Impossible Music

by Sean Williams

  The guitar was a cheap Yamaha acoustic, the standard model that music students have been learning on for generations. I’d seen them in school, and I knew in principle how to hold one.

  Alone in my room, I sat on my bed and took up the instrument. It was surprisingly light in my arms. I’d never realized that guitars were hollow, like a held breath.

  I selected a string at random. Plucked it. And suddenly this inanimate lump of wood became extraordinary.

  It vibrated. It resonated. It sang.

  The note surrounded me like a giant bubble, and I fell into it, as though the floor of my room had dropped away. I was weightless, entering a realm where the usual physics no longer applied. That bubble felt like home, a place where I was safe and surrounded by wonders.

  Every note I’ve played since has been a step deeper into Narnia or Middle Earth, en route to the Magical North where all bets are off.

  Until the bubble popped and all the music left the world.

  * * *

  Take me to a concert, G said in a message, three months and seven days after I lost my hearing. You owe me.

  Owe you what?

  A night out. An experience. A reason to get out of bed this weekend. Take your pick.

  It wasn’t a big ask. I already had an invite-plus-one for a show that weekend. Judd Nelson Overdrive was a melodic death metal band from Canberra I’d been wanting to see for years, and I wasn’t going to let a small thing like not being able to hear stop me.

  When I told G about the gig, she said, Sure, and I said, Great, and thus it was settled. Or so I thought.

  We had kissed a little after the roller derby bout but hadn’t seen each other since, because I was no longer going to deaf class. This sounded like second date material to me, or another audition. I could tell that she was testing me. And why not? Kissing in complete silence is weird at first, like doing it for the first time all over again, and so is getting to know someone without hearing them speak.

  Taking G to a concert was something of a test on my part too, to be completely honest. I’ve been seeing live music at underage gigs since I was thirteen, and first played at the Jade Monkey when I was fourteen and a half. The shows I go to are so loud you can feel the sound hitting you like a physical force—​which is exactly what sound is, on a molecular level. Pressure waves expand and compress across our bodies, and inside our bodies too if the noise is big enough. The first time I went right up close to the speakers, I thrilled at the waves of focused energy literally pouring through me. When I stood at the back, the muddled wash of echoes I absorbed made me feel as though I was floating in a gentle surf. In general, I prefer to be in the thick of it, being pummeled by people rather than pressure waves.

  Gigs like this are a great leveler. Above a certain volume, we’re all deaf.

  It’d been a crappy week, thanks to a certain newspaper article and the three-month anniversary of my stroke, but it was looking up now. If G liked the concert, that would make it even better.

  She and I arranged to meet a couple of blocks away in order to negotiate the door bitch together. People there knew I was deaf. Some even knew my new name: left hand raised in a fist except for a crooked little finger (half an S) combined with right hand strumming an imaginary guitar. I was keen to spare G the hassle of passing notes back and forth just to get inside.

  Five minutes before she was due, she sent me a text saying, Sorry. It’s not going to work tonight.

  I tried not to be disappointed.

  What’s wrong? Everything okay?

  She didn’t reply until I was inside and the gig had started, and the buzz of my phone went unnoticed through the assault of the concert. I felt bad later, but what could I do? Phones solve just one communications bottleneck. You can’t make a deaf person talk if they won’t look at you or respond to your texts. And you can’t wait around forever.

  The concert was good. Fast, busy, loud. My ears felt it deep in their fragile bones, even though my brain no longer knew what it was supposed to be. Every other part of a gig—​the smell of sweat, the taste of beer, the flashing of lights, the close proximity of people in the mosh pit—​was present and correct, vital and reviving, going some way to filling the yawning chasm at the center of my existence. What is the sound of music, I told myself, but just the most obvious part?

  As I came out of the club, I quickly waved good night and peeled away from the safe crowd of my friends to avoid the awkwardness that inevitably descended when normal speaking rules resumed.

  Only then did I notice the texts G had sent.

  Imagine your least favorite song.

  Imagine your least favorite bit of your least favorite song.

  Now, imagine that bit stuck on a loop, and nothing you do can shake it. It goes around and around, the same few notes, over and over, unchanging, like it’s never going to end. Not until you’re completely fucking crazy.

  I have that tonight.

  The earworm from hell.

  That’s why I didn’t come to the concert. It’s not you, it’s the music. Sorry.

  Still feeling a bit of a beer buzz, I refused to take that as a blanket rejection of everything I held dear.

  Two words for you: Good Vibrations.

  Her reply was instantaneous: Are you kidding me?

  Never Gonna Give You Up.

  You bastard.

  The Macarena.

  Stop!

  . . . In the Name of Love? . . . Hammer Time?

  She was silent for a while after that, long enough to suggest that maybe I’d been insensitive, joking about something that was obviously a big deal to her. I didn’t really know what tinnitus was like, although of course I’d read about it since meeting her. Tinnitus isn’t deafness per se: instead of the ears’ wiring not working, the wiring detects sounds where there are none. Phantom noises, like phantom limbs, can be irritating, even frightening—​and they can drown out all other sounds if they’re loud enough, making someone effectively deaf, like G . . . but could these noises really be musical? If G was describing a literal thing in her head right now, then yes, and it sounded like a fucking nightmare, maybe one I had carelessly made much worse.

