Apparently, during sessions for their previous album, Aja, Steely Dan had recorded an early version of the song that would eventually become “Third World Man.” That song was titled “Were You Blind That Day,” but because the music was essentially identical, our audio fingerprint app was unable to tell the two songs apart.
The weirdest thing about this “twin song” situation was that it wasn’t a rough demo version from the Aja recording sessions. It was perfectly polished studio-quality Steely Dan, the kind of pristine recording that audiophiles used to test their speakers.
But this was impossible.
No version of “Were You Blind That Day” had ever been officially released in any form. “Third World Man” was, and had always been, the final song on the Gaucho album.
We searched the Internet. Every single image of Gaucho contained “Third World Man” as the last song. We checked scans of the album’s liner notes online and compared them to the album we’d just purchased. Everything was identical except for that one song.
Like a rare stamp, coin, or baseball card with an error, somehow we’d ended up with a copy of an album that featured a song that never appeared on the official release.
But there was more.
It wasn’t just the title; the lyrics of “Were You Blind That Day” were completely different as well, and one of the names of the musicians credited on that song wasn’t listed on the official release of the album.
His name was Mordecai Kubler. He was credited as “Horns of Terzos.”
“What the fuck kind of instrument is a Horns of Terzos?” Chloe asked.
“No idea,” I said. “But neither song has any brass instruments at all.”
We did an online search for Mordecai Kubler and Horns of Terzos. Nothing came up.
“Can you try the darknet?” I asked.
“You know that’s not how it works, K. You don’t just try the darknet.”
“Okay, so, how does it work?”
“You can try a blind Torch, but for this kind of thing you need to know where to look,” she said.
“So where do we look?”
She flipped her computer around. “I checked everything,” she said. “There’s nothing.”
“You could have led with that.”
Chloe suggested we try something else. She had a friend at the university who had access to a number of older education-and library-based intranets. Because the majority of these databases weren’t online, she thought we might get some different results.
And we did.
“This could be something,” Chloe said. She turned her screen around and revealed an abstract for a graduate thesis written by somebody named Sandra Aikman. Her thesis compared the imagined worlds of Frank Herbert, J. R. R. Tolkien, Fritz Leiber, and Mordecai Kubler to contemporary people and cultures.
“Oh shit,” I said. “Can we take a look at that thesis?”
“For six dollars and ninety-nine cents we sure can,” she said.
I entered my credit card information, and Chloe downloaded the PDF.
We devoured that thesis in less than an hour.
It was interesting to read Sandra Aikman’s political take on the imagined worlds of some of my favorite writers, but sadly, Mordecai Kubler was a minor character. Sandra Aikman had used only one novel by Kubler as reference material. Thankfully, however, that book was The Horns of Terzos. She’d included a notes section at the end of her thesis along with a biography of all of the writers mentioned in her work. The entry for Mordecai Kubler was brief:
Mordecai Kubler. Born in 1937 in Chicago, Illinois, Kubler studied science and English at Brown University, publishing his first and only novel, The Horns of Terzos, in 1973.
We did one more deep dive online for any mention of Mordecai Kubler or his novel, but we were unable to turn up anything new.
“We’ve got nothing,” Chloe said.
“We have Sandra Aikman.”
“We do?”
“It looks like she lives in Portland,” I said as I spun my computer around to reveal Sandra Aikman’s Facebook profile.
“Please tell me it’s not Portland, Maine.”
“Oregon,” I said. “She hasn’t posted in years, but the last time she did, she was teaching English at Portland State.”
“Message or visit?” Chloe asked.
“Let’s message first and see what she says,” I said.
* * *
—
The next morning, we received a return message from Sandra Aikman. We called the number she’d left and she answered on the second ring. We explained how we’d read her thesis and were interested in talking to her about it in person. She said she’d love to meet, but she was no longer living in Portland.