Impossible Music

by Sean Williams

  Briefly, I consider texting Shari to see if talking to her shakes anything loose. Then sanity kicks in, and I message G instead. Perhaps a distraction will help. She’s been under observation in the hospital five days now, detoxing or whatever doctors make people do when they’ve taken an overdose, assuming that’s what she did. She must be bored out of her mind. I was in the hospital for some knee surgery when I was a kid, and every minute of those two days dragged.

  Good night and good morning.

  Where are you? Bring coffee.

  I smile. G is back to normal, for her version of “normal.”

  I can be there in an hour.

  Too long. I’m fading fast.

  Maeve has the car, but she’s due back any minute now.

  Note to self: next boyfriend must have own mobile cafe.

  Gotta get rid of this one first.

  Is that a challenge? I accept.

  A second later, my phone vibrates. It’s G requesting a Skype session. She appears on the screen, pointing at her face with an I dare you to comment expression. She does look somewhat below par, I have to admit. Her hair is simultaneously greasy and flyaway. Her face has pink lines down one side, as if she woke up lying on a tangle of rope. Dark rings bag her eyes, almost certainly not mascara.

  Still, my heart does a little thud-thud on seeing her. Silent, but present.

  Wasn’t that you in The Ring?

  Dude, you’re the one with long hair.

  Enjoy it while it lasts: my dad is an egg.

  That’s not how baldness genes work.

  I think?

  Beats me.

  Shall I come visit?

  Dunno, SHALL you?

  Don’t hate me for my grammar.

  Just bring coffee. Don’t forget!

  G ends the call, and I go to get ready, cheerful at the prospect of seeing her again. She may be sick, but I want to be with her, particularly when she’s feeling chatty. Maybe her tinnitus isn’t so bad today.

  Maeve’s schedules run on a plus-or-minus-half-an-hour principle. I’m practically dancing by the door, waiting to speed off through the suburbs when she gets home. Seeing my eagerness, she has fun holding the keys just out of reach and switching them from hand to hand behind her back. I don’t have time for this.

  I pick her up and take her bodily back outside, feeling her laughing against me until I drop her down next to the car. She hands me the keys and reaches for her phone.

  What’s the hurry? Hot date?

  With burning cheeks, I let myself into the car. “Don’t wait up,” I tell her and reverse out the drive.

  The sky is cloudy, threatening summer rain. I crank the window down and tie my hair back in an attempt to keep it out of my face. The hot wind just makes it feel heavier.

  Being behind the wheel of a car was weird at first. There are so many audio cues when you’re driving. The sound of the engine revving. The clicking of indicators. Squeaking brakes. The ancient Civic Maeve and I share has more than its fair share of quirks, and there’s not an indicator light for any of them.

  Then there are the other cars on the road. I can’t hear horns honking or sirens approaching. More than once, I’ve been caught out by the latter. When you’re watching everything all at once to make up for being unable to hear, it’s amazingly easy to miss flashing lights weaving through the traffic behind you. Sunlight glinting off chrome is something you quickly learn to ignore because it looks like emergency vehicle lights. Same with strobing bike lights at night. Ignore all the false alarms, and eventually you’ll miss a real one, just like G and her ref’s whistle.

  I know that some deaf drivers have extra rearview mirrors so they can watch what’s being signed in the back seat, but I can’t imagine trying to follow a conversation with my eyes while behind the wheel. The thought is terrifying. I’m too busy watching the entire world at once to think about words.

  Distracting habits are hard to break, though. On the way to the hospital, my phone, flopped face-up on the passenger seat, rat-a-tats its flash to let me know a text has arrived. Another one quickly follows. Then another.

  I glance down at it to read the text on my lock screen. Maeve. What does she want so urgently?

  My head whips up. The car in front of me has slammed on its brakes. I do the same and barely stop in time. If my tires screech, I don’t hear them.

  Then the tug of my seat belt relaxes, and I fall back into my seat, feeling the rapid rise and fall of my chest. Brake lights are blinking on and off everywhere I look. A cloud of smoke or dust rises ahead along the road. An accident!

  I crane my neck to see better, but the car in front is a ridiculously huge 4WD that takes up the entire lane. The driver looks tiny inside it. She’s not getting out, so I assume there’s no need for me to do so either. Anyway, what use would a deaf guy be in a crisis, even if I did know first aid? I could ask questions but not hear the answers.

  The right lane starts moving again. Indicators flash. Gradually the stalled traffic merges and flows around the scene, which turns out to be a rear-end collision between a red pickup and a taxi in the leftmost lane. Steam pours from a busted radiator. The drivers stand on the side of the road, exchanging details. No road rage in evidence. I keep my eyes peeled for flashing lights, just in case the police have been called and I need to get out of the way.

  Then I’m past and accelerating, leaving behind everything, apart from a shaky feeling in my entire body. If I hadn’t noticed in time, that might’ve been me back there too, trying to explain to the driver of the big 4WD why I went headlong up her arse.