  But hell, a tiny part of me said in response, she’s still got music.

  Home was a half-hour walk away—​the journey had never spooked me until I was unable to hear the sound of people creeping up on me. No one ever did, but that didn’t stop me from looking around every few seconds, just in case.

  Halfway there, my phone buzzed.

  Are you flirting again? (Say yes.)

  Yes. (Why?)

  Good. (Because it’s distracting.)

  We could take it to the next level. (We *should* take it to the next level.)

  Which is? (How many levels are there? (Typing in brackets is a pain in the arse!))

  What part of “Hammer Time” was unclear? (Let’s find out. (Agreed. (But why stop now?)))

  I am pulling my “That’s so not happening tonight” face. (But thank you for giving me something else to think about. (Seriously. (Maybe next time. (Good night.))))

  With that she was gone, and I trudged on alone, feeling the crunch of the pavement under my feet and a cool breeze across my forehead. I made the sign for her name, the G with a twist, and admired the “sound” of it. I liked the “feel” of “George.” I liked the sound of Maybe next time even better.

  Ghost Spray

  September 7

  Any kid who has a wardrobe in their room goes through a phase of being afraid of it. Mine is a hulking old heirloom, dark and brooding, with a wood grain pattern that looks like a hooded person standing with their face in permanent shadow. When shifting light hits it through my half-open door, as someone walks up the hallway, say, the figure seems to turn and look at me with cruel fingers unfurling . . .

  God, the sleepless nights that thing has caused!

  So convinced was I that the figure in the wardrobe was literally going to kill me, snatch me up into its dusty depths the
very moment my eyelids closed, that Mum resorted to desperate measures to get me to stay in bed. Ghost Spray, she told me, was the world’s most powerful deterrent against all things supernatural. Just one squirt could dispel not just ghosts, but also goblins, ghouls, and any other gremlins waiting to get me. Since I was so upset, she’d give the wardrobe three squirts. All right, five—​to be absolutely sure.

  I can still smell the Ghost Spray, sharp in my nostrils like the citrus our neighbor’s dog gets a blast of every time she barks, but with an almost vanilla aftertaste. The can was silver with the words Most Effective Ghost Spray EVER spiraling around it in red and black letters.

  For less than a year, I fully believed in the power of that can to dispel my demons. It wasn’t until Maeve was the same age I had been and wanted the spray too that I looked at it more critically. The silver was matte paint, it turned out, and the writing was clearly done in marker. Underneath, if I squinted hard, I could see the words GLENN 20 DISINFECTANT.

  Mum had faked us out. But hey, it worked—​because we wanted it to work, I guess. I don’t think I slept any worse once I knew the trick.

  We’ll fix it, promise. XX

  * * *

  That note from Mum was the first handwritten message of my new life. There were many more to come, from Selwyn Floyd or the relatively reticent Prameela Verma.

  . . . further neurological and cognitive testing required to determine long-term prognosis . . .

  I clung to the idea of plasticity, while Mum took hope from the possibility of remission. No one had come out and said—​not in writing, anyway—​that spontaneous recovery wasn’t an option, but the way Prameela looked at me suggested that this wasn’t a race she had much of a stake in. She’d already brought up counseling and sign language classes, two concepts I recoiled from, but which Mum enrolled me into regardless.

  I felt like a germ on a slide, and that was before the tests even started.

  A second stroke was always a rather horrible possibility those first few days. What would go next? I feared losing my vision, leaving me locked in a dark and silent box. Or perhaps the use of my limbs, or my sense of taste and smell. Or my memory. Which would you rather be? That was a nightmare from which I awoke only slowly, as test after test came back showing no further changes, for better or for worse, and the drugs did whatever they were doing, and people came and went, writing me still more notes and cards, and sending flowers and inspirational memes that made me want to gag. When I wasn’t in the hospital having tests, I was in my room where it all started, feeling irrationally superstitious about my bed and the wardrobe that looms over it, as though sleeping there might risk the curse falling upon me again. When I did sleep, it was on the couch in front of the television, which I set to a YouTube playlist of songs I knew well. That way I could watch the videos and imagine what was happening in the land of audio, from which I had been expelled.

  I realize now that I was trying to push through the chaos of recent events and clutch either that last moment of stillness when my personal symphony was still playing, or the first notes of it kicking in again.

  Meanwhile, Maeve kept turning the volume down because I had it up too high. To make her point, she shone flashlights in my eyes or waved her hands right in front of my face and then handed me notes saying This is “loud” for YOU now, right?

  * * *

  Led from specialist to specialist, I felt again like someone who wasn’t really real, a shadow or a ghost of the person I had formerly been. A whole world still existed out there, but I didn’t know how to part the veil that separated me from everyone else.

