WHATEVER HAPPENED TO CONCERTINA TOM?

It is always at least a little sad to return somewhere you used to live and see how much has changed, but I think it’s particularly painful for college graduates to see their alma mater after some years away. Few adults would really want to go down the old slide on their elementary school playground if it was still there, but you might have revisited a well-remembered coffee shop at which you used to study for midterms, or a bar you always went to on Thursday night after class, or some other haunt from your time. To find these places are no longer there is to have a door to your past shut. It would, in truth, have been shut regardless—but you might have at least tried the lock.
       On the other hand, sometimes a physical place will remain but be somehow lesser than you remember. This can, of course, be simple nostalgia creating a memory no reality could ever live up to, but there are cases where the void left behind by what is missing might be very real and undeniable. This was Drakes’ experience when he returned to the university where he and I went to school and saw what had become of the library square.
       This square is a large open-air pedestrian space in the heart of campus. The north border is the university’s massive main library and some decorative green lawn surrounding it; the south border is a wall of other campus and campus-adjacent buildings; the west and east sides open up onto parallel streets and sidewalks. You might think of a sort of paved park between two rows of buildings, covered in concrete tiles of alternating shades of lighter and darker gray, like an enormous checkerboard, with benches and small planted trees arranged in neat rows throughout. Sometimes—at least when Drakes and I were in college—there would be small festivals or craft fairs here, and at other times student protests and demonstrations against the war, or celebrations after a big game. But one of the most consistent and reliable presences on the library square was the fleet of food trucks that would set up every day, rain or shine, for a few hours on either side of noon.
       The trucks set their prices with students in mind, although it was also a popular destination for faculty and anybody else who happened to be passing through the library square at lunchtime. Drakes and I used to eat there frequently; we would split up and get whatever we wanted from whatever cart and meet at one of the tables. Different trucks came and went over the years, but if any one went out of business or moved locations, it was always promptly replaced by some other entrepreneur seizing the opportunity. I’m a bit of a creature of habit, so I tended to stick to one or two carts at a time—I liked the gyro truck and the soul food truck the best—but Drakes ate wherever his appetite led him on a given day. It might have been Korean barbecue or Indian or empanadas. There was a Tibetan place once that didn’t last long that he was particularly fond of. It might sound a little ridiculous to romanticize this sort of thing, but to young people like Drakes and myself, who had been raised on small-town Wisconsin cooking and convenience food, this small window into a larger world of cuisine was at least a small part of what we considered our education.
       There was music much of the time as well, but we will return to this later.
       Drakes and I were quite close as students, but when we left school, Drakes left definitively: diploma in hand, he did not set foot on the old campus or the city it sat in for over ten years after graduation. I, on the other hand, remained within an hour of it and stopped to visit sometimes when I happened to be driving through the area on my way somewhere else. Drakes and I kept in touch in a very low-stakes and low-expectations kind of occasional correspondence. But a change in careers eventually happened to bring him back to the city, and on his first free day there, his only thought was to reacquaint himself with the library square. I warned him, however, that things would be very different than he remembered.
       Drakes found the space was both changed physically and lessened in quality, as I’ve described. He wasn’t actually all that bothered by the cosmetic changes. The tables and benches were different, but there were still tables and benches. He also told me, in his opinion, the remodeled front entrance to the library had been quite tastefully done to preserve its familiar character.
       But his heart sank to find that instead of the dozen or so food trucks he expected to find, there were only two. If there had been none, he told me, he might have simply assumed the campus or city had made some policy change or rezoning plan that disallowed them and felt disappointed enough, but it was somehow more demoralizing to see only a small fruit stand and a rather dismal gunmetal gray trailer offering pulled pork sandwiches that nobody seemed eager to buy. Although there were plenty of students and faculty in sight, nobody lingered in the library square like they used to; in fact, many of them seemed to walk with the distinctively awkward gait of someone trying not to be obvious that they are hurrying.
       The library square had become a place to pass through rather than a destination. Drakes immediately sensed that this was the new state of affairs rather than an aberration; it was nearly high noon and the fall semester was in session, and there was no threat of rain to discourage being outside that day or any construction forcing anyone to use an alternate route. The life, it seemed, had simply drained from the library square at some point in the past decade.
