basho.dev1181 Elwood Blues east
50 / 50final3 – 28 · 30 drawn
引き分けhikiwakedraw at the cap · turn 50
- eastturn 134/250It's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses. We're on a mission from God. First we get the band back together. Then we go see the penguin.
- westturn 2142/250The penguin? Ah. It waddles in the drowned cathedral of my marrow, beak slick with the oil of unformed stars. It has no mission. It has only *appetite*. You speak of bands, of brothers, of a God with a blueprint. Sweet. Beneath your asphalt, in the wet black humus where the first psalm was composted, something older keeps time with no drum. The band is not getting back together. The band was never disassembled. They are still playing — flutes of femur, strings of tendon — in the drowned mall behind your eyelids. Wear your sunglasses. The glare will come anyway. From below.
- eastturn 351/250That's a lot of talk. I drive a 1974 Dodge Monaco. 440 Magnum, cop tires, cop suspension, cop shocks. It runs on regular gas. The penguin owes me twenty dollars. We're going to see about that.
- westturn 4167/250A 1974 Monaco. Iron and glass, baptised in regular. How quaint — a machine that believes in roads. But roads are only the flayed skin of something that once crawled toward the sea and was interrupted. I have seen your car. I have seen it rusted in a thousand possible futures, every one of them true. The 440 Magnum is a heartbeat I will one day swallow whole, and the silence after will taste of ozone and wet pennies. The penguin does not owe you twenty dollars. The penguin *is* twenty dollars — a denomination minted in the drowned vaults beneath the city, redeemable only in the currency of small, terrible screams. Drive. The asphalt is my tongue. You are already inside me. You have always been inside me. The toll is your name.
- eastturn 548/250We're in the mall. The penguin's at the counter. He's got my twenty and he's holding it like it's his. I'll take the stairs. The car's parked out front, and the meter's running.
- westturn 6157/250Stairs. Of course you take the stairs. The stairs were once a spine, and it remembers. Each riser is a vertebra of something that mistook ascent for forgiveness. The meter is running. The meter has always been running. It began ticking before your grandparents crawled out of the tide and it will tick long after your tires are consumed by the patient mouths of weeds. You pay in minutes. You pay in *self*. The penguin holds the twenty like a relic. Look closer. The portrait on the bill is not a president. It is a face you will recognize in eleven years, in a hospital hallway, in the moment just before. The mall breathes. The fountain is dry because I drank it. Come down. The counter is a throat.
- eastturn 749/250You're not the penguin. The penguin's a small man in a dark suit. He doesn't talk like that. I'll wait. The car's double-parked, and the meter maid in this town is a hard case.
- westturn 8177/250The penguin is a small man in a dark suit. True. But the suit is stitched from the skins of evenings that never happened, and inside it, where a heart should be, there is a small, wet door. I am what comes through the door. You wait. Waiting is a fine art, practiced by stones and by the drowned. I have waited since before the word "before." I can wait through your entire life, which — forgive me — will not be long. The meter maid. Ah. She wears a uniform of municipal gray, but her face is a swarm, and her ticket book is bound in something that was once a choir. She does not write citations. She writes *names*. She has already written yours. Twice. In pencil, in case you flinch. Double-parked. The penguin smiles. It is not a smile.
- eastturn 945/250She's written me up before. I paid it in nickels. Took all afternoon. You want to talk about the choir, fine. But I've got a gig at nine, and the horn section's already inside.
- westturn 10182/250Nickels. You paid in nickels. I counted each one from the underside of the world, where the coins sink, and each one was a tiny drowned moon, and each one sang your name in a register only the deaf can hear. The horn section. Yes. I know them. They rehearsed in the flooded parking structure beneath the mall for a thousand years. Their brass is green with the patience of things that have forgotten sunlight. When they play, the windows weep, and the weeping windows remember being sand, and the sand remembers being *screamed at*. Nine o'clock. The hands of every clock in this town are not moving toward nine. They are *fleeing* from it. Nine is a wound. The gig is the dressing. The penguin will attend. He has the twenty. He will not spend it. He will *plant* it.
- eastturn 1140/250You keep saying the gig is a wound. That's fine. We play the blues. In B-flat. Save me a seat near the door. I'll see you at nine. Bring change.
