Soliloquy for Pan

by Beech, Mark

  She still hears bees buzzing and cars swishing by on the main road, the occasional rumble of a truck. The air is full of a rich odour that makes her dizzy. She follows the scent, and the buzzing grows louder as she comes near the heavy purple blossoms hanging in grape-like clusters from vines along the fence.

  She now knows these flowers are called wisteria. A word like wistful, the way she felt when she wanted things she didn’t even know about.

  But their blossoms are bold and luxuriant, the scent purple and secret, promising intoxication.

  Looking at them and smelling them calms her. School is crap, but she can always come here, to a place that is hers. She’ll find a good long stick later... somewhere.

  Then a loud splash form the pool makes her jump. A smaller splash follows it. Whafs that? An animal? Or what?

  She is suddenly afraid, alone near the ruined pool. Her heart beats, the very blossoms in front of her seem to smirk and poke their yellow stamen tongues at her.

  She rushes out of the hidden grove, looking away from the brackish pond at the deep end as she closes the gate behind her.

  “Can you stay in the moment between dark and light, wakefulness and dreaming? Then you can enter my world. And when you dance and sing with me, I can enter yours.”

  That’s what the lady in the yard said to Suzy, back in the Bronx.

  It’s only now she can even remember those words, or understand what they could mean. Sort of.

  When Suzy saw her, she was just a kid, the winter after president Kennedy got shot.

  Total dufus that she was, she’d managed to impale her wrist on the high fence in back of their apartment building.

  She’d been after a stray parakeet, trying to tempt the bird to eat from her hand. It was perched in a tree in the yard next to hers. Her building’s yard was all concrete, but next door had a real house with a garden and a tree that flowered with white blossoms in the spring.

  The snow was coming down fast. It had been too crowded and hot in the apartment, so she asked if she could go out and play in the snow. Fine, as long as she stayed in the yard where the caretakers, Alice and Don, could watch from their window. They often kept an eye on her in the yard and invited her in for cookies later.

  When she arrived in the yard, Suzy looked in their window. Then she remembered they were visiting their grandchildren in Bridgeport for Christmas.

  When she looked away from the window, she saw a green and blue parakeet sitting in the tree among a bunch of sparrows. Its colours made a bright spot against the cold white of the snow, the grey of the concrete and the black lace of the branches.

  A bird like that would die out in the snow. But didn’t she have a little bag of nuts in her coat pocket? She could lure the parakeet, then take it home where it will be warm and she could look after it. She would call the bird Jackie, after the dead president’s glamorous wife.

  She got up on Don’s stepladder, but slipped while she was reaching over the fence. Her arm and then her wrist got stuck on top of the fence between her building and the house next door. The blood splashing the snow made her think of a slush cone, ground ice with raspberry syrup.

  She let out a yell, but no one came, she just hung there and then maybe she fell, but she doesn’t remember that. The cold made her numb, so she stopped feeling the cut.

  Her thoughts were ticking over in circles like a tumble dryer at a laundromat, getting slower and slower too, blown by a cold wind rather than hot air. But she began to feel warm, as if the sun was shining down on her through the swirling snow.

  The snow turned brighter as the sky grew dark. It carried shades of blue and green and deep pink in hollows within the white. The stars winked on like the Christmas lights in the windows, guiding her through the spiralling flakes.

  Was she asleep? Was she awake?

  Nowadays Suzy walks around half-asleep most of the time, but she’s sure that’s not the kind of moment the lady in the yard spoke about.

  When they moved into the house in New Jersey, Suzy asked for the room in the basement, though it had been a tiny storage room. But she liked how it was away from it all.

  Now she can stay up all night listening to her favourite radio shows. Her real life and learning takes place at night when she draws the covers around her, listening to dispatches from a world beyond New Jersey.

  “We are deep into the night,” Alison Steele would say at the start of her show on WNEW-FM.

