Impossible Music

by Sean Williams

  Leaving this morning was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

  I really have to go. I’m sorry.

  I had booked the appointment with Prameela via email as soon as the clinic opened. G didn’t know that I had done that; she was still asleep at the time, probably snoring, for all I could tell. When she woke, I told her this was something I’d locked in ages ago and couldn’t get out of.

  Do you want me to come back afterwards?

  It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.

  She seemed different this morning. Distant, distracted. I wondered if she regretted what had happened. I wondered what was going on inside her head. Then I saw her fingers tapping restlessly against her breastbone, one rapid rhythm, repeated over and over.

  Is it loud today?

  Instead of replying with words, she leaned into me and put her head against my shoulder. I took that as a yes. My fingers itched to say more, but I didn’t. Anything I said would make things worse.

  Thank you, she texted while I was en route to the clinic. Three more texts quickly followed.

  I’ll message you when I can, Simon.

  Don’t worry.

  I’m not going anywhere.

  And here I am, turning the phone over and over in my hand. Give her space, give her silence: that has to be my mantra. The last thing I want to do is drive her away.

  A hand touches my left upper arm. Prameela leans into view, and I have to think for a moment to remember why I’m here. Seems my entire being did forget, after all.

  Hi, she signs. Come on through.

  I wave, a gesture, and follow her into her office.

  * * *

  Prameela’s space is friendlier than Selwyn Floyd’s sterile cavern. The chairs are made of a brown leather that gives comfortably underneath my weight. Her shelves are full of glass knickknacks, handicrafts, and photos of small children. They don’t look like her kids. Patients, perhaps.

  You really should learn how to sign, Simon. It would make your life so much easier.

  “Your life,” I say, unrepentant for making Prameela speak via her iPad.

  I get it. You’re deaf, but you don’t feel Deaf yet. That makes sense to me. The difference is not just whether you can hear or not. It’s where you belong culturally. Until you can bring yourself to add the D to deaf, you’re not part of the Deaf community: you’re a hearing person who can’t hear—​but how long can that stance last? That defiance of the facts? You’re going to need Auslan one day. If you learn it now, it’ll be there for you.

  Who made her my counselor?

  “Yesterday,” I tell her, “I think I heard something.”

  Prameela leans forward and erases her words from the screen with one deft swipe of her hand.

  Go on.

  * * *

  She listens to my account of that moment in traffic once through, paying close attention, then asks me to tell her again, this time with questions. I am interrogated from all angles, including some I never thought of. Could I have seen a driver alongside me reacting out of the corner of my eye? Could cars have been slowing already before I glanced at the phone? Have I experienced headaches lately, or dizzy spells, or double vision? Have I been unduly stressed? How does the thought that I might be wrong about hearing again make me feel?

  “Feel? No worse than usual.”

  Are you sure?

  “Don’t worry. I’m not like G. I mean George.” Then I remember that Prameela probably doesn’t know about the connection between us. “Another one of your patients. A girl. I met her in deaf class. You know, tinnitus? The whole, uh, vagus nerve stimulation thing?”

  She nods. The connection is made, but she divulges nothing.

  I don’t want you to invest too much in this, Simon, she tells me. It’s probably just one of those weird coincidences that happens sometimes, but if you like, I’ll talk to a colleague. I can do that right now. Would you mind waiting for a few minutes?

  “No, sure, okay.”

  She gets up and walks past me and out the door. I sit and wait as patiently as I can. Who is her colleague? What do they know about me? There have only been thirteen cases of cortical deafness in the history of medicine. Prameela knows as much as anyone.

  No worse than usual. It would be fair to say that what I told her was a lie. The very thought that my hearing might be coming back has sent me into an emotional spin. Did it happen, or am I going crazy? Am I going crazy, or did it happen? I’m wearing a rut back and forth between those two thoughts, deeper and deeper.

  My head whips around. Prameela is standing behind me, her hand on the handle of the door, which is closed. She is looking at me, studying me, with a clinical intensity that feels like a blow.

  What just happened?

  “Are you okay?” I ask her.

  She crosses to the desk and picks up the iPad.

  Did you hear that?

  “Hear what?”

  You didn’t hear anything?

  “No. Was I supposed to?”

  But you turned around.

  “I . . . don’t know why. Something happened. I turned to see. What did you do?”

  I slammed the door.

  We stare at each other. I definitely didn’t hear anything, but I definitely did turn.

  Perhaps you felt the air move. Unconsciously.

  “You were standing between me and the door.”

  Vibrations through the floor, then? Or perhaps you saw me moving in a reflection.

  “Off what?” There are no mirrors, and her framed diplomas are too high to cast an image at the right angle.

  Perhaps you did hear something, then.

  “So why don’t I remember it?”

  That’s the question.

  Her eyes are alight with speculations too complex for me to guess at.

  I want you to note when anything like this happens again, she writes on the iPad. In the meantime, let’s do some tests. My receptionist will email you the details.