  The test I particularly didn’t enjoy was the MRI machine. It was like being in a coffin, prematurely interred, and although I couldn’t hear the loud noises the machine made, I could certainly feel them. Imagine being inside a steel drum that someone’s banging on. My heart tried to beat in time, and I could practically feel the veins in my head become swollen to bursting, shivering on the brink of flooding my brain with darkness, madness, or worse.

  When the explosive non-sounds in my skull finished, I felt dizzy to the point of throwing up.

  What I wasn’t telling anyone, even myself, was that I was terrified. This silence . . . What if my brain didn’t reshape itself to hear again? Would I become a ghost permanently chasing a ghost, a memory, a fading echo of the thing that had once filled my life . . . ?

  The world was eroding beneath me and around me, and I had nothing solid to cling to but a note from my mother.

  * * *

  Weirdly, perhaps, it was my other biological parent who made the biggest difference in those early days. Dad wasn’t at the hospital, and I don’t think it was because Mum wouldn’t let him be there. I think he guessed correctly that I needed space more than sympathy, an opportunity to properly process what had happened, and he went in search of something that could help me do that.

  It came in the form of the biggest book I had ever seen, wrapped in garish tartan paper with a card that said Not a scrapbook. Love, Dad. Despite this reassurance, I unwrapped the parcel with suspicion, unable to imagine what else it could contain but some earnest stand-in for the other vocation he had given me.

  I couldn’t hear the paper tearing, which still strikes me as tragic. Like losing Christmas, or the smell of toast. Childhood, gone.

  Inside was a full orchestral score of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, a work I knew nothing about but was destined to become very familiar with while waiting for my fate to be determined.

  The book opened with an introduction that described at some length the ups and downs of the composer’s life, leading to the difficult times in which the tempestuous work was written. Gustav Mahler was a fairly complicated Austrian from over a hundred years ago, right when orchestral music was becoming very big, brash, and occasionally brutal (almost metal, you could say). Mahler was greatly influenced by Ludwig van Beethoven, and he wasn’t made any less complicated than his hero by falling ill just when he became successful. He died from pneumonia before fully orchestrating this work, which meant it wasn’t completed. Like Beethoven, he never heard his last symphony performed.

  On the final page of the final movement, he wrote “für dich leben! für dich sterben!” and then the pet name of his wife, Alma, who had been cheating on him. So he had that going against him as well.

  To live for you! To die for you!

  Poor bastard.

  Turning to the first page of the score was like opening the door to another world, one written in a language I had never truly experienced before. Not like this. I could read musical notation: Mr. Mackereth had made sure of that. I had never, however, seen notes in such masses, arranged in such complex relationships. They were like letters, and the letters formed words, which formed sentences, which formed paragraphs, all the way up to entire stories. Reading the score was like reading a novel—​using symbols to build a version of reality that existed only in my mind.

  The first page alone was overwhelming, and most of the instruments were silent. I felt drawn in and repelled at the same time, because what attracted me to this symbolic representation of everything I had lost was the hope that I could experience it again, and this was the very same thing that pushed me away. It wasn’t the same. Maybe it would never be the same.

  On the page the music was alive, but at the same time it was dead, like Gustav Mahler’s aching heart.

  “Almschi!” he wrote in agony to his wife under the final notes of the symphony. A cry from a man who had lost everything.

  As I scanned the massed staves, his voice sounded loudest among my thoughts and gave me no small comfort.

  Someone had been through this kind of pain before me. I wasn’t alone.

  * * *

  If it seems strange that a metal-core maniac could be moved by Mahler, well, I have pretty diverse tastes. Still, it seemed strange to me, too. The bigness of the work, which I didn’t “hear” so much as “experience” while reading, was something that unfolded in wave
s as I unpicked melodies, harmonies, and structures that had kept music theorists occupied for a century.

  Ultimately, though, I was reaching, straining my mental limbs to snatch the tiniest crumb from the musical table. The futility of trying to resurrect a memory of the last sound I ever heard was possibly matched by that of trying to kickstart my hearing again by will alone—​by imagining music solely from a printed score.

  I was still telling myself that this, my inability to hear, was a temporary thing. Mahler’s score was just a stopgap until real music returned. When it did, life would go back to normal: school, social life, girls, music in my ears instead of just my head. I only had to grit my teeth and wait this out, one note-filled page at a time.

  Dad understood better than Mum ever did that what I most needed then was not reassurance, but distraction.

  Mum’s not into music, so I don’t think she had a chance of understanding. For her, music is just ambience, and like any other ambience, sometimes it can be too present. One piece of music she does like, though, is a New Age work called “Structures from Silence,” by Steve Roach. She plays it when she’s stressed—​all twenty-eight minutes, thirty-three seconds of it—​lying on her back on the living room floor with her eyes tightly closed. She says it’s the only thing that settles her mind. I don’t know if it works that well, but she certainly played it a lot when she and Dad broke up. My childhood was full of that track’s sonic surf crashing on the shores of her unhappiness. The moment it started, Maeve and I would run to our play area, knowing we had half an hour completely to ourselves.