Another Kind of Madness

by Ed Pavlić

  After a few weeks, he’d begun to sit at a table in a corner of windows near the garden and read. He’d intended to keep on studying as he’d done on the road. For years he’d traced the music of what he considered the great voices in American jazz: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, Wynton Kelly, Lester Young. He didn’t exactly know why he was doing it. It struck him that the music he studied (phrase by phrase, song by song, year by year, each artist one at a time) was older than he was. Sometimes twice his age or more. It also struck him that the music was much closer to the age of the old men he worked with. Maybe that’s why he’d done it. He didn’t know. He’d grown to love the music. It never felt old to him. Note by note, gliss by gliss, it felt like it’d become flesh of his flesh, as if his body bore the old-time music into the contemporary world. He’d become a kind of time warp. He wondered if this alone had caused his senses to bend and smear in the gap between the music he’d slow-poured into his brain like warm honey and the manic, info-flow world he found around him in Chicago during the first years of the twenty-first century.

  As far as his studies went, he thought it wouldn’t matter that he was back in Chicago. It mattered. As soon as he arrived, he found it impossible to concentrate on the music as he had. In retrospect, the next part looked like a cheap setup. Maybe it was. When he arrived on the third floor of 6329, there’d been an old upright piano in the hallway. It sat on oversized, hard rubber studio rollers. On the back of the piano was well-stenciled script: Mount Carmel High School for Boys. He didn’t ask and he didn’t know why. He rolled it into his apartment mainly because he didn’t have much furniture. He’d never sat at the keys of a real piano before. When he did he loved the feel of the mechanism connecting his fingers to the felt-covered hammers he found hidden inside. From the time he rolled that piano into his apartment, it had seemed as if he didn’t hear recorded music anymore. He’d assembled a vintage stereo system before he found that listening had changed. He loved it, still, for the way it filled space around him with electrified warmth. He could listen, of course, but he didn’t hear it like he had on the road when it seemed like he could step inside the music and watch the world as if through a window in a song. On the road, he’d felt like he could grab hold of the sound, like it was made of physical components. At 6329 he always had music playing. But he didn’t really listen because he really didn’t hear it any more than a fish feels the water that surrounds. Maybe what Shame had begun to do with music had more in common with breathing than it did with listening. Or maybe more with drowning.

  When Shame sat at the piano and touched the keys, he felt the notes made by the hammers before he heard them. It was as if the hammers were inside his body somehow. And he could feel the mechanism between the keys and hammers as if they were joined to his tendons and muscles. He began to suspect that the piano listened to the recorded music he played more than he did. Even if he couldn’t play anything, he began to hear music when he played the piano much more than when he listened to recordings. He didn’t hear what he played. It was coming from somewhere else. So he decided to leave music playing for the piano to listen to when he was out of the apartment. He turned it off when he came back. Then he’d play the keys and listen to what appeared in the distance. Because he did all of this, whatever it was, alone, Shame had no gauge for the intensity of what was happening to him.

  There were the recurring dreams of being trapped in narrow alleys by collapsed buildings. His hands buried in brick, he tried to cut them off at the wrist but couldn’t cut through thick piano wires in his arms. The dream of showing up to work with keys instead of hands, pedals instead of feet. As he’d learn later, he could hear music performed live as well. But for six solid months, other than work, sleep, and log two hours a few evenings a week standing on the bank or wading ankle deep into conversations at Earlie’s Café, Shame had done nothing in his house but listen to what happened elsewhere as the living tendons of that old piano moved the hammers in his body.

  During the first months, a few of the people he’d talked to at Earlie’s had worked their way up to inviting themselves to his place. They were all women. By then he had come up with the afternoon-chef job with the kids and so he’d clean up from the first shift—more on that to come—in the kitchen and cook dinner for the visitors from Earlie’s.