  “From this point on all sense of time ceases to exist. Only space and the sensory, that which we feel and experience becomes the manifestation of all the cosmic waves of the universe... We are in space. We are above and beyond. The flutter of wings, the shadow across the moon, the sounds of the night, as the Nigh third spreads her wings and soars, above the earth, into another level of comprehension...

  “Come fly with me, Alison Steele, the Nightbird.”

  Sometimes she giggles at the Nigh third’s patter. But she also loves to hover on the edge of sleep, wrapped in the intimacy of Alison’s voice as she introduces a track by the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band. It invokes a world just beyond her sights, a secret world she enters because she is the only one awake in the house.

  Sometimes she turns the dial to 99.5, and listens to Bob Fass on WBAI. His music is often rough and rowdy, with bands like the Fugs, Country Joe and the Fish and David Peel’s Lower East Side. And sometimes Bob plays quiet and doodly stuff, like The Incredible String Band.

  Then there’s music she doesn’t have any names for, because she never writes down who made the songs when she’s not quite awake. Even when she falls asleep, she wakes with notes in her ears and the mystery of who made them.

  “All sense of time censes to exist...”

  And when that happens, Suzy can hear what the lady in the yard used to play. Sometimes she smells her musk and hears her laugh, though she doesn’t remember her laughing much in the yard.

  The lady’s laugh makes her shiver with a feeling that she’s not in on the joke.

  When Suzy first saw the lady in the yard, she was only six. Not everything is clear, not even now since she’s remembered more. She yelled, she cried, then she quieted down and her mind went away. She was drifting through the layers of the sky and earth. Perhaps the last layer was sleep, and she stayed suspended above it.

  The music of pipes surrounded her, with notes that danced and tinted the snow. They drew together and moved in and out as if the air itself breathed... and a woman stood there playing an instrument that was more than a flute, but a bunch of flutes bundled together.

  The cold didn’t bother the woman, though she didn’t wear many clothes. She had wings, but she was no angel. Not all her skin was bare... she had feathers, or perhaps it was fur. The feathers on her wings were green and blue, like the parakeet that Suzy had tried to tempt into the warmth of her hand.

  The woman came closer. Suzy caught a whiff of earth, though the real earth was frozen and covered with snow. Suzy imagined a fountain covered with moss, a green layer drifting on the water. She’d seen one like that in the park.

  The woman in the yard had wide-set brown eyes, a snub nose, and thick eyebrows that met in a line above her eyes. Her brown hair hung to her chin. She wasn’t pretty. She might even be ugly. But Suzy wanted to keep looking at her.

  The woman put her face right up against Suzy’s. The odour was stronger, but Suzy was getting used to it. The woman’s eyes were brown, with flecks of green and an overcastting of dark blue. A friend’s dog had eyes like that. Looking too much at those doggy eyes used to make her nervous, even when the dog licked her and wagged its tail.

  The woman gathered Suzy in her arms. Waves of heat came off the woman’s skin, and with each whirl some of that warmth seeped into Suzy. Suzy laughed, though the sudden warmth came close to pain. But Suzy knew she’d be fine. She put her arms around her new friend. It was easy to do that now that the woman no longer had wings.

  Then the woman put Suzy down and began playing her music again. Suzy
watched her hands on the valves of the instrument. They moved fast and fluid, as if they had no joints. Then her fingers turned sharp to add a rat-tat-tat sound. The music they created made thoughts buzz about in Suzy’s head.

  The lady danced again and Suzy looked down. Under her feet, the snow began to melt. As her feet skipped over the pavement, the concrete broke beneath them. Sturdy shoots pushed through the cracks, and pale green flower buds unfurled to reveal berries of a deeper green.

  A sad note entered the music, weaving between the snow flakes to cast a cool blue and purple light on them. It made Suzy imagine the parakeet lost in the grey and white of New York City.

  Then the woman stopped playing. She put a hand to her chest, as if she was about to say the Pledge of Allegiance. But instead, she was holding it under a breast.

