A life can become caught in anger. Anger at death. Anger at loss. The body becomes swollen with it. It itches, festers. The dialogue within becomes also swollen, and immovable. Here, loss does not resolve itself. Without silence, anger is fed with the constant conversation of the mind. Grief is a ghost limb, hot and burning and reminding. A ganglion cluster of nerves. Imagined. Gone over.
Such a life had become Roger Strickland. There was no epiphany for him. There were long angry walks. Through the city and down to the piers. Not really to think, but to look. Let each distraction ambiguously confirm. A decaying girder. A dead pigeon in an oily puddle. A bad smell. All confirming a loss in life. For the cynic, humor is always a conformation of the worthlessness of life.
Here is a man of notoriety. He is familiar to his friends in his long, camel hair coat. His contemporaries dismiss his moods. He is even funny. And the composer is fortunate. His work is known, even celebrated in circles. He was a composer before his daughter had died. When he was able to enjoy the things is his life that seemed fortunate.
That was a time when Roger had almost skipped with fortune. For him, it was a family with money. An upbringing that allowed. Roger had direction. And vision. A great cello player, he soon started to write composition, eventually graduating from Juilliard.
He would sit at the bar with his friends he graduated with. They would clink drinks. His blonde intellectual wife would sit also. All the intellectual wives would sit with the intellectual husbands and they would discuss the nature of silence in Cage’s music and they would discuss Shoenberg’s twelve tone. Roger described a series of notes that invoked Autumn. Sometimes they would all be very drunk in the bar with the oiled wood trim and antique frosted mirrors, and become excited about a particular composition. They would all brainstorm about the archetypical scale and the roots of human resonance. The very keys to emotion that trigger movement in the human race. Even Roger’s wife agreed that it was because of what quantum physics was proving, that it was frequency, the frequency of particles that defined rhythm in life, as in music.
They would go home with a certain smugness that an urban lifestyle can produce and they would walk into the brownstone apartment and pay the babysitter and have a nightcap of Remy Martin. Then going to the bedroom to have titillating sex of the type you can have when you are educated and familiar with The Joy of Sex, the Karma Sutra, and various writings of Anais Nin.
Here were the days. Here were the days when the man was not a shell. The short time when everything came back to him tenfold. Roger produced. The little family would go on adequately. Much childcare for Heather. His wife played oboe for the philharmonic. He wrote music. They ate dinner sometimes. Sometimes they went out. Sometimes they went out with their friends. It seemed remarkable that all were so content and productive. There were absences in them as a couple. The little girl was starting to talk. He loved her deeply at times and wished he were not so wrapped up in things, to be able to truly spend some time with her. She responded when they played pieces to her. Roger imagined that the sounds of the woodwind and the strings would blossom in her someday, like a pile of dry leaves getting hit by the wind. The vibrations growing stronger with time. He had his theories.
He was offered a teaching position at a University in Prague, and spent large chunks of time there for a couple of years. He did not worry about the family back home. His wife assured him that he would be loved from afar during those months, although he missed his daughter, and at times said so on the phone, and he would imagine little sparks traveling through cables under the ocean carrying his voice. His wife would say she was proud of him with sparks that came back to his end and it would satisfy him. They had a don’t ask don’t tell arrangement. When he wasn’t teaching he wrote music almost non-stop. Vibratory and resonant pieces that over laid on each other like rich blocks of fudge. Long and dissonant chords from four and eight piece string ensembles. His music became popular in Prague as well as New York.
In his daughter Heather’s eighth year she got a spider bite. On her leg. He was not in Prague. It happened right under his nose. The spider had crawled from the fireplace in the brownstone across the hardwood oak floor onto the horsehair rug and up into the little girls bed where it rested for the day and then bit her on the shin. It was not a terribly poisonous spider, but it carried a stray, rare bacteria that killed the little girl in the matter of a week.
All time stopped for Roger when that happened. The mother had screamed how can you not do something in the doctors faces. The dawdling men in white coats and clipboards said they had never seen anything like it. The girl grew sicker by the hour. Her skin turned. By the third day she was filled with tubes and on a heart monitor. It was difficult for Roger and his wife to even come to the hospital in the end. The doctors had said on the phone that it had gotten awful for the little girl in a way that a parent wouldn’t want to see.
That was when everything completely fell apart. Roger said to friends that it is beyond explanations what he is going through. The couple separately enclosed into themselves. In Roger’s way of enclosing himself he becomes non-sexual and placid and could not be touched, where as his wife became over sexual and took more lovers. She explained that it was her way of dealing. Then one night she was being cool to him and he asked her what was the matter and she cried and told him that she was out of control, or had been a little bit, that she had sex with a couple of strangers in the recent month and now she was freaked out because AIDS was everywhere and she didn’t use a condom at all. She asked that Roger take her to get a test because she was scared to death. He brought her. She didn’t have AIDS. They got a civil, friendly and consenting divorce.
