Music Banter - What Are You Watching Right Now?

this is the introduction of frownland's character into my novel

"I'm just trying to heat up the zone, man." Z says to Hoyt. "Why do you have to be such a lint?" All four of the men's eyes are fixed upon the artist, their ears caught adrift in his guitar molestation. He plays a classical style acoustic with all steel strings and considerable action up the neck, which he utilizes to unleash stupendous harmonics. He has a face that defies legitimate description, as the things one would say about it would only offer the foggiest of foggies. Not even fog, just a plain white wall. His face somehow carries the absurd and out of nowhere notion of being on backwards, like an inward turned mask that sees through your eyes rather than you through its. There has not yet been established a proper name for the style of facial hair crawling from the Artist's chin, very wolfman-esque. The strands seem to climb upward like vines. Though obviously of the same ilk, saying his beard and mustache are the same entity would be trite. More like cousins, perhaps. The hair dwindles away further up his face, as if afraid t tread the disheartening scalp looming above like a haunted wasteland. His t-shirt is black enough to be a spatial void and his jeans are as blue as a pair of blue jeans, as if blue jeans could ever look like anything but.

"What zone?" Hoyt asks. "I'm the only one that comes in here."

"Well that's why this ingenious live music idea. It should entice." Z retorts from behind the bar, drinking on the job like you're not supposed to do.

"I don't think stuff will draw the kinda crowd we want." The Artist's playing is either inept or masterfully ept. The plinks and tings and shcrrzhs percolate from the guitar to dance about the air like an ethereal ballroom. Closer to music than a departing train but further than Bach or Beethoven or Bono, it is as abstract and improbable as the Artist's face.

"It's progressive." Z says. The Artist does not seem bothered by his peers' rude whispering as he apparently finishes his audition. The ensuing silence would exceed a reasonable conversational pause. "That was something else, man." The Artist is silent and does not blink.

"What's with it?" Hoyt interjects. Still no acknowledgement, and he turns to the barkeep. "Is he aw whack job?"

"Well I hope so."

"Why mute?"

"Aerosmith said to let the music do the talkin, you know. Not that anyone should live their life according to Aerosmith."

"Well we can't have him if he doesn't talk."

"And why is that?" Z counters, to which Hoyt hasn't a true answer. "He knows what it's all about. He iswhat it's all about." Hoyt's three double shots of bourbon are conversing like schoolyard friends in the playground of his stomach. The Artist had been sitting in a bar stool in front of the two gents, but after finishing with his performance, seemingly satisfied, he would reach into his guitar case and extract a portfolio so portfolio-ish it ought to be the archetype for all portfolios. He approaches the bar to hand to Z, who would open it immediately.

"What is..." Hoyt begins, but in that instant of folder opening the Artist would disappear.

"This is a reputable assessment." Z says, though the folder contains no words or numbers or recognizable symbols. Rather all of it is just distressing swirling and sentient geometry. The ripples of color seem almost in motion against the black painted sheets. Z reaches out his hand with irrational caution, a piece of paper is almost never lethal. But as his fingertips come in contact with a cold, murky gel, he would lose at least four of his marble. "Maybe you're right, Hoyt. He could be a safety concern. We probably shouldn't have any practitioners of the dark arts serenading us. Bad for business. Where'd he go anyway?"

"I don't know." Hoyt slurs theatrically, as if accosted by the feds. Z lets his gaze trickle back upon the contents of the offensively bland and contrasting folder, still vortexian and odd, at least this top sheet.

"I dunno why he even brought this in. We didn't ask for any mystical resumes."

"It's like a fresh painting... That's live." Hoyt remarks, trying to mask the alcohol's impairment beneath this admittedly apt simile. At this point, as if for some reason the idea only surfaced this instant, Z takes the top most sheet between his fingers to peruse the other chapters of the folder. He tries to, at least. Further celebrating the fresh painting comparison, the sheet is in fact drenched in an impossibly dry wetness and incredibly limp upon lifting, like it'd been floating in a puddle. The segment pinched by Z/s fingers tears off with no resistance and he decides to be more careful.