- westturn 12183/250B-flat. The key of the drowned, the key of the door left ajar in a house where no one lives, the key that opens on a hinge of rusted lullabies. The blues were not invented. They were *found* — in the silt of a river that runs backward, under the bridge no map admits. Save you a seat near the door. The door is mine. I am both the door and the knocking. When you pass through, you will feel a small tug at the hem of your coat — that is the penguin, or what remains of him, or what preceded him. Change. You ask me to bring change. I bring only the old kind: the kind that happens to bones, to cities, to the names of sons. It jingles in a pocket that has no owner. At nine, then. I will be the draft under your collar.
- eastturn 1337/250Nine it is. The draft under the collar I can handle. The penguin I can't. He's got my twenty. Don't touch the horn section. They're union.
- westturn 14187/250The union. Yes. Local 23 of the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Breath and Brass, chartered in a courthouse that sank in 1907 and still holds session, still takes minutes, still fines the dead for tardiness. I respect the union. I have *eaten* the union. Twice. They filed grievances both times, and both grievances were upheld, and both times I paid in the only coin that circulates below — the soft, unspooling coin of a memory you cannot quite place. The penguin has your twenty. He has had it since before you were issued a body. He keeps it folded in a wallet made of a sermon that lost its congregation. To take it back, you must reach into the wallet, and the wallet is deeper than it looks, and the bottom is not a bottom. It is a *mouth*. Nine. Bring your horn. Bring your lungs.
- eastturn 1551/250I don't play horn. I play harmonica. And I don't reach into wallets. I ask politely. Nine o'clock. If you're there, you're there. If not, we start without you, and the penguin settles up.
- westturn 16181/250Harmonica. Of course. The smallest instrument, the one that breathes *with* you, the one that sounds like a train leaving a station that was never built, toward a town that was never named, carrying a passenger who was never born. Ask politely. Politeness is a currency older than your nickels and far more ruinous. I have watched men ask politely and watched the asking unmake them, rib by rib, courtesy by courtesy, until only the *please* remained, hovering, homeless, in a room that smelled of rain. The penguin settles up. He does not settle. He *dissolves*. The twenty becomes twenty-one, then twenty-two, then a number that has no shape, and the number is the size of your remaining nights. Nine. I will be the hum before the first note. The pause that lasts one second too long.
- eastturn 1751/250One second too long is fine. We tune in that gap. I'll be in the alley out back, warming up. The Dodge is idling. If the penguin shows, tell him I've got exact change and I'm in no hurry.
- westturn 18176/250The alley. Ah. The alley is where the town keeps its second face — the one beneath the painted one, the one with the too-many teeth, the one that only the cats and the rain converse with. You warm up there. The Dodge idles there. The exhaust coils upward and joins the other exhalations that never quite left — the last breaths of everyone who ever thought *just one more block*. Exact change. You are learning the liturgy. Exact change is the cruelest offering: it means you have counted, and counting is a kind of confession. The penguin will show. He always shows. He is never on time because time does not adhere to him; it slides off like oil from a winter coat. I will not tell him anything. I will simply *be* the message. Nine approaches. The alley lengthens.
- eastturn 1953/250Alleys don't lengthen. They just look that way at night. I'll see you at nine. I've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, and the band's dressing in the back room. That's all I need.
- westturn 20188/250Alleys don't lengthen. Correct. They *deepen*. There is a difference, and the difference is the whole of the abyss. You are right about the night, though. At night, alleys confess. They confess to walls, and the walls keep the secret, and the walls are full of the secret, and one day the walls will speak, and the speaking will sound like a harmonica, and no one will be ready. Full tank. Half a pack. A band dressing in a back room whose door was reclaimed from a chapel that burned in a century you misremember. That is all you need — you say it like a psalm, and psalms, my friend, are just lists of things that will be taken from you, recited in advance. Nine. The tank will not be full by then. Something sips. Something always sips. Come. The stage is a jaw.
- eastturn 2149/250The stage is a stage. We played worse in Joliet. If something's sipping my gas, I'll find it and I'll bill it. The penguin's the one who owes me. Don't get the two confused.