  The sequence of events plays on repeat through my mind. Maeve’s texts. Me looking down to read her name, then looking back up again to see red lights flaring. Slamming on the brakes—​

  Maeve’s texts. Me looking down, then looking back up again to see red lights flaring—​

  Maeve’s texts. Me looking down, then looking back up—​

  Me looking down, then looking back up—​

  —​then looking back up—​

  My mental recall sticks here. There’s something missing.

  What made me look up?

  I couldn’t have seen anything to indicate that there had been a sudden impact in my vicinity. The phone had my full attention. I couldn’t have felt anything, either. Not from inside the car. And I definitely couldn’t have heard anything . . .

  Could I?

  My hands are shaking with more than just adrenaline. Almost sick with something that might be hope, except there’s no word I know of for a feeling this desperate, I pull over and search my memory.

  I have no recollection of hearing anything, and surely I would remember that. But what if it’s not that simple? What if the hearing part or parts of my brain are only slowly growing back?

  I try clicking my fingers and clapping my hands. I turn on the radio as high as it’ll go. Maeve has it set to some shitty commercial station, but I don’t care. Straining, I hear . . . I hear . . .

  Nothing.

  I sag, unsure whether to feel hope or despair. Maybe my memory has the timing all mixed up—​after all, it happened in an instant.

  I think of G and everything she’s going through. I warn myself not to get too excited about something that might never happen.

  G is waiting for me. My hands are steadier now, so I put the car in gear.

  Remembering the texts from Maeve, I read them before pulling back out into the traffic.

  What’s her name?

  When do I get to meet her?

  Come on, big brother, YOU OWE ME.

  “Peyote Squeal”

  November 6

  Maeve was born thinking I owed her, but sometimes she’s right, and not just for pushing me out of the car the night I argued with Mum.

  I fully expected no one to listen to “Pain Grade,” so it was a surprise when people started leaving comments.

  There was some criticism: bending flat, copying Metallica, don’t quit your day job, bullshit you
’re deaf kind of thing. Someone complained that they could hear me humming along, which is flat-out impossible since I recorded straight from the effects pedals into my laptop with no microphone—​unless the groaning ghost has supernatural powers.

  Others were more complimentary, noting my chops, expressing amazement that I couldn’t hear a thing (usually with lots of exclamation marks), and asking for more.

  When Maeve left a comment, I knew why the recording was getting hits. She’s way more active on social media than I am. Seeing my Deafman post and figuring out it was me, all she said was He lives! but the message was clear and appreciated. I’d been feeling dead for a while. I was warmed that she’d noticed my brief revival and felt moved to share.

  That prompted the question, though: what was I going to do next?

  Mia and Shari had left me feeling lonely and isolated, but recording and releasing “Pain Grade” into the wild definitely made me feel better. Perhaps, I reasoned, I should do more.

  The second solo I released, “Shark Venus,” was very different from the first. Cleaner sounds, experimental chords, long loops that folded back on themselves in strange, irregular ways. I have no idea if it sounded anything like what I was writing in the moment, in my head, but it gave me a feeling of completion and connection—​and that’s what I was looking for. Getting something out of my system and offloading it onto the internet.

  Upload. Share. Wait. That’s the mantra of the modern music mogul, right? Would-be mogul, anyway. I told myself I wasn’t likely to become famous this way. I just wanted Deafman to be noticed by someone.

  It was. The first comment on “Shark Venus” was a question from someone calling themselves GlanMaster.

  Hey, are you starting a channel?

  I hadn’t responded to the comments on “Pain Grade,” but I felt this deserved an answer.

  Would you subscribe if I did?

  Sure. I like a good laugh.

  Don’t feed the trolls, I reminded myself.

  Mum, I told you not to comment here!

  That earned me an LOL, which I suppose was something.

  * * *

  Setting up a channel was a double act of defiance, aimed at my circumstances as well as GlanMaster, who did subscribe and continued to listen and comment, if only to tell me how hilarious the whole exercise was. I wondered at first if he was a sock puppet for Roo or Sad Alan, but they couldn’t have maintained such a pretense for so long. I know my friends as well as they know me. There’s a limit to how hard they’ll work for kicks.

  “Peyote Squeal” followed “Shark Venus,” and after that came “Crystal Tomato.” The names meant nothing beyond a faint evocation of tone, but I’ll confess I had fun with them. The Notes app on my phone is full of odd phrases I’ve copied from shop signs and graffiti, saved for possible band names. Some are misheard phrases or typos.

  My family subscribed, although I suspect Mum never listened, and Maeve lost interest pretty much immediately. Dad was more involved. Occasionally he lifted a lick and made sure I was paid for it. He even had suggestions for how certain tracks could be improved. My general method was to explore an idea via improvisation until I felt it had the correct shape, then to pick a take that felt right to me. By “felt,” I’m being literal: pressing my desktop monitors against my stomach, like Beethoven clenching a stick between his teeth and touching it to the piano while he played, I could feel the way the sound rose and fell. If I could’ve smelled or tasted the files, I would’ve done that too. Dad’s feedback helped shape my instincts, giving me an idea of whether my gut was on the mark or not.

