A Thousand Miles from Nowhere by John Gregory Brown Read Free Book Online Page A

distinct, unconnected fragments.
    When someone from the city’s commercial registrations office finally did walk through the door— Jerome T. Burton, CRO Inspector, it said on his card—Henry wasn’t surprised.
    Henry asked if he’d still need a business license if he simply gave everything away. Mr. Burton made a stern face but allowed that he didn’t really know as he had never been asked such a question; he said he would get back to Henry promptly. “In a week’s time. Five business days,” he added decisively, as if the words were a threat.
    Henry, though, didn’t wait for an answer. He told the artists they could no longer sell their work in the store, and one by one they took away the things they’d made. He put up a sign that told customers they were free to leave with as much as they could carry, and by the end of the week, just about everything was gone. The only item Henry kept, the one thing he’d never agreed to sell, was his father’s bass, a great bronze-bodied Kay that for years had stood untouched in a corner of their dining room, the only place in their house where it wasn’t in the way. It had always felt to Henry like an uninvited guest who arrived each night at dinnertime but wouldn’t sit down and eat. Henry had refused to sell the bass—he’d gotten offers ranging from twenty dollars to two thousand—not so much for sentimental reasons as empirical ones. It was by means of this bass, of his father playing it, that his own undoing had begun, and he thought that maybe one day the instrument might prove necessary—that word again—for him to put himself back together.
      
    This is what had happened: One night in bed, Amy peacefully asleep beside him, Henry had watched as his father—the ghost of his father, of course, because his father was by then undoubtedly dead—stepped into the room, the bass tucked beneath his arm as if it were no larger or heavier than a violin. Henry continued to watch as his father walked forward, stopped at the foot of the bed, set down the instrument, leaned into it, stretched his hands across the strings, and began to play, humming the melody whose rhythm he sustained with his flattened, callused fingers, the bass pressed against his chest.
    Henry tried to wake up Amy. He called her name, gently shook her shoulder. She stirred but didn’t raise her head. “Listen,” Henry said, and he suddenly recognized what his father was playing. It was a Thelonious Monk tune, “Ask Me Now,” and though Henry tried again and again to get Amy to wake up, she wouldn’t, and when the song was done, his father simply nodded, picked up the bass, and walked out of the bedroom.
    In the morning Henry told Amy what had happened, how he’d tried and tried to wake her. They were still in bed, and Amy propped her head up on her arm. “You were dreaming, Henry,” she said. “It was just a dream.”
    “I know, I know,” Henry said, but the next night he had the same dream, the same visitation, though this time his father played Monk’s “Rhythm-a-Ning,” tearing through it at lightning speed, a virtuosic performance of which Henry was sure his father had been incapable when he was alive. He lay in bed and listened, stunned, until his father finished and then, as he had that first time, simply turned and left the room.
    The dreams continued night after night, each time exactly the same dream except for the Monk tune his father played; “Think of One” one night and “Hackensack” the next and “Blue Monk” after that and then “Ruby, My Dear” and then “Well, You Needn’t.” Finally, the night his father played “ ’Round Midnight,” which was Henry’s favorite Monk tune, maybe his favorite song by anyone ever, Henry somehow knew this would be the end. The song had always seemed to him profoundly solemn, unspeakably sad, as if it were not some smoky and romantic ballad but an elegy lamenting a lover’s death. As his father played it in the dream,