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Junior purses his lips. “That’s what you see, then that’s him. Don’t always look the same to ever’body.”
“Who is he?”
“Somebody who ain’t from around here. Somebody who don’t like bein’ put off. Somebody you gotta tangle with at some point, whether you want to or not. Him and them fire bullies been trying to get my horn for years and years.”
“Why do they want your horn?”
“All my passion’s wrapped up in the notes. That’s not just air I’m blowing through this mouthpiece, sonny. It’s my soul. Someday he’s gonna come for me, and I’m gonna blow like I never blown before, and we’ll see if it’s enough. You lookin’ for Dr. X, that right?”
“How’d you know that?”
“I met him myself one time. In the hospital, after the war. Yes sir, you and me got a lot in common.”
“Wait—how do you know about all this? How could you have already met Dr. X if Dulcie said the wormhole just opened up—”
“Time and space don’t always play by the rules you think they do, son, and Dr. X bent a lot of rules,” he answers. “I met him then. You looking for him now.” He taps the tips of his fingers together. “All connected.
“Enough with that talk. I wanna show you a little something. Take my arm.”
I help the great Junior Webster from his chair. He may look frail, but there’s a lot of strength in that arm. I’ll have to tell Eubie about it when I get back.
He drags one leg when he walks. “Got this limp in the war. Went over to play for the troops. Silly songs, mostly. Dance songs. Get-you-some kinds of songs. You feel me?”
I nod.
“I saw things there, such things. Things a man hopes never to see.” He shakes his head. “When I got back, I spent a year in the VA hospital. Nerves, you understand? Not right in the head. I didn’t play a note for three years. Just couldn’t. Some part of me was lying out there on those fields with my friends, dead. Then one day, I picked up my horn, and when I started playing, the sound was all different. Blood on the notes. Heart. Soul. Every bit of me coming out this horn. I didn’t hold nothin’ back. And that was that.”
“That was that?”
“I learned how to live changed.”
I don’t really understand what he’s getting at, but he seems like a nice old man, and I feel sorry that he lived through what he did.
“We goin’ over to that corner,” Junior says. As we get closer, I can see another pair of gates attached to the wall. They’re just like the ones we came in by, like the ones on the Morpheus float, except that these don’t go anywhere. They’re just art. Smack-dab in the middle of the wall is a big red button. “You gotta open one of them gates to get at the button.”
Something about the way he says it makes it sound like a test. “Does it matter which one?”
“It’s your choice, son, not mine.”
That doesn’t do anything to make me feel less anxious. After a quick, silent game of eeny-meeny-miny-mo, I open the white gate.
“Hmmm,” Junior says. “All right, then. Go on. Push the button.”
As soon as I do, there’s a whirring noise that makes me jump. The ceiling opens up. Above us is a plush black night twinkling with stars. It reminds me of a planetarium, one of those optical-illusion skies that you know can’t be real, it has to be a projection on a 360-degree screen, but you swear at the time that you could just blast off into space from your chair. It’s that real.
“Ain’t that a sight? With all the things we know and learn, we still ain’t touched the big mysteries—where we come from, where we go next, why we even here. And when something truly miraculous happens, we run and hide in our caves. We deny.”
Junior Webster puts the trumpet to his lips, and blows a few bars of “Cypress Grove Blues.” He stops and inclines his head toward the fake sky like he’s listening for something.
“The scientists say most galaxies got a black hole at their center. They suck up matter, those black holes. Just gobble ever’thing right on up, don’t matter what it is. That’s what we know. What we can observe. But the scientists, they can’t observe what happens inside a black hole—not directly, you understand—because the gravitational pull is so strong there ain’t a thing that can escape it. Not you. Not me. Not this here horn. Not even light. Only one thing comes out of a black hole, and that, my friend, is sound. Music. As things get pulled right on in to it”—he lowers his voice to a whisper—“that black hole sings. Do you feel me? It sings in an octave no human being could ever hear, but it does sing.”
When he puts the trumpet to mouth this time, the song comes alive. The sound is a force pushing on me; the notes make me dizzy. I could swear the screen-sky is revolving slowly and that we’re drifting toward it. And right in the center is a dark pinpoint getting bigger with every note.
“Mr. Webster?” I say, but he’s lost to his playing. I feel like a little kid at the planetarium, like I want to close my eyes and sink down in my seat till it’s over. But Junior’s angling his face toward it. The solid dark is bearing down on us from above and around. There’s no escaping it. I feel like I’m moving toward that black hole, like I’m being pulled right in, and it is freaking me the hell out. Junior’s got a strange look on his face; I can’t tell if it’s terror or awe.
“Sing,” he says quietly. “I’m ready. Go on. Lay that note on me.”
The hole’s so big that the sky’s almost completely dark. Stars zip past us into the giant maw of that greedy, cosmic hole and disappear completely, and even though I know it’s just an illusion, I’m afraid I’ll be next.
