Impossible Music

by Sean Williams

You mean you don’t sit holding your phone all day and all night, creating playlists I’ll never hear?

  Uh, maybe that last part.

  Try again, bro. Third time’s the charm.

  It’s so difficult to tap out. My thumbs feel suddenly gigantic, like they’ll mash down on the wrong letters if I don’t try very hard.

  Music, performing music, gives my life meaning.

  There you go. Shockingly articulate as well as completely obvious.

  Sorry to disappoint you. You wanted it.

  I did. I do. And please, no jokes about that, or you will disappoint me.

  Heaven forfend! *crosses out brilliant quip about voids needing to be filled*

  *groan* Why do I even bother?

  Why do you, exactly? WHY REALLY etc.

  You want to hear what I’ve not been telling you?

  Sure.

  The thought of seeing you again makes me afraid.

  Of what?

  Of what might happen.

  Particulars, please.

  She goes silent for a while. I wait, not wanting to risk breaking this fragile link she’s reestablished. She’ll come back in her own time, sooner rather than later, I hope, and she does.

  Of everything. And if you think I’m talking about sex, I’m not talking about sex. Perhaps I should make that clear. I’m not afraid of sex. In fact, I think we should have sex. You and me. That would be a good thing. If you would like to. What do you think about that?

  I read the message four times to make absolutely sure I’m understanding her correctly. Behind the words there’s a definite impression that she has been sitting wherever she is tapping out the letters as carefully as I am, maybe deleting the whole thing a couple of times before hitting send. My reply needs to be delicate and nuanced in return. Adult.

  Hell yes.

  Well, I’m glad that’s established. Would you like to come over?

  Um . . . now?

  Yes. But no phones. Promise me.

  I promise.

  While I text with one hand, I’m looking for a clean T-shirt with the other and trying to remember if I had a shower this morning.

  You do realize I have no idea where you live?

  That’s okay. I’m not there right now.

  She gives me an address. It’s in the city, in a corner of the Square Mile far from any clubs, restaurants, or apartments. I click the link for a map . . . frown . . . and drop back onto the bed as understanding sinks in.

  She’s in a hospital.

  Part Three

  Silent Signs

  December 29

  English has silent letters. They’re inaudible, but if you take them out of a word, the whole meaning is changed. This is not a knot, for instance. The lamb is on the lam. While reading Mahler’s Tenth, I realized for the first time how important silences are in music, too. So much of the score was silent, for one instrument or another. If they all sounded at once, it would be chaos.

  What about sign language? Are some signs “quieter” than others?

  This thought has troubled me ever since I lost my hearing. It troubled me even more when G and I started sharing more than the occasional kiss.

  There are thoughts and feelings I wish I could express to her, but I don’t know the signs. Sometimes I sense that she can detect what I can’t say—​she initiated that first kiss, after all—​and maybe even understands better than I do. How, though, when those thoughts and feelings remain unsaid?

  My body betrays me, I usually end up deciding. Learning to speak a new way doesn’t unlearn a very old way, one that predates all other languages. Is this something that all speakers of sign language must grapple with? Body language is simultaneously silent and more honest, for anyone who can interpret it.

  Which leads me to the hospital. When no one hears, perhaps it’s not simply that no one listens, but that some signs are too silent to be understood, even for those trying with all their might.

  * * *

  Why are you here, G? What’s going on?

  No phones. You promised.

  What aren’t you telling me?

  You wouldn’t understand.

  I might.

  You just wouldn’t. But I’m glad you’re here. It means more than I can say.

  Can or will?

  Can. Now quit with the phone before the nurses kick you out. They think you’re my boyfriend, or you wouldn’t be allowed in at all.

  Does that mean I am your boyfriend?

  Let’s not have that conversation right now.

  But if I’m your boyfriend, I have privileges.

  Maybe. It would be more romantic, though, if you waited until they took the drip out.

  I mean, you should talk to me.

  What if I don’t want to?

  Why don’t you want to?

  Do I have to want to?

  No, but isn’t that why you asked me to come?

  No.

  So why?

  G?

  Why?

  Subaqueous Studios

  October 7

  The closest thing I found to music in the month after losing my hearing was not the gut-thumping vibrations of a band in full grind, the inspired ink-scratchings of Mahler on the page, or frenetically edited music videos on YouTube. It was the lights in Dad’s studio.

  Dad’s house is unlike any other I know. When he and Mum split, he bought a place way out in the northeast foothills, a sprawling wedding-cake mansion that wouldn’t look out of place in a soap opera. There’s little yard to speak of; what there is contains nothing but gravel and apparently immortal cactus. He lives alone, apart from the odd traveling musician or roadie from the old days who might bunk down in one of the spare rooms after a bender, or maybe an infrequent, ill-advised girlfriend attempting to change his ways. None of them last long. Maeve and I never stay over much either, which seems to suit both Mum and Dad. He is there for us if we need him, but he avoids our everyday lives out of a mix of respect, awkwardness, and fear—​all focused on Mum, not me and Maeve, we quickly worked out.

