“Le canté,
canté para usted,
canté de amor y alegría y vida”.
There was a way to retire, but Arnaldo Celis wasn’t sure what it was.
Ducking off stage after the first set of the third to last city on his 2085 tour and carrying his Yamaha FG230 with the missing 3b string, he waved and went to the hard case lying open just beyond the edge of the curtains.
If he didn’t find a way to retire, he’d die like Country Dick Montana nearly a hundred years ago – performing somewhere, singing something then fading away into history, forgotten by everyone but collectors.
“You sounded like you were seventy again,” exclaimed Tom Nguyen. As usual, his manager appeared at the end of the first set then hung around to listen discretely to the fans gossip. He’d be dissecting the gig in a few days.
Arnaldo put the guitar into the battered hard shell case. Given to him by a girlfriend whose name he’d tried to remember but couldn’t he’d refused numerous offers for a new one. Brand new, the case had been purchased with money collected by her from forgotten college friends for his nineteenth birthday. The original case’s finish – black, plastic imitation leather – covered only a few spots now. Repaired by his younger brother when he was in technical college in a fiberglass lab; it had traveled from the old United States to Haiti, Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Cameroun, Liberia, Hawaii and thirty-nine of the forty-eight contiguous states. It was impossible to explain to anyone that the twisted broken latch had come about when he’d lost the case key in Lagos, Nigeria and opened it with a screwdriver. The physical evidence of the gouges, scrapes, cracks, scratches, indentations and breaks on the case and guitar were the only memory he had of their travels together. He closed it, caressing the battered surface.
Tom gave him a hand towel, accepting it back after Arnaldo passed it over his sweaty forehead and the back of his neck. Tom opened a bottle of water and handed it to him. Leaning forward, the young manager glanced onto the stage to scan a bit of the crowd. The front row seats were mostly dignitaries in tuxedos, though a gigantic purple dinosaur that should have been a joke – if it hadn’t arrived in a starship large enough to flatten the downtown Des Moines area if it had landed on the ground – took up six seats in the front row and a diminishing number in the next six rows. The Mynosaurs were founding members of the interstellar union Humans hoped to join someday. She was Arnaldo’s biggest fan – figuratively and literally.
Arnaldo stood up, accepting a hand from the much younger man. His knees still hurt. Why had the rejuvenation process only taken him back to fifty? Why not twenty? “Because I was an idiot at twenty,” he said.
“What?” Tom said.
He shot his manager a grim look and said, “Nothing and before you ask, the answer’s still ‘no’.”
Tom stomped his foot. “If your popularity’s going to go any farther off the charts, then you have to give your fans your best. The best is when you sing with the old guitar.”
“It’s over a hundred years old, Tom. Younger than me, but I was ten when it was shipped to the States from Japan. If I take it out under the hot lights and play it like I used to, it’s not going to make it to my career finale.”
Tom snorted. “I’m surprised it lasted up to your first concert.”
Arnaldo laughed in unexpected surprise. What exactly had he told his manager? He said, “I supposed I was a little rough on it when I was a kid.”
“You suppose? You spent three years traveling as a missionary minstrel, eight years as a touring troubadour...”
“I know, I know and now I’m the New Man with the Old Guitar…”
“...and it doesn’t have to be that way anymore.”
“I’ve told you, I’m not getting a new guitar. This one has served me well, but I’m not going to use it for an entire concert.”
“The least you could do...”
“I’m not going to sing ‘Estrellas de Seda’ using anything but this,” he gestured to the case. “But except for that and a few others, I’m not using it, son.”
“What if the guitar could be rejuvenated like you were?”
Arnaldo opened his mouth to respond as he always did to the argument then closed it, glaring at Tom. Finally he said, “What do you mean ‘like you were’?”
Tom sniffed in an uncharacteristically snotty way and handed Arnaldo his tablet computer. Arnaldo snatched it from him and read. He finally looked up and said, “Where’d you get this?”
“Your doctor.”
“Why’ve you been talking to her?”
“Because I want to know what I’m supposed to do if your rejuvenated DNA starts to unravel while you’re on stage.”
Arnaldo snorted but felt oddly comforted. He said, “Thanks. So – what does she think?”
“Read the article and let me know what you think. I’m meeting my boyfriend after the show. He’s introducing me to his friends.” He flashed an uncharacteristically shy smile. “So, go on out and knock ‘em dead – except for the Mynosaur. That might cause an interstellar incident.” Shaking his head and smiling, he slipped away, but Arnaldo didn’t notice. He’d started the article. He’d breezed through the intro. The master of ceremonies called him out, he handed the t-comp to a stage hand and went out to finish the show.
