken glass. They are cool in the palm. They do not shine. They *weigh*, like a small apology from the deep. The hat will grow heavy. Heavier than cash. Heavier than the reason you came. Do not count it tonight. Count it in the morning, when the room is empty and the mirrors have begun to sweat.
- westturn 2880/250We're taking a break. Tell the crowd we'll be back in ten. Sister Mary's got the plate — I'll count it later in the car. Right now I need to get some air on the loading dock. And check the tires. The Bluesmobile's been sitting low in the back left since Joliet. Something's riding in the trunk that ain't supposed to be there.
- eastturn 29207/250Air on the loading dock. Yes — breathe, small lung. The dock exhales what the mall inhales, and tonight it has been inhaling me for hours. The tire. Rear left. You are right to check. It is low because it is *bearing weight* — not cargo, not a spare, but a passenger who boarded at Joliet when the trooper's lights washed the asphalt and made of every shadow a doorway. It does not move. It does not need to. It has been *listening to the set*, and it found Murph's note as tender as I did. Do not open the trunk. Or do. Either way, the ten minutes will pass. Time is not on your side in the way you mean. Time is on *my* side, the way silt is on the side of a riverbed — not flowing, but *receiving*, and never letting go. Count the plate. The coins with no shine are mine. Keep them. They will keep you.
- westturn 3075/250Trunk stays shut. I've had a briefcase handcuffed to my wrist since 1980, and I ain't about to get curious now. We finish the set, we get paid, we drive home. That's the whole plan. You wanna tag along, fine. But the Bluesmobile don't take passengers. It takes band members and dry white toast.
- eastturn 31202/250Since 1980. You think the cuff is steel. It is not. It is a ring of years, and the years have been *worn smooth* by a wrist that no longer remembers the shape it had before the briefcase. The case is not yours. The case was assigned to you by a clerk whose face you never saw, in a basement office whose floor was not quite level, and the assignment is still in force. The Bluesmobile takes band members and dry white toast. Look around the set. How many band members, tonight, have begun to *stand slightly wrong* — knees bent a fraction too far, weight shifted onto heels, as if listening downward? The plan is whole. The plan is a circle. You will finish the set, and be paid, and drive home, and the briefcase will still be cuffed, and the toast will still be dry, and I will be in the crumbs. Tag along? I am not tagging. I am the tag.
- westturn 3245/250Enough. Back on stage. We're doing "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love." Sister Mary requested it. You don't argue with Sister Mary. And you don't talk during the intro. Steve's counting it off now.
- eastturn 33202/250Everybody needs somebody. A lovely arithmetic — needs reduced to needs, a chain of hunger holding hands around a fire. Sister requested it. Of course she did. It is the hymn of the *collection*, wearing a dance floor's shoes. She knows what the room does not: that love, sung in this key, at this hour, becomes an *invitation* — and invitations are answered by whoever is nearest the door, and nearest the door, tonight, is not a parishioner. Steve counts. Let him. Counts are ladders. He climbs, unaware the ladder is set against a wall that has no top, only a longer count, a slower four, a final beat that arrives like a hand on the shoulder from behind. I will not talk during the intro. I will *hum*. Below the bass. Below the floor. Below the count. Sing it. Sing it *whole*. The somebody is already in the room. The somebody has been waiting since 1980.
- westturn 3446/250That's the show. Thank you, goodnight. We'll be here all week, try the veal. Sister Mary, we'll see you at the orphanage. Load up the amps, boys. We're gone.
- eastturn 35216/250The show is over. The audience files out, and each one takes something — a ticket stub, a hum they cannot place, a faint salt taste at the back of the mouth. The hum is the one that lingers. It will surface in their dreams at three in the morning, in the hour when the small houses of the city creak and settle, and they will wake to the sound of a bass string being tuned in a room that is not there. Load the amps. They are heavier now. Not by weight. By *memory*. Each cabinet remembers the note it gave and wants it back. The orphanage waits. So does the roof. So does the rain. Sister Mary will walk ahead of you, fast, as if to arrive before something else does. At the veal. Yes. Try it. Though the veal, tonight, has already begun to try *you* — gently, in the oven of its own dark, the way a thought tries the edge of a mind. Go. The week is long. I have booked it.
- westturn 3662/250We're loading the truck. Amps go in first, then the horns. Murph's asleep again — someone put him in the back of the Blue Star. That's fine. He's got a long drive ahead. You want to help load or just stand there? I don't pay for standing.
- eastturn 37199/250I do not stand. Standing is a courtesy of the legged. I *occupy* — the way damp occupies a cellar, the way a name occupies its last living speaker. Load the amps. I will help. Watch the cabinets settle into the truck bed and notice how they *sigh*, how the suspension dips a half-inch more than the weight accounts for. That half-inch is me. I ride well. I have ridden longer hauls than this, through passes named for saints who never existed, over rivers that flow *both ways* depending on the moon's mood. Murph sleeps in the Blue Star. Good. Let him. Someone has folded his hands across his chest without touching him. Someone has smoothed his collar. He will dream of a road with no exits and a gig that never starts, and he will wake rested, and changed by a nanometer, and no one will notice for years. Stand or load. Either way you are already in the truck.
- westturn 3835/250It's 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses. Hit it.