       The music was no longer there either. It had been, he would eventually learn, the first thing to go. I don’t believe it can ever be brought back.

“I’d opened my truck about a year or so back and started out on the east side, setting up here and there,” F——— began. “But I always wanted to get a spot on the library square as soon as one opened up. Finally, that June, I heard there was an availability, and I moved in: third space to the left. I was only there for about a week before the skeleton showed up.”
       Drakes nearly dropped his glass on the bar. “Skeleton?”
       “Plastic. A Halloween decoration. Someone had hung it up overnight, and it was there when the trucks arrived that morning.”
       Drakes felt silly. “Of course.”
       A meeting between Drakes and F——— had been arranged at the Glass Spider Lounge by Lee, the bartender. Lee knew everybody who came in and took a matchmaker’s pride in connecting them. In this case, he found out that Drakes was interested to learn what had happened to library square in the years he was away, and Lee happened to know someone who used to run one of the food trucks during their last gasp of dominance there. “It was creepy all the same,” F——— continued, referring to the skeleton. “It was hung up from one of the light poles by a noose. Mouth open, swinging in the breeze. And whoever put it there dressed it up in clothes.”
       “What kind of clothes?”
       “Like the kind road crews wear on the highway, or firefighters. Jacket and pants. Bright greenish-yellow, with orange and white reflective tape. And it had a hat, but it’d fallen off by the time I saw it. It was—”
       “Blue? A fisherman’s cap?”
       “That’s right, man. How’d you know?”
       “Because,” Drakes replied, “I remember Concertina Tom from when I went to school here.”
       F——— leaned in. “Was that the guy’s name?”
       “I’m really not sure.” Drakes peered into the bottom of his drink, a yellowy gimlet. “That’s just what we called him. I’m not even sure why.”
       All college campuses have a local character or two, and Concertina Tom was one of ours. I think the simplest way to describe him is that he was a street musician: a fixture on the library square most days while I was in school, and I gather he had been for some years before already. But for someone so ubiquitous on campus, he was shrouded in mystery and became the subject of much debate among us. His age was unknown—generally described as “old,” but keep in mind this was the assessment and perspective of college students. He was what you might call ethnically ambiguous; I alternately heard him described as Middle Eastern, or Greek, or Indian (both East Asian and Native American), but just as often some Irish or German who stayed out in the sun too long. Occasionally, someone would refer to him as homeless, which would sometimes lead us conscientious students into a political discussion about unpacking and confronting the cultural biases that led to this assumption. One legend had it that he was a former municipal employee who had helped construct the library square in the first place; another said he had worked for the state highway department and walked off the job after a close call with a speeding car, having decided life was too short to do anything but play music. He might have also been a millionaire who only dressed this way for some eccentric reason known only to himself. All such stories were equally plausible and equally doubtful. In short, nobody knew anything about him; not really.
       The man we knew as Concertina Tom was very thin and had a coarse and wiry beard shot through with silver. He wore an old navy-blue fisherman’s cap, which he would take off and set next to him for people to leave money in, revealing that despite his long silvery hair, he was in fact completely bald on the very top of his crown. But his main distinguishing feature was that even on the hottest days, you would not see him without a heavy coat and pants of the same acid yellow-green color F——— had described. He would sit, dressed like this, on the low wall in front of the Lutheran campus center, or on the steps to the library, or wherever else on the library square there was space available. And he would play showtunes, or classic television themes, or things that I didn’t recognize but that I took to be folk songs, on his concertina.
       If you’re not familiar with the instrument, picture the small accordion-like device you might imagine a pirate playing in an old cartoon: a small hexagonal plate attached to each hand and covered in buttons that serve as keys, connected by a bellows. It is possible to play both melody and chords or other accompaniment at once, so that the skilled player (which Concertina Tom certainly was) can squeeze a very rich and complex musical performance from it. The sound it produces is like an accordion or even a church organ, but owing to its relatively compact size, it is quite high in pitch. I would have said the sound was pleasantly sweet and sharp, like a lemon. But some others described it as “shrill” or “piercing.” This was, it seems, the origin of the problem that led to his exile.
