by Rich Terfry
•
I had only been in Ward a few weeks when I was contacted by a woman from Brussels who made pretty music. Her name was Joëlle. She wrote to say she liked my work, and after spending time with a few of her songs, I wrote back to tell her the feeling was mutual. A few more messages were exchanged before she wrote to say she had composed a piece of music especially for me. Her expectation was that I would write and record lyrics for it. I was extremely moved that thoughts of me could inspire something so beautiful. I wrote to tell her so, but also that I couldn’t do what she asked. To do the music justice I would have had to find beauty within myself, and it didn’t exist. The losses of the previous few months had filled me with a black tar of despair and violent self-hatred. But Joëlle was insistent. I hadn’t told her of my troubles, but I think she sensed I was in need of diversion. She pushed.
My life had turned into a ghost town, so I listened to her four-minute composition on repeat—all day every day—for two weeks straight. I tried to plumb the depths of its beauty, yet got nowhere. If I hadn’t gone completely crazy before, this agonizing exercise pushed me over the edge. I felt as if there was somewhere I needed to go, but that this place existed only in a painting. I had to walk through Tōhaku’s mist and among his pine trees. I had to fight my way through one of Bosch’s fiery battlefields. I brawled, suffered and bled, and sooner or later got something down. In the end, I made a plea to Claire:
Dragonflies and the agonizing blast from a gun.
Under a magnifying glass in the sun.
You ran fast and you won. It takes time to heal a wing.
A hundred-year-old photograph doesn’t feel a thing.
Tracked courses. The parable lacked sources.
Unbearable first memories of terrible black horses.
Question the funeral procession and the pageant.
The home we chose versus the one that we imagined.
Break chains. Make change. Break chains …
I was boxing with a ghost and drawing maps
While the bells were accidentally announcing the collapse.
Trial by journalist and crushed beneath heavy light.
A child’s handwriting: I cry for you every night.
The lonely end. I love you, you’re my only friend.
Break chains. Make change. Break chains …
Sailor versus salesman. Nothing bores a genius.
Oceans and time zones, six doors between us.
Eyes that burn holes through people and indignant hisses.
Alone in our rooms with cures for malignant kisses.
Oh my god, oh my god … The broken man that cries “Believe me.”
Merciless, the wind and night. Scared to death, my eyes deceive me.
Tie my hands behind my back. Question marks surround my head.
My legs know how to love someone. Alas, there’s walls around my bed.
Break chains. Make change. Break chains …
Over the phone. It’s good to know we’re not alone
With all the broken parts in the world and our own.
The sleeping ache. All the messes that we make.
Sound, you can count on me to come around when you break.
Break chains. Make change. Break chains …
The words turned the music into something else. The composition had been beautiful like the aurora borealis, but now it was beautiful like a broken window or a forest fire. When I sent my corruption of Joëlle’s masterpiece back to her, she seemed excited with the result. So much so, in fact, she responded by suggesting we record a full album together. Although I knew the offer would put a kink in the plan I was developing, I gave it some thought. Finally I concluded I would record the album with Joëlle. And as soon it was finished, I would kill myself.
As work on the album got under way, Joëlle revealed to me the news that she was pregnant. And before our work was finished, she gave birth to a girl. Every week or two, she would send a new instrumental composition across the Atlantic, each more beautiful than the last. I wrote lyrics to go with them—about Claire and imprisonment and new life and suicide. The system was perfect: from one side of the ocean came inspiration; from the other came expiration. Life and death were dancing together. Joëlle and I laid ourselves bare in our work, both of us insisting upon remaining strangers to each other, six thousand kilometres between us. Each song passed back and forth was like an intimate confession spoken in two different languages: hers wordless and pure; mine written in blood.
Joëlle chose all the titles for our collaboration. She came up with the name “Bike For Three!” for our project. The album was to be called More Heart Than Brains. The last song we made together was called “The Departure.” Immediately after sending my final piece in the mail, I removed my belt and put it around my neck. I couldn’t run any longer.
Without everything else. Heavily and only less.
Late at night in a city known for loneliness.
The words written are up for interpretation.
The ring on your finger cut off your circulation.
