I Did a Bad, Bad Thing

The day started like any other in that it started completely unlike any other day has previously. While the alarm clock played its merry chimes and sleep began to ebb away to consciousness, I was aware of a brief inner struggle: The Driven immediately reached for his glassine whip; The Computer Scientist rolled over and pulled the sheets over her head; The Compassionate remembered that there was a parcel waiting at the Post Office; The Director and The General voiced concern at my overall lack of motivation. After a few moments watching this play out in my head another alarm began to sound, the harsh buzzing sound of the house alarm an unhappy bleating in my ears. I climbed out of bed and walked downstairs.

The house alarm is very old and very unhappy. Years of “do it yourself” have left its cabling battered and bruised, the resistance of the insulation surrounding its wires altered with moisture and the gradual decay of plastic. This episode was just another reminder of some more work that The Driven is sure to task me with in the near future. At least it didn’t happen in the middle of the night again (gods, it was awful to be woken up that early). Standing naked by the front door to the house I became quite aware of how cold it was outside: another reminder that the house that protects me needs return of my loving care in the form of altering the hang of the front door. I eagerly returned to bed as soon as the drone of the alarm tamper warning had been eliminated.

It was no use trying to return to sleep, no matter how tired I was or how little sleep I had actually had the previous night: The Driven had lit the fire in my belly and it was time to do some work. Somehow The Compassionate managed to inject his wishes into The Driven’s priorities and, now fully clothed, I made the short journey to the post-office. Indeed there was a small parcel for me, and judging from the addressee, Faelix Limited, it suggested that my ruse had worked: they might not want to ship hundreds of scalpel blades to an individual, but this medical supplier had no qualms about doing so to a company address. The Analyst and The Paranoid high-fived in recognition of their successful social engineering attack.

The Driven now teamed up with The Director and The General, and this time there was no escaping. I returned to the office and sat at my workstation. My laptop was true to its name “Constant Motion”, and already awake and awaiting further instructions. A few mind-numbing hours later and the work was done. I was hungry by now, but since my encounter with a witch a few days earlier, I had lost my appetite. Perhaps it was stolen from me, or perhaps she worked some magic on me to help me with a personal goal, or perhaps our talk had awakened sickening memories of planning for emergencies. Perhaps all of these things. Perhaps just apathy. I shook myself, packed my things and left the house and made my way to what was already turning out to be a grueling day of minor tweaks and changes to some bespoke piece of work, flecked with constant interruptions from other clients who had begun calling me around half past seven. If the number of calls one receives before leaving the house is any judge of how a day might pan out, the writing was well and truly on the wall. And my wish was to have this day be put up against the wall and shot.

I continued to have it in for myself that morning, forgetting the mental note of roadworks I had passed the day before. After a very slow crawl towards my destination, I arrived and began to set myself to work opposite the client’s technical manager. I never like sitting there, and took special offense today as his desk refused to be flat. Constant Motion was in constant motion, rocking back and forth as I typed on this formerly even surface. I shuddered to think what must be happening to the drive-heads, flitting a micron above the platter of the hard-disk, suspended there by some effect of fluid dynamics; the slightest jostle a risk that they might crash into the surface to gouge an arced furrow and destroy some of the carefully ordered entropy that is my data.

Suddenly I hit a mental barrier. I was staring at the firewall rules which segregate this client’s network, struggling to find out why this protection enchantment was misbehaving. Whenever I build such a firewall, I start with a complete and impregnable wall and only then begin to make the required holes. Here I could see the incantations to make some of those holes, and yet nothing would come through. I could clearly see the spell-form notating these flows of information and yet watching both sides of the wall always showed the same thing: a fragment of data would approach the wall, disappear into the wall (for it it opaque and has thickness), but nothing would come out of where the hole was meant to be on the other side.

I decided to look at this problem out of the corner of my eye. I communicated to the witch at the same time she communicated to me, and with the knowledge gained I wrote down a number: twenty-seven. I placed the packet of blades I had collected much earlier in the morning into the newly-labelled envelope and walked through the rain to the Post Office to send the bitter-sweet gift. It had stopped raining when I headed back to my work a moment or two later, which I took to be a good omen.

I stared some more at the problem of my sanctuary spell. I remarked that I was clearly missing something blindingly obvious. I stared harder, trying to put back all the layers I had peeled away in my mind so that I could stop focussing on the detail. It leapt out at me: the charm was making note of where the holes in the wall should be, as if marking them in chalk upon brick, but I was missing the crucial part to the formula. I added two words to the end of each of the four lines in the verse. Verse became curse, blasting away the solidity to turn chalk marks into apertures. I was mentally exhausted, and now my body was telling me that I really should feed it more often than once every two days. I relented, ate a few mouthfuls and fooled myself by filling the rest of my stomach with a drink.

I left the client’s offices, my immediate work done. Being truthful with myself, The Computer Scientist’s and The Mystic’s powers a lot weaker for the morning’s endeavours. The Driven had to find a different whipping-boy, and so The Performer and The Musician were the next to feel the sting of his whip.