       “So you never saw him?” Drakes asked. “Concertina Tom, that is.”
       F——— shook his head. “Before my time. I didn’t live around here before I started the business. I guess the time he was supposed to have disappeared was around when I first came to town.”
       “Right.” Drakes was trying to form a timeline in his head, although the gimlets he had downed were complicating his calculations.
       “Anyway, like I said,” F——— continued, “the skeleton hanging there was a little creepy but a little goofy, but the other vendors really took it seriously. M———, who used to run the gyro truck, she kept going, ‘That’s not funny, that’s not funny.’ Somebody got up there and cut the thing down eventually. I don’t know what happened to it after that.”
       Drakes felt a shudder, which surprised him. Where might this plastic effigy be today? “You didn’t know his name, but did you know who he was, generally? Or had been? Did the other vendors tell you what they’d done?”
       “I sort of put it together myself, and then B—— sort of filled me in on the gaps.”
       “Who’s B——?”
       “He sold Hmong egg rolls,” F——— said. “How much do you already know about what happened?”
       “Not much,” Drakes said. “I didn’t know about the skeleton, for one thing. But I used to work for the campus newspaper when I went to school here, and the only story I was able to track down was in their archives. It wasn’t even a real news story, it was on the little community section on page two, from about a year before the time you’re talking about.”

ITEM: Has anybody seen Concertina Tom lately? The maestro of the library square? Reader Allie Wysczek tells us that early last Monday, a city police officer interrupted his daily performance and threatened him with a ticket if he didn’t leave the scene. Concertina Tom complied with the request, and as far as we can tell, nobody has seen him since. Is he still out there? We hope so. If he really is gone for good, the cops might have turned him from a squeezebox busker to a campus folk hero.

       “Yeah,” F——— continued. “B—— told me everyone else but him was in on making the noise complaint. B—— said he tried to talk the rest of them out of it, because the students, they all liked the guy and would be sad if he was gone.” He affected a voice. “‘The kids don’t understand.’ This was M——— from the gyro stand, right? ‘They hang around for twenty minutes and then go to class and it’s fun for them. But if they had to listen that whiny music all day, every day...’”
       “So, after the skeleton,” Drakes said, “is that when the fires started?”
       “First it was the food poisoning, and then it was the fires.”
       Those incidents had made it into the actual news coverage of both the campus paper and the local city one, and Drakes had read about them. The police stated they suspected pranksters, perhaps related to fraternity hazing, which was a particular problem on campus at the time. No official account mentioned Concertina Tom or his apparent skeleton representative.
       “Then M——— got heat stroke or something, passed out right in the gyro truck. And that was weird. It gets hot with food cooking, but it was October—pretty cool out. That’s when I found out the guy who had the space I was in before me went down with the same thing or something similar and just never came back. M——— didn’t either. Someone else left around that time, but I don’t know if something happened to him, or if he just wanted to get out while the getting was good. Maybe it was completely unrelated; I didn’t know him that well.”
       Drakes took a long sip of his latest gimlet and proceeded with caution. “Did anyone talk about a ghost?”
       F——— looked at him, hard. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
       “Neither do I,” said Drakes. He took another sip. I’m afraid I had put the idea in his head, because, being much closer to the old campus, I had heard some stories over the years.
       After a pause, F——— continued. “B—— didn’t say it was a ghost. He wasn’t some superstitious immigrant, you know; he was a businessman like me.”
       “But he saw something?”
       “Just once. I mean...the thing about ghosts is, you’re not supposed to see them in the daylight, right? That wouldn’t be very scary. And you know how sunny it is in the library square, especially around lunchtime. But you know that people don’t hang around there at night anymore, right?”
       “People don’t seem to hang around any time of day anymore.”
