The Keyhole Opera

by Bruce Holland Rogers

  “Well,” said the dead boy, “in the town where I was born, there was a widow. Maybe she was your wife. I knew a boy whose mother had died, and an old woman who might have been your sister.”

  “Are you going back?”

  “Of course not,” said another dead person. “No one ever goes back.”

  “I think I might,” the dead boy said. He explained about his flying. “When next the wind blows…”

  “The wind never blows here,” said a man so newly dead that he remembered wind.

  “Then you could run with my string.”

  “Would that work?”

  “Take a message to my husband!” said a dead woman.

  “Tell my wife that I miss her!” said a dead man.

  “Let my sister know I haven’t forgotten her!”

  “Say to my lover that I love him still!”

  They gave him their messages, not knowing whether or not their loved ones were themselves long dead. Indeed, dead lovers might well be standing next to one another in the land of the dead, giving messages for each other to the dead boy. Still, he memorized them all. Then the dead put the stick back inside his shirt sleeves, tied everything in place, and unwound his string. Running as fast as their leathery legs could manage, they pulled the dead boy back into the sky, let go of the string, and watched with their dead eyes as he glided away.

  He glided a long time over the gray stillness of death until at last a puff of wind blew him higher, until a breath of wind took him higher still, until a gust of wind carried him up above the grayness to where he could see the moon and the stars. Below he saw moonlight reflected in the ocean. In the distance rose mountain peaks. The dead boy came to earth in a little village. He knew no one here, but he went to the first house he came to and rapped on the bedroom shutters. To the woman who answered, he said, “A message from the land of the dead,” and gave her one of the messages. The woman wept, and gave him a message in return.

  House by house, he delivered the messages. House by house, he collected messages for the dead. In the morning, he found some boys to fly him, to give him back to the wind’s mercy so he could carry these new messages back to the land of the dead.

  So it has been ever since. On any night, head full of messages, he may rap upon any window to remind someone—to remind you, perhaps—of love that outlives memory, of love that needs no names.

  V. Symmetrinas

  Something Like the Sound of the Wind in Trees

  1. White noise

  I’m not sure. Maybe it was the sound of sand hissing against the windowpane. Maybe it was tires on a wet road. Maybe it was the sound of paper tearing. Maybe it was the sound of water almost boiling. It might have been a distant river or the sound you hear in a seashell or a jar: the sound of space contained.

  2. When the Phone Rings at Three in the Morning

  You wake up with your heart hammering away, but your jaw and tongue are still numb with sleep. You say hello, but there’s nothing there. Well, there’s something. There’s the hiss of the wires. You say hello again. Hello? Hello? But with your tongue so sluggish, it’s coming out instead as hollow, hollow? That sound of an empty line, the hiss and buzz and occasional crackle, is more empty than silence would be. More absent. You fumble the receiver into its cradle, and a moment later, the phone rings again. Still, no one. Very insistently, no one.

  3. The Ovation Lasted a Long Time

  After the second encore, the musicians had left the stage, returned, gone away again, returned, and exited for the last time. But the applause did not die down. Finally, one by one, the members of the audience grew tired of clapping and stood to leave, but the sound of the ovation still hung in the air. Even when the last person had left the auditorium, the sound persisted like the rush of a waterfall. It remained when the building manager went home, it had not diminished when he unlocked the place in the morning, and it was still there even when another ensemble arrived that afternoon to rehearse. Perhaps, the building manager told these musicians hopefully, the sound would die down by the time of their performance. But it did not. Their music sounded thin and gauzy through the echo of the previous night’s applause. Many in the audience demanded their money back. When the manager cancelled the next two performances and hired a team of acoustical engineers, they installed foam-rubber baffles and hung strips of carpet from the walls. These measures seemed to dull the enthusiasm of the applause somewhat, but they could not erase or absorb the sound completely. The place was now useless as an auditorium. The season was canceled, the front doors boarded up. For a time the building was vacant. Finally, the owners converted it into a warehouse. The fork-lift operators complained about the relentless ovation as well as the sloping floors, and they frequently went on strike. Even so, storing dry goods made more money for the owners than the music ever had.

