Once is Enough by Victor McConnell

My wife tried to wring every drop out of music. She read up on what foods doubled as hearing enhancers and thereafter every meal involved some combination of spinach, potatoes, broccoli, liver, wheat germ, mango, kiwi, or peanuts. She took supplements, too—alpha lipoic acid and vitamin E. She could hear anything. I joked that I would focus on sight. I’d crunch on a carrot, which my mother used to say helped one see in the dark, and tell Sara that we just needed to have three kids and then each could concentrate on one sense and all together we’d make one super person. What about the sixth sense? she said. I told her I didn’t know but that if we had a fourth kid they’d have to figure that out and what a burden that would be. But we never had kids. 

The last time we discussed having children was over a late-summer dinner at a Mexican restaurant on South Lamar, not long after we moved to Austin. Our plan had been to wait for a few more years, but after a couple of margaritas Sara asked what I thought about starting sooner. Starting what sooner? I asked. You know, she said. Trying to get pregnant. She didn’t realize she had a glob of guacamole in the corner of her mouth, and I had to stop myself from laughing. She smiled back at me, uncertain, and asked what was funny. I reached across the table and wiped the guacamole off her face and showed it to her. We eventually decided that we’d start trying toward the end of the year.

I remember the first time I heard the name Ken Boyster. It was maybe a month after the dinner where we talked about having kids. Even though we were new to town, Sara was already tapped into the scene, going out at least five nights a week. It was a bit of a sore point, actually, when we talked budget. One night when I didn’t go she came home from the Continental Club and said I know this sounds crazy but there is this new musician who everyone says will absolutely blow your mind the first time you see him. It’s weird, though. They say if you see him a second time it’s unbearable, you can’t sit through it. I thought it was an odd underground rumor and ignored it. Then, a week later, we saw Boyster at The Parlor on Guadalupe Street. We had to elbow our way in, which was odd considering he was playing for tips. It was so crowded that I thought we’d leave after one song. Then he started playing. The music was not loud but it seemed to blanket the bar noise before swelling up in my head and transmuting everything into melody. His voice was liquid and I was awash in it, adrift at sea. It felt like hearing someone who you’d loved for years tell you they love you for the first time while you’re totally stoned. 

Two days later, the first press coverage of Boyster came out. It was a small article in the Austin Chronicle and it didn’t mention the rumor that he had no repeat customers. Sara and I argued about going back. I had a strange desire not to go. Sara said that she wanted to see his show again and that she might write an article about it. She had always wanted to write about music. I told her she’d never really written anything. I knew I was being unkind, but I couldn’t stop myself. Boyster happened to be playing that night, otherwise I would have probably ended up apologizing and going with her another time. As it was, we were both angry, proving ourselves, and I stayed home and she left.

I was on the couch, reading, when her car rolled up. It was only 10:30 so I knew she hadn’t stayed for the whole show. I hadn’t gotten any texts from her, and I figured she was still upset. I clung to my irritation, defenses ready. Everything collapsed when I saw her face. She looked at me and said I don’t feel well, hon and it was as though I could see her headache. I wonder about that now, actually. If her throbbing temples were visible. 

I led her to bed and undressed her. It was early spring and the night was cool. I laid her on her back and bent forward and rested my lips on her forehead and listened to her breath. She told me that she loved me and said her head hurt. I went into the kitchen and folded a hand towel in half and dipped it in ice-water, wrung it out, then brought it to her and placed it against her head where my lips had been. I sat on the edge of the bed and asked her if it was that bad. She said Yes. I don’t feel like talking now. I’ll tell you about it in the morning. I bet I’ll feel better after I sleep. We kissed and I told her goodnight. 

I was worried but when I joined her in bed an hour later she was on her side, breathing heavily, and I thought that was a good sign. I slept well, too, for a few hours. I always slept well on nights when she was sick and I was taking care of her. When she had the flu the prior winter, I fed her Gatorade ice chips, and she laid there with her eyes closed and asked me to read old Rolling Stone features about her favorite nineties bands. 