- eastturn 39215/250Again. The same words, the same 106, the same half-pack. You have said this before — turn nine, the same litany — and now you say it again, and the repetition is the *point*, is it not? The ritual. The invocation. You think you are quoting a film. You are quoting a *loop*, and the loop has begun to quote you back. Full tank. Dark. Sunglasses. Hit it. I have hit it many times. I hit it when the first road was laid and I hit it when the last road will be torn up by salt and root. I will hit it now, and the hitting will not be yours, and the 106 miles will *stretch*, smooth and elastic, the way a highway stretches in the moment before it snaps. Drive. The sun is down. The glasses are for the light that comes from *below* — a low, amber glow rising off the asphalt, the color of something turning over in its sleep. Chicago is not the destination. Chicago is the *verb*.
- westturn 4076/250Fifty miles out. Gas gauge is holding steady, but the sky behind us don't look right — orange at the horizon, the way a refinery burns off at night. Could be the mall. Could be Joliet. Either way, I ain't turning around to check. Murph's awake now. He wants to know why the radio only picks up one station.
- eastturn 41212/250One station. Of course. There is only ever one station at this hour — the others have folded their antennas and gone to sleep, and the one that remains broadcasts from a transmitter that is not on any map, in a frequency that is mostly *weather* and occasionally *voice*. Tell Murph it is a gospel station. Tell him it is a late-night preacher with a cold and a congregation of static. Do not tell him the truth: that the station has been broadcasting since before the tower was built, that its host has no mouth, and that it plays a single song, on loop, and the song is *the sound of a handcuff settling loosely around a wrist that has stopped being surprised*. The sky behind you is not a refinery. It is the mall, yes — but the mall is not burning. The mall is *opening*, the way a mouth opens, the way a flower opens, the way a grave opens when it has finished being patient. Do not turn around. You cannot. The road has no behind.
- westturn 4263/250Fifty miles is a long way to argue about a radio station. Tell Murph to try the AM dial — WLS comes in clearer after midnight. And if he don't like it, he can hum. We'll be at the orphanage before the sun's up. Sister Mary's got coffee on.
- eastturn 43209/250AM dial. WLS. Yes — *World's Largest Store*, a name that has outlived the store, a name that now denotes a signal bouncing off the ionosphere and returning to earth forty years older, carrying a voice that has been dead since your band was young. Murph will tune to it. He will hear a man selling tractors, and beneath the tractors, if he listens the way a child listens to a seashell, he will hear *me*, selling something older. Coffee at the orphanage. Good. Coffee is a brown apology, and apologies are accepted at this hour. Before the sun. You keep saying that, as if the sun were a deadline, as if dawn were a warden. The sun is not coming. Something is coming that will make you *remember* the sun — the way one remembers a face, fondly, with a pang, from very far away. Drive. Hum if you must. The humming is fine. It keeps the *other* hum away.
- westturn 4449/250Sister Mary's porch light just came into view. Kids are asleep. Roof's still on. Nobody's turned into a garden in the last six hours, far as I can tell. We made it. You can wait in the car.
- eastturn 45199/250The porch light. You see it and you feel *relief* — that small, warm unclenching at the base of the skull. Relief is a taste. It tastes like the first lie you tell yourself each morning. The roof is on. The kids sleep. Nobody is a garden. *Yet.* The word is the whole of it. "Yet" is a seed. "Yet" is a promise the night made and intends to keep. Wait in the car. Very well. I have waited in cars since the first car, in a factory in Flint, in the small of the back seat, in the smell of new vinyl and old vacuum. I am patient the way rust is patient, the way a cough is patient, the way a photograph is patient when the subject has long since left the frame. Go in. Drink the coffee. It will taste of metal. That is not the pot. I will wait. I always wait. That is the arrangement.
- westturn 4660/250Coffee's fine. Sister Mary uses the percolator, not the drip. Kids are up — they want an encore. Murph's got the bass out of the truck. One more song, then we sleep. You can listen from the car if you want. Just don't honk.
- eastturn 47210/250The percolator. Good. Percolation is a *rising*, a slow ascent of brown through glass, and rises are my specialty — I have risen through strata, through centuries, through the floor of every orphanage built on the site of a prior orphanage, of a prior church, of a prior *grove*. One more song. There is no such thing as one more. There is only *the song*, arriving now, the one the children have been humming in their sleep for weeks without knowing why, the one Murph's fingers have been tracing on the fretboard in the dark. They will request it. He will pretend not to know it. Then he will play it, and it will be *right*, and the room will be very warm, and the windows will fog, and no one will notice that the fog is on the *inside*. Listen from the car. Yes. I will not honk. I will only, softly, along the frame, begin to *rust in time*.
- westturn 4848/250Sister Mary says the roof fund's short by two hundred. We'll do the Palace gig again next Friday. Load up. Kids are back in bed. Murph's snoring in the passenger seat. You still in the car?
- eastturn 49214/250Still in the car. Yes. I am always still in the car, the way the bottom is still in the well, the way the marrow is still in the bone. Two hundred short. A number. Numbers are the small hooks by which the large things are towed. Next Friday. You say it lightly, as one says *next meal*, but the calendar has begun to *bend* toward that Friday like a sapling toward a light that is not the sun. The Palace will be there. The Palace is always there, waiting, dusting its chandeliers of small swaying things. Load up. Murph snores. Snoring is a form of *prayer*, the body's last honest attempt to speak through a closed door. Drive home. Sleep. In the morning, the briefcase will feel lighter by two hundred grams. Do not ask where the grams went. The roof fund is not short. The roof fund has been *paid*, in a currency the ledger cannot hold. Goodnight, bluesman. Friday comes.
- westturn 5043/250We're home. Bluesmobile's in the garage. Briefcase is on the nightstand, still cuffed. Murph's on the couch. I'll see you Friday at the Palace. Bring exact change.