The Beatles—Future Perfect, Part 8

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Lifting the Veil

The second night at the Teatro Municipal Baltazar Dias began the way the first had ended—with the sense that the room itself was listening.

Three hundred people filled the horseshoe of red velvet boxes, close enough that George could see individual faces catching the light from the painted ceiling. There was an initial very enthusiastic round of applause, but no wall of noise to hide behind. There was only the music, and the way it returned to them off the old plaster and gilt, altered and enlarged, as though the hall were a fifth instrument that had waited a hundred and thirty years to be played properly.

They opened quietly. Maya and Chloe traded a figure back and forth, Zack laid something warm beneath it, and George felt the familiar settling in his chest that had become, over these months, almost a form of prayer. Then, somewhere in the third song—he could never afterward recall exactly when—but something shifted.

It was not dramatic. That was the strange part. There was no flash, no vertigo, no sense of falling. It was more like the moment a word one has said a thousand times suddenly reveals its shape, and one sees it whole for the first time.

He was playing. His hands knew the chords. And at the same time, from somewhere vast and unhurried and entirely calm, he was watching himself play.

The hall, the audience, the warm bodies of his friends around him, the faint smell of old velvet and sea air through the open doors—all of it remained perfectly real. But it had become transparent, the way a film remains vivid even as you become aware you are sitting in a darkened room watching light thrown against a wall. George did not lose the music. If anything he played better, more freely, as if a hand that had been resting lightly over his own had lifted away.

He finished the set without a flaw. He smiled and bowed with the others. He said little and withdrew as the others, flush with the afterglow of adrenaline were busy celebrating.

They found him afterward in the empty auditorium, long after the audience had gone and the crew had wound their cables and carried the last cases into the Madeira night. George sat alone in the front row, guitar across his knees, looking up at the painted ceiling where cherubs drifted through a sky that no longer quite convinced him.

Maya came first, then Chloe. They did not ask him what was wrong. They simply sat, one on either side, the way people sit with someone who has just understood something.

"You felt it tonight," Maya said. It was not a question.

George kept his eyes on the ceiling. When he spoke his voice was steady, almost amused, but underneath it ran a current of something enormous.

"I've been trying to work out how to say this without sounding as though I've gone daft." He gave a short laugh. "John's favorite line, that. I've borrowed it more than once these last months."

"Say it however it comes," Chloe said.

George was quiet for a moment. Then:

"When I came upon you four in Rishikesh, I thought—" He paused, choosing. "I thought I'd stumbled into something that was mine. Not that you were mine. That the finding of you was mine. Like a door had opened in a house I'd lived in all my life, one I'd walked past a thousand times, and behind it was a room I somehow already knew."

He turned to look at them.

"I suspected it was another reality. Something close to my own—nearly the same, but bent, just slightly, off true. And I felt I'd been—" he searched, "—invited into exploring it. Drawn in. I never said a word. Not to Paul, not to John. They'd have thought I'd finally gone round the bend with all my heavy meditation. So I just went along. I told myself I was imagining things, and I played the part, and the part became my life, and after a while I stopped asking."

Maya said nothing. Chloe reached over and rested a hand lightly on his forearm.

"Tonight the room opened me up," George went on. "The acoustics, the closeness of it—no distance to hide in. And for a moment the veil lifted, and I saw." He tapped his chest. "I understand now that only the smallest sliver of me came here. Some tiny fraction of a self far larger than this one. It slipped into this reality, and it adapted—it had to, to live as a man, to have a free will and not know the ending of my own story. It shut the channel. Closed the door behind itself, so this experience would be real." He shook his head slowly. "And it is real. That's the thing I can't get past. You're not phantoms. You're living beings. I had no cause to suspect anything at all."

He smiled at Maya then, a little wonderingly.

"Cosmic Illusion," he said. "Maya, that's what your name means in Sanskrit. Did you know that? Of course you knew."

Maya's answering smile held no triumph in it, and no cruelty—only the same patient kindness she had shown a group of famous, suffocated men on the banks of a cold river.

"We wondered," she said softly, "how much you'd come to see."

For a long time George said nothing more. A single work-light burned at the side of the stage; everything else lay in warm shadow.

