In honor of the ancient legend Vince Carter outscoring the game’s best player LeBron James for the first time in a decade, the following passages from the basketball novella With the Memphis Blues Again have been patch-worked together as a singular tribute:
II.
Vince Carter had taken to keeping a journal.
He arrived in Memphis by boxcar with a musical instrument case underneath each arm. He boarded in a room above the corner drugstore. During the day, he offered music lessons and scrawled long musical compositions in the tradition of Sousa’s marches. With more time than freedom, he absorbed the blues and wrote song after song: “The Carolina blues,” “The Toronto dinosaur blues,” “The my cousin left me blues,” “The Hoboken blues,” “The Orlando swamp blues,” “The line at Space Mountain is too long blues,” “The Seven seconds or less blues,” “The Big cactus desert blues,” “The coming off the bench in Dallas blues,” “The broken jaw blues,” “The Chandler Parsons blues,” “The life after Boogie blues,” and “The list goes on blues.”
He spent his nights playing up and down Beale Street, occasionally he played in rooftop gardens overlooking the gaslights glowing through the fog rolling off the river. These live performances shifted his aesthetic. In addition to offering music lessons by day, he paid for his rent, sheet music, and instruments via these saloon gigs.
One night playing at one of these upper crust gatherings, he noticed his finger struck the wrong key, not due to an improvised gesture, but as a result of misjudging time and space. And yet, the right note still sounded in his ear. His eye even caught the correct key falling and rising. This discord shook him to his core.
The next day he sat down to write notes on a blank sheet, but in the staff letters appeared, as if his hand moved of its own accord, his body conducted by an author separate from his mind. He felt like an instrument, except he was aware of his condition. He read the letters hanging in the spaces typically reserved for musical notes, between the staff lines.
The letters formed a story. The character in the story had a name. His name was Vince, but Vince did not recognize the story.
However, in the story before him, this fictional Vince ran with outlaws such as Jason the Kidd and quested with the likes of Dirk Nowitzki. He even spent time as an overseas assassin, embroiled in the workings of nationalism and world wars.
Could it be that the events from the fictional Vince’s life could account for the holes in Vince’s own memories? He wondered. More importantly, he started buying notebook paper instead of sheet music.
When he wrote, he became struck by the fact that the Vince he wrote about remembered other Vinces. Sometimes these men were younger, but sometimes they were older. Sometimes a bald Vince remembered a Vince with an afro. Sometimes a Vince with an afro remembered a Vince with a beard. Never did a Vince recall a Vince with both an afro and a beard, but sometimes a bald Vince remembered a Vince with an afro who remembered a bald Vince. It turned out in all this remembering that an infinite number of Vinces existed. Even if Vince’s body was finite his identities were not. This realization caused Vince to move from journaling to plotting.
In doing so, he started sorting and tracking the individual memories of all the different Vinces in the room above the corner drugstore. The color-coded bits of yarn zigged and zagged on the cork board. He sketched illustrations of himself in different states of Vincedom.
Where holes in the story appeared, he drew question marks, knowing he would have to revisit a particular setting or sequence. He longed to relive particular moments in order to unlock other Vinces that he felt might eventually lead him, stumbling and blind, to the essential Vince. Sometimes he soared with confidence. Other times, he faded away in disappointment. The struggle for truth loomed large with impossibility at each new discovery.
One day, at a local gin joint, he sat behind the piano. The keys moving of their own volition, for he had long given up playing them, opting instead to mimic the motions of a great musician, who just so happened to be himself. While enacting this charade, three men barged into the room. Vince would never know their names, but they were in order of appearance: Latrell Sprewell, Allan Houston, and Allen Iverson. Rumors are Ray Allen waited behind the wheel of the getaway car. They operated as a loosely formed crime syndicate known as The Second Sons of Allen. No one knows who The First Sons of Allen were or why Latrell Sprewell was not called Allen Sprewell or Latrell Allen. They entered the gambling din with their guns drawn.
Pistols and a sawed-off shotgun.
When they yelled, “Everyone drop to the floor!” Vince dropped to the floor, between the piano (that never stopped playing) and the piano bench. His temperature rose in degrees. He could hear their actions, but he could not see them clearly through the legs of tables and chairs. A struggle ensued. Someone lost more than someone won.
A man groaned as if stabbed with a knife. A gun slid across the floor.
Vince picked up the gun and handled it as if it were a trumpet, as if the trigger were as innocent as a spit valve.
In a flash, he dropped two of the gunmen. He did not know if they were dead or merely wounded. He did not have enough experience in such matters. In fact, even as he did whatever this was, he asked himself: How can I be doing this? But then the dream screeched to a halt. He took aim. He pulled the trigger. He was out of bullets.
