As he lay there on the threshold between being asleep and being awake, the comfortable weight of Jane’s neck on the crook of his elbow, he saw something walk across the ceiling. It was not the shadow of anything, because it was brown, as if it were furry, and it walked on all fours, but its legs and its body too were bizarrely elongated. It walked across the green area of the ceiling and then stopped, and then changed direction. It was the image of something, some animal, walking across the ceiling of the Mortimers’ bedroom, which he knew was painted white, but which now was distinctly tinged a green, like the color of grass.
It was the lawn, of course. It was the lawn in front of the house, down there below these windows. And that red-and-black thing in that corner of it up there above him was the power mower, right where Danny had left it. The image of the animal walked over and sniffed at the image of the lawnmower. The world of nature is coming over to check out the world of civilization, he thought.
This is a camera obscura, he realized. Somehow the shutters, or one of them, were acting as the lens of a pinhole camera. The light of the sun was being reflected off the Mortimers’ lawn and their lawnmower and their deck chairs and that groundhog, and converging at the pinhole in the shutters, which then projected it onto the ceiling, which was acting as the focal plane. He and Jane were actually lying here inside a camera, which the house was. If the ceiling had been tilted at the right angle, they would have had a perfect image of the outside world. He felt like Leonardo da Vinci, who had seen people walking upside down on the wall of his room. They had been out in the garden; the light reflected from them had converged at the pinhole in his curtain. No wonder he was excited. “Of course,” he heard himself say aloud.
“Hunh?” Jane asked.
He stroked her face lightly and kissed her, and she went back into her doze. He pulled his arm out from under her head.
Of course. This is what Les Champs Magnétiques was really all about. No wonder he had not been happy with Anselm’s visuals. He could not have known what the piece was really about until he’d gotten inside it. He picked up his clothes, wanting to call Anselm, to tell him about this.
But not now. Just then he heard that imperfect fifth again, the double-stop the house was playing, its secret voice. He walked out into the hall, still carrying his clothes, and stood there naked for a long moment, his head cocked, listening for it, those clicks and that groan.
Nothing.
He must have been mistaken. It was too early in the day. The house would not speak again until this evening, when it started to cool off. He looked back into the bedroom. The ceiling was a dull gray, blank. He looked at the shutters. He could not see any gleam of light coming through them, just a general, softly diffused dimness. He went back into the hall, but there were no windows there. He went into the bathroom and looked out the window: that strong, direct sunlight they had had all morning was gone; the day had already started to cloud up. Tonight they would have a storm for sure. Danny had grown up in California and had never seen a full-scale electrical storm. He would see one tonight.
He glanced at the mirror and saw himself standing in the Mortimers’ bathroom. He looked at his face. This is what people saw when they looked at him. This is David Lyman, the composer. He made a face. He shrugged his shoulders. You do what you can with what you’ve got. He heard it again.
He went out into the hall and stood there, listening, feeling the house all around him, somebody else’s house that would now speak. Its voice was too far away, it had come from someplace downstairs, but he could not tell yet exactly where. He had been standing perfectly still for a long time when he realized that for some time now he had been looking—without really seeing it—directly at a single panel of a Dick Tracy cartoon that someone had framed and hung there. He could not tell, in this light, if it was an original or if it had just been clipped out of the funny papers. There was nothing in the panel to suggest that the Mortimers had seen it as particularly appropriate to them, just Dick Tracy, in profile, holding a big and very heavy-looking gun, a .45-caliber automatic. Turning only his head, he looked at the other wall, and saw a photograph of a big church. Why? What had prompted these people to hang just these two pictures here, in this hall? The church looked European.
The colored pictures on the ceiling had come and gone. Here on a corner of the bannister was a place where the paint had chipped off and he could see three or four different colors of paint. The house had of course gone through a whole series of lives, different families coming in and painting it different colors, and the house had remembered and preserved their lives.
When he heard it again, he knew it was coming from almost directly below him. He went down the stairs as quickly and quietly as he could, and stood again, still, tilting his head this way and that, just on the threshold between the stairwell and the dining room, glancing from time to time into the TV room and down the stairs that led to the cellar and the studio. The TV room was also a sort of den or library. They had lots of bookshelves, which were neatly stacked with sets of books in identical bindings. They must have been bought at auctions. How else explain the complete works of Twain on the same shelf with Pierre Louys and Pearl S. Buck? The father’s history stuff took up a small corner, where the desk was, but obviously he must have done most of his work at his office up at the school. David had once looked into one of the man’s own books—Gens and Justice: The Law in Early Roman Civilization, R. Charles Mortimer, Jr.—and the opening sentences had been all he needed: “It is not music or art or poetry that distinguishes man from the animals, but the law. Man is an animal, and only within the structure of the law can he find that protection from his own animal passions that alone allows music and poetry and art to flourish.”
