Whale Music

by Paul Quarrington

  The father, the father, the great unruly man. He should have existed in a rainforest, before the recording of time. He could have gobbled up lizards, spilled his seed willy-nilly, covered the earth with dull-witted progeny. And they would have ruled the world, kings and queens all.

  Danny came home after a year in reform school, and it made me sad because we had grown very far apart. He had taken to wearing T-shirts and bluejeans, his feet decked out in shiny pointed shoes. In a desperate attempt to make friends at high school I was wearing Pendletons, clam diggers and Hush Puppies. I was working hard at my music—at least, that’s all I ever did. Danny was still obsessed with speed and machines, cars to put it simply, and his hobby was rebuilding old wrecks even though he wasn’t old enough to legally drive them. He’d spend hours on their engines and bodies, and then he’d cruise them stealthily onto an old dirt track near our house, and he’d bomb around until the cars either gave up the ghost or were driven into trees.

  One day when I came home from school I saw Danny out in the driveway underneath one of his old coupés. Danny was always preceding me home from school, which leads me to believe that he was not in fact attending. Anyway, he couldn’t see me as he worked on the chassis, and I was surprised to hear him singing. He was singing a popular song of the time, I think it was “Teen Angel,” and his recently changed voice was a very sweet and pretty one. Without thinking I joined in, adding a high harmony, and Danny scooted out from underneath the car with a big grin on his face. We finished the song, even locked our arms around each other’s shoulders to add pathos. Then Danny laughed, gave me a little punch to the belly.

  “Do you want to come down into the basement?” I asked. “We could sing some more songs.”

  Danny thought about it, but finally he shook his grease-spotted head, waved a monkey wrench in the air. “Nope. I got to work on this beast. It needs more torque.”

  “Torque?”

  “Torque.”

  The strange-sounding word started bouncing inside my head. “Go like this,” I said urgently. “Torque torque. Torque torque.” I gave Danny a note, jabbed in the air to set him on a rhythm. Danny made a rude sound, but I was insistent, and my brother finally started doing it, quietly at first and then with more power. “Torque torque. Torque torque.”

  I falsettoed away up high, the better to swoop down on the melody like an eagle. “The beast needs more torque!” I sang. “The beast needs more torque.” I waved my brother up to another note, and he adjusted. “I gotta uncork the cork, because the beast needs more torque!” Up to the fifth, an idiot could see it coming. “The pig needs more pork,” I shouted, “and the beast needs more torque!” We laughed, Danny and I, and then we flew down to the basement. The Farfisa spat out the raunchy chords like that was what it had been waiting to do. Danny grabbed a tambourine, and without thinking he began to sing the melody, and I took over the undercurrent, “Torque torque. Torque torque.” The song was written in seven minutes, but we spent about four hours singing it over and over again.

  We were finally summoned up to dinner. The father scowled at us and picked away at his poule grappé. He looked sad and distant, lonely in a strange world. My mother was very animated, though, and as she served us our food she sang softly under her breath, “The beast needs more torque …”

  I have decided that I must go to bed. Not a radical bed-going, mind you, just a simple clocking of zee-time in order to rise refreshed and rosy-cheeked. This is a real step forward for me, mental-health-wise, and I should call Dr. Tockette and make him aware of this achievement. No way in hell I’d do such a thing, but it’s a positive sign that for a fleeting moment I considered initiating discourse with the quack.

  I have finished recording the song “Claire”. I don’t know how long it took, but I do know that my belly has lost some of its size and toning. My eyes are screaming eaglet arseholes, I have developed a pungency that only a long period without dips in the pool can produce. Speaking of which, I think I’ll go for one now. Let me see how big a splash I can make.

  Ah, here is Claire herself, sunbathing beside the pool. She is asleep. Talk about your restful slumber, this is napping in Connecticut, dozing by the fire while Aunt Dorothy makes plum pudding. This girl makes the oddest sounds when she sleeps, it’s like her nose, mouth and throat decide to party down while she’s flaked out, they sputter and whistle and make noises like tiny pink engines. Needless to say, Claire is currently naked. They have scant truck with clothes up on chilly Toronto, which is a bit surprising. Claire is lying on her stomach. I wonder if she realizes that her bottom is turning red as a lobster. This is going to be very painful for the creature. Beside her lies a tube of ointment, and I decide that I will add some to this sensitive area. I make a dab in one palm, rub my fleshy hams together and then gingerly press down on Claire’s body.

