A little after midnight, the muertos show up. They’re always in their Sunday best, dressed to the nines, as they say, in pinstriped suits and fancy dresses. Some of them even have those crazy Spanish flamenco skirts on. They wear expensive hats and white gloves. While the children sleep, the muertos gather around my little desk on the fifth floor foyer and carry on. Mostly they dance, but a few of them bring instruments: old wooden guitars and basses, tambores, trumpets. Some of them show up with strange ones that I’ve never seen before—African, I think—and then I have to figure out how to transpose whatever-it-is into the piano/horn section arrangement I’m used to.
Look, their music is close enough to what I’d write anyway, so either they’re some part of my subconscious or it’s a huge supernatural coincidence—really, what are the chances? So either way I don’t feel bad jotting down the songs. Besides, I started bringing my own little toy store carry-along keyboard and accompanying them. Course I keep the volume low so as not to wake up the little ones.
There’s a jangle to the music of the dead. I mean that certain something that’s so happy and so sad at the same time. The notes almost make a perfect harmony but don’t. Then they do but quickly crash into dissonance. They simmer in that sweet in-between, rhythm section rattling along all the while. Chords collapse chaotically into each other, and just when you think the whole thing’s gonna spill into total nonsense, it stands back up and comes through sweet as a lullaby on your mami’s lips. Songs that’ll make people tap their feet and drink melancholically but not realize the twisting genius lurking within until generations later. That’s the kind of music I make, and the dead do too. We make it together.
Tonight was different, though. The muertos didn’t show up. They never scared me. If anything they kept me company in those wee hours. But this, this silence, made me shiver and feel like I was both being watched by a thousand unfriendly eyes and all alone in the world. I looked down that empty hallway. Tried to imagine my brand-new-long-lost friends making their shadowy way up towards me, but it remained empty.
Just to have something to do, I made the rounds. Each troubled young lump in its curled up spot. Some nights when I don’t feel like doing my music, I read their files. Their twisted little sagas unwind through evaluation forms and concerned emails. Julio plays with himself at meal times. Devon isn’t allowed near mirrors on the anniversary of his rape. Tiffany hides knives in case the faceless men come back for her. But night after night, they circle into themselves like those little curlup bugs and drift off into sleep.
One bed, though, was empty. The cut out construction paper letters on the door spelled MARCOS. A little Ecuadorian kid, if I remembered his file right. Untold horrors. Rarely spoke. The muertos being gone was bad in a supernatural, my-immortal-soul kind of way and Marcos being gone was bad in a frowning-Nancy-in-the-morning, lose-my-job kind of way, and I wasn’t really sure which was worse. I turned and walked very quickly back down the hallway. First I spot-checked all the rooms I’d already passed just in case little man was crouching in one of the corners unnoticed. But I knew he wasn’t. I knew wherever Marcos was, there would be a whole lot of swaying shrouds with him. Remember I told you sometimes I just know stuff? This was one of those things. Besides, I don’t believe in coincidence. Not when kids and the dead are involved.
When I got to the end of the hallway, I stood still and just panted and sweated for a minute. That’s when I heard the noise coming from one of the floors below. It was just barely there, a ghost of a sound really, and kept fading away and coming back. Like the little twinkling of a music box, far, far away.
To the untrained eye, I appear bumbling. You can see my blood vessels strain tight to support my girth. My hands are ungainly and callused. For a man who makes such heart-wrenching, subtle melodies, I am not delicate. But if you were to watch me in slow-mo, you would then understand that really I am a panther. A slow, overweight panther, perhaps, but still, there is a fluidity to me—a certain poise. I flowed, gigantic and cat-like, down the five flights of stairs to the lobby, pausing at each landing to catch my breath and check for signs of stroke or heart attack. Infarto, in Spanish, so that in addition to perhaps dying you have the added discomfort of it sounding like you were laid low by a stinky shot of gas.
The lobby is covered in posters that are supposed to make the children feel better about having been abused and discarded. Baby animals snuggle amidst watercolor nature drawings. It’s a little creepy.
The noise was still coming from somewhere down below, definitely the basement. I wasn’t thrilled about this, was hoping the muertos had simply gathered in the lobby (perhaps to enjoy the inspirational artwork) but can’t say I was surprised either. I opened the old wooden door that leads down the last flight of stairs and took a deep breath. Each step registered my presence unenthusiastically. At the bottom, I reached into the darkness till my hand swatted a dangling chain. The bulb was dim. It cast an uneven, gloomy light on a cluttered universe of broken furniture, file cabinets and forgotten papier-maché projects.
I followed the noise through the shadows. I could now make it out definitively to be a melody, a lonely, minor key melody, beautiful like a girl with one eye standing outside a graveyard. I rounded a corner and then held perfectly still. Before me hovered all my friends, the muertos, with their backs turned to me. I tried to see past them but they were crowded together so densely it was impossible. Ever so quietly, I crept forward among them, their chilly undead shadows sending tiny earthquakes down my spine.
The muertos were gathered around a doorway. I entered and found myself in this dank boiler room. At the far end, little Marcos sat calmly in a niche of dusty pipes and wiring. He held my carry-along in his lap. His eyes were closed and his fingers glided up and down the keys. Between myself and Marcos, about thirty small muertos, muertocitos, bobbed up and down, their undivided attention on the boy. You know—I never think much about those who die as children—what their wandering souls must deal with. Who watches over them, checks on those small, curly-bug lumps at night? The ghost children were transfixed; I could feel their love for this boy and his music as surely as I felt the pulse pounding in my head.
And, to be quite honest with you, at first I too found myself lost in the swirling cascade of notes coming from my little keyboard. It is rare that I feel humbled, rarer still that it would happen because of a ten year old, but I’m not above admitting it. The song filled the heavy boiler room air, so familiar and so brand-new. It was a mambo, but laced with the saddest melody I’ve ever heard—some unholy union of Mozart and Perez Prado that seemed to speak of so many drunken nights and whispered promises. It tore into me, devoured me and pieced me back together a brand new man.