would be to gouge the trees open.
I’m not from Florida originally. Before relocating, I worked for a small marketing firm in Manhattan. My department was called Corporate Synergism, which, though it sounds exciting and dynamic, is really just a sexy way of saying “joint venturing.” Basically, my colleagues and I helped companies market themselves to each other; we worked as corporate matchmakers. A client company would come to us hoping to form a relationship with some other company out in the world that it found very attractive. And we, in turn, would help that client company put together a proposal to offer its crush—a proposal that would explain, point by point, why together they had what’s called applied synergistic potential.
The work was not the most exciting in the world, and the salary was modest, relatively speaking—only about seventy grand a year for starters—but I enjoyed my job well enough. It was a corporate life: I was invited to the restaurant openings and magazine launches. The gallery shows. I could get into the club with the movie-screen floor without having to wait in line. I’d received a key-card in the mail, inviting me to go to Locke, a new bar on the West Side. I was regularly sent free samples of products sold by companies we’d helped out: cases of Scottish vodka, a bedspread with a 700 thread count, a little robotic floor vacuum that zipped around and cleaned the apartment while I was out.
Ours was a young, competitive department. I was the new hire, but my colleagues, who for the most part were only a few years farther into their thirties than me, all made in the mid–six figures. My boss, Roddy, was only forty-two, and he had three homes already. He owned art he actually had to alarm.
I was on my way—that was how I felt. I was engaged to a woman named Pearl, just twenty-five, who was far and away the most beautiful girl I’d ever dated. She had the kind of face that moved through a crowd like a lantern. Huge blue eyes, a smile almost too big for her head. She was lean and graceful, with a dancer’s body. In heels she was a good inch or two taller than me. She’d done some acting and now she was studying to be a playwright, taking graduate classes to get her master’s, or whatever degree comes with playwriting.
I even owned my own apartment, a small duplex in a renovated factory building. Everything about the place was brand-new; the walls were moon white, the counters were made of brushed steel. The bedroom windows stood five feet tall—huge, industrial panels that afforded a perfect view of midtown Manhattan. In fact, if I slid our bookcase out and squeezed myself into the corner of the room, I could just make out my own office building.
Sometimes, if I couldn’t sleep, I would climb out of bed and press myself into the corner and look out over the moonlit river until I found my building, then my office, and finally my window. There, I’d think. You fit there. And after a while a soothing fatigue would come over me, and I’d climb back into bed.
Then, one day in January, Pearl came into the den with a strange look on her face.
“What is it?” I said.
“You almost ready to go?”
“Ready to go where?”
“To see that guy I told you about? The one performing in the East Village,” she said. “I’ve been going to see him sing every night this week. You promised you’d come tonight.”
I looked down at the papers in front of me—part of a proposal by a company that manufactured high-end synthetic plants, everything from desk plants to full-size trees. Our client was hoping we might help it court a major home improvement retailer, one that had giant warehouse-like stores all across the country. This was the biggest deal I’d been handed so far. Our client had sent along an artificial fern as a sample of its work, along with a real fern. I had both pots next to each other on my desk.
“Here, try to tell the difference.” I gestured for Pearl to touch the ferns.
“Max, I want you to come. It’s important to me.”
“Just feel.”
She sighed and rubbed a leaf from each plant between her fingers. “Wow.”
“Feels real, doesn’t it?” I said. “They’re a good company. Now smell.”
She squinted at me as though I were suddenly very hard to see. “Max…”
“Fine. Okay.” I closed my binder and got up. “Who is this guy again?”
“He’s a country singer,” said Pearl. “His name’s Dick Doyle.”
As soon as we entered the club, I could tell something strange was going on. Usually the artists Pearl got excited about—the musicians and painters and writers and such—were up-and-comers: they’d been written up in magazines and had some sort of buzz around them. And the people who went to see them perform were like us; they were in our crowd. But as we made our way toward the stage, I saw that Dick Doyle’s audience wasn’t our crowd at all. The people filing in were bikers and construction workers, security guards. Jeans and boots and even a little leather. It had been a long time since I’d felt overdressed in a button-down.
At ten o’clock sharp, an old cowgirl came out from behind the curtain to offer an introduction to Dick’s show. She was dressed in cowboy boots and a denim shirt with fringe hanging off the sleeves. When she reached the center of the stage, she took off her hat and held it over her chest.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she began, “there is a story behind the man you are about to see here tonight. A story that has become an inspiration to many…”
I looked around at the crowd, expecting smirks and snickers, but everybody was just standing with their faces turned up toward the stage, listening. Even Pearl. I felt like checking outside just to make sure I was still in Manhattan.
“The story begins in Florida,” the old woman continued, “with a man named Dick Doyle.”
The audience erupted in cheers, clapping and stomping and whistling.
The old woman smiled and patted down the noise. “I know, I know,” she said. “But back then, Dick Doyle wasn’t anyone special, really,” she said. “He was just your average country singer. Living and playing around town. Singing his songs at birthday parties and weddings. At the derby on Thursday nights…”
I wondered why she was talking about Dick Doyle as though the man were dead. Wasn’t Dick backstage, waiting to come on? The band was already setting up.
“Oh, Dick was a real jokester, too,” she said, smiling wistfully. “In between songs, he liked to poke fun at the audience, tease them a little, you know. Rib them.”
The stage lights dimmed, but the spotlight on the old woman grew brighter.
“Except this one night, see,” said the cowgirl, looking around at all of us, her face becoming grave. “Someone in the audience didn’t take kindly to Dick’s jokes. A man. He didn’t like the way Dick was teasing him about his hair, which was long, you know, in a ponytail? And so, after the show was over, he waited for Dick outside the bar in his truck, and when Dick came out, this man…well, he ran Dick down.”
He ran Dick down. I couldn’t help a laugh from bubbling up. Pearl shot me a cold look.
The cowgirl went on to explain that Dick had spent two months recovering in the ICU at Orlando Memorial. He had some broken bones, a few busted ribs, a fractured wrist. But worst of all—and here she let out a long, sad sigh—the doctors discovered that Dick had brain damage.
“Hemorrhage-induced catatonia. That’s what the docs called Dick’s condition,” she said. “The way I think of it, though, is like a trance that Dick’s stuck in. The accident knocked Dick into a lifelong trance that he never wakes up from. Like one of those people that gets voodoo done on them.”
“A zombie!” someone yelled from the audience.
“A zombie. Right,” she said. “Except that in real life, zombies never wake up from their trances…” she said, putting her cowboy hat back on. “But…the amazing thing about Dick…is that on certain occasions, under very special circumstances, Dick can wake up from his trance.
“Circumstances, ladies and gentlemen, such as these here tonight. Because if there’s one thing that Dick reacts to, one thing that can part those clouds sitting on his brain, it’s the power of music…”
And here the woman took a deep bow, and then began backing away, off the stage. A moment later she returned with two men, both of them helping a fourth person onto the stage. This fourth person was a man about six feet tall, my height, average build, with a big trucker’s mustache. He was wearing a string tie and a cowboy hat. His suit was bright purple, covered with musical notes made of glittering rhinestones. The crew stood Dick in the center of the stage and brushed him off.
I leaned over to Pearl. “That suit’s giving me…
