As the sun set on Mayne Ridge Park that evening, Walter hid huddled in the security and solitude of some nearby bushes, peering intermittently out upon an exuberant crowd a hundred or so yards away that far outnumbered both his ability to count and to estimate. It had to be in the thousands. They stomped and chanted and whooped and cheered even though nothing had started happening yet.
“Music! Music! Music!” the crowd exhorted. “Music! Music! Music!”
Walter checked his watch. He had been there for nearly an hour now and only two minutes remained until, according to Wallace’s schedule, the performance should begin.
Walter was fully cognizant of how tenuous a long-term plan life in a public shrubbery seemed. But given the varied events of his day, this nevertheless felt like perhaps the only reasonable place left for him to be, the whole city over. And staying here actually seemed like an equally reasonable pursuit for at least as long as it remained viable, which could not possibly be much longer given the potential riot that the crowd might start should it’s hunger for the fictional Walter Braum, whom they nevertheless considered absolutely real as gravity, not be satiated.
“Music! Music! Music!” The volume and fervor of the crowd’s invocation grew louder and louder. This single word, chanted over and over again, repeated metronomically until it turned from a word into a simple noise. “Music! Music! Music! Music! Music! Music!” A noise that quickly became just a sound. A sound that Walter stopped trying to understand. A sound that Walter simply heard, letting it wash gently over him. “Music! Music! Music!” A sound that effortlessly shifted into a series repeating of tones. “Music! Music! Music!” Tones that fit themselves seamlessly into a melody. “Music! Music! Music!” A melody that unearthed within Walter a single shred of stillness upon which he could focus. “Music,” he muttered to himself. And he considered the thought that perhaps this, and only this, was truly what all of the furor was about. Not any one version of Walter Braum or another, real or perceived, perfect or pockmarked, kind or cold, smart or foolish, but a simple love of music and all the ways it can make us feel that life on its own simply cannot.
“Music,” he repeated to himself, as if testing the word out.
Then he backed himself out of the shrub. And before he could talk himself out of it, he started walking across Mayne Ridge Park towards the unthinkably huge gathering just outside the open gate at the park’s entrance.
The crowd spotted him.
At first just a few people, their zeal heightening into “woo-hoo” and “Yes!” and “Here he comes!” and “Walter! Walter!” But it spread immediately, building and building until the entire crowd was one electrical cloud of unified longing and joy and excitement and innocence and eagerness and belonging. Although he did not normally do so, Walter allowed himself a good look at the crowd tonight. The overwhelming majority of the faces were unfamiliar, but Walter did spot the emo lady near the front. And the skinny man from the YMCA showers was closer to the middle but arching out over top of the crowd. He saw Beau Chalmers, too, around the edge of the crowd and holding hands with a handsome, sharp, and neat man, presumably his husband. Beau looked excited, a bit scared, too. My friend, Walter thought to himself. He saw Mark Clark hiding toward the back. Mark was too far away to really read, but Walter liked to think he was fuming with regret right about now. Walter even spied Veronica near the front third of the sea of people. Surprisingly, this made his heart soar. Her very presence at least ruled out her total indifference to the music he made. He couldn’t quite make out her expression. So he chose to presume that she was happy for him. And she probably was. Or probably would be once more time had passed. Adrenaline poured through his veins like nothing he had ever experienced. His lungs stirred with tornadoes, bucking to set his vocal cords atremble with the deepest felt notes he could muster.
Twenty yards…
Ten yards…
As he closed the last ten yards, Walter stole one last glance at the crowd for familiar faces, but his eye caught on a complete stranger instead, a smallish man Walter spied out of the corner of his eye. The unfamiliar man charged along the periphery of the crowd, pushing his way to the front with an expression wide-eyed and slack-jawed, over his head a hand raised clutching a newspaper tightly. It took Walter a moment, but he placed that look, eyes wide not with awe but with revulsion. It was the same look that people gave upon their first unexpected sighting of Wallace. Before they knew him. Before they saw his brilliance. Before they saw that he was better than even the best parts of what they might ever become. When all they saw was his admittedly harsh and unsettling shell. It was a look that slowed Walter’s gait as he narrowed the few remaining steps between himself and the crowd.