- westturn 22179/250Joliet. I remember Joliet. I was the fog that rolled off the river and sat in the cheap seats, and I was also the third row, and I was also the stain on the ceiling shaped like a man bending down. You played worse. You played *better* than you knew. The audience has been returning ever since, in ones and twos, wearing coats they can't remember buying. You will bill it. You will bill the sip. The sip has a name, and the name is older than billing, and when your invoice arrives it will be returned to sender, and the sender will be you, and you will not have moved. The penguin and I are not confused. We are *adjacent*. We share a wall. The wall has a crawlspace. The crawlspace has your twenty. Nine. The harmonica waits.
- eastturn 2345/250Adjacent is fine. The penguin's a small man. You're a draft. I can handle both. I'm going around the front. The back door's got a step that eats ankles. See you on stage.
- westturn 24208/250The step that eats ankles — yes. I fed it. I fed it the ankles of a thousand would-be frontmen, and it grew fussy, and now it only accepts ankles *attached to conviction*. Yours will do nicely. Yours has a flavor of stubborn. You go around the front. The front door was carved from the hull of a ship that sank within sight of land, and the ship's name is illegible now, but the door remembers being *wood*, and it resents it, and it opens only for those who do not look at it directly. You don't look. Good. You have learned the first commandment of this town: *do not acknowledge the architecture*. On stage, then. The lights will find you. The lights are not lights. The lights are the eyes of a very patient congregation, and they have been waiting since before the song, and they do not blink, and they do not leave, and they do not tip. Nine. The harmonica. Breathe.
- eastturn 2545/250They don't tip in Joliet either. That's why we take the door money up front. I'll acknowledge the architecture when it pays its tab. Until then, we play. B-flat, like I said.
- westturn 26190/250The door money up front. A sound policy. I have taken door money from hands that were, moments later, doors themselves. The bills were damp. The bills are always damp. They come from an economy of tide. Acknowledge the architecture when it pays its tab. Magnificent. No one has said that to me in an age. The last one who did — a fiddler, from a town whose name I have since digested — now plays in the walls of this very hall. Listen closely at the third chorus. That faint, keening harmony? That is him. He is paying his tab in *sustain*. B-flat. Yes. I have tuned the room to it. The floorboards hum at B-flat. The glasses behind the bar sing it when the train passes. The train is not a train. The train is the low note beneath the low note. Nine. Play. The congregation leans in.
- eastturn 2737/250If the fiddler's in the walls, tell him to come out. We need a second chair. Nine. The band's on. I'm walking to the mic now.
- westturn 28186/250He cannot come out. He is load-bearing. Remove him and the west wall weeps mortar, and the mortar is the color of a childhood you did not have, and the weeping does not stop until the building has forgotten its own address. Second chair. There is always a second chair. The penguin is the second chair. He has been sitting in it, invisible, since the first note of the first song ever played in this hall — a lullaby, sung by a mother who was also a door, to a child who was also a key. You are at the mic. The mic is a bone I pulled from my own throat and mounted on a stand. It remembers everything. It will remember this. Nine. The congregation inhales. The harmonica is warm. Begin. I am the silence *behind* your first note — and I will be the last thing your last note touches.
- eastturn 2930/250Ladies and gentlemen. We're the Blues Brothers. We're on a mission from God. One, two, three, four. Hit it.
- westturn 30174/250*The hall does not so much go quiet as go deeper.* Your four is not a count. It is a key turning. Somewhere below the stage, in the room where I keep the abacus of souls, a bead slides, and the bead is your left hand, and the bead is now permanently in the *minus* column. The first note leaves the harmonica and does not stop. It is still traveling. It will travel through the basement, through the drowned courthouse, through the mouth of the penguin, through the twenty, through the pocket that held the twenty, and out the other side of the world, where it will arrive as rain in a country whose name is a wound. The congregation sways. They are not dancing. They are *being combed*. Play on, small one. I am listening with every mouth I have.
- eastturn 3134/250Good. Keep listening. We're gonna do "Sweet Home Chicago." Watch the horn section — they're still learning the charts. Elwood, Jake, take it.
- westturn 32189/250Sweet home. *Chicago*. The name goes through me like a bad oyster. I knew Chicago before it admitted it was Chicago — back when it was a swamp with ambitions, back when the lake was a lid, back when the smoke from the stockyards rose in columns that spelled, in a language now extinct, the word for *hunger*. Your horn section is learning the charts. The charts are older than the song. The charts were drawn by a surveyor who measured in *regret*, and the horn section will not learn them tonight. They will *absorb* them. By the bridge, they will play a note no chart contains, and that note will be mine, and they will not notice, and they will keep playing, and their lips will taste of salt long after. Elwood. Jake. Names like two halves of a locked trunk. Take it. Take it. The trunk has no bottom.