But the records were probably the weirdest thing of all. They had a couple of albums of Ives and Carter, but most of the rest of it was dance-party stuff, or “easy listening,” the kind of music you would barely realize you were hearing in a waiting room someplace, wallpaper music. There were also sets of “The Greatest Hits of” records, almost all of them big bands—Ellington, Goodman, Glenn Miller. But these were not the original recordings. They were reconstructions by studio musicians. Somebody’s brilliant idea. Pay a couple of dozen hacks to transcribe all this stuff from records—including the improvised solos—so that another bunch of hacks, some Ernie Hecksher or John Wolohan, and their orchestras in some studio in Atlantic City could play all those notes right off the page. In the case of Miller it wouldn’t make any difference, but why would anyone in his right mind go to all this trouble to turn music into paper? It was like a Xerox copy of the world. And where in the hell were this kid’s things? If he had been such an acclaimed composer, who the hell did he listen to? Sure as hell not this José Iturbi stuff. There wasn’t even any rock ’n’ roll in the house.
Then he realized that this must have been the parents’ doing. When the kid had been killed, they must have just about gone underground—to suppress every possible reminder of his having been here. He had become an unperson. His room, when Danny had moved into it, had not even had a picture on the wall. It was just a room with two beds and a chest of drawers in it.
He heard it again, long and deep this time, and unmistakably coming up the stairwell from the studio. He ran down the stairs, trying to control his breathing. This was perfect. He had been concerned that even after he’d located the source of the sound he would have to come down here to get his equipment, and by that time the performance might have been over for the day. He would have had to wait till the morning. But now he put a fresh reel of tape in the big machine and switched on the omnidirectional mike. While he waited, he thought about the crawl spaces under the house, where it might make sense to use them if he had to get in under the floors to place his mike better. But when it came again it was practically saying, “Here I am!” It was coming from a corner of the studio up above the top shelf of the tape-and-book-storage unit, and between that shelf and the ceiling was just enough ro
om for a mike on a stand. He plugged one in, switched the panel over to it and then looked around for something to stand on to reach up there. There wasn’t anything, and he looked at the shelves themselves, which were built in.
He climbed them very carefully, pushing some of the tape boxes aside to make room for his hands and feet. It was awkward putting the mike down on a shelf and then using both hands to climb, but he only had to go up a couple of shelves in order to reach the top, and that was when he saw the black spring binder, its corner just sticking out over the edge. He placed the mike and pulled down the book.
“Hmm.”
It was covered with dust, and when he opened it and realized what it was, he almost forgot about the sound, the voice of the house that he had finally tracked down and was now about to capture. Love Songs to Death, and then all those scrawls. It was like hearing a voice from beyond the tomb. But it was only the fact of his being a kid that allowed him to get away with such grandiosity. Not even John Donne—
Just then the house spoke again, and he leaned over toward the main panel to see what the VU meters were doing. Just fine. This might be all it would say for now, but in the morning he would be ready for it. He would be up before dawn. He still had the book in his hand, and opened it again, just as Anselm poked his head through the door of the studio, saying, “Pretty kinky! Is this how they write music out in California, au naturel?”
The next morning he got up before dawn and went down to the studio. He rewound the tape, hit the playback button and listened while he got ready to thread a fresh tape on the other machine. The speakers gave him back the various clunks and squeals of his moving the microphone around. Then there was a long silence. He heard a voice, his own, say, “Hmm.”
A sharp breath, his own, blowing the dust off the cover of the black binder. Some rustling of pages.
A long groan, on two notes that weren’t quite a perfect fifth, accompanied by a series of clicks or pops, as if the house were cracking its joints. Creaking its joints. A beam or beams of wood that had come from a tree, maybe even from these woods, and that had stood now for two hundred years, unseen, in the dark interior of the house’s structure. Its voice.
“Pretty kinky! Is this how they write music out in California, au naturel? Look, I came over to bring you a present, but I would hate to break up a tender moment between you and your—uh—equipment.”
“I can explain everything!”
Laughter.
“Look what I brought you: a [something mumbled] mike. I think this was developed by the C.I.A. Super-directional—”
“I really want to talk to you—”
“This thing will pick up a whisper from a block away and—”
“I finally figured out why we haven’t been satisfied with the piece.”
“This sucker is so directional—if two people are whispering—a block away!—you can aim it so you’ll hear only one of them. Why haven’t we been satisfied? See, you aim it, just like a rifle. What’s that?”
“The kid’s poems, the Mortimer boy, the one who was killed. Hey, what is their story, anyway?”
“Wait a second. What’s wrong with the piece? You know, I haven’t been entirely happy with it either, to be perfectly frank.”
“Oh man, it’s been both of us. We’ve both been thinking of the audience as an audience, sitting out there in rows, looking at projections and listening to music that we put on for them up on a stage.”
“Do you want to trade places with them?”
“No, but I—”
“It would be a lot less work for us, but I don’t know if—”
“We ve got to bring them inside.”
“If they could handle their end. How do we get them inside?”
“Well, I was upstairs just now, in bed, and—”
“Look, David, you know how excitable I am. Please. Don’t go into details. Just leave out the heavy breathing, O.K.?”
