by Oisín Curran
As I spoke I watched her fingers strike the keys with rapid power. That rhythmic, assured percussion is among the most vivid of my childhood memories. The clatter of the steel alphabet transferring words to crackling paper in an authoritative blur of movement thrilled me more than any music, I think, other than peepers crying in the swamp next to us. And also I suppose the call of the hermit thrush, not to mention, while I’m at it, crickets. But those noises were seasonal, whereas Iris typed all year long. She typed stories that she wrote first in longhand. She typed short pieces for the newspaper. She typed poems and essays and papers for Myles.
In the garden, for those twenty minutes, all other sound was muted by my own unbroken voice in my ear and the hammering of the Olivetti. My mother’s sun-browned cheekbones, her broken nose, her bow-shaped mouth pursed in concentration, her eyes slate-blue and her blond strands falling from their pins, all were focussed on my story as it tumbled out of the darkness into the dry autumn light. Or so I would like to be able to say—it wasn’t until many years later that I was able to see my mother as somebody else, not me. And it would be many years as well before I could see the shape of that story I told her, or rather the shape of how I told it to her and Myles, how it started as a lark but, beginning that day, grew steadily more burdensome the more deeply attached to my lie we three became. It was, to be honest, still a pleasure to gloat over my mother’s attention, even as the tears dried on her face, because in those early days I chose to believe her declaration that she would not die. No, it was impossible that she could die.
When I had finished, we rose, typewriter and pages in hand, and made our way slowly back to the house, pausing in our progress to remark the late new blooms of calendula and the cucumbers under siege by slugs. Iris bent to pick several yellow bodies from a tattered leaf and flung them bitterly into the woods, wiping their slime from her hands on a pile of uprooted weeds. But she mastered her humour quickly and agreed with me that the blue of the Chinese forget-me-nots closely resembled the lapis lazuli earrings that Myles had given her some years before my birth, but which she never wore due to the absence of piercings in her ears.
These earrings were kept in a box of yellow leather embossed with curlicues. To open this box gave me a pleasure nearly comparable to that of opening a book. When the lock sprang open, it hit the box with a small thud and the box itself acted as resonator, augmenting the sound. Attached to the underside of the lid, a mirror reflected a mass of coloured stones and wrought metals. A ruby-coloured glass necklace tangled with Bodhisattva pendants built of silver set with amethyst. Myles’s gold wedding ring resided there, for it was too uncomfortable, he said, to wear all day. Sitting quietly in the darkness of the treasure chest, his gold band had gathered a dull patina, its edges sharp, its two decorative slashes distinctly visible. By contrast Iris’s ring gleamed yellow, soft and round with use. When she washed her hands or picked up a bottle of beer, the gold knocked against porcelain or glass with a reassuring clank, the satisfactory quality of which I remarked only many years later, when my own wedding ring collided with dishes and stones. I think, in fact, that it was only upon the recognition of this familiar sound that I understood myself to be finally an adult. I had become a ring wearer, bound by covenants once obscure, to sentiments that had mystified. But even then, as a child, rummaging in my mother’s jewelry box, I knew those two rings carried more symbolic weight than they could bear: one tarnished and hard in the dark, the other glittering softly in sunlight—the marital equation was too exact to be tolerable. Too exact, yes, and therefore not accurate, because their marriage, like most, was an indecipherable stew of ambiguities, inscrutable, I later discovered, even to them.
Myles was spattered with house paint as usual—even his glasses sparkled with white droplets. He first scraped the lenses, then his beard with a razor, and we all changed into clean clothes and walked out onto the dirt road and followed it west, back the way I’d come from the schoolbus, between the swampy trees, past the ominous farmhouse, across the giant culvert now feeding the marshland from the ocean’s surging tide. The sun collapsed over the bay, a colossal jellyfish trailing raw purple. And from there the road sloped upward gently past the home of the Silvers, also under construction but having reached a more advanced stage of completion than our own. And here the slope abruptly reared up into a hill. We walked up, conversation lapsing with the effort. Halfway we passed the Bojanowskis’ miniature house. Herman Bojanowski was always building new rooms, but inexplicably the house appeared to grow smaller and smaller with each addition.
