Michael
 
 

7

(Okay!  No more short chapter jokes!  I promise!)
 
 

8

Michael lay awake on his bed, staring toward the ceiling.  The short trip home from the concert had been uneventful, and the kids had been pacified with a few minutes of Monty Python and the Holy Grail playing on the van's ceiling-mounted DVD player.  Neither he nor his wife had said anything about the strange events they had encountered after the show's end.  Only once they had arrived home and were getting ready for bed had she mentioned anything about it.

"Honey," Bev had asked, "are you going to try to find anything on the Internet about that weird message tonight?"

"Not now," he had replied.  "It's late and I've got a few computers to work on tomorrow.  I just want to go to sleep."

But sleep was evading him now.  The strange scene with the dummy on the stage, the mystifying message written in black-light ink, the possibility that his wife's purse was a portal to another dimension of handy, readily accessible tools, knick-knacks and odds and ends that could be called upon at a moment's notice... all of this weighed upon his mind.

He had memorized the message, a cryptic cipher mocking all sense of intelligibility.  The seemingly random series of numbers, the nonsensical exclamations... and the postscript: Find Kerry Livgren.

Michael knew his Kansas history.  Guitarist/keyboardist/composer Kerry Livgren had founded the first Kansas band in 1970 along with drummer Phil Ehart and bassist Dave Hope.  Vocalist Lynn Meredith, keyboardist Dan Wright, saxophonist Larry Baker, vocalist Greg Allen and pianist/woodwindist Dan Montre had filled out the rest of the roster.  Their brand of experimental, progressive rock coupled with mystical, searching lyrics was odd at best and downright weird at worst in the rural, dusty wheatfields of Kansas.  After a year of trying (and failing) to be noticed by anyone who could sign them to a record contract, the band had folded.  Ehart and Hope had then joined up with guitarist Rich Williams, violinist Robby Steinhardt and keyboardist/vocalist Steve Walsh to form a new band called White Clover, who seemed to have a better time of it commercially than had Livgren's band.  Livgren, meanwhile, had resurrected his failed vision into a new Kansas band that featured himself, Meredith, Wright and Montre from the original lineup along with drummer Zeke Low, guitarist Rod Mikinski and woodwindist John Bolton.  For almost two years this second Kansas band struggled to be heard, insistently playing only their unique, eclectic, original material, gathering a small but intensely loyal following but never quite getting the break that would land them a record deal.

White Clover, meanwhile, had begun to attract attention in some corners of the recording industry.  A demo tape had landed in the offices of rock entrepreneur Don Kirshner, who liked what he heard.  While these wheels were in motion, Phil Ehart contacted his old bandmate Livgren to ask him to join with White Clover, who needed a second songwriter and guitarist.  Livgren felt intense loyalty to his second Kansas band, with whom he had shared many adventures in their quest to be heard.  But scrounging out a living on pennies per day had begun to wear on him and his bandmates, especially since White Clover now appeared to be on the verge of something big.  Reluctantly, Livgren folded his second Kansas band, whose other members went on with their various and sundry lives, and he joined forces with his former bandmates Ehart and Hope and their new band, who then decided that the psychedelic name White Clover sounded just too, well, "sixties."  Since Livgren's former band was now defunct, its name was available, and since all the other members of White Clover were themselves natives of Kansas, they decided to take the name of their home state and become the third incarnation of Kansas.

But that had been a long time ago, Michael thought to himself.  The band had gone through hard times, incredible fame, and bitter disillusionment over the next decade.  They had always sought to be unique and original in their music and their lyrics, but on the heels of the commercial success of the songs "Carry On Wayward Son" and "Dust in the Wind," the band had found themselves pressured by the record company and the music industry as a whole to fit into a predictable, commercial mold.  Livgren's conversion to Christian faith after years of spiritual searching had only added to the tensions within the band and ultimately led to their breakup barely a decade after the signing of their first record deal.  Since then, Livgren and Kansas had mostly gone their separate ways, he briefly forming a Christian band called A.D. in the mid '80s before going on to a solo career and the members of Kansas plowing ahead in varying incarnations of personnel.  The most recent version, featuring three of the original six along with two new members who had joined over the years, was the one that Michael and his family had seen the night before.  The band seemed content in their present incarnation, determined to continue making a name for themselves on their own regardless of past disappointments.

