The Wild Harmonic Read online

  Shame boils in my belly.

  I finally recognized that I was better off alone. But then I began recording with Rowan and found that we laughed easily together, sharing a love of “outsider music” and egregious B-movies. I had stopped daring to dream of true love by then, and tried to bury the notion of more than friendship with this compelling music man. But at my first whiff of his lycanthropic scent, I could no longer repress my hope for a deeper connection.

  Now, everything is different. I have my pack: Sylvia duBois, Raúl Makamu, Teddy Lee, and Rowan López. My whole world has just expanded. I will give the gigs my all and try to be an asset to the pack.

  What do I really want in life, true love or a successful career? I am supposed to be hard-wired to strive for a successful music career. It’s the eternal hunt, always pushing for more. According to the masses, performers aren’t supposed to feel pain. They aren’t supposed to have hobbies, confidantes, or even boundaries. This is the age of instant gratification, and we are expected to be available to the public at any given moment. But the tiny bits of glory, the places I’ve gone, the things I’ve seen … I’ve tasted enough to want to stay in the game.

  But at some point, happiness and true love would be a nice option.

  Perhaps the simple, basic necessity of belonging is enough. It’s going to be a fine line to tread: a balance between pack, career, and hope for love. I hope to every higher power that I don’t screw this up.

  I shake myself out of my musings like a dog come in from the rain. I’ve just walked almost three miles, and haven’t even thought about it. I’m almost to the New Orleans Music Exchange. I need new bass strings, and it will be good for me to drop in and say hi to everyone. A dose of the normal would be good medicine, if hanging with musical equipment dealers could be considered normal.

  Just before I reach the cross street of Louisiana Avenue, a shriek nearly makes my heart stop. It isn’t a human cry of terror, but it sets my every nerve on edge. Ignoring the traffic and indignant horns, I go pelting across the road, off to the side of my destination, and find the source of the sound. It’s a dead mockingbird draped over the roots of the old oak tree down the block. I shrug off any advice I’ve ever heard about handling dead wildlife and lightly put a finger to its breast. The bird is still limp and warm, eyes and mouth wide open as if to scream, and I stare until my neck prickles.

  Mingling with the outside world no longer appeals to me, and the safety of my own house screams my name. I buy my strings as quickly as possible, catch the bus home, and lock myself inside. Lighting some candles and incense, I choose my favorite bass, my Rickenbacker, plug into my small practice amp, and dial up some comfort and grounding. I play into the late hours in a vain attempt to drown out the shriek that still resonates in my mind.

  CHAPTER

  3

  THEORY AND PRACTICE

  My phone rings just as I am waking up, and I silently commend this caller for waiting until a decent hour to summon a nocturnal musician. Then I see that it’s Teddy, which makes sense. “Hey, packmate,” he croons. “We need to have a rehearsal.”

  “Huh?” Having two basses on a gig isn’t unheard of around here. I’ve seen groups with two electrics, electric and upright, or even electric and sousaphone. Teddy and I have often considered covering the two-bass masterpiece “The Maker” by Daniel Lanois, but I don’t recall having been booked for a two-bass gig with him.

  His familiar chuckle wrests a grin from my lips. “Code talk. It’s our first pack meeting together. You know, like if we’re going to be a pack, we have to actually be in one place now and then. Rowan has a room at the Fountainbleau.”

  “The Fountainbleau?” Tipitina’s Fountainbleau, just off of Tulane Avenue, is a former Mid-City hotel turned complex of rehearsal spaces and studios for musicians to rent long term. It seems like an unlikely meeting place for a bunch of potentially dangerous shape-shifting carnivores, since there are people all over the facility at every hour.

  He laughs again at my pre-coffee stupor. “Okay, so we’re freaks of nature, but we’re musicians nonetheless. What better place to hide than among a bunch of fellow nutjobs? Especially since so many of them are insomniacs anyway. I know your car is still in the shop, so I’ll pick you up in an hour. Bring your bass, but don’t worry about backline—Rowan says that we have amps.”