  There was a noise... of footsteps in the snow? Someone coming to stop the music and dance? The lady licked her lips with a red tongue. It was the colour you find inside people, the colour of a cut, and the blood that had mixed with the snow.

  And then Suzy woke up in a hospital. Her mother and father were sitting by her bed. She turned her head and saw her right arm, tightly bandaged from the wrist to the elbow.

  Her brother Danny was there too, but he was more interested in his comic book.

  “What are we going to do with you, Suzy?” Her mother was wiping her eyes, the way she often did when Suzy did something she wasn’t supposed to do.

  “You’re in trouble,” said Danny.

  However, she’d been ‘lucky’. The cold had slowed down the bleeding so she only needed some stitches. But later, the skin on two little toes itched and peeled, and then swelled and bubbled up in black blisters.

  Frostbite, they called it. It involved more visits to doctors and hospitals. Thank goodness for Daddy’s health plan. That was one of the few good things about working for the government, she heard them saying.

  Finally, they brought Suzy in for surgery and didn’t even tell her what would happen. Voila! Two toes gone. So much for those last little piggies, then.

  For months she felt like those toes were still there, itching at night.

  When she went to the park in the summer, she’d want to take her shoes off and walk in the grass with the other children. She felt the grass and earth between her toes, even between the ones that were gone.

  When she was little, the sight was greeted with curiosity. Later, exclamations of disgust. She stopped taking her shoes off near other people, but she can’t avoid that now with phys ed. She tries to be discreet but they found her out.

  When she first lost her toes, she stumbled without that bit of leverage. Now she has no trouble. When she’s alone in the pool, she can do anything and not worry what people think. It’s also a great place to practise her flute in the summer. Even in the winter, she’ll play a little before her fingers get too cold.

  She had to give up the music lessons at school because she didn’t want to play in the marching band at football games. She hated that brassy bland music. And who gives a shit about football, even if her brother is on the team? All the more reason to ignore it. She just plays on her own now, with occasional sessions with Bernie the sax player from Hackensack when he deigns to meet her in Morristown, the only place her local bus will take her.

  The first time she played her flute in the pool, it was a revelation. The walls of the almost-empty pool gave the music a loud and hollow sound that gave her pleasurable shivers of recognition.

  The next time she went to the pool, she took her new reel-to-reel portable tape recorder. She recorded herself and listened for the echo, the sound of an emptiness that she had to fill. She got up and hopped around on one leg, pretending to be the Jethro Full flute-playing guy. She balanced on the foot with the missing toes, just to make sure she could do it.

  Then she played along with her recording, devising a counterpoint. The lady in the yard played a special instrument, which included seven pipes. Suzy had nothing of the sort, but she tried to get a seven-fold sound from playing against herself.

  That was when she decided she wanted to become a recording engineer. When she told the guidance counsellor at school, he pursed his lips and said she had to get better at math if she wanted to become any kind of engineer.

  Suzy stayed inside while she recovered from her foot operation. She drew in colouring books and watched TV. She loved films of Broadway musicals, especially Peter Pan. This wasn’t the Walt Disney version, which she hated.

  Suzy imagined Peter Pan flying between places that you see and places that might not exist. She wished she could do that, and sometimes she did in her dreams.

  Suzy asked her parents if Peter Pan could be a real boy.

  “No, of course not. He’s make-believe. A man called JM Barrie made him up.” Suzy’s father explained. “But I think he’s based on a Greek myth. He prances around and plays the flute, like the Greek god Pan.”

  “And Suzy, it’s a lady called Mary Martin who plays Peter Pan,” added Suzy’s mother. “So Peter’s not a boy at all.”

  And to Suzy, that made a lot of sense.

  Suzy’s mind always wandered in school. She preferred watching the birds in the tree outside the classroom window to reading stories about kids with blonde hair that are always smiling with big white teeth.

  She was ten when her family moved to New Jersey. She didn’t do much better in the new school, though New Jersey seemed OK in the beginning. It was closer to where her father worked, so he didn’t come home so tired. There were fields to roam around in, apple trees in the back of their house.

