“What in the fucked-up Renaissance fair?” calls a voice from the opposite side of the room, creating a wave of nervous laughter. None of the performers react in any way, which doesn’t help dispel the culty vibes they’re giving off.
Without warning, the men lift their arms in unison so the objects they’re holding are perpendicular to the floor.
“What are those?” Elaine whispers.
“Panpipes,” I whisper back.
The smallest of the eleven instruments is made up of eight hollow wooden tubes lashed together and arranged in a gently curving line from shortest to longest; amusingly, it’s held by the man in the group who looks like he might’ve played Big 10 football in his youth. The biggest of the instruments is over twenty tubes long and is held by a man who could give Kevin Hart a run for his money in a short-off. The other nine panpipes vary in size, as do the men who hold them. But they’re all radiating the same creepy intensity that has partygoers shifting nervously in their seats, their chairs audibly creaking.
The man in the center, whose sand-colored hair is the darkest in his troupe, lifts his panpipes to his lips and blows one quavering, sustained note. The others join in one by one down the circle until all eleven are holding on the same note.
They hold it for a long, long, long time.
“This is the strangest thing I’ve ever heard,” Radha murmurs, “and we once saw Philip Glass perform ‘Einstein on the Beach’ in a converted warehouse at two a.m.”
“Without intermission,” Gerry adds.
The single note builds and builds as the audience squirms in their seats, everyone’s desserts forgotten, until the man in the center nods, the sustained sound breaks, and the group slides into the opening notes of“Greensleeves.”
After the high-energy performances that came before, nobody in the room is physically or emotionally prepared for the frail, haunting sounds coming from this hive of musicians. Despite the number of performers, the ethereal music is so quiet that every shuffle, cough, and whisper in the room is audible in the spaces between notes. When the men perform a key change, I swear to god, a chill goes down my spine.
The song begins to wind down, and everyone at our table relaxes into their chairs with a relieved sigh until the cult leader in the middle drops his chin and the brigade starts the song again, but this time, in the round.
“Dear god,” Gerry whispers as the layers of the song build and build. Just as the intricacy of the music becomes borderline unbearable and the creaking of chairs grows, one of the geese honks.
The music cuts off into abrupt silence, and the smallest piper steps forward to glare at the offending bird in utter contempt for a solid fifteen seconds. Message delivered, the man slowly steps back to rejoin the group, which seamlessly resumes the song before finally, mercifully, the performance draws to a close.
When the final notes fade away, there’s scattered, uncertain applause, and the pipers file out with the preternatural calmness they walked in with.
“Interesting, uh, choice,” Franklin says as the lights come back up and he tucks into his cake.
The increased brightness in the room rouses the sleeping Dillon or Dale, who snaps upright like a vampire waking at sundown. Without missing a beat, he grabs the dessert Drea placed near his left ear and wolfs it down in two bites.
“Flavortown!” he says with a fist pump.
“Oh good,” Howard says, looking cheerful for the first time in hours. “I love Flavortown.”
He’s about to take his first bite when he pauses and holds the fork away from his mouth, eyeing the dessert warily. I can practically see the cogs in his brain spin into motion. On one hand, most of the things he’s eaten tonight have punished his mouth. On the other hand, no sane chef would put hot peppers into chocolate. Therefore, his favorite dessert is safe to eat.
Poor Howard. He’s mired in level-one thinking, but my girl’s playing level-three. She anticipated both his sweet tooth and his ignorance of the Mexican tradition of chili and chocolate, and now I get to watch him be taken completely by surprise yet again.
I always did tell him he needed to brush up on game theory.
As Howard lifts the fork the rest of the way to his mouth with an anticipatory smile, I wait with satisfaction for the ultimate betrayal as even chocolate turns against him.
“Heavenly!” he says with a beatific smile when the first morsel hits his tongue.
He swallows with delight and goes back for more, getting several bites in before he jumps to his feet with a noise even more startling than the goose’s song-stopping honk.
“What the fu—” He manages to stop himself from finishing the curse when every single head in the room whips to him. Sucking air through his teeth, he chokes out an apology and grabs a napkin to mop his sweaty brow, knocking the rest of his dessert to the floor in the process.
“Apologies,” he says again, but we’ve all turned to watch the missing private equity bro pick this moment to stroll back in with his hands in his pockets and no explanation for his whereabouts for the past hour.
“What’d I miss?” he asks his partner.
“Dessert,” Dale or Dillon tells him. “Due diligence done?”
“Due diligence done. Strip club time?”
