I rush downstairs, knowing the end must be near, because I have run out of space in my imagination to make this world make sense. I am now being made by it. I have the crumpled man in my arms, either he has gotten lighter due to some release of corporeal ballast or I have grown stronger in the panic that the world I know, the one for which I care and to which I am attached only in specific and momentary ways, is at stake. I gesture to Moist, there is no choice, I hand Dallow down to her, and she awkwardly carries him down the hallway, down the mercifully-wide stairs, careful not to lose her footing, and for splinters. We lean against the wall at the end of the hall opposite the boiler room, the nerve center, the rowing station, the mainframe, whatever other metaphor we can think of, breathless and sorry that we did not ascend. Dallow has recovered or else was faking all along:
“I haven’t been carried like this in years. It’s…wonderful.”
I looked to Moist for the obligatory eye roll, but exhaustion and the loss of the comforting smell of oak and green were too much. She looked worried as she lowered Dallow to the floor, still supine as if his legs were not ready to work yet. He hopped up in his poor man’s Buster Keaton manner, and we stood in a triangle of mixed consciousness: Dallow wanting to get back to the source of the sound, Moist wanting to go downstairs and see about Jack, and I, still waiting for the floor to give way so I could return to the filthy basement and trace graven images in the dirt floor while awaiting immanent collapse. It was all different after all, I thought, and I put one arm on each of their shoulders. Jack lied, I asked myself, as Moist did the same, reaching up to Dallow and mine. But he can’t lie, I remembered, at least not to us, as Dallow shrugged under both of our touch and brought his hands up as well. We were in a scrum, and would move as a unit or else remain rooted to the spot until they built speakers into us, affixed contact microphones to our rib cages and rang tuning forks against our skulls to set the pitches properly. I could feel Dallow pulling back towards the room, betraying his resolve, but that could not be. I held tighter and felt the rest of the circuitry tighten as well, a Gordian constrictor knot of arms, slackened only as we inched towards the stairs, the dangerous, promiscuous melody reaching its tendrils after us. Or so we thought.
I heard a voice, barely audible over the squall, and glanced over my shoulders, down the stairs. I saw it, unmistakable, the headstock of Furey’s guitar probing upwards as if an extension of his field of vision. It seemed to beckon me, and I forgot all about Jack and the attic and the echo chamber and the outside world, for at least an instant, as I had to verify that the headstock was connected to a neck, and down to a body, and so to another body, and finally to the world. I nodded to the other two and we all released at once, my triceps aching ferociously as I had been but a string on which the house plucked and sounded. Furey was wrought concentration, picking through the notes, while Feli sat on the divan, working that devastating, yes, infernal, three noted melody in perfect time, flipping back his hair at intervals. He raised his eyebrows at Moist, then directed Dallow to the Wurlitzer in the corner, facing the wall. Dallow awkwardly reversed the thing as all three of us followed the cable from the two instruments upwards to the light fixture, and assumedly through to some kind of relay box to the amplification.
I must digress, but only slightly, to recall: it was the loudest sound which retained any semblance of melody I had ever experienced. My head shook and waves of sick vibrations emanated from the base of my neck, through my collarbones and down to my pelvis. I moved from one foot to the other, as if barefoot on scorching pavement with no relief in site, no shadow, no wet, no vegetation, no indoors. I could feel tears welling up at the sides of my eyes, but not tears of any emotion, just my person’s sheer futility in the face of this aural brutality. I want never to experience anything like it again, and not simply because it was painful and unpleasant, but because it was overwhelming and I was lost without control. That kind of hopelessness is beautiful for what it is, and what it is is singular, unrelenting, but as much defined by its conclusion as its own onset, irrevocable-until-revoked, then irrevocable truly.
I was shocked that Moist was in any condition to perform, as I certainly was not, but she took the instrument from Feli, who wordlessly showed her the key, into which Dallow had already ambled, and so the changeover was surprisingly seamless. Cashman sat in the far corner, nearest the kitchen, on a chair he had dragged in from it. This, obviously, was going to upset things, and I heard the tinkle of ceramic smashing on the linoleum floor every so gently behind him. He had a satisfied smile painted across his face, inevitably recording the details to share with confidants and intimates down the road, on the roof of some building, where exciting things used to occur. Suddenly, it seemed to be time, and Jack shuffled in from around the corner by the stairs, stood in the center of the room and raised one hand with a flourish. Poor Old Jeffrey Young responds, striding out of the shadows and seeming to shake the dust from himself as he raised the head of his bow to the same angle as Jack’s outstretched fingers, and, after a pause no longer than a short breath, launched into the unmistakable strains of that Sonata #9, “Kreutzer,” and Dallow found him on the Wurly, a perversion the maestro would have found despicable, and yet was so fitting here. Furey stood directly before Moist, send telepathic notes from his hands into hers, conducting with his eyebrows, keeping time with tapping toes just beside her own. The volume dropped as though every fader above had been pulled to that of the chamber, and Feli beat and scraped out the time with mallet and brush, and the mixture of delicacy and power in the absence of the bludgeoning power must have had me near tears again, as Jack opened his softly shut lids to see me standing before me, and he lay his forehead on my clavicle, and this time asked me if I thought it was right. As my lips twitched to form the words of my reply, some kind of circuit was thrown, generator died, fuse blew, and the chamber orchestra became just that, only the gentle din of single amplifiers being played through multiple rooms away. Feli jejunely matched volume, and I replied to the query as you’d expect:
“I truly do not know.” I held him below the arm. “But does it matter?”