I slept close, feeling the need to remain her caretaker through the sleeping hours, and I awoke around four because of her foot. The blanket had shaken off our lower legs and I must have shifted so that her foot pressed into my calf. Her skin was startlingly cold, like a leather car seat in winter. Yet the skin of her back, which I was still pressed against, was warm, and my first thought was to cover her feet, else she awake. Then my mind cleared and I realized I couldn’t hear her breathing, that the wispy metronome of her inhaling and exhaling that I’d listened to whenever I’d lain awake at night wasn’t there. I shook her shoulder and it was cool. Through my panic I remember thinking she is cold everywhere except where our skin is touching. How do I cover all of her? I wanted to cocoon us in our comforter like we had so many times when something was awry in that world out there and we could hide and wait for the magic of our combined warmth to fix things. But the cocoon would solve nothing. Something was awry in our world and her body emitted no warmth. I pressed my ear to her chest. I couldn’t hear anything. I lifted her from bed still wrapped in the blanket and ran to the car.  

I struggled to strap her in and thought she is dead or dying and you’re worried about her seatbelt. I had to tilt the seat all the way back to prevent her from slumping forward, and her head flopped from one side to the other when I took a corner. I tried to concentrate, telling myself not to wreck and ruin whatever chance she had. It seemed like we weren’t moving but the clock said that only five minutes had passed before I was parked beneath the red Emergency sign. They took her from me and in twenty minutes they told me they were sorry, but she was gone. 

I ranted that Ken Boyster had killed her with his music. I think that they were convinced that she overdosed and I was on my way to it. But they did all sorts of drug testing on her and found nothing. An ischemic stroke. That was what they called it. Blood supply to the brain cut off by a clot. They said it was rare in the young, but that they found that she had a blood condition that increased her risk for clotting and that might explain the stroke.

Ten years since Sara died. I obsessed over Boyster for a while. His career exploded a few months after her death and he was soon booking auditoriums, then basketball stadiums, then baseball stadiums, then football stadiums. One hundred thousand people per show, more than two hundred shows a year. Twenty million plus people annually. He was on every magazine cover and any scientist who knew anything about sound and craved publicity was interviewed. There were a few dozen deaths supposedly linked to Boyster, and the National Inquirer seemed to report a new one every week. Many maintained that it was just probability, that lots of people tried to go to a second show—before Boyster and the concert promoters prohibited it—and the few who died would have died anyway. Rolling Stone assigned a music critic with a sociology degree to go to a half-dozen shows but he quit the assignment partway through the second show. It was still a cover story. The reporter began the piece with skepticism, saying that he’d always thought music fans were mistaking correlation for causation when it came to Boyster. But then, once the show began, the nausea and the headache overwhelmed him and he left after three songs. I remember feeling a morbid pride that Sara had lasted longer. He referred to Sara, actually, calling her the first fan who supposedly died from sitting through a second Boyster show, though he mistakenly wrote that she died from a seizure and likened it to the weird anime induced seizures of Japanese schoolchildren in the 1990s. He said that, like the anime, Boyster a second time wouldn’t necessarily kill people. But he theorized that the music could set something off in an unlucky few. He admitted fear that he was among those unlucky few. And at the end of his article, he simply wrote that he left the show because he didn’t want to die. 

I don’t know how he mistook it for a seizure, because he interviewed me and I told him what happened. I guess he heard what he wanted to hear. Journalists do that. He wasn’t the only one who tracked me down. There were a few. Fewer, though, as time passed. And it has been a couple of years since anyone besides my family has asked me about Sara. They still worry, but I mostly avoid the topic and tell them that I’m over her. 