Work your patience also nobody else’s.
So bloody. Mark and trust your dark impulses.
See your own breath. Freezing cold and feelingless.
Why ask questions when the words are just meaningless?
The picture of emptiness. The high wall it’s mounted on.
The disappearance of the one person you counted on.
Nothing to look forward to. A painful past to sever.
Call off the search for something that lasts forever.
Close your eyes tight. Break the bottle lightly.
Fall to the floor and bleed. God almighty.
The process of elimination. Part of the pain.
The start of its reign. It’s hard to explain.
Playing dead. Cry your eyes out. Faint instead.
Under attack. Black walls, paint them red.
Kiss the ghost. Listen close. Hear the curse.
Reveal the worry. Feel the fury. Fear the worst.
Home remedies. Witchcraft. Wizardry.
This space for rent. Torment and misery.
Intelligent hands wait for the day to arrive.
The need to feel pain as a way to survive.
Exorcising demons and other things you try to do.
Cut yourself open to show me what’s inside of you.
Scars all over your body, fast and clever.
Finally, something that will last forever.
Playing dead. Cry your eyes out. Faint instead.
Under attack. Black walls, paint them red.
Kiss the ghost. Listen close. Hear the curse.
Reveal the worry. Feel the fury. Fear the worst.
Dark lives. Sharp knives. Pieces of glass.
Lets all the air out, releases the gas.
•
The next morning, I picked myself up off the floor. The belt was still around my neck. I guess my rig couldn’t bear the thousand-pound weight inside me.
I cleaned my apartment, frozen in complete emotional paralysis. Although my psychic stasis lasted just one day, for the next year I was plagued with deep despondency, panic, insomnia, eating disorders and hallucinations. I was haunted daily by visions of flashing lights and crawling black spots. Sometimes the spots would crawl over my body; sometimes they’d be on the ground below me. One day, a gold ring the size of a basketball hoop followed me everywhere I went. Things would appear and disappear: people, text, common objects. On the worst days, the hallucinations were extremely strange and terrifying. One afternoon I saw a man whose teeth were growing outside his mouth, in rows along his cheeks. I saw people with six arms and others with no eyes.
I already had the troubles I had been carrying with me since childhood. I had rarely made eye contact with myself in a mirror since I was ten years old. And until I knew people well or trusted them implicitly, I couldn’t be touched by them without flinching. I had to want it or be ready for it. Now this sensitivity was s
o raw, I felt extremely uncomfortable being within two feet of a stranger. This made something as simple as waiting in line at a grocery store difficult, and elevators and public transit were no-go zones for me. If I had been broken before, now I was smashed.
What got me through was the letters.
The first one showed up the day after my leap into the void. There was no return address on the outside of the envelope. Inside was not a regular letter but a handwritten story. It told of the anguish of Guillermo José Torres, the Puerto Rican television reporter who narrated the death of Karl Wallenda—the legendary high-wire daredevil who fell from the skies above San Juan in 1978—on live television. The script revealed a woman’s hand and the work of a sensitive imagination. The words moved me to tears and made me breathless.
A few days later came the story of Kaspar Hauser, the chubby wolf child of romantic-era Bavaria who fussed over his appearance and extended his pinkies. Then came Lawnchair Larry, the truck driver who in 1982 flew a homemade airship made of patio furniture and helium balloons. And the Papin sisters—the incestuous French maids who in 1933 gouged out the eyes of their employer’s wife and daughter.
After some weeks of receiving missives like this, there was a change in the letters. Now came a description of an old house and its ghosts. And this time there was a return address in the corner of the envelope. But the author was still nameless.
For the first time in months, I picked up a pen. I wrote back with a story about Saint Anthony and his temptation in the Egyptian desert. I based my story on Domenico Morelli’s 1878 painting depicting Saint Anthony’s torment. I told of how Saint Anthony met a centaur as he wandered, and how the centaur led him to a cave where he could take shelter and rest. Saint Anthony slept but was awoken by the kisses of beautiful women who emerged from the rock. Anthony was tempted to worship their naked bodies instead of his god. But a bright light flashed in the cave and the naked women ran away. Anthony knew the light was God and that the beauty was God’s test. Anthony cried. God rewarded him for his strength by promising his name would be spread throughout the world.
