Regression

A few hundred years ago, people wanted to be kids again. I don't see what all the fuss is about. All right, just maybe I'm still a little sore about what happened to me. It's hard, you know? One day you're living the life you've been making for yourself, and the next day you're back to climbing on chairs to reach the cookie jar. But back to what I was talking about:

A few hundred years ago, you also only had one life.

That's right--one life to live, and once your time was up, poof!--you were dead, gone unless you had your stock in some black magic with the voodoo-man. It didn't matter if you'd gotten yourself knifed during some scuffle outside Ol' Smokey's Bar, or if you'd had a heart attack partway through the second act of Hamlet, or if your shelf date had expired and the Universe decided that you were too much of a burden with all your grumbling about old eyes and the Way Things Used To Be--dead was dead, and their wasn't nothing anyone could do about it.

That wouldn't do; oh no, that wouldn't do at all, and so a few hundred years ago some of the big-forehead types straight out of MIT pieced together a giant Goldberg machine out of a bunch of old tri-d sets and microwaves, and now nobody really needs to die no more.

I'm proof of that, pure 100% proof: I should'a been dead, but they got to me before the hovercar went up in a regular conflagration.

I should tell you who I am, I suppose: the name's Anita. Anita Amara, and no comments about the alliteration, thank you very much. I'm one of those people you hear about on the tri-d news: brought back from the brink of death by the miraculous, heroic efforts of the medical team that braved the flames and smoke to pull me from the wreck of my burning car.

Actually, they just dragged me out, like some mouse the cat brought back to their owner, and then they shot me.

I can hear your eyebrows rising. Not shot me, like they do in the old movies with their guns that go kabang! and the handsome hero that always foils the mad scientist's plans and gets the gal--they just cut me out of the car, took one look at the horrendous mess of my old body, pulled the emergency resurrector from the ambulance and poof!, I was alive again. I was also precisely seven years old.

Woah woah woah--seven? Yah, seven. Those emergency rejuicers don't got much punch to them, and unlike the big booths they have at the medicenters, they don't have many age settings between 'dead' and 'somewhere between six and ten years old'. Actually, they have no age settings at all--just one big red I'm Feeling Lucky button that, if you really are lucky--will solve any known medical issue up to and not including Death. Sorry to break it to you hopefuls who want to see what the Afterlife is really like, but if you're already dead, you're dead--though I'm sure some R&D department is working on the Necromancer Device, and once that's done, we'll have no worries whatsoever.

Given the alternative, I suppose I should be happy to be alive. I still got my female parts--the emergency 'juicers only have two settings, Female and Female--but frankly, I'm a little disappointed; I mean, if you're going to die, why not try life again as a fine member of the opposite sex? Sorry, no-can-do with the emergency 'juicers, and if I really had it set in my mind to grow a certain something at crotch level, I'd have to cut through enough red tape to decorate all the town for Christmas, and have some left over...and then I'd be even younger, since the 'juicers only go backwards, and have a rough two-to-four year minimum. Maybe next time...

At any rate, as a medical rejuve--that is to say, someone zapped without consent--I get treated incredibly well. You'd expect that, right? You're going on all happy with the life you've carved out for yourself and then zap!--you're seven. It's society's way of trying to make up for the trauma.

I guess I should go on about what actually happened, instead of telling you all the boring details. Like I said, the name's Anita: mum had the bright idea of finding a last name that also started with an A, and the thing's been following me like a shadow for my entire life, and didn't I say to knock it off with the wisecracks on alliteration?

I play that saxophone down at the little down joint on Fifty-Second and Z, or I used to, anyways, before It happened. Wasn't much room inside Ziffany's Club--oh, no, just a few chairs and tables squeezed in near the bar, and a little corner that served as a stage. The lights were dead, or at least I ain't never seen them on while I've been in there--only light is this great big gaudy thing hanging over the bar, this flickering neon monstrosity that washes everything and everybody in red. Just as well that there weren't more lights--judging from the smell, you wouldn't want to see the floor. Oh, I'd smelt worse, to be certain, but it was pretty low on the nasal aesthetics scale.

So I was there every Saturday night, squeezed up their with the best of the big cats--ol' Daddy Dave with his trumpet, and Slappin' Sam on bass, and Two-Timin' Tim on keyboard, and--didn't I just say to cut it out with the wisecracks? Of course those ain't their real names, they're stage names, and audiences love alliteration.

My stage name was Blowin' Betty. I'm serious, now, no wisecracks.

Well, perhaps that one was deserved--I picked that name myself. Y'see, I was the outrageous gal of our ragtag group, with the miniskirt and the open blouse, and I'd always be out their in the crowd, blaring my horn to some guy or another, and my antics eventually chose the name for me.

Ziffany's was my haunt, my weekend stomping ground. We'd collect there, the five of us, early in the evening, and we'd play until either until we got kicked out or Amazing Ameche (that's the drummer--I don't think I mentioned him before. A damn fine drummer, and an even finer gentleman) fell asleep. Food was cheap and booze was cheaper and--ahem--things like Slam and Pixel Dust were the cheapest of all--if you were a regular. It made for some pretty wild times, yet nobody ever seemed to get caught. Ziffany had friends on the police force, you see, and so long as nobody turned up dead, the little basement joint on the corner seemed to not exist.

