Dawn crept across the South Bronx like a tired DJ fading between tracks. I stood in my building's storage basement, inhaling the musty perfume of forgotten things, flashlight beam cutting through decades of accumulated dreams and discarded necessities. The revelation about my father's musical past had haunted my sleep, driving me down here before sunrise.
The box I sought had gathered twenty years of dust in my first lifetime, unopened until after Mom's passing. This time, I wasn't waiting. It sat behind a stack of old National Geographics, my mother's precise handwriting marking it simply "Marcus Sr. - Music."
My hands trembled as I lifted it – lighter than its significance suggested. Inside, wrapped in yellowed newspaper from 1987, lay vinyl records, their sleeves worn soft as old money. Underground labels, pressed in quantities that barely qualified as commercial releases. And there, between brittle papers and tarnished demo tapes, was my father's face – younger than I'd ever seen him, caught in the amber of a promotional photograph.
The resemblance struck like a misplaced beat. The same high cheekbones that Rico said would look good on album covers. The same fingers that could span octaves without stretching. Even his stance behind the mixing board captured a confidence I recognized from my mirror – not just genetics, but shared purpose.
"I thought I heard someone down here."
Mom's voice startled me. She stood on the bottom step, wrapped in her robe, looking at the opened box like it might contain live ammunition. In a way, it did.
"Couldn't sleep," I said, holding up the photograph. "After what you said last night..."
She crossed the basement, bare feet silent on concrete that held the building's chill. When she took the photo, her fingers traced its edges with a familiarity that spoke of countless private viewings.
"Red Eye Studios," she said, tapping the logo visible behind my father's shoulder. "It was over on Westchester Avenue. Place barely had heat, but they pressed their own vinyl. Had this old Neve console that your father swore had magic in it." She smiled at my expression. "Yes, I used to know about things like that. Before hospital administration ate my life."
I picked up one of the records, its label hand-printed in meticulous block letters: "FUTURE CURRENT - M. JOHNSON & THE MIDNIGHT COLLECTIVE." The irony of the title wasn't lost on me.
"He produced this whole album," Mom continued, her voice taking on colors I'd never heard before. "Wrote most of it too. People didn't know what to do with it – said it was too complex, too layered. Like he was making music for a world that didn't exist yet." She paused, looking at me. "Sound familiar?"
My throat tightened. In my original timeline, I'd never known about this inheritance of sound and vision. I'd thought my ability to hear music's future was unique, or maybe just the product of having lived it once before. But here was evidence of another path, another Johnson who'd tried to pull tomorrow into today.
"What happened to the studio?" I asked, though part of me already knew. Places like that didn't survive the Bronx's evolution unless someone rewrote their story.
"Became a cell phone store around '95." She shook her head. "Your father had already been gone three years by then. Said he was going to LA, going to find someone who understood where music was heading." Her laugh held no humor. "Guess he's still looking."
I lifted the vinyl carefully, studying its grooves in the flashlight's beam. Somewhere in these tracks lay the blueprint of my own future-haunted sound. A heritage I'd missed the first time around, too busy forging ahead to look behind.
"Can we..." I hesitated, weighing the impact of small changes against the need to understand. "Can we listen to it?"
Mom was quiet for a long moment, one hand still resting on the box like it might contain the answers to questions she'd stopped asking years ago. "Rico's studio," she said finally. "He's got a turntable, right? One of those fancy Technics you keep talking about?"
I nodded, hope rising like a crescendo.
"After school," she said, gathering the records with careful hands. "And Marcus?" She waited until I met her eyes. "Whatever you hear on these... remember you're not him. You don't have to carry his future to make your own."
But as we climbed the stairs, the box of vinyl between us, I wondered if that's exactly what I'd been doing all along – in both timelines – chasing a vision of tomorrow that might have started spinning on these very records, waiting for someone to finally understand its rhythm.
The morning sun caught the dust we'd disturbed, turning it to floating gold in the stairwell light. Somewhere in the building, a radio played modern hip-hop, its beats echoing off walls that had heard my father's future-cast sounds decades before. Past and present mixed like tracks on a master DJ's deck, while I stood between them, blessed and burdened with knowing where the music would lead.