Richard Burgin - The Best American Mystery Stories 2005

“Fine,” Remy said; he felt he was hardly in a position to object. In the club Remy suspected that members assumed their identities with varying degrees of intensity. Clearly Poe was unusually committed to his to the point where he had renounced his former name, become a poet, short story writer, and alcoholic, and given up dating women his age. Because he worked mostly at home doing research on the Internet he was able to be in character pretty much around the clock.

“You need to focus on your choice,” Poe said. “You have an important decision facing you and not much time to make it.”

“I hope I’ll know during the probing,” Remy said. “I hope it will come to me then.”

“Listen to your heart, even if it makes too much noise,” Poe said, smiling ironically.

They walked in silence the rest of the way, Poe sometimes putting his hands to his ears as if Roderick Usher were reacting to too strident a sound. As they were approaching the steps to Evans’s walkup, from which they could already hear a few haunting chords on the piano, Poe turned to Remy and said, “Are you aware that we’re voting on the woman issue tonight?”

“Yes, I knew that.”

Poe was referring to the question of whether or not the Identity Club, which was currently a de facto men’s club, would begin to actively recruit women. Remy had sometimes thought of the club as practicing a form of directed reincarnation, but did that mean that in the next world the club didn’t want to deal with any women? “I’m going to vote that we should recruit them. How can we fully be who we’ve become without women? I need them for my poetry, and to love of course. I think the organization should try to increase our chances to meet them, not isolate us from them.”

“I completely agree with you,” Remy said.

They rang the bell and Dali opened the door, bowing grandly and pointing toward a dark, barely furnished, yet somehow chaotic apartment.

“It’s Bill Evans’s home. I knew it would be a mess,” Poe said quietly to Remy, drinking again from his brown paper bag.

Evans was bent over the piano, head characteristically suspended just above the keys, as he played the coda of his composition “Re: Person I Knew.” He also had long dark hair but was clean-shaven. From the small sofa — the only one in the room — Erik Satie shouted “Bravo! Encore!” Remy couldn’t remember seeing any photographs of the French composer but judged his French to be authentic. As a tribute to his admirer, Evans played a version of Satie’s most famous piano piece, “Gymnopedie,” which Remy recalled the former Evans had recorded on his album Nirvana. This was the first time Remy had heard the new Bill Evans play and while he was hardly an Evans scholar he thought it sounded quite convincing. The harmony, the soft touch and plaintive melodic lines were all there (no doubt learned from a book that had printed Evans’s solos and arrangements) though, of course, some mistakes were made and the new Evans’s touch wasn’t as elegant as the first one’s. Still, Remy could see that the new Evans’s immersion into his identity had been thorough. Remy had recently seen a video of the former Evans playing and could see that the new one had his body movements down pat. Could he, Remy, devote himself as thoroughly to the new identity he would soon be assuming?

“Encore, encore,” said Satie again and now also Cocteau, who had joined his old friend and collaborator on the sofa. Continuing his homage to his French admirers, Evans played “You Must Believe in Spring” by the French composer Michel Legrand. When it ended Remy found himself applauding vigorously as well and becoming even more curious about the former life of the new Evans. All he knew was that he’d once been a student at Juilliard and was involved now in selling computer parts. He wished he’d paid more attention when he talked with him five months ago at the meeting but now it was too late, as members were not allowed to discuss their former identities with each other once they’d committed to a new one.

After a brief rendition of “Five,” Evans took a break and Remy slowly sidled up to him, wishing again that Eugene were there. Though he was often aloof, when the situation required, Eugene always knew just what to say to people. What to say and not a word more, for Eugene had the gift of concision, just as Evans did on the piano.

“That was beautiful playing,” Remy finally said.

“Thanks, man,” Evans said, slowly raising his head and smiling at him. Like the first Bill Evans, his teeth weren’t very good and he wore glasses.

“I know how hard it is to keep that kind of time, and to swing like that without your trio.”

“I miss the guys but sometimes when I play alone I feel a oneness with the music that I just can’t get any other way.”

It occurred to Remy that Evans had had at least four different trios throughout his recording career and that he didn’t know which trio Evans was “missing” because he didn’t know what stage of Evans’s life the new one was now living. Perhaps sensing this, Evans said, “When Scotty died last year I didn’t even know if I could continue. I couldn’t bring myself to even look for a new bassist for a long time or to record either. And when I did finally go in the studio again a little while ago, it was a solo gig.”

Remy now knew that for Evans it was about 1962, since Scott LaFaro, his young former bassist, had died in a car accident in 1961.

“Do you play, man?” Evans asked.

“Just enough to tell how good you are,” Remy said.

“So there’s no chance you could become a musician?”

“No, no, I couldn’t do it.”

“I know this identity thing is difficult to handle at first.”

“It is for me. It really is,” Remy said, touched by the note of sympathy in Evans’s voice.

“Do you do any of the arts, man?”

“Not with anything like your level of skill or Dali’s or any of the other members, for that matter. I write a little at my job.. but you could hardly call it art. There’s a man, a rising star at my ad agency named Eugene who’s working on a campaign with me now who has the most original ideas and comes up with the most brilliant material who really is an artist. If he were here, instead of me, he could become George Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde.”

“Have you spoken to him about the club?”

“No, no. I don’t really know him that well. I mean he barely knows I exist.”

“Anyway, I’ve been speaking to some of the other members and there’s definitely growing support to include men of letters in the club, you know, critics of a high level like Edmund Wilson or Marshall McLuhan.”

“Oh no, I don’t know anywhere near enough to be Edmund Wilson or McLuhan either. I figure if I become a member it will be as a novelist. I was thinking of Nathanael West, or maybe James Agee.”

“Either way you’d have to go young.”

Remy looked at Evans to be sure he was joking but saw that he looked quite serious. A chilling thought flitted through his mind. Did the committed members have a secret rule that they had to die at the same age their “adopted artists” did? And if so, was it merely a symbolic death of their identity or their actual physical death duplicated as closely as possible? Was the Identity Club, which he’d thought of as devoted to a form of reincarnation, then, actually devoted in the long run to a kind of delayed suicide? Of course this was probably a preposterous fantasy, still, he couldn’t completely dismiss it.

“But you’ll have to die young too then,” Remy said, remembering that Bill Evans had died at fifty-one. He said this with a half smile so it could seem he was joking. Evans looked around himself nervously before he answered.