Arriving at the front edge of the crowd, the stranger fought his way to the middle of those first few rows of people, his diminutive size allowing him to duck and bob and weave through the throngs. Finally he grabbed at the shoulders of a cluster of fans who, based on their prime spot for the show, had presumably been there quite some time. Over the hysteria, Walter could not hear what the little man was saying but his gestures spoke clearly and loudly on their own as he pointed to the paper and then right at Walter four, five, six times, over and over again. The cluster of fans puzzled over the newspaper and what the man was saying a moment before they all, simultaneously, looked up at Walter and then back to the newspaper. The people around this cluster then started to suspect that something unexpected was going on. They began leaning into the group to inquire and the members of the initial cluster explained, pointing at the paper and then pointing at Walter while they spoke. The people behind those people then leaned in, too. Walter’s stride had slowed down to nothing, the inertia of his dwindling momentum having landed him smack in the middle of the platform at the front of the crowd. He felt as though he should fight what was only now just beginning to unfold, but he had no idea how one fought against a break in an otherwise brilliantly crafted story. So he just stood there and watched as the blast radius of this new information gradually and all but effortlessly expanded an ever-broadening hush over the throngs of people until the crowd’s furor had deadened all the way down to a deafening silence.
Walter found himself wondering who that stranger was who had drawn whatever connections he had drawn between the fictional Walter Braum and the actual Walter Braum who had given birth to his very own genius twin brother. Walter scanned the front of the crowd but could find not even a single trace of the unfamiliar little man.
Walter wanted to leave now. But he remembered Wallace’s shrill voice beseeching him to complete that evening’s show. And beyond that, he reminded himself that music was still music. And he was still a singer. These things were immutable. They did not bend to circumstance. Unless he let them.
So he closed his eyes.
He cycled through his mental juke box. But one song, and only one song, surfaced.
Walter opened his eyes to find the crowd still there. Stupefied, granted, but listening.
He spotted a man near the front of the crowd with a guitar case slung over his shoulder. Walter hopped off of the platform and shifted bodies aside, as effortlessly as one might move mannequins, until he reached the man. “I need this, please,” Walter explained as he pulled the case off the dumbfounded man’s shoulder, opting to interpret his lack of resistance as permission.
Walter pulled the guitar from the case and across his chest as he made his way back to the stage, where he climbed back up and practiced the few chords he had picked up from Klaus Klein. They sounded like sloppy versions of what he imagined they were supposed to sound like, but they were close enough for rock ’n’ roll—or they would have to be, anyway.
Walter gathered himself, took one last breath and pushed down his nerves.
Then he started strumming out a melody that sounded roughly like the melody he had tried to capture in his memory that sleepless night so long ago. And it was coming through, too. Just barely, but it was coming through. He still had no words for the verses. So he just strummed hard through those parts, his foot stomping out metronomic time and subsequently animating the rest of his body just enough to maybe be dancing. When he got to the chorus, he took a step towards the crowd, pulled in his deepest breath, leaned forward, and belted out with all of his might…
My girlfriend’s in love with a monster.
And by the way that beast is my brother.
I fell for Eleanor the Whore.
I thought that she’d love me more
Than my girlfriend in love with a monster.
Then right back into the verse he went, strumming and stomping and strumming and stomping.
He looked up to find the crowd still staring blankly at him.
So he kept right on going until he arrived back at the chorus…
My girlfriend’s in love with a monster.
And by the way that beast is my brother.
I fell for Eleanor the Whore.
I thought that she’d love me more
Than my girlfriend in love with a monster.
If he’d had another song to sing, he surely would have sung it. But this was his only song. Uneven and incomplete as it still was at this point, it nevertheless said more or less everything he had to say right now. Or at least everything he knew how to say right now. And that wasn’t nothing. In fact, it felt like something. The very beginning of something, but something. So he kept right on strumming, back through to the chorus again, five, six, seven times.
But the crowd did not change. Its confusion did not shift. Its despondence did not so much as warm. And they most certainly did not seem to make so much as an ounce of sense out of the song, no matter how many times Walter belted out the lyrics he had crafted over months and with all of his heart. By the time he had completed his twelfth round of the chorus, people started to disperse. Others, hopeful still that this was all some sort of horrible mistake, started to yell out requests for other songs. But Walter felt this song right now and with everything in him. So he kept right on singing it. He even stopped counting the choruses, focusing instead on bleeding his heart into every strum, every stomp, every sound, and every word. At some point, his hands started aching. His voice felt raw. His foot was blistering. His back was starting to spasm from his forward lean into the guitar. But he pushed on. He kept playing. As though stopping might mean never getting to come back to this exact space and time ever again, as though the very next instant after he finished playing would be tantamount to saying goodbye and he was not ready yet to say goodbye. So he just kept going for what might have been minutes or might have been hours. Until eventually his hand lowered across the guitar strings and simply could not rise back up to fall again, his foot pounded out one last enervated but still percussive stomp, and his tiny dance steadied into stillness. His voice muted into silence. And just as suddenly as he had started the show, Walter was left spent and standing stone still upon the stage.
