33 Heavens
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33 Heavens
By K. Overman-Edmiston
Copyright 2011 K. Overman-Edmiston
All rights reserved.
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33 Heavens is from the short story collection Night Flight from Marabar.
Paperback print edition (ISBN 9780646369693) published by Crumplestone Press
PO Box 6546, East Perth, Western Australia 6892
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33 Heavens
Is this the first time you've done this? No? Well it is for me. Weird feeling, being overawed by a city as small as Perth, hey? But I am, a bit. I live in the age of cyberspace, the World Wide Web, Internet land – you'd think I'd be unshockable, but I'm not. I still have the bigness in me to be shocked by little things.
Take this, all this rubbish, on chairs, under chairs, rubbish, refuse – I've never seen so much garbage in one place in my life. I guess I've lived a sheltered life, a little life, well, in some ways, in some ways not. This has been my first big rock concert, and I only got in because a friend from my hometown asked if I'd like a job for the weekend − clean up after a rock concert. My Big Day Out. I also get to visit my sister, she works in Perth. Geez, I’ve never seen so much debris in my life, not even after a storm.
This bag’s beginning to cut into my shoulder, I’ll dump it in the skip and start again where I left off …
Where was I? Oh yeah, shockable. The concert was something else. I’ve seen bands play before, they come down to Albany and do a couple of shows if they’re on a country circuit, but I’ve never stood in a wave of decibels that big. The vibrations felt like they started right at the centre of my chest, and blew outwards. You know, you see concerts on television and the crowd looks like one beast, moving as if it were one creature − but me? Five minutes into the show I was on my own, I couldn’t see a person around me. It was like, like no-one else was there, just me and the music.
I’m a bit of a music freak, I just love it − music and reading − my sister says if you could eat them, I’d be one fat amigo. She’s the same, she writes. The sort of stuff that makes you want to surface and shriek, bite at the air for breath. She can really get inside the head and walk it round in there. She’s something else, my sister, when I’ve read some of her stuff I’ve just wanted to cry, not with pity, not the snuffling at the movies crying, no, I mean the sort of cry you make with rage, the sort of tight, dry, tearless cry you feel when you see a kid picked on, or when you see those bodies in documentaries, piled in pits, or rolled over carelessly by the sides of roads, you know, like they somehow just got in the way of the tank − something as sacred as life, pushed out of the way like rubbish.
My shoulder’s hurting again, I’ll do another dump … back in a minute. You know, I don’t think I’ve picked up a can yet that hasn’t had a trickle of liquid left in the bottom with a couple of floating fag ends, my sister would call it a visual cliché. I guess she’d be right, but boy, the smell of them, a few hours in the sun and wham! What’s a cliché on the nose called? She’d know it. Hers is the sort of writing that makes you smell situations, taste them − she has a whole new set of senses up in her head.
How she sticks it out in that office I’ll never know. She’s just the sort of person an office would kill, not outright, but slowly, like a slow release poison that breaks a spirit down, particle of light, by particle of light. That’s what offices can do, they put out the light, not directly, not as an instruction, but sideways, through side doors, by gradually changing the angle of the blinds so those inside don’t pick up the fact the light is fading, until it’s complete darkness and they’re pensioned off, and they look around them and it’s all darkness. That’s what X-rays record − not illness, but the dark patches, the areas where the light has been put out. In these spaces, there is no room for life. Unless, of course, we’re talking hyper-darkness. That sort of dark that’s darker than black, it turns anti-life on its head. The old ‘good from bad’ business they’d drum into us at catechism when we were kids. I’d sit there listening with her, all ears, all eyes, full of fear, well, me more than her I think. She’s a lot older than I am, but I was a real kid − and I believed it all. They’d tell us about the plucking of good from bad felix culpa, or something. That’s my sister. She got so black when my mum disappeared − but she’s got a good soul − so the blackness kind of inverted.
My sister is one of the black holes of our universe. Complete and utter gravity. One teaspoonful of my sister would carry the weight of worlds. She’s undemanding, unappeasable and she changes everything around her. The space between her and those she meets is the ‘event horizon’ − light, space, time bend to a different set of rules. And, if you’re lucky, if she lets you get to know her, if you fall over her edges and into her depths you streak towards her singularity, that point at which time stretches out to infinity, gravity piles in upon itself and becomes almost solid, light is transformed to a gleaming black, a point of shriek-filled silence. My sister is all soul. She flew out, blew out, exploded when she was eight, a baby super nova; from then till the age of seventeen she contracted in upon herself. Worlds falling in upon worlds, galaxies contracting to a central point. At twenty-nine my sister had become a supermassive black hole. And so she remains. A perfectly ordinary office worker; an old super nova at a desk in a corner. Softly, silently affecting everything, everybody that moves past her − her influence barely observable − only to be seen in the effect around her. A slight change in the radio static for a brief few seconds, the voltage moves up, falls through the floor, gently throwing satellites off course, bodies slightly off balance. My sister is a black hole stealthily recording all around her, an ancient soul in an aging body. You should meet her. Perhaps you have. How big is Perth, anyway?
I suppose you can tell by my grin – I don’t mind a bit of science fiction.
I couldn’t work in an office, it would be the end of me. All those war games, and like, you’re not even allowed to say ‘Bang! Bang!’ You fire your bullets in memos and emails. You kill the enemy with redeployments and redundancies. You storm cities in restructures, and take captives in performance appraisals: shabby little wars. Geez, talk about virtual reality.