He stood upright to face me again, hand still autonomically conducting and dancing in the air along with the mad chase of the instruments around us. “You know, everything I’ve done was done to make it better.”
I didn’t know if I believed him. “I don’t know if I believe you.”
He smiled, the fatherly, slippers-by-fireside version of his smile. “You always were a bit skeptical, Mister Hamme. It was one of the things we liked about you. At least, it was one of the things I liked about you. It was a charming affectation.”
There was much to dislike about this set of comments, and in my current tenuous grasp on consciousness, I considered each phrase. In my current tenuous grasp on social niceties, perhaps also trusting my friend to understand, I gave voice to each concern. How the band managed to maintain dynamics was rather incredible, and I thought that if I somehow left this place intact, I would transpose all of Mad Ludwig’s work to orchestre infernal. Though I knew at least one of those two things would not come to pass.
“Skeptical, was I?”
He expected this, raising those dreamy lids but a sliver to address the inquisition. He put his free hand on my back, as if we were to dance.
“It did take you some time to sign on the dotted line.”
“But only a bit?”
“Well, you did sign eventually? Through no small amount of nudging, I might remind you.” He offered up the other, conducting hand. I shook my head, not least because I could not conceive of how we’d dance to think music.
“One of the things? I trust there were others.”
“That is why I said ‘one of.’ You know there were, do not be dramatic in a unkillable house during the Kreutzer.”
I danced around the most glaring query, even as I waved off dancing with Jack. Moist looked up at us during a few bars of rest, looking far more contented to lean into her instrument and await the next passage. She looked over her shoulder to Feli, who shot back raised eyebrows and flipped the hair out of his face.
“And my skepticism is affected?”
He chuckled through his smile as only he can, shoulders bouncing in slowed time with the music. He knew everything and nothing, all that had passed and naught that might follow.
“We are all affected, pally.” Here he took my free hand, there was no fighting it. As if awaiting a cue, Cashman shot forward to move the small table from beside us to clear a suitable floor. “We are all affected, all affect, all affectation. We are built as characters, you know, you and I. Oh and them?” He spun me, for panoramic effect. “Them too. They don’t all know it, but we’ll reveal it to them in due time.” He perceived some kind of uncertainty in me, but it was just as likely vertigo from the house ceasing to shake and bounce. I desperately wanted to see the window, the disturbed lake that beckoned in and suggested a way out, but for now Jack had in mind steps for a dance as if he’d choreographed them in advance. I assumed he was being cheeky, he could be a master of cheek, undergirded with whatever version of truth seemed best-fit at that moment.
“Do we have their characters written down somewhere?” I would dance a bit longer.
“Yes, yes, the great book. Wouldn’t that be grand? But in reality, they must develop more…”
“Organically?”
“Organically. Yes, the organs of the characters.”
I was at the very end of my tether, and there wasn’t much Sonata left, or so it seemed to me. Likely some distant memory of my father’s records in a sun-drenched living room on Sundays.
“There is no more ‘we’ Jack, or it is a—”
“Yes, it is a.” He nearly snapped, regaining his composure in the complicated piano-and-pizzicato interlude. “It is a different ‘we.’ You know better than that. It is always a different ‘we,’ eventually. All the dust is kicked up into a cloud, and then pieces fall back into place.”
The generator, or fuse, or circuit kicked back in and the final minutes of the music exploded with volume. Only the violin was not overdriven into distorted oblivion, as if Poor Old had toed some hidden button to keep it in check. The other three winced and Cashman put his hands over his ears and walked out through the kitchen. The small mantle over the fireplace to our right cracked and gave, crashing to the floor with family photos I did not recognize. I was certain I heard other wood splitting, though the choir reverberating in my head drowned out almost any other possible sound. Jack was distracted by the smashed picture frames and went to attend to them, leaving me to swivel to the window, which bowed and waved, the dying sunlight and impending night cast orange and navy in the ripples. I could not think what else to do, what else to say, and I let the renewed sense of bodily danger crest over me with each next wave of sound. Furey looked concerned, the only one, really, moving his worried eyes from one of us to the next. I nodded to the window, and found the table Cashman has cast aside, picked it up by one of its three legs, weighing the dense wood in my hand, and launched it through the window with the last reserves of strength my arms possessed. The door frame caved in, because it must have, else I would have no reason to smash the window for egress, and I stared at the tinkling glass, which now danced on the floor, and demanded I go and sleep the memory of the entire affair into a candy-colored landscape of dread which I could keep with me forever. I raised both of my hands to the room, and leapt.
