Starting on a low E 

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On a clammy East Coast afternoon in August 1976, a saxophonist with a lisp and an aversion to practising stood to one side of a lone 1965 Shure 315 ribbon mic, closed his eyes, and played for Arkansas. He played for the trees, for the stones on the bed of the Ouachita, for the clear blue sky above it. Starting on a low E and weaving out into the ether, he let the notes lead him off the worn wooden floorboards of the dimly lit studio, past the Fender Rhodes and the cow horn, the bird whistles and the balaphone, through the aluminium window casement and the clear glass panes smudged with fumes and neglect and up through the wispy leaves of a neighbouring bamboo grove, up, up, up into the sticky heated whiteness of the sky and the midsummer emptiness beyond. 

 

The producer checked the levels on his mixing desk, breathed in the thick, sweet smell of a plantain stew simmering on a hot plate in the far corner and slouched back into his swivel chair. Lifting up his feet just off the floor, he let it swing round, slowly, a tethered buoy in the lulling wake of a boat long passed.

 

When it was time to bring the players back into the room, he knew what to do. He’d dim the lights.   

 

Thirty years later, almost to the day, after overseeing a stocktake of the basement bar and wondering whether the lighting upstairs would be bright enough for impatient Friday night City diners, Daido Tao lay down on the couch at work and slept for the length of a long song. When he woke up, it was as if he’d died a death. He was pale. He asked where he was. One by one his staff stopped what they were doing. Poul looked at Kei. Kei looked at Himli. Himli got Shoko. Shoko ran up the steps behind him, and past the reception desk then slowed to tip toe up to the couch by the cloakroom. Daido looked up in fright and stared at her. 

 

“Anno daijoubu Tao-kun? You alright?” she asked. 

 

“Who are you?” he replied. 

 

Shoko turned to Poul. “Call Kira.”

 

Kira came over, took one look at Daido, and drove him to the red stone hospital on Queen Square. He’d stood up and bowed to greet her, as if for the first time, though by that point they’d been in business together for almost 30 years. But then when they got to the car, he knew to sit in the passenger seat and he put on his seatbelt. Kira stood outside the restaurant later that night with Shoko couldn’t wrap her head around it. 

 

A few weeks earlier Daido had been pacing like an addict in Shino Yamazaki’s Tottenham living room, talking about selling all his records. He needed money for the kitchen, he said. Something about a bigger extraction and Islington council pounding their greasy, greedy fists on his brand-new melamine counter. The skin across his bony forehead pulled more tautly than usual, black eyes darting like swallows above a darkened lake. Shino coaxed him on to a chair and poured him a glass of orange juice. “Tao-kun, ne, your record collection has a shape of its own,” he said. “Keep it whole.”

 

Shino met Daido when they both worked in a second-hand bookshop up two flights of stairs in a big white pile on Picadilly. They’d go to record fairs and trawl through charity shop bins for vinyl treasures. Daido had his favourite Soho haunts, some he’d staked out years earlier, a couple he tried to keep hidden. Even from Shino. It took Shino three years to find a copy of what they called the bamboo record because of the delicate drawing in indigo ink of a leafy branch on the white cover. Critics had panned the Osceola-born horn player’s sketchy vocals and full-on instrumentation when it was released in 1977, but they didn’t care. Listening to the album’s B-side opener was as close as either of them ever got to peace. Daido already had a copy. Shino needed one of his own.  

 

When Shino went to see Daido in the hospital, he tucked the only photo he had of the two of them in his pocket, from a trip they’d once taken together to a record dealer’s basement store in a concrete high rise in Noisy-le-Sec, on the outskirts of Paris. Kira had told Shino he should bring one. “I mean he just won’t know to trust you without one,” she said. She puffed out her cheeks and rubbed the tips of her fingers into her temples. Shino nodded. 

 

When he walked on to the ward, Daido stood up and bowed. “Ah, ah, Yamazaki-san. Nice to meet you.” And when he went down to have a smoke, he took a bottle of orange juice in his hand. Shino did a double take. Tao-kun still smokes, he thought. He still likes orange juice. “Fushigiyane,” he whispered. “This is so strange.”

 

Daido Tao had never liked having his picture taken, but he looked at the one Shino brought and said, “I look happy.” He recognised himself, but not the guy he was standing next to, or the wooden-slatted bridge they were standing on, or the city skyline beyond. It was as if he was looking at himself through binoculars. The detail was all there, but the emotion, the life of it all, was missing.

 

Shino, Daido and another guy, Big Peeps they called him, had shared a small room on the top floor of a cheap hostel, near the big police station in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. An ancient plastic bidet on rusting chromed legs was installed in the bathroom next to the basin. Daido saw it, and almost threw up. “Mo dame, Yama-chan, that’s disgusting,” he’d said to Shino. He couldn’t fathom washing his face that close to it. 