  The first thing Dad did on taking ownership of the house was to gut the upper floor and turn it into a soundproofed recording studio. It would have been easier, and possibly cheaper, to erect an entirely new house, but he’s lazy that way. He’d rather modify what already exists than conceive and build from scratch—​a principle he applies to his professional life and friendships as well as his home. I’m not aware that he ever started a band or wrote an entirely original song in his life. But he’s a good producer, co-writer, and bandmate, I’m told, and he’s a real icebreaker at parties. As long as he doesn’t have to throw one.

  Even before he gave me the guitar, I used to like hanging out at the studio. It’s very sci-fi, with a sweeping digital mixing desk, several flatscreens, and multiple racks of synths. The air tastes of electricity and hums with potential, like the weather before a thunderstorm. Everything is linked and has a light that shines or winks with its own color, calmly and quietly marking time.

  Dad calls it “the cave,” and that’s exactly how it feels to me. It reminds me of our last family holiday, when we went to Waitomo in New Zealand and saw the glowworms, tiny insects who dangle from threads with their shining arses on display. In Dad’s cave, as in the cave of my memory, I feel cool, calm, and full of wonder.

  For Dad, the cave triggers memories of scuba gear and bioluminescent deep-sea fish, hence the official name of the business: Subaqueous Studios. He bills himself as a “forensic synthologist” and has quite a tidy operation going in creating backing tapes for bands who’ve lost the ability to recreate the sounds that made them famous decades ago. I won’t name names, but there are quite a few of them. You’d be surprised how hard it is to identify what made a past hit sound the way it did. Sometimes it’s the right drum machine. Sometimes it’s a particular preset. More often than not, it’s a combination of instruments and effects that hits the memory centers of old folks’ brains and makes them want to dance like it’s 1988. />
  The work is fiddly and exacting, and really, Dad’s not well compensated for the hours he puts in. Or the material investment: occasionally the sound can only be perfected by, say, purchasing a Yamaha DX1 from a collector in Fairbanks and then spending a week trying to get the wretched thing to work. His collection of synths from the eighties is one of the best in Australia.

  Often, I’ll find him sitting in the dark, watching the lights, or maybe letting the lights watch him. I’ll sit next to him, even though I can’t hear what he’s hearing anymore. There’s the hum of cooling fans through my fingertips, the lights, the waveforms, and his balding head nodding along in time.

  Not that night, though, when I asked Mum to drop me off after walking out on Sandra. He was out somewhere, doing his own thing. I thought about texting him, but what would be the point? It was not as though there was any meaningful way to talk about what happened. How do you turn a silent scream into words?

  So I just picked a backing track at random and cranked up the volume. Even if I couldn’t hear it anymore, I could watch the lights and imagine the sounds of his latest brand-new imitation.

  Tear Tracks

  December 29

  A proper boyfriend would respect my feelings.

  I’d be happy to if I knew what they were.

  I just don’t feel like talking right now. Is that clear enough for you?

  Okay, sure. Can *I* talk instead?

  No. Please. Just

  just

  be

  quiet

  it’s so loud in here

  all the fucken time.

  * * *

  Dad came home eventually, long after dark, and found me hunched in a corner, the same track looping unheard for the hundredth time. I guess that was why he didn’t look surprised. The volume was cranked up so high he probably heard it two blocks away. He nodded hello and took his seat and went back to work.

  I had expected no more. The trouble with Dad is that he’s great with music but terrible at pretty much anything else. Vacations, for instance. Proper vacations, I mean, not ones he can write off on his taxes because he’s mixing or touring while he’s in town. It’s entirely possible he spent one day in his life voluntarily doing nothing, but if so, he never did it again. Being married, ditto.

  Then there’s shopping. Cooking. Gardening. Housekeeping. Bookkeeping. Beekeeping. (Keeping of any kind.) Driving (including golf). Parenting. And so on.

  Maybe I’m being too hard on him. He hasn’t been a bad father since he and Mum separated. He made sure we had keys for his place as soon as that was okay with Mum. He tops up our mobiles and provides impromptu junk food feasts. He buys us presents whenever he sees something just right, which makes up for getting nothing from him on birthdays and Christmas most years. He has a keen eye for things that might interest us—​or maybe it’s just that he gets to see us from a different and occasionally revealing perspective, compared to Mum, who has us in close focus all the time.

  Maeve, like Mum, is good with numbers, so Dad has been paying her to look after his accounts since she was thirteen. She’s now thinking about studying economics at uni, which never would have happened if Mum had been pushing her. Me, he got into playing music and was soon trading pocket money for rhythm or lead on jingles and demo tracks. Still does: there are ways to navigate around a studio without hearing. I learned only recently that this is how he’s undercut other studios around town: by exploiting the natural talents of his kids. Don’t tell Mum should be tattooed across his back, where she’ll never see it.

  He seems to understand, though, when silence is what’s easiest for me.

  Like when he came home to find me huddled in a studio listening to music I couldn’t hear, with tear tracks down my face and a damp patch on my T-shirt.

  * * *

  Listen.