The night It happened I was sitting on the steps with Daddy Dave and Two-Timin' Tim and the rest of the band, going over the set list.

"Hey, Daddy," I said. "Whazzthis song here? I ain't heard it before."

Daddy took a look at where my accusing finger was pointing on the list and said, "We gonna try something new tonight."

That's how it always is--was--with Daddy. He'd throw in a different song every weekend just to keep us on our toes. It don't matter if we know it, or how well we can play it, it just mattered that we milk the song for all it was worth. That's how we were. We didn't play 'nice' music. We didn't play that bouncy crap that they play out in the suburbs, or the eclectic oddities that come in from off-planet, or the latest craze from out at the Blue Kaboom. No, we played that real music. It don't even have a name. You might call it jazz, I guess, but the closest you're gonna get is the jazz that they played way back when, from around when civilization on Earth was going through its twenty double-oh, and that isn't even close to the music we played. Some people listen to it and say, "Naw, that ain't music," and walk away, and we never see them again. Most people listen and they don't say anything at all, and that's how it should be, because watching them snap their fingers and tap their feet tells all that needs be told.

We didn't read music off them sheets like those formal clowns with their fancy pants and perpetual frowns. Most of the time we didn't even know what we'd be playing until we started, and after that it just kind of flowed, like some great river flowing right through Ziffany's. Even the barkeep would stop what he was doing when we flew over some of those musical rapids, just stop and listen, and that's when we knew that we was playing right, that we had found the grove, gotten in the zone, that we'd opened a door to some other place, and misty, swanky melodies were coming through and I always wondered what would happen if the door stayed open too long--but it never did. Those were the shows where we wrung each song for all the melody it was worth, chewed on the marrow of the rhythm, and ate the bones of the bassline whole. Those shows were music incarnate.

The show on the night It happened wasn't quite one of those nights, but it was awful close...I got the feeling that the door didn't quite open fully, but it was ajar, and if I had found a way to give the door a nice shove with my saxophone it might have opened--but it was still a good night. A solid night. We got paid, and then it was time to go home.

And then It happened.

Maybe the other driver was drunk. Maybe he fell asleep. Maybe he was distracted, on the phone with his lovely wife at home, telling her that he loved her, that he'd be home soon, to bring his daughter Mimi to the phone to say that he loved her and that he'd see her real soon--or maybe he just wasn't paying attention, 'cause if he had been, and if he'd swerved too, we might've both lived. But he died instantly, wham, when the front of his hovercar turned into an accordion like the street musicians down by the Bay like to play, only this time it was God playing the accordion and not some character trying to draw attention away from the metallic-man and the flame juggler. When I woke up, I found myself pinned beneath the the control panel and things were burning and I was screaming, only it didn't sound like me because it was the most awful sound I had ever heard anyone make. They pulled me out of the car and grabbed the 'juicer and--

When you get ressurected at one of the medicenters, it doesn't hurt, they say. You just step into the chamber and get bathed in light and you wake up young and full of energy. But the emergency 'juicer?

Pain. Pain turned to eleven. Pain, pain, pain. Pain like being stabbed in the eyeballs by burning knitting needles. Pain like having an entire saxophone stuffed into your left ear. I could fill an entire book with chapters filled with paragraphs filled with sentences filled with the word: "pain," and it wouldn't even begin to describe the pain. I was missing a good chunk of my body at the time, as you may recall--ever felt your leg grow back? Pain. Pain that went on and on and on, and I started to wonder if it was too late, if I was dead, if the door at Ziffany's had stayed opened too long and I'd gone through and found that really, that's all there was on the other side of the door, sorry, no pearly gates for you, just pain, incredible pain, lovely pain, just lots and lots of pain, pain, painpainpainpainpainpainpainpain--

And then I woke up--and I was seven years old.

Now I'm nine. I can sort of play the sax now--I can at least hold it, and I can reach most of the notes except the ones where I need to stretch with my little finger--but there's something missing. Maybe I'm just not old enough to provide enough air, or maybe there's some sort of muscle memory involved, but either way it sounds like a little girl learning to play the sax for the first time--which, in a way, it is, because since I'm not the same Anita that howled on-stage at Ziffany's every Saturday.

I know it; Daddy and the rest of the band know it too. I still see them sometimes--Sam lives not two blocks away, and Tim has a day job as an instructor at the local elementary school. We exchange greetings and move on.

It's comforting, though, to hear that Daddy's group is still a quintet, and they're not looking for another saxophonist. It'll take time, but I know that I could be that Anita again--the outrageous Anita, or if you'd prefer, Blowin' Betty--that stomped around Fifty-Second and Z. I have practically all the time in the world, and I know that if I work as hard as I did before--staying awake late at night practicing, sneaking off at every opportunity to perfect my riffs, playing, living, breathing saxophone--that I could eventually be Daddy's sax player again. I know I shouldn't be grumbling at all, given that I'm still alive, but...

Well...remember when you were a kid?

You remember what it was like to have to wait?