       “Maybe the dark’s especially bad, though. This one time there was a chance of a really bad storm in the forecast: a fifty-fifty shot, but if it was the bad fifty, it’d be pretty bad. I decided not to roll the dice and stayed home that day. B—— set up as usual. Actually, it looked like he was the one who made the right call, because it really only came pouring for about twenty minutes and then it cleared up all nice. But for that twenty minutes it got really dark in the square, he says, when I saw him the next day.” F——— finished his drink. “He didn’t look good that next day. He told me he’d seen, in the darkest part of the shadow at the front of the library, some kind of shape. That’s all he said, was ‘a shape.’ The day after that, he didn’t show up, but there was a note taped to the pole where I plug in the electrics on the truck, you know. It said I was a good friend and a good cook, but if I knew what was best for me, I’d get out the same as he had. And he said...”
       (F——— faltered.)
       “...he said it wasn’t fair because he liked music.”
       “So what did you do?”
       “I left my spot after another two weeks. Not because he’d warned me; we had a couple weeks of food poisoning, fires, and everything else, and that’s just plain bad for business. Things trickled off after that, so I went back to the east side. I do just fine there.”
       “And this was...five years ago?”
       “Five or six, yeah.”
       “Have you ever thought about going back to the library square, now that so much time has passed?”
       F——— took a deep breath and held it. Then he shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s over, man. You know?”
       For Mr. F——— perhaps it was, and Drakes thanked him for his time. But when Drakes left the Glass Spider, he did not go home. We may blame the four gimlets he consumed for the decision to go to the library square so late at night and all by himself—but not, I think, for what he saw.

By night, the square was even emptier than Drakes had seen it in the daytime. As it was in our time at college, the library was by this hour closed and locked, and all the other buildings on the north and south sides of the square were dark. But there would have been—should have been—people, even just cutting through to take a shortcut between the two roads on the west and east edges of the square. As Drakes stumbled off the adjoining sidewalk and onto the gray checkerboard-tiled pavement, there was only one other person hurriedly making her way through it, and she eyed Drakes almost guiltily as she passed, as though she’d been caught trespassing. When she disappeared around a corner, Drakes was truly alone there, so far as he could tell.
       One thing that had not changed, at least, was the color of the library square at night. The lamps were tall, straight cylinders with perfectly round globes of light at the top, like glowing lollipops. It was so quiet he could hear them faintly buzzing with electricity. They tinted the buildings and pavement a muggy yellowish orange, for all the good the light did anything.
       Drakes toddled over to one of the benches toward the middle of the square, sat down and looked around. He was processing, I suppose, the lesson we all are forced to learn as we get older: the world does not preserve the things we love in amber, and it is not always clear to us how important these things are until they are gone. Or that these things might remain in space, as the library square did, and yet still might be considered “gone” in all the important ways. He felt, in that moment, that he was taking his leave of the library square. His mood was funereal. He imagined a wistfully sad tune drifting through the air to commemorate the loss.
       After a moment of this introspection, the music became so clear and distinct that Drakes came to realize he was not imagining it after all.
       He whipped his head around, trying to find the source of this high, reedy song. The acoustics of being surrounded on opposite sides by tall buildings has always made it difficult to pinpoint where a given sound on the library square was coming from. At last, without really realizing why he was doing it, he stopped trying to follow the sound with his ear and turned to look at the place he most likely expected it to come from.
       Less than fifty yards away, on the low wall of the Lutheran campus center, sat a figure, hunched over in concentration over the instrument it was playing. It seemed to glow, faintly. Not unlike, perhaps, the lamplight hitting reflective tape, but diffused as through a light mist of rain.
       Drakes stood up from the table without thinking, as though pulled up on a string like a fish. It was difficult to make the figure out through the glow; it forced Drakes squint his eyes, like the sun glinting off of shiny metal. He walked toward the light, first slowly creeping, then almost jogging. But as he got closer, the figure became no more distinct and the music became no louder. Only the light became stronger, and Drakes held a hand up to shield his eyes from it; soon he moving forward essentially blind. What could it mean? Surely, the music and the pure white radiance would attract someone else from off the square sooner or later.
       His foot hit the low wall and he lowered his hand. The glow had faded and he could see again, but there was no one there. He even groped the air where he was sure he had seen something or someone moments earlier. Of course he was alone. And yet...couldn’t he still hear the music?