His target, tattooed and cornrowed, looked at him, stepped over a body on the floor that later would not admit to being Tyronn Lue, and laughed: “I guess that’s just how these things go.” The man raised his own gun and leveled it at Vince, but before the man could pull the trigger, a chair broke over his shoulder blades and knocked him to the floor.
And that’s how Vince became acquainted with Zach Randolph.
No longer a talented enough musician, Vince still sat at the piano bench often. Sometimes, in doing so, he dreamed of far off places and cattle drives under a clear, blue sky. When violence broke out at the Grindhouse, he would receive either a subtle nod from Gasol or a wink from Conley, bosses of the city he had met through Randolph, and he would rise from the bench, hang his pressed jacket on a hook near the piano, and address the issue with a patient brand of violence, born from age and waiting and the consummation of the two.
This arrangement was reached the night Allen Iverson almost killed him. The way Vince remembered it the chair broke over Iverson’s back in slow-motion, as if years had passed between the one man aiming to kill him and the other man coming to his rescue. When Iverson collapsed, Z-Bo had said: “I think you and I need to have a conversation, Mr. Carter.”
They exited the back of the gambling hall and walked to a livery stable filled with a countless number of freshly constructed coffins. Z-Bo leaned against one of these yellow wood stacks and unscrewed a mason jar’s metal ring and popped its circular lid. He offered Vince a taste of some home-brewed glory. The chemical burned through Vince like wildfire, dimming the light of his memories, distancing his present from all those past Vinces. He had caught a glimpse of the future.
“What’s in this?” he had asked.
“Couldn’t really say, and you wouldn’t want to know.”
Marc Gasol and Mike Conley arrived shortly after and participated in a conversation that, despite the mason jar orbiting the circle, was indeed an interview of sorts. Needless to say, the next time Vince found himself in this situation, he would pass on the moonshine, its scorched earth flavors brewed in sleepiness and smoke. He trusted neither its contents nor its makers, at least not fully.
Shortly after those initial meetings Vince found himself on a train to Florida. He and a man named Jeff Green were conducting business on behalf of Gasol and Conley’s interests. The countryside rose in a pristine blur beyond the window pane. The train swayed over the physics of rails and wheels grinding the metal from one another. Mostly the men slept and drank and strolled the aisle without purpose, but sometimes they talked.
Jeff Green described to Vince a recurring dream. The man told him how he had awoken in a laboratory with his chest cavity open. His heart sat on a table nearby, but it resembled a mechanical bird more than flesh and pulsing tissue. The bird flapped its wings and rose from the table.
“And then flew into your chest,” said Vince.
“How did you know?”
“A man in Chicago once told me the same thing.”
“You from there?”
Vince had learned to not answer such questions directly, and after staring at the passing countryside for a bit, he told his traveling partner: “I was with a man named Oakley, and we were on a similar job as you and I are now. We were cleaning up the mess left by a man named Isiah. Oak told me about the dream and its requirement for blood.”
“And—what happened to him?”
“To Oak?”
“No, to the man who had the dream.”
“Last I heard, he fell off a bridge in New York City.”
“Shit, that ain’t happening to me,” said Green.
“You seeing ghosts?”
“No. Why?”
“He was. The man who fell that is.”
Shook, Green looked away from the other man. After a while, though, he felt the need to confess one more detail: “The letters A-I-N-G-E mean anything to you?”
The letters did not mean anything to Vince at the time, but he wrote them down in his journal regardless. Then he said something that had never occurred to him before, but seemed to make all the difference in the world:
“We were in Toronto, not Chicago.”
The next night, upon their arrival in Florida, Vince Carter, as instructed, buried Jeff Green in a swamp. And before covering the man’s body with dark earth, he followed another instruction: he removed the man’s heart.
As he walked through the Petri dish of mosquitoes and snakes, he stumbled across the charred remains of a burnt car. Beside the car he found a matchbook with a Bird on it. He slipped it into his pocket and hitched a ride to another city, taking the long way on his way to Memphis. Certain orders were becoming harder and harder to live by.
III.
As Vince watched Chandler Parsons climb out the window, he remembered the burnt car from the swamp in Florida. He also thought burning one in Florida (or Mexico) wouldn’t be such a bad detail for his eventual pursuit of Chandler Parsons that would surely lead him to one of those places.
With the world past and the world to come burning in his brain, Vince strolled over to the desk. He rested a hand on its flat surface. He saw the briefcase. He opened a drawer with the other hand. He found it empty. He spoke to himself: “The key again, Chandler? For Christ’s sake, man, learn something!” He looked back at the briefcase on the floor. He lifted it. Empty. He laid it on the desk. He opened it. He pulled the tag loose from its handle. He did not look at the name scrawled on it — D. West. He didn’t need to; he had seen it before. He walked across the room to a picture hanging on a brick wall above the mantle of a closed off fireplace. He removed the picture and its frame from the wall. He did not eye the two brothers. He had seen them before; one in military dress and the other in civilian clothing. He had even come face to face with one of them — he was sure of it. In the catacomb behind where the picture frame had been sat a safe. He looked at the back of the tag he had removed from the briefcase. On the back of it were numbers to a combination written in pencil. He started turning the knob on the safe. He opened the safe.