  4. Caribbean

  In the parking garage, April fell asleep in her car, dreaming of islands with white beaches. Her engine ran. Carbon monoxide crept around the door cracks, slithered in through the ventilation. She kept sleeping. The gas was colorless and bland. It had no sound of its own, but it borrowed the sound of the ventilation fans, the sound of the sleeper breathing. In her dream, April felt the sea breeze in her hair. Her arms and legs grew heavy with sunlight. The waves rushed ashore, one after another, turning to foam with a hush, hush, hush.

  5. She Wasn’t There When It Happened

  Sheila’s lover, Ben, died of a heart attack in the street in front of their apartment. It was the old coat he wore that killed him. When he slumped against the side of a parked car, no one would help him. They thought he was a bum.

  Sheila wasn’t there when it happened, but she could imagine how it must have been: Ben curling forward, his hand reaching out of the coat’s frayed sleeve, strangers shifting their gazes so that they could step around him without seeing him.

  She tried to get on with things at work. She sent Ben’s things to his family. In short, she held together.

  Once, passing the spot where Ben had died, she heard a sound like the whisper of leaves in the wind. But there weren’t any leaves.

  It’s nothing, she told herself. She went in, made dinner, and switched on the television. But in the morning, the sound was there again. She heard it on the street, in the subway, at work.

  She tried to ignore it. She tried to pretend that the louder and louder hiss didn’t exist, even though at work she had to ask people to repeat things.

  The next morning, in the subway car, the sound intensified until it was like strong wind in her ears. Sheila looked up and saw flecks of light dancing across the faces of the passengers. It was as though silver confetti were falling right in front of them, glittering. As she watched, the confetti fell faster and thicker until the faces of those around her were like television screens tuned to an empty channel. She stared.

  She missed her stop. She rode to the end of the line, where people suddenly had their faces back, and the sound fell off to a whisper. Because she didn’t know what else to do, she went to work, but she spent the day avoiding people.

  On the walk from the subway to her apartment that night, she came to the place on the sidewalk where Ben had died. The sound had stopped. There was no rustle or whisper or hiss. There were just the street sounds, shoes scraping the sidewalk around her, cars passing.

  Sheila was too tired to take another step. Her knees felt weak, and her eyes burned. A sound started out of her. Her shoulders shook.

  On either side, people shifted their gazes half a degree so that they could step around her without seeing her.

  6. Insomnia Cure

  When his parents fought, Walter would turn on the old record player in his room and drop the needle on the empty spot after the last song. P​s​s​h​h​h​h​h​h​h​h​h​h​h​h​h​h​h​-​p​o​p, it went. If he could still hear their voices, he would turn up the volume: P​S​S​H​H​H​H​H​H​H​H​H​H​H​H​H​H​H​-​P​O​P. P​S​S​H​H​H�
�H​H​H​H​H​H​H​H​H​H​H​H​-​P​O​P. Filling the room up with the absence of music.

  Thirty years later, after his own divorce, he keeps a record player in his room. Some nights, the absence of music at full volume is the only thing that will get him to sleep.

  7. The Ultimate Mood Maker

  In the new house, Jerry had trouble sleeping. As he stared at the dark ceiling, listening to Carla breathe, there were things that weighed on him: The job at the planner’s office that had once been his dream and was now drudgery. The mortgage, which meant—even with Carla’s income—that he needed to keep the job. Carla’s difficulty conceiving. What if they kept trying and she didn’t get pregnant? And what if she did? Worst of all was the thought of not getting enough sleep, of what it would do to him the next day. His fear of insomnia sometimes kept him awake all night.

