Jacob Beizart, 2317 A.D.

The birds erupted into flight seemingly the instant he awakened. About a score of them had collected to perch upon the long utility line slung low across the back edge of the field, just before where the woods began. Beizart had passed out sitting beneath one of the giant poplar trees that grew in the grass lot behind the ancient elementary school building, his back propped against the tree's smooth trunk.

He'd spent the better part of the previous day drinking beer and playing his electric guitar in one corner of the studio while the sculptor Marshall, also drinking, worked his clay in the room's opposite corner. In the evening the sculptor's girl Maxine had come by. As the sun set the three friends gathered outside in the school's small courtyard where they drank more beer and smoked marijuana and finally grilled and ate a chicken that the sculptor had killed and dressed that morning.

After dinner, they smoked again and gradually drank most of a pint of Kentucky bourbon. Later, while Beizart played his guitar, Maxine and Marshall left the studio to make love on an old red couch that sat at the top of the stairwell in the small foyer outside the old, converted school room.

Now alone, Beizart's hands stopped playing but the audible sound of the instrument continued, the notes growing in volume and intensity.

He stood and watched, occasionally swigging from the bottle of bourbon, his free hand dangling away from his side, as the strings of the Stratocaster hanging freely before his narrow waist vibrated and bent and hammered and chorded and fretted of their own accord. He watched for many minutes in the bare, silvery moonlight, his black eyes huge and glittering, before the photonically ascending column of sound from the amplifier finally blasted itself away within a towering stratospheric roar, wash, pealing whistle and, finally, gently receding hum of electronic audio feedback.

Now lying against the poplar in the increasing dawn, Beizart watched the birds suddenly whirl against the wan backdrop of the morning sky. In their circular motion he saw the shapes of the fretboard. He began to play guitar in his head. The pattern and trajectories of the birds' wheeling flight did not alter. The birds flew out of sight. Beizart closed his eyes.

The sound of one of the school's large, heavy windows unlatching and falling open with a creak and a thunk wakened him again. The sun was well up now in a clear blue sky. The seat of his jeans had soaked through with dew.

He sat breathing in the smell of the grass, never once cut since the onset of spring. Never would be, either. He breathed deeply in its odor and in the other morning smells. Behind his eyes a line of ascending minor sixths, starting at the top of the fretboard in lower E, bloomed upward into more major intervals. He wasn't sure if the phrase was one Hendrix had played at Woodstock or not.

From up the hill he heard Maxine in the studio now gently strumming chords on his acoustic guitar. The tenor inflection of her voice, with its terrifying clarity of tone, started whispery, then ebbed and caught and began to rush before ebbing back again, carrying the melody of her words alongside and on top of the harmony like icy water tumbling in a brook somewhere up in the mountains.

Up in the mountains, where he knew he must soon go. He knew not why and wasn't sure this mattered. But soon.