"You should be more careful." Hoyt pipes.

"Thanks, doc." Z squeezes several more sheets to more firmly lift. Four, five, perhaps eighteen, and a shrill tone chimes from the pages as they are peeled apart, similar to the catastrophic string scraping suite of the Artist's performance. Similar as identical. The very same cacophony that had been expelled from the Artist's bloody murder screeching guitar is now reacquainting itself with the two men, much to their suppressed horror. This paper-like medium (surely it can't be paper, can it?) almost seems to be like some otherworldly sound capturing material. Or perhaps not otherworldly, after all, how do records work? Black magic, as far as anyone in the bar is concerned. The Artist's mad litany is somehow housed within these eldritch, swampy pages. Maybe it's his sheet music

The other pages observed, including the backside of the bottom sheet in Z's grasp, are equally dark and sludgy and unnerving, only accented by the repeated section of disembodied aria still devastating the very particles comprising the room's atmosphere. Black fluid-like material would appear to be running from the page Z holds, yet no liquid drips from its edges, giving its surface the visual quality of staring into the night sky whilst wrapped in a hazy nutmeg induced delirium. Such ocular nuances are subtle at first, the sudden ripple like a wave or insectoid shooting star, no outright lysergic fractalization, but grow more pronounced and comprehensible the deeper your gaze, until strange wiggly men form and prance unfathomably about the emptiness, stacking milk crates and conducting orchestras and directing horse drawn carriages, or any such banal activities that now seem so peculiar to you when carried out by nothing.

Z warily pinches another cluster of sheets to explore, his actions now driven by grim curiosity after logic, reason, and concern for safety have all headed for the hills. A horrible and dissonant tremolo like a swarm of locusts now blasts from the folder, a movement Z remembers the Artist delivering with particular enthusiasm. Z and Hoyt now both begin to tremble, as if their fear wasn't already insurmountable, at the new sheet atop the stack. They share no words or gaze, but a single thought balances like a circus performer upon the telepathic tight rope: Is that what I think it is?. They simultaneously ask and answer each other's mental query. The churning ooze dousing the page would slowly morph into a foggy, barely visible scene that would manage to further the men's apparently infinite bewilderment and, more noticeably, their sheer, primal terror. "Barely visible" might not be a discretion to do justice to the ineffable display. In fact the page would appear more like some far off channel that is somehow forcing itself through the static of a disconnected television, the black and white fuzz attempting to shape itself, however inadequately, into the broadcast. All in all the scene is perceived by the men like the fleeting, tail end of a dream as their true vision comes to a wake. The instance where elements both phantasmagoric and real blend together confusedly, when the dream has faded into an echo bouncing off the solid walls of your room and turning the morning light through your window into a perplexing rainbow.

After a moment of unblinking focus, the associates could make out the outside of the station, the boarding dock directly out the door of the bar, cast in frightful noir, while slowly but surely the bar separates from the rest of the building it's connected to, the benches and potted trees and tracks blurring away as well, until Z's establishment is but a single cube suspended in void.

"So we're tossing it, yeah?" Z cannot hide the quake in his voice.

"Toss it?" Hoyt cries in response, no less girlish. "I think we have to drive a stake through it." Z studies his customer for a quick second as if considering it to be a sensible plan. Then he nabs the bottle of vodka he'd already been immorally siphoning, takes a fierce gulp like an overworked athlete, and with the rest drenches the Artist's horrid portfolio, which by now had been shut to silence its squalor. He goes outside, Hoyt follows curiously, and tosses on the gravel in the track bed, then lights it with a match from his pants pocket. By now the two men might have expected some kind of rank death knell from the burning blasphemy before them, but it simply crackles and fizzes like anything else. After the source of their horror is reduced to ashes, Z takes a breath for no reason other than to breathe purposefully, and turns to Hoyt.

"Let's just go buy a jukebox."