  Then she started school. In the Bronx, all the kids just played together. But here the children divided into groups, and none of those groups let Suzy in. Some made fun of her New York accent, though it was no accent at all, just the way she talked.

  The teachers didn’t like her either, though she tried to be good. She just said the wrong things and asked the wrong questions. And the books they read here didn’t interest her either.

  Then a new school librarian actually asked the kids what they wanted to read. Suzy asked for a book about Greek myths, because she always wanted to find out about the flute-playing god that Peter was based on. The librarian gave her Bullfinch’s Mythology to try, though it wasn’t really a children’s book.

  Perhaps those earlier lessons had gone in one ear, out the other. But something must have lodged in there, waiting to come out. When she read about Greek myths, she found that one letter led to the other, forming a word. The words formed pictures in her mind, then a whole movie. She was able to smell the air of a Greek mountaintop, feel Neptune’s sea lapping at her feet.

  She enjoyed these stories much more than the Jewish and Christian ones. This wasn’t just about some old guy with a beard or white-robed jerks strumming on harps. Some of these gods were even women.

  Within the pages of Bullfinch she finally met Pan. He was the god of flocks and shepherds, which you don’t find in the Bronx or in New Jersey.

  Pan is a god who loves late-night revelries, and welcomes the dawn. Then he sleeps, and gets angry at anyone who disturbs him when he is resting in the day. That’s kind of like Suzy, except she listens to the radio instead of cavorting with nymphs.

  One nymph refused Pan’s attentions and turned into a bunch of reeds. Pan blew on the reeds and a sad song came out. So he made these reeds into a musical instrument. A syrinx, similar to what the lady in the yard played.

  Mr Bullfinch quoted a poem by Keats: “How he did weep to find nought but a lovely sighing of the wind, along the reedy stream; a half-heard strain, full of sweet desolation, balmy pain.”

  She found another book on mythology, which had illustrations. The syrinx here was a lot more basic than the one played by the lady in the yard, but she supposed even deities had to adapt. There were drawings and sculptures of Pan, which she didn’t find attractive. Perhaps his syrinx expressed the nymph’s anger at getting chased by some hairy guy.

  So where w
as the lithe leaping boy? Or the woman who could become a boy?

  Suzy later asked the librarian if Pan was ever a woman.

  The librarian told Suzy that such female deities have appeared in Roman art and in murals found under the lava in Pompeii. Here she lowered her voice.

  “But I’m afraid those murals are for adults, not children. You won’t find them in any books here.”

  So Pan could be a woman.

  But Pan is just a myth, which is similar to a fairy tale.

  Sometimes Suzy doubts that the woman in the yard had been real, only a hallucination spawned by her unformed hypothermic brain. But why did she live? The lady’s embrace had brought warmth. Just as it raised the plants beneath the sidewalk, it kept a girl from freezing, though it didn’t reach all her toes.

  When Suzy went into the yard afterwards, she did find those cracks in the concrete. Of course, the actual plants that grew in them would have died in the cold after the lady left.

  If Suzy closes her eyes and remembers as she plays the flute, with the help of a toke or two, she can almost find the tune played by the lady in the yard. It came from a place where lost creatures fly... out of place, out of time. She still felt that way now, though the dimensions have changed.

  Dimensions. That word stays in her mind, a smooth pebble she could hold in her palm.

  She tries to find that common note. A sequence of notes over and over, and then stronger.

  The followers of Pan worshipped him in groves and grottos. Her place in the abandoned swimming pool is as grotto-like as it gets.

  But she has never worshipped the lady in the yard. She just wants to meet her again and talk to her. Is that so much to ask?

  Suzy’s parents were happy that her reading had improved and she was moving out of the ‘slow’ track. So they agreed to take her to the big county library and pick her up when she finished.

  As she walked through the library, she felt like a new person. No one told her where to go and what to do. She could look at what she wanted, read what she wanted.