Bix’s Angel

by Bob Brill

Chapter 3, part 1; part 2
appear in this issue.

Chapter 4: Epilogue

BIX LIVES! were the words emblazoned across banners, bumper stickers, posters, T-shirts and mugs at the Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Jazz Festival in Davenport, Iowa, Bix’s hometown. Gvedn attended this festival in 1995, curious to see how Bix’s countrymen honored him in the place where during his lifetime he was considered to be a degenerate freak.

Gvedn noted that the crowd fell into several distinct categories. There were those who knew little and cared less about Bix, but recognized that a rousing good money-making, tourist attraction could be built around a long dead local hero, the only such hero in the history of the town. There were those who never heard of Bix, but were drawn by the promise of a party, a chance to eat, drink and mingle with members of the opposite sex.

There were amateur musicians, who came to play dixieland music while decked out in striped shirts and straw boaters. They all knew who Bix was, collected his records, and idolized him, but they all slavishly patterned themselves on a stereotype of the white dixieland musician and played a highly derivative brand of jazz. They never played any of Bix’s advanced piano pieces, like In a Mist or Candlelight. They couldn’t follow where Bix was leading. They played nice safe tunes like Back Home Again in Indiana, which after all, is not so far from Davenport, Iowa.

And then there were the true devotees of the Bix cult, the insiders who knew Bix’s records note for note, collected Bixeana of every variety, argued through long nights about obscure incidents in Bix’s life, and who looked with disdain on the outsiders who made up most of the crowd.

Of all the people in attendance Gvedn was the only one who actually knew Bix. Bix’s generation had come and gone and, if the catch phrase BIX LIVES had any meaning in 1995, it was that Bix lived on as a meme, an idea passed down through the generations, distorted, fictionalized, romanticized, refined into a myth that had almost nothing to do with the once living man. For Gvedn, Bix was long dead and gone, forever a guiltstone around his neck.

As for Duke, Gvedn, who followed Duke’s career closely, noticed that Duke never mentioned his brush with the Continuum. His autobiography and other writings and public utterances were completely free of any reference to this episode in his life. This was not surprising to Gvedn. He visited Duke in early 1974, shortly before Duke’s death. Duke, of course, did not recognize Gvedn. “I looked very different then,” he explained. “Do you remember? Princeton Junction? Bowler hat?”

“That can’t be you,” said Duke. “He was a little guy, older than you. That was thirty years ago. You’re just a kid.”

“Right. I’m younger now. You know, the Continuum, alien culture. We take on many shapes. I took on this shape for a certain job and I’ve been trapped in this body for twenty years.”

“To tell you the truth, old boy, I don’t think about that time very much. It was all too weird. I put it aside and got right back into my life.”

“But you do remember, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes, I remember all right. Was it really you? I’ll never forget how you stopped the train. How that son-of-a-bitch shot at us.”

“Good. I’m glad you remember, Duke.”

“But I never talk about it.”

“I understand.”

Richard Feynman never wrote a paper called I Was Abducted by Aliens. Like Duke, he never talked about his experience. Long after his death, in the year 2019, some of his personal papers were discovered stored in the basement of the library at Cal Tech. One of the documents in that stash described the whole adventure in detail. It concluded with the following passage.

I struggled with this for a long time afterward. I invented a scenario in which the whole thing could be construed as an elaborate hoax. This was a very appealing hypothesis. It would get me off the hook and preserve my view of the universe. But in all honesty I couldn’t buy the hoax hypothesis. I knew in my bones that what I experienced was real.

The moment that the LCA turned to me wearing my face and my body, I knew. That was a stroke of genius on his part. If he had appeared in any other body, even an alien body, the hoax hypothesis might have held up. It would have just been some stranger or somebody with an elaborate Hollywood makeup job. Ah, you might say, those Hollywood makeup artists could have done a Feynman look-alike just as easily. True, true, but I tell you, he convinced me. He looked at me with my own eyes and it chilled me to the bone.