  Hiding in plain sight. He’s right, of course. Congregating in nature within a day’s drive might only tempt some yahoo with a shotgun. I can’t wait to see what this rehearsal is all about.

  The old eight-story building is a familiar sight to me. From many varied rehearsals and recording sessions out here, I am already well acquainted with the pleasant, slightly musty smell of hundreds of individual A/C units tempering each room—or not. On the ground floor just before the elevators is a large vending machine replete with nearly everything a musician might need in a pinch: individual guitar and bass strings, picks, drumsticks, earplugs, blank CDs, and nine-volt batteries. Going deeper into the giant hive I can hear the bleed-through of sounds from assorted bands. Unbeknownst to the players, they create a private cacophonous symphony for the outsider’s listening pleasure, comprised of funk, blues, and heavy metal. At the top floor, we pad silently down the long halls that could pass for hotel corridors save for the cement floors and uncarpeted walls. It looks more like a disciplinary school for wayward players, a strict institution that no longer carries any threat or shame.

  Raúl and Sylvia appear to have arrived a split second before us, standing in front of a small door on the left. Raúl grins and queries, “We should have some sort of secret knock or something, shouldn’t we?” He raps out a flurried rhythm with his knuckles. Teddy snorts, “Morse code for the Toronto airport isn’t exactly a secret knock, you caveman drummer!” Before Raúl can retort, the door jerks open.

  And then we enter the tiny room, and I step into what feels like another universe.

  Aside from the expected small size of a practice room—probably sixteen by twelve feet—this space is like no other cell here in which I’ve done rehearsal time. The soft illumination seems to come from everywhere, easy on light-sensitive eyes. A whiff of something rich and familiar, maybe cedar, blurs the olfactory traces of the outside world. Instead of the usual band stickers and grimy concert flyers hanging on the pressboard walls, there are vibrant tapestries of mandalas and colorful cushions offsetting our pack equipment. There is a pristine seven-piece drum kit with state of the art cymbals for Raúl to use, a few brand-new amps for everyone else, some mic stands, three vocal mics, a small monitor, and a modest mixing console. There’s something else different about this room, a soft veil that can only be detected with a gut feeling. It’s the same sort of hocus-pocus protection about that enabled us to go unnoticed in the parking lot the other night. This explains why, unlike the other rooms, there is no sonic bleed-through in here, which probably means that no one can hear us either.

  Rowan is waiting inside, and he is a completely different man. Gone is the passive, patient veneer, replaced by his stronger nature: flame and steel and ferocity. His cheekbones are more pronounced, and although his form looks the same, something beneath his skin seems harder, leaner, and more intense. But he smells the same, and his eyes are still kind.

  I smile at him with a mixture of joy and shyness, like greeting a lover in the morning after a first tryst. His black eyes sparkle. “Buzz! Welcome to your new life of fully accepting who you are,” he greets me in a voice that seems to have gained overtones. “We are, after all, a hybrid of the two most misunderstood creatures in the world: the wolf and the musician. And welcome everyone else! The pack is complete at last.” This is met with a few cheers and yips.

  I am at a loss for words. “This is … quite the private facility!” I blurt out.

  “It needs to be for what we’re going to be pulling off,” Teddy supplies. “Let’s face it: musicians can be narcissists, substance abusers, swindlers, eccentric assholes, and just plain crazy. And werew
olves … well, we can be almost as bloodthirsty as any other musician. This is why in this combination of lives, we have to work twice as hard to not make waves. Can you imagine what would happen if we were the worst of both worlds?”

  I shudder. “I would hate to imagine. At least it feels secure in this room, almost like no one knows that we’re here.” And it really is a safe haven, part den, part temple, and part playground.

  Rowan turns his smile on me, and my heart flips. “Secrecy is one of the most important things of all,” he explains. “We are far more endangered than we have ever been dangerous. Now that you have come into your own, you need to be aware of how surreptitiously you need to live your dual nature. You also need to know about warding and shielding. This is crucial to remaining undetected. Using the power of your consciousness, you can disguise your scent, even to other lycans. You can also obfuscate your energy signals, keeping yourself safe from humans.”