He removed two items from the safe:
The first item was a rack holding twelve vials of blue liquid in vertical positions. Once upon a time, he would have left eleven of the vials behind, but Vince had long decided to no longer heed every instruction. The destination of the group and the individual may not always be compatible, even if the journeys are intertwined.
He removed the entire rack and positioned the vials in the briefcase. To ensure the rack would not move while traveling, he grabbed five books at random from a shelf. He placed two volumes by Roland Lazenby on the left side of the rack. He placed a third volume by Lazenby and another by Marcus Thompson on the right. On top of the rack holding the vials he sat a volume by Jack McCallum. He closed the briefcase. He lifted it. He swung it back and forth. He returned the briefcase to the desk. He opened it. Nothing had moved. If anyone opened it, they would assume he were a traveling book salesman. He closed the briefcase for a final time and returned to the open safe.
The second item in the safe was a torn piece of paper, brittle and brown, as if a child had dunked it in tea leaves. The map conveyed everything east of the Mississippi River, including Memphis and even parts of Mexico. The western half of the map was missing. In the bottom right hand corner of the map, where a compass rose should have been, was a double set of the alphabet’s twenty-third letter and a white silhouette mimicking a Da Vinci sketch, its arms arranged like hands on a clock and balancing globes on their fingertips.
Vince folded the map and hid it on his person. He closed the safe. He followed Chandler’s path. He climbed out the window and slid down the drainpipe in the pouring rain, hopefully for the last time.
. . .
In a not so distant future, in the jungles not so distant from Cancun’s tourist beaches, the following scene occurs in the underwhelming disappearance of a red herring named Chandler Parsons.
Vince returned to the second car and closed the trunk. The dawn light lit the sky blue Crown Victoria like a heliograph. Vince walked around its shimmering body to the driver’s side door. He lowered himself into the car, turned the key in the ignition, and felt the life hum through it.
Out the open window, he said, “When Ray gets here, tell him how it happened.”
He hung his forearm over the door, up to his elbow, as he drove into a terrain where the centuries melted away.
The buzzard sun continued to fly overhead, almost as if it were giving chase to him and his patch of blue automobile. The radio played nothing; there was nothing for it to play. He sang a song he knew quite well. He arrived at the last verse:
"Now the last shall be first thenWhere the neon jumpmen digThey all fly there so dreadfullyIt all seems convolutedAn’ here I sit on contrivanceBegging for a chance to kill"
"or be killed to get out offacing all these dreams twice toldOh, Hubie, take that for data"
Vince pulled off the road, or whatever remained of a road. He cut the ignition. He walked into the jungle. He counted the tree trunks as he marched. At the forty-fifth, he knelt to dig with a garden spade. Twenty-three inches into the brown earth, the metal spade struck stone. He widened the hole. He removed the round stone bearing the face of an antiquated god, its ornamental tongue hanging from its open mouth that refused to answer any questions. He tossed the stone aside. He reached back into the small cavern he’d dug. He removed a shoe box from it. He dusted off the lid. He opened it and checked the contents. Before returning to the car with the box and its contents, he returned the stone and filled the hole.
The Carolina blue car waited for him under rays of golden light, as if anointed. He climbed once more into the driver’s seat. He placed the shoe box on the passenger side. He reached into the glove compartment and removed a syringe filled with the serum, supposedly derived from jaguar blood. He had taken the blood from the briefcase in Chandler Parsons’ hotel room. He lifted the lid off the shoe box. He held the syringe in one hand and folded back flaps of tissue paper with the other. The small, breathless corpse of a passenger pigeon, that once innumerable species that collapsed under the strain of European expansion, stared up at him. He aimed the syringe at the center of the bird’s delicate chest. He pierced it with the syringe. He forced the serum into the bird’s body. The creature gagged to life. He placed the lid over the box and placed the box in the glove compartment.
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He leaned back in the driver’s seat. He inhaled. He exhaled. He reflected on this tiny, yet significant resurrection. Life was, after all, everything, and if this bird could live again, then it could surely die again too. He turned the key and started the engine.
Vince Carter drove into the sunset in a sky blue Crown Victoria, listening to the last passenger pigeon on earth flapping from the glove compartment. Once upon a time in the West, they had roamed the skies like feathered buffalo.
He finished the song on his way to somewhere else, maybe a place called Sacramento:
"To be stuck inside of CancunWith the Memphis Grizz again"
(Again, these fragmented scenes can be found in their entirety in With The Memphis Blues Again.)