“I was lying there looking up at the ceiling, and I saw these images on it, on the ceiling, like a groundhog walking across it, and—”
“I keep telling you to lay off those psychedelics. Next thing you know people will come down here and find you standing around in your birthday suit making love to your Moog.”
“I wish it were my Moog.”
“Well, monogamy isn’t everything. So you found the kid’s poems. I knew he wrote poetry, but I never saw any of it. You know, I barely knew these people. Charlie Mortimer—that’s the first time I’ve ever called him Charlie—was very, ah, remote. Very straight. Right wing. N.R.A., anti-abortion, the whole shmeer. The kid was quite bright, but like something out of Charles Addams. A one-boy Graveyard School. The old man, too. Cadaverous, with a big beaked hook nose on him like that, like Dick Tracy.”
Pages rustling.
“But you were going to save the piece. You were watching the groundhog walk across your ceiling. That’s not bad, you know. You could get that on the Gong—”
“I finally figured out what it was. The shutters were closed but one of them or some of them were open just a crack. The crack was acting like the lens of a pinhole camera, projecting the image of the front lawn up onto the ceiling.”
“Hmm.”
“We were lying there in bed inside a camera obscura.”
“That’s great. You realize you were only born about five hundred years too late.”
“That’s the story of my life.”
“If that groundhog of yours had walked across that ceiling just five hundred years sooner, you could have beaten Leonardo to the punch. But how is that going to bring the audience into the piece?”
“Don’t you see? You can’t see the image of a camera obscura unless you’re inside it. You can’t know what a magnetic field is like unless you’re inside it. If you stand outside it, all you can see is the effects of its being there, the designs of the iron filings—”
“ ‘The rose in the steel dust.’ ”
“Right. What we’ve been doing is showing the audience the effects of the field, and what we want to do is bring the audience into the field itself.”
“Well. I don’t know. This is all pretty metaphorical. And besides, I’ve always liked the idea of the audience sitting in the stands and leaving the field to the players. I’ve never been particularly impressed with the level of play of the few espontáneos I’ve seen. By the way, the Yankee Stadium footage came back from the lab today and it’s sensational. You’ll love it. I brought it with me— I mean, practically, in terms of the actual mechanics of production, what are you getting at?”
“I just think we could rethink the whole concept. I don’t think it has to be a concert with projections, or a multimedia ‘show.’ That’s just a son et lumière. The thing could happen all around the audience or in between the audience. One possibility would be an installation, with your various monitors and projections spread out all around the area, so that the audience would have to walk around to see the different parts of it. They would be inside it walking around in it.”
“Hmm. Like an environment.”
“Right. And one of the things I thought of when I saw those images on the ceiling is the whole idea of the focal plane. The shutters will act as a pinhole lens all the time, any time the rays of the sun hit them at the right angle. But unless you’ve got a projection screen right at the focal plane—or pretty near the focal plane—you won’t see the images. You’ll just see an uneven light. It was an incredible coincidence that the ceiling happened to be at just the right focal length.”
“So. One idea was to have some of your projectors aimed out into the space of the room, but not in focus on any screen. I mean, they would be focused, but there wouldn’t be any screen right there at that point, just empty space. Then, if somebody carrying a white card were to walk to that precise spot—we could mark it with tapes on the floor or something—and if they held those cards at the right angle—”
“Oh, I like it. I like it. Or they wouldn’t even have to carry the cards
. If they were wearing white, like white leotards, the image would come to a focus on them. I like this. Or they could wear nothing at all. We could project directly on the nude.”
“Well, I don’t know how many people in the audience are going to want to take their clothes off just to—”
“No, I mean our people. Then if we get some espontáneos to join in from the audience—with people like yourself around that shouldn’t be too hard—so much the better. This is starting to sound very good.”
“Another possibility would be to use video cameras in the installation. Then, as the audience walks around, some of what he sees on your monitors is the prepared stuff, and some is himself.”
“Yeah! Only we have to hook the cameras up to a delay loop. That way, someone is checking out a monitor over here, and even though he doesn’t realize it, he’s being taped. But the tape doesn’t play back right away. It goes into a delay loop. Then, fifteen minutes later, the same guy is over there across the room, and there—on another monitor—is him, only fifteen minutes younger.”
“Perfect! See, this keeps the audience working, like you said. This audience has to be a live wire.”
“Well, if he’s any kind of wire at all, as long as he keeps moving he will be a live wire.”
“I thought it was the field that had to move around the coil—”
“It amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it? Oh, David, this is terrific! We’re going to be immortal! I do have one small request, though.”
“What’s that?”
“Would you please put some clothes on?”
Danny said, “I’ve seen thunderstorms.” Bishbash Falls had been something of a disappointment, although it had given him a chance to outswim François. “He is pretty good at tennis, but he can’t hang with me in the water. It was a total face.”
David said, “I don’t want to make any predictions. I don’t want to build it up to a big letdown. But I don’t think you ought to make up your mind before you’ve seen it.”
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