As we approached the top of the hill, we could hear the screams of peacocks mingling with the tuning of strings and a purring crowd, all punctuated by giant laughter and vocal scales. Strung lanterns fought the dusk through a screen of trees. A male peacock with fan unleashed staggered, iridescent and absurd, along the shoulder of the road like an eighteenth-century debutante straying from a ball.
Then we were in the crowd, some freshly dressed, others stinking vehemently of manure and sawdust. Mallards and chickens were underfoot, squawking from time to time when someone, already pickled in vodka, stumbled over them.
In the forest of adults, I found Artemis and Apollo, who were morosely plotting to blow up the concert barn. Nobody we liked would die, they assured me, but this horde of assholes must learn. I asked what the horde must learn, but the plotters were already heading for their target.
The barn was still empty as we crawled under the stage to lay the charge. Artemis dumped a pile of gunpowder that she’d collected from stolen bullets. She punched Apollo, her protege, who was gaping up through the cracks in the floorboards. The daydreamer shook himself and produced a fuse that he uncoiled. I fretted that the powder was directly under Willard’s piano bench. But that was the point, Artemis explained with satisfaction, Willard would blow sky-high in the middle of the “Bemsha Swing.” They had told me nobody would die and here they intended to kill off the Teacher, who was indubitably somebody.
That’s where I was wrong, Artemis insisted, Willard wasn’t somebody, he was a monster.
How? I asked. Something horrible had happened, but they wouldn’t say what. Nor would they ever, in fact, ever, ever say what.
They were already backing out from under the stage, uncoiling the fuse as they went.
Then we wandered in the crowd, establishing an alibi. The disciples had been joined by well-heeled locals who had come to gawk as though at exotic fauna. They adored the Teacher and called him Maestro and he did not correct them. They filed reverently into the barn, admiring the authenticity of its rough-hewn timbers and their reflections in the gleaming black flank of the grand piano. And gingerly, genially, they lowered themselves onto the motley stools and benches, rocking chairs and sofas that populated the dirt floor. In the glow of the kerosene lamps that served as footlights, Willard hopped lightly onto the stage. His thick, grey-black hair spiralling straight up from his head in an explosion of short, tight curls radiated a glow of pleasure as applause rose around him.
Nobody knew exactly where Willard came from. Some said he was a Black Indian, the descendant of Louisiana slaves who escaped their masters and found refuge with local Choctaw. Others said his mother was a Brahmin from Jaipur who scandalized her family by marrying a Chinese fisherman. Still others insisted his father was a Sephardic Jew from Ethiopia. A man claiming to have gone to high school with him said Willard was just a Schmidt from New Jersey who tanned easily. Willard himself neither confirmed nor denied any of these rumours. Where we come from is irrelevant, he would say. We must erase our past, our selves. We must become the wind.
That’s what he always said. That’s what he was saying now, more or less as he stood on the stage of the barn.
Thelonious Monk, he said, grand poo-bah of the bebop ivories, prince of the percussive attack, emperor of improvisational jazz. And what is improvisation? It’s making do with what you’ve got, what’s right in front of you,
right now, right here. That also happens to be an A1 description of zen practice. Monk’s compositions are musical zen. In a given moment they use no more nor less than the precise note required. To play Monk, to listen to Monk, to really play, to really listen, is to be immersed in samadhi. Let’s do that, cats. But before we do, a moment to reflect on the moment, which contains a reality that is neither welcome nor unwelcome; it simply is and must be faced.
One amongst us, he said, Has a life-threatening illness. Our dear friend Iris, he went on gesturing toward her, Has cancer. She is in our thoughts, but not just in our thoughts, in our actions too. The proceeds from this concert will go toward paying her medical bills.