  “Aaeeyah!” There is a sudden bolt of awful electricity, and Claire is on her feet, staring at me, her hands twisted and clawlike. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  I show her my greasy palms. You have to careful when you have an interplanetary house guest, you never know when you’re going to offend some ethnocentricity. “Your bottom was getting burned, number twenty-one. I thought it would hurt you.” I clamber to my feet, not feeling particularly well. “I have decided to go to bed. A great leap for mankind. I’m sorry I scared you.”

  “Where I come from you don’t just go around latching on to someone’s arse-end.”

  There, you see? How was I to know? I turn and lumber away. I wander down to the barbed-wire fence, I press my forehead against the metal, dig it into my fat face. Below me is the ocean. I hope I will see some whales. Baleen, humpbacked or sperm, it makes no difference. I am composing music for them, you know. When I finish the music, I will set up speakers, hundreds of them, I will play the music for the whales. They will gather beneath my house, they will nestle comfortably in the sea and smile upwards.

  Claire is beside me. She has put on a terry-cloth robe. We watch the water. It is rough, tempestuous. Men will be lost at sea today, their widows will evermore wear weeds.

  “I don’t like being touched,” Claire tells me. “I was touched a lot, for a long time, and now I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t like touching.”

  “I didn’t mean to scream at you.”

  “Oh, think nothing of it. I’ve been screamed at many times. Fay was a great one for screaming at me.”

  “That your wife?”

  “My used-to-be wife.”

  “Your ex.”

  “Ex, why and zee.”

  “How long were you married?”

  “Many, many years. More than I care to remember. Or am capable of, for all that.”

  “Why’d you bust up?”

  Now, to make matters truly nauseating, we have the daily Memory Matinee. See Desmond come home unexpectedly. See him mount the stairs, eager for the embrace of his life-mate. See him open the bedroom door. See … agh.

  Fay, you know, was born too late. As are we all. Fay should have existed during the French Revolution. She would not have been bored. She could have led small peasant insurrections. She’d cheer dizzily as the heads rolled off the aristocrats, her ample bosom heaving. In that time of mayhem, there would have been wanton copulation.

  “So what have you been up to, dude?” Claire is trying to be cheery, she even taps my flabby arm with a small set of freckled knuckles. “You been working away?”

  “I’ve been working.”

  “On the Whale Music?”

  “No. No, I’ve neglected the Whale Music. I’m going to go work on that now.”

  “Don’t you think you maybe ought to go to bed?”

  “If you have any questions on human behaviour—although I myself am stymied much of the time—feel free to ask.”

  “Huh?”

  I wander into the living room. Wait. My fairy godmother has been here. Look on the table, what do you see? A bottle of whiskey. When brain cells fall out, you leav
e them under your pillow, and in the morning there will be a bottle of booze there. I unscrew the top, look around cannily (force of habit, I instinctively search for the despicable ex-footballer Farley O’Keefe), and send a shot downwards.

  I blast back into the music room, retro-rocket into the control booth, power-on all my computers and machines. “Desmond to Earth, Desmond to Earth,” I mutter into a squalling microphone. Apparently there is something evil up on the planet Toronto in the Alpha Centauri galaxy. I drink more whiskey. And now, the Whale Music. Yes! I must dance to the Whale Music. I must leap into the vocal booth and sing along, the “Song of Flight” and of “Danger”. You know what this needs, don’t you? A sax, absolutely, a sax to crackle like dolphins in the never-ending sun, a sax to rip life through the heavy water.

  If Dan-Dan were here, he could play the sax. That was a musical machine that he learnt to work, maybe not particularly well, but Danny could certainly play the dolphins.

  It is not a good idea to reflect on my brother and consume whiskey.

  It seems to me that I recently had some intention of going to bed. What a noble intention that was, wouldn’t Dr. Tockette have been pleased. Now I’m going to sleep, but unfortunately getting to bed is more or less out of the question.