Yet still there was this strange message.  The first three lines of it had been connected to the band only by the most tenuous link of the fallen dummy on the stage.  But the last line, the concluding postscript demanding that former bandmate Kerry Livgren be found, brought a note of urgency that pulled at Michael's mind.  Who had left this message?  The band?  The roadies?  Some deranged fan?  A booking agent?  A record company official?  Kerry Livgren himself?  What did it all mean?

Michael knew he would never sleep until he tried to find the answer.  Quietly he eased out of bed, being careful not to wake his sleeping wife.  He sat down at his computer a few feet away, called up the Google search engine and began typing...
 
 

Bev awoke to the light of the early morning sun streaming into their bedroom.  The kids weren't yet up for school, and the house was quiet.  She felt her husband's side of the bed and, feeling his absence, sat up and looked around toward his computer where he would often sit after waking.

She gasped.

In front of the computer screen, seated in his chair, was her husband.  His motionless body was bent over the desk, his head lying across the keyboard.  His arms hung limply at his sides.

"HONEY!" Bev screamed.

"Huh?  Who?  What?"  Her husband's still form suddenly jerked upright as he turned toward her, the imprint of the computer keyboard pressed into the right side of his face.

"Oh, honey, you scared me," she stammered.  "I thought... well, never mind.  What were you doing?"

"Oh," he replied, yawning.  "I couldn't sleep, so I got up and started trying to find out something on the Internet about that weird message from last night.  I must have dozed off."

"Did you find out anything?" she asked.

"Well," he said, bringing up a document in which he had typed the message, "I think it's some kind of secret code."

"You think?" she replied, only slightly facetiously.

"Well, first I tried rearranging the sequence of numbers to try to make sense of them.  I put them in ascending and then descending order but found no discernible patterns.  Then I considered that they might be the numbers of a bank account or the combination to a safe, but I have no idea where they might be.  Then I even considered that they might be ASCII or hexadecimal code."

"Did that tell you anything?" Bev asked as she moved into the kitchen to begin brewing a pot of coffee.

"Well, if it's ASCII code," Michael replied, "it can be converted into hexadecimal values or simply into letters and numbers.  If it's hexadecimal, it can go to ASCII or binary notation.  But when I ran the conversions, each result was gibberish."

"Can you think of anything else they might be?" she asked.

"I considered for a moment that they might be the MAC address of a network adapter card.  The MAC address uniquely identifies each card on a given network, but you'd have to know which network to scan for the number.  All I know for sure is that it doesn't match any of the cards on our home network... not that I expected it to," he said.

"What about the message as a whole?' she asked as the coffee began brewing.

"Well, here's what I think," Michael replied.  "The numbers are either a super-secret code or just random numbers used to get our attention.  The middle lines, 'Pop is a climbed rogue!" and "We tar!" however, are more intelligible when taken into context."

"What context?" Bev asked.

"The context of Kansas' history in the music industry," Michael said.  "You see, Kansas at its heart is a progressive rock band no matter how its membership may change over time.  As such the band has created unique, intriguing music over the years.  But that's not what ultimately makes money for the record company.  What makes money for them, in a word, is 'pop.'  Pop music, 'popular' music.  Kansas and other bands like them have been around for years and will be until they die, slowly but surely amassing a wealth of material that brings in money in the long run, but the record companies would rather make quick money with the lastest 'flash in the pan' artist who catches the media eye.  For example, back in the late 1980s both Kansas and Boston, huge acts from the '70s, were signed with MCA Records.  But right after Kansas released their In the Spirit of Things album, new management came in at the top who cared nothing for proven, long-haul bands.  They pulled the rug out from under Kansas and steered all their promotional efforts and cash flow to push Tiffany instead."

"Who's 'Tiffany'?" Bev asked.

"That's the point.  She's gone.  Finished.  Flash in the pan.  There one minute, forgotten the next.  And proven bands like Kansas who've been around forever are left to fend for themselves.  Hence the middle lines of the message we found: 'Pop is a climbed rogue!' and 'We tar!'  Basically the message says that the pop music industry is a rogue -- a knave, a lie, a cheat -- that Kansas long ago 'climbed' or conquered back in the '70s.  They no longer care what the music industry thinks of them; they 'tar' as in 'tar and feather' pop music and the industry that pushes it."

"You know, honey," Bev said as she poured cups of coffee for herself and her husband, "it seems to me that if Kansas wanted to communicate this particular message to the world, they would have done so in clear language and for all to hear, not in a secret message that only one person would find."

