Patrick Malka

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Bootleg of All That’s Left


The doors opened and the steam flooded through the crack in The Plateau Theatre’s side. The balmy air turned to razor sharp crystals when exposed to the frigid wind tunnel between buildings. Out on the sidewalk, the light of the street-lamps reflected off the fresh snow, making the deserted city block far brighter than the theatre’s drab and dingy interior.

It hurt. The cold, the reflected light. Most of the effect the few pints I consumed withered with the twenty below slap to the face. This was a mistake. Why did I think tonight would feel normal?

I took the earbuds from my pocket, stuck them in my ears and covered them with the folded over edges of my black tuque. I pulled up the voice memo app on my phone to listen to the performance I had just witnessed. An old habit of making recordings at every show, something to listen to on the walk home. I used to do it with poorly concealed tape recorders but now, a phone in a shirt pocket does the trick. These were never for sharing anyways.

I felt a dreadful regret. I regretted what I thought the evening would be. I pressed play on
the staticky 25-minute recording and started walking.

#

In high school, I lost my best friend Cal to a book on cosmology. After being given a glimpse at the enormity of the universe, the scale of everything became too big for him. Relationships, hobbies, the arts, all of it irrelevant when seen through the lens of supernovas, pulsars and blackholes. Nothing mattered anymore. Deep, depressive angst took hold.

I disagreed. I didn’t think our interests served zero purpose because they existed in the same universe as God damn black holes. I didn’t think the two should be measured using the same metrics. It upset me. I couldn’t imagine not being interested in music and punk vampire novels and Argento movies and Cal was right there with me for the longest time. We were on the same page back then.

I tried to get him to write about these new intrusive thoughts. I thought maybe this feeling could go into our music. A little nihilistic for me but if it helped my friend get past it, I would certainly deal. As far as I know, he never even tried. He started spending more time alone. His parents finally got wise when they realized he wasn’t even returning my calls. They always thought, “well, as long as he has Jeremy.”

After a time, I convinced myself it was okay to stop trying.

We graduated high school. Barely. Six months after that, his family relocated for his mother’s work. I completely lost touch with him, and he remained this unanswered question in my life. I regularly wondered what Cal was up to. Was he even still alive?

Then, out of the blue, twenty some years later, he messaged me online, asking if I would like to see his band, Third Portal from the Top, play at The Plateau Theatre in Montreal the following week. At first the name at the end of the message meant nothing, then it hit me, and I gasped loud enough that my cat ran out of the room. A ghost had reached out from the past and firmly taken hold of my wrist.

I had to see him.

He was in a fucking band.

#

Everything about the weather was turbulent and my head swam ineffectively in its currents. My only preventative measures against the cold were a hat, a turned-up denim jacket collar, and shallow pockets. My whole life I never really learned to check a forecast and dress accordingly. I would have to lose myself in the muffled music coming from my earbuds and make my way to the rented room I managed to get on short notice for the weekend, trudging through rapidly accumulating snow.

I had started recording on the voice memo app a couple minutes ahead of the start of the show, so the only thing playing in my ears for now was the theatre’s ambient sounds and staccato conversation. I loved this as much as the music and it reminded me just how much I missed spending time in music clubs, theatres or even just pubs with decent house bands. The noise seemed to amplify rhythmically as I made my way in and out of the evenly spaced cones of jaundiced light lining the street. I saw no signs of life as the snow fell faster, concealing the edges of the brutalist city structures I walked past. If I wasn’t filling my head with the noise of The Plateau Theatre, the dampened city soundscape would have caused me to become far more anxious about my surroundings. The whitewashing of every sense by the cold and snow was unnerving.

A burst of applause straightened my spine.

I closed my eyes for a moment, large snowflakes knocking insistently on my eyelids, and I could picture Cal walking out on stage. He looked beautiful. And so so broken.

#

The smell of The Plateau made me both nauseous and lightheaded. Like someone burning incense veined with mold and the evaporation of salty slush. It put me even more on edge. I was alone and that was fine but there were too many questions surrounding the evening. Why was I invited after all this time? Why did I jump at the chance? Was there something I wanted to say to Cal? Or was I so desperate to see if there was something he wanted to say to me?

The room was already scattered with pockets of people, the varied humanity you’d expect at a show on a Thursday night. It made me self conscious of my own look: older punk with a steady day job. I dropped off my jacket and hat at the coat check and sought the refuge of a pint. The line up was long, but the bartender did their job with a practiced efficiency. They smiled a genuine smile of acknowledgment when handing me the cup. It made me feel seen. I took a breath.

I turned from the bar to take in the space. Looking up at the old theatre’s ceiling, off-centre chandeliers hanging like stalactites from moss green copper tiles, it felt cavernous. The woodsy decomposition in the air and rhythmic white noise added to this impression. It must have once been a glamorous place.

When my eyes came back down to the shallow stage on the other side of the room, the band was setting up equipment. That was my first glimpse of Cal in person in over twenty years. Always the tallest person in the room, even when not on a stage. He wore clothes that seem to accentuate the absurd length of his limbs. A black T-Shirt that exposed half his toned torso, the tightest black jeans, ripped to shreds in the most unlikely places and calf high Doc Martens. I stared at him intently, almost willing him to turn and spot me alone and off to the side of the room. I had traveled to see him here; I just wanted him to do the last thirty feet. But impatience won out and I walked over to the stage and nervously croaked his name. He turned to look down at me. He was never the most expressive person, but this was a particularly blank look on his face. Which is why it was even more of a shock when he sat down on the stage, pulled me between his legs and kissed me. It was alarming. Not the kiss itself. In the time we had known each other, we would be in and out of silly teenage relationships and knew how to keep busy with each other in the meantime. This was different. His hand at the back of my head held me in place. This was not a greeting. This was a statement with a note of aggression.