  Oh, dreamtime. Peachy. There’s nothing I like better than these little features. My mind has hired a really shlocky director, some asshole who affects a monocle and talks with a thick Brooklyn accent. He favours gratuitous nudity, graphic violence. Today the boor has decided to redo the death scene. “Okay, okay,” he shouts at his underlings. “Light the car!” A silver Porsche is illuminated. My brother Daniel sits behind the wheel. Danny looks good, bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked. Women crowd the side of the road, fawning. A few faint. Slowly Danny depresses the accelerator. The Porsche rolls forward a few feet. “Cut!” yells Cecil B. “Good stuff, Dan-Dan!” Daniel climbs out of the car, goes over to stand with his adoring female public. “Stand-in!” shouts the director.

  Stud E. Baker leaps forward. “Rock and roll!” he shouts, gyrating his pelvis. The outline of a thick monkey-dong causes much giggling along the sidelines. Stud E. Baker removes his Confederate Army cap for a brief moment of solemnity. “If I don’t pull this off,” he announces, “and I don’t see how the fuck I could, I just want you all to know that it’s been a gas.”

  “Stop!” That’s me shouting. I am invited to my own nightmares, after all. “Don’t do it!”

  “Forgive me, Desmond.”

  I am silent.

  “Okee-fedoke.” Stud E. Baker climbs into the silver Porsche. He places his snakeskin boot on the gas pedal, works the revs up. “Quality machine,” he announces. Stud places his right hand on the stick-shift. “It’s one for the money!” he sings.

  “Two for the show,” I mumble.

  “Three to get ready,” chorus the scantily clad beauties along the roadway.

  “And go, cats, go!” Stud E. Baker throws the machine into gear, the teeth bite with fury, a lion clamping its maw around the flank of a gazelle. He runs through second, third, fourth, within seconds he has the Porsche in overdrive. And then Stud E. Baker turns the wheel softly to the right. Through the guardrail. For long silent moments the silver car flies above the Pacific. The Porsche hits the water with a surprisingly soft sound. A moment later comes the explosion.

  The whales surface cautiously, curious looks in their large sad eyes.

  “Fawk.”

  I sense a presence in the room. Moreover, I sense a shoe in my tummy.

  “What is with you, Desmerelda?”

  In my state it would be a mug’s game to play along with every apparition that happened by. I decide to ignore this one, which is huge and black.

  “You have accumulated some avoirdupois there, baby. You be doing me quite a favour if you would get un-nekkid.”

  Pretty pushy for a drug- and liquor-produced figment, wouldn’t you say?

  “Well, if I get quadruple scale for watching you lie curled up on the floor, I say fine by me. But I want to see the money.”

  Hallucinations have unionized. What is this world coming to? Before long we’ll be as badly off as that ghastly planet that hurt something within the alien Claire.

  “Fawk.” The fabrication disappears into a shadow. I tumble briefly back to never-never-land (I don’t sleep, I collapse into these bread-pudding comas, as restful as cattle-drives) until a reveille is sounded on a saxophone, the thirds all pulled bluesily flat. I leap to my feet and peer into the darkness. “You can play the sax?”

  “Desmerelda, whom do you think it is?”

  “I need a saxophonist.”

  “So the lady said.”

  “I was going to hire Mooky Saunders, but he’s dead.”

  “The hell I am.”

  “You’ve returned from beyond the grave?”

  “Des-baby, let’s start at the beginning. Hey, Des, it’s Mooky. The lady told me you needed a sax. She called me on the telephone. I am not dead, Des. I never felt better. Okay? Now, see if you can pick up that ball and run with it.”

  “Mooky!”

  “Touchdown.”

  I pull on my bathrobe. I shake Mooky’s hand, which is enormous, nails as big as playing cards. “It’s good to see you.”

  “Quite the set-up you got.” Mooky wanders around, touching all my equipment gently. “Quite the play-pen.”

  “I’ve been working on Whale Music.”

  “W-h-a-l-e or w-a-i-l?”

  “And I need you to do dolphins.”

  “Dolphins. Fawk. I thought the lady asked could I do ‘Dolphy.’ ”

  I play Mooky what I’ve done so far. He tilts his head, his long fingers stroke the air. When it’s through he grins at me. “You crazy.”