And with that he bowed and turned to his piano. Nobody looked at Iris, but it was as though the peripheral stares of the audience bore down on her, and she shrank, mortified, in her chair. Later she would accuse Myles of revealing private information to Willard and god knew who else to humiliate her in public. To which Myles would say he had no idea that Willard was going to announce it at the concert, but in any case it was a very kind gesture and they certainly would need the money and why must she be so bloody private all the time and from there the argument travelled a well-worn path along one of the major fault lines between them—in this case the division between a Reticent New Englander and a Garrulous Irishman.
The lights flickered with Willard’s brisk movement. In the silence the manure-encrusted hems of his overalls knocked gently against the legs of his piano bench as he sat and splayed his giant, work-swollen, splinter-ridden hands over the ivory teeth of his grand, its belly wide open to the barn. Beside Willard sat his page-turner, his aide-de-camp, Ms. Ohm, my piano teacher, a woman who, in every other context, could hardly restrain herself from grinning, but here, in the shadows of the barn, sat concentrating still and grim through the “Bemsha Swing.”
No sooner did the music begin than I started to squirm. These concerts were torturous endurance tests during which I attempted the rapt stillness or quiet swaying and head-bopping of the adults around me. I even tried closing my eyes like them. After an eternity, I had to accommodate myself—my bones were growing as I breathed. While notes roared by, or tinkled pitifully along the ground, my sinews stretched and twisted new strands, my teeth pressed themselves out of my jaw, and it became imperative that I shift in my seat to release all this inner movement. So, at last, as silently as possible, I twisted my torso in the wicker armchair that imprisoned me and was met by the disapproving glare of Jack Blatsky, the violin maker. Swiftly I reverted to my original position and just as swiftly my body was agonized by interior crowding. I slammed my eyes shut. My skull was expanding at such a rate that I could feel the ligaments stretching, my throat distending, knees bursting their caps off, and I knew myself to be rolling in salt air.
The storm passes, not finding me. The ship still floats. The porthole window dries fast but I can’t see much through it except for horizon, sun, sea.
Rook finds me, gives me a hat, an apple, a biscuit, and points me up to the crow’s nest, on Captain Severn’s orders. We’ve been blown off course and now must hunt for land.
From the top of the mast, the world is a giant disc under me and I rock above it. Sheets of colour everywhere. Above me the dome of the sky is an upended purple bowl that slowly becomes a mercury-red curtain in the west, where the sun sets into a horizon made of blood. And that blood flows over the waves to me, turning pink as it reaches the boat, and then quickly fades to galvanized steel and finally whelms into black in the east on the far side of the world.
I turn my eye inward and hunt for the missing picture. I have so few I can’t afford to lose any of them. But it’s gone, completely. Yet I can still feel the gap. It would almost be better if it disappeared without a trace, but some residue remains, like the glue left in an album where a picture was removed, and that residue feels nearly as vivid as the image itself, and so all the more painful. What was it, what was it? I sort through my collection one by one to safeguard those I have left. There can be no more losses.
accident
waiting room
planet
refugee
bird
treasure
boat
spectre
gun
rainbow
firewood
bread…
The Lizzy Madge is a tiny shell beneath me.
Rook and a skinny, bearded man wheel a piano out from a large cabin on the foredeck. A little while later, the bearded man brings out a bench, opens the piano, and tunes it. When he’s done, a tall woman in a big straw hat sits down. A small, brown animal moves like water to the bench and flows up onto it to sit next to her. It’s an otter. Why do I know that? The woman’s fingers move up and down the keys a few times and play a strange, sad song that tires me.
To stay awake, I scan the deck. Toward the back, Rook juggles oranges. He stares straight up at his flying fruit and walks around like it’s nothing. He juggles to the music. Maybe the woman at the piano notices, because she plays faster. Rook speeds up. So does she. They keep going until the juggling and the music are both going so fast they’ll brew another storm. I look up and don’t see storms but land. I ring the bell.
