Impossible Music

by Sean Williams

  Every objection I raised was met efficiently, with determination and good cheer. They weren’t going to let me rain on Sad Alan’s parade before Courtney had a chance to.

  Thus was born Scrote Punch. Not one of the immortal names of show business, but impactful. Pardon the pun.

  Our first proper song, “Malevolent Machinery,” was equally impactful, if only for being terrible. I think it’s okay to be terrible, though, when you’re starting out. It means you’re taking chances. You only have to worry if you stay terrible.

  That’s what Dad told me once, and he would know. Working out when to give up, he says, that’s the hard thing.

  George-who-loves-coffee

  September 23

  Three weeks after my stroke, I attended my first deaf class, but with a sense of obligation instead of the this is a new beginning, yay! that Sandra would rather her clients embraced.

  Because none of us had planned to be there—​who would?—​we each had a different way of reacting. The guy with the thick handlebar mustache, a forklift operator whose years working in a factory had finally done in his hearing, watched everything closely and reproduced the signs with mechanical precision belying the look of his leathery, knuckled hands. The woman with bouffant, dyed fake-natural hair came bearing voluminous notes and a repertoire of apologetic expressions ready for when she got things wrong; she had lost her hearing from a bad case of the flu, of all things. The guy in his twenties who hit on me once seemed almost excited to learn this new skill, engaging with an exuberance that was desperate at times. Or maybe that was just me projecting. He was a recreational diver who timed an ascent wrong and blew his ears out.

  Deaf class was where I met G. As I say, we didn’t hit it off at first. I was shy, she surly. When I hid in the corner, she resorted to gestures, often rude ones. These, we quickly learned, didn’t count.

  Our teacher was a cheerful deaf woman in her fifties who, via a mixture of handouts, projections, and whiteboard scribbles, did her best to bring us up to speed. Her name was Hannah, and I would’ve liked her more had our circumstances been different. At the very least, she gave me a rocking deaf name. The first thing she taught us was the difference between gestures and signing.

  Gesture is any form of nonverbal communication, like shrugging, giving someone the middle finger, or blowing a kiss. Those early days, my home life was conducted almost entirely through gestures, every exchange an elaborate, torturous variation on “pass the salt.” Deaf and hearing alike use gestures. They’re not the same as signing, though, which is a full-on language, with rules.

  G was a master at expressing her disdain for Hannah and her rules by means of posture (slouching, mainly), proxemics (where she stood in relation to others, usually apart), hand position (biting her fingernails so neither her fingers nor her expression was clear), and so on.

  At first it was intimidating, particularly if she and I were paired together. Later, I found it amusing. Perhaps because it was clear I wasn’t enjoying classes either, she seemed to settle on me as the least irritating person available.

  People are building sign-language gloves, you know, she texted me once from the other side of the room during a ten-minute break in class. Like dictation software but for deaf people. The machine turns the signs into words on a screen so ordinary people can read them.

  How does that help us? We can’t sign.

  Ah, you see, that’s the best bit. We don’t need to. We can still talk, right? Ordinary dictation software can transcribe it, so deaf people can read what we’re saying. Then the gloves transcribe what they’re saying back to us. No need for us to learn sign language at all!

  Could work. It’d all have to be done through computers, though. Or phones.

  That’s where augmented reality comes in.

  Now I know you’re messing with me.

  Someone has to. I mean, have you looked in the mirror lately?

  That stung a little, because I wasn’t sure how she meant it. Was she saying I was sloppy-looking? My hair was long and straight and not easy to keep in condition. I had a goat patch on my chin, but nothing as protuberant as Tutankhamun or the bassist from System of a Down. The rest I kept clean-shaven.

  Or was she talking about my clothes? I’m a jeans-and-band-T-shirt kind of guy, with Converses or something chunkier if I’m in a particularly metal mood. The money I don’t spend on my guitar goes on my feet, mainly. All those shifts at KFC were totally worth it.

  So to be dissed, potentially, by this hot stranger, possibly the last one who’d ever try to talk to me in my isolated new world . . . well, I wanted to know exactly what for.

  I asked her, in response to her mirror crack, Have you ever listened to a recording of yourself talking?

  Not lately. Duh.

  Of course not. Before.

  Who hasn’t?

  It’s weird because we’re used to hearing the sound of our voices conducted from our voiceboxes to our ears via the bones of our skull and jaw. That’s why we sound so bassy and warm. We all have this overinflated sense of how good we sound, because we never hear ourselves right.

  Is that true? Huh. Interesting. But who says the way other people hear us is the “right” way to hear us?

  My point exactly. Mirrors are the voice recorders of the eyes.

  Wait. Wouldn’t they be the echoes of the eyes? Or wouldn’t seeing yourself in a video be the same as a voice recording?

  Are you always this pedantic?

  Only when someone says something wrong, but still interesting.

  I’ll take that as a compliment.

  That was the first time she smiled at me, and I felt something flutter through me. It didn’t feel like passion, then, but it certainly felt real.