  I recognize the documents G hands to me, even though I’ve never seen those specific pages before. I’ve seen lots just like them. They’re notes from her specialists about her tinnitus.

  . . . not a disease but a symptom that can result from one or more underlying causes . . . often but not exclusively associated with head injury . . . further neurological and cognitive testing required to determine long-term prognosis . . .

  There’s such a familiar rhythm and timbre to them that if my concentration blurs, I might be reading notes about my own condition. The only difference is that she has more of them than I do. A thicker pile.

  I flick through to the end.

  . . . no guarantee that treatment will subdue all abnormal hyperactivity and restore the auditory cortex . . .

  I read the signature at the bottom of the letter twice before realizing that it is a name I know. Prameela Verma, the sidekick who helped Selwyn Floyd determine what happened to my hearing. I feel an irrational, unreasonable flash of jealousy. Prameela never gave me a letter. Maybe because she had nothing to say.

  Skimming back a page, I read more closely.

  . . . cannot promise that a reliable intervention exists, but treatments are available that might reduce the severity for people with conditions like . . .

  Certain words pop in my mind like firecrackers. But. Treatments. Are available.

  My hands fall into my lap. G isn’t looking at me, and she shakes her head when I wave the pages to attract her attention.

  “This why you’re here, for treatment? You’re going to get better?” I say, even though neither of us can hear me speaking. I have to say something to let out what I’m feeling. “That’s fantastic!”

  She’s in a private room, a sterile rectangle that smells of linoleum, plastic, and metal. There’s a chair next to the bed, but I’ve been sitting on the edge of the mattress, as close to her as I can get without touching. Someone steps into my peripheral vision, a woman in casual clothes who looks a lot like G but older—​grandmother is my immediate thought. The rinse in her hair is almost the same shade as G’s faded purple. She’s looking at me in obvious puzzlement.

  I stand up, feeling awkward.

  G snaps her fingers to get Grandma’s attention and begins scribbling in a notepad by her bed. Grandma’s eyesight isn’t very good, I guess, because G’s writing is big enough for me to read.

  It isn’t an introduction.

  What did he just say?

  Grandma hesitates, then checks me out again. She says something to me, and I point at my right ear and shake my head. She understands immediately and takes the pad from G’s outstretched hand. In a precise cursive, she writes word for word what I said as she walked into the room. The last bit, anyway.

  What happens next surprises all three of us equally, I think.

  G bursts into tears.

  The Meat Forks

  October 7

  It’s maddening, not being able to hear. My work with Dad, say, not really knowing what I’m playing. I’m completely reliant on him to tell me if I’m doing it right. If he’s paying me for a particular kind of tone or style to match something he can only describe with words, those words aren’t always sufficient. There’s been the odd “What do you mean, again? That was genius!” but really it’s all the same to me.

  Professor Dorn told us in winter school that there’s a brilliant liberation in playing with sound that is regarded by most as unmusical. How much more liberated am I, then, for playing with notes that have no sound at all?

  Yeah, right. “Free Bird,” that’s me.

  Once, not long after my stroke, Dad put on two pairs of noise-reducing headphones, in-ear and over-ear, one on top of the other, to see what the world had become for me.

  Weird, he tapped out on one of his screens as we sat in silence, neither of us able to hear the racket filling the studio.

  Some notes make my trouser legs flap, while others I can feel in my shirt. Or my arm hairs. Or in my gut. Resonant frequencies, I suppose.

  I had noticed that too. Different parts of us vibrate at different rates, so they pick up different tones. It’s like having many different ears
all over your body, each designed to hear a single note. That’s how Evelyn Glennie “hears” the music she performs. Which is weird enough.

  Trust Dad to give it a further spin.

  We’re tuning forks . . . tuning forks made of meat! There’s a band name in that. The Meat Forks?

  “A bit close to the Meatfuckers,” I told him when he took his headphones off.

  They’re a thing? Jesus. I was born in the wrong century.

  That was a joke. Dad claims that the name of his band, Contact, refers to sexual touching, and is a very toned-down version of another name he won’t reveal to me. Sometimes it feels as if the only difference between parents and children is timing, but saying so would be a heresy for both generations.

  Dad and I understand each other in a way that Mum doesn’t, which isn’t to say that he gets me better than she does, or is a better parent than she is, or anything like that. Having options is good, is all, when you really need them.

  At least he doesn’t mind me speaking when I should be signing like a good deaf boy, when I have so much to say.

  * * *

  Grandma and I freeze, she clearly wondering along with me if physical comfort is something G would ever want. I’d know what to do if Maeve or Mum or even Sad Alan or Roo was the one crying, but I’ve never met someone so tangled and knotted up as G. And yet, in her way, so sure of herself. Underneath those knots is a sword that could cut her free anytime she wants. I have to respect her decision not to.

  I am wary of the sharpness of that sword, too.

  The frozen instant shatters when Grandma and I move at the same time, she to take G’s hand, me to put my left arm around her shoulders. She folds into me and tightly squeezes the old lady’s hand. Whew, I think. We got it right.