what was the time?
(He remembered it now—the clouded window to this world hung above his parents’ bed when he was a child: three Incas and their burro on a tortuous Andean trail, the vast sky above them turbulent, bruised. A rainbow like the lifted wing of an iridescent bird seen through the mist. A small tear in the sub-bleached print like an eye in the wall. A silent midnight under the rain-forest canopy. When he was very young he would lie the wrong way on the bed, staring into the faraway scene, far away in place and time... until he was in that world, until he went dizzy from the sensation of falling headlong off those Machu Picchu heights down into the steamy jungle miles and miles below. This unknown world within its gilt frame terrified yet thrilled him; it was his first mystery, his first secret. He had not thought of it in years, but the longing it had instilled in him for unattainable places remained strong. Maybe that was why he was here. “Rainy Season in the Tropics.” Now he was another traveler in the rainy season, and falling, fading forever into the green core of this earth, the Yucatan, into sleep, into fever.)
While he fell he could not help but think of things he would prefer not to hear, touch, or see again; neither could he keep from trying to match up the water-stains on the ceiling with the faces he had passed out there, though the stains were not like the white child carried in from the sea, nor the waxen Christ, the young girls before their windows and mirrors, the blunt Mayan faces of the fishermen, the hollow-mouthed mummies, nor the heavy-lipped and pock-marked face of the Creole; the stains matched none of those faces, and yet in them he saw something he knew better than any face, but could not name nor place who or what it was. The face was ultimately as impenetrable and intangible as that history he was until even yesterday trying to write of this place. Then again, perhaps nothing of this place was knowable; its history was impossible. Was there a face or was there not a face in that stain? What was the time? Why must he know? Only when you are falling asleep are these things important. The faces must fade, however, as does everything else, and after they had gone there was nothing left to think once again.
He had touched bottom. All mysteries were about to be revealed. He knew the secret of the dream of time. He had traveled nowhere but in time. And he would capture time on the page. He would write the forgotten history of this world. He would understand it all: the stain of blood, the stain of water. His open mouth was shut. The world ends here...
Then the traveler turned on his side, trying to find and re-enter the door of the dream he’d left very early that morning. (The look on her cold and silent face.) A dull fire was burning up his spine. (A slit like a bleeding mouth.) The flies thrummed against the window panes; a radio was playing in the lobby below, but the words were unintelligible—might as well be spinning the record backwards. In a foreign land the language you learn from a book fails you first. (Shining yet dark.) He buried his head between the pillows. Forget all the words. leave behind time. Find the door. (All will be revealed.) There must be a space between the rhythms around him, he thought, an opening—space for a door where sleep could slip in and fall into the rhythms of the world, as well. There has to be a space. (A scream ending the silence at last.) He opens his eyes, listening, breathless, searching between the slow drag of the radio music, the pulsing of flies on the panes, the flashing of the hotel’s neon sign, the useless ticking of his watch... and his blunted heartbeat, the rushing heartbeat of the surf off the coast of Quintana Roo.
from Impossible Musics
1. The Omniphonium
Author’s note:
Although the Telharmonium was an actual instrument, the first real electronic synthesizer, almost everything else in this story is not to be believed.
A Means To A Prologue
None of its several thousand investors, subscribers, machinists, engineers, researchers, tuners, publicists, or players, not even the whole of the American Telephone And Telegraph Company, could have guessed the true purpose of the famed Telharmonium: that it was invented to facilitate communion with the dead. Thaddeus Cahill had shared this secret with only two other people in the world—his brothers George and Arthur—and of these three, only Arthur was still alive in 1916. At that time the New England Electric Music Company was bankrupt, the new aesthetic science of “Telharmony” had fallen into disfavor, the mid-Manhattan building which housed the gargantuan instrument was up for sale, and the Telharmonium itself lay silent as all the lost tombs of Egypt.