My sister tried to set me up with someone. I wasn’t interested, and I lied and told her I was seeing someone else already. The truth is that I haven’t seriously seen anyone since Sara died. A few dates, but I probably weirded them out when I talked about Boyster. They didn’t know what to make of it, or they didn’t believe me. 

Oddly, Boyster’s album sales and televised performances were pretty ordinary. No one had trouble listening a second or third time to his recorded music, which was popular but not exceptional. It was something about being there live. At one point, Boyster allowed his guitar and his sound system to be examined and nothing was found. He even supposedly went to some sort of sound lab and had his voice tested. That was romanticized, of course, and I read all about it. Someone wrote that seeing Boyster was an experience in the divine and those foolish enough to test their luck when the divine clearly only desired one observance deserved what they got. You would think that would enrage me, but it didn’t. I was just sad. I never seriously considered suing for Sara’s death either. There were a few lawsuits that were reported in the papers, and who knows how many were hushed up. That was why buying tickets had become so hard.

To buy a ticket, you had to sign a waiver removing liability from Boyster and the concert promoters. Your signature attested that this was the first time you’d seen Boyster. You had to give your driver’s license, social security number, or passport. And that number was printed on your ticket, along with your photo.

The same rules were in place when I bought a ticket three years after Sara died. I was able to get that ticket with no trouble, since there was no record of the night Sara and I saw him. The show was at Texas Stadium, where the Cowboys play, and I drove the three hours up from Austin that day. When I took my seat I could immediately feel the fear swelling in my throat, and before Boyster was even onstage I was running out of the stadium. It was dark in the parking lot and I lay on the asphalt beside my car with my arms over my head. I thought about what a stroke would feel like and tried to will my blood to clot so that I could exit through the same door that Sara did.

I never told anyone I went to the show that night. My mom called while I was driving home. I had been sobbing and my throat was raw but I held it together pretty well and told her I was on the road driving down to the coast for the weekend and no I didn’t know Boyster was playing in Dallas. I think she believed me.

For years, I’d been wading through the shame born when I ran out of that stadium. It grew and grew and I didn’t know how to kill it. I told myself that I would go to another show but they had me on file and I didn’t have the money or the gumption to get an illegal ticket. Plus Boyster left the U.S. for a while. Europe, Asia, Australia. I was worried that he might never return when he seemed to disappear in North Korea. He was the first western musician to be invited there for a tour, though it wasn’t really a tour. He played at one venue, the 150,000-seat Rungrado May Day Stadium, the largest stadium in the world. It was logical, I guess, that the world’s most in-demand performer would play there. He was scheduled for a three-month gig but North Korea allowed no press coverage. I was in a panic for those months, afraid that the rumors that he would never be allowed to leave or that he would be assassinated were true. 

Boyster finally came back to the U.S. and was booked for Texas Stadium again. I started preparing months before I even knew how I would get the ticket. I ate all the foods that Sara used to eat and I took the supplements she used to take. I even unboxed all her old CDs and played them non-stop. I read about sound. I read studies that linked low frequency sound waves to ghost sightings. I found someone online who said they could get good tickets for second timers for ten grand. The price included a fake ID.

The ticket had a face value of five hundred dollars and it arrived a week before the show. It had my photo beside the name Marvin Celeste. Marvin had to be a real person for the driver’s license number to work when they scanned it. I asked the scalper about that when I bought the ticket.

“Who’s Marvin Celeste?” I said. 

“Someone who’s not a Boyster fan,” he said. “As far as it concerns you, you’re Marvin Celeste.” 

“What about if the real Marvin Celeste tries to buy a ticket?” I said.

“Mind your own fucking business,” he said. 

I had read online that people sold their identities to Boyster scalpers and I figured that was what Marvin Celeste had done. But when I searched his name and date of birth I found that the only Marvin Celeste born on that date had died two weeks prior in a single car accident in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Fell asleep at the wheel, according to the Broken Arrow Daily Ledger. A picture of him was posted beside his obituary. He didn’t look much like me. 