"But how many people at the concert besides myself would have caught the significance of the dummy falling to the stage during 'How My Soul Cries Out for You'?  Maybe Kansas wants me to be the one to say this for them."

"I still think they would have said it themselves out loud if that's what they really meant.  And you're assuming that the members of the band are the ones who left the message," she said, sitting down on the couch by the front bay window.  "What about the last line?  The postscript that says, 'Find Kerry Livgren'?"

"That," Michael replied, "I've concluded is a highly encrypted, secret coded message."

"It's a secret code?" Bev asked doubtfully.  "It seems fairly straightforward to me."

"I've been doing some checking on the Internet," Michael said, picking up a sheet of paper from his printer and taking it to his wife.  "I've found that the phrase 'Find Kerry Livgren' is a cleverly disguised anagram that, when rearranged, says, 'Fry Kern Driveling.'"

Bev raised her eyebrows.  "Who is 'Kern Driveling'?" she asked skeptically.  "And why would anyone want to fry him?"

"That's just it," Michael replied.  "It's a secret."

"So you're saying that the top line of numbers and the 'Find Kerry Livgren' at the bottom are a mysterious, secret code and the two middle lines are an oddly stated but otherwise intelligible indictment of the pop music industry," Bev said, sipping her coffee.

"It makes perfect sense," Michael said, taking a sip from his own cup as his wife continued eyeing him dubiously.  "Well," he said, growing uncomfortable under her gaze, "perfect sense in an... imperfect... kind of... way."

"I'll tell you what I think, honey," she said, sitting up on the couch.  "I think it's the other way around.  I think the numbers at the top are in that order for a reason and that the 'Find Kerry Livgren' means just what it says.  The middle lines are the secret code."

"Are you saying that pop isn't a climbed rogue?" Michael asked.

"I'm saying that that's the secret code, regardless of what it seems to say," Bev replied.  "Otherwise, if it is just a cryptic putdown of the music industry, why would anyone go to such lengths to mask that reality behind such a disguise?"

"Someone who has a vested interest in the meaning of this message," Michael said, walking back to his computer.  "Someone who wanted me to find it."

He sat down at the keyboard.  "So you think that the numbers are in the right order after all?" he called back to his wife.

"It's worth a shot."

"Let's see," he said, typing the string of numbers into the search engine.  "Zero-three-zero-zero-zero-seven-two-four-one-nine-seven-nine and... go."

The screen cleared and displayed its results.

"'Your search... did not match any documents,'" Michael read from the screen as his wife came up and leaned over his shoulder.

"Leave the hyphens in and try it again," she suggested.

"03-00-07-24-19-79," Michael said as he typed, "and... go."

After a moment the screen again returned its results.

"'No standard web pages containing all your search terms were found,'" Bev read.

"But look," Michael said, pointing to the screen.  "It's asking if I meant '03-00-07-24-1979,' as if the last four digits go together to form the year '1979.'"

"Maybe they do go together," Bev said.  "What happened in 1979?"

"Well," he said, "I remember Three Mile Island, Skylab crashing to earth, gas shortages, asbestos hair dryers, DC-9s falling apart in mid-air, the Islamic revolution in Iran and the resulting hostage crisis, the heyday of disco... it was just one disaster after another."

"What about anything having to do with Kansas?"

"Well, they released their album Monolith..."

Michael suddenly sat upright.  MONOLITH!  The same album that featured the song "How My Soul Cries Out for You," during the band's playing of which in concert that year a dummy would fall to the stage... just as the John Brown dummy had fallen during the previous night's performance of the same song.

"I think you're right, honey," Michael said excitedly.  "I think it does mean '1979.'  And that would make the rest of the numerical string..."

"It would be a date," Bev offered, "except there are too many numbers for it to be just a date."

"If the last four digits are indeed '1979," then the preceeding four digits could be the month and date... July 24th, 1979."

"Maybe that was when they released the album," Bev wondered.

"No, it came out in May of that year," Michael said.  "This is a couple of months later."

"What about the first four digits...?" Bev asked.

"They could mean the time of day... oh-three-hundred hours... three a.m."

"I don't understand.  What happened at three o'clock in the morning on July 24th, 1979?" Bev asked.  "And what does it have to do with Kansas or Kerry Livgren?"

"It has everything to do with Kansas and Kerry Livgren," Michael replied.  "That precise moment in time determined the rest of their history, both together and apart, from then until now.  That was the moment," he said, pausing dramatically, "of Kerry Livgren's conversion to Christianity."