  “But wouldn’t a whiff of a rumor that I am potentially a little dangerous make people back off?” I blurt out. The infinite patience in Rowan’s eyes smarts worse than a jab. I get the hint: apparently I have “stupid question Tourette’s syndrome” today.

  Raúl suddenly appears grim and pensive. “Trust me, little one: if we were so invincible, we wouldn’t have to go into hiding. Humans are capable of genocide toward other humans … how do you think they would react toward a people like us? Fear brings out true monstrosities. Remaining warded will spare you a lot of danger, not to mention heartbreak.”

  Rowan cuts off the solemnity at its knees, interjecting, “Ok, enough already. Let us howl!” He ends his command with a dramatic flair, releasing the tension.

  I notice that there are cushions on the floor for five people, but it isn’t laid out in a perfect circle, or even a symmetrical pentagram if the lines had been connected. Rowan’s seat is the largest, and the rest of us take up smaller stations in a semicircle facing him. One large and four small, and then I realize that the layout from above resembles a wolf’s pawprint.

  “Buzz, you were an oboist once. How about giving us a note?”

  “Come again?” is my dumbfounded response. I haven’t played oboe since college, and even then, it was only so I could get that sweet scholarship that enabled me to attend without the threat of paying off student loans until the end of time.

  Teddy chuckles. “Many musical packs tend to think in terms of a starting note. You know how the principal oboist gives the orchestra an A, and everyone tunes up to that note? You have the best sense of pitch … I think you ought to be the one. What do the rest of you guys think?”

  I am dubious. “Should the alpha be the one …?” I don’t know much about wolves, but I do happen to know that in true wolf packs, there tends to be an Alpha male and Alpha female, lower ranking Betas, and an Omega, who is not a low man on the totem pole, but rather a peacekeeper or court jester.

  Rowan appears thoughtful. “Many conventional rules go out the window when it comes to lycan bands. One of the biggest mistakes that people make is to apply human traits to wolves, and the reverse is also true. We are not entirely wolves, and we are not entirely human, either. Because we belong to neither one nor the other, some lycans remain loners, but most naturally gravitate toward each other and form packs. Different packs find each other based on common strengths of our lupine senses—for us it is our sharp hearing, while others bond based on their sensitivity to lunar phases, group dynamics, or smell and instinctively form small groups of preternatural communities. For example, many lycans make superb wine experts, social workers, oceanographers, or in our case musicians. We all channel it different ways.”

  I recall that my cousin Bonnie MacKinlay back in Scotland is a whisky expert. I wonder if she’s one of us, and if she could be harnessing her lycan skills with enhanced sense of smell.

  Rowan cuts through my tangent. “Earth to Buzz! Do you want to give this a shot?”

  I am oddly pleased to be asked, almost pathetically so. I never had any aspirations of being a great oboe player in college—I was having too much fun playing bass on Frenchmen Street every night, much to the dismay of my advisors. I had a good tone, which made me come across as a better player than I actually was, but my heart was never in it. My days as principal oboist came to an end when I could no longer contain my subversive humor, and decided that it would be funny to give the orchestra a B-flat instead.

  Now I sit back and clear my throat. No, throat clearing is bad for voices. The rest of the pack is looking at me with kind patience, waiting for me to figure something out. At first I feel stupid. I have howled in complete wolf form, but something about doing this in human form feels something cross between childish and disingenuous. I decide that I’m overthinking this, and unfocus my mind a little. I take a deep breath and a yawn bursts forth: a yawn with a high-whistling overtone, sounding much like a big, lazy dog. I can feel it in my sinuses and soft palette. I think I’m onto something. I raise my head and instead of trying to land directly on the note, I croon a gentle rising howl that eases its way into the standard A concert pitch. Nothing resonates.

  Finally I try shutting off my mind and reaching for a feeling in the note vicinity, a bit lower in pitch but with feeling, something that no orchestra has ever required of me. This time something opens in my mind and a tingle runs down my spine.