  I think of the MRI, and my heart sinks a little. Totally worth it, I tell myself, if it proves I’m going to get better.

  But will it? I feel oddly deflated, as though the ambiguity is itself a negative.

  Remember, Simon: don’t get your hopes up.

  She has read me completely wrong. “Okay, I won’t.”

  Seriously. Go home, think about something else. Say hi to George and tell her I’ll see her soon.

  Her smile is too knowing. But there is caring there, too, and I am hit with the understanding that Prameela’s days must be full of people like me, who clutch at the slightest threads of hope as if they’re lines to the lives they have lost. How many times has she seen those threads snap? Will mine be one of them? Like G’s?

  “Thanks,” I tell her as I get up and leave the warm sanctuary of her office. I came seeking answers and am leaving with more questions than ever, but none of that is her fault. All I can do is follow her advice to the very best of my limited abilities.

  “Live or Die”

  December 31

  In the parking lot, I text G. She hasn’t replied by the time I get home, so I figure it’s a safe bet I won’t hear from her for a while. The harsh light of this summer day bears down on the oasis that enclosed us the last twenty-four hours. Reality is unremitting.

  The first thing that catches my eye in the kitchen is not something to graze on, but Madeleine Winter’s article, which Mum insists on keeping pinned to the fridge with the irrational number magnets I gave her for Christmas last year. It’s been out almost a month now, and the sight of the clipping still makes me cringe.

  Brave Headbanger’s Battle with Brain Injury

  Under that headline, the photo captures me in mid-riff with long hair spraying up and out like a halo. It looks ridiculous. Maeve has helpfully added a hook nose and pointy chin.

  My friends are texting about New Year’s Eve parties I can’t muster the energy to go to. Tired, dispirited, and alone, I brace myself for a long night.

  * * *
<
br />   To: Grace Dorn

  From: Simon Rain

  Date: December 31

  Subject: Impossible Music #2

  Dear Professor D,

  I know, I know, you need my submission next month. I’m going as fast as I can.

  “Live or Die”

  Once upon a time, in the 1980s, there was an Australian synthesizer called the Fairlight CMI. Way ahead of its time—​you could take a light pen and draw a waveform across the screen, and it would play the sound that you had created. This work is performed entirely on a Fairlight that belongs to my father.

  On the big screen at the back of the stage is an image of the last page of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony laid flat, with the notes, staves, and other markings standing out, as though drawn with very thick ink. A red line moves diagonally across the page, taking on bumps and kinks as it goes.

  That red line is fed into the Fairlight as a waveform, creating one long, continuously changing note—​a note that is far too low for the human ear, but played so loudly the audience feels the room rumble around them like the ceiling’s about to fall in. Their eyeballs literally shake in their sockets.

  The last details that go into the computer are the stems on Mahler’s f’s where he wrote “für dich leben! für dich sterben!”

  There, the work comes to an end, like everything must, even if it never really existed in the first place.

  Simon

  * * *

  To: Simon Rain

  From: Grace Dorn

  Date: January 2

  Subject: Re: Impossible Music #2

  Simon—​

  This is promising, although I think you need to work on the titles. Let the performance do the talking. For the next one, try being a minimalist.

  Also, are you okay?

  Part Five

  I.T. Conquered the World

  December 15

  Madeleine Winter’s newspaper article was an embarrassing disaster from the headline (who wants to be described as “brave”?) to the last line. Everything I told her went through the saccharine filter of her mind and emerged so syrupy and sweet I barely recognized myself or my life. I guess she found out about Dad because of the photo shoot at Subaqueous Studios, but I wish she hadn’t. Under her pen I became a child prodigy following in his famous father’s footsteps, untimely toppled from the pantheon of great guitarists by fickle fate, stubbornly striving on in defiance of adversity, etc., etc., gag gag gag.

  At least she mentioned the cassette. I sold a few extra copies as a result, not viral quantities, but enough to recoup the costs. That only made me feel worse, though. What were my buyers expecting? I wasn’t Jimi Hendrix. All I had to offer was nine tracks I would never hear . . . a poignant detail Madeleine exploited in the final paragraph, to my endless mortification.

  Twelve days after my first date with G, I threw the remaining cassettes in our garbage bin.

  Mum found them and brought them back inside. Reluctantly, I think, but determined to use them to illustrate her point. Failed attempts to restart music career? Counting Blackmod, two.

  We need to talk.

  That was the prewritten note she handed me from her perch on the end of my bed. I was sitting in a corner of my room, feet hard against an amp that hadn’t been turned on for weeks, head slowly thudding against the wall.

  “What about?”

  Another ready note: Your future.

  “Do I have one?”

  Exasperation is easy to read, at least on Mum’s face. Note three said, I spoke to a course advisor at uni. They offer Auslan translators and transcripts for Deaf students. When you decide what courses you want to put on your new uni application, instead of music—​

  I read no further than that.

  “What do you mean, ‘instead of music’?”

  Mum looked confused for a moment. Whatever was on note four, it didn’t match the response I’d given her.