What do I want to be when I grow up? Pretty much what I am now. I live for music, it’s my food. It keeps me moving, keeps me breathing. Not just rock or soul, not just John Lee Hooker, or Van-the-Man’s ‘gardens wet with rain’ striding out through green swards, naw, the whole range. I mean, a soul rolls over belly up at Beethoven’s Opus 132, hey? If that isn’t the sound of a soul peering towards the end of it …
I’m never going to be a Mozart, but then like, he’s never going to be me. No-one has that, no-one’s got my experiences, lived through what I’ve lived through. I haven’t got Michael Stipe’s soul, and he ain’t got mine. What I’ve got to give, through the music I put together, is entirely mine, and almost entirely shareable. You want a piece? It’s yours – no qualifications, no conditions apply. You look at me and think ‘Yeah? So what’, but inside this tatty T-shirt, these baggy old jeans, phew, friend, I could give you 33 heavens …
I’ve got a band together and we play some of my tunes, some have got words, some haven’t. But you never feel quite so alive as when you’re playing your song, writing your piece – sharing it about a bit. We do a few of the drummer’s songs but I get a bit embarrassed with those, I kind of move to the back of the stage and let him at it. They’re someone else’s – you can always tell when someone isn’t being real, kind
of wearing someone else’s clothes, I suppose.
I’m also a bit uncomfortable in crowds, I guess I don’t need to be part of a gang thing, I’m too cocky for that, or arrogant my sister would say, I don’t mind small groups when I can listen to one person at a time, but as soon as the number gets too big, it’s just too much. Then, the best thing I can do is sing from my gut, or play my tunes. Or bugger off.
I went to the mountains once. Boy, all height and mists and what a longing, what an ache for something lost. A slow moon over a fast stream – what a sense of loneliness. I was there for all of five minutes, what a promise, Nyman’s got nothing to answer for, he said it all with no words, a simple, deep ache in 4/4 time. And Campion put that woman’s eyes there to record it all, register that dislocation, that distress at the loss of part of her. Her voice.
You know, music’s not actually solid but sometimes it feels as hard and brittle as glass. As cutting, brilliant, transparent, shucking light into shards. Throwing you off skywards. At other times it’s fluid, like water seeping into the soul – a relax drug, instant peace. The Real Thing.
A friend gave me some tabs of speed once, only once. What a loser. Not him, me – I took the stuff. You know all that stuff about expanding the mind, cutting through concepts to reality? Shite. I sat in a toilet cubicle for two hours, my heart beating like a newborn’s. The only thing that kept me from crying out like a baby was the fact that I pushed both fists through the walls of the cubicle, through to the other side, and held on tight. Sweating like a pig. I learnt something all right; I learnt the size of my fear. And I learnt that my fear is massive. Am I a control freak, am I afraid of letting go, afraid of releasing myself to a higher consciousness? Put it this way, I’d rather keep control of myself than hand it over to a squalid little chemical that grabs the reins for me. You’re your own person, or you’re someone else’s. I know which way I swing.
I’ve already got enough fear in me, I don’t need to manufacture any more. I don’t want to sound like a real nerd, I mean, I probably drink a bit more than is good for an eighteen year old liver but, hey, is there anything like that warm feeling you get when you’ve had a few beers and they’re hitting the inner highways and you’re feeling nice and loose, a bit disjointed from yourself, but really smiley. Like your muscles are kind of warm and relaxed and even that jerk of a drummer doesn’t seem too bad.
Music’s not a drug, but it is mood altering, life enhancing if you want it to be, if you choose wisely. It’s like Esperanto in notation form, cuts across cultures, language barriers, sects. It’s like saying ‘I know what you mean’, a kind of shared sympathy. Thousands of languages at once, and all in a simple melody and beat.
God speaks to us in music more clearly than He does in the Scriptures. He puts an arm around you more surely in the sweep of a tune, than is managed in a commandment. One gives direction; the other comfort, a hug.
Sorry, I’m rambling a bit, hey? But I get carried away when I talk about music, it really is a religious thing to me. I mean, music lifts me higher than any catechism ever has. Religion’s only ever told me how wrong, how mistaken I am. Music can make me feel what’s absolutely right. It makes me feel what’s sacred. Sounds corny, hey?
I remember a guy asking me once what I believed in, religion-wise. When I told him he started laughing. He said it sounded like a whole bunch of fairy-tales cobbled together. What a loser, shite, he should’ve read up a bit about black holes if he wanted fairy-land. He sounded kind of panicky when he laughed, that hollow sort of laugh you do when you’re not quite convinced. Like, hey, it’s not fair you’ve got a bigger soul than me. But he didn’t want to listen and in the end I didn’t want to speak. His laughing was a bit of a punch in the guts but also pretty liberating – I didn’t have to be polite to him any more.
I ran the scene past my sister. She just shrugged and said to me, ‘He listens with his ears, not with his compassion, so he’ll never hear anything worthwhile.’ I was thirteen and I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. I think I do now. You see, there are people who think God created us and then ran off and left us. He disappeared, leaving us behind with babies that get shaken to death by their mums and dads, and thousands that die simply because they don’t have enough to eat, or people that die because their religion or colour is different to that of the guy who has a gun and a cruel streak. But God didn’t leave us completely alone, did He? He left a small piece of himself behind in each of us, and He left us music – that way we can find our way home again.
Shite and onions! I haven’t picked up any rubbish for the past ten minutes …