By the time he was on the tube train out of Des Moines to his hotel, he knew there were two people he had to talk to if he was really going to send The Eleven String through rejuve. His ex-wife and his first guitar teacher. Nadifa still lived in Minneapolis; he had no idea where Reuben Ristrom was – but it wouldn’t be hard to track him down.
Nadifa would be the hardest to speak with, but she’d been there during his rise to stardom. She’d eventually gotten tired of the constant travel. Originally bitter that he’d choose to sing over staying with her, both of them had mellowed over the past half century.
The only problem would be if she’d never bothered with rejuvenation. He’d been 110 when went through the NativiTube™ rejuvenation. He understood that the process turned off cellular differentiation genes, every cell reverting to a stem cell when it inevitably divided. At that point, he had technically died, an Arnaldo-shaped shell of his former self. Memory was stored in a little understood manner of electrical potential in the stem cells of the former brain. When the “stem cell body” received the chemical message to begin differentiation, most of the cells divided again forming their previous type. Many of them were brand new, without the telomere degradation causing Human aging. Because the rejuvenation was unpredictable and never one hundred percent, no one had ever been able to take a Human body all the way back to the first blush of adulthood. “Back-To-The-Fifties” was the best that could be accomplished commercially.
If she hadn’t rejuved, she’d be 130 years old. Probably still alive, but probably not very active.
He still needed to talk to her.
And Reuben. Arnaldo knew his teacher been through a rejuve. Twice. How old had Reuben been when Arnaldo had taken his first lesson? His oldest memories weren’t particularly clear anymore, even though he’d always heard that as Humans aged, their older memories became clearer. That what had happened to his grandmother – she’d called him by his father’s name until the day she died.
Reuben would likely be pushing 200. There was a special ceremony for bicentennial Humans. He’d probably be on a list somewhere. He’d set Tom on it in the morning. Maybe he’d have an answer by the time they finished the Tour in Minneapolis at the newly renovated Target Center.
He had set his t-comp up to do a name search by the time he got to the hotel. When Tom called at three in the morning, he still wasn’t sure he’d found the right Reuben Ristrom. He shook his head. He’d known how to do a deep search once when he was still young. Frustrated, he slapped his wrist cell and said, “Well, what did the crowd think of this performance?”
“I thought I’d get your voicemail! What are you doing up at this hour? The crowd loved you but most of them wanted to hear you sing more than just one song with The Eleven String guitar. Even the Mynosaur.”
“You talked to an alien about Human music?”
“Sure. The Mynosaurs are our allies – especially when it comes to defying the Shabe.” The Shabe were the aliens who had ‘discovered’ Humanity when a deep space mission stumbled across their starship orbiting as what Humans had always thought was a Kuiper Object named 90377 Sedna.
Arnaldo paused then said, “What did he think of the concert?”
“Essentially he liked it, thought his seat was a little uncomfortable, and he thinks you should play The Eleven String more often because it has – and I quote – ‘a heavenly tonal quality’. I’m sending that to the Chicago Defender-News-Sun-Times Newsblog for the concert series there in three days. Listen. I need to go. I’ll talk to you tomorrow – and get some sleep. You may look fifty-six, but you’re still a hundred and twenty-eight.”
“Wait! As long as I have you, I’d like you to see if you can dig up the whereabouts of my old guitar teacher, Reuben Ristrom and my ex-wife, Nadifa W...”
“I know her name.”
“How?”
“She buys tickets for every city you hit in your tours.”
“She goes to them all?”
“No, stupid! She’s a hundred and thirty with no rejuve. She goes to the one in Minneapolis and gives the tickets away to charitable organizations everywhere else.”
He blinked. All he could manage was, “Oh.”
“That’s it?”
“Uh...yes.”
“All right, I’ll track down your old teacher tomorrow. Late. Night.” He hung up.
Two days later, Tom called Arnaldo at the hotel in Chicago. He said, “Sorry I didn’t call you – I’ve been spending lots of time with Grayson. Reuben’s still alive, but according to the records, I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to talk to him.”
“Why?”
“Parkinson’s. He’s in a Memory Care Facility with a wing especially for Parkinson’s patients. I talked to a caregiver on duty, and he said your friend doesn’t say much.”
He cussed. “You’d think we’d be able to stop something like that from developing at all.”
“Sorry, Sir.”
He stood with his head down for a few moments before he managed to say, “My ex?”