  Each track took a couple of days spent pretty much nonstop playing and replaying. In the two months since my stroke, I’d been given a permanent pass from school and exams (a definite upside to losing my hearing) and had lost my part-time job, so time was one thing I had plenty of. My only obligations were deaf class and counseling, and I barely concentrated during them. When I started working on the files at Dad’s place, mixing in effects, drum tracks, synths, and even vocals (the odd growl, where the urge took me), I knew it had become an overwhelming obsession. My subscriber list wasn’t huge, but it was growing, and I felt I owed it to them to keep producing, if not to myself.

  That’s when a local reporter got wind of it and sent me an email. I think my old guitar teacher, Mr. Mackereth, had ratted me out. She said she wanted to do a story but that her paper would need something concrete to back it up.

  Like a concert? A tour? Sad Alan’s skepticism fairly dripped out of my phone’s screen.

  I won’t feel comfortable playing live without you guys.

  A video? I could film you. Add a filter. My sisters could dance, or whatever they call it, in the background. Roo was marginally more supportive, although as always I had a hard time telling if he was ripping on me or not. He had twin sisters, who had spoken their own language until they turned eight and now, at thirteen, still seemed like interlopers from an alien dimension.

  Maybe I should cut a CD.

  Yeah, I could give it to my gran for Xmas.

  And put it up on the internet as well, I mean. Is that so dumb?

  I dunno. How important is it to you? You know you’ll probably only sell ten copies.

  We’ll buy one, won’t we, Roo?

  Yeah, anything for the Drip. But only one. You can keep it, Alan. I’ll rip it.

  They were right. It was a dumb idea. But it did matter to me, more than words could say. Maybe a CD could stand in for everything I couldn’t hear.

  What about a cassette? Dad’s got an old duplicator somewhere.

  Tapes are in again. That could work.

  Alan, you reckon flares are coming back in. Are you serious, Drip?

  Maybe. I could master it in the studio, knock together a cover I could print at home . . . You’d help put it all together, wouldn’t you?

  Miss the chance to make history? Never!

  That was as big a vote of confidence I was going to get from those guys, so next I emailed Dad, who confirmed he still had the replicator, which produced six finished cassettes from a stereo master running at high speed. He also had some boxes of cassette blanks hoarded away in hope of the format’s return.

  Really takes me back, he said as he showed me how to work the ancient machine. The first album I ever owned was on cassette.

  Back in the Stone Age?

  The Rolling Stones Age, yeah. When I was a kid, you got one new album a week, if you were lucky.

  Sounds brilliant.

  Ah, well. It’s all relative. You’ve absorbed ten times more music than I had by your age. I’ll never catch up. Who has time to listen to anything new?

  I’m pretty sure he was trying to make me feel better.

  Me, I concentrated on having a physical object that I could hold up as evidence: Look, there’s hope! Hope in the performance of music that people would hear and maybe even pay for.

  I kept my newfound positivity clutched tightly to my chest, fearing that if I let go for an instant, it would be dashed.

  Stuck in Leaps

  December 30

  New Year’s Eve Eve brings me emotional déjà vu as I thread through sterile-smelling corridors, past nurses and patients and the occasional doctor, to find G sitting with her back against the bedhead, playing a game on her phone.

  What’s up? Why do you look weird?

  Damn my body language for shouting when I want to be silent. I can’t tell her about what happened in the car on the way here, because it wouldn’t be fair. It might turn out to be nothing, anyway, like her “vagus nerve stimulation” treatment.

  That’s how I normally look. And I’m here to see you, not talk about me.

  Nothing to see here. I’m being discharged today. Want to give me a lift home? Aunty Lou is at work. I’ll give you her number if you want to check I’m not scamming you into breaking me out early.

  No need. I trust you, god knows why.

  I’m asking myself the same question. You forgot my coff
ee, didn’t you?

  I actually slap my forehead. Her vital beverage completely slipped my mind—​understandably, I reckon, given what happened, but how can I explain the one fact without mentioning the other?

  Sorry. Guess I’m more worried about you than you thought.

  You should be worried about yourself. I’ve killed for less.

  But she’s smiling, so I sit down.

  Want me to get some from the cafeteria?

  She shudders theatrically.

  I’d rather die.

  The smile frays. We’re thinking the same thing: You almost did.

  I take her hand. She squeezes.

  Tell me, I say. If you want me to understand.

  G nods, and I hold the phone up to her lips. This is what it records:

  I’ve talked to some of that tiny fragments of sounds songs speech background noises gets stuck in leaps over and over that it mean anything I’ve tried using hot to see if these and a siege and a but it’s just nothing and lay out most of the time sometimes I can’t sleep we didn’t think when it fades out for beat until myself it’s going finally the day comes back again always louder than into you have no idea

  You know that once the enemy soldiers with no ways time she that heavy metals shit Eli 24 as a day that drives people crazy that really like this is driving me crazy like it squeezing me out of my own heat splitting the atom ideas

  And then per meal a affect sorry she said it was a long-shot new treatment isn’t over yet but nothing’s getting better it’s never going to get data I tell myself I should stop lending sign language but that’s like giving up and I never give up when of lewd is mad at me she stays on as stubborn and stupid as my mum table was that I don’t know if she’s just trying to shine me into being glued to your parents do that