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The bottle of rye was as empty as the promises made by the neon light flashing across the street, its bitter circus glow alternately illuminating my office with pink gaiety and rendering it dark and dismal. Every time you thought, hey, this is it, bright lights and joy forever, some automatic circuit made the thing shut off again, leaving you in darkness both physical and metaphorical. A metaphor for life, at least.

I always got maudlin like that when drunk.

It was 22 November, 1937. The "real" 1937, at least. This time around, some German crackpot Dark Anchor? was rattling sabers over in Europe. The previous go-around, it was Doctor Zumm, threatening to breed atomic monsters. It made you wonder what the Big E was thinking with the whole Rollback.

I dug another bottle out from the drawer, to keep the first four company. I wasn't really drunk. It's hard as hell to get a guy like me drunk. Absinthe will do it. So will Trathala?, if you know the right way to cure it. And if there were any left in this reality, which there wasn't. So I wasn't really drunk. Sometimes it was better to pretend I was, though.

It helped me forget Adlai.

Everyone thought it was Zuum, or however he was spelling it that year. I mean, hell, mad genius, out to rule the world, or destroy it, or save it. I lost track somewhere around 2049. Anyhow, he was the big, public antagonist to Adlai. Flashy, fun, zestful -- sure, insane and lethal, too, but you can't juggle eggs without dropping a few. He and Adlai were made for each other.

No, not Zumm. He'd never really take out the Big A, not like that. Cut out his heart for real, sure, especially if a clockwork torture table and a maniacal cackle were involved. But not metaphorically. Not with silence.

An era ago, on this date, Adlai met his match. He lost his heart. The burning of his passion was quenched, like a campfire in a downpour, and that sort of thing just doesn't spring back to life. Hell, get down to it, even Zumm wasn't the same after that. Yin-yang. The bad guys need the good guys to define 'em, and vice-versa. By the time of the Rollback, Zumm was just a faded caricature of himself -- which is saying something for a guy like that. A pushover for the Powers that Be. Course, he'd never been real. Just a meme. But one the people believed in, so I guess that makes him real enough. That's irony for you.

I took another long drag from the bottle. Here's to you, Adlai.

It was the music, of course. That was the core of Adlai's being, after all. Maybe it was the core of the whole era. That's what the Dead History folks thought, the damned punks. Whatever. I don't know about eras and cultures, just the folks I've met. And it was the music that was the heart of Adlai.

Too bad it wasn't that Parker jerk. No, he got to go out in a blaze of glory. Just as forgotten, though.

It was the KC Gang?, of course. They made the Cammora look like indecisive Girl Scouts. Maybe the Lord E had the right idea after all. And not just the KC Gang in general, but Ben Faulk in particular. He did the Zumm thing backwards -- he started off real, and became a meme. He wormed his way into human thought?, the memosphere. He bided his time. And then, at the most crucial moment, when Adlai was facing his greatest challenge, Faulk simply took over. He suppressed the whole idea of music from human thought.

I've met the new Adlai, y'know. The one this time around. And the new Ben Faulk. Truth to tell, the two of 'em are as dull as a street-fighting priest's switchblade.

It couldn't last, of course. Faulk was a damned bastard, but he was no Excrucian. He couldn't do away with music for long. Hell, that'd take a bigger meme than I'd want to meet in a dark alley. The will of humanity, the multitude of other memes and beliefs that demand music, eventually flooded back in over him inside of half a minute, like a kelpy wave over a kid's sand castle. Thirty seconds, call it. They restored things -- mostly.

But the tunes Adlai'd loved -- a Sousa here, a Blazonczyk there, even the entire corpus (all three of them) of Dicky "Swing-Boy" Gonzales -- they were gone. Humanity did away with 'em, didn't need 'em or remember 'em. Everyone's a critic, they say. Wonder if that's where Big E got the idea. Anyhow, Adlai was never the same after that. Him, the Illinois Nineball Champs, the whole hill o' beans, just didn't know what to do with themselves.

So they went home. Retired. Listened to baseball on the radio, and watched burlesque shows on the TZ, and wondered why nothing was the same any more.

It's something I've wondered before, myself, sometimes, when the night's that dark, and the bottle's that empty, and the bed next to me's that cold. And I'm old enough to know better, dammit. Those are the nights I end up needing to shop for more hooch the next morning.

Not much left, I noticed. I grabbed the guitar from the corner, and dusted it off. Didn't pick it up but once a year. It was out of tune, but so was I. I struck a chord, downed the last of the rye, and started to play.

"A long, long time ago. I can still remember how that music used to make me smile ..."

SEE ALSO: Adlai, Ben Faulk, Doktor Zumm, Memetic Encoding?, Zograscope

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This is a T entry in the Lexicon of the Lost 500 Years.