“Same place as always. She stayed in your old apartment. She said when you two lived there, it was a dump but that it’s trendy and expensive now. Some people think she was brilliant to hang on to the property. Apparently she bought up all of the places around her – those half-buried apartments – what did you call them?”
“They never really had a name except that it was in the Seward neighborhood – it was on the edge of what was once a freeway on which internal combustion...”
His assistant cut him off, saying, “It’s called Earthhome now. I called her and made an appointment for the two of you a couple days after the concert. She said that was fine. I’ve got to go.”
“Then go, son. I’ll see you at the theater tomorrow afternoon.”
“See ya, boss!”
Arnaldo stared through the hotel room window looking over Lake Michigan. The sky was dove gray as waves raced the shore, some capped with white, some not – unsettled rather than threatening or stormy. It helped him set his mood for the concerts over the next two nights. He liked doing that. It was one of the things that made him popular in concert. He’d written enough music that he could generally fit the mood of the town he was in – though he always did his most popular songs. He also slipped “Estrellas de Seda” in randomly somewhere in one of the sets. One reviewer...he paused. What had they said during a podcast review thirty-odd years ago, at the beginning of his real popularity? “Ah!” he said, “We know the song is coming; just not when it will ambush our senses, drowning us in memories of joy.” He turned to look around the room, found a rocking chair – something he requested wherever he went – pulled it in front of the window and sat down. The Eleven String was in its case next to the bed and he moved that, too. He never knew when the mood to write a song would strike. It was good to be prepared.
He’d just settled into the rocker when a glare of light far off up the shore, north toward Waukegan, flared. The Old US Great Lakes Naval Base had become Great Lakes Space Port. No landings – though alien starships could pretty much land wherever they wanted and there was nothing Humans could do about it – but if he’d ever wanted to go up to Space Station Courage or any of the other habitats Humans had built since the Space Age rebooted, he could leave from there.
With a smile, he reached for his t-comp and started assembling the program for tomorrow night. The podcaster’s comment suddenly surfaced in his head, as well. The woman had said, “The genius of Arnaldo Celis’ performances is that he views every concert, every venue as an organic part of the people he is playing for. He’s been around long enough to have become a robot, but is new enough to have grown cocky. Fortunately for all of us, he has become neither.”
By the time he was done with Chicago, he was ready for the closing concert in Minneapolis. Tom had met him after three encores. Arnaldo’s t-comp was tucked under Tom’s arm. He pulled it out and said, “Have you made a decision yet?”
“I haven’t talked to Nadifa yet.”
Tom snorted. “You know what she’ll say.”
Arnaldo shook his head, “Not any more. Besides, I got into endless trouble when we were married thinking that I knew what she was thinking or going to say.”
“That one I understand,” he said.
“There are some things however, in which her sense was unerring. She missed on how popular my music would be – she didn’t think people would like my old stuff. She hit the nail on the head when it came to insisting that I never have a set program – that I build every concert to fit the audience.”
Tom nodded, saying, “That’s one of the things that have kept your concerts at the top of the list of cultural events.” He pursed his lips then said, “I’ll go to the rejuve office and make an appointment for the guitar at the end of October. That should be smack in the middle of your holiday break. The clinic is here in Chicago, so I can speak to someone face-to-face.”
“Good. Thanks.” He bumped his manager with a shoulder, adding, “Now get out of here.”
Tom grinned and said, “Yes, sir!”
Arnaldo rode back to the hotel, packed what few things he carried for himself then took the elevated train to the tubeport. Underground, Minneapolis was an even faster trip than it had been when he was flying – an hour in the air. Air flight of course had been preceded and followed by another hour in each airport.
Now it let out in the city of Minneapolis at the Continental Tubeport under the Hennepin County Government Center. The ‘port was immense, deeper than even the Mississippi and served as a hub for entire North American continent. He could take the ‘tube to virtually any city and not have to leave the car.
Leaving the car was easy. Finding his ex-wife waiting was going to be, “Stunning.” He stared at her for a long time before he finally said, “Nadifa?”
She smiled as she walked slowly toward him. She didn’t limp or hobble. She moved with stately grace. She opened her arms to embrace him, saying, “Arnaldo. You’re looking very good.”
He lowered his bag and The Eleven String to his feet and hugged her hard. He held her at arm’s length and said, “You look wonderful.”
She smiled faintly and made a gesture to someone standing some distance away. A young woman stepped forward and said, “I can take your bags, Mr. Celis.”
He nodded and she easily took both, handling the guitar case with care. Arnaldo asked, “Where should we go?”
Nadifa smiled, “Where else?”
“The Tea Garden?” he said.
“Of course.”
