1.
He wakes early, waking his familiar pleasure. It's still dark. Hears
rain on the roof, an airplane, the cat's purr down along his shin. Her breathing.
The strong warm reach of her field. He lies listening to it. He sees the
underside of a bridge over a canal; a pair of headlights dazzle him suddenly
from the end of a cul de sac. He loves this travel. There's no way to tell
whether it's her gift or the gift of the way he feels her, his consent.
This is a moment when she is here.
The cat wanders away, he sees its shape appear in front of the fire,
the tip of its tail twitching at the sound of a sliter of coal down into
the embers. This afternoon he has a long session mixing for a band, tomorrow
a string trio. Schumann. Then the rest of the week is his own. Studio time
at the college. He thinks of his equations that will make an imaginary sound
travel the circuit of a much larger space than the room with speakers. The
centre of a swirling vapour, opalescent, around a point of white heat. And
something for her, points of light jumping into and out of a river the color
of clear glass. There is a way to have them move through a plane at the
level of the listener's solar plexus.
He's speeding now. He'll go to his desk. On the way he opens the fridge,
takes out milk and eggs, fetches flour, honey, bran, raisins, stirs up muffin
batter and lights the oven. Puts on a pair of jeans and lights a candle
on his desk. Turns on the computer. Mixes batter by the light of its screen.
Watches his equation draw a line of coloured sound. Fills it in. He's there
for an hour before he remembers the coffee. It's still dark. He puts the
muffins in the oven. Forty minutes. The smell will tell him when they're
done. Goes back to the screen. Takes down a notebook, looks something up.
Sits considering the page. It's the sketch of a shadow under a rail bridge
over a canal. He's imagining the sound of the white light bent into the
edges of riplets in that glassy black. Then he imagines the sound set into
a space the size and quality of his pleasure at the temperature of her body.
There is a way of texturing and sizing a silence and he knows something
about how to do it. He smells the muffins, gets them out of the oven, tips
them onto the counter.
She wakes. He sees from across the room a sudden reflection on the dark
glass at that end of the room, a gleam, her eye opening. It's morning. They
haven't gone into each other yet. He breaks four muffins onto a plate, cuts
butter onto them, carries them with coffee to her side of the bed. Touches
her arm where it's raised next to her cheek. Her eyes flicker. What were
you writing she asks. He tells her. While he does she rapidly eats two of
the muffins. Her eyes follow what he says. She doesn't comment or ask questions.
2.
David.
She is looking across the room through the dark to a silver rectangle
in the corner, the mirror he has set at an angle across the corner of his
desk to give him glimpses of the skylight. The loved day. It's snowing,
there's a pink glow from the sky down onto the soft pile growing along the
sill of the French window. They have been lying in silence listening to
the damped sound of the streets. What is it she wants to ask.
Has anything bad ever happened to you? She means that his self-possession
is so constant.
More than one he says.
How many?
Three.
Very bad?
Two were very bad one was mixed.
Tell me the mixed one.
I have a daughter. She is startled that she's never thought to ask.
Where is she?
I don't know.
How long is it since you've seen her?
She was four when I saw her last, she'd be eleven now.
Why did her mother do that to you?
I don't know.
Did you hurt her?
I tried not to.
Tell me.
Sal was lively and hungry. She was determined to have me and I didn't
see why she shouldn't except that something about it didn't work.
She crowded you?
Yes but she wouldn't have if I hadn't been so unhappy in bed.
You were unhappy in bed?
I'd lie next to her and my shin bones would buzz. It took me a long time
to understand, I thought there was something wrong with me.
What was it really?
She was lying. Small things and large things, all the time. She wanted
what she wanted.
But your daughter. Did she look like you.
I guess. She looked like my family.
3.
David Mac. A night when he's looking out over the city, standing at the
low brick wall around the sides of his rooftop.
David what is it?
Missing someone.
Who?
Someone I knew when I was at home. A woman who lived in the village and
died last year.
Was she old?
In her nineties.
What was her name.
Ann Davis.
Had she always been in the village?
No she must have been in her sixties when she bought a house there. I
remember her coming. I remember the first time I saw her. We had a little
library. She saw me sitting on the floor reading something. She said That
is a terrible book. I must have been nine or ten. I said Why is it terrible?
She said It's a lie and the person who wrote it knew it was a lie and wanted
it to be a lie. I thought I knew what she meant but I wanted to be sure.
I said Do you mean the way the mother is. She said yes and shot me a look.
I'll give you a better book, you come have tea with me. I went.
Did you like what she gave you?
I liked anything then, I don't think I liked it more than I liked other
books. But she told me to come again and I'd stop in at her house every
couple of weeks. When I was in high school, fourteen or so, I began to try
to fathom her. There was no end to what she knew and what she'd noticed.
She gave me a subscription to Musics. By then she was in her seventies
and she wasn't robust but she liked to walk. I'd walk with her for half
a Saturday sometimes, slowly.
Were you in love with her?
I was. I wouldn't have known it to say but I thought of her all the time,
she was the conversation I was having all the time until I left for uni.
Even then. I wrote her. She was always the first person I'd see when I went
home.
Did you take people to meet her?
There were women I knew better than to take to her. I did take Sal there
after Clare was born.
Did she say anything?
