The Great Composer: Hope, Love, Purpose and Other Necessary Evils

By Luis J. Martinez

A hard-fisted young man learns at his girlfriend's hospital bedside that love is violence on a cosmic scale. Meanwhile, another lost soul gives up the fight and is forced to confront his losses when he meets his doppelgänger and, shortly thereafter, witnesses his murder. At the center of it all rises the Global Systems Tower, wherein the Great Composer sits and awaits a changing of the guard. Anarchy is at the gate. The Great Lies must keep us together. The center must hold.
The Great Composer is a novella told in three acts, united but by many degrees of separation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Luis J. Martinez
• Release date: Jun 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463628249

Luis J. Martinez

I was born and raised in and around Los Angeles county, and anything before that is story to me. As an only child to an orphan single mother, I grew up entertaining myself, so, really, the transition to writing just meant putting a keyboard between me and my never-sleeping thoughts. As an adult, I went out and tried my hand at everything but writing, failing miserably, until I decided to finally go to college. I did really well there. It provided a general sense of purpose that had been missing, and at the age I was at (30), it became my bar scene, really. I took to it, and I ended up patching together some kind of persona, I suppose, only to spend the next 10 years dropping it. I think (or hope) this comes out in my writing... that whole idea of being conscious and unconscious at the right place in the story.

Book preview

The Great Composer

Contents:

Penny Sparrows

Smash

The Interview

Prefaces:

Generally a bad idea (if you’re reading this, you are more patient than I am). My main trouble with them is that they often blunt the impact, stand in the way of the arresting vitality of a, say, Dolores Claiborne to just grab you by the wrist and shout still your jawin and listen to me for a while!

That said, I’ll still my jawin soon and let the story begin. I would only pause here to say a word about the order of the stories to come, which I would actually like to leave up to you. The worlds of the following tales intersect at points, but I don’t believe anything would be lost by reading the last first or the first last. As presently arranged, this is a horror story. Place Smash at the end, however, and this becomes a story of silver linings and insistently springing hope. Place Penny Sparrows at the end and we have, perhaps, a hero’s journey. I remember a preface to a Robert McCammon novel in which he said—if you’ll forgive this reckless paraphrase—that writing, essentially, turns memory into art. I would agree. We are travelers in this life when we look ahead, and we are composers when we look behind. Godspeed to you, Dear Reader. I do hope you enjoy this brief excursion. I’ll see you on the other side… in the epilogue, where authors’ notes belong.

L.J.M.

Penny Sparrows

Insist on yourself.

Emerson

There’s this joke told fairly common in horse circles: a horse walks into a bar; the bartender, also a horse, says nothing.

Horses have a strange sense of humor. It’s a bit flat, like a copy of a copy, which is exactly what it is. They took it from us, swapped out leading figures for ones they could identify with, and then let the punchlines develop naturally from the new premises.

But horses aren’t funny, and I promise never to bring one into this bar again. I’ll just tell it straight: A guy walks into a bar, and he sees himself. He hadn’t come looking for a crisis, and he didn’t lead the sort of life that led to them. He was a software analyst, and he’d just botched the job opportunity of a lifetime by not knowing how to follow a receptionist’s simple lobby-to-office directions. He had shown up fifteen minutes early to the Global Systems tower, and, too embarrassed to go back down and ask directions, he spent thirty minutes trying to find the boss’s office, trotting down hallways and turning heads with a worried expression that suggested he was not trying to find his place there but to escape. Tomorrow he would return to the usual obscurity and inconsequential life that came with the job he just couldn’t seem to get rid of. In this moment, all he was looking for was a drink.

The door closed behind him and he was swallowed up by the cloud of souls hovering over the dance floor like ballroom corpses on the Titanic, not really dancing, just standing in, it seemed, for the dancers they wished they were. There was just a slim stream of unpeopled waters between the dance floor and the bar, and he slipped into it, searching patiently for a break in the phalanx of wallflowers and stool settlers that stood between him and the bartender. Nothing. Nothing. And then, at last, a familiar face— his.

That’s me, he said like an idiot. But no one was listening. A slight blonde woman at the bar sensed that he had spoken aloud to no one and instinctively sent out the sign of estrangement, but Dante didn’t notice this. He was busy. The man who was him stood up after the sound coming from his glass turned to dry suck and the crack of ice cubes falling over and then he blinked lazily and drew in a quick breath that straightened his posture. He slid out from the bar and his gaze came crashing down onto Dante’s, and he looked horrified, for a second; then, he looked relieved, as if he had just had a great cosmic joke revealed to him at last, but that look didn’t last long either. His joy broke. If the world’s end was a joke, this was the expression we’d be wearing when the laughter had worn off. As if the sickest part of the Cosmic Joke were simply that it wasn’t at all funny but it was still necessary to laugh along because God was telling it and it was his house after all. The look-a-like’s eyes glazed over, but he turned around too fast to show any would-be waterworks and when he did he was met by a man most certainly out-of-place in the young-ish, would-be-hip bar. He was a small man, just over five-feet, balding, dressed plainly but respectably, solidly round, like he was meant for it. Dante’s look-alike bumped into him and both their expressions changed and when the round man looked down, Dante followed his eyes to his forearm where a long kitchen knife had partly disappeared behind the flesh like a magician’s saw.

The initial feeling that hit Dante upon seeing this had little to do with the irreconcilable fact of having met, if only for a passing instant, his exact replica. It was the simple obscenity of the image. It was grotesque. It was impossible. It was the breaching of a wall somewhere in the backdrop of all-Dante-needed-to-believe in order to carry on as a fearlessly optimistic human being, and it was all disrupted by the sight of that blade peering out from either side of an as yet bloodless wound. He watched the dying man’s expression fade back to the ironic smile, as if the funny-cum-really-serious thing had become once again funny, and he was glad that this fellow, whoever he is, was, is… that he was smiling— dying, but smiling anyway.

The blood was running now. The little man who had cut him was gone. The small crowd around the double was just beginning to react to the grotesquery of a butchered human artery sending all of its life onto the vinyl tile below. The man was almost gone, and Dante knew that there had to be something he needed to learn from the guy because don’t ‘things happen for a reason?’ But Dante ran. He bumped into an onlooker as he swung around for the exit, and when their eyes met a twinkle of recognition lit up in the guy’s eye, who then shot his stare quickly back to the now dead man on the floor. Dante was gone by the time he turned back.

Outside, Dante slipped in the gutter and fell straight to his hip and the pain was a mute rage in his numb leg but he shimmied up off the blacktop and kept on. He got to his car. He got in. He made two shallow gashes in the steering column as he stabbed at the ignition, but the third brought the key home and he turned it violently and ripped out of his parking spot and hit the highway. He was still drunk, but the road was rolling away and he felt every hiccup in the concrete. He was alert as he ever had been, even if the only fact to be aware of was his ignorance of any facts at all. Who the holy fuck was that?

Was. That part was certain. The man is dead now. He had to be. That knife had floated straight down to the bone and stayed there. The blood rose up and turned over the tear in his skin like a river bends over a stone. It just fell. Without restraint and, most unsettlingly, without hurry… It just ran out freely like that was where it was headed all along. Dante blinked hard. Each time he did his eyelids sprung back with more and more force.

That was Friday night. Nearly two weeks passed before he saw the round man again.

∞

Hey buddy, the bartender