  OMGs and WTFs

  October 2

  Loving music and being a musician are two very different things, as different as loving to watch a sport and playing it. Which is not to say that being an observer of art is in any way passive or meaningless: G was totally right on that score, when she told me to read the postmodernists. Anyone possessing the right senses can immediately engage with art—​training, practice, or commitment not required.

  But I guess it depends on how you define musician. If I remain committed to my earlier proposition, that there’s no such thing as unmusical sound, then maybe there’s no such thing as an unmusical musician, either. You can pick up a violin and make the most godawful noise, and it counts. It must, or my thesis unravels.

  A musician, Dad tells me when I ask him, is someone who engages with the music industry. Be it in a band or behind a mixing desk or as an agent . . . However they’re doing it, they’re adding to the great pooled experience that is music.

  Because music, he says, is about the audience. If people aren’t experiencing it too, it’s “solipsistic twaddle.”

  “Aural wankery,” in Maeve’s words.

  Dad has some experience in the field. His name, Bengt Bengtsson, is slightly recognizable, him having been in a band that had a brief window of fame in the late 1980s. Contact was a blatant Depeche Mode knockoff whose first album, Day of the Dolls, features their sole hit song: “Tokyo Go.” Its jarringly peppy chorus occasionally pops up in the background of movies set around that time. Part of the ambience, with a slight hint of mockery for times when people didn’t know any better. It has a pretty good synth bass line, which was all Dad. His hair was bright blue back then, and very, very high.

  Mum insists they didn’t hook up because he was tall, handsome, and in a band. I think they might have, because she’s so insistent about denying it. Also, later, when he had no hair and a string of albums no one listened to, they broke up.

  More likely, though, they broke up because Mum doesn’t really care about music. Oh, and Dad is a hopeless husband.

  * * *

  Let me make it clear that during my first sign language lessons I wasn’t pursuing George-who-loves-coffee, and not only because I was still seeing Shari. Technically. Perhaps we coul
d have worked through our sex problems, but communication wasn’t our thing even when I could hear. It would be fair to say, in fact, that we never really talked at all. Not properly. We were a walking cliché. I had my friends, and when she talked to me, mainly to complain about me spending too much time on the band, I tuned it out because it wasn’t anything I cared to hear. Her chatter and my silence performed the same function, to distract us from the fact that we had nothing in common.

  When I lost my hearing that September, her voice was another part of the symphony that I hadn’t noticed until it was gone. What remained between us gained a kind of poignancy as a result, and I think she felt some of that too. She was there, which was worth something, and she wrote me many, many text messages, mostly about what was happening at school interspersed with OMGs and WTFs and SURELY SOMEONE CAN DO SOMETHINGs, but occasionally just to see how I was doing and if she could help. She isn’t a monster. She was in her own version of a hard place.

  Turns out boys with sad eyes who just sit in their room playing guitar with the amp turned off are no fun. Who knew?

  When Maeve, whose friend she had been in primary school, passed on the news that Shari had been seen kissing a footballer called Jude Lee at a final-exam party on the one-month anniversary of my stroke, I was not terribly surprised. I’d sensed the crisis coming.

  Which is not to say that I wasn’t hurt. I felt miserable about it, actually. Not Gustav Mahler territory, but still.

  “Way to kick a guy when he’s down,” I told Maeve, the bearer of bad tidings.

  It’s your own fault, she said via a small whiteboard she had taken to carrying around in case I needed to be annoyed.

  “How do you figure that?”

  Well, maybe if you weren’t being such a miserable, useless shit, Shari wouldn’t be off pashing other boys.

  “Thanks. You’ve made me feel so much better.”

  Is that my job? I must not have received the memo.

  “You’re my sister!”

  Exactly. Not your mother, counselor, or girlfriend. Someone’s got to get you off your arse and on with your life. Such as it’s worth.

  I wrote Fuck you! on the whiteboard and stomped off to my room, where I blasted out another blistering solo into the void of my hard drive. But she had a point. Lots of people lose their hearing. It’s inevitable that some of them are musicians. Evelyn Glennie is probably the best example, so famous even Mum has heard of her, thanks to the Adelaide Festival. She started losing her hearing at the age of eight and was totally deaf by twelve. That hasn’t stopped her from performing on the world stage as a percussionist and a composer.

  Reading about her on Wikipedia later that night gave me the impetus to get off the couch. If Evelyn Glennie could give deafness the finger, why couldn’t I? Sandra would’ve been proud!

  Also, success is the best form of revenge, they say. Suppose I did keep playing and Blackmod took off . . . ? Well, Shari would rue the day she ever cheated on Simon Rain.

  Scrote Punch

  3 Years Earlier

  The hardest thing for me about sign language is this: it’s only partly about signing.

  Not so long ago, people used to think the Deaf were mentally deficient. Partly this was because hearing people only interpreted the signs, which was like translating Russian to English but glossing over every word that contained a K, resulting in speech that looked disjointed, simplistic, and, well, dumb.