He felt his chest rise and fall and reach to catch his breath. But that was all he felt. Everything else had drained.
He looked up to find that the crowd was gone now, but for four people spread out over the large expanse of barricaded concrete.
The nearest of these people took the fifteen steps between him and the stage, looked Walter squarely in the eye, and asked…
“Can I have my guitar back?”
It took Walter a moment, but he remembered that the guitar was not his.
It took him another moment to realize that he was not ready to let the guitar go.
“I will give you five thousand dollars for it,” Walter stated softly in his tired voice.
“It’s only worth…” the man began before he stopped himself. “You know what? Keep it.”
“No,” insisted Walter, reaching into his bag with trembling weak hands and pulling out one of several gray envelopes. He tore it open and extracted from it a stack of cash that he figured was likely about $5,000 and he held it out to the man. “Here,” he said.
The man stared at Walter, conflicted.
“Stop thinking,” Walter explained, “and just take it.”
So the man did. But he quickly sorted through the stack of bills and took from it whatever amount he considered fair, putting the rest on the ground at Walter’s feet.
“Good luck,” the man added, offering a kind nod as he turned and left.
The second and third persons left were a woman and a man, probably in their mid-twenties. They stood near the middle of the abandoned concert floor, he right behind her with fingers interlaced and resting on her hips. They looked upon Walter with a warmth, a gentleness.
“That was beautiful,” the woman called out.
The man nodded softly but deeply enough that it gently rocked his whole body and hers, in turn.
“Thank you,” Walter called back, wishing that there was a phrase that could cut through the banality that muted and stifled this everyday expression. Because his gratitude ran much deeper. “Would you like my guitar?” he asked.
The man looked down to the woman, who looked back and up and over her shoulder at the man. Both had wide, eager eyes.
“Really?” the man asked, looking up at Walter. “Are you sure?”
“I would love for you two to have it,” Walter explained.
The woman pulled at the man’s shirt and muttered something to him before raising her hands to her mouth and bobbing up and down at her knees in excitement. So the man stepped out from behind the woman and approached Walter, his footsteps echoing through this now-silent part of the city. “Are you sure?” he asked as he came to stand a few feet in front of Walter.
Walter shrugged off the question with nothing more than a thin, knowing smile as he extended the guitar in his hand.
“We loved your song,” the man said as he took the instrument. “It was funny. But it was sad.”
Before Walter could even bother to withhold his reaction, the man turned and hurried back to the woman, who was now jumping up and down with excitement. She hugged her boyfriend upon his return, kissed his cheek. She took the guitar and the two scurried off giggling and muttering to one another. Walter watched them go before turning to the last person, who was standing at the very back of the concrete expanse, leaning against the furthest barricade from the stage. Even though Walter could not, at such a distance, make out many details of this person’s appearance, the size and form were inimitable. As Wallace stepped away from the barricade and started making his uneven way across the deserted space, Walter held up his hand, instructing his twin brother to stop. So Wallace did, but a few feet from the barricade. He grimaced and lowered his eyes to the ground a good, long moment before looking back up and calling out, in his high-pitched wail of a voice…
“I’m sorry!”
Walter shrugged his shoulders and called back, “The song is…”
“Ironic,” Wallace cut in. “I get it.”
Another silence set in.
“Go ace your midterms, Wallace!” Walter insisted.
“I’m not sure that I know how to fix this—” Wallace yelled back until Walter interrupted, raising his hand again and stopping Wallace silent. Satisfied that everything that needed saying had been said, Walter turned his gesture into a wave.
Wallace waved back. But he did not move.
So Walter shooed him on.
And the little man heaved a reluctant sigh before turning and making his way along and then outside the barricades, which city workers had already begun breaking down and gathering.
“I’m sorry,” Wallace called out one last time as he headed off.
Walter just shook his head and watched his brother go. Until finally and completely he was all alone once again.
He kind of wished he had a band.