The sea is still, and in the middle of it is a small island made of bare yellow rock. It’s little but tall, at least as tall as my nest and with cliffs as straight as the mast. All in all, it looks like the top of a drowned castle and even has doorways cut in the stone along the inside walls of the rock. Nothing grows on it, and the whole place is as mournful-looking as a cemetery. But if I could, I’d climb out of the crow’s nest and fly straight to it because the gravity of City pulls me there.
This feeling slams into me from behind. One moment I’m coolly sizing up the place and the next I must get onto it. Why? There’s no city there, no waterfalls, no lilacs, no room for car accidents or waiting rooms or rooms that look like planets. But still I must, still it’s here I have to go.
The place is inhabited. There’s a small dock cut from the rock. On the dock a few people with nets and ropes. They don’t look happy to see us, but maybe they can tell me the way to City. Maybe that’s why I must go ashore. But for now I wait.
The Lizzy Madge lowers her anchor, and Captain Severn jumps into a small motor boat with Rook. When they reach the dock, Severn cuts the engine and from the ship we hear voices back and forth. Rook seems to be trying to speak with the people in different languages. Apparently his wanderings have turned him into a linguist.
When the launch comes back, Rook says they don’t speak any of the twelve languages he knows. It sounds like our tongue, he says, But it actually isn’t at all. He seems happy about this. He pulls out a small mechanism and plays back a recording of a man saying:
Hostage sounds or rather silence held hostage by incessant sound, darkness imprisoned inside street lights, clock light, brake lights, moonlight, Sound and light, immobility kidnapped by earthquakes and engines.
Then a woman’s voice:
Towns floating on rivers of blood, on torrents released into the innocent air, but was there ever anywhere an innocent ceremony to drown? The sighs, the shouts, the ecstatic flood, the rush, the din.
A child’s voice says:
Nothing there nothing there, now hear this here. In recent days the course of blood, the inward wind that wails down my spine all the time but only now and then heard and then too loud to reach so then propitiated with coinage and chants.
Finally, the man again:
We dwelt and slew the hours one by one, inch by inch, till the whole thing was through, black spider sun, competing moons, the approaching orbit of the joyous bug, wings thrown, jaws wide, furred antennae of a demigod. Indifference to the eternal, if eternal there is. What is to love is what flees, what is—
Severn turns the tape deck off impatiently.
Tell the whole story,
Rook, he says. We were still able to communicate. Hand gestures may not be as refined as language, but we got through to them. I drew a picture of our destination in the sand and they pointed east.
The deck of the Lizzy Madge is crowded. Everybody looks east. Nothing but horizon.
All right, says the woman who played the piano, Let’s go.
She’s quiet, but everyone listens to her. She sounds rich. Maybe that’s why. Why everybody listens, I mean. She’s regal somehow, tall, her long, grey-black hair in a thick braid over her shoulder, her grey eyes are shaped like hawk wings, her mouth a thin, proud line.
Yes, they all say, Let’s go.
They move fast to make it happen.
Rook asks Captain Severn if we can stay a little longer to record more of the strange language, but the anchor is already raised.
Severn turns to Rook and says, It seems the consensus is against you.
You mean Chisolm is against me, Rook says, and looks at the rich-sounding woman who is playing the piano again.
She’s the one who chartered my boat, says Severn, and heads for the bridge.
No!
I hear my voice before I know it’s mine.
You can’t leave. This is the place you’re looking for!
Severn stops and stares at me. Everybody does. Stowaway vagabond shouting at captain. But what else can I do? The boat is turning and City is yanking me back toward the island with such force I feel like I’m going to throw up.
And how would you know what we’re looking for? asks Severn.
It doesn’t matter how, I say. This is it.
Silence from Severn—nose hard and sharp as a knife. He turns and walks away, the others go back to work, the boat pulls away. We’re not going back. It’s too late for me to swim for the island. I’d never make it. I’ll come back, I think. I’ll turn this boat around. Somehow. It’s like having two poles of gravity pulling me in two different directions. There’s the usual force pulling me down and then the island yanking me sideways. I feel sick; I lean against the gunnel and grab at the pictures in my mind to steady myself.
