Lloyd’s legs dangled from his wooden stool when we played live. As his cheeks billowed and the saxophone wailed those stout appendages of his, never quite reaching the floor, popped and jolted with a terrific elasticity, striking the air like snakes. The music’s intoxication would wheel up from his lower half and convulse the whole of him, gut and chest and arms and all. First-time attendees of our shows wondered if an invisible wire throttled his neck. The uninitiated watched slack-jawed as Lloyd seemed to huff the last gasp of his strangled soul into the reed between his lips. And their notion wasn’t completely wrong, for that was how the music had always taken him…into the Valley of Death, and back out again.
            When I first started playing with him, Lloyd Brun transited between our mundane plane and that sonic oblivion of his like an amphibian between water and land. At every show, he plunged into its iridescent depths to bring forth its beguiling gospel into our world.
            His God-given talent provided the key to the wellspring. He came to view his sojourns there as his purpose on this earth, as an obligation to his fellow man. For with his dazzling melodies, he could lead that most primitive and powerful of rituals, the gathering of souls for musical communion. The need for such shamans was the same then as it was tens of thousands of years prior when the first humans huddled around a fire and modeled a drumbeat after the pounding of their own hearts, thumping a rhythm in the night as a countermeasure against the primordial darkness.
            That seductive realm was no different than a powerful drug, always beckoning to him in its promise of fecundity, gifting him the fruits of altered consciousness. Yet when the show lights quit and when the tours ended, Lloyd was somehow unchanged. He seemed an addict who bore no outward signs of his vice, a messiah without the nail wounds.
            His audiences, however, were not so unaffected. In the kaleidoscopic hues of back-alley, brick-walled clubs, his faithful heaved, cackled, spoke in tongues when he played. They quickly forgot the dinners and cocktails arrayed on their gingham-clothed tables when the spirit slid into them. His possession made the holiest woman jig, the severest man howl and swoon. Long after the shows, those flirtations with the musical divine remained in their hearts like a stent. Meanwhile, Lloyd trotted on, bald and silk-shirted, to bring another flock in some distant city to befuddling bliss, always mining more creative gold from that strange and ethereal dimension unlocked by his gift, channeling its mysteries into his music. I never thought he would pay a price.
            “I think we’re lucky to be alive,” I told him and Angel and Xavier one night after we had retired from the stage to a back-room, windowless hideaway that stank of cigarettes. “That wiring’s got to be from Prohibition. With all our amps taxing it there was a good chance we all burned up tonight.”
            “Plenty of night left.”
            With a grin of porcelain teeth Xavier uncorked a bottle at the pre-set bar and brought it over to the faded black couch. Angel raised her glass and Xav poured the whiskey into it as he wrestled his other drumming glove off with his teeth.
            “That’s how B.B. King named his guitar,” added Angel as she lay back in the couch’s folds. I sat in a plaid armchair across from her.
            “In a fire?”
            “Basically,” she said and sipped. “Well, after the lady that started the fire. You haven’t heard that song?”
            Xav plopped down next to Angel with a contented sigh. He undid the knot of his tie and opened his vest. “I give my set too much of a beating to ever name it.”
            “Didn’t stop me,” she responded. “Lydia is tough.”
            “‘Lydia?’”
            “After my high school bass instructor,” Angel smiled nostalgically. “She had a crush on me.”
            “I bet.”
            I turned to where Lloyd sat at a small table against the wall on the other side of the low-ceilinged loft. “What about you, chief?” I called. “Does your sax have a name you never told us about?”
            Lloyd looked vacantly along the dingy brick wall running beside him. The dim light of the room reflected off his scalp. His shoulders drooped like wilted leaves and his snake-charmer’s hands gripped his legs. On the wall behind him black-and-white, autographed portraits of crooners, celebrities, and politicians hung in procession and peered outward, eternally sizing up the acts who followed them.
            We watched him for a moment, waiting.
            “Lloyd?”
            At my word, a blink peppered his dark, heavily lidded eyes, as though we had startled him. His head swiveled to the couch. There was a dislocation in his gaze, like he didn’t recognize us or his surroundings.
            Angel and Xav fidgeted under his heavy stare. Xav whispered something to her that sounded mocking.
            I got up. Lloyd watched me as I approached and sat opposite him, leaning forward with my elbows on my knees.
            “I thought the new single went better tonight, huh? The crowd loved it.”
            Emerald clouds swirled in his irises as he examined my face. He rubbed his thighs with his palms like he was trying to smooth out the creases of his grey pants. I watched him, holding my breath, as he groped around in that fog in search of a ladder by which to climb out. A fatherly concern flashed into his eyes, weepy with exhaustion.
            “Cliff, how are your hands?”
            I looked down at them. They were grasped between my knees. Just a few years into my tenure with him our shows started selling out and we swaggered in the big-time. I felt like enough of a rock star to justify drinking like one. After enough of that debauchery my hands, really my brain, rebelled. Halfway through shows, my fingers would seize up and go numb. I offered to quit the band, horrified at the idea that I was dragging him down. Hundreds more talented than me would have lined up to play with him, but he wouldn’t allow it. He paid to get me into rehab. After I sobered up, the neuropathy healed. I owed him nothing short of my life and career. But it had been years, close to a decade, since I had touched a bottle or since my hands gave me a problem.
            “They’re good, Lloyd. Getting old and spindly, but good.”
            “Good, good, Cliff.”
            His pupils bubbled with lucidity. He slapped my knee. “Yeah, the new single! The crowd was on our wavelength,” he crowed. “I love the clubs here. People know how to have a good time.”
            I laughed and nodded to conceal my relief. Angel and Xavier remained on the couch. Xav grimaced, ogling Lloyd like he was a mutant.
            “Amen. They were under your spell.”