She was pleasant. At the end of the visit she took my hand - Sal and
Clare were in the truck - she just held it for a moment. She had never done
that. She had never touched me in that way, as if we were family. She was
sad for me. I felt she knew it all. She said Work. Work will bring you something
right. That was so direct tears jumped into my eyes. We stood holding hands
and smiling. Then I didn't get up to see her for a couple of years. The
worst years. I was mixing for people but I hadn't enough of myself to work
on anything of my own. She wrote me notes the whole time. She never asked
me to reply, just wrote notes in her usual way. Told me things she'd found
or read. Then finally Sal met someone. I sat around in a little room like
someone who has been dead for years. I didn't want Ann to see me that way.
I thought. But one day I got in the truck and drove through the night and
stood on her doorstep at seven in the morning. It was winter. I knew she'd
have been up before light. She looked at me. You're alright she said. Come
in and sleep. I slept on her couch for most of the day. She walked around
doing her household things. Talked to her cat. In the late afternoon I woke
up and sat again at my place in her kitchen. I didn't know whether to tell
her how it had been. She didn't ask. She asked about the studios I'd mixed
in. She talked about something she'd read in Xenaxis. She got me talking
about things I hadn't noticed myself noticing on the drive up. She said
why didn't I make supper - I'd often cooked with her when I was in high
school.
What did you make?
Scrambled eggs and toast. It was just for the sake of standing there
at her counter while she spoke.
After that I'd see her every couple of months. I knew she wouldn't last
forever and I had more and more to tell her. I was slowly beginning to get
into the grain stuff I'm doing now. I'd bring her recordings. Once I got
her to fly up for a concert. She came because she understood she couldn't
hear it without the set-up but she hated the scene so much that after that
I'd just bring full equipment when I went to see her. She was always my
best ear, I don't know how she did it, she was so cut-off from the community.
Do you have her on tape?
I do, my first presence piece was about her. I went on trying again.
There's a whole suite. That was where I worked out separating the silences
out of the voice and toning a space with them.
4.
He puts on his boots and trips down the stairs, a rhythm he plays with.
Is in the dark alley with his hands in his pockets walking and listening.
She read him a passage this morning, said listen to this voice, listen to
the way balances are distributed in it. He's thinking now about balances
distributed in electronic sound with the overlay of one texture by another.
He's looking at a sandstone paver with water standing in a film between
grains. A standing field of particles. Xenaxis. An open darkness with spits
or pings of sound like the sound of a spark, a tiny spark from your hand
to the cat's nose. Pay attention, what is it like to be.
He smells the river, an inflowing tide. Sparks. Distribute the sparks
and have them stretch a little sideways as though seen moving. A slight
rise in pitch indicates the motion. It's the great freedom of the open sky
at night. And in this night still feeling the sweet ache of his hard-on.
What he hadn't stopped to remember, the electronic fur spreading from
her hand shaped with such exactness to his upper arm, spreading from that
hand deep into his muscle, and then the precision of its stroke over the
shoulder bone. He wouldn't know how to name it if he didn't spend his time
constructing just such textures and gestures. He could transcribe her touch
directly into timed sound. He will try to memorize a sentence of it.
He turns. She's at the Y tonight. Will he call her? He has promised himself
he won't coerce what gives him so much by its freedom. But they meet at
the door.
Have you eaten?
No, have you?
I'll make pancakes.
Eggy crepes with cheese sauce. Quite a few. She sits on the stool while
he flips the pan with his long thin wrists she's following with her eyes.
He likes to cook with the lights off, by the blue flame of the gas stove
and a candle. Looking at him she feels her lips fattening, the skin around
her mouth prickling. They sit on the rug in front of the Pither with their
plates.
Put something on she says, something of yours I haven't heard.
He considers.
Wait 'til we're finished and I'll set up some more tracks.
5.
Sit here.
She's in the middle of the room in the dark. He's across from her in
the faint light of his screen. There are four speakers wired into the room
and he has placed 4 more.
She's in a black space of transparent planes. Vast. Tissues moving at
depths. Ethereal? No. Not ethereal at all, transparent but so strong, like
sheets of rock seen by a god with X-ray eyes.
A buzzing. A so beautiful buzzing, like nothing she's heard, like something
she could hear gladly on and on.
She's physically so present in that space that she's wanting to turn
her face to feel its air, cleft solar to throat with pain, axis pain, right
pain, glorious, turning her face in an occult north she wants never to leave.
She doesn't understand that movement but knows it is a tribute.
She's saying, where am I, beyond myself, aching with beauty and truth.
Then that stretched thread of the sound of a human instrument, like brass,
like a bagpipe, but an edge of a shred of the sound, drawn into a bright
line, human concentration vanished to a point on the horizon.
Somehow a place she could honor more because some human had built or
found it. In great pain, was it? The other kind of pain that is a joy.
6.
They'd met on a plane. She'd stolen his window seat.
She'd booked too late to get a window so there she is stuck with the
middle. When she arrives at her row she has to squeeze past someone at the
aisle but there's no one next to the window yet. She'll chance it, maybe
whoever is in 22A won't care. She takes off her boots, folds up her legs
to sit cross-legged, tucks her journal into the seat pocket.
A tall straight thing arrives, black eyes, dark hair in a pigtail, slightly
creased reserved face. Artist clothes. Looks a bit tired. As he's stowing
his shoulder bag above them he takes her in. He's amused. It's a night flight
and over the wing, he'll let her have it. Tucks himself into the middle
seat, scrunches forward taking off his boots. She glances down. They're
DM's, old worn DM's.
Straightens. Window seat always worth stealing he says. His accent is
mildly Scottish, Scottish been in England some while. She laughs.
He's on his way home from a gig in the States. She's on her way to a
gig in London. They talk through the night.
[to be continued]
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