  The others gradually join in. Not in the perfect fifths and fourths that string players play, striving to all become a perfect colony. Not the flurry of wind players, running across their favorite licks to get into their comfort zones. This is something simpler … and at the same time way more intricate. Tones glide around each other, not limited to any paltry western scale of twelve distinct notes. I had no idea how limiting absolute pitches and perfect intervals could be. In the howl, the musical potential is infinite. It’s the difference between a paint-by-number kit and a finely blended oil painting. In a slight trance, I feel the tones swirling around with all five of my senses.

  It reminds me of a music therapy workshop I once attended years ago. We learned a technique called “vocal toning”. Someone started with a vocal note, and everyone joined in, relative notes somehow finding each other, tonal centers changing and everyone gradually going with the flow, like a school of fish all changing direction at once, or thousands of starlings in flight—natural and primitive. It had nothing to do with performance and everything to do with raw emotion. I had been nearly lightheaded at the end, feeling as though I had been slightly tranced out … it had been a powerful experience.

  This goes beyond even that. I am more than a voice box musical instrument, a speaker cone, or a radio receiver. I surrender to just loving the sound of my note as it merges with other tones, drifts away from them into complex intervals, and then reunites with the drone. All the pleasure centers in my brain have been short-wired to my auditory perception. I feel the pull of the tides in my veins and I feel the wind over the earth. Human minds judge a performance, but lycan minds are all about a connection.

  The music naturally begins to decay and fade out, and with a satisfied sigh we all turn towards Rowan. It’s obvious to me that Rowan is the Alpha, and everyone else just sort of falls into a natural order like notes in a chord, with Rowan as the tonic.

  Democracy in a band is a nice concept, but everyone knows that it’s seldom the reality. It’s also far less stressful in the long run to have someone have the final say-so, so long as there is mutual respect.

  I can no longer contain myself. I glance at Rowan. “So, are you the Alpha of this organization, or what?”

  Rowan’s smile is maddeningly ambiguous. “We may be part human and part beast, but we are all musician. A traditional ranking does not apply as it does in other packs of lycans or true wolves. There are different rules for different packs, not unlike different systems of government for different nations. Basically what works for most musical packs is just ‘stay in the groove.’ Don’t give it too much thought. Musical lycan packs are unlike most bands�
��we are loyalty-based, with the intent to have no backstabbing or power struggles. We have to set our egos aside in order to survive.”

  “But yes, Little One, Rowan is our Alpha,” adds Raúl. “When we discussed forming a pack a few years ago, I more or less insisted. He has the most musical experience and sharpest instincts. His wisdom has been legendary for decades, and forming this pack was his brainchild.” It occurs to me that I have no idea how old Rowan really is, or even Raúl. Wolves don’t tend to live much longer than a decade in captivity—even less in the wild—and humans decline altogether too soon. I wonder if the two factors cancel each other out?

  “I am happy to be his right hand man,” Raúl continues, now speaking to us all. “As far as finding the rest of you, we didn’t have to try very hard to decide who we wanted. All we had to do was sit back and observe the scene over the past year. The cream always rises to the top, and the answers became obvious. Teddy, with his fluid social skills and teamwork ethos, was eager to join the party. Sylvia was already clinging to her newfound reclusive life, and took a little more convincing. But when she realized how much good she could do as a spiritual advisor to other lycans, she welcomed the prospect.”

  “Hey, I didn’t want to miss all of the fun!” the nun gently protests.

  “But you, Little One,” he says turning to me, “you were the most stubborn!” He lightly raps my skull with his knuckles. “Hardheaded! You hang onto your secrets so hard, you should be part bulldog! And that is actually a very important trait, to be able to guard secrets.”

  “Let’s take a break,” Rowan’s voice is a benevolent command. “We need to address a major issue, here. We old farts—Raúl and yours truly—know most of the shifters in the local music scene. Buzz, I have a feeling that no one has told you yet that shape-shifters are far from limited to lycanthropes. You’ll catch up on all the lore during your training. In any case, we lost one of our own yesterday. Have you guys heard of Alma’s passing?”