Impossible Music

by Sean Williams

  Does she want me to worry?

  Her eyes flicker shut, and I am locked out again.

  I want her to talk. I want to ask questions. I want to know if she sent that message right before she did it, and whether I could’ve made a difference if I’d been online instead of watching Love Actually for the tenth year in a row (hard to say if it was any funnier subtitled) and digesting a giant feast with my mother and sister. I want her to tell me how she did it, because I see no bandages, no bruises, or other signs of violence, and the chart above her bed doesn’t explain anything.

  Absently, I note the index finger of her right hand tapping, tapping, tapping to a beat no one else can hear.

  Drugs, I decide.

  After everything she’s been through, she’d want something quiet.

  I feel like weeping.

  But all I do is sit silently until G falls asleep. Then I figure my job is done, for the moment. I say good night to Aunty Lou, and she says thank you, clutching my hand briefly like she’s found an ally in a dark corner.

  Part Four

  “Plastic Maps”

  December 29

  To: Grace Dorn

  From: Simon Rain

  Date: December 29

  Subject: Impossible Music

  Hey Professor D,

  I imagine it will look something like this:

  “Plastic Maps”

  Two people walk onto a stage where their instruments await. Everything’s wired: sequencers, electronic drums, synths, etc. Each machine has a flashing light. There are no microphones. No speakers, either.

  Behind the stage, a giant projector screen displays a fish-eye view of the street outside. Pedestrians, cars going by, more flashing lights. It’s rush hour. People are everywhere.

  The performers look at each other. One of them counts off their fingers. Lights flash faster as the music starts.

  But what’s this? No sound!

  The hearing audience is confused for a moment. Are the performers miming? Are their instruments not plugged in? Or is the electricity of their performance vanishing down an earthed wire somewhere, never to be heard at all?

  The deaf audience take it in their stride. “Plastic Maps” is silent for everyone, apparently.

  It could end there, but it doesn’t. As the performance progresses, people begin to notice what’s happening on the screen. Passersby are responding to an invisible stimulus. They don’t know where it comes from, but it’s there, and it’s infectious. Poppy, even. Familiar.

  They react because they can hear music—​the music of the performance, broadcast without announcement to the world outside. Every note the duo plays is vanishing, but at the same time it exists. Just because the audience inside can’t hear it, doesn’t mean it isn’t real to someone.

  When the piece finishes, the performers bow. They haven’t heard their music either, but they have brought it into being, and it is done.

  The audience will be left with the feeling of having experienced something. But was it something real, or something denied them—​an absence, a theft? And ultimately, was it music?

  What do you reckon?

  Rain

  * * *

  To: Simon Rain

  From: Grace Dorn

  Date: December 29

  Subject: Re: Impossible Music

  Rain—​

  Promising. Press on. Two more will convince me that this is worth pursuing, not just a stunt.

  Rain Parade

  November 5

  After our first post-Shari practice in October, Sad Alan, Roo, and I rehearsed for a couple of weeks before calling it quits. Blackmod still existed as an entity in the garage, but nowhere else. And that, frankly, was something of a relief. I liked playing live and missed it, but the thought of making the attempt now made me even more anxious than it had in the beginning. Everything needed to work as one to make even a halfway decent live gig. When you added a deaf lead guitarist to the many other things that could go wrong, the prospect became more terrifying than it was worth.

  Which is not to say we didn’t try to find a way. There was the Zappa signaling method, but that only worked if we were looking at each other and had hands or other limbs free to say “you’re flat” or “you’re dragging” or “wrong song, dickhead!”

  Next, we tried reworking some of the arrangements so the kick drum would provide cues that I could feel rather than hear. However, concentrating on those cues led all of us to play like robots. We might as well have sacked Sad Alan and bought a drum machine.

  Maybe if we’d been super-professional before I lost my hearing we might have survived the transition. But, sadly, we were just kids messing around with loud noises. Without hearing the noise, all I made was a mess.

  It was hard to step back from the stage and set the two of them free, but it had to be done. For their sakes. I couldn’t drag my best friends down into silence with me. And it wasn’t as if we didn’t still have Blackmod. We played for the three of us now, no one else.

  The plug was officially pulled on my eighteenth birthday, and the guys took me out for something that felt at least partly like a commiseration, although I don’t remember most of it. My hangover of the next morning is, alas, painfully clear.

  Within a fortnight, Roo invited Sad Alan to join a group he’d formed some weeks earlier with two girls he knew from their part-time work at Subway. Slave Leia billed itself as post-post-punk: high-energy, kinetic, sexy, with a unified aesthetic and even the odd moment of choreography. That was Sad Alan, not the girls—​Roo crossed his heart, hoped to die.

  They dragged me to their opening gig, and despite the irrational jealousy I couldn’t help feeling, I found it to be good, infectious fun. Jumping to the beat alongside friends and strangers was the easiest thing in the world. It felt liberating to be part of the crowd, no different from anyone else, while it lasted.

  The same thing happened that always happens after gigs, though. As people started talking, I could only nod along or shake my head and stand in a corner, hoping no one would bother me.

