Jackson Page picked up the Gibson ES-175 gingerly, as if it might be trip-wired to some explosive device. He examined the pickups, the toggle switch, the controls. It wasn’t even plugged in, but you couldn’t be too careful. No, it was okay. Still in tune-well, close enough for rock ’n’ roll. Right. And that was the problem.
“I am regressing,” he said to no one. And then he listened to see if no one had any suggestions.
He closed his eyes to try to hear the music in his head. Simple. He had already laid down a bunch of tracks, knew the overall shape of the thing, the musical through line, but there was something missing in the final movement. Ha! Movement-as if it were a symphony. Maybe he should say there was something missing in the final stages, as if it were a disease.
The big old guitar was still new to him. He’d found it in a secondhand store in Toronto. The ES-175 was a workhorse in the jazz world, the kind of guitar someone like Pat Metheny played, not some twenty-two-year-old with concert-hall pretensions. Then again, what was he doing playing around with electric guitars at all?
He swiveled his chair westward and tilted the top of the Gibson toward the window of the loft. He watched the daylight glint off the sunburst finish. The light also picked up the dust. He grabbed some polish and a rag from his worktable and set to cleaning the guitar, lovingly, until the lacquer finish gleamed. Just because he was screwing up didn’t mean the instruments should suffer.
Simple had started out spare and clean. And serious. He’d been listening to Arvo Part and Toru Takemitsu. To Hildegard von Bingen, for Christ’s sake! He wanted an unadorned, almost mystical sound, off the top, with lots of space around every note. He’d always known that the piece was going to get weird and dissonant, that “simple” was not easy-that was the point. He just hadn’t known how weird or dissonant everything was going to get. Then yesterday he’d lost it-strapped on the guitar, plugged it into the stomp box, and pretended he was Travis Stever of Coheed and Cambria. As if. He was no rock star. His garage-band days with Snye were far behind him.
Snye had packed the coffeehouse at Ladybank Collegiate, rocked the legion hall, warmed up for Hammerhead in the city. Their musical influences were ancient: King Crimson; Yes; Procul Harum; Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Big gaudy stuff. Jay had written all the band’s tunes and was the only one who had stayed with music. Got himself a degree and now was taking a year off, courtesy of Mom, to consolidate, to write. Next year-graduate school. Next fall.
So what was Simple?
It was supposed to be a tone poem, not some emo-punk piece of shit. But right now, emo-punk shit seemed about all he could channel. He had to get serious back. He closed his eyes again. Listened. It was in there somewhere.
He let the quiet build up around him. He started playing the riff he’d recorded yesterday but at half the tempo. He played it sweet. It was an inversion of the first motif, and when you didn’t distort the crap out of it, you could hear that.
He plugged the guitar into the amp. Switched it on. There were chorus dials on the Roland: he kept the rate low, cranked the depth up to six. There was that nice flangey sound. He added some reverb. Nice and wet. Pressed the distortion pedal for some crunch.
Right. Rock on, dude. What was he doing?
He dumped it all. Dumped the crunch, dumped the reverb. Everything. He closed his eyes and played the riff over and over, pure and simple, letting it worm into his ear and down into his bones. It was comforting and sad. A teen ballad. He was Linus, and the ES-175 was his electric blanket. A year out of the University of British Columbia and he was backsliding, big-time.
He clamped his hand over the strings, damping the sound. He cocked his head and listened: nothing but the amplifier’s throaty hum. He leaned forward, turned the Roland off, and placed the Gibson on its stand beside the baby-blue Stratocaster and the old yellow Martin acoustic. Then he groaned a great long emo-punk-shit groan.
“I am losing my mind,” he said.
But what he was really afraid of was that he was losing his sense of what it was he did. They’d crucify him at Indiana. The Jacobs School of Music was right up there with Juilliard and Eastman, for Christ’s sake. He had gotten in on great marks and a crazy-good letter of recommendation from Gabriel Zouave, the composer in residence his last year at UBC. Zouave was the one who had recommended Indiana and advised Jay to include the composition Gunk in his application, scored for bass clarinet, button accordion, tabla, and street sounds. The people at Indiana had called the piece “cheeky and brave.” His lighter side, now missing and presumed dead. Because serious didn’t have to be dead serious, right? But it had to be more than jacking off. And here he was playing three-chord riffs on the guitar.
He crossed the loft to the dormer window that looked out over the ragged garden sloping gently down to the snye. He leaned on the sill, and his flash drive, on a string around his neck, tapped against the glass. His kayak was down there in the undergrowth by the stream. You couldn’t see it from any approach, as far as he could tell.
There was a row of fist-size stones along the windowsill. He picked one up and rolled it around in his hands. It was blue-green, shot through with cream, and smoothed almost perfectly round by the sea. It was warm from sitting in the sun all day. He held it up to his cheek. Closed his eyes again. Which was when he heard the car.