            His decline started like that, innocuous at first. Only those close to him saw the deterioration. It was hidden in little moments. His gaze wandered astray; he forgot names and biographical details. On tour, I could hear him in the hotel room beside mine. Awake through the night, pacing, flipping the television on and off. I had seen the same anxious peregrinations in my mother before she passed. But unlike her when she faltered, his mood did not swing to extremes. Much the opposite; his charisma, which I’d for so long watched him wield to command his congregation like the moon sculpting the tide, deflated. It was a premonition of catatonia. His wife Verna, who at the rare show she was able to attend, would press me to encourage positive habits in him, told me his doctor saw dementia, possibly Alzheimer’s in his fading.
            Before long, his condition bled into public. I winced as he tried to maintain the old masterful rapport with his audiences. They loved him and so they forgave the forgetting of city names, the punchlines of jokes, the long pauses and torturous silences after songs. Those multicolored lights fanned over his roaming face as he looked out at assemblages of sudden strangers: wondering who they were, why they had him under the gun of their expectation. Feeling, like a delicate child, that he had failed them.
            “Cliff,” he caught my arm.
            I stopped.
            “Hang back for a spell.”
            Angel and our new drummer Derrick were halfway out the hotel room door. Xavier had dropped out after a bad night in Chicago, saying he was getting off the ship before it sank completely. He had four inches and thirty pounds on me and yet, I had almost swung at him for how he had demeaned Lloyd in his whispers. Angel looked back and I nodded to her. She smiled and she and Derrick went out. The room was silent save for the hum of the little fridge by the television.
            He sat at the room’s cheap particle board desk. A plastic cup on its edge contained a jumble of his watch and rings, a device against their misplacement. I lowered myself to the edge of the bed opposite him.
            “I’m keeping you?”
            I scoffed.
            “No. It’s easier for me this way, believe it. I’m getting old.”
            He rasped a laugh.
            “Tell me about old. You wouldn’t believe what it’s like.” His left hand rose to his throat and he rubbed the jowls under his chin.
            “The fans can’t seem to tell. The crowds keep getting bigger.”
            “The crowds,” he snorted. His nostrils expanded. “The music. It all goes away if I don’t have my head.”
            I waited for him to continue.
            “Sometimes, Cliff,” he began and looked down, talking at the floor, “I worry that I’m losing it. One moment I’m here, I think I am, and then when I look around, I realize it’s a trick. It’s some older time. Years, sometimes decades older. Full of people and places who are long gone now. Then I snap back and everything’s foreign to me. I just float, like I’m suspended in water…” He trailed off.
            A knot tied in my throat.
            “I know that’s why Xavier left,” he added and raised his eyes to me.
            “Forget Xavier.”
            “He was a cocky prick, but he was talented. No, he saw what’s happening to me for what it is.” He expelled a sigh of fatigue and slouched back. “Verna thinks it’s about time I gave it all up. She’s been having foresight of some accident.”
            “She’s just worried for you.”
            “Maybe she’s right. Maybe this,” he tapped twice on the side of his head, “is what she warned about. One long, drawn-out calamity.”
            A raucous party of shouts and feet passed in the hall outside the room and died away. The mini fridge’s motor droned on quietly in the backdrop.
            “What do you think?”
            He looked at me and his eyes worked over the question. He threw up his hands and brought them down on his jeaned thighs.
            “Lord, Cliff. If I knew…” He shook his head despondently. “I’ve had my time. There’s Verna and my kids, their kids. I want to see them grow.” His eyelids quivered. “I don’t want to die on some dirty basement stage in Louisville or Newark.”
            I looked down at my feet and ran my hands through my hair. Sorrow and relief fought within me, a reluctance to witness the wiser but more heartbreaking end of a long and glorious reign.
            “It sounds like you’ve decided.”
            There was a wet, tired gleam in his eyes.
            “We’ll finish the tour. Nobody will know except you and me until it’s over and I make it public.” He pressed the knuckles of his fist against my knee. “I’ll find you another group. You’re still a young man.”
            I chuckled. A cough wheezed out of my dry throat.
            “Whole life ahead of me?”
            That impishness, the juvenility that drew his audience into playful conspiracy with him, sparkled in his pupils.
            “Well, at least a healthy portion.”   
            During our last shows his music soared even as he slipped further into that inexorable cognitive twilight. We rip-roared through Denver, Las Vegas, up to Vancouver and down to Seattle, making our way to his sunbaked hometown of Los Angeles. His creations, already so beatific, bloomed continuously without exhaustion, like a mythological flower. But at each show his dialogue sputtered. By Portland he didn’t utter a word, only raised a grateful hand and bowed a humble head between songs. All the while he leaned on me to get him through, a profound honor that I accepted with private gloom.
            It was during our San Francisco show, the penultimate stop before Los Angeles, that a stroke lowered his saxophone for good. He survived the hemorrhage, had his family to care for him, but afterwards he could only muster wads of rough syllables. The doctors fingered the usual culprits: his diet, lack of sleep, the stresses of his livelihood. Verna neutralized those ills without mercy and saved him from the grave, even if what remained was not the Lloyd of the past.
            Maybe to make his deterioration more bearable, I took some kind of refuge in the idea that his plunderings of that otherworld from which he derived his genius had all along not been without consequence; that little by little they had exacted a toll, untethering him from us. There was a small comfort in believing that his mind had not dissolved but was merely waylaid in that synesthetic darkness. That those captive eyes brimming with tears were entranced by the richness of that mystical place he loved, where he could still unfurl his music over an audience spellbound and grateful for his martyrdom.

Colby Galliher’s short fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Inscape Magazine, Harrisburg Magazine, the Inlandia Literary Journal, and elsewhere. More information about his work is available at colbygalliher.com.