  Hey, guy with the hair. You’re Alan and Roo’s friend, right?

  The text came from a number my phone didn’t recognize. There was no way to tell if the source was in the room or halfway across the country.

  Who are you, and how did you get my number?

  I have my ways.

  Yeah, this is not creepy at all.

  A tiny woman with short blond pigtails appeared in front of me, grinning and waving her phone. I didn’t know her, but I’d just watched her performing in the band. Keyboards and vocals: I had heard neither, but my eyes had been entertained.

  I’m Mia, your stalker for the evening. Wanna buy me a drink?

  Mia’s energy was infectious enough to punctuate my mood. We forced our way to the bar, where I used a large-print app and my file of photos to order two Coopers Pales. I was still enjoying the ability to legally drink and had finally got over the hangover of my eighteenth-slash-end-of-rock-god-career bash.

  We clinked glasses. I felt the cold ringing in my fingertips. The crowd was too loud for voice recognition, so we kept texting.

  It’s great to finally meet you. The boys talk about you a lot.

  None of it is true, I swear.

  Did you know they wrote a song about you? They weren’t going to tell you, but I think it’s right to own your muse. You know, in case you have a hit and your muse decides to sue.

  Oh, I would. What’s it called?

  “Rain Parade.” We played it tonight. Fourth song in.

  What’s the chorus?

  “She’s raining on my rain parade / mistaken while I play charades” . . . I didn’t say it’s any good.

  Better than anything they’ve done before. Are you sure it’s inspired by me?

  It’s about a guy who wants to break a girl’s heart, but she’s deaf so he has to mime it.

  Deep.

  Yeah, that’s what I said. And swapping genders has never been done befor
e. Did she really break your heart, whoever she was?

  Kinda. You know when you probably would’ve broken up with someone but they got in first? It was like that.

  Never happened to me. Weird, huh?

  Mia leaned in close, gifting me with a wave of perfume and sweat. I thought she was about to kiss me, and maybe I would’ve kissed her back, but instead she put her mouth next to my ear. Her lips moved. I felt her breath against my skin. When she pulled away, her eyes were dancing. They were blue and brilliant.

  You didn’t hear that?

  No.

  Boy, you really are deaf.

  She did it again, this time standing even closer, for longer, presumably going into more detail.

  How about now?

  Okay. Let me see if I got it right.

  I returned the gesture and spoke directly into her ear. She put a hand around my waist and pressed full-length against me for as long as it took me to say seven words.

  “Being deaf is not a pickup line.”

  Then I pulled away from her and headed for the nearest exit. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her mouth moving unintelligibly. “Thanks for the show,” I called over my shoulder, but I don’t know if I spoke loudly enough for her to hear. Whispering or screaming, it’s all the same to me.

  On the way home, I deleted her texts and blocked her number. It’s not exactly flattering, being offered a pity fuck or whatever was going through her mind. Maybe she wanted to sleep with a guy she could say anything to. Or maybe she was just messing with me. I didn’t know, and I told myself I didn’t care. She had scratched my surface and exposed the dreadful mix of anger, anxiety, and shame that lurked beneath.

  But it wasn’t entirely unflattering, either, and the encounter snapped me out of the self-pitying funk that Shari and Blackmod had dropped me in.

  Mum was on the couch, where she’d fallen asleep watching Netflix. I tried not to wake her, but I must’ve closed the door too hard or bumped into something or just breathed too heavily. She sat up, rubbed her eyes, and signed, Fun night?

  I gave her a thumbs-up and mimed a yawn. Gestures, not signs. Neutral territory, still.

  She waved as I headed to my room. There, I picked up the guitar, plugged it straight into my laptop, and recorded something fast and angry, but not too bitter. I was aiming for an old-school metal riff with plenty of energy, using effects settings I remembered from aping a Judas Priest album once. Throw in a little Satriani, and you get the idea.

  Something clicked in my head as I played. Sure, I couldn’t perform with Blackmod anymore, not outside the garage, but here I was playing my own music, and nothing was stopping me from doing that. I had no one to keep time with, no one else’s pitch to match. It was just me, alone, and maybe that could work. All I needed was a venue that would allow a deaf guitarist to get up and play . . .

  I dismissed the slightly-less-crazy thought of joining Mr. Mackereth in Rundle Mall, busking for spare change. I would feel like someone from a freak show, unable to hear if passersby were cheering or jeering, completely exposed.

  But getting up in front of a literal crowd is not the only way to find an audience, and as my solo chugged to a stupendous finale, the alternative was clear in my mind.

  When the last virtual echo had faded to silence (according to the indicators on my laptop), I trimmed the sound file, called it “Pain Grade,” and uploaded it to the internet under the username Deafman, a nod to Steven Wilson. In the bio for Deafman, I said my goal was “to make some noise in a silent world” and that I came from Mars, “where sound doesn’t work.” I dedicated the recording to “Shia” (Shari + Mia) and privately hoped someone would think I meant LaBeouf. I took a blurry photo of my right ear and uploaded that for my userpic. Then I put it out on my usual social media at two a.m. on November the 5th, two months and three days after I lost my hearing.