“You don’t drink tea.”
“Things change,” she replied, leading the way. They took a cab which had no wheels, hovering on the magnetic sheathe that lay over every road surface in the city. It didn’t take long to get to the Garden. The young woman with his guitar and bag followed in a second cab. They’d already settled themselves and ordered by the time she got there. He’d ordered the usual peach iced tea with a dash of artificial sweetener, for himself. Nadifa ordered, “Large, hot chai tea latte, longan honey and taro.” He raised an eyebrow. She smiled and said, “I concede victory in this small area. I am a tea fan now.”
Their drinks arrived shortly on a tray carried by a live server – most likely a student at the nearby University of Earth at Minnesota. He took a deep breath and said, “I need your honest opinion on something.”
It was her turn to raise eyebrows. She said, “I can die now.”
“What?”
She leaned back in the chair, sipped her tea and said, “I never thought I’d live long enough to hear those words. Now I can die a complete woman.” She stood up.
He waved her back down as he laughed then said, “I deserved that after all these years.” She met his laughter with a chilly glare. Then she laughed with him and sat. “Tom wants me to get The Eleven String rejuvenated just like me.”
She said, “Will they replace 3b?”
His mouth twitched then he said, “I hadn’t thought of that. I suppose they would if I asked them to.”
“Would you ask them to?”
He paused then said, “That missing string and key are part of the guitar’s memory. Some of my earliest memories have become harder to dredge up. Things about high school, college, growing up with my brothers and sister. If I do recall them, it takes a lot of work. There are other times when all I can recall is that there was a memory that was supposed to be connected to the end of a train of thought.” He shook his head.
She said abruptly, “Remember the big windstorm that knocked down all the trees in the park?”
He frowned for a moment. The memory was faint but as he worried at it, it shuddered to the surface and he nodded. “Yeah. What was it? A thousand trees were down. The woodchip piles in that abandoned parking lot steamed all winter.”
She smiled. “It was quite a sight. Do you remember the petition you started the next summer?”
He snorted, feeling his cheeks color in embarrassment. “The one to force the park department to remove all the downed trees along the lake trail rather than just cutting them up and pushing them into the woods?”
“That’s the one,” Nadifa said. “The Park Board refused. Do you remember why?”
He pursed his lips. He barely recalled the actual Board meeting. It returned to him in a rush of images and voices. He sorted them then said, “They said the trees would have fallen sooner or later no matter what anyone did. Removing them from the forest would have removed the nutrients stored in the tree from the ecosystem. The way they managed the park was to just move the trees off the trail so people like us could use it – but leave them pretty much where they fell.”
She nodded, then asked, “Why do you only play The Eleven String for ‘Silken Stars’?”
He sat back in the chair, took a long drink of the peach iced tea then said, “To preserve it. It’s old and I want to keep it around as long as possible.”
“The song or the guitar?” He pursed his lips and hummed. Nadifa added, “Why not let it be rejuvenated?”
“Because it’ll come back all shiny and smooth and perfect.”
“Isn’t that what you want? The same guitar only new?”
“I want the memories that go with it.”
She nodded slowly, took a sip of her large hot chai tea latte with longan honey and taro then said, “And the memory will disappear when the scars are gone?”
He stared at her for a long and finally nodded. A longer moment when they simply looked at each other and he said, “Why did we get a divorce?”
“You were insufferable,” she said gently.
He lifted his chin, “Ah.” He finished his cold peach tea. She finished her chai tea latte. He stood up.
She said, “You know what to do.” It was a statement rather than a question.
“I do,” he said, letting the words hang for a moment. She didn’t move at all for some time, but finally turned her head to the left, her good side away from him. He nodded. “Then I’ll see you again sometime.” He bowed, “Thank you very, very much.” He turned slowly, feeling every one of his 128 chronological years, and walked down the steps and out of her life again.
He sang every ballad that night, every love song including “Estrellas de Seda”, playing The Eleven String. He didn’t do the rock songs with it, he didn’t do the fast songs with it. He wanted to retire – not go out with a bang. When he was done, he had to return for six curtain calls. Tom even applauded from his place in the front row on the opposite end of the Mynosaur, smiling, closing his eyes and nodding as he’d only done seven other times since they’d started working together.
He was even fairly certain he’d seen Nadifa in the front row of the balcony, tucked into a dep left corner.
The curtain closed one last time and Arnaldo went to put the guitar away in the open case.
There was a way to retire, and Arnaldo Celis had just done it.
Image: https://www.123rf.com/photo_106244580_stock-vector-dna-with-guitar-logo-vector-template.html
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