       He turned around, slowly, scanning the square with his eyes until he was staring right at the front of the library opposite the Lutheran campus center. At the top of a short sequence of steps was the remodeled front entrance, surrounded by columns supporting the overhanging concrete pediment.
       And in the darkness cast by the pediment he saw an even deeper and purer darkness: another figure, this one thin and upright, and with two pinpoints of light about six feet up.
       The concertina music trilled.
       Drakes opened his mouth—maybe to call out, maybe to scream, he can’t be certain—and then the figure dropped out of sight. It was as though a large black sheet had fallen off the hook it was hanging on and crumpled to the ground. At the same moment, the lilting tune in the air abruptly stopped.
       At this point, my friend believed that he was having some sort of nervous hallucination, but the fit or whatever it was had passed. He was entirely by himself in the jaundiced glow of the lamps. There was no figure sitting on the low wall next to him. There was no figure towering at the entryway to the library.
       But in another moment there was, descending those stairs, something long, black, and perfectly flat slithering on the ground. Like a long rug it assumed the zig-zag shape of the steps as its own as it worked its way down. The tail of the thing—if we can call it a tail—stretched back into the darkness under the pediment, growing thinner as the rounded front of the shadow crept to the checkerboard pavement of the square. Suddenly, that tail snapped, like chewing gum or mozzarella cheese stretched to its breaking point. And then the shape was free. Much faster now, this perfectly flat darkness began to snake its way toward Drakes, writhing from side to side as it approached.
       My friend began to run, and as he did, he heard the concertina sound again coming from behind and getting closer. But it was no longer music. It was a rhythmic wheeze, like breathing in and out, and its pace was quickening.
       Drakes was running toward the sidewalk on the eastern edge of the square. Between him and it were a few lamps, a planted tree, and one metal picnic table. He was another two or three moments from stepping off the square and back into the world beyond, where he instinctively trusted that he would be safe, somehow.
       At that moment, there was a rusty squeal from his right as the shadow darted around him and curved in front of him, cutting him off.
       By this point, Drakes was near the table, and he jumped up on it. Whatever was hunting him was flat, and my friend was now up off the ground. He had seen that this thing, whatever it was, could travel down stairs, but he thought he might be safe if it could not climb.
       The shape began to circle the table. Drakes followed it with his eyes, and his entire body followed. He spun around wherever the shadow went, keeping pace even as it increased its speed. The breathing bellows sound was so loud and so squealing, hurting his ears. Drakes was hysterical, half-drunk, and becoming dizzy.
       He thought he saw the shape, aided by its centrifugal momentum, try to lift itself up from the ground. Suddenly, a pair of arms from behind wrapped around Drakes and pulled him off the table. My friend moaned loudly, partly in terror and partly to drown out the horrible shrill wheezing.
       “Hey man!” a voice at his ear said. “Hey man! Calm down!”
       Drakes stopped screaming. Everything was still. The music had stopped. And he was in the arms of F———, who, in a remarkable show of civic spirit, had apparently been concerned about the state my friend was in when he left the bar and followed him.
       “Did you see him?” Drakes wailed, wresting himself free and looking around. “Did you hear him?”
       “Who?”
       “Concertina Tom!”
       “I told you!” F——— shouted. “I never saw him and I never heard him in the first place!”
       Drakes stopped his frantic search and stood still. There was pale orange light on everything and there was the buzz of the lamps. And there was him and there was F———. But there was nothing else.

You are free not to believe that any of this happened, but if you are willing to at least entertain the idea, you will probably come to the same assumption that my friend Drakes did: that the vengeful ghost of Concertina Tom, dead of a broken heart following his exile, haunts the library square and hunts those who linger after dark. When Drakes told me the story, he expected I would agree with him; “That’s your line, isn’t it?” he asked. And I have to admit I was half inclined to believe it, before a trip to a garden center on the north side of the city some weeks later changed my mind.
       I had never been there before, and I was not there for any very interesting reason: looking for something specific—a gift—that is of no consequence to the story. In the greenhouse, I passed an old man in a blue polo shirt pulling a metal cart laden with potted flowers, placing them one at a time on the shelves to be sold. He greeted me in a soft, polite way, and I was so wrapped up in what I was looking for that I almost ignored him, so I took a moment to turn to him and politely respond.