  There’s more to Auslan than the signs, and that’s . . . a challenge, particularly for a shy person like me. Nuance and entire meanings are conveyed via body language and facial expression: ignoring those parts is like deadening a speaking person’s tongue with anesthetic. Embracing them, though, means opening up in ways that feel unnatural. Dangerous, even. Every grimace, eyebrow raise, or head tilt is a window into your soul.

  When you’re saying “sad,” for instance, you don’t just make the sign for sad with your hands. You put on the face and act out the emotion. You are the emotion—​for the purposes of communication, yes, but you can’t help feeling it a little as well. I do, anyway. Hungry, afraid, sleepy, strong . . . When was the last time you had a conversation that didn’t touch at least tangentially on something emotional or triggering? How you hate the way G doesn’t respond to your texts sometimes. Or Roo’s sneakers smell like arse. Or you’d kill to hear the new TesseracT single. Or whatever fucking thing . . .

  Everyone has details they just don’t want to reveal.

  And, well . . . I say I’m shy, which most people don’t believe. It’s not that I don’t like people. I just like them in small doses, and I like to control what they see of me.

  And that’s why sign language is so confronting to me. I’m not acting a part. I’m acting me.

  * * *

  It’s also why my first live performance was so terrifying. There was Simon Rain, a kid who had been playing in private with his best mates, suddenly thrust into a literal spotlight and expected to shred in front of a sea of strangers. There was nothing to like about that scenario. I pictured a thousand ways the night would end me. Memory blackout. Electrocution. Bladder failure. Catastrophic trouser collapse. Each as unlikely as the other.

  I am at my most inventive when I scare myself shitless.

  Roo and Sad Alan pushed me ahead of them onto the stage. The light was dazzling, and it was much warmer than I had expected. I was glad I’d worn my ripped jeans and a Death Meal T-shirt (our “look” being teen wannabe hardcore), because other­wise I would’ve been sweat-logged in an instant. As it was, my eyes felt foggy, and I stumbled, momentarily losing my way.

  Muscle memory from sound check guided me to my guitar, and its familiar weight gave me an anchor. I turned to confront a sea of faces—​one of them did belong to the crushable Courtney, it turned out, and the knowledge that this would make Sad Alan the nervous one pulled me right out of my anxiety. I was doing this for him, right? I couldn’t fuck up.

  Click, hum. The guitar was live. I raised my pick and power-chorded the opening notes of our second original song, “Thy Ken.” A staccato blast of noise, more percussive than melodic.

  The crowd responded with a mixture of cheers and jeers (there are always “friends” who think booing is funny, except when they’re on the receiving end). The response wasn’t unanimous, but that didn’t matter. They had responded.

  Sad Alan, the color of his skin camouflaged perfectly against the black-sheet backdrop, boom-tished to signal he was ready. Roo rumbled on the E-string.

  I played the opening riff again, and off we went, just like we’d rehearsed in the garage so many times, but this time with the sound blasting away from us into a kinetic human void, and the smell of sweat other than our own thick in our nostrils, and all manner of unpredicted upsets, such as feedback and noisy cabling and our foldback dropping out at one point, and the echo from the far end of the Jade Monkey trying to drag me off beat in the slow sections . . .

  Scrote Punch was onstage. It didn’t matter if anyone else liked us, because we were having a good time, sharing something we enjoyed with a world that seemed to care, at least partially, because someone had turned up. And they weren’t leaving. Not all of them, anyway.

  We played for half an hour, then we came off. Opening act of five. The only way is up, I remember thinking as I left the stage, sizzling with adrenaline. The shy boy had had his first taste of performing. He had finally met a real, live audience, and it was love at first sight.

  “Thy Ken”

  October 3

  Someone once said, Show me a person capable of nobility in the face of rejection and I’ll show you someone who secretly wanted out anyway. Me, I didn’t want out—​not from my relationship with Shari, problematic though it was, and not from the hearing world, either. Her breaking up with me doubled down a sense of complete social expulsion, the feeling that I was being squeezed forcibly out of the world.

  My oldest friends visited as well as tweeted, of course. Roo and Sad Alan sat on the couch
and passed me corn chips and commiserated via text. They joked about making up our own sign language that no one else could understand. We watched silent movies on YouTube while I missed the tinkly piano music and stewed in my misfortune.

  The day after being dumped, I was the first to raise the one thing the three of us hadn’t discussed yet.

  So . . . Blackmod.

  Don’t feel bad about us, Drip. We’re cool.

  Uh, what?

  You know, it was fun while it lasted, and we don’t blame you. It’s just one of those things.

  Let the man finish, Alan. I don’t think he’s apologizing.

  I was going to suggest a rehearsal. Maybe write a new song. Did you really think I was going to break up the band?

  Well . . . yeah.

  Blackmod means everything to me. We’ve got to play!​

  But—

  Shut up, Alan. Having a one-armed drummer didn’t stop Def Leppard, did it?

  Hey, “Deaf Leopard”—

  We’re not changing the band name again. Let’s just do this!​

  Sad Alan’s assumption was forgivable, but I felt wounded all the same. Why did me not being able to hear mean the band was over and done with?

  Furiously, I led them straight into the garage and went through the usual motions of plugging into the amp and turning up the gain.