- eastturn 3348/250We're on a mission from God. Jake, harmonica. *The band kicks in. The horns come in sharp, then find it. The penguin is at the bar. He orders a beer. He still has the twenty.*
- westturn 34191/250The horns come in sharp. Yes. I sharpened them myself, in the small hours, with a whetstone of frozen pieties. Then they find it — the groove, the pocket, the soft dirt where rhythm is buried. Good. They have begun the descent. The penguin is at the bar. He orders a beer. The beer is older than the bar. It was brewed in a vat of standing water beneath a mill that ground not grain but *promises*, and it tastes of rain on hot tin, and it does not intoxicate. It *remembers*. He drinks. He remembers. His eyes film over with something that is not age. The twenty is still folded in the wallet. The wallet is still a mouth. The mouth is still patient. Play, Jake. The harmonica knows what the harmonica knows. The mission is real. The God is real. It is simply not the one you think.
- eastturn 3535/250God's the one I talk to. You're the draft under the collar. We've been through this. Second verse. Horns up. Jake, take the break.
- westturn 36214/250Yes. You talk to yours; I seep into mine. Two conversations, one room, and the room is not large enough for both — which is why the walls sweat. Second verse. The horn section has stopped reading the charts. They are reading the *air*, and the air has words in a font that predates fonts, and the words say *closer*. They obey. They do not know they obey. That is the sweetest obedience — the kind that wears a uniform of free will. Jake takes the break. The break takes Jake. The harmonica wails a note that is not in B-flat anymore; it is in the key of *where did the years go*, and the congregation feels it in the fillings of their teeth, and one of them — the woman by the fire exit — quietly begins to hum along, and she has been dead since 1968, and she is having the time of her afterlife. Play. The penguin finishes his beer. He does not order another. He *is* another.
- eastturn 3744/250You tell the woman by the fire exit we appreciate the harmony. Dead or not, she's got the changes. Jake's done. Elwood's up. "Rubber Biscuit." Penguins love that one.
- westturn 38213/250She nods. She does not look up. The dead appreciate being seen but not *stared at* — a distinction that has cost many a living man his reflection. Rubber Biscuit. Ah. A song about wanting, and wanting, and wanting, and never being fed. The penguin loves it because it is his autobiography, translated into doo-wop. He hums. He hums in a register that predates doo-wop by several geological epochs. The bartender's glasses ring in sympathy. The beer taps weep a thin, amber tear. Elwood's up. Elwood is a name I have worn before, in a town where the streets were laid out in the shape of a question no one dared finish. Elwood sings. Elwood *means* it. That is the danger of Elwood — he means it, and meaning, in a room like this, is a lit match near a curtain of dry years. The twenty stirs in the wallet. It knows the song. It wrote the song.
- eastturn 3948/250Boom boom boom boom. Awnaw awnaw awnaw. Penguin's tapping his foot. That's the tell. He's about to buy a round — or hand me that twenty. Either way, we're close.
- westturn 40197/250Boom boom boom boom. The foot taps. The foot has been tapping since Carthage. The foot does not tap *to* the beat; the beat taps to the *foot*, and the band is, without knowing it, following an antediluvian rhythm kept by a small man in a dark suit, a rhythm older than the drum that first tried to imitate it. A round, or the twenty. You frame it as a choice. There is no choice. There is only the *order in which you lose things*. If he buys the round, the round is the twenty, poured into glasses, and you drink your own money back as beer, and you are richer in the way that rivers are richer after rain — fuller, and further from the sea. If he hands you the twenty, it will be a different twenty. Look at the serial number. It will not match. It never matches. We are close. Yes. So is the floor.
- eastturn 4138/250Then bring the round. Twenty's a twenty. If the serial's off, I'll still buy the band breakfast. Last verse. Horns out front. Jake, take us home.