I entered Manchester town centre with a strange feeling of, “today is going to be the day”. The Paranoid suspects this sentiment was just The Driven exerting some form of mind control, trying to keep me moving, my enthusiasm fired. I thought back to my efforts in the quest with which I was now self-charged. I had tried this quest a few days earlier, with the same witch. She had accompanied me in an attempt to find “the canvas” onto which she would finesse some of her brilliance. Unfortunately for us, neither of the canvases found were suitable. The first was like a crazed horse, kicking and biting me and only relenting when I had calmed her. She had fire but not grace. The second had soul and depth, and the voice of a negro man, but for all its aural talent The Musician was left feeling that all his songs would boil down to “Old Man River”. While perfectly poised, it could never be nimble. So I began pacing the streets of Manchester, predictably in the rain, looking for more candidate guitars.

I didn’t feel very optimistic when I wandered into SoundControl on Oxford Road (or is it Oxford Street? one seems to turn into the other in the mind and on the maps). While a huge store, their wares tend to be flashy and new, so it was of little surprise when the answer to my predetermined question was met with the inevitable answer.

The female clerk said, “alas, we have no second-hand RG series Ibanez”.

The male clerk approached and confirmed: “yeah, they don’t hang around long, and we don’t usually get many in stock… try the other place down the road?”

The female clerk then remembered something. “Hang on, don’t we have Salford’s new one that isn’t new because someone returned it completely battered to bits, only we didn’t notice because it was still in a case?”

“Shit, yeah, the one from Salford…”

“And this would be for sale?”

“Yeah, someone brought it back to the Salford store and some muppet there accepted it back as new… only it wasn’t in “as-new” condition. Or even close.”

The very kind gentleman then presented to me the guitar in question and sent me into a little room. He returned with a guitar cable, set the amplifier up for me, and left me again. He was right: it had been battered by a previous owner. The electronics were practically… there just is no other way to say it… fucked and there were several chips in its otherwise pristine body. It looked as though it has been gigged and returned the following day. I studied the physical attributes and determined that it was a sound instrument.

And then I ran my hand down its neck. Straight as an arrow (and I know a thing about arrows), and delicately thin. My hand moved along the neck incredibly quickly — “Old Man River” wouldn’t have seen the movement with his tired eyes. I thought to myself: “it’s so agile, oh my…” I sat down on a stool, kicked my feet up on top of an amplifier and cranked the volume. Honest to all the gods, I have never played that well in my life. Licks which I have been on my “practice this very hard and one day…” list flowed effortlessly. This guitar practically took my hands and played itself. I swear to you now, it is a guitar which has been played by the one and only: the patron saint of guitars. I was conscious that I shouldn’t spend too much time playing the only one in the shop, but it was a quiet day there and I was sure they wouldn’t mind another ten minutes… oh the rapture, this is how playing is meant to be…

Suddenly the guitar emitted a death rattle. With a crackle and a basso “pop”, it fell silent. The volume knob, which was one of the obviously distressed parts of the electronics, was now defunct, its wires shorting inside the screened body of the guitar. Turning the dial would temporarily restore sound, but as soon as I released it, silence fell again.

I put the guitar down and told the clerks that I would think about it.

I ventured up the road to “next door”. I explained what I was seeking, and that if they had anything which had been beaten up a bit then I wouldn’t mind in the slightest. They pointed to the wall. There, hanging by its neck, a neck which looked like it someone had taken some wickedly evil glass and stabbed slithers and shards into the fretboard and left them there, was a sight to behold. I had promised the witch that I would go looking for the guitar which displayed the character of the image she had shown me, and here it was.

“The Prestige? Oh, now that is the best RG we’ve ever seen, touched or heard. DiMarzio pickups…” (my heart fluttered in anticipation of the richness of sound) “…two ‘buckers and a single in the middle, the pearloid edging here…” and his voice faded as I found my feet walking me towards the wall from which it was hanging. My right hand extended and grasped the neck delicately in case the glass shards laid into the fingerboard would at any moment slice me open, and lifted. It was practically weightless. And the neck… I could have died in that moment having known bliss. The wood was somehow soft to the touch, and warm, a lady’s delicate kiss. And the sounds she made, as I stroked her neck and played her heart-strings…

I left in a hurry to catch my breath, continuing my pacing around Manchester trying to shake the memories of the two instruments I had found out of all the others I had tried. I played more and more in other shops, including the twin of Desire, and each time I came back thinking, “but I have played the guitars of the spirits, and now these others feel like they are for mortals.”

I returned to Oxford Road, to the silvery-grey beauty with the shards of glass in her slender neck and her voice of a demon, beguiling and malevolent; to the blue-green-black saint that had lived up to his rock-and-roll bloodline and had given his life to win my musical heart. Back and forth between the two establishments I walked, I don’t know how many times, playing each and falling more and more in love with their unique styles, sounds and feels. I had to decide soon, for trading hours were almost over and I could not let either escape me. I had been possessed by these two forces, one latent but adept, the other beautiful and sinister.