Free Concert of Ghosts by Campbell Armstrong

called Cygnet. I got the names of all the people in the picture from the agency files. There were old addresses for three of the participants, but none for you or Maggie. I didn’t expect them to check out after all this time, and I was right. I thought I’d ask Obe if he knew the whereabouts of any of the subjects. I figured, say, a fifty-fifty chance. After all, that photograph made him famous. Maybe he was still in touch. It was worth a try. But I didn’t get further than a phone call to his wife, who says he sits in a room in an institution somewhere in Iowa. On good days, according to her, he can just about weave a few strands of a basket. On bad days, he tears up newspapers and babbles. He’s been in the same joint since 1968. Nobody’s quite sure what happened. One day he was seemingly okay, the next …” She snapped her thumb against her middle finger, suggesting the sound of a mind breaking like a fragile twig.
    Tennant opened the kitchen door and turned on the outside light. Small flares of moisture hung like gases in the reaches of electricity. He liked the rich sound of rain in the woods.
    â€œTwo dead kids, a photographer who’s lost it, and a couple of people I haven’t been able to trace.… That’s what I call all the elements of a good story, Harry.” She stood directly behind him. He could smell her perfume, mellow as a newly punctured peach.
    Flippantly he said, “Maybe the picture’s jinxed.” The rain was harder, the trees buckled. He wanted to step into the core of the thunderous noise. Suddenly the downpour slowed and the dark shed its turbulence.
    â€œYeah, right,” Alison Seagrove said. “Don’t you wonder at times? Don’t you ever ask yourself about your black holes or whatever you call them? Is this your whole life, Harry? These woods. Your precious plants. Is this all? It’s not much, is it? Was it ever enough?”
    â€œIt was okay,” he answered. “It was a life, and I lived it, and I lived it quite happily.”
    â€œHow long have you been here?”
    â€œNine years. A little more.”
    â€œBefore that? Did you grow dope someplace else?”
    â€œBefore I came here you mean?”
    â€œRight. Between the time you lived in the Haight and the time you came here, what did you do with yourself?”
    â€œI …”
    And he stopped.
    It was as if his mind were a room plunged suddenly into stillness. He walked to the end of the porch and breathed the wet air deeply. He wondered why he was struggling so to get his lungs going. The darkness in his head was bleaker than anything in the woods out there. “Well, Harry? Or have drugs rubbed out all that too?”
    He didn’t speak. He scanned his mind frantically, trying to bring back some memory that would enable him to answer the girl. He felt as if he were rubbing sticks together in the brain in the hope of creating the friction of recall. A tiny flame. Anything. You’ll be okay boyo. You’ll lead a happy life . That voice. Did madness lie in this direction—amnesia, voices, messages from your personal ether? He shut his eyes, frowned in desperate concentration. Nothing came back from the void. It was a gulley without echoes. Go back, Harry. Back before this place. Back and back. What do you come to? “I don’t …” He opened his eyes and looked at the woods and he thought: Nine years in this place is all I have. Where is the rest of me? There was slippage going on; more than slippage. He was slithering down a slope, kicking up nothing but scree.
    â€œYou don’t know, is that it?” she asked.
    â€œWait. Gimme a minute.” He gripped the porch rail, felt rain blow against his face. “Gimme a minute,” he said again. Why was he having this difficulty in fixing that part of his history? The surge of panic he experienced threatened to consume him. Control, Harry. Slow down.
    â€œOkay.