Now are the days when Roger walks alone, covered up in his long camel hair coat. Enclosed up in his thoughts and his walks. Grief as a ghost is vicious. It forces one to consider. To constantly reckon and regret. If he had only loved before, in the way that he now loved. Or felt he did. But it had become more abstract than that, for Roger. His anger at death had spread in him much like the putrid bacteria that had killed his daughter. Spread through his thoughts. Beckoned on him like a layer of brown oil.
He had stopped teaching in Prague. He published some older works and gave a couple of lectures and that was all. No music he could think of. The wind was enough. And the sounds of the trains. Some things were loud and constant and could cover up bad thoughts.
A life can become caught in anger. Anger at death. Anger at loss. The body becomes swollen with it. It itches, festers. The dialogue within becomes also swollen, and immovable. Sometimes there are only the sounds of trains. Sometimes there is only the hollow sounds of what could have been, echoing in tunnels that drip with dirt, and age like caves. Sometimes years go by like this. You read the paper. You come up with righteous diatribes. People become bastards. Its all because of entropy. Life falls apart around you. Like a dry pastry. A picked apart croissant. That turns to croissant dust.
It had come now to years. Roger amended himself. Un-re-coiled. Amended as if to continue with solace. And know things as a stoic does. Drag, but push. Solace. Un-requite. The way he would push down the street and rush angrily into the cold wind. Winter always seemed much longer than summer to him. In fact it was in summer that he begged for the enclosure of winter.
But, as with even devastating stories, they become stories. In him, monuments to his place of such a pallid vacancy. To this sentinel place was where he walked. He walked to the piers. He walked to trains to take him places. Sometimes Coney Island. Even once the beach in Montauk . Only there to walk once again, and look at the decay of the world, and in a way listen to it. Listen to the whole world crumble apart around him. There was no music in it except a topic upon silence.
By now by his thoughts about his daughter had bled into his moment. His waking up. His going to sleep He had realized that it was not just his daughter. That in a way regret or even reproach had existed always within him. And that his life was reproach pieced together from the very beginning. And in some way that was where he walked, and fled to. That story of himself. That knowing it was his discretionable day.
There he would look on as a stoic. The beach his porch as he sits, stands, and looks out. The beach is always littered and filled with glass. The sea less green-blue than he remembered it as a child. Filled up with toxic microbes, sloshing around in some unknowable brown muck. Or so it seemed. But he was watcher, and in it he heard no other music. Just a cold math that bounced around in front of him.
He would always come home. Riding the trains late. Always a last sprint back to his enclosure. Usually he would come into the door with a bustle. Take care of things. Fold things. Drink Scotch. Watch news. Sometimes he would talk on the phone with his sister. Always pothering. Unable to sit still. Trying to continue. Continue at home while waiting to ride and walk out again to the sea. His restlessness crawled out of his skin, bugs of death that putrefy the earth. Bugs that crawl up into your bed. Maybe he wasn’t walking to the trains, or to the sea. Maybe he was just escaping, walking away from the bugs of the city. Away from the roaches of his very brain he felt. Grateful they didn’t appear outside of his thoughts. Grateful for the banging and screeching of the trains. Leading him to the sea of reproach.
There was a day he was coming home from Coney Island. He had left. The brown sea was in him. The second stop came. He was mostly alone and went in through the sliding door. A few unsmiling people as is the custom to keep a straight face on a New York subway train. Some people were reading. The train ground on down. The sliding door opened. Two men walked on with instruments. They were obtuse. Their faces were a little deformed. They wore black pants and white shirts. Shiny shoes. One held a black accordion with silver embossed into it. The other a guitar his looming face and model-clay chin hung over. Large spaces in between all his teeth. People looked up from their books. Roger looked up. One of the men gave a little speech. Roger couldn’t hear it clearly above the train.
They played their song. It was a folk tune. A simple porch song. The one with the gaps in his teeth sang words. The train groaned with the accordion. As if turning a crank organ. But it was not spring. It was cold Autumn. He heard the trains deep in the song of the two. Something about the way the air went through the accordion. Or maybe the crooning of the singer. Something about the frequency of the train. The squeals and caws of the metal track. It all bled together. Roger still had the brown sea in him. He heard some dark, slow music that the men were not playing. A music he had heard before. The next stop came. The complacent and unsmiling faces reached in and gave the men their dollars. Roger gave his dollar.
A life can get caught up. The body becomes swollen with it. A person needs to spend time listening. Listening to the sorrow of the world. Sometimes a man is not granted with such an extreme nothingness. There are urges. One must look in the mirror. Open the casket up and examine the resumes of a life. Sometimes one admits the dis-chord in ones self. And how they hear it. It can be that things happen to you and you hear sorrow and enclosure clearly. The anger becomes clear. The feeling of dissonance.
Sometimes one only exists to write the music of a dark death.
