He asked me to visit and talk. He'd show me around so I could see, This is where studio A is, This is the production suite. And in exchange he asked if I'd sit and talk with him for a little while. Not about anything in particular, he just liked to talk to new people he thought were interesting, and get their points of view. Something about expanding his circles of existence, or some transcendental spirit quest thing like that. I said sure.
So I walked out of the dusty motel room overlooking the dullest highway in existence. Being from the East and all, this exact center of the country's idea of a highway was laughable. It was midmorning and the sun was staring too intensely, the wind was hot and ragged, and I stood there staring out across a great flat nothing. Sure, to my right, there were buildings and people, but straight out ahead, I could see miles towards a shimmering horizon. I slid on my shoes and started scuffing along the half mile to the address he had given me. I didn't feel like telling him I didn't have a car; he asked me to come and visit, I wasn't about to impose for a ride.
When I got there the front door was glassy and gleaming, and my eyes welled up from the reflection of the sun. It got worse the closer I got, till I was reaching out blindly with tears coming down, fingers clawing at the air the height a door handle should be. Even though my eyes were closed, I could see through the lids when the angle of the glass changed and the sun's penetrating gaze was diverted, and I heard a scratchy sort of Hey. It sounded rough around the edges, like that favorite piece of furniture with all those scratches and dings, that gets loved and passed down for generations. Why are you crying, it said.
The sun, I said, blinking; it's too bright. I know what you mean, said the face I could now see in detail. It was studying me, half solid and half unsure. Now that I was through the door, I wiped away the sun's invasion of my privacy, taking in the sales counter and the racks of tee shirts. Thanks for holding the door, I said. He nodded and gestured for me to follow him through the door to the side of the counter; as I passed, I smiled at the girl standing there. She looked sort of smug, like she coveted this job with unhealthy obsession.
We walked past doorways and then turned into one. The room was large and comfortable, glass on one side that was mirrored now, because all the lights were off on the other side. He stepped ahead of me, and looked around for somewhere to begin. I stood a few feet inside the doorway and breathed in the magic of this place, feeling immediately the time and energy spent in here. The emotions lingered in the floorboards and the coiled cords snaking around its edges. He was saying something but I'm not sure that I heard it; I was too busy hearing the past of this space. I said, You've changed a lot. He gave me an odd look then, and with a faint chuckle he said, I’ve tried. We walked to the next door in the hallway, and found ourselves on the other side of the glass wall, in front of hundreds of buttons and dials. The chairs were comfortable, and said that they needed to be, for this was the room of harsh things. Beauty and pain were kept behind the glass; this was the place for critique.
We walked and walked and I was lost the entire time, listening to him tell me things about the rooms we saw; interesting things, and things I imagine he doesn’t usually say on these tours. I spent a night lying on this floor feeling like I was dying, he said. And, Once I had a girl here, yeah right on that chair there, she kissed me and undid my pants, it was like seven in the morning and I'd been up all night, and then she left, and half an hour later this little Chinese boy showed up on a bicycle with eggs and hash browns and a lipstick print on the paid receipt; it was the best damn breakfast I'd had in a long while.
I heard these stories disjointed and without a frame of time, but they all fit in perfectly with the history of the place. The chair remembered him sitting slouched and her kneeling before him. The floor offered a stoic, terse Yes, I did cradle him that night. Each story he told of his life was echoed in the architecture. I probably looked really far away, but he didn't mind or didn't notice, because he just kept talking in that stilted awkward croak of a voice. It reached out to my ears the way a shy child reaches for a hand to hold, and I wondered why he was telling me these things. Was it the comment I’d made about him changing? Had I revealed something by accident?
And then we came to a room like a studio apartment, and time slowed to a standstill. There were piles of papers and notebooks everywhere, and a guitar there next to an old upright piano, a small fridge and some chairs and a rusted daybed. This room screamed. There were words in everything, spilling over the edges of the furniture and floating through the air; strains of music were stuffed into corners, abandoned ideas and old drafts of misery. I watched him, a few steps ahead of me, turn around and spread his arms slightly with an awkward smile. The soft glow of a full body halo emerged around him, as he sloughed off his shell. Its edges were chaotic and messy, and every twitch and jerked movement made it sway and shift, but was about as successful in calming it as an attempt to comb through a knotted head of hair charged with static electricity.
If you don't mind, he started, I'd like to record this. I asked why absently, because my eyes were too busy reading scratched out lines in the air, recognizing them enough to be old versions of ones I knew. He said, No real reason; sometimes it's meditative to hear what people say over and over and over again. Like spelling out a word too many times in a row, it starts to look funny, doesn't it? Like it isn't right. Conversations can be like that too. Some offhand comment really isn't, when you hear it for the eighth time. Everything's got weight, and sometimes poking it enough lets you into someone's mind a little.
I blinked and tried to focus on his face. Is that where all these songs came from, I asked, from poking at yourself? He gave me that same look as he did in the first room, and I had a moment’s panic. But there was more of a smile behind it this time; he had confirmed his suspicions and it had poked his curiosity the right way. The tiny center of his eyes filled with sadness and truth, but he still smiled when he said, And sometimes they poke back. We stood for a moment, before he picked up a tape recorder and raised his eyebrows to repeat the question. I said, Sure, go ahead and record; I’d be honored.
So we sat and talked for a long time, about everything and then some. It was like having a private conversation at a cocktail party. A hundred other people were around us, having their own conversations, and little quips from theirs kept drifting into ours. Except, of course, the other guests were the notebooks and bric-a-brac, and as far as I could tell, only I could hear them. But the spot in his eye told me he knew, or at least suspected, that I was picking up on something that is normally unseen. He tried to hide the voraciousness of his interest, keeping his questions polite and reserved. I held myself back as well, out of fear. So rarely do I get the opportunity to discuss it, and I didn’t want to drive him away.
My fears, of course, were unfounded; just a practiced habit by that point. He was as courteous and gentle as I somehow knew he would be. When I asked him to play something on the peeling piano for me, he smiled and obliged, and I let myself rock in the waves that rushed out; he seemed happy, and I wondered vaguely if he could sense how the notes carried me. It’s funny, almost, how I can’t remember a word of what we said that whole time, but I remember exactly how he played. The intake of breath, the striking of the keys, the vastness and the depth that he created. The wholesome silence that followed. Excuse me, he said in his stilted croak, I have to change the tape.
© 2012 Emma Jane Powell
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