Groody's Place wasn't helping. Smoke filled the air like deep fog in a harbor. The warm sound of a bass guitar pulsed through the hazy darkness, the musical foghorn keeping Alice conscious.
Alice was drunk. He'd been drunk for nigh on a decade. Alice was high. As a kite. But what was new.
Groody behind the bar saw Alice pull the bloody napkin from his mouth and let out a low whistle.
"Bark, you got to go to the hospital dude."
Alice spat the last taste of iron from his mouth into his empty shot glass. "You need to to shut the fuck up, Grood, and get me another."
No point arguing with Bark. Everyone knew that. Grood shook his head and took the empty glass. He went to the other end of the bar without replacing it.
Alice turned to the smoke obscured stage. Three men stood there, tossing music back and forth between each other like a dozen flaming torches. They never let a note fall, but grabbed it and swung it back around, into the air, to be caught and swung back. Alice loved it still, the perfect dance that was Jazz.
A hell of long time ago, Alice played the trumpet. If you asked the right people, in the right cities, in the right the dives, who "Bark" Gorman was, they were liable to wax poetic. Ask anyone else - literally anyone else - and you'd get a blank stare.
Alice had a career once, briefly, before his manager got him hooked on smack and stole everything. Since then, life had been a downhill slope. Alice was just about at the bottom.
Alice was at Groody's tonight with a purpose. A goal. Alice could feel whatever darkness or cancer was eating his lungs. He knew time was no longer of the essence, time was fucking up. So there was only one thing left to do.
Alice stood up at the bar and walked toward the stage, through the musty smoke, up those worn steps, interrupting the set. The guys up there kept playing, professionals. Bark tapped the trumpet player on the shoulder and the young man backed out of the wave of music.
"What the fuck man, I'm pla... oh shit. Hey, you're Bark Gorman. Shit man, I thought you were dead."
Bark smiled. "Not yet. Can I get on that. Left mine at home."
The star struck trumpeter took a second to realize Alice wanted his trumpet. But when it became clear to him he turned it right over. "Hell yes. You just sign it after or something."
Then the trumpeter interrupted his fellow musicians and took the microphone.
"Folks we got a treat for you tonight. If you recognize the name then you know you're in for some crazy shit. Bark motherfucking Gorman."
No one recognized the name. Groody swung around in surprise. Alice coughed one last time and put the trumpet to his lips. The original trumpeter got off stage and started recording with his cell phone. That video would become one of the most heavily analyzed recordings in human history.
Alice started real quiet, struggling with the instrument to get his breath and its sound. But slowly he gained strength, from a source even he couldn't identify. He led the bass and piano to and fro on a musical journey of escalating complexity and spirit. In the years to come that bassist and pianist would take on an otherworldly significance, not unlike the two criminals crucified beside Christ.
Bark played for an unbroken hour, until the room and every person in it, belonged to him and him alone.
But it wasn't the incredible music that made the video famous. It was what happened after the final, profound note Alice played. A crescendoing siren call from someplace deep and dark, lovely and unknown. It went on and on, the single perfect note, beyond the capacity of any human lungs to play. And, at last, as the sound broke, a light emanated from the brass opening of the instrument, brighter than the sun, but without heat. Audience members could look right into it without hurting their eyes.
A perfect white light shone, and lingered, and flew. And when it left, the body of Alice "Bark" Gorman was dead. And the audience burst into rapturous applause.