  “Can you hear the dolphins? They leap through the waves, five or six abreast.”

  “I can hear them motherfuckers.”

  “Soprano?”

  “Absolutely, Desmond. Them is some soprano dolphins.”

  “It’s in the key of F, Mook.”

  “Could have fooled me, Desmerelda. But if you say so.”

  Claire comes into the music room. She is trepidatious, she sets her feet down tentatively. Mooky is warming up, lines of music scoot around the padded walls. Claire comes into the control booth, where I am busy capturing sounds. “Hey,” she says.

  “Hello, number twenty-one.”

  “Are you hungry, Des?”

  “Probably. But I’ve got no time to eat. We’re doing the dolphins.”

  “Oh, yeah.” She watches Mooky through the plate of glass. “He sure is big.”

  “Echo!” I fire up a reverb unit, the sound opens, the music bubbles up from the bowels of the earth.

  “Guess what?” asks Claire. “My butt is raw. I can hardly sit down.”

  “I guess you’re just not used to the sun. Our planet is only three stones away, you know, perhaps a tad too close for comfort.”

  “You want me to split?”

  “No.”

  “I just thought that maybe you figured that me and you, you know, and now you’d be kind of peed-off or something and want me to leave.”

  “Complete your mission, whatever it may be.”

  “My mission?”

  Mooky puts on his headphones, sticks his finger into the air. “Turn that up,” he speaks into the microphone. “Drown me in that shit, Desmerelda.”

  I crank up his levels until they’d be just about deafening. Mooky gives the A-OK. I rewind, start the tape from the beginning.

  The dolphins begin to leap into the sun.

  Claire begins to dance. She closes her eyes, extends her arms, and rhythm overtakes her body. Soon she too is leaping, obeying the command. Leap, flee, there is danger here! Jump! Leap! I join the alien and leap as best I can, although I am more earthbound. Wallowed by my lard and sorrow. Claire reaches out one of her small hands. I take it.

  I stop leaping, though, when I notice a face pressed against the dark glass window that separ
ates my music room from the rest of the world. The face belongs to my mother.

  I don’t know when or where my mother encountered Maurice, but I know she was the first to mention his name in our household. Mantle was the president of Mantlepieces Inc. My mother badgered the father for a very long while, and finally he crumbled, he and Mantle had a meeting, a deal was struck, and Maurice became the father’s publisher.

  Maurice Mantle was a tall man with a moustache, and he was bald in a manner suggesting not so much that he’d lost hair, but more that his skull had ripped skyward with determination. Maurice was the first adult male I’d ever encountered who was concerned with his personal appearance. Before that I had thought that most men were like the father, that jackets were meant to look as if they’d been borrowed from a brother-in-law, that part of the tie’s function was to let people know what you’d had for lunch. Maurice Mantle was dapper, almost perfect, and the only reason I say almost is that Mantle was always judging himself short of immaculacy, constantly adjusting sleeve lengths, tugging at his stockings, brushing lint (fairly irritably, I might add, especially given the invisibility of the lint) from his trousers. I think now that these things sartorial were designed to distract the eye from Maurice Mantle’s head, which was resolutely, profoundly bald. Still, I’d have to report that he was a handsome man, and certainly charming. Although I tried not to, I couldn’t help comparing the father to Maurice Mantle, and the father invariably ended up seeming freshly dug-up, like he ate little furry animals and belched swamp-mung.

  Maurice Mantle got into the habit of coming over to the house. He’d bring little presents for Danny and myself. I remember he brought me a chromatic harmonica, he brought Danny a baseball that had been signed by all the members of the Los Angeles Dodgers. My mother encouraged Danny and I to call him Uncle Maurice. This we could not do. I called him a respectful Mr. Mantle, Danny usually hailed him as Moe. I know full well that Maurice was coming to see our mother, but he could not set foot inside the house without the father cornering him, ushering him upstairs to the den, where the father would pitch his latest tunes the way he pitched his rubberized doggy-do. “Now this one, Maurice, this one would be perfect for that Presley boy.” Then the father, with his fat finger on the musical pulse of the nation, would pull out a tenor guitar and play something like “The Legend of Pocahontas.”