  He kept it cool. He’d play the guests music that he couldn’t hear anymore on the stereo. Visitors were more interested in the glowing tubes of the amplifier than any music that happened to be playing. In contrast to the dice-roll of kids he’d host on the first shift, he enjoyed the adult company, the presence of a fully grown body in the room with him. Human stillness. He wasn’t studying anymore. He didn’t know what he was doing. It felt like he was skating. What he was skating on and what was below that, he didn’t know. People were there but it felt to him like no one really came to visit. No one stayed the night. And no one ever came twice which, at the time, was a good thing.

  No one, that is, except Colleen, who turned out to be a very crucial presence, a real person and a friend. After a half dozen of these other dinner visits, he figured out what they felt like. He and his guest were ventriloquists’ dummies. They talked but in ways that, somehow, weren’t theirs to say. For years after I was dead, Shame hadn’t talked to anyone effectively. The ventriloquist thing with those first visitors didn’t bother him too much. He didn’t mind the feeling. But he didn’t recognize it and he didn’t trust it. Everyone was still cool at Earlie’s as far as he could tell, but none ever mentioned coming back to 6329. The closest he’d come to his visitors, in fact, was when he’d fall on his bed and watch them leave out the front. He’d watch them warp down the street as the scene poured up through the clear glass bricks in his bedroom wall. That was enough for a while.

  ■

  He knew it was ridiculous. But he thought of the spider as his first overnight guest since he’d quit traveling full time with the construction crew. He’d had no overnight guests on the road, either, only music. If there was sex, that usually took place in the company-owned Ford F-250 he drove. He looked. There were no webs in the room. The boards in the floor were warped enough to allow easy transit to untold worlds of tiny, flexible beings like spiders. Not roaches. He’d caulked and puttied and steel-wooled and foamed those openings. He’d spent enough years on the road in efficiency motel rooms where he had to stomp his feet on the way to the bathroom at night and shake the cereal box before pouring it into the bowl in the morning. He wasn’t going back to that. He’d rather go back to planet college. Well, OK, maybe not that. If the spider wanted to come from out of the old elevator shaft through whatever crack she found and slip up next to him in the night, as long as she left nothing more than one of these small hickey-like bites or so per week, he could live with it. With her. Again, he knew this was strange, which, he told himself, was half the battle.

  So he made a quiet deal with his silent roommate. As long as she could slip in and out of bed with him and he didn’t wake up and she was gone by morning, she was more than welcome. It was a pact with silence and a truce with its consequences, a kind of embroidery of fear and, maybe, an experiment with trust.

  The bites traveled up his body. Another appeared on the inside of his upper arm. This one was the same as the others. A marble on days one and two that diffused into a poison reef and atoll by the end of the week. The barrier faded and went away by day seven. The spider’s visits made him notice spiders. He read that, in fact, westerners in temperate climates are never more than five feet from a spider. He made a small series of transactions with his roommate during the first six months he lived at 6329, apartment 3B. Spiders aren’t silent, they’re silence. During the years working on the road, he’d come to understand himself as a repository of silence in a mad-loud world. The hemorrhaged world bled noise. He didn’t participate. Less and less. On some jobs he ran a diamond-blade brick saw, cutting very dense, ceramic brick. A small hose sprayed water on the blade. This meant
specialized cuts, expensive brick, no mistakes, and a diamond blade spinning at 4500 rpm an inch from his right thumb.

  The blare from the blade was beyond deafening. Earplugs did nothing. The sound waved its way past skin and flesh directly into the bones. It rode the marrow, bypassed the ears, and opened into the mass of the skull. Floating in an amplifier, his brain itself translated the vibrations into sound. In fact, he’d come to believe that, like water, bone marrow transmitted sound better than air and so he had given up on the earplugs altogether. But it wasn’t just the saw. It was the world gone agog on blather. The saw was, however, good training for this world. He’d imagine that he was a set of inverted waves that canceled out the noise of the saw. Same amid conversations and in front of all manner of media. TVs had proliferated in public spaces. When he’d stopped watching altogether, it became obvious to him that TVs watch people, not the other way around. And he could see clearly that TV had turned many people into things that didn’t need to be watched. In fact, TVs worked much like spider webs. Those caught ended up like the dried husks of bugs one finds in a web. It was only a matter of time before the screens had sucked all the juice from people’s homes and would then need to reduce their size and find a way to follow people out into the world and into every waking moment. At that point the only unwatched piece of life would be sleep; Shame doubted that wall would hold. Screens would be invented that could watch people in their dreams too.