George Cahill had been struck dead by lightning during a visit back home to Iowa three years before; a thunderstorm had caught him unaware while bicycling a country road near his parents’ disused farmhouse—perhaps he would not have been struck at all if he had been riding on rubber tires, but he had been testing a recent invention of his: “ever-last” steel rims. Similarly, Thaddeus had been electrocuted the very next year in his beloved Telharmonium Hall as he was connecting two power lines which had not been properly grounded. The final blow had come when a mob of angry New Yorkers, tired of having their conversations interrupted by the Telharmonium’s constant telephone-cable interference, broke into “Tel Hall” and proceeded to rip up pieces of the instrument, which were then ceremoniously heaved into the East River.
The sole remaining Cahill brother soon repaired the damages, but his spirit had been crushed. He did not even argue with his lawyers or financial backers when they unanimously agreed, literally as well as metaphorically, to pull the plug.
Never before had Arthur Cahill, now fifty years old, been so alone in this world; consequently, he labored without rest or nourishment to reinvent the Telharmonium and forget how he and his brothers had once shouted in joyful collaboration above the din of the dynamos, in such harmony with one another they seemed to be an entity with one mind and three bodies. Arthur would rise long before dawn, leave the brownstone he’d shared with George and Thaddeus at Spuyten Duyvil, fueled only by strong black pekoe, hop streetcars and subway trains with no notice of his fellow travelers, and would not return from his experiments in the laboratory upstairs at Tel Hall until long after midnight. Having no friends and barely acknowledging messengers and grocery boys, he seldom spoke to or exchanged more than a few words with anyone for weeks at a time; often he felt that in the midst of crowded Manhattan he was living in a city of ghosts.
Of the three brothers, he had been the only one to marry, and then his wife, a concert pianist who had been hired along with a half-dozen others to master the musical intricacies of the Telharmonium (it took two musicians and four hands to coax the simplest music from its bowels), had left him after scarcely a month. Nevertheless, she still sent him threatening letters through her attorney, claiming she had been “driven near-on to insanity” by the Sisyphean demands of the instrument and that “if she were a more religious woman, one might even say she had been possessed by the demon which lived in its electro-magnetic heart.” He had little money to assuage her since his brothers had died with vast debts unpaid, and the new instrument he was working on would cost him much, much more than the previous three incarnations of the Telharmonium put together. Sometimes her counsel, and more often, one of her uncles, would pound at the Cahill household at all hours, though Arthur was seldom there to negotiate the costs for yet another spa and another rest-cure. Even if this hadn’t been true, he realized that he must depart New York City if he was ever able to complete his brothers’ mission.
Eventually (once he had managed to borrow enough money from a former Electric Music Company backer) he had the silenced Telharmonium dismantled and shipped in thirteen boxcars to Mt. Vernon, Iowa, where the Cahill homestead was promptly revivified by Arthur and where, once he had sold off enough adjacent pasturage and woodlots, he bought an abandoned textile mill for a song (the only one like it in Iowa) in which to reassemble and augment his life’s work. The mill, made of goldenrod-yellow Iowa limestone, took up an entire block just above downtown Mt. Vernon, straddling a wide creek known as the Polecat River. (Don’t bother look
ing for either today.) The creek had long run dry, its waters diverted elsewhere. A fire in the last century had destroyed most of the mill’s interior, so Arthur was free to arrange its cavernous spaces however he liked. Although the Telharmonium had taken up the entire first floor and basement of Tel Hall (a former hotel), it seemed much smaller indeed within the mill, which was five stories high and loomed over town and country on the high clay banks of the creek like one of the ancient wonders of the world. Fitted with electric lamplight and soon clattering and clanking with a team of carpenters and machinists, and visited by the occasional physicist or music-theory professor from nearby Cornell College, the purpose of “Tel Mill,” as Arthur dubbed it, was never fully explained to anyone. “Just another money-making boondoggle,” was the closest he would come to the truth. By now he knew not to trumpet his discoveries in an age of often outlandish or inexplicable inventions. People had enough trouble understanding wireless radio or the cinema. God-fearing townsmen scratched their beards in perplexity when they looked out of their windows and up to
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