"I don't understand all of it," he admitted at last. "My larger true self—it knows. It knows exactly what's happening, and it allows this. The way a man will let himself be carried off by a film, if the film is good enough. My higher self wants to see how I handle all this. So the whole thing works precisely because the higher self consents to forget." He frowned. "And I think the spiritual state of a soul is the whole key. What you can bear to see of reality depends entirely on where you stand inside yourself. John and Paul—they're fully here in this reality, and fully asleep to it, and that's right for them. But I've woken, and I'm still only a sliver. I know I'm not my whole self. I can feel the size of what I'm not."

"Can you go back?" Chloe asked gently. "To the whole of it?"

George considered this with the care of a man who had already turned it over many times in the space of an hour.

"No," he said. "Not by wanting to. That command doesn't belong to me—not to this me. It has to come from the something greater, and I think that something greater is in no hurry. It's enjoying the show, and I'm learning something." He laughed quietly. "I've become a member of Future Perfect, haven't I? Quietly. In both worlds at once."

Neither sister denied it.

"There's a great deal I still can't reach," George said. "My own timeline, for one. The larger me would know every turn of it. But the sliver sitting in this chair—I couldn't tell you what became of the man I was, or the world I came from. It's like trying to remember a dream that dissolved the moment you reached for it." He shrugged. "I only know I was drawn here. I don't know why me. Perhaps because I was the one already listening for the door."

Footsteps came softly down the aisle. Kiran, then Xample and Julian behind him, with Zack and Kyle following. They had been waiting in the wings, George realized. Waiting for this.

He looked from face to face, and something in his expression steadied into certainty.

"You're all part of it," he said. "You, Kiran—especially you. Kyle. Zack. The two managers hovering at the back like they're afraid of the stage." Julian had the grace to look caught out. "I've felt the difference in you for months. I put it down to your being American, or young, or simply strange." He smiled. "It isn't that."

Xample stepped forward. He had rehearsed a hundred careful evasions on the walk down the aisle, and abandoned every one of them the moment he saw George's eyes.

"We're from the future," he said simply. "That much is true. Further than you'd credit. And the four of them"—he nodded at Future Perfect—"came from there to find you. To find all of you."

He stopped there. He did not speak of the CCE, of the resonance field, of the billion and more minds pressing their shared attention against this single point in time. He did not explain the machinery. There are truths a man can carry and truths that would only break the vessel, and Xample had spent a long career learning to tell one from the other.

George waited a moment, and when nothing more came, he nodded slowly. He understood that a boundary had been drawn, and he understood, with the odd new clarity that had come to him tonight, that it had been drawn in kindness.

"You won't tell me the rest," he said. "That's all right. I don't think I could hold it and still play tomorrow." He rose, guitar in hand, and the greater calm that had touched him during the concert seemed to settle over him again. "But I know what I want."

"Tell us," Maya said.

"John and Paul will never come to this. I've known that for a while, and I've made my peace with it. They're happy—happier than they've been in years, and I won't be the one to crack that open. But I don't want to go on pretending I'm asleep with them." He looked at the six of them ranged around him in the dim, magnificent old room. "I want to work with you. Properly. Knowingly. I'll be your voice inside the band—the one who understands what the music is really doing and why it matters that we get it right. Whatever this is, I'm part of it now. Awake."

Kiran, who had said nothing, studied George the way an astronomer studies a star that has begun, unexpectedly, to shine at a frequency no one predicted. Where John and Paul held the field with the great unconscious stability of belief, George's resonance had changed in the last hour—no longer merely anchored, but aware of the anchoring, and steady even so. A bridge, Kiran thought. The single point where the old timeline and the new could pass a message hand to hand.

"You'll be limited," Kiran said quietly. "You already know it. You'll see more than the others and less than yourself."

George smiled, and for a moment—just a moment—something looked out through his eyes that was far larger than the man holding the guitar, something that had consented, for love of the experience, to forget itself a while longer.

"A sliver's enough," he said, "if it's the right one."

Above them, painted across the old ceiling, the cherubs drifted through their false and lovely sky. George looked up at them once more, and this time he did not mind that it wasn't real.

None of it was, and all of it was. He had finally learned that these were the same thing.

To Be Continued...