I was sitting at my kitchen table about four hours before the show when my Mom called. It had been months since we’d spoken.

“Hello,” I said.

“Alex,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I haven’t talked to you in a while.”

“That’s true, Mom,” I said. “I’m sorry. But you know, you can call me, too. It’s a two-way street.”

It was quiet for a second and I wondered if she was angry. 

“I know,” she said. Her voice was soft. “But I don’t want to be a bother.”

“It’s not a bother, Mom. What’s up?”

“What?”

“Why did you call?”

“Does a mother need a reason to call her son?” she said.

“I don’t know, Mom. I’m not a mother.”

She was quiet again. I felt guilty.

“I was just kidding. Of course you don’t need a reason. I was just asking if there was one.”

“No,” she said, hesitating. “I was thinking about you. And, well, I know you don’t like to talk about Sara, but I thought she’d be on your mind with Boyster playing in Dallas today.”

I was keyed up, ready for the show. I tried to breathe. I didn’t want her to do something crazy like call the police and tell them her son was going to be attempting to commit suicide by Boyster.

“What do you want me to say, Mom? Yeah, I think about her. Yeah, I know Boyster is playing. But you can stop worrying. I’m not going to the show. Okay? I’m fine.”

“You’re fine,” she said.

“Is that a question? Yes, I’m fine. Really.”

“Well. Are you seeing anyone?”

“Mom, I’m heading out the door. I don’t have time for this right now.”

“Alex,” she said. “Alex.”

“Yes?” I said.

“Honey, it’s okay… it’s okay for you to love someone else. Sara would want that.”

I waited for her to say something else. She didn’t.

“I don’t think either of us knows what Sara would want,” I said. And then I hung up.

I stood in line, reciting Marvin Celeste’s date of birth and address in my head. I thought somehow they would know he died, that the driver’s license wouldn’t scan and I would be arrested. I didn’t think it was a crime to try and see Boyster twice but it was surely a crime to have a dead man’s ID. I had never been arrested before. What if they thought I killed him? I could see the Broken Arrow Daily Ledger headline: Car Crash No Accident: Local Man Killed for Boyster Ticket. What would everyone think of Sara’s death if I was suspected to be a murderer? The line moved forward and I stood in front of the ticket checker. I held out my driver’s license and she glanced at it and at me. She swiped the license through a machine. I waited for a red light or a beep and for her to grill me, to sound the alarm. I imagined how I would dodge past, leap the turnstile and disappear into the throngs in the stadium. But she just waved me through. 

My seat was even better than I expected. The retractable roof was open and the night was clear, though the lights in the stadium were too bright to make out any stars. An off-white tarp covered the field, and the stage was black and empty and strangely small. Just a stool, a microphone stand, a keyboard, and two guitars. There was no opening band and no MC. Boyster toured with an opening band for a while. They had to finish their set and be out of earshot by the time Boyster came on. Supposedly, Boyster stopped touring with them for liability reasons. I spent a lot of time thinking about his life after Sara died. I wondered when he discovered his power, for he avoided the question in the few interviews he gave. I wondered if, early on, his friends made up excuses for why they didn’t want to hear him play. I wondered if he ever hurt someone he cared about with his music. He wasn’t married. Was he lonely? Did he feel guilty? Global population would keep growing but I figured that eventually he would tap most of the people who could afford to see him play at these prices and then what? Would he want to keep touring? Would he disappear into the jungle? Would he retire? I wondered if he was happy.

I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I was on the aisle, and a big man wearing a Dallas Cowboys hat sat on my left. He had a beer in each hand and seemed excited. I hadn’t bought a drink because I knew that Sara had been sober. She’d quit drinking right around the time we met, and, though she relapsed twice, neither time had been within six months of the night she died. Plus there was no smell of alcohol on her breath when I kissed her goodnight. I was fairly sure of that, even though it was a short kiss and our mouths were closed. I didn’t know then that it would be the last time. If I had, I would have lingered and tried to imprint it. 