After this, the letter writer and I traded stories and descriptions for the better part of a year. I came to count on another envelope showing up every few days. It became the thing I lived for.
I had been stripped bare of everything else.
My dreams of baseball were gone.
I had no more music in me.
The envelopes kept me going. Their words filled me with wild wonder. Sometimes the notes would be paired with a Polaroid photograph: an old sofa on a sidewalk, birds on telephone wires, statues deep in thought, neon signs in the daylight … Each little package contained its own universe.
For almost a year, I lived in that universe and healed.
•
One day I was eating lunch in a café in Gold Hill, a town not far from Ward. I was sitting with my back to the door, when I heard spoken these words: “ ‘Doubled in his cave, he couldn’t see her, but he heard her music …’ ”
I remembered how Saint Anthony had thought he was having another one of his fever dreams when he heard his own thoughts descend upon him in a woman’s voice. Demons had appeared to him.
My hands began to shake. I recalled how the demons had offered naked temptation.
I turned.
She smiled.
It was her.
Emily.
•
I never asked Emily how she had found me with her words. Or why. I didn’t want to know. I just wanted to live in her magic. I was irrevocably in love with her long before the day she appeared. But from the moment I saw her face, I couldn’t bear the thought of being away from her. Her fire was soothing and chased the dark away.
For a year we travelled around the world. We went gypsy. We didn’t stop long enough to ask how we’d do it—we just did it. We raised our voices to each other only in laughter. Every day, we laughed and laughed and laughed. We were the funniest people in the world. And the bravest. And the most alive. For the first time in my life, I was having fun. I felt ecstatic joy. We were running too fast for it to scare me.
When we finally stopped for a moment to catch our breath, I asked Emily to marry me. Without hesitation she said yes, and we both exploded into tears.
And then, with an evil demon who knew I didn’t deserve her crouching in the cell inside of me, I put a diamond on her perfect finger.
WICKED AND WEIRD PLAYLIST
“Black and Tan Fantasy” by Duke Ellington
“Rhinestone Cowboy” by Glen Campbell
“Just Waitin’ ” by Hank Williams
“Playin’ Dominoes and Shootin’ Dice” by Red Foley
“Life Gets Teejus, Don’t It?” by Tex Williams
“Swamp Root” by Harmonica Frank Floyd
“Wildwood Eeeph” by Jimmie Riddle
“La Di Da Di” by Doug E. Fresh and the Get Fresh Crew
“Leader of the Pack” by UTFO
“Jam Master Jammin’ ” by Run-D.M.C.
“My Melody” by Eric B. & Rakim
“Miuzi Weighs a Ton” by Public Enemy
“The Bridge” by MC Shan
“Break North” by Ultramagnetic MC’s
“Let There Be Drums” by Incredible Bongo Band
“Tour De France” by Kraftwerk
“Frankenstein” by The Edgar Winter Group
“I Only Have Eyes For You” by The Flamingos
“Popcorn” by Hot Butter
“Venus In Furs” by The Velvet Underground
“Girl” by Suicide
“Something Came Over Me” by Throbbing Gristle
“Horizontal Hold” by This Heat
“I Go To Sleep” by The Kinks
“Pulling A Train” by Six Finger Satellite
“Apocalypse Across the Sky” by the Master Musicians of Jajouka
“Ballade de Melody Nelson” by Serge Gainsbourg
“All There Is To Say About Love” by Bike For Three!
“Rake” by Townes Van Zandt
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THANKS TO —
My dad, Lynn Henry, Kiara Kent, Scott Sellers, Brad Martin, Kristin Cochrane, Scott Richardson, Marc Gerald, Nick Blasko, Colin McTaggart, Emily Keane, Claire Berest, Francesca Anderson, Maggie Ryan Sandford, Sage Francis and Mr. Noodle, without whom I would have starved during the writing of this book.
Photograph on page 1: my grandfather’s house.
Photograph on page 83: the street on which I lived in Paris.
Photograph on page 159: Ward, Colorado, early 2000s.
Photograph on page 230: my mother in the 1960s.