It was done with alien technology. How do I know? I don’t know. And how did I pass through that dark region to get to that place and how did I pass back again to yet another place, a hotel lavatory where I’d never been before? I don’t know. Alien technology. I observed some strange shit. And my intuition said this is just what they are telling you it is.

To say alien technology is no explanation at all. It’s like saying God did it. The maddening part is that I have not been able to go back there, to do experiments, to develop the concept further, to test it, to make it into science. It remains forever elusive. So it is tempting to dismiss it. To a large degree I have, at least I have gone on working as though it never happened.

But at bottom I can’t ignore it. I have made the leap of faith and there you have it. I have fallen so low as to believe in a god called alien technology.

Gvedn lived on in the slender boyish body that he had adopted for his visit to Richard Feynman. He was cut off from the Continuum, had to live like an ordinary human in that not quite human body. He and Feynman had driven down to Tijuana that night and checked into a sleazy hotel, after which Feynman got stinking drunk in a bar crawling with prostitutes. Gvedn steered him back to the hotel and put him to bed. In the morning they parted, Feynman to begin a leisurely, meandering drive back home, Gvedn to board a bus heading toward Mexico City.

There he stayed for several years, living off his wits. Having no papers he couldn’t get a legitimate job, so he became a thief and set about the task of learning the codes and mores of the criminal class. Gradually he infiltrated this world and was accepted as a trustworthy, sensible and resourceful member of a gang of counterfeiters and smugglers. In time he became chief advisor to the lord of this gang. Through his underworld connections he finally acquired an identity, a passport, and a sizable income.

This accomplished he left Mexico and traveled the world. He became the Continuum’s greatest expert on the human condition, but of course, the Continuum did not benefit from this knowledge.

After about fifty years the body began to fail him. He did not grow old like a human. He still looked young, the skin did not wrinkle, he did not stoop or grow lame. He just looked used up, like an old machine. He felt tired. Most of all he was tired of Earth and its culture. He longed for his own culture and he wanted a change of body. He was ready to go home and face whatever punishment awaited him. He tried to beam to Continuum HQ. But nothing happened. He remained standing at the coffee bar in Rome where he had just drunk a cappuccino and eaten a sweet roll.

Have I forgotten how? he thought. He tried again. No luck. He tried again numerous times over the next few days. Finally, he gave up. He was stuck. They have shut me out, he concluded.

What he didn’t know, what he never found out, was that the Continuum had packed up and left this sector of the universe. Largely through Gvedn’s efforts, the local branch of the Continuum had not achieved a successful alignment in nearly a hundred years. A faction grew up within the Continuum that began to think as Gvedn did, that the universe was muddling along just fine without any adjustments. The authorities held to the orthodox view, but they were demoralized. The schism grew and a struggle for political power ensued which came to the attention of the higher Continuum authorities at Yalora.

The LCA was replaced again and with the new leader came an entourage of his cronies to support his authority. But they only became embroiled in the local political turmoil and were unable to assert their power. In the end the local branch of the Continuum was shut down and the entire staff dispersed to various obscure outposts far from the scene of their failure. For the time being, at least, the Earth was left in peace.

Gvedn went on living in exile, restlessly moving from place to place, increasingly dejected that he had been so utterly cast out by his kind. One day while crossing a street in Vienna he collapsed and lay twitching on the pavement, where he narrowly missed being run over by a florist’s delivery van. His mind was functioning perfectly as he lay unable to stop the erratic trembling and jerking of his limbs. In the ambulance the medics administered an anti-spasmodic and he died instantly.

A post mortem examination revealed that his internal anatomy was extremely strange. The most shocking anomaly was his six-chambered heart. For a while the doctors were animated by discussions of this peculiar phenomenon. Conflicting theories were concocted, discussed, argued, accepted, rejected. The only unanimous opinion was that until some agreement could be reached the press should not be alerted. A full report was filed containing all the anatomical details together with the various hypotheses and explanations. Then gradually the doctors returned to their always pressing duties. No one was assigned to study it further and ultimately the case was forgotten.