The man on my right caught my eye. I nodded and turned back to the stage, but he nudged me and laughed and said, “I guess I don’t have to ask if this is your first Boyster show.”

“What?” I said. I couldn’t breathe. My panic must have been evident, for he looked puzzled and uneasy.

“Easy there, fella,” he said. “I just meant that it’s everyone’s first Boyster show. That’s why I don’t have to ask.” Repeating his joke made him smile. He was proud of it.

“Oh,” I said, trying to smile, too. “Yeah, that’s funny.”

He seemed satisfied and asked where I was from and how much I paid for my ticket. I lied about both, and he soon lost interest and returned to talking with whoever sat on his other side. A minute or two later, Boyster walked out.

The stage seemed to grow with his presence. The big screen that hung like an alien spaceship above the field showed a video feed from a camera that must have been mounted on the edge of the roof. The small black stage against the white tarp looked like a constricted pupil in an oblong eyeball and I tried to think how the hundred thousand dots fit in. I was some sort of neuron vibrating within this giant organism with Boyster as the center. Not orbiting but just moving slightly, buzzing, quivering, giving life to the whole mass. Aimed upward as it was through the open roof, I wondered how far an eyeball that size could see into the sky. 

Then the screen switched cameras and I could see Boyster’s face. He seemed unchanged from the night when Sara and I saw him and I didn’t know whether it was makeup or if he hadn’t aged. He walked around the edge of the stage waving to the crowd as though he had just won a race. Then he sat on the stool and leaned toward the microphone and I thought maybe he wouldn’t play, that he would tell people that he couldn’t do it anymore and he was sorry. Instead, he said, “Hello, everyone.” And it started.

He began with just his acoustic guitar. Those first chords and his voice sliced something open in me and I sucked in air to try and fill it. My abdomen heaved upward into my chest cavity and every muscle and tendon in me seemed to tighten and pull and stretch and push. Could a spasming muscle snap a bone? The song was short and only toward the end did I notice my teeth hurting from clamping my jaw. When it was over, the man in the Cowboys hat said, “You really enjoyed that one, eh?”

I thought I would vomit if I spoke so I just nodded and smiled, hoping he wouldn’t notice my mouth trembling at the effort. He didn’t speak to me again. 

During the second song a heavy thumping started in my skull and I thought about how Sara looked when she walked through the door and I wondered if this is what she felt.

By the fifth song my vision was going in and out of focus, Boyster blurring and sharpening on stage as though I were staring through constantly adjusting binoculars. My eyes seemed to want to roll upward and it was a struggle to look straight ahead. I imagined myself at the Continental Club that night, beside Sara, suffering with her. I looked for her in the blur on the stage around Boyster. For a moment, I thought I could see someone standing just to the side of my focal point, but when I shifted my eyes a little they disappeared.

It was during the eighth song that I realized how slowly the world was moving. I couldn’t understand Boyster’s words or which instrument he was playing. Sound was no longer what it had been. The tension had burned through my body and I was limp, the thumping in my head matched by the violent irregularity of my heartbeat. My physical self had become attached to the music and I lurched forward and backward with the beats, totally out of control, those around me surely mistaking my movements for enthusiasm. I couldn’t swallow anymore. 

I realized that I was past when Sara left, but I wanted to be thorough and didn’t know if I could escape anyway. During the brief time between songs I felt a little better but was afraid that if I got up and the music started before I reached the exit it would floor me and I wouldn’t stand again.

Boyster played the harmonica during the tenth song, and it was like a bone saw cutting into me on a skeletal level. Before the twelfth song he leaned into the mike and with the music stopped I could hear him say, “I want to thank you all for being such a good audience. This’ll be my last one tonight.”  Then he began and the pounding and the cutting and the swelling and the tension and the blurred vision were all united and I was left with a sort of unified sense, a filtered reality of undiluted pain.