 

These days he polishes his bathroom until it gleams. The only colour in the flat is an impressive array of spray bottles and cleaning gels. 

 

He once told Shino he basically just wanted to go back to Queen Square. He said he felt safe there. 

 

“What did losing your memory feel like?” Shino asked. 

 

“Like white, Yama-chan, like the colour white. Like I’ve disappeared into some kind of stubborn, unyielding whiteness,” Daido replied. 

 

As he spoke, Shino remembered crossing a bridge somewhere as a child with his grandmother. A horse suddenly emerged from the fog. Black mane and big eyes, breath rising hot and pale from a dark mouth on a cold day. And just as quickly, it disappeared back into the low cloud hovering dense and humid above the stone of the bridge and the inky waters it spanned. 

 

Daido said if he tried to remember things from before the whiteness, his head would ache. That whiteness was the only place he could get back to. And there was nothing to lift him out of it. No horse’s mane, no bamboo shoot, no weightless melody in C. Meanwhile, everything new he encountered, his brain catalogued, tight type on salt paper, a seemingly endless print run. 

 

Daido Tao felt his life split in two, a landmass newly bisected by the continental divide of an afternoon nap. His memory became two rivers flowing in opposite directions. On the before side, it emptied into an inaccessible basin, forever unconnected to the open sea. And on the after side, it flowed relentlessly, exhaustingly, into the ocean of an emptied mind. If the whiteness had claimed all memories that preceded it, every word, every object, every person, every event that followed it became one more new thing his mind would not let go of. Daido Tao could not remember, but he also could no longer forget.  

 

About five years ago, Daido started buying books: vintage titty mags, South African interior design, 1970s photobooks, fashion stuff. He has moved to a new room in a different city, but he stays indoors for days on end, spending up to 20 hours a day looking for books to buy. And bit by bit his purchases are filling up the flat he lives in. He stores them in the packaging they arrive in, because that keeps them in mint condition. Which, Shino notes, is exactly like before, with the records. The same obsessive searching, the same compulsive stacking, the same cigarettes and orange juice, the same indifference to changes in the weather. “The same clouds and the same brightnesses,” Shino recites Auster to himself, the same winds, the same nights, the same agitated shadows that bring neither sleep nor stillness. He did stumble as he walked. He fell asleep on a couch and that falling – the melting, the pulsing – hasn’t stopped since. It’s been 12 years, and Daido still only gets two hours of sleep a night. He lives in fear that it will happen again.  

 

The day he lost his memory, Daido Tao had about 8,000 records in plastic sheaths and cardboard covers, stacked in rows around his bed at home, with just a narrow path from the bed to the door. When all tests to find a diagnosis proved inconclusive, and his physical health, robust, the hospital discharged him and sent him back to that room. They sent him home. What else could they do? Shino watched Daido open the door, and shrink into the musty shadows, each record a black disk etched with a tune he no longer knew. He lived like that for three years, in this stranger’s room, waking up to go to work, then, 22 hours later, stepping from the door to the bed and collapsing under the weight of his day. And then one day, it got too much and he dumped the lot. Shino and Kira came to help him carry the 40 boxes down the carpeted stairs of the terrace house, through the wrought iron gate at the end of the front garden, past the wheelie bins and the abandoned upturned road cone, and on to a grey rug thrown across the bed of a rental van. When the room was finally emptied, Daido stood in the doorway and breathed in slowly, noting, for the first time, how filthy the purple carpet pile the vinyl had concealed all those years was. Then he made his way down the worn oatmeal flatweave that lined the stairs and shut the front door. Kira briefly put her hand on his shoulder then drove them to the dump. 

 

“Don’t you want to sell them?” 

 

Daido didn’t reply. 

 

“Hmmm,” said Shino.

 

Daido hasn’t listened to music since he woke up. But Shino remembers visiting him once, a long time ago, and Daido saying, “Do you know this album?” It wasn’t something he’d just found. He already had it. A three-track LP recorded in one hot take on a hot summer’s day in August 1976 in a warehouse studio a stone’s throw from the banks of the Hudson in Nyack, New York state, and released the following year on a small indie label that no one at the time paid attention to. The saxophonist, unsigned and unpopular, struggling to make ends meet in a run-down bedsit on the Lower East Side, leading a motley crew of percussionists and dreamers in and out of the space of a room, the band members all crowded around a single mic, someone making vegetarian stew on a hot plate in the corner, the producer looking at the clock and holding his breath and feeling the whole bespectacled, embroidered, emboldened troupe hover in a cloud of sound above the floorboards and up, up, up into the sky and time and the firmament above them.

 

Shino said, “Ah, it sounds like the universe, doesn’t it, Tao-kun?” 

 

And Daido said, “Yeah. Yeah, it does.”