  The recorded sailboat sounds were Carla’s idea. “The house is too quiet, that’s the problem.” She bought the recording from a mail-order company called The Ultimate Mood Maker. They specialized in recorded waterfalls, rivers, cornfields, and rain forests—she could have bought a whole library of restful sounds. But she bought just the sailboat.

  It worked wonderfully at first. With the stereophonic waves breaking on the bow, with the gentle purling of the wake astern, with the occasional luffing of the sails and the creaking of the mast, Jerry felt the whole house gently rocking him, carrying him away to a place where the job and the mortgage and his insomnia just didn’t matter.

  But after fifty minutes, the recording would end and Jerry would be wide awake, staring at the ceiling, wondering if maybe he should have chosen an adjustable interest rate. After a while, he’d get out of bed, start the recording again, return to bed, and drift off into another fifty minutes of sleep.

  Carla’s solution was to buy more copies of the recording and set the stereo for continuous play, and Jerry finally began to sleep through the night. In fact, he found the sound of the creaking decks and splashing waves so comforting that he began to leave the recording on all morning. On the days when he was the last to leave for work, he left it playing so that the sounds of the waves were the first thing he heard when he came home. Soon Carla, too, was leaving the sailboat sounds playing around the clock. With the sound always in the background, Jerry sometimes felt, even wide awake at the dinner table, that he could feel the house gently rocking.

  There were hints of the coming transformation, but they were too subtle to be alarming. When a crust of salt repeatedly formed on the front doorknob during the day, Jerry thought it was curious, but not inexplicable. After all, it was winter, and there was plenty of salt about on the roads and sidewalks. When the air inside the house began to smell distinctly of kelp, well, that was surely just a case of suggestion, Jerry reasoned. If you hear the sound of a sailboat all night long and for much of the day, you begin to imagine the smell of the sea, just as the feeling that the house gently rocked on the waves was an illusion.

  On the morning that Jerry opened the front door and saw; not his front walk, but blue waves stretching to the horizon, his feet had already started down a path that was no longer there. He stepped into the sea. The weight of his water-logged suit nearly pulled him under, but he managed to grab onto the rose trellis and pull himself back onto the front stoop.

  For a long time he sat there, dripping, looking out at the sun-flecked waves. He should be worried, he knew. There were many things now to worry about. But the sound of the waves lapping gently against the aluminum siding, the sound of the house creaking as it turned slowly in the current, these comforted him almost beyond belief.

  8. When You Let Your Head Slip Under the Water

  It’s been a tough day. Well, when was the last time you had a day that was easy? But for once you’re taking care of yourself. For once you’re up to your ears in hot bathwater, and you’ve taken the phone off the hook. You relax and let most of your head slip under the surface. The water has a sound to it, a warm, cottony, muffled sound. Eyes closed, you hear yourself breathing, but distantly. There are clicks and tappings in the building, things you don’t ordinarily hear. Life in the womb must have been like this. This is the sound you came from. You stay until the water grows cold, and when you open your eyes, your knees surprise you like islands sighted after a year at sea.

  9. White Noise

  I think it was the sound of my grandfather’s last breath amplified many times over. I think it was the sound of a gunshot played back at quarter speed. I think it was rain. I think it was the sound of swimmers dividing the water. I think it was the sound of wind in tall grass or the sound of a brush fire. It was the sound of three degrees Kelvin, the sound of snowfall, of ashes stirring, of smoke rising up on the cold air.

  Dead White Guys

  1. Fathers of Our Fathers

  We see their faces on our money, in textbooks. Washington and Hamilton. Jefferson and Adams. We read their words, but their words can never be the men themselves. So we light blood candles and burn gunpowder incense. We dance and chant over graves in Virginia and New York. “Fathers of our fathers,” we say, “come forth. It’s time to explain yourselves.” We knock on crypts in Massachusetts. “Ours is a different time. Come among us now and let us judge you as men of this world and these years.”

  The generals of the revolution stir. Architects of the constitution wake. They put on new bodies and come forth. “Now we’ll see who you really are,” we say. “Knowing you, we will know ourselves at last.”