  Noise and him. That’s where the name “Shame Luther” came from. He invented it on the road. It was a name for Allen Sardonovic’s pose in a guerilla war against noise. Actually, it was more a psychological operation than a guerilla war, but either way. Shame Luther began life as a psyop. He thought of himself as fighting a battle behind the lines of his own brain. Denied territory. In ways he didn’t understand, it was also a desperate attempt to not let a terrible grief turn into despair. Following an intuition covered by impenetrable waves of pain, he named the silent border between grief and despair Shame, which strikes me as accurate enough. It was a way to survive, which, I can tell you, doesn’t exactly mean it was a way to live. But he did survive.

  So the first transaction was the silence. Shame decided to leave little Ms. Nasty the spider in charge of a few tiny points of silence in the room. He could immediately feel the decline in his responsibility. He was shocked that those tiny points of silence could make such a difference in the battle against massive and pervasive sounds. The conflict was asymmetrical. He thought it must be like the difference between duration of a dream in dreamworld and its span in minutes on the clock. Maybe silence is a volume. He imagined a bucket full of silence would be as heavy as the matter that physicists described at the core of collapsed stars. Maybe heavier. He wondered if there was five gallons’ worth of silence in the universe. Or maybe it was infinitely collapsible. Could you fill something with silence? If it worked in his room, in the alcove of the converted elevator shaft, then he’d deputize other spiders in the operation. If it was, indeed, true that we’re never more than five feet from a spider, Shame reasoned, there was always at least a tiny teaspoon (which seemed to mean a trainload) of pure silence nearby. It was available if we’d only use it, not run from it or hide away in it. And not scream, flinch, and kill it, he thought. He decided to try.

  If he lost faith in transaction number one for a moment, he’d sit and concentrate and attempt to come up with one way that a spider could make a sound, not cause one, mind you, make one. Jungles and deserts maybe. Spiders the size of rodents. He’d read about a spider in the suburbs of Bangalore who’d been caught killing chickens. OK, even though he’d no evidence that they’d made (rather than caused) any actual sounds, he left them out of it. But these city spiders in Chicago, they check out every time. So, they could take the pressure off Shame at the silent border and allow him to focus on a few sounds of his own.

  The second transaction was an accident. Shame had noticed the similarity between the view through the glass blocks in his bedroom wall and the way his convex personality slid through the world. Who knew how much trouble it had spared him? Who knew how much despair? A little shame was a small price. Still, he didn’t consider it an end in itself. After the first few of Ms. Nasty’s visits, he decided not to spray the ointment on the bite. He traced the itch; he knew it was the action of the poison tempting him to scratch and help it along. He didn’t. He attended passively as the sensations moved outward from the center, circled clockwise down the dome of the wound. As the dome dissipated, he found less traffic and a slower, deeper itching sensation. Once in a while, just to check, he drew two fingers across the wound on either side of the center and the itch would flame, the clockwise pattern appear. He’d count his pulse and allow it to go away. After five days, the dome was gone and the convex patterns in and around the wound would ease away altogether.

  Beginning the day after each of Ms. Nasty’s night visits, Shame matched his slippery self to the pulse and static that crossed between his skin and the wound. “The world and the wound,” he thought. He found he could put up with people at Earlie’s, for instance, to the tune of his dissipating spider bites. After a while at it, by day two or three, he found he could actually enjoy a person’s company. He could actually talk to someone without having to watch from above in horror at the same time. He didn’t know how it would play out, but that’s the way it went. He followed along the border between grief and despair. He began to suspect that despair wasn’t the only possibility beyond grief. And, by degrees, Shame became just a name and not a way to be in the world.