  Can—​be—​H-O-B-B-Y—​

  “No. And I’m not changing my application.”

  She signed But—​

  That was as far as I let her go. “Music is all I know. It’s not a hobby. So what if I can’t hear? I’ll do more theory, more musicology to make up for losing performance . . . Maybe I’ll take composition instead.”

  Mum thrust another note at me, in desperation, it seemed to me.

  I.T. is a good career path. Or design. You won’t have any trouble getting in, thanks to your midyear results, and you can work from home, communicate via email—​

  “I’m not interested in I.T. or design. Or sculpture or . . . astronomy or whatever you’re going to suggest next. I’ve applied for music, and that’s where I’m going to stay. If they’ll have me.”

  How—​you—​know—​they—​will?

  To indicate “they,” Mum pointed in the general direction of the university.

  For the first time, I thought hard about how this might actually work.

  “Professor Dorn—​I met her at winter school—​she runs the advanced composition program. It’s super hard to get into, but she’s interested in all sorts of weird shit, and we’re tight.”

  T-I-G-H-T—​what?

  “We’ve exchanged emails.”

  So she can get you into the program?

  “I guess so, if she thinks I’m up to it. I’ll ask her.”

  When?

  “When I email her next!”

  Then—​we—​talk?

  “Yes, but not about I.T. I’m not doing I.T. Ever.”

  The more we argued, the more obstinate I became. Partly out of fear, because what if she was right to be worried? There was no chance of me getting into performance now that I couldn’t hear; the obstacles were just too great. Neither theory nor musicology offered anything like the thrill of creating or performing. Composition was my only remaining hope of taking music further—​but what if Professor Dorn wouldn’t accept me into the program? Music is my passion. I love it so much I recorded a cassette I’ll never hear, for Christ’s sake. That seemed crazy to Mum, but it didn’t to me. Just because she’d caught me throwing out the cassettes didn’t mean I’d given up entirely. My brief dream of being a mogul was dead, but this dream would do instead.

  Mum was talking and signing at the same time, but I had gotten lost somewhere in the finger-spelling, and then Maeve was in the room, and she was shouting at Mum. Not wanting to miss this latest development, I thumbed on my phone and tried to decipher the garbled text trickling across its screen.

  One fragment stood out:

  He knows what he wants to do, Mum. Why don’t you just leave him alone and let him do it?

  Maeve defending me? I couldn’t believe it. Neither could Mum, obviously. She threw up her hands and stormed out of the room, making the floorboards shake as she went.

  “Thanks, Maeve,” I said.

  It wasn’t for you. When you’re doing your music thing, you’re at least tolerable.

  She left me alone to chew over this abruptly clarified understanding of myself—​not Maeve’s parting shot, but what my determination to study composition might actually mean. “The Future” was something I’d never articulated in detail. Before losing my hearing, it had simply been assumed that I’d go to uni to do performance, with a career in music to follow. Maybe I’d be a huge star; most likely I would play like Mr. Mackereth did and tutor music students on the side.

  The future was now even harder to map out.

  I texted Mr. Mackereth that night, seeking his guidance and, hopefully, approval.

  It’s a tough life, he replied. I won’t lie about that. It’s hard enough even if you can hear. You should only do this if you’re absolutely sure.

  Mum wants me to do I.T.

  Well, maybe you should consider that.

  I couldn’t. I’d rather die.

  Well, then. I think you’ve answered your own question. Give it your best shot and see what comes of it.

  The thing is, I looked up the course requirements for co
mposition, and they’re really tough. I need to submit a portfolio in order to get in. Do you think Deafman would count?

  I don’t know, Simon. You’d have to ask.

  I knew he was going to say that. That was the obvious thing to do. I’d been putting off that task, however, afraid the answer would be no, meaning the effective end of all my dreams, the erasure of a future that I still wanted, despite everything, to be very much like the old one, but with performance swapped out for composition. Was that too much to ask for?

  Mr. Mackereth had more to say.

  The smartest teacher I ever had once tried to talk me out of a music career. It was the best advice I ever ignored.

  But you did ignore it. And now look at you!

  There’s not much to look at, Simon. Apart from music, what have I got?

  Apart from music, what matters?

  If you really feel this way, nothing anyone says is going to make a difference.

  I wish I could convince Mum of that.

  She’s just worried about you. And rightly so. She’s afraid you’re making life harder for yourself by choosing this path. If you want to bring her around, you’ll have to convince her that’s not the case.

  How?

  Don’t ask me! I’m still trying to convince my mother . . .

  Mr. Mackereth signed off to put his eighteen-month-old son to bed—​thankfully, a child whose musical displays involve nothing more ambitious than banging two pots together—​and I lay back on my own bed to consider his words. On the one hand, he was spot-on: Dad had made it very clear to me that no one made money from the arts unless they were extraordinarily lucky. One day the royalties to “Tokyo Go” would dry up and he’d be as poor as the next musician.