  2. Famous For the Wrong Reason

  Who wants a write up in Sports Illustrated for a string of disappointments? The headline read, “Revere Comes Up Short Again.”

  But in this race you’ve been around the Atlanta oval almost five hundred times. Fuel tank dry, you’re coasting into the last laps at a mere 125 miles per hour. But you will cross the line.

  Coming out of a turn, thump, the car jolts. You spin into the wall.

  “Paul,” says your spotter’s radio voice, “you okay?”

  “I’m okay,” you say, checking to see if you are. “What happened?”

  “The number fourteen car hit you from the inside.”

  “I gave him room!”

  “You did, Paul. You gave him room.”

  So you’ve extended your record. Despite great qualifying times, you haven’t finished a race.

  3. It’s Who You Know

  A woman hobbled into the Shoe Palace and slammed two shoe boxes onto the counter in front of Horatio Gates. “I want to speak to the manager,” she said.

  Gates stood tall. “Madame, you have that pleasure.”

  “You’re the manager? The idiot who sold me these torture devices is the manager?”

  “If you’ve found the shoes unsatisfactory,” said Gates, “may I suggest that the flaw lies either in your feet or in your character. It could hardly be the shoes.”

  “They’re too small! And I told you they were too small.”

  Frowning, Gates rang the bell on the counter. His teenaged assistant emerged from the stockroom. “Yes, sir?” said the boy.

  “Kindly inform this person,” said Gates, gesturing at the woman, “of the nature of this store.”

  “Shoe Palace sells only the best,” the assistant recited.

  “They don’t fit!”

  “Do you know the ultimate shoe horn?” asked Gates. “The ultimate shoe horn is a positive mental attitude. And I fear, Madame, that you are lacking in that department.”

  “Shoes have to fit!”

  “And by force of will, they can be made to fit.”

  “How does a man who doesn’t know the first thing about shoes get a job selling them?”

  “He knows the owners,” said the assistant.

  “I would be qualified even if I did not.”

  “I want my money back!”

  Gates laughed pleasantly. “If we gave a refund to every customer who wanted one, we could scarcely stay in business! I suggest that you adopt a more optimistic v
iew.”

  4. Storm Chaser

  Kathy drove the van. Ben checked the doppler radar. They watched the sky.

  Twenty miles out, they could see what they had. Cumulonimbus clouds usually form towers. No towers rose at the edge of this storm. Instead, one enormous cauliflower blossomed from the center.

  “Now that,” said Ben Franklin, “is a supercell.”

  “I see it.” At first, Kathy hadn’t wanted to work with Ben. A grad student in his seventies? How serious could he be? But over the summer, he had mentioned things he had done, the English language newspaper in Moscow, the Amazon tourist boat, literacy campaigns in Detroit. He had hosted radio shows, written books.

  All summer, he worked hard.

  He wasn’t all work, though. He flirted. Almost every fifty-something waitress in eastern Oklahoma knew Ben by now. Some seemed to know him well.

  Drivers fleeing the storm flashed their lights. The sky closed.

  “Hurry!” Ben urged.

  Rain sheeted down. She had to slow. Then as suddenly as the rain had started, it let up. They could see.

  A weak tornado dangles like a dirty string; a strong one looks like a funnel. This monster came grinding over the earth like an anvil.

  Kathy stopped.

  “Closer!” Ben said.

  “Close enough!” She fought the wind to open her door. Ben joined her at the back of the van and helped her slide out the instrument package and lower it to the ground. “It’s turning!” Ben yelled. “Perfect! We’ll catch it right down the middle!” Kathy didn’t look to see if he was right until she was back in the driver’s seat, legs shaking.

  Ben whooped as the van shot forward. In five minutes, they were safe.

  “Shit!” Kathy pounded the wheel.

  “What?”

  “I’ve lived my whole life for that moment, and all I could think about was how scared I was!”