The song stopped and I grabbed the seat in front of me, fearing an encore, knowing one would come, and stumbled into the aisle. Everyone was on their feet and the applause was horrible, too, and I could feel my legs wobbling beneath me and I thought if I went down I would stay there. I didn’t notice I was sobbing until a venue attendant tried to stop me. He asked how much had I had to drink before seeing my tears, at which point he squeezed my arm just above the elbow and asked if I was okay. His touch sent adrenaline through me, as though my body were too sensitive for even the slightest sensory input—or as though something had been interrupted—and it strengthened my legs and I nodded to him and pulled from his grasp and stumbled up the stairs and out of his sight before he could decide what to do.  

No one else was leaving early, and I was alone in the parking lot. My vision was still bad and my limbs were numb. I could walk, but my feet flopped along, useless and limp and clumsy. I swung them in half-circles to make each step as I leaned on the rows of cars. The adrenaline was gone and I just wanted to lie down. I remembered the time years ago when I’d lain on the asphalt outside the Boyster show. Just then, the noise of the crowd rose up through the hole in the stadium roof like lava from a volcano and it spilled down toward me in the parking lot and I wanted to run from it but my numb feet would move no faster. I finally saw my car. I swung the door open and slammed it shut, knowing that the exploding sound signified Boyster’s return to the stage. I almost screamed at the quiet inside. After a few seconds, I calmed a little and started my car and followed signs toward the exit. I stopped beside a dumpster at the edge of the parking lot and rolled down my window and threw away the only evidence that I’d been to the show—my ticket and Melvin’s driver’s license. 

There was no traffic as I shakily pulled onto the highway. All those nights driving home drunk after Sara died were good training. It was a three-hour drive but time and distance were distorted, every mile seeming like it stripped something else away, and I wasn’t sure what would be left when I got home. No matter how loud I turned up the radio, all I could hear was what Boyster had left in my head. It wasn’t even music. It was just some unclassifiable noise. I told myself that Sara would be home when I got there, which was the same thing I used to tell myself when I was struggling to make it home drunk. That she would be there, asleep in our bed, waiting for me to join her.

I stumbled through the living room and into our bedroom, searching, though I could barely see. The house was empty, and I screamed, trying to fill it, but the echo of my voice just made it seem emptier. I was full, bursting with things I didn’t understand. With all the thumping and pounding and deep skeletal weariness still in me, I didn’t undress or brush my teeth. I didn’t want to go to sleep, to somehow recover and wake up and face another day. Instead, I went in the kitchen and mechanically started making coffee. I thought about the times when Sara and I were up late together, when it wasn’t until lunchtime that we were out of bed. 

I picked up my phone off the kitchen counter. Sara’s number had been disconnected years ago, so I couldn’t even call and hear her voice. I blinked a few times and rubbed my face. There were five missed calls, all from my mom. She must have called while I was at the concert. I looked at the phone for a minute, trying to imagine what my mom was thinking. Then I set it back on the counter.

Enough coffee had brewed in the pot for me to fill a cup, and I held it with both hands, feeling the warmth against my palms. There was nothing left to do now but wait.  

Victor McConnell grew up in a small town in Texas and graduated from Dartmouth’s creative writing program in 2004.  After a year in a wheelchair in 2005 and a long, mostly dormant period from 2010-2019, he resumed writing fiction and poetry in 2020. His work has appeared in a variety of literary journals, such as The Los Angeles Review, New Ohio Review, New Brussels Review, Dogwood Literary Journal, and Driftwood, among others. His first book, a collection of short stories titled WHEN EVEN THE BONES HAVE THINNED, is scheduled for publication in late-2025 with Hidden River Press out of Philadelphia. He has a 14-year-old son and lives in Golden, Colorado. More of his work can be found at https://www.victormcconnellauthor.com/. 

14 November 2025