So I'd turned it off and listened to something else—tried listening to something else. Except nothing else worked anymore. Everything sounded shallow.
And that's when I got it—
—not all of it, but enough.
Jazz isn't music. Jazz is what happens when the music disappears and all that's left is the sound and the emotion connected to it. Jazz is a scream or a rant or a sigh. Or whatever else is inside, trying to get out.
And when you listen to it like that, you don't have to understand it. All you have to do is get it. And in the middle of the night, with my headphones clamped to my head, in the middle of a scorching saxophone riff that had to be about anger and love and frustration and hurt all wrapped into one gritty scream of sound, I got it—that sound was about how somebody felt and right now it was about how I felt. And I got it.
And after that, whenever I wanted to get away from Mom or Dad, but especially whenever I wanted to get away from Mom and Dad, I went to the music and the music I went to was John Coltrane, and I'd listen with my hands holding the headphones tight to my ears until I heard the sound that was me, and then I knew I was all right. I wasn't alone. There was someone else who knew. Or who had known. And it was all right for a while. A little while, anyway.
If I had my way, I'd listen to music forever. But sooner or later, usually sooner, somebody wants something, and they're never polite about it. They never say, "Oh, I see Charles is listening to his music, I'll come back later." Instead, they always say, "If you're not doing anything ... " Excuse me? I am doing something. I'm listening to my music. But what they're really saying is, "What I want is so much more important than what you want that what you want is irrelevant." And usually, it comes out as "Chigger, would you take those damn headphones off and listen to me!!" I don't think I've ever gotten to the end of any music.
And this time, I didn't either—
This time it was a kid. A skinny kid in T-shirt and baggy over-shirt, shorts, and scabby knees. I had a weird feeling like someone was watching me and I opened my eyes and there he was, standing right in front of me, staring. My age maybe. But smaller. Brown hair, cut very short. Goofy smile. He tilted his head sideways with a funny sort of expression, but I couldn't hear what he was saying, and even though I didn't want to take off the headphones—I was listening to The Paris Concert—my concentration had already been broken, and wherever I had been I wasn't getting back there tonight, if ever, so I peeled the headphones off my ears and said, "What?"
"I said, 'What are you listening to?' " He had a soft girlish voice.
Nobody ever asked that before. Nobody ever cared enough. "Why do you want to know?"
"Because you had such a strange look on your face, I wanted to know what program you were running."
"I wasn't running a program. I was listening to music. Have you ever heard of John Coltrane?"
He scratched his head—some people do that when they think, probably because thinking makes their brain itch, but this kid actually went into a momentary trance—then he snapped out of it, frowning. He said, "One of the most influential jazz saxophonists of the nineteen-fifties. Died of liver cancer in 1967. Recorded with Miles Davis and McCoy Tyner and Thelonious Monk. The recordings he made for Impulse are generally regarded as his best, in particular—"
"What are you plugged into?" I interrupted.
"Nothing." He grinned.
"You've got all that in your head?"
He nodded and tapped the space above his right ear. "Built in."
I didn't say anything, I just sorta sucked in my cheeks. Augments are expensive. Whoever this kid was, he was worth a lot of money. Or his family was.
"Is he any good?"
"Who?"
"Coltrane."
"I thought you knew—"
"Not yet, but I will ... in a little bit." He scratched his head again.
"That won't work."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because it won't. You can't listen to Coltrane. Not like you listen to anybody else. That's why."
"How do you listen to Coltrane?"
I shook my head. "It can't be explained. You just gotta go out there where the music lives and live there with it."
He frowned, puckering up his mouth while he turned my words over in his head. It was a funny expression. I bet his grandma liked to pinch his cheek and say, "Look at this, isn't this such a cute little face, I could eat it up." And I bet he hated it too.
Abruptly, he finished with whatever he was thinking about. He said, "My name's J'mee, what's yours?"
"Chi—Charles."
"How far are you going? We're going to the moon."
"For a vacation?"
"Uh-uh. To live. What about you?"
"Um, we're supposed to be going to Geostationary, but ... we might go farther."
"The moon?"
I shrugged. "Dad was talking about a brightliner. I don't know if he was serious."
"Your Dad is like mine."
"Huh?"
"Daddy says the Earth is getting too dangerous."
"I don't think it's that bad."
"Where are you from?"
"El Paso. Where are you from?"
J'mee shrugged. "All over."
"Yeah, but where do you call 'home'?"
"The last place was Edmonton. Daddy does a lot of traveling for the company."
"What does your dad do?"
"He's a conductor."
"Really? So's mine!" I was suddenly interested. "What orchestra does your dad work with?"
"No. My dad's an electrical conductor. Or sometimes he says he's a 'power broker.' For the Line. Do you know that the Line generates electricity? A lot. It has something to do with poles and potentials and moving through the Earth's magnetic field and generating super-currents. Do you know what super-currents are?"
"Lightning."
"Yeah, that's the short explanation. But super-currents are part of what holds the Line up. You probably don't want to know this, most people don't, but the Line isn't strong enough to hold itself up. Earth's gravity is just a little too high, and the molecular bonds aren't strong enough to withstand the strain. But when you run a supercurrent through superconducting carbon-doped titanium-ceramic alloys you get a superbond, with the current doing most of the work. Daddy says the Line is made of lightning, that's how much power is flowing through it."
"Oh, yeah," I said. "I knew that." Sort of. Lightning, huh? I looked at the huge cables just outside the windows with new respect.
"Don't you think it's scary?" J'mee said.
I shrugged. Yes, it was scary. But I wasn't going to admit it. I looked around the lounge, feeling suddenly uncomfortable. This was the feeling that I'd had down below just before we started up, only worse. I wished J'mee would change the subject.
Instead, he nattered on: "Daddy says, if you could turn the current off, the whole thing would fall down—the Line would come apart in a million little explosions. Doesn't that make you feel gooshy inside? But don't worry. You can't turn the current off. It's automatic. The Line generates it because one end is sticking out in space and the other is connected to the Earth, and even if it weren't covered with windmills and solar skin, it would still generate electricity because of all the different potentials. And that electricity has to be drained off to keep the potentials unbalanced and keep the current flowing.