When he pulled away, he smiled, exposing the lines around his eyes and mouth that were unknown to me. It was Cal’s face, just one that a cartographer had taken a grease pencil to, drawing in the topography of the same deep time Cal obsessed over in his youth. I recognized the peaks and valleys, and I recognized him, but it took a moment to reconcile the two together.

“You came.”

“I did.”

“I didn’t know if you would. I didn’t know for sure that I wanted you to.”

I wasn’t sure what to do with that. Instead of answering right away I took a sip from my pint and tried my best to avoid showing any emotion.

“I appreciated the invitation. It’s been a long time Cal. I was surprised. It seemed important to come.”

“Okay.”

I had taken a step back from him and he was looking in my direction but just over my head. I couldn’t tell if he was actually listening to what I said. The feedback in the room was more pronounced and I could barely think. I drank the last third of my beer in one go and asked, “how long have you been performing?”

“I don’t perform.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I said I don’t perform. What I do on stage, that’s not a performance. That’s the truest version of whatever all of this is. What is seen and what is hidden below the surface. Whatever’s left of it anyways.”

“And how long have you been doing that?”

“You should know.”

He left it that. He seemed to be flinching at the sight of something beyond me but when I turned, there was nothing there. The smell of rot invaded my nose. I needed to step away.

“I’m going to get another beer. Can I get you anything?”

“No need.”

“Okay.”

I stepped away thinking “Jesus Christ, what is happening? Has he forgotten how to be a God damn person?”

Even at the bar, as I ordered my second and third beers together, the bar tender’s earlier look of sweet compassion was now one of concern. They squeezed my hand when giving me my change in such a way that I almost started crying. This was not how I imagined I would react.

I turned back to the stage to find that Cal and the rest of the band had disappeared. Everything looked set up for them to start. I stood to the side and waited. I hadn’t realized how full the venue had gotten. I felt hidden away and miserable and I couldn’t shake this feeling that maybe that was Cal’s intention.

Before the band came out, the theatre went dark, and a projector came on. That’s when I turned my phone’s recorder on. At first it was just white light against the brick backdrop of the stage but soon roots of various colours streaked across with no obvious pattern. The drummer and cellist came out first. The drummer immediately started hammering the bass drum and floor tom in sequence, like rocks falling off a cliff. The cellist played long strokes through a distortion pedal that made me think of a hot, pulsating wind coming off a pyroclastic flow. I could practically feel it against my face. Two guitarists came out and played nothing that sounded like guitars. Their heavily layered effects added a galaxy of noise to the already thumping rhythm
section. Then Cal stepped up to the mic to a round of cheering and applause. The projected images behind him changed to a series of colourful explosions as soon as he started singing, though from what I could hear, his singing was more growled vocalising than the actual saying of words, only adding to the swell of noise. He moved fluidly and with a confidence I had never seen in him. Or anyone else for that matter. The music got louder, building to the point of some false climax before continuing to climb, always maintaining the underlying melody. All I got was dizzier. The room was closing in on me and the crowd was radiating a dangerous entropy. It was like I was watching them all through a haze.

On the stage, Cal was standing with his arms spread wide. A look of delighted horror on his face, his eyes wide and darting across the audience like he was tracking the movement of injured prey. Or prowling predators? It was so hard to watch. He was not well.

I couldn’t continue.

I had to leave.

#

My face was wet from melting snow and tears. The music in my ears was chaos but it was also beautiful. The swirling of the falling snow seemed to pulse in time with the noise.

And then, I heard something else. My phone had picked up screams I hadn’t heard in person. They were pained, horrified screams. Cal’s wide-eyed stare came to mind, but this wasn’t him or his band. I took an earbud out to make sure there wasn’t someone on the street in some kind of danger. Nothing. I put it back in, the screams immediately resumed but now accompanied by indistinct whispers and heavy breathing. Was that me? I didn’t think so.

I was listening so intently that I slipped on some ice that had been lightly covered over by snow. I landed hard. With my hands in my pockets, I didn’t stop myself from falling at all. My back, neck and head took the full impact. I stared up at the flurry, the low cloud cover and snow reflecting the city lights. The air was on fire, and I could see explosive streaks of colour projected against the sky, still in time with the music in my ears.

I turned my head away only to find blackened hands coming out of the snowbank lining the street, reaching for me.

My stomach dropped, and my breath caught. I dragged myself away, pushing my back against a darkened storefront, watching the hands attempt to pull themselves out of the snow, something bigger shifting under there. I couldn’t move. I stared in disbelief, terrified at what was happening in front of me and still, the music played. Beyond the shifting snowbank, across the street, a silent crowd of shadows appeared, their outlines resolving in my blurred vision. They were bouncing off each other, seemingly spring loaded, ready to whirl violently in time with the music. My first thought was that Cal’s audience had followed me out of the theatre.

Not the people in attendance.

Cal’s audience.

So I finally understood, could hear what Cal was growling into the mic. He was singing

“Do you see now? I think you do.” Over and over.

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Banner Art:
Photo by Peter Trones, Unsplash, 2023