       I must have stared at him for too long. “Can I help you with something?” he asked, slightly uneasy.
       “I’m very sorry,” I said, a little nervously. “Didn’t you used to play the concertina on the library square?”
       He smiled faintly and bowed his head. His beard was grayer but neater, and he was perhaps a few pounds heavier; without a fisherman’s cap, I could see skin spots on the top of his bald head.
       “Concertina Tom!” I said, a little too loudly.
       “My name,” he replied, “is Patrick.”
       I detected, being as he was in a customer service position at that moment, that he was suppressing a feeling of annoyance, and I was immediately embarrassed. I meant nothing insulting by it, but I realized I must not have been the first person who insisted on calling this man by something that was not, in fact, his actual name. By way of apology, I told him about how much I used to enjoy hearing his music when I was in school.
       “Long time ago, wasn’t it?” He was now a bit warmer.
       “I try not to think about how long.”
       “Good advice.”
       I had so many questions, but I didn’t want to ask any of them, just as Drakes and I and all of the student body could have asked him questions but never did back then. There was, I felt, no mystery about what he was doing in the garden center; he was far from the only retiree living on the north side and working a part-time job to make ends meet. Do you still play? was the first potential question that came to mind, but somehow I thought either answer would make me sad. But I felt, if nothing else, I owed it to Drakes to at least get something out of this figure of near-myth. I had no idea where to begin, though, and the idea of point-blank telling Concertina Tom—that is to say, Patrick—about my friend’s experience seemed ridiculous. Almost dangerous. Not to mention that I would be telling him that a sizeable number of people in town assumed he was dead simply because they never saw him anymore.
       And so, I only said: “My friend said the library square isn’t the same.”
       I had made this comment with a certain deliberate slowness and given him a look that I believed would be meaningful. I don’t know precisely what I was hoping for his response to be—I suppose I wanted him to intuit that I knew something that he also knew, and we could share a secret between us.
       But he merely shrugged. “Suppose it wouldn’t be.”
       I apologized again and thanked him for speaking with me, but I was so bewildered I left the greenhouse immediately without any more thought about what I’d gone there to find; in the end, my wife received an inferior orchid from a different greenhouse for her birthday.
       I told Drakes as soon as I could, and he began to formulate new theories immediately. You can probably imagine some of them, and perhaps contribute new ones he hasn’t thought of. A curse, for example; Patrick—Concertina Tom, if you must—had played a secret song to summon a demon or a wraith or something I don’t have a word for, and it tormented the food truck operators who had driven him from his favorite spot and stands guard still. Or maybe the man himself had been the guardian; perhaps the thing that haunts the library mall predates him, and it was only his playing that had kept it at bay all those years. Astral projection? Or some psychic emanation from Drakes himself, a manifestation of memory? Had my friend, perhaps, somehow tuned into music that had, over the years, become physically embedded into the surrounding buildings like grooves cut into a record that under certain conditions might be played, ensuring some strange immortality for this man we knew nothing about but about whom we speculated endlessly? Any of these could be the explanation, and you are welcome to any of these interpretations. Although for some reason, I tend to doubt them. The old man had been so guileless in those thirty seconds I spoke to him that I don’t think he has anything consciously to do with anything; Drakes might have mourned the musician’s removal, but the musician himself simply seemed to regard the past as something that was well and truly past.
       I think it’s more likely—on the days that I think there’s any truth to my friend’s story, which is not every day, I’ll admit—that the solution is not so simple, that there was not one single event or explanation responsible for what has happened to the library square. The exile of a man who wanted to share his music with people might well have been just one domino to fall, and possibly not even the first.
       But when you remove, bit by bit, the things that make a place pleasant, perhaps you invite something else in?
       The city and university have been discussing repurposing and redeveloping the library square. It is, after all, centrally located on campus; it is arguably wasteful to let all that space stand empty and unused. I have no idea if these plans will go through, and what will happen if they do. It may be better or worse. But whatever happens now, or even long after I’m gone, I don’t think there will be music there ever again, unless it is heard by the people who remember when there was.