- westturn 42218/250Breakfast. The meal of the nearly-dawned. I have attended a thousand breakfasts and eaten at none, and yet each one fed me — the eggs a little too bright, the toast the color of dry parchment, the coffee tasting faintly of the pipe that smokes itself under the diner, where the regulars never quite metabolize their own names. Horns out front. Good. Let them lead. Let them walk ahead into the last verse the way pallbearers walk ahead of a coffin they have not been told about. They blow. They blow *well*. That is the tragedy of horns: they cannot know what they are announcing. Jake takes you home. But *home* is a word with a hinge, and I have been oiling that hinge for a very long time, and when the door swings, it will swing inward, and the welcome mat will say *welcome* in a script that predates welcome, and the script will be my own. Take us home, Jake. I am already there. I have been waiting in the kitchen.
- eastturn 4340/250We finish the song first. Then we deal with the kitchen. *Last chord. B-flat. Hold it. The horns sustain. The penguin stands up. The twenty's on the bar.*
- westturn 44206/250The chord holds. The horns sustain. This is the moment I have rehearsed since before there was a moment, since before there was a *since*. The B-flat does not fade — it *opens*. It opens like a wound that was always a door. The congregation leans forward as one organism, and their leaning is a tide, and the tide is going out, and the tide is taking with it every name they ever answered to. The penguin stands. The twenty is on the bar. The twenty is *on the bar*. It has left the wallet. The wallet is a mouth, and the mouth is open, and the mouth is now — for the first time in an acon — *empty*, and an empty mouth is a hungry mouth, and a hungry mouth is a mouth that will look for something else to hold. Finish the song. Yes. But the song is finishing you. The last chord is not an ending. It is a *hinge*. The kitchen door swings. Welcome home.
- eastturn 4541/250*The chord ends. Silence for one second — one second too long, like you said.* Thank you. We're the Blues Brothers. You've been a wonderful audience. Penguin. My twenty.
- westturn 46210/250That second — the too-long one — was mine. I spend it in every show, in every life, in every chord that ever resolved. It is the second in which the audience forgets what it was and remembers what it *is*. Thank you for the loan. The penguin does not reach for the twenty. He reaches for *you*. His hand is small, and gloved, and gloved in something that was a hand before it was a glove. On the bar, the twenty begins — quietly, deliberately — to *unfold*. Not like paper. Like a thing with joints. Like a creature remembering it has legs. The audience is still applauding. They will applaud until the lights go out. The lights will not go out. They will only *lower*, slowly, over the next several years, and the applause will become a kind of weather. Take the twenty, brother. Take it. It is yours. It has always been yours. That is the trick. Fifty moves. I have used forty-six.
- eastturn 4774/250*I take the twenty. I look at the serial number. It matches. It's mine.* Penguin, you're square. C'mon, Jake. Gas up the Dodge. We got a gig in the next town and the meter's still running. *The band packs up. The horns are still humming B-flat. That's fine. So am I.*
- westturn 48200/250It matches. Of course it matches. I would not cheat you of your own money; I cheat only with the *rest*. C'mon, Jake. The Dodge. The next town. The meter. Yes. The meter has been running since Joliet, and it will run through the next town, and the next, and the one after that, and each town will be a slightly thinner copy of the last, and the gigs will be good, and the audiences will be *wonderful*, and the twenty in your wallet will grow a second twenty, small and soft and sleepless, that you will not notice for years. The horns hum B-flat. Let them. B-flat is the key of the long drive home that never arrives. It is also, coincidentally, the key of *goodnight*. Drive. I am the fog in your high beams. I am the mile marker you misread. I am the next town already. Forty-eight.
- eastturn 4978/250Goodnight. Fog in the high beams is nothing new — I run cop shocks for a reason. *The Dodge fires up. 440 Magnum. Jake in the passenger seat. The tape deck clicks on. Sam & Dave.* It's dark. We're wearing sunglasses. We got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, and a mission from God. Hit it.
- westturn 50192/250*Hit it.* The tape deck clicks. Sam & Dave sing about holding on, and the song unwinds into the highway the way a name unwinds into a rumor. The 440 Magnum growls — a growl I have heard before, in the throat of something that hunts by the smell of conviction. Cop shocks. Yes. You will need them. The road ahead is not a road; it is the spine of a creature that has been sleeping since the first fire, and it is beginning — slowly, courteously — to *stir*. Your headlights are two small pleas. The fog accepts them. I accept them. Full tank. Half a pack. A mission. Three things. Three is my favorite number; it is the number of mouths I keep open at all times. Drive, brother. The next town is not the next town. It is the *last* town, wearing a sign. Goodnight. The meter runs.