  The final transaction was a simple matter of scale. Shame decided to imagine it from her perspective. A cold, intricate structure in a revolving abyss of space. Sunlight from the cracks in the roof travel the abandoned shaft under the floor. She catches light on her invisible legs. If he looked he wouldn’t see her legs at all. He’d see blackness and points of light where the sunlight collects at her joints. He’d never see her in the dark, a constellation of elegant needle-tip joints. Think of a hollow tube that’s too thin to see. Think of the tiny transit such a tube is designed to convey. Think of a being who strings up a vast nervous system outside of herself. A silken, spinal world hitched to cracked brick and rusted springs. Listen to that for a while.

  Her silence is held open by the limitless, asymmetrical power of accuracy. Architect of silent wounds, she’ll commit no scar in sound. This fact requires no withholding. She’s here to make poise a verb. Because nothing is withheld, because there’s only nothing to withhold, it’s not a pose. If there was something to withhold, to hold back, that silence—like most—would curdle and spoil; it would become a vanity, a simple disguise. But accuracy is never vanity. Real pride was never false. That’s why the webs are beautiful. Ms. Nasty in her spinal net. She poises there a leg for each major cable in the web. Webs aren’t discarded when torn. Most spider webs are never torn. They’re discarded when they dry. A note in the spine runs fluid in the weave. She designed poise, an invisible system of fluid. Poise the verb: to take a position where you are; and as a noun: a way to know where that is, a method. And, at a rhythm, when the arc of light leaves the shaft she migrates through an eye in the floor. Climbs whatever post or wall and, via another, single, fluid cord of spine, she descends.

  ■

  She descends to me. By our bargain with each other, I feel nothing. She’s a fact in this silent dimension of poise. If I hear her there’s nothing. And she walks me, along me at the yawn of shade and shadow between my skin and the folds of cloth. For her, I’m a living landmass, a geography. An unbound cloud of violent rhythm, a source of gravity across which she strings her fluid spine that she leaves weekly to make the migration to the source of sound and dream and back through the open eye in the sleeping floor. Even asleep, my body thunders under her touch. There are spiders who attach bulbs of air to risk transit to their underwater sources. She carries only the cold, quiet of her lightness, which is mostly made of darkness. For her, even small feathe
rs from the pillow are cruel iron blades. Dust a roaring machine. She knows I’m asleep beneath dreams by the even rhythms of all the pulses in the bed. At bottom, if it comes to that, she knows all she has to do to disappear is be herself.

  From there we can see that the noun form of the verb “to poise” is: poison.

  ■

  When Shame Luther thought of Ms. Nasty in this way, he almost craved her. No matter how close, he was able, in her silent, poisoned company, to flatten out his own web of cravings a bit. Undulations remained, always, of course. There were no level fields or clean slates. But with her, in the rhythm of her visits and the patterned traffic of her poison, he began to rebuild his senses around a sixth sense: a structure of proportions between sound and silence, grief and despair, need and want in the world. Shame built a conscious sense of how to poise himself. The poison in him had become an island of “want and don’t need” surrounded by oceans, abandoned webs of “want and can’t have.” His skin became a reef between the two—self the surf at the reef. Shame.

  After my death, what Shame never knew was that everything he did and didn’t do was a move within an unbounded circumference of grief; there’s no word for the surface area of a sphere. Grief says it’s unbounded because there’s no word for the boundary; but it isn’t. The skin of grief is a membrane with no pattern. It’s hard to get a grip on the surface inside the sphere of grief. Ms. Nasty had, in effect, given Shame a way to grieve, to attach himself to the smooth, inside skin of the space. If he could grow from that point, he might learn enough to want something else. He might use the surf of himself to impel another seeking. The hammer hits everyone. After it hits many people, all they ever want is to awake and die quickly every day before they open their eyes.