  Maddening Hints

  December 30

  There’s a kind of joy in flying in the face of futility. I got that feeling from releasing “Pain Grade,” and I suppose the fumes of it are sustaining me now, in the face of Professor Dorn’s demand.

  Two more impossible music ideas? I didn’t get the first until my maybe-girlfriend tried to commit suicide . . .

  Still, I put every effort into it, researching haptic music accessories, high-tech gadgets that turn the vibrations up to eleven. Some are strapped to your body like miniature subwoofers; others resemble bulletproof vests, with actuators that thump different parts of your body depending on what frequencies are being activated. That, I thought, could be cool. Mechanical meat forks.

  But, again, expensive. Does every idea slam up against that brick wall?

  Not all of them, I’m pleased to say. “Plastic Maps” takes something normal and simply rearranges it, so sound and performance will be separate. If I can come up with another concept like that, awesome. And then another one.

  Or maybe I can skip the idea of performance entirely. Already it is slipping from my everyday thoughts as I concentrate on more arcane ways of making music. My mind is stuck on a hall full of people being thudded and buzzed by machines in time with music they can’t hear . . . It’s too amazing an image. I can’t let go of it.

  Of course, the concept of “touch” is a flexible one, just like music itself. People are incredibly empathetic: we flinch when we see someone else being hurt. Perhaps there’s an idea worth exploring here? Could showing people images of instruments being hit or plucked provide a similar sensation to that of hearing them?

  Or maybe I don’t even need images. Light alone could be enough. Photons would “touch” everyone in the audience at the same time, without preference for either the deaf or the hearing. Music visualizers already convert sound to light shows, but the idea goes back much further than iTunes and VJs. There were “color organs” in the eighteenth century, mechanical devices that translated sound into things people could see—​and while that’s cool, it might mean I’ll be hard pressed to come up with a novel twist.

  Color organs were big fifty years ago too, as trippy as lava lamps but on a much bigger scale. I watch a bunch of old concerts on YouTube and am not particularly impressed. Too slow, too amorphous, too dim. We could do much better these days with high-powered LEDs, maybe even lasers. Or with projections of those silent GIFs that some people claim to hear?

  But to what end? What would be the point? Professor Dorn is never going to give me the go-ahead for a pretty light show. At the very least, I’m going to need some music . . .

  * * *

  “Lava lamp” triggers a memory I’d rather not pursue, but I follow it in case it leads somewhere useful.

  Shari’s parents owned a vibrating bed. Why? I have no idea. Prior to meeting her, I didn’t even know such things existed. Needless to say, we wanted to check it out. Her parents were such stay-at-homes, though (maybe because of the bed), that we didn’t get the chance until after my stroke. On that day, when things weren’t too tense between us, she texted to invite me over.

  Buzz buzz—​it’s finally free!

  OMG

  Stop texting. Get moving!

  I scoped out her driveway on approach. As promised, no sign of Shari’s parents’ car, a giant silver beast about as old as the very notion of a vibrating bed. She had already explained that they were at a Greek Orthodox wedding and wouldn’t be back until dinnertime at the earliest. I grinned. That gave us hours to explore the possibilities.

  My good mood lasted about as long as it took for her to let me in.

  The freight train scooped me up and delivered me to the bedroom, where we had the same problem we always did. It’s much easier to be deaf when you’re alone. Being around someone you never really communicated with in the first place is a reminder of how much you took for granted, and wasted. Vibrating bed or no vibrating bed.

  Afterwards, I lay sprawled on the trembling mattress while she played a version of “I Spy” by spelling out letters with her fingertip on my stomach. I correctly guessed
about one word in three; maybe I would have been more successful if I’d been paying attention.

  “Pillow?”

  “Foot? Too easy.”

  “Lava lamp—​really?”

  My mind was mainly on the bed’s vibrations. They felt much stronger when I was lying still, and maybe I was beginning to see the point of them now. I felt electrically adrift, as though I had entered Mum’s favorite meditation music and become one with the very idea of sound. Ommmmm.

  I didn’t know I’d gone to sleep until Shari shook me awake. Night had fallen. Headlights were moving across the window, painting blocky white shapes on the far wall and across her face. Her mouth was moving, urgently.

  Her parents were back!

  We threw the sheets together as though we were in the worst sitcom ever and barely reached the living room in time to make it look like they’d caught us fooling around out there. Everyone blushed and looked awkward, but I couldn’t hear what they said to her, so I didn’t know until later that they’d banned me from coming over again. I just said goodbye as politely as I could and left them to it.

  A better boyfriend would have stayed to share the punishment.

  * * *

  Lava lamps and vibrating beds.

  There’s something in this memory that I can’t put my finger on. Something so obvious I can’t see it. The hint is tantalizing and maddening. I need this idea, need it badly. I have to convince Professor Dorn that I’m getting somewhere with this, or else she won’